Zephyr Dear

So apparently the Hugos suck this year, thanks to an organized voting campaign. See Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the voting campaign, which seems to be in part a product of internal disputes within the field (various right wing people upset that f/sf isn’t ‘their’ field any more, and belongs to teh_women/teh_gay/teh_PoC) and in part overspill from Gamergate. I don’t know many of the slate of nominees put up by the campaign, with the minor exception of Marko Kloos (whose self-published book I read and thought was unexceptionable military SF with the usual odd politics), and the unlovely John C. Wright (whose work and political opinions remind me of Gene Wolfe if Gene Wolfe had been subjected to an involuntary lobotomy). I did read and like Katherine Addison’s (Sarah Monette’s) The Goblin Emperor (although I liked her Melusine books even more) but apart from that I don’t have much advice to prospective Hugo voters on what they should vote for. What I do have is opinions on other work that didn’t get nominated but that seemed to me to be worth reading, and I hope that CT readers have too. One of the important functions of awards is to point readers towards good work that they otherwise might have missed. Since the Hugo Awards won’t be doing much of that this year, other people should do what they can.

Best Novel

2014 was in my opinion a pretty good year for novels – much better than 2013. Novels I especially liked.

Jo Walton – My Real Children. Probably not in need of much publicity given Walton’s previous Hugo win, but really, really good. January saw the publication of The Just City which is even better (but obviously was not eligible for awards). It’s one of those books that sounds as if it can’t possibly work – Plato’s Republic as SF, Greek gods, Socrates-as-muops, robots evolving consciousness – but does, gloriously. It’s also – like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty a book which reads as though it was purposely written to hit Crooked Timber’s sweet spot. And you’ll be hearing more about it here.

William Gibson – The Peripheral. I’ve written about it already here – this may be my favorite science fiction novel published last year.

Greg van Eekhout – California Bones. Again, I’ve written about it already. The next book in the series is even better.

Elizabeth Bear – Steles of the Sky. Write-up here. Really nicely done fantasy in a non-Western setting with fine attention to the underlying sociology.

Peter Watts – Echopraxia. It pursues many of the same themes as his previous Blindsight but perhaps isn’t quite as disturbing in its bleak view of human cognitive limitations and what they mean for our place in the universe. The characterization isn’t up to much but that is part of the point.

Felix Gilman – The Revolutions. Write-up here.

Elliott Kay – Rich Man’s War. A sequel to his Poor Man’s Fight – originally self-published, but now coming out via Amazon’s in-house publishing arm. Has all of the virtues of early Heinlein without the dubious politics. Highly recommended.

Best Novella

Daryl Gregory – We Are All Completely Fine. An excellent, sardonic take on HP Lovecraft – what happens when those driven into shrill unholy madness by perceiving the true lineaments of world go into group therapy? His new juvenile, Harrison Squared is a prequel, but doesn’t look to be nearly so creepy.

Best Short Story

Ruthanna Emrys – The Litany of Earth. A very different take on HP Lovecraft, which very nicely turns his racism back on itself and just a lovely short piece. I haven’t read anything by Emrys before, but I’ll be looking out for her name.

Hannu Rajaniemi – Invisible Planets. in Jonathan Strahan ed., Reach for Infinity. I’ve never warmed to Rajaniemi’s novels, but this was really well done – while being more deliberately scientifictional, it captured Calvino’s grave playfulness very well.

Best Related Work

Again, Jo Walton. What Makes This Book So Great should not only have been nominated for Best Related Work this year but won it by a landslide. I read all the columns when they were published on Tor.com – but reading them cumulatively makes a big difference. I’ve already bought (and not regretted) Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence, and Candace Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine on the strength of her writeups, and want her to start writing about Steven Brust’s Taltos series again, now.

If there was a ‘Best Short Story Collection’ category, I’d also have nominated Ysabeau Wilce’s Prophecies, Libels and Dreams. Those are what I’d like to have seen on the ballot. What about you?

kurtsnyder:

Marcy

Almost a year ago, I attended the local film festival Dances with Films to see a short film that my friend Austin Highsmith acted in called DRINK. I had met the director, Emily Moss Wilson, once at a party but otherwise didn't really know much about her or her film. When I found out the short was 23 minutes, I got a twinge of the same gut reaction I'm sure some of you might be feeling.

"23 minutes?! In the short film world that might as well be Gone With The Wind! Who makes a short that's the same length as your average sitcom sans commercials? If you're gonna take that much of my time, you'd better deliver!"

