This post is for those who have heard about the controversy over slate voting and the Hugo Awards, but don’t know exactly what that means in the context of the Hugos. I’m going to simplify for the sake of (relative) brevity. 1 .2
BACKGROUND: HOW HUGO AWARD VOTING WORKS
For any readers who don’t know, the Hugo Awards are an annual award given out for science fiction and fantasy works. The Hugos Awards are voted on in two rounds. The voters are members of Worldcon (anyone with $40 to spare can be a voting member).
In the first round, voters can write up to five works within each category on their voting ballot (categories include “best novel,” “best short story,” “best graphic story,” and so on).
Hundreds of works and creators are written in during the first round by over a thousand voters (iirc), but only five in each category – the five most popular among all voters, using a “first past the post” vote-counting method – get to be “nominees.” This is what people are referring to when they say a work or creator is “Hugo-nominated.”
In the second round, Hugo voters choose from among the five nominees per category, and one winner per category is chosen, using Instant Runoff Voting. (Voters can also vote “no award,” and if no award “wins” a category, then no award is given in that category that year.)
HOW SLATE VOTING WORKS
The current controversy over slate voting is specifically related to the first round of voting. Because the majority of Hugo voters spread their first-round votes among hundreds of different works per category, it takes a relatively small number of votes (40-60, iirc) for a work to be nominated for a Hugo.
Therefore, if a minority of 100 or so voters organizes as a bloc and votes in unison (or near-unison) for the same five works in each category, they alone will determine who gets nominated for a Hugo, while the majority of voters will have no effect on who gets nominated. This form of collective organizing is called “slate voting” or “bloc voting.”
There were two known slates this year, the Rabid Puppy slate and the Sad Puppy slate. The two slates overlapped significantly, and I will refer to them collectively as “Puppies.” In multiple Hugo categories, the Puppies controlled which five works were nominated, locking out the majority of Hugo voters from having an effect on the outcome. In other categories, the Puppies did not control all five nomination slots, but they still had a much greater effect than they would have if they had voted as individuals rather than collectively organizing.
WHY I DISLIKE SLATE VOTING
(This section is less factual and more about my personal opinions.)
Slate voting is antidemocratic, since it is a way for a minority of Hugo voters to control the outcome of the Hugo nomination process.
Slate voting also breaks the longstanding understanding that Hugo voters are supposed to vote based on quality – that is, they’re supposed to vote for the works they as an individual consider the most outstanding work of the year.3 That hundreds of Puppy voters all individually decided to choose almost exactly the same 27 or so works as the most outstanding works of the year, and by a massive coincidence their individual favorite choices matched the works listed on the slates chosen by their leaders, is not a credible claim.
Finally, although the pre-Puppy status quo was not perfect, the Puppy’s slate tactics are exceptionally prone to nepotism and corruption, because the final decisions of which works went on Puppy slates were made by just a few leaders, who operated without any transparency.
As a result, some Hugo nominees this year seem to have been nominated for being pals with Brad Torgensen, who ran the Sad Puppies slate, rather than for producing work that is outstanding either in quality or popularity. And the Rabid Puppy slate strongly favored a previously-obscure Finnish publisher, a company owned by… the organizer of the Rabid Puppy slate.
Slate voting leads to political parties. “What institutional slate voting gets you, no matter how well-intentioned or how much it is aligned with your own views, is political parties. Nothing can get onto the ballot unless it’s part of a slate, so the people who run the slates become the kingmakers; any author who wants any chance at an award has to get in with one of them.”
THREE POPULAR PROPOSALS TO REDUCE THE INFLUENCE OF SLATE VOTING
Many have suggested that all that’s needed to reduce the influence of Slate voting is more voters, that is, for a larger number of people to vote in both rounds of Hugo voting. However, since Slate Voting is a strategy that mathematically allows a collectively organized minority to overcome the preferences of a disorganized majority, I don’t have much confidence in this proposal. (Although it is a nice idea for other reasons.)
Another proposal is the 4/6 proposal, in which individual Hugo voters can only nominate four works per category, and there will be six nominees per category. In this case, rather than a successful slate controlling 100% of nominees in each category, it will only control 66% of nominees in each category. If there are two slates, then the most successful slate will control 66% of nominees, while the next most successful slate will control the remaining 33% of slots. This seems like an insufficient solution, to me.
