Legendary film director Wes Craven has died at age 76 of brain cancer, he was best known for the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Scream" film franchises.
President Obama will become the first US president to visit the Arctic Circle as he makes a three-day trip to Alaska to address a climate change conference and meet with native Alaskans.
Japan is shifting military defense resources away from its
One adds a little of my own experience and insight to a great article David Roberts wrote this week about tech nerds and their alternating disdain and naiveté towards politics. His article is “Tech nerds are smart. But they can’t seem to get their heads around politics.” Mine is “Hey, Nerds! Politics is a System. Figure it Out.” Nerds have respect for facts and a way of getting their heads around complex systems — two things the world needs a lot of right now. They just can’t seem to grasp that politics is exactly the kind of system that deserves their hyper-focused attention.
Ben Carson’s critique of Black Lives Matter inspired the second featured article, which I’m calling “Protesting in Your Dreams”. I find it fascinating how the people who aren’t actually protesting anything always think they know best. The Powers That Be love it when the fantasies of people on the sidelines draw public concern away from the protests that are actually happening.
The weekly summary still needs a quote and a name. It covers the Katrina anniversary, this week’s horrifying shooting on live TV, my disgust with the coverage both Sanders and Clinton are getting, and the dangerous vagueness in Trump’s message, before closing with a mistake that will put your various screw-ups in perspective.
The nerds article should be out sometime in the next hour, and the Carson article by 10 EDT. The weekly summary should appear about 11.
In the popular action dramas of my youth, nerds were never the heroes. We had no equivalent of, say, Neo from The Matrix or Hiro Hamada from Big Hero 6. At best, the heroes we were offered were jocks open-minded enough to tolerate the occasional nerdy associate or sidekick, like 007’s Q or Captain Kirk’s Spock. (Nerds particularly loved Spock’s Vulcan nerve pinch, because he knocked people out by knowing stuff about physiology rather than decking them with a right cross.) Even in the defining nerd-fanboy film of my college years, the jockiest character (Han Solo) was a hunky action hero while the nerdiest (R2D2) was a beeping blinking machine. No matter how many times he saved the day, was there ever a chance R2 would get the girl?
20th-century high-school nerds. One thing I remember clearly about the uncool nerd subculture of my youth: We were bitter about our unpopularity. We returned the disdain of high-school society with interest, and saw its social system as a scummy, irrational thing. Figuring out its rules and mastering its processes was beneath us, no matter how much we wished we could enjoy its fruits (or at least stop being its victims).
So we told ourselves and each other that it wasn’t a system at all. There was nothing to know about how to dress or make conversation, no reason to map the social structure or look for possible points of entry, nothing to gain from identifying and cultivating potential allies.
We weren’t just un-strategic about the society around us, we were anti-strategic. If you had taken 16-year-old me aside and tried to explain how things worked and how they could work to my advantage (if I mastered the appropriate skills), I would have argued with you: High school society represented pure irrationality. That fact was the only thing worth knowing about it. Imagining otherwise wasn’t a necessary pre-condition to figuring stuff out, it was surrender. I’d be opening my pristine mind to corrupting nonsense.
21st-century nerds and politics. I have it on good authority that high school isn’t that way any more, at least in the professional-class suburbs. I’ve watched a math geek and a dungeon master go through public high school. Each has had a diverse group of friends — i.e., not just the chess club — and girl friends whose attractiveness to non-nerds went well beyond any aspiration of mine at that age. (There must have been jocks who wanted to go out with these young women, but couldn’t raise their interest.)
Despite that progress, though, Roberts’ article points to an arena where the familiar patterns of my youth still apply: politics.
The text for Roberts’ sermon is the nerdy Wait But Why blog of Harvard-educated Tim Urban, particularly a 26K-word post about the history of cars and energy and climate change that Urban wrote at the request of arch-nerd Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. Climate change is Roberts’ bailiwick (I’ve often quoted from climate-change articles he wrote for Grist before moving to Vox), so he read Urban’s long post with great interest, and mostly approved.