As far as I'm concerned DRINK delivers. I was rivited to the screen the whole time. The production value is fantastic, the acting is great, the visuals are appropriately unsettling at times. I completely bought into the world that Wilson and her team created. This might be one of the best shorts I've seen.

In talking to Emily post-screening, she cited The Twilight Zone and The X-Files as two of her big influences and said that one reason DRINK came in at the length it did was because they wanted it to play like a pilot for a Twilight Zone-like anthology series. For my money, it works.

Every now and then, we see some flashy VFX-driven short somehow get featured on Deadline or some other website and everyone seems to "ooh" and "ahhh" over the VFX that was done at a pittance, if not a total favor, and gives a total pass to the story. I'm tired of viral shorts that are little more than sizzle reels for stunt teams or VFX wizards. You want to impress me? Tell me a story.

If some film school punk can upload a 3-minute showcase of his knowledge of After Effects and suddenly have studios fighting begging him to come in for meetings, there is no reason that DRINK shouldn't be a fantastic calling card for Emily Moss Wilson. She sustains the tension and intrigue for a full 23 minutes - not an easy feat.  I want to see what she can do with a feature. This is a helluva lot stronger calling card than most short films I see.

Please check out DRINK, "A Twilight Zone-inspired cautionary tale about a young mother forced to come face-to-face with her deepest desire."

STARRING Austin Highsmith, Nolan Gross, Noah Swindle, Jake Muxworthy, Carter Jenkins, Virginia Tucker, Ron Harper
Directed by Emily Moss Wilson
Written by Emily Moss Wilson and Larry Soileau
Produced by Greg Wilson and Benjamin Grayson

[content note: mental illness. I am still in training and do not understand these issues even as well as a fully-trained psychiatrist, let alone a researcher, so take all the biology and studies in here with a grain of salt until you double-check]

I.

IO9’s new article The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On An Outdated Theory jumps on a popular bandwagon of criticizing psychiatry for botching the “chemical imbalance” theory. See for example The New Yorker, BBC, The New York Times, and various books.

(…and also The Myth Of Chemical Imbalance, Debunking The Chemical Imbalance Myth, The Chemical Imbalance Fraud, and Depression Delusion, The Myth Of The Chemical Imbalance, etc)

According to all these sources psychiatry sold the public on antidepressants by claiming depression was just a chemical imbalance (usually fleshed out as “a simple deficiency of serotonin”) and so it was perfectly natural to take extra chemicals to correct it. However, they had no real evidence for this theory except that serotonergic drugs effectively treat depression, which is not very much evidence at all (antibiotics effectively treat pneumonia, but pneumonia isn’t “an antibiotic deficiency”). And now the research is unequivocal that serotonin deficiency is not the cause of depression, and psychiatry has ended up with lots of egg on its face.

This narrative is getting pushed especially hard by the antipsychiatry movement, who frame it as “proof” that psychiatrists are drug company shills who were deceiving the public. The conversation has required a host of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals.

For example here antipsychiatry blog Mad In America attemps to rebut psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Pies, who argues that psychiatrists never pushed the chemical imbalance theory. Pies says that “The ‘chemical imbalance theory’ was never a real theory, nor was it widely propounded by responsible practitioners in the field of psychiatry,” and cites the American Psychiatric Association’s 2005 statement on the causes of depression:

The exact causes of mental disorders are unknown, but an explosive growth of research has brought us closer to the answers. We can say that certain inherited dispositions interact with triggering environmental factors. Poverty and stress are well-known to be bad for your health—this is true for mental health and physical health. In fact, the distinction between “mental” illness and “physical” illness can be misleading. Like physical illnesses, mental disorders can have a biological nature. Many physical illnesses can also have a strong emotional component

Mad In America doesn’t accept his claim, and counter-cites two speeches by American Psychiatric Association presidents to prove that they did push the chemical imbalance theory:

In the last decade, neuroscience and psychiatric research has begun to unlock the brain’s secrets. We now know that mental illnesses – such as depression or schizophrenia – are not “moral weaknesses” or “imagined” but real diseases caused by abnormalities of brain structure and imbalances of chemicals in the brain.” – Richard Harding, 2001 APA president

And:

The way nerves talk to each other, and communicate, is through the secretion of a chemical called a neurotransmitter, which stimulates the circuit to be activated. And when this regulation of chemical neurotransmission is disturbed, you have the alterations in the functions that those brain areas are supposed to, to mediate. So in a condition like depression, or mania, which occurs in bipolar disorder, you have a disturbance in the neurochemistry in the part of the brain that regulates emotion. – Jeffrey Lieberman, 2012 APA President

I have no personal skin in this game. I’ve only been a psychiatrist for two years, which means I started well after the term “chemical imbalance” fell out of fashion. I get to use the excuse favored by young children everywhere: “It was like this when I got here”. But I still feel like the accusations in this case are unfair, and I would like to defend my profession.