The proposal I favor is “Least Popular Elimination,” in which voters could still nominate up to five works per category, but the votes are counted in a way that mathematically favors works that appear on the broadest number of voters’ ballots while diluting (but not completely eliminating) the power of slate voting. A detailed explanation of “Least Popular Elimination” voting is available here. While LPE voting is not as intuitive as the other two proposals, I believe it would be more effective.4
Disclosure: Although I’ve tried to be accurate, I am not neutral or objective, and I generally disagree with the Puppies on most things.
Gif stands for Graphics Interchange Format. when graphics is pronounced “JAFFICKS” Then I will pronounce Gif with a “J”
^ This
It’s followed by an R of course it would be a hard g. But Giraffe is a soft g. Genius is a soft g. Gin is pronounced with a soft g too. GIF is I following a g, it would be pronounced with a soft g.
It aint Jif peanut butter though.
It would still be pronounced like that. The general rule is if the g is followed by an e or i, it’s soft g. U or a consonant is generally a hard g.
I will DIE WITH MY HONOR
Gear =/= Jear
Get =/= Jet
Gift =/= Jift
Give =/= Jive
In English, words with a ‘G’ followed by an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ can be pronounced with either a hard ‘G’ or a soft ‘G’.
Words with Germanic roots such as ‘gear’, ‘get’, ‘gift’, ‘give’ (see above) are pronounced with a hard ‘g’ while words with Latin or Greek roots such as ‘gem’, ‘general’, ‘giraffe’, ‘giant’, are pronounced with a soft ‘g’.
So no, it’s not exactly a “general rule” that ‘g’ followed by an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ makes a soft ‘g’ sound.
Additionally, “GIF” is an ACRONYM starting with a word that begins with a hard ‘g’ sound, so “GIF” is therefore pronounced with a hard ‘g’.
A Tennessee Republican is making headlines for voting in favor of a national abortion ban, even after pressuring the women in his own life to have legal abortions.
Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) publicly opposes abortion and has repeatedly run for office as a pro-life candidate. Last week, he was one of 242 House members to vote for a proposed 20-week abortion ban that has become one of the top priorities for the current GOP-controlled Congress.
An anti-abortion Republican casting a vote in favor of an abortion restriction is not typically newsworthy. However, DesJarlais’ positions on the subject are particularly controversial, thanks to evidence that emerged in 2012 that revealed he has advocated for at least three legal abortions in his personal life.
Three years ago, transcripts related to the congressman’s divorce trial showed that DesJarlais supported his ex-wife’s decision to legally end two pregnancies. He also had several extramarital affairs, and once pressured a 24-year-old woman to have an abortion after she told him she was pregnant with his child. “You told me you’d have an abortion, and now we’re getting too far along without one,” DesJarlais told the woman in a recorded phone conversation. “If we need to go to Atlanta, or whatever, to get this solved and get it over with so we can get on with our lives, then let’s do it.”
This reminds me of people asserting that when John McCain said that if his daughter wanted an abortion he’d leave it up to her, this showed that he was really a moderate on abortion rights. The problem with this is that the formal legal status of abortion is essentially irrelevant to whether the wives, mistresses, and daughters of people like Scott DesJarlais and John McCain will be able to obtain safe abortions. They are fully aware of this when they vote for every abortion regulation and ban to come down the pike. And the disjuncture also illustrates that these votes are appalling. All women should have access to safe, legal abortions, not just women who are affluent or who have access to the patronage of people like Scott DesJarlais.
“Knight Rider Supercar KITT instrumentation”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Without evaluating the likelihood of the changes described (I think the author gets the impact on manufacturing a bit wrong, even accepting his priors) or the timeline, I’m curious what folks think about the political effects of a transformation in transport.
Most people—experts included—seem to think that the transition to driverless vehicles will come slowly over the coming few decades, and that large hurdles exist for widespread adoption. I believe that this is significant underestimation.
Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they bring will eclipse every other innovation our society has experienced. They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.
In particular, I’m wondering what a progressive coalition looks like in this world; we simultaneously reach (and indeed, vastly exceed plausible estimate of success) goals in safety, energy use, environmental impact, and urban livability, while also laying waste to vast swaths of the working class. Does a move to autonomous vehicles continue and enhance the urban renaissance, or does it revitalize suburbia by significantly reducing the costs of long-range commuting?
IDAHOBiT day gave me a chance to reflect on trans inclusion within what sometimes feels like the LGB(t) movement. I’ve written lots before about the importance of organising across difference, and I make no bones about it – I think whenever and wherever we can, we should be as inclusive and pro-intersectional in our community organising as possible.