I’m not political because nothing could ever possibly be more annoying than American politics. I think both parties have good points, both also have a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things, and I want nothing to do with it. So I approached this post—like I try to with every post—from a standpoint of rationality and what I think makes sense.
Roberts comments:
Indeed, politics is one area where the general science/tech nerd ethos has not exactly covered itself in glory (I’m looking at you, Larry Lessig). And it’s a shame, because if tech nerds want to change the world — as they say with numbing frequency that they do — they need to figure out politics, the same way they’re figuring out solar power or artificial intelligence, in a ground-up, no-preconceptions kind of way. They need to develop that tree trunk knowledge that enables them to contextualize new political information. Currently, they lack a good tree trunk, as Urban’s post demonstrates.
Unexamined frames. Instead, presumably because he wants “nothing to do” with politics, Urban doesn’t look too hard at his basic political frames, like this one:
Here, Republicans and Democrats are symmetrically distributed around a rational center, with mirror-image crazy zones at the extreme left and right. If you picture the political spectrum this way, then it’s obvious what you hope for: Rational moderates on each side should get together, reject their crazy compatriots, and construct a reasonable compromise around known realities and theories supported by evidence. The fact that this almost never happens just emphasizes how irrational politicians are, and why nerds like Urban want nothing to do with them.
Roberts points out the embedded assumption:
That vision of the political spectrum implies that one is partisan precisely in proportion to one’s distance from rational thinking. It defines partisanship as irrationality, as blind, lemming-like behavior, the opposite of approaching things “from a standpoint of rationality and what I think makes sense.”
He offers a counter-narrative: In current American politics, the center isn’t defined by shared rationality, but by money and power. As a result, when we do have the kind of bipartisanship Urban would like to see, it’s not rational, it’s corporate. He illustrates with climate change:
The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It’s a hoax, so we shouldn’t do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It’s happening, so we should do something about it. The “centrist” position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it’s happening but we shouldn’t do anything about it. That’s not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.
The ones talking about ambitious policy to address climate change are mostly out in what Urban has labeled crazy zones.
Two asymmetric parties. Political-science research — there really is such a thing — has shown that the two parties are not mirror images, but “different beasts entirely”. Republicans are united by ideology (or abstract principles, if you prefer a less pejorative formulation), while the Democratic Party is a coalition of groups each of which centers on a particular issue and its corresponding policies — immigration reform with a path to citizenship, Blacks Lives Matter, feminism, the environment. Democrats represent growing urban-centered demographics that can be discouraged from voting and gerrymandered out of full representation in the House, while Republicans are mostly older, better-off whites who are no longer numerous enough to control the presidency (if Democratic constituencies vote).
So that’s where American politics stands today: on one side, a radicalized, highly ideological demographic threatened with losing its place of privilege in society, politically activated and locked into the House; on the other side, a demographically and ideologically heterogeneous coalition of interest groups big enough to reliably win the presidency and occasionally the Senate. For now, it’s gridlock.
Roberts illustrates with a policy that Urban thinks is so sensible that it should appeal across the political spectrum: a revenue-neutral carbon tax that fights global warming without shifting money from the private sector to the public sector. Roberts characterizes Urban’s expectation as “political naiveté” resulting from envisioning politics “as a kind of ideological grid, with certain sweet spots where all of both sides’ criteria are met.”
It ignores the fact that the GOP is not a policy checklist but a highly activated, ideological demographic that views Democrats as engaged in a project to fundamentally reshape America along European socialist lines. A coalition that will trust Democratic promises of revenue neutrality about as far as it can throw them. A coalition of which virtually every member has signed a pledge never to support any new tax, ever.
Who’s crazy now? If Urban wants to further the goals he espouses, he needs a better understanding of where he is:
Urban supports what Musk is trying to do, which is accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels. As it happens, out of America’s two major political parties, about a half of one of them supports that undertaking. That half a party is concentrated on the Democratic Party’s left flank, over in Urban’s crazy zone. Turns out he’s in that crazy zone too, but he doesn’t realize it.