I propose that the term “chemical imbalance” hides a sort of bait-and-switch going on between the following two statements:

(A): Depression is complicated, but it seems to involve disruptions to the levels of brain chemicals in some important way

(B): We understand depression perfectly now, it’s just a deficiency of serotonin.

If you equivocate between them, you can prove that psychiatrists were saying (A), and you can prove that (B) is false and stupid, and then it’s sort of like psychiatrists were saying something false and stupid!

But it isn’t too hard to prove that psychiatrists, when they talked about “chemical imbalance”, meant something more like (A). I mean, look at the quotes above by which Mad In America tries to prove psychiatrists guilty of pushing chemical imbalance. Both sound more like (A) than (B). Neither mentions serotonin by name. Both talk about the chemical aspect as part of a larger picture: Harding in the context of abnormalities in brain structure, Lieberman in the context of some external force disrupting neurotransmission. Neither uses the word “serotonin” or “deficiency”. If the antipsychiatry community had quotes of APA officials saying it’s all serotonin deficiency, don’t you think they would have used them?

Further, anyone who said that depression was caused solely by serotonin deficiency wouldn’t just be failing as a scientist, but also failing as a drug company shill. Pfizer spent billions of dollars on Effexor, which hits norepinephrine as well as serotonin, and they’re just going to dismiss all of that as useless? GlaxoSmithKline has Wellbutrin, which hits dopamine and norepinephrine and maybe acetylcholine but doesn’t get serotonin at all. So everyone, including the shills, especially the shills, has been very careful to say that depression was a “chemical imbalance” rather than a serotonin deficiency per se.

So if you want to prove that psychiatrists were deluded or deceitful, you’re going to have to disprove not just statement (B) – which never represented a good scientific or clinical consensus – but statement (A). And that’s going to be hard, because as far as I can tell statement (A) still looks pretty plausible.

II.

If you listen to these articles, psychiatrists decided that neurotransmitters (or just serotonin?) were implicated in depression solely on the evidence that SSRIs were effective antidepressants, even though every study trying to measure serotonin levels directly came back with negative results. For example, The Myth Of The Chemical Imbalance Theory writes:

There is no question that the chemical imbalance theory has spurred chemists to invent new anti-depressants, or that these anti-depressants have been shown to work; but proof that low serotonin is to blame for depression – and that boosting serotonin levels is the key to its treatment – has eluded researchers.

For starters, it is impossible to directly measure brain serotonin levels in humans. You can’t sample human brain tissue without also destroying it. A crude work-around involves measuring levels of a serotonin metabolite, 5-HIAA, in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which can only be obtained with a spinal tap. A handful of studies from the 1980s found slightly decreased 5-HIAA in the CSF of depressed and suicidal patients, while later studies have produced conflicting results on whether SSRIs lower or raise CSF levels of 5-HIAA. These studies are all circumstantial with regards to actual serotonin levels, though, and the fact remains there is no direct evidence of a chemical imbalance underlying depression.

The corollary to the chemical imbalance theory, which implies that raising brain serotonin levels alleviates depression, has also been hard to prove. As mentioned previously, the serotonin-depleting drug reserpine was itself shown to be an effective anti-depressant in the 1950s, the same decade in which other studies claimed that reserpine caused depression-like symptoms. At the time, few psychiatrists acknowledged these conflicting reports, as the studies muddled a beautiful, though incorrect, theory. Tianeptine is another drug that decreases serotonin levels while also serving as a bona-fide anti-depressant. Tianeptine does just the opposite of SSRIs – it enhances serotonin reuptake. Wellbutrin is a third anti-depressant that doesn’t increase serotonin levels. You get the picture.