This point was drilled home for me in one of the events in IDAHOBiT week that I co-organised – a creative writing workshop followed by open mic event that was all about the trans community being empowered to tell our stories. We deliberately made no exclusions – trans people were prioritised, but anyone could attend. This inclusiveness led to the discovery of how many themes connected across the different groups represented. We don’t have to be “the same” in order to connect to one another.
I’ve been struck, also, in some of the other organising I do, where socials are organised across a broad LGBTIQA spectrum, that so many LGB people who approach these inclusive spaces are reporting experiences that intersect with a trans story, even if they do not want to live or identify openly as trans people. I’ve met lesbians, for instance, who have some gender dysphoria, and who feel like imposters in women’s spaces, as I once did, or gay men who toyed with transitioning but decided it was not for them, but nevertheless remain gender variant. These people often feel marginalised in the communities that are supposed to be “theirs”.
Gender is an unspoken issue across LGB campaigning. When it is not spoken about, we pave the way for “acceptance” that is based in cisnormative values – if you act and present yourself in gender conforming ways, you can sleep with, and indeed marry, who you like. LGB people have been sold an idea of “rights” that looks a lot like assimilation. This leaves gender non-conforming LGB folks, who often face the most prejudice, high and dry.
Gender and sexuality have only recently been seen as two entirely separable things. When the term “lesbian” was first coined in the late 1800s, it represented gender non-conformity rather than simply sexuality. In Nazi Germany, when “homosexuals” were sent to the death camps, that included people we would now think of as trans. In the early 1930s, Germany had been pioneering transsexual surgery – the Nazis burned down the institute responsible.
At the Stonewall riots, butch lesbians and “drag queens” took a lead role – these were the people subject to the most violence and oppression, the folks who did not conform to gender. Stonewall icons Sylvia Riviera and Marcia P Johnson, called “drag queens” at the time, would now be known as transgender women.
Since Stonewall, we have come to understand gender identity and sexuality to be different things, and our community has separated out in a way it never was before. The movement for rights in same sex relationships has forged ahead, with gender non-conforming folks being left behind with weak promises that the bus will come back for us.
Now inclusion is improving, and I’m pleased to say locally there was good representation of T and B at IDAHOBiT events. But representation is often based on the idea that it is LGB’s movement and we Ts are crashing it. However, those folks within the LGB community most in danger, most at risk, are those with the biggest connection to the trans narrative. This is why gender variant folk have always been at the forefront of LGBT activism.
In reality, there is a huge overlap between our communities. Our rainbow is an ever-merging spectrum, rather than neatly divisible colours. It is not that we are “all the same” but that we are on a continuum, with no clear place to draw a divide between us.
We are and always will be one movement.
IDAHOBiT day celebrates the day, 25 years ago, when homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness by WHO. However, Gender Dysphoria is still in DSM V, the latest manual for psychiatric illnesses. Of all days, this has to be a day to raise awareness of the fact that trans people are still fighting a stigma that LGB folk have had lifted.
Those that say IDAHO is really about being gay and nothing to do with trans folk are missing not only the interconnectedness of our lives and histories, but also the importance of reaching out in empathy and fellowship to people who still fall under the stigma of psychiatric diagnosis.
Even when we’re nominally included, the extra difficulty trans people face in participating in events is often overlooked. Trans women in particular are more likely to experience hate and violence than other members of the community, and are often, therefore, terrified of being visible. Many if not most trans folk have trauma levels higher than the general population. Making participation safe and welcoming is therefore a disability access issue.
And let’s not forget that the violence figures for queer people of colour are even higher still.
But often instead of being supported to participate, trans and queer people are branded “unreliable” or “difficult” and cis folks just shrug and say “we tried”. Often they haven’t listened carefully enough, at worst they see us as an inconvenience, or too demanding.
IDAHOBiT, 2015
In reality, if we’re not making events accessible and fully inclusive to trans people, we are probably also deterring other vulnerable and marginalised elements of our LGBTQ+ community. IDAHOBiT needs to be more than just a day when white professionals can come out to represent “diversity”. Youth, disability, race, gender non-conformity, class, mental health and a whole lot of other issues are the casualties when this happens. When we start to focus on inclusion, it’s hard work, but the benefits to the whole community are enormous.
A scene from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” in which Captain America and Black Widow are trying to get information from a bad guy:
Jasper Sitwell: Is this little display meant to insinuate that you’re gonna throw me off the roof? Because it’s really not your style, Rogers.
Steve Rogers: You’re right. It’s not. It’s hers.