Use your powers for good. Roberts closes with a plea for nerds to direct their nerdly powers of intellectual hyper-focus towards politics:
There is no subject more ripe for the dissection of an obsessive nerd than American politics. It is ridden with myths and outdated conventional wisdom. And the kind of people who read Wait But Why are among those most in need of tree trunk knowledge of politics.
Nerds want to make the world better, but they cannot do so without allies in the public sector. They should roll up their sleeves, hold their noses, and try to get a better sense of the complicated web of historical, economic, and demographic trends that have shaped American public life. Only when they understand politics, and figure out how to make it work better, will all their dreams find their way into the real world.
I’ll amplify that with my own perspective: The biggest weakness of the nerd mindset is a tendency to fall in love with a vision of how the world ought to work, and (from that Olympian height) to pass negative judgment on the world as it is. Once you do that, you’ve cut yourself off from constructive action and made yourself powerless. Having decided that the World-That-Is is not worth understanding, you will never learn its rules or master its mechanisms.
When my generation of nerds did that with the social system of high school, it didn’t work out well for us. If the current generation of nerds cops a similar attitude towards politics, it won’t work out well for them either — or for a world that desperately needs well-intentioned people who can understand and organize complex systems.
Many discussions of the word connect it to the history of second-person pronouns in English. Old English had singular and plural forms of “you,” and these eventually morphed into the formal “you” and informal “thou” pronouns you find in Shakespeare and the King James Bible. But “y’all” isn’t a descendant of these, and there’s still debate about its origins.
Long story short, there are plausible origins in both Scots-Irish and Afro-creole dialects. Given that there’s a lot of variation (in both frequency and application) across the South in usage of “y’all” and “all y’all,” I wonder if it might be useful to map that variation onto Scots-Irish immigration and slaveholding density, see how it falls out.
I want —
No, I need —
Fire.
Flames surrounding
Flickering, dancing, twisting light.
I need the ocean.
Water stretching outward
Floating, rocked by the waves
Deep, dark, vastness beneath me.
I need sex.
Bodies unnumbered, countless
Writhing muscle, skin on sweat on skin
Touch and taste and pleasure and scent
Beauty, pain, exquisite delight.
I need silence.
Nothing, void, dark, empty, perfect.
In the various recent kerfuffles surrounding science fiction and its awards, there have been a couple of people (and their spouses, declaiming about their beloved) who have been slapping down Mensa cards as proof that they (or their spouse) are smart. Let me just say this about that:
Oh, my sweet summer children. Just don’t.
If you want to be in Mensa, that’s fine. Everyone needs hobbies and associations, and if this is the direction you want to go with yours, then you do you. Not my flavor, but then, lots of hobbies and associations aren’t my flavor.
That said:
1. Literally no one outside of Mensa gives a shit about your Mensa card. No one is impressed that you belong to an organization that has among its membership people who believe that because they can ace a test, they are therefore broadly intellectually superior to everyone else.
2. Your Mensa membership does not imply or suggest that you are the smartest person in the room. Leaving aside the point that the intelligence that Mensa values is a narrow and specialized sort, a large number of people who can join Mensa, don’t, for various reasons, including the idea that belonging to a group that glories in its supposed intellectual superiority is more than vaguely obnoxious.
3. Your need to bring up the fact you have a Mensa card suggests nothing other than it’s really really really important to you for people to know you’re smart, and that you believe external accreditation of this supposed top-tier intelligence is more persuasive than, say, the establishment of your intelligence through your actions, demeanor, or personality. Which is to say: It shows you’re insecure.
4. Your Mensa card does not mean you know how to argue. Your Mensa card does not mean you do not make errors or lapses in judgment. Your Mensa card is not a “get out of jail free” card when someone pokes holes in your thesis. Your Mensa card does not mean that you can’t be racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted. You may not say “I have a Mensa card, therefore my logic is irrefutable.” Your Mensa card will not save you from Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and if you think it will, then you are exactly who the Dunning-Kruger syndrome was meant to describe. You Mensa card will not keep you from being called out for acting stupidly, or doing stupid things.