If you prefer your data to be derived more accurately, but less relevantly, from rodents, you might consider a recent meta-analysis carried out by researchers led by McMaster University psychologist Paul Andrews. Their investigation revealed that, in rodents, depression was usually associated with elevated serotonin levels. Andrews argues that depression is therefore a disorder of too much serotonin, but the ambiguous truth is that different experiments have shown “activation or blockage of certain serotonin receptors [to improve] or worsen depression symptoms in an unpredictable manner.”

Other problems with the chemical imbalance model of depression have been well documented elsewhere. For instance, if low serotonin levels were responsible for symptoms of depression, it stands to reason that boosting levels of serotonin should alleviate symptoms more or less immediately. In fact, antidepressants can take more than a month to take effect. Clearly, something here just doesn’t add up.

Clearly!

GABA is a neurotransmitter that promotes inhibition and relaxation. Suppose I were to tell you that alcohol is a drug that mimics the effects of GABA. Which it is.

You might say: something is wrong with this theory! After all, people who drink alcohol don’t always get relaxed and inhibited. A lot of the time they get uninhibited and angry and violent! And then if they drink too much of it, they get super-inhibited to the point where they’re in a total blackout. Also, alcoholics who have been drinking for many years have higher levels of anxiety than non-alcoholics, but anxiety is also the opposite of relaxation! Clearly, something here just doesn’t add up. Maybe the neuroscientists are all shills for Budweiser!

Or else maybe the brain is kind of complicated. In the case of alcohol we pretty much know what’s going on. Alcohol does inhibit and relax you, but in some people and at some doses, it preferentially inhibits and relaxes the parts of the brain involved in inhibiting and relaxing the rest of the brain, meaning that the person as a whole because more uninhibited and violent. At higher doses, it inhibits and relaxes the entire brain, leading to confusion and eventually blackout. And once you’ve been taking alcohol for many years, your brain adjusts to the higher level of GABA-like chemicals by producing fewer GABA receptors, making you more anxious.in general. It’s a whole bunch of contradictory effects, but when you look at the neuroscience it makes sense.

We know less about the serotonin picture, but what we know suggests something similar is going on. Serotonin has different effects in lots of different parts of the brain. There are fourteen different types of serotonin receptor, all of which do subtly different things. Some serotonergic neurons have autoreceptors that cause decreased release of serotonin in response to serotonin. The brain responds to different levels of serotonin by slowly altering endogenous serotonin production as well as the expression of the different serotonin receptors. Etc, etc, etc.

Lest it sound like I’m making excuses rather than presenting evidence: A study on a monkey model – generally preferred to humans when you want to kill your patients and take apart their brains when you’re done – showed that depressed macaques had elevated levels of serotonin in the dorsal raphe nuclei and decreased levels of serotonin in the hippocampus, resulting in average levels of serotonin in the cerebrospinal fluid where the experiments mentioned above took their serotonin measurements. A study with a more sophisticated measurement process, Elevated Brain Serotonin Turnover in Patients With Depression, found that depressed subjects had serotonin turnover as measured in the jugular vein about twice as high as healthy controls (p = 0.003), and successful treatment with SSRI therapy corrected this imbalance (though others dispute the methodology).

All of this sort of fits. If depression involves a distorted pattern of serotonin across the brain, then both certain drugs that increase serotonin levels and certain drugs that decrease it might be helpful. And SSRIs might take a month to work if their mechanism of action isn’t the direct serotonin increase, but a contrary response they provoke from the brain. I think I heard from someone in the field that a month is about how long it takes for them to change the levels of expressed 5HT receptors by altering genetic transcription. Or something. I’m not a neuroscientist (though you can read some more complicated work from people who are) and I don’t know. The point is that you can get a heck of a lot more complex than just “Too little serotonin!” versus “Too much serotonin!”

So does this mean depression “was really serotonin after all”?

No. It means we have good evidence serotonin is involved somewhere. Among the other things that we have good evidence are involved somewhere are: dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, cytokines, BDNF, thyroid hormones, and whether the kids at school picked on you in first grade.

Suppose you ask me what caused you to become blind. I happen to have your medical records and know that the answer is proliferative retinopathy secondary to Type 2 diabetes, but you’ve been living in a cave your entire life and never even heard of diabetes. Which is the correct answer to your question?