[Natasha kicks Sitwell off the roof]
In context, it’s a really funny scene. Don’t worry, they didn’t really kill Sitwell.1 Cap’s pal The Falcon was below, waiting to fly up and catch Sitwell and throw him back down onto the roof. Then Sitwell talks, because in the superhero genre torture always works (at least, it does when the good guys torture).2
6.) A situation in which the torture’s been designed to be gruesomely compelling for the reader, because torture is, as [the writer] amongst many others obviously believes, an entertainment in itself.
7.) The clear suggestion that the heroic torturers are never sadists, incompetent or misguided, let alone evil.
8.) Information gained from the torture leads to decisive action which saves the day, because the torture, of course, always works and always works in an entirely productive fashion which allows the sins involved to be entirely eclipsed by the thought of all the children and puppies who’ve been protected.
9.) An outcome which either ignores any suggestion that the victim of the torture will suffer any lasting ill-effects or which actively implies that they won’t.
10.) The sense that the hero or heroes who sanction and commit the torture will themselves suffer no lasting, dehumanising effects from their behaviour beyond a noble air of angst earned through the suffering which they – and not their victims – underwent as a result of the cutting and poking and burning and so on.
11.) The clear sense that torture is something which real heroes rise to, and which marks the truly super-heroic superhero as a figure willing and able to do anything in order to save the world once again.
Torture has been routinely used by “dark” superhero characters like Batman and Daredevil for so long – I’m really enjoying the Netflix Daredevil series, but I think this show uses torture even more than “24” did – it’s become normalized. By now, “light” superhero characters like Spider-Man and Captain America both use torture, and it’s seldom questioned. (Although it’s odd that in both those examples, the actual physical torturing was done by a “dark” female friend of the male hero, rather than by the male hero himself.)
I accept that in some genres, heroic characters do things that would be horrible in real life (like, you know, being a vigilante), and often that’s part of the fun. But the routine, fruitful use of torture by good guys in pop media – and not only in superhero films – worries me, because the typical American voter mainly learns about torture from pop culture, and the view of torture pop culture pushes is horrifying. If pop culture wasn’t so relentlessly pro-torture, would the American public be so quick to accept it when our government tortures?
Later on Sitwell does get murdered by a villain – but the villain in question is VERY good-looking and on a redemption narrative arc, so that’s okay too, I guess.
Honorable exception: The Dark Knight, a movie in which Batman tortures two bad guys, and it doesn’t work either time. Unlike Frank Miller’s Dark Knight graphic novel, in which torture works.
Seventeen of the twenty-one names on the list of advisers to the Bush campaign-in-waiting worked in his brother’s administration and a majority of those were in one way or another associated with the war in Iraq or its aftermath.
Three names stand out in particular: Paul Wolfowitz, John Hannah and Stephen Hadley, all of whom were intimately involved in promoting the war, and in deceiving not just the American people but the entire world. Wolfowitz and Hannah had their fingers all over the document that formed the basis for Secretary Powell’s speech to the UN in February 2003. Hadley, as President Bush’s Deputy National Security Adviser offered his resignation to then-President Bush after discovering three documents in his files from the CIA telling the White House not to include the claim of yellowcake from Niger in the case for war. These were but two of the many lies promulgated by the cabal that brought such disgrace to the Bush administration and to the country.
It’s sadly common for the ageist dicks of the world to tell younger doms that they’re too young to be dominant, as if age has anything to do with it.
First of all, being dominant is an identity, not an achievement. If it was an achievement, there would be an agreed upon test to take or a panel of judges who could decide whether or not to bestow true domhood upon you. Tests and judges only make sense when you have something concrete to test, like the ability to play pierce someone without cross contaminating anything. Domination (and submission!) are so subjective that testing how good a dom someone is would be as relevant and useful as testing how good a romantic partner someone is. There is no “good partner,” only the person who is right for you. Dominance is an identity like nerd is an identity – it’s certainly related to things you do, but only you get to decide whether or not you’re a nerd and it has nothing to do with how old you are.
If the people who shit on younger doms were being logical about it, they would also have to shit on older doms who are new to the scene. Age does limit the amount of experience you could possibly have, but if you’ve ever spent any time at any kink events, online or off, you’ll know that it’s not exactly uncommon for people not to figure out they’re kinky or not feel comfortable exploring it until later in life. So why don’t older newbies get more shit? My theory is that they don’t scare the douchebags of the scene because they aren’t walking threats to the idea that domination is this extraordinarily difficult thing that requires years of intense study and only the most extraordinary, experienced, and educated person could possibly call themselves a dom. Basically, these people are so insecure that they freak out when some kid shows up and proves that anybody can be a good dom to the right partner. We can all agree that’s blatant douchebaggery, right?