5. Your Mensa card does not immunize you from being a complete, raging asshole.
In short, it’s not actually smart to flash your Mensa card, and if you were smart, you’d know not to do it. If you have to resort to waving your Mensa card around to establish your intelligence, you’re signaling that you have no other way to do it. And you don’t have to be a genius to know what that actually means about you.
A few weeks ago, while a friend and I were driving to Rockland, Maine, where I was scheduled to give a lecture, we stopped in Portland, because I wanted to see the exhibition Rose Marasco: index at the Portland Museum of Art (April 24–December 6, 2015). While the museum billed Marasco as “perhaps Maine’s most prolific photographer,” what piqued my curiosity was the image the museum had on its website. In what was clearly a setup photograph, “Projections No. 5” (2007), the view is of one side of a white room with a fireplace, bookcase and table with a light box on it, presumably where Marasco lives and works. Projected onto the two walls forming one corner of the room is a black-and-white montage of different sections of a young woman’s face. There was something eerie about the setup, which caught my attention. By the time I read this part of the press release I was hooked:
Throughout her career, Marasco has remained uninterested in genres such as documentary, landscape, and portraiture. Instead, she has consistently mined concepts of framing, point of view, and orientation to make images with a complex relationship to the everyday image of the world.
Rose Marasco, “Projections No. 5” (2007), inkjet print, 43 1/2 x 34 1/2 inches
Organized by Jessica May, this large survey exhibition begins with black-and-white photographs Marasco took in the early 1970s in Utica, New York, where she was born and raised, and culminates with “Scape, No. 1” (2014–15), which consists of two images she has juxtaposed one above the other. The topmost photograph is taken from inside one end of a long, empty building, facing an open doorway overlooking a tree, fence and field.
The building has become a kind of camera. The photograph below it is an overhead close-up of different lengths of string, arranged by Marasco to form a linear structure that falls somewhere between ideogram and musical score. While each photograph is interesting, together they become something mysterious. Moreover, the pairing feels discovered rather than arbitrary, though I cannot say why I feel this.
Rose Marasco, “Photomontage” (1981−82), gelatin silver print, 3 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches (click to enlarge)
Over the period of roughly forty-five years covered in the exhibition, Marasco has explored the possibilities of the straightforward document and the setup or invented photograph, the factual and the fictive, often dissolving the boundaries between the two. Within these seemingly incommensurable choices, Marasco has taken photographs of grange halls; trees in urban settings; rooms with images projected onto the walls. She has made montages of the same scene, photographed at different times; she has used a range of equipment, from a pinhole camera to a 4 x 5-inch view camera; and she has employed the negative space of a cut-out figure as a framing device, a kind of reverse silhouette, to isolate part of an image.
In her series, Domestic Objects, Marasco photographs of pages from 19th century women’s diaries. In another series she photographs photographs of vacationing gay couples from early in the 20th century. In both groups she incorporated objects, as diverse as an egg to popcorn into the setup. By surrounding the photos or diaries with incongruous items, which she then photographs, Marasco turns them into homages that recall the work of Joseph Cornell.
Rose Marasco, “Egg Diary” (1994), cibachrome print, 18 x 20 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Portland
The results can be eccentric, tender and touching. No matter how sympathetic you might feel toward these individuals, Marasco registers that they are lost to us, swallowed up by history and time. We can never know them, their personalities; all we know is what they have ceded to us, a written record of mundane activities or a sweetly innocent portrait of two young men sitting next to each other in the doorway of a clapboard house, feeling safe from the disapproving and even hostile society in which they lived. Marasco is neither nostalgic nor didactic. Rather, one senses her curiosity and empathy.
Works such as these suggest that Marasco is interested in bringing largely invisible histories into the light. Sympathy seems to be one of her primary motivations, but that is not all that possesses her. She is curious, restless, and open to trying out new and challenging possibilities. The angles and points of view Marasco chooses in her photographs breathe new life into her subjects. At times, I felt like a flaneur, or a scribe preserving a story, or detective collecting evidence. Formally speaking, her exploration of varying viewpoints and angles has moved her decisively away from the frontal images we associate with so much modernist photography.