1. Your blindness is caused by tiny little blood vessels growing all over your eyes
2. Your blindness is caused by imbalance in a chemical called protein kinase C-delta and the resulting signaling cascade
3. Your blindness is caused by too much sugar in your blood
4. Your blindness is caused by your cells becoming less sensitive to insulin
5. Your blindness is caused by you drinking too much Coca-Cola

All of these are true. You drink too much Coca-Cola, it causes your cells to lose insulin sensitivity, that causes too much sugar in the blood, that increases the activity of PKC-delta, and that causes little blood vessels to grow all over your eyes. Sometimes the chain is different. Maybe you drank too much lemonade instead of too much Coca-Cola. Maybe you drank too much Coca-Cola, but actually instead of causing diabetes it caused hypertension and then you got hypertensive retinopathy which made you blind. Maybe it was diabetic retinopathy, but actually you haven’t gotten to the proliferative stage yet, and you just had a lot of your blood vessels get damaged and start leaking and causing macular oedema. Maybe it was diabetic retinopathy, but you had a perfect diet and lost the genetic lottery. I don’t know.

If someone told you “We think it involves an imbalance in protein kinase” it would be woefully incomplete. But if someone said “That doctor there said your blindness was caused by an imbalance in protein kinase, that proves he’s a fraud!”, well, no, it wouldn’t.

Except the situation is even more complicated than this, because at least I specified this guy had diabetic retinopathy. What if somebody just asked “What causes blindness?” “High protein kinase” or “high blood sugar” would be two answers, and you could find tests supporting both. But “cataracts” would be another good answer. So would “people getting acid thrown in their eyes”.

All I’m saying is that depression is complicated. Discovering its relationship to the serotonin system is a lot like saying “blindness quite often has something to do with the retina”. It’s a big step forward, and don’t believe anyone who says it isn’t, but it’s not anywhere near the whole picture.

III.

And this starts to get into the next important point I want to bring up, which is chemical imbalance is a really broad idea.

Like, some of these articles seem to want to contrast the “discredited” chemical imbalance theory with up-and-coming “more sophisticated” theories based on hippocampal neurogenesis and neuroinflammation. Well, I have bad news for you. Hippocampal neurogenesis is heavily regulated by brain-derived neutrophic factor, a chemical. Neuroinflammation is mediated by cytokines. Which are also chemicals. Do you think depression is caused by stress? The stress hormone cortisol is…a chemical. Do you think it’s entirely genetic? Genes code for proteins – chemicals again. Do you think it’s caused by poor diet? What exactly do you think food is made of?

Diabetes is caused by a chemical imbalance: too much sugar (or too little insulin) in the blood. Parkinson’s is caused by a chemical imbalance: too little dopamine in the basal ganglia. Heart attacks are caused by a chemical imbalance: too many of the wrong kinds of lipids and lipid-related plaques in the coronary arteries.

I can get even more nitpicky if you want. The Donner Party died of chemical imbalance – too few fatty acids, proteins, and carbohydrates. The passengers of the Titanic died of a chemical imbalance – H2O in the lungs instead of O2. And it was a chemical imbalance that got Hiroshima in the end: excess uranium-235. Anything that’s not caused by ghosts is going to be “a chemical imbalance” in some sense of the word.

This is why I’m being so insistent that psychiatrists referred to “a chemical imbalance” rather than “a serotonin deficiency”. They were hedging the heck out of their bets. It might be BDNF, or cytokines, or whatever. But if something happens in the body and doesn’t show up as a gross anatomical defect on MRI, it’s a pretty good bet it’s chemical in some sense of the word.

So is this a giant cop-out? Psychiatrists said “it’s a chemical imbalance” to make it sound like they knew what they were talking about, when in fact all they meant was “it’s a thing that exists”?

Sort of.

Anything that isn’t caused by ghosts is going to be “a chemical imbalance” in some sense of the word. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, “depression is not caused by ghosts” was a revolutionary statement, and one that desperately needed to be said.

I still see this. People come in with depression, and they think it means they’re lazy, or they don’t have enough willpower, or they’re bad people. Or else they don’t think it, but their families do: why can’t she just pull herself up with her own bootstraps, make a bit of an effort? Or: we were good parents, we did everything right, why is he still doing this? Doesn’t he love us?