On the subject of douchebaggery, how exactly are people who are “too young to be doms” supposed to get the experience that would get these assclowns off their backs? Oh, that’s right, they’re not. They’re supposed to quietly slink away from the scene and not provide any competition for the hot young submissives. If you know you can’t compete with a young, inexperienced dom in a subculture that fetishizes experience in doms (god forbid submissives be experienced, but that’s a separate post), I know where the problem is and it’s not with your competition.
Life experience does count, of course, but it’s hardly the be-all end-all of skill as a dom. There’s no shortage of people with decades more life experience than I have making complete asses of themselves on Fetlife, after all. Now, it would take a pretty exceptional 20 year old dom to convince a 25 year old to submit to them, but why couldn’t they be a perfectly good dom for another 20 year old?
I used to have trouble taking younger doms seriously, but I think that was because I a) bought into the myth in the scene that you can’t possibly be a good dom without lots of life experience, and b) was insecure about my own level of experience so I was kind of a dick about people even younger than I was. Fortunately, I’ve grown up since then and now understand that it’s pretty cool if people are figuring out what they really want younger than I did.
And finally, if age is so important how come nobody gets told they’re too young to be submissive?
One of the most important findings of the leading economists who study inequality is that wealth and incomes at the very top are “fractal.” What they mean is that when you zoom in on the upper end of wealth distribution, patterns repeat themselves in an ever more finely grained pattern.
… In other words, the number of people who, by this metric, could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso has increased more than fourfold since the painting was last on the market. That helps explain the actual price the painting sold for in 1997: a mere $31.9 million, which in inflation-adjusted terms is $46.7 million. There were, quite simply, fewer people in the stratosphere of wealth who could bid against one another to get the price up to its 2015 level.
Heba Kayal, who just graduated with a degree from Columbia University in modern art history and curatorial studies, posted this on Facebook on Friday (and it’s reproduced here with permission): “Just got told off for throwing a cookie wrapper in a black bin by very rude & irate gallerist… Turns out the black bin was a work of art #frieze #nyc #art”:
MARK DI SUVERO: Renzo, I have some questions for you. I would like to ask you why you do so many museums? [laughs]
RENZO PIANO: I don’t know why. Because they ask me. Also, Mark, really, I do much more than museums. What I really long to do are public buildings. I love that—a concert hall, a school, a library, a hospital. Everything that is public makes a city a better place to be. Because you make a place where people share values: they come, they stay together. It’s much the same as a museum.
DI SUVERO: But the museums that you’re known for …
PIANO: Museums tend to do a better job. It’s about wondering.
DI SUVERO: Imagination.
PIANO: Yes, it’s about imagination. But take, for instance, something I was working on this morning: We’re making a big building for Columbia University for the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative. It’s about the structure of brains, and we’re working with the scientists there. And those people are equally queer, like artists.
A thoughtful piece — though a few lines (like, “Everywhere, the global circulation of images and commodities goes hand in hand with increasing partitions in the social sphere: segregation, cultural difference, inequality”) are suspect for being contradictory — published in the e-flux journal about the idea of space, labor, and the internet:
Though the internet was hailed as a solution to all kinds of perennial problems—blogs will solve the issue of the corporate consolidation of the press; Bitcoin will solve currency manipulation and rampant corruption in financial markets; social media will fix the democratic deficit—the digital economy entails a shift from a formal to an informal economy, which replaces formal benefits, like salaries, pensions, and social safety nets, with “likes” and barter, while the formal benefits accrue to the very few.4Under the twin pressures of financialization and what is called “the sharing economy,” capital has emancipated itself from its direct relationship to labor—which is not to say that it has done away with work; it has just overcome the need to pay formal salaries, along with the claim to formal possessions.
… If we understand digital space as a territory in its own right, we need to scrutinize how said territory is being mapped. This is not happening with Borgesian fidelity, as the corporate interests that are trying to describe this territory are not concerned with accuracy or diversity, nor are they interested in the imaginary (in old maps, unknown lands were often inhabited by fantastical beings, like sea serpents, monstrous beasts, or mermaids, whereas the maps of the digital world are being drawn in Silicon Valley, with little regard for mapping unique or differentiating characteristics of space). Instead of imagining how one could inhabit the spaces being mapped, the digital topographers labor to create a homogeneous landscape where a user is a user is a user, disregarding the social and cultural “accidents” in the landscape, and filling the unknowns in the map with replicas of themselves.