Rose Marasco, “Orchard Street near Delancey Street, May 11, 2013” (2013), inkjet print, 20 x 16 inches (click to enlarge)
In “Orchard Street near Delancey Street, May 13, 2013,” Marasco used a pinhole camera situated near the street to photograph a row of red and gray suitcases, back to front, extending from the sidewalk, which is in shadow, to the bright, deserted street. A cluster of other traveling cases sit in the middle of street. There is something uncanny about the image, a sense of desolation and the feeling of being thwarted. Of course, one can explain why the suitcases are there, but that is not the point. Marasco might point the camera at something, but she is not being literal or theatrical. Something else has caught her attention, and that I think is one of her strengths. She is able to make a memorable image out of commonplace things. The street toward buildings in the distance, suggesting that there is nowhere to go, that one is bounded by one’s circumstances, whatever they are. The desire to travel, to be elsewhere, comes across as a forlorn wish.
The catalog accompanying the exhibition includes a conversation between Jessica May and Marasco, which is quite informative. I found two other catalogs of the artist’s work in the museum bookstore, each focused on a particular body of work. It seems to me that Marasco deserves both a full-sized monograph and to be better known. She is more than Maine’s most prolific photographer.
Rose Marasco: index continues at the Portland Museum of Art (7 Congress Street, Portland, Maine) through December 6.
An image recognition network dreams about every object it knows. Part 2/2: non-animals
Second video from Ville-Matias Heikkilä uses deep-dream like technique to visually reveal a collected neural dataset, this time featuring man-made objects and food:
Network used: VGG CNN-S (pretrained with Imagenet)
There are 1000
output neurons in the network, one for each image recognition category.
In this video, the output of each of these neurons is separately
amplified using backpropagation (i.e. deep dreaming).
The middle
line shows the category title of the amplified neuron. The bottom line
shows the category title of the highest competing neuron. Color coding:
green = amplification very succesful (second tier far behind), yellow =
close competition with the second tier, red = this is the second tier.
4. The fear (slippery-slope or not) is that trigger warnings will lead to suggestions from admin about possibly removing certain works or materials from the syllabus.
There remains an obvious problem: there’s no logical connection between trigger warnings and censorship. Trigger warnings are only relevant to material that’s being presented. (How would you put a trigger warning on material that’s been suppressed?) Conflating trigger warnings with censorship is another example of the game played by the anti-p.c. crowd, in which critical speech is mysteriously transformed into speech suppression.
In addition, this is also an excellent illustration of why the slippery slope in generally a logical fallacy. On the one hand, there’s nothing inherent in trigger warnings that leads to material being suppressed. Conversely, if the administration wants to dictate to faculty what material is being taught in class, they don’t need trigger warnings to do so. (Indeed, assessment is a much more powerful lever to do so.) Undue interference by the administration into academic affairs is bad because it’s bad; trigger warnings per se are neither here nor there.
I also strongly recommend Angus Johnston’s recent thoughts on the subject. Here he responds to deBoer’s “What are we supposed to do with students who frivolously claim to have suffered trauma?” question:
My syllabus trigger warning doesn’t provide students who invoke it with any special privileges, so this isn’t really an issue for me — and as I said above, my text has been pretty widely adopted, so it’s not an issue for those professors either.
Speaking more generally, there are three paths a professor can take when asked for an accommodation from a student — offer the same accommodation to everyone, require that the requesting student provide proof of need, or apply their own judgment. I can see any of those approaches working in a trigger warning context.
Preciesely. The potential for cheating and abuse is ubiquitous whether one uses trigger warnings or not. My syllabus contains the university’s disability policy, which allows students to ask for special accommodations. Almost every semester, I have students who get extra time to write exams and write them in a separate room. Almost every semester, a student will ask for an assignment extension or a makeup exam date, and when the reason can’t be easily documented I have to assess their credibility and decide how to respond. If you’re a college teacher dealing with this kind of thing is, you know, your job. Again, I don’t see what particular problem trigger warnings are supposed to be creating here.