And I could say: “Well, it’s complicated, but basically in people who are genetically predisposed, some sort of precipitating factor, which can be anything from a disruption in circadian rhythm to a stressful event that increases levels of cortisol to anything that activates the immune system into a pro-inflammatory mode, is going to trigger a bunch of different changes along metabolic pathways that shifts all of them into a different attractor state. This can involve the release of cytokines which cause neuroinflammation which shifts the balance between kynurinins and serotonin in the tryptophan pathway, or a decrease in secretion of brain-derived neutrotrophic factor which inhibits hippocampal neurogenesis, and for some reason all of this also seems to elevate serotonin in the raphe nuclei but decrease it in the hippocampus, and probably other monoamines like dopamine and norepinephrine are involved as well, and of course we can’t forget the hypothalamopituitaryadrenocortical axis, although for all I know this is all total bunk and the real culprit is some other system that has downstream effects on all of these or just…”

Or I could say: “Fuck you, it’s a chemical imbalance.”

Last time I talked about the definition of disease I said that people want diseases to “be caused by the sorts of thing you study in biology: proteins, bacteria, ions, viruses, genes.”

I don’t think I could actually get away with telling a patient’s family “it’s caused by, you know, biology stuff” without them asking if I really went to medical school. I don’t think I’d use the term “chemical imbalance” precisely; too likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction from people reading exactly these articles I’m responding to. But I think I would say something alone those lines. “We don’t know exactly, but it probably involves problems with brain structure and brain chemicals,” maybe. That covers about the same ground as “biology stuff” while also sounding like I’m at least trying to answer their question.

So if what I’m actually saying with that is “depression is caused by complicated biology stuff you don’t understand, and not by things like your son not really loving you, or being lazy,” am I sure that’s right?

I won’t say all depression is 100% caused by internal failures of biology in the same way that for example cystic fibrosis is caused 100% by internal failures of biology. I am happy to admit that some depressions can be caused by being in a crappy social situation, being abused as a child, being stuck in an unhappy marriage, being worried about problems at work, stuff like that.

But it’s far from obvious that being stuck in an unhappy marriage should drain your energy, drain your concentration, make you stop enjoying your hobbies, and finally drive you to suicide. We can imagine another person, or another way of designing a person, where someone says “I hate my husband, so I try to stay away from him as much as I can by working extra hard and spending my free time playing frisbee with my dog in the park.” But instead, someone hates their husband, and it drives all the joy out of their life to the point where they can’t go to work, they can’t play with their dog, they just sit around wishing they were dead.

And is that the fault of “biology stuff”? That’s a harder question than it sounds. What would it mean to say ‘no’? If we are strict materialists who don’t believe in some kind of division of labor between the brain and the soul, then yes, if it’s a feeling you’re having, it’s based in biology.

I’ve previously said we use talk of disease and biology to distinguish between things we can expect to respond to rational choice and social incentives and things that don’t. If I’m lying in bed because I’m sleepy, then yelling at me to get up will solve the problem, so we call sleepiness a natural state. If I’m lying in bed because I’m paralyzed, then yelling at me to get up won’t change anything, so we call paralysis a disease state. Talk of biology tells people to shut off their normal intuitive ways of modeling the world. Intuitively, if my son is refusing to go to work, it means I didn’t raise him very well and he doesn’t love me enough to help support the family. If I say “depression is a chemical imbalance”, well, that means that the problem is some sort of complicated science thing and I should stop using my “mirror neurons” and my social skills module to figure out where I went wrong or where he went wrong.

In other words, everything we do is caused by brain chemicals, but usually we think about them on the human terms, like “He went to the diner because he was hungry” and not “He went to the diner because the level of dopamine in the appetite center of his hypothalamus reached a critical level which caused it to fire messages at the complex planning center which told his motor cortex to move his legs to…” – even though both are correct. Very occasionally, some things happen that we can’t think about on the human terms, like a seizure – we can’t explain in terms of desires or emotions or goals an epileptic person is flailing their limbs, so we have to go down to the lower-level brain chemical explanation.

What “chemical imbalance” does for depression is try to force it down to this lower level, tell people to stop trying to use rational and emotional explanations for why their friend or family member is acting this way. It’s not a claim that nothing caused the chemical imbalance – maybe a recent breakup did – but if you try to use your normal social intuitions to determine why your friend or family member is behaving the way they are after the breakup, you’re going to get screwy results.

(in much the same way, if I just saw you take a giant handful of amphetamines, I pretty much know why you’re having a seizure, but I still can’t rationally / intuitively model the experience of why you’re “choosing” to move your limbs the way that you are.)

(though it’s important for me to temper this by mentioning that many people diagnosed with depression don’t have it)

There’s still one more question, which is: are you sure that depression patients’ experience is so incommensurable with healthy people’s experiences that it’s better to model their behavior as based on mysterious brain chemicals rather than on rational choice?