The vicious targeting of women, women of color, queer women, trans women, disabled women, and other oppressed groups who speak up on online has reached crisis levels.
Infographics, it seems, are a dying breed. Except that in talking to a dozen data visualization experts across the world’s top studios, I learned that the story is far more nuanced. Once a playground for independent designers, data visualization has evolved into something more mature, corporate, and honest about its failings. The quirky, experimental infographics that once peppered the Internet may be disappearing. But that’s only because data visualization, as a medium, has finally grown up and gotten a job.
Implicit in the notion that an apartment like mine can “be gay”—and that you, despite any politically correct training against saying so, could easily recognize it as such—is an understanding of gayness as something more than a basic sexual orientation. The concept of a “gay apartment,” like “gay literature” or “gay mannerisms,” suggests that gayness also comprises a set of markers or values or practices that manifest themselves in the spaces and objects and relationships that gay men create. (While cultural gayness, as I’ll try to define it here, is not the exclusive province of men, their history as its most visible advocates will necessarily bias this piece.) If you believe [Edmund] White and [Neil] Bartlett as I do, gayness may be found not just in whom you sleep with, but also, perhaps, in the sort of sheets you insist on sleeping between.
Hilarious! The LA Times does their own (spoof?) version of the typical New York Times story about visiting Los Angeles and finding people can actually live there, but in their version someone from LA moves to NYC looking for the comforts of home:
She landed an apartment in Brooklyn, which she’s heard is similar to the Eastside of Los Angeles.
Unlikely though it may seem, Cadenas is part of a trend: Angelenos have always loved visiting New York, but lately they have embraced the city as a place to live. According to Census data, between 2008 and 2012 almost as many Angelenos moved to New York as New Yorkers moved to Los Angeles.
Southern Californians are overcoming their fears of subway germs, and reversing the American directive to go west. They’re finding that New York is more than a capitalist prison that runs on the fumes of the finance industry and nostalgia for CBGB. It now offers many of the lifestyle amenities that their hometown has boasted for decades.
Not too long ago, Angelenos thought of New York as a veritable food desert; as recently as the 1990s, poppy-seed bagels were considered the lone culinary standout. These days, however, New Yorkers can sidle up to the juice bar 3 Roots in Greenpoint for liquid kale and wheatgrass, or stop by Sun in Bloom in Park Slope for a raw-food lunch.
Witness accounts of crimes can be very unreliable. The New York Times looked into the issues and provides some interesting examples related to the police shooting of a hammer-wielding man in Midtown Manhattan:
There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists.
“It’s pretty normal,” said Deryn Strange, an associate psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “That’s the hard thing to get our heads around. It’s frightening how easy it is to build in a false memory.”
Called the “international master of memory” in the Mongolian Press, Khatanbaatar has participated in the World Memory Championship himself, and is the best known mental athlete in his home country. As the director of the Mongolian Intellectual Academy in the capital Ulaanbaatar, he is now training hundreds of children and adults, some as young as kindergarten age, who are interested in flexing their cerebral muscles, using mental calculations, speed readings and Rubix Cube deciphering.
The practice has paid off. Organized, consistent and steadfast, Mongolians are a fixture at international memory competitions. Only China boasts more competitors with world rankings.
What New Yorkers listen to on jukeboxes … namely, lots of Rolling Stones, Jay Z, Beyonce, and Romeo Santos. Here’s the top 10 artists in Williamsburg’s 11211 area code (which is where Hyperallergic HQ is located):
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
After almost twenty years of directing nothing but kids movies, 70 year-old George Miller has picked himself up, dusted himself off, and, like a Boss, once again shown the whippersnappers how it is done.
I mean, he really likes it.
“Fury Road” is dazzling to watch and experience. The talk of no CGI is, however, pure hype. There is plenty of CGI, and that includes moments in some car stunts. Compared to the new “Avengers” movie, which is practically a cartoon for extended periods, this is a small thing and in no way takes away from Miller’s practical-effects achievements. There will be Oscars.
You know what he likes best about it? The feminism. That’s right. Nolte likes the feminism, ‘cuz it’s the right kind of feminism. Nolte-approved feminism.