There was a time when I opposed trigger warnings, because I worried they’d have a chilling effect. That was the mid-90’s, and the ‘trigger warnings’ in question were the FCC’s voluntary but widely adopted “TV Parental guidelines” that went into effect in 1997. I knew this system didn’t include any overt censorship, but I worried it might have a chilling effect on material that might be controversial–that viewers, advertisers, and networks might be worried about ratings, and the pressure on writers and directors to avoid the kind of content that might result in a TV-MA tag for the show. I think it’s safe to say, from the vantage point of 2015, that my concerns turned out to be overblown.
It would be a mistake, I think, to suggest that these guidelines played a major role in ushering the golden age of television they happened to coincide with; correlation is not causation and all. And the analogy is far from perfect; writers and producers were and are obviously self-censoring in a number of that syllabus creating professors are not (and vice versa). Viewers aren’t perfectly analogous to students, nor networks to administrators, etc etc.
But like many people who seem overly worried about trigger warnings on syllabi today, I thought I was capable of predicting how this would play out, based on what turned out to be an overly simplistic set of assumptions about the motivations and likely behavior of the various actors. I turned out to be clearly wrong, at least in part because I didn’t give some of the relevant actors enough credit. The rating system seemed to lead to less viewer freakouts, and less attention paid to them by advertisers and networks, and more potentially controversial and challenging material on the air. The prediction of a chilling effect from trigger warnings, similarly, requires taking a fairly dim view of maturity of students, and the professionalism of faculty. Perhaps that’s warranted, but based on the faculty and students I interact with, I’m not convinced that’s likely to be the case.
“Studios just bring me into oversee things when they ‘bout to drop a deuce.”
It’s called “Hollywood Sequel Doctor.” It’s about a flamboyant guy who crashes a meeting of “Gremlins 2″ writers. He’s Magic Jackson, the Hollywood Sequel Doctor and here’s here to make sequels more fun!!! If you don’t want to watch the sketch, here’s a quick synopsis: The doc goes around the writers’ table, asking that each writer “create his own Gremlin.” The dumber the idea, the more thrilled with it he seems to be. The sketch is all Peele’s and he’s on fire through the whole thing. Some highlights from his jaunt ’round the table:
To the suggestion that the movie have a “brainy” Gremlin: “You talkin’ about a gremlin with glasses who could talk and sing ‘New York, New York’. That’s brilliant. It’s in the movie. Done.”
To the suggestion Hulk Hogan star: “You sir are a raging psychopath. Don’t let this town take that away from you.”
To the suggestion that the movie have an “electricity” Gremlin: “You just said noun and gremlin, like you playing Mad Libs. You just like a child. You have the brain of a child. You do not have a high IQ, but you haphazardly came up with a gremlin that’s just made out of bolts and is zig-zagging all over the room and is done completely in animation. You a crazy person, and your idea’s in the movie! Done. Next.”
Here’s the thing: the sketch ends with Key’s character saying “You know none of this stuff is actually going to be in the movie, right?” And then the words “All of these things were actually in the movie.” flashes on the screen. Never having seen Gremlins 2, I was like “NUH UH.” Then I wikipediaed it. Holy Magic Jackson. It just makes the sketch more delicious.
So, it’s an homage to crazy sequels. I know a lot of sequels are bad. But some sequels are as good as or even better than the movie that spawned them. Discuss.
Quick recap:John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular is a parody of an ebook by an obnoxious bigot who is obsessed with me, and I said (full details here) that if people raised $2,500 for Con or Bust, which funds science fiction convention memberships for people of color, I’d create an audiobook version of it. That happened. Then I said if we hit a stretch goal of $10,000, I’d also commission a song about me not being very popular. And that just happened! Whoo-hoo!
It will take me a bit to organize the song (update, 9/1/15: The song is commissioned! It’ll be a few weeks before it’s ready! Patience! It’ll be worth it!), but because you lovely people got us to an amazing $10,000 for Con or Bust in under 48 hours, I decided not to make you wait any longer for the audiobook. Here it is, with my love and appreciation.
First, the complete book, in one 40 minute chunk!