And part of what I’m going on is the stated experience of depressed people themselves. As for the rest, I can only plead consistency. I think people’s political opinions are highly genetically loaded and appear to be related to the structure of the insula and amygdala. I think large-scale variations in crime rate are mostly attributable to environmental levels of lead and probably other chemicals. It would be really weird if depression were the one area where we could always count on the inside view not to lead us astray.

So this is my answer to the accusation that psychiatry erred in promoting the idea of a “chemical imbalance”. The idea that depression is a drop-dead simple serotonin deficiency was never taken seriously by mainstream psychiatry. The idea that depression was a complicated pattern of derangement in several different brain chemicals that may well be interacting with or downstream from other causes has always been taken seriously, and continues to be pretty plausible. Whatever depression is, it’s very likely it will involve chemicals in some way, and it’s useful to emphasize that fact in order to convince people to take depression seriously as something that is beyond the intuitively-modeled “free will” of the people suffering it. “Chemical imbalance” is probably no longer the best phrase for that because of the baggage it’s taken on, but the best phrase will probably be one that captures a lot of the same idea.

(Warning: some links lead to to triggery ranting. As James D. Nicoll warns: "memetic prophylactic recommended".)

By now, everybody who cares knows that the nominations for the 2015 Hugo Awards reflect the preferences of a bloc-voting slate with an agenda—and their culture wars allies. But, interestingly, a new Hugo-related record has been set: for a Finnish publisher few people have ever heard of is responsible for no fewer than nine nominated works.

Castalia House was (per wikipedia) founded by Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) in early 2014 in Kouvola, Finland. As their website explains:

Castalia House is a Finland-based publisher that has a great appreciation for the golden age of science fiction and fantasy literature. The books that we publish honor the traditions and intellectual authenticity exemplified by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert E. Howard, G.K. Chesterton, and Hermann Hesse. We are consciously providing an alternative to readers who increasingly feel alienated from the nihilistic, dogmatic science fiction and fantasy being published today. We seek nothing less than a Campbellian revolution in genre literature.

Total culture wars, very gamergate, much fail, wow. But the screaming question I feel the need to ask, is: why Finland? Could there be a connection between the white supremacist Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party), the overtly racist Sweden Democrats, the Dark Enlightenment/neoreactionary movement, and Vox Day's peculiarly toxic sect of Christian Dominionist theology?

Vox Day writes:

It's time for the church leaders and the heads of Christian families to start learning from #GamerGate, to start learning from Sad Puppies, and start leading. Start banding together and stop accommodating the secular world in any way. Don't hire those who hate you. Don't buy from those who wish to destroy you. Don't work with those who denigrate your faith, your traditions, your morals, and your God. Don't tolerate or respect what passes for their morals and values.

Over a period of years, he's built an international coalition, finding common cause with the European neo-nazi fringe. Now they've attempted to turn the Hugo Awards into a battlefield in their (American) culture wars. But this clearly isn't the end game they have in mind: it's only a beginning. (The Hugos, by their very nature, are an award anyone can vote in for a small fee: it is interesting to speculate on how deep Vox Day's pockets are.) But the real burning question is, "what will he attack next?"

My guess: the Hugo awards are not remotely as diverse and interesting as the SFWAs Nebula Awards—an organization from which Vox Day became only the second person ever to be expelled. I believe he bears SFWA (and former SFWA President John Scalzi) no love, and the qualification for SFWA membership (which confers Nebula voting rights) is to have professionally published three short stories or a novel. Castalia House is a publishing entity with a short story anthology series. Is the real game plan "Hugos today: Nebulas tomorrow?"

Yesterday I drew this self portrait: it was the first one I’ve done in four years. The last time I drew one was a year in which I was more distant from my body than any other time in my life, and distant with everyone else’s bodies as a result. The last self-portrait I drew was monstrous and cruel and full of a complete lack of hope for possibility of any future burgeoning. This wasn’t just about gender, but a lot of it was.

Drawing myself was useful in a way that felt only comparable to a feeling of witnessing being seen by someone who really digs you: that they’re a more honest mirror of who you are than the photographs, gaze of most of the rest of the world, doctors, blabla….