“Fury Road’ is nothing like the diseased modern-day, left-wing feminism spread by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Miller’s women are not victims, are not Julias, are not dependent on a central government to solve all their problems, are not wallowing in a narcissistic cult of their own victimhood, and are not acting like men.
In fact, just the opposite is true. Miller’s heroines are beautiful, feminine, and breaking away from a cult of personality and its tyrannical central government. These are feminists who have come for their God-given rights, not emasculate. They don’t crybaby, they act. They don’t tell others how to behave, they fight. They don’t want to take away your rights, but they damn sure are demanding their own.
These are women too busy being strong and independent to collapse into a helpless ball of harpy outrage over imagined offenses.
I, for one, am excited about this convservative-approved avenue of feminism suddenly available to me. Provided I look like Charlize Theron and confine my feminism to beating people up in the desert, I will be golden!!!! Not like those whiny feminists who complain about things like the prevalence of rape in military culture and petition the government to change things legislatively. I mean, that is some straight up outraged harpy shit right there.
The only problem I see with partaking of this new feminism (because I already look exactly like Charlize Theron*) is that I just don’t think I’ll get many opportunities to beat up random folks in the desert; but since I’m guessing Nolte lives in Southern California I’ll happily volunteer to ride out there in a fixied Humvee so I can hit him the face with a shovel. FEMINISM!
*Theron a is a freckle-faced middle-aged woman with a sagging ass, right?
No but this scene is extremely important and it’s why I’m angry at people who say that Steve’s characterization sucked.
Steve is the only one who understands where these two kids come from. Hill is trying to distant Steve from them because right after he says this line she says: ‘’We’re not at war anymore.’’. She’s trying to prove that Steve did the right thing because when the country is at war we all make some hard choices that we are not proud of. In war everything is permitted, and Steve did the right thing because he was doing it for the right cause. Hill is basically saying ‘You did it to protect your country and to save people and to make a difference, but these kids have no excuse for volunteering to these scientists.’
But how does Steve reply to that? To her ‘’We’re not at war anymore’’?
He says ‘’They are.’’
And it is SO important because Steve sees the big picture. For most Americans the war is something ugly that their grandparents had to deal with, something in the distant past that left mark but is also way behind them. But just because there wasn’t a war in America for over 70 years doesn’t mean that other countries have been so lucky. And Steve GET’S IT. It doesn’t mean that he’s not mad. It doesn’t mean that he will not fight them if they’re on the opposing sides. But he knows where they come from. And he won’t let them be reduced to some monsters who let German scientists experiment on them.
Because if Steve was anything but American during WW2, if he wasn’t on the ‘winning team’, he wouldn’t be labeled as hero.
A view of one of the many illegal markets set up by migrant laborers in the Abu Dhabi worker camps (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
The news that a third member of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition was barred from entering the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has many people wondering what this means for the future of the Gulf nation’s growing art community. In the art world, where the free circulation of ideas has long been an important value, the travel restrictions signal a very different climate emerging for cultural workers in the UAE.
The Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, which is an international group of artists working to ensure that migrant workers’ rights are protected during the construction of museums and other institutions on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, has released a statement on the recent situation faced by its members and reasserted its position that the “betterment of conditions for workers is not separate from the development of conditions of making and showing art.” The group goes on to elaborate on the relationship between workers and art:
The specter of work has always haunted the making of art and the reflections of artists. To deny this engagement is not just a denial of a particular topic or subject matter, it is a denial of the history from which art emerges, which is from an inherent questioning of human activity in this world and the measures by which these activities are valued.
New York University Professor Andrew Ross, who was the first member of Gulf Labor to be turned away last March, is troubled by the reactions by the UAE-affiliated cultural institutions to the travel bans. “For the UAE authorities to tolerate forced labor and trafficking at the core of the country’s workforce is bad enough. To retaliate in this way against those investigating the abuses is tantamount to saying that the state actually sanctions these practices,” he told Hyperallergic. “The silence of the Guggenheim and NYU suggests that these institutions have ceded too much autonomy to their Emirati partners who pay all the bills.”
For Ashok Sukumaran, who this month was denied a visa to visit the UAE from his native India, the issue raises many concerns. “Beyond the classic arguments for freedom of speech and movement (which must be restated), and the issue of workers’ rights (which is a systemic one), there is another condition that is at issue here. That the UAE is a regional hub and a melting pot for the region,” Sukumaran told Hyperallergic. “It’s where I would meet Nepalis, Punjabis, people from southern Iran, and Balochis. The role of the cultural institutions of the UAE is to develop forms of dignifying these relations and thereby the treatment of all these people. It is a big role. A role of the anti-police, if the police is about suspicion, surveillance, and control.