And now, the individual chapters:
Prologue
Chapter 1: How it Begins
Chapter 2: John Scalzi’s Blog is Not That Interesting and No One Reads It
Chapter 3: John Scalzi Does Not Understand Satire as Well as I Understand Satire
(Note: This chapter contains reference to a piece I wrote about rape, and despite its humorous nature as parody, may be triggery for some folks.)
Chapter 5: John Scalzi Did Not Get Me Thrown out of the SFWA
Chapter 5: John Scalzi’s Deal With Tor is Not a Very Good Deal
Chapter 5: John Scalzi is Not a Very Popular Author
(Update, 9:09pm: Kate Nepveu of Con or Bust has created an Audible-like audiobook file of the complete book, which you may find here.)
Enjoy!
And if you did enjoy this, and have not already done so, may I suggest you donate to Con or Bust, and help people of color attend science fiction conventions? That would be awesome. Thank you! And song to come!
The talented photographer Joséphine Cardin, drew her inspiration from the song “St. Jude” by Florence + The Machine for her new series “Comfort with Chaos”. She wanted to illustrate chaos through a collection of portrait showing a torn woman enveloped by smoke.
“Things are getting freer. Even a few years ago, I couldn’t wear what I’m wearing now without inviting a rebuke. The scarves are getting brighter and looser. The sleeves are getting shorter. The laughter is getting louder. This is a very young country. More than half the population is under 30. Have you ever seen an Iranian child? They are the most mischievous children on the planet. If you want an Iranian child to do something– tell them not to do it. Tell them not to kiss. Tell them not to hold hands. Tell them to dress in black. Tell them not to use Facebook. This country is full of mischievous, curious Iranian children. And the people who make the rules are getting older. And just like the Iranian parent, they are getting exhausted.”
I have really not been coping very well the last few days.
Granted, there’s been a whole shitload of unpleasant stuff to deal with, which certainly doesn’t make things easier, but I’m already at my wit’s end and desperately doing everything I can to hang on.
A little bit ago, I was going through an Instagram account with over 1000 posts of sexy ladies, scrolling though and liking the pictures. I planned to comment when I got to the bottom and thank them for giving me something worth staying around for, letting them know that I was alive because of their work.
But before I got anywhere near the bottom, Instagram blocked me from liking any posts, “to protect the community,” they claim, some actions aren’t allowed. I guess me staying alive would be harmful to someone out there…
And I’ve been dealing with idiots on Facebook, too much to even begin to describe.
And then, even here on my blog — a creep who sometimes goes by the incredibly ironic handle “Advocate,” who I had briefly known in person, who I have repeatedly tried to cut off contact with, who has repeatedly located my social media profiles, and — the last time he tried adding me on Facebook (without bothering to look at the VERY LOUD info all over my profile that says GO AWAY, DUDES! WOMEN ONLY!) I sent him a message to tell him to fuck off, to stop attempting to contact me, that I would do whatever was needed to keep him away — including, if necessary, involving Law Enforcement — and still the predatory, stalking motherfucker son of a bitch comes and comments on my blog to tell me that if I ever need a place to stay, he’ll gladly take me in… in a completely different state.
Because yeah, that’s not even slightly uncomfortable coming from an asshole who has repeatedly ignored boundaries, who can’t handle “stay away or I’ll call the cops.”
And I’m dealing with so much other shit here with The Rabbit and QotU that’s left me wanting to explode…
Except for one thing: politics. Urban expresses a disdain for politics that is common, not just among the current generation of nerds, but among young people in general:
Here, Republicans and Democrats are symmetrically distributed around a rational center, with mirror-image crazy zones at the extreme left and right. If you picture the political spectrum this way, then it’s obvious what you hope for: Rational moderates on each side should get together, reject their crazy compatriots, and construct a reasonable compromise around known realities and theories supported by evidence. The fact that this almost never happens just emphasizes how irrational politicians are, and why nerds like Urban want nothing to do with them.
Use your powers for good. Roberts closes with a plea for nerds to direct their nerdly powers of intellectual hyper-focus towards politics:
The Almata apple, as we have seen, is a red paint ball, dripping with color.