“Which is why it is upsetting to see the major cultural forces gathered on the island of Saadiyat treat workers as a PR problem, or ‘security issue.’ We expect some imagination from them, and not more policing. To paraphrase a painting once shown in the [2007] Sharjah Biennial (by Rikrit Tiravanija), ‘Less Oil, More Courage’ is needed. “
We asked artist Walid Raad, who is the third member of Gulf Labor to be denied access to the UAE, if he thinks there’s a growing awareness of the issue in the art world and why he become involved in the first place. “We do what we can, as we assume others are as well. I personally became involved in this because I was asked to contribute to various projects in the Gulf,” he told Hyperallergic. “I take the institutions and individuals who invited me at their word when they say they want to build the most progressive infrastructure for the arts in the world. Then the question became about what this actually means. Does it refer only to the architecture of the buildings, the quality of the programs and artworks, or can it also be about those who are building the museums, roads, pipelines, etc.”
The following is the recent Gulf Labor Coalitions statement in full:
To:
Guggenheim, New York and Abu Dhabi
Louvre, Paris and Abu Dhabi
New York University (NYU), New York and Abu Dhabi
Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), Abu Dhabi
Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA), Abu Dhabi
Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF), Sharjah
Art Dubai, Dubai
Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation, Abu Dhabi
This week artists Ashok Sukumaran and Walid Raad were denied entry to the UAE on grounds of “security.” This comes after NYU professor Andrew Ross was similarly barred from flying to Abu Dhabi in March. Given Sukumaran and Raad’s history of vital and sustained engagement with the country and region, invited or celebrated by many of you addressed in this letter, the only possible reason to suddenly have three such integral parts of our art and academic community denied entry, must be their involvement with the Gulf Labor Coalition.
All three are members of this artist-initiated group that has been working since 2010, urging the museums and other institutions being built on Saadiyat to create better conditions for their workers. One of the reasons Gulf Labor has focused directly on the Guggenheim is that as contemporary artists working in and engaging with the region, we have felt particularly implicated, and also felt we could have a say in the development of this museum.
Beyond Saadiyat Island, Gulf Labor has conducted independent research and continues to produce a body of knowledge around migrant labor, not only in the Gulf, but also in the home countries of workers. In July 2015, it will present a report on this research in the context of the Venice Biennial.
Gulf Labor’s long history of constructive, and patient engagement with the Guggenheim and TDIC on this issue is documented on our website. From the summer of 2010, six months before the announcement of a boycott, up to our last proposal in April of 2015, we have have tried to consult with, or address directly, the Guggenheim before making our positions public.
Our most recent proposal synthesizes and brings together years of research and engagement with many parties ranging from human rights and labor organizations, to researchers and workers in the region. These remedies have been drawn from the experiences of workers at the Louvre, NYU Abu Dhabi and Saadiyat Island infrastructure sites, and is supported by experts in the field. We have made this proposal at a pivotal juncture when contractors are meant to be hired and construction of the Guggenheim building is set to begin. Addressed to the Guggenheim and its Abu Dhabi partners we have stipulated:
(1) setting up a fund to reimburse workers for recruitment fees,
(2) ensuring a living wage,
(3) allowing forms of collective representation.
We provided the Guggenheim a month to engage with what we still believe is a realistic and achievable proposal to improve the condition of workers on the island and to end our call for a boycott. An entire month passed without a response.
Now with these denials of entry, we are faced with a further retrenchment of the possibilities of dialogue and a foreclosing of the exchanges which have contributed to the development of the cultural institutions of this region. We have always held that the betterment of conditions for workers is not separate from the development of conditions of making and showing art.
These denials are not targeting specific individuals, but potentially setting a dangerous standard of what can or cannot be done within the field of culture itself. And in this way, they implicate all the members of our artistic and cultural communities. Thus, we believe that it is an especially crucial time for institutions with expressed commitments to the region such as your own, to commit to lifting these denials of entry and, at the same time, to explicitly engage with the questions that these denials seem to want to evade – that is, the fair working conditions of the people who construct and maintain your organizations.
The specter of work has always haunted the making of art and the reflections of artists. To deny this engagement is not just a denial of a particular topic or subject matter, it is a denial of the history from which art emerges, which is from an inherent questioning of human activity in this world and the measures by which these activities are valued.
Neil Irwin writes “The $179 Million Picasso That Explains Global Inequality“:
and my personal favourite