So, yesterday I put out an ask for trans* folks who are interested in being drawn to send me photographs to use as reference. I want to stress that what I’m saying includes people that identify as genderqueer, nonbinary, pangender, genderfluid, everything. There’s no “trans enough” going on with this, which is also coming from someone that knows how much presentation and privilege matter and who is thinking about how beauty and realness and worth are assessed and prioritized.

For a long time whenever I drew people I drew them as shadows, or ghosts, or an attempt at drawing genderless humanoids that ultimately just felt abstract and as though they were helplessly assisting in the construction of monumentalist beauty standards. I refrained from drawing anyone in their specificity, both out of fear of getting them wrong but also the fear of really trying to be present and see somebody. I think that I excused drawing specific people as a way to attempt to democratize my art work, to make it inclusive, and to keep it vague to the point that it was enterable from many standpoints. At this point, I’m becoming interested in specifics.

In reality, I think that what was going on was not an attempt at a gender politics of inclusion, but rather, an unwillingness to attempt to become present in my own body that played out as a refusal to actually examine the ways in which I wanted to experience the sensation of being me. 

I’m really exhausted from coming up with clever reasons for why it’s OK to be the person I am, and really sick of being forced, both by other’s and my own internalization of a network of institutional repression of queer imagination, to have to negotiate labyrinths that are constructed by patriarchs and their cronies to get to some moment of actualization, to be able to answer the question of what and how I am I came to be.

In the context of these processes of self-actualization that are now indelibly linked with TDOV, I am also thinking about the ways in which my process of actualization and visualization are supported by the infrastructures of whiteness, thinness, and androgeny. I think that this post about who benefits from visibility and who doesn’t is really good.

I want to be here with other people when I’m here. Mostly for a long time I’ve just felt weird and alone and unloveable, so starting to be in a place where I feel like maybe I’m not a twisted evil bad-weird creature is something that would feel cool to feel with other people. I don’t have many tools for that right now other than talking to people and making art, but I have those things, and this feels like a way that I can share them with the folks that I feel like are just slightly removed family. If you want me to draw a portrait of you, please send me a message with some pictures. It would be best if you sent them to my email so I can keep track of them. It’s noellelonghaul@gmail.com. I can’t promise that I’ll be rapid in response times, but I can say that I feel really committed to doing this for as long as it feels sustainable.

Thanks,
Noel’le

13:45 - Spiritual Care note - visiting pastor distributes palm fronds to clients, in celebration of Palm Sunday.

13:53 - Clients are reminded that palm fronds are intended for religious purposes and are not to be used as weapons.

13:57 - Client-client altercation.  See incident report.

14:04 - Clients are reminded that palm fronds may not be used as weapons even if it is “a joke,” because not everyone finds the same things funny, okay?

14:08 - Clients are reminded that palm fronds are not to be used to touch any other person in any way.

14:12 - Palm fronds confiscated by nurse.

the shell program i use remembers what commands i use in specific directories so i can pretty much just get stoned and wander into a directory and remember what kinds of things i was doing there last time by having it give me suggestions

between that and leaving little READMEs it rly helps with  the whole executive functioning issues thing

like honestly my goal for personally programing workflow is “could i do this when i’m rly stoned” because that’s a good indicator that it’s such a small amount of effort that i can actually focus ond whatever the heck i’m actually trying to do at a high level instead of worrying about process

i was talking with peach yesterday about religious texts and how they are so totally different from modern literature in a very specific way. they are writen by many many hands and usually curated and preserved by some kind of cultural institution where the words produced belong to no any one person and this anonymity or beyond anonymity even destruction of the authors voice and a lot of things makes them feel to me more like a modern software project with many tiny hands maintaning and reworking and adding to words than the violently individualist institution known as modern literature

my big aha moment that left this in relief for me was how in judaic texts things are writen very specifically so that you can drop yourself off anywhere in the text and just start reading and things will generally make sense. a part of this requires the text to be very repetitious

when working on a very large software project your first inclination is to never repeat yourself so that if you need to change what you say you only have to change it in one place, but this actually is not always a good drive and so yourself and the people you work with tend to develop a sense of taste for what kinds of repetition are good and helpfull and you will see lots of code duplication throughout a project that is not a bad thing it helps people

jumpingjacktrash:

i think a lot of us, when we’re growing up, we learn kind of the opposite of self-care. a kind of self-disregard, if that makes any sense.

especially those of us who have invisible disabilities, we needed extra rest or extra help or something different from other kids, but not only did we not get it, we were made to feel greedy or lazy for needing it. so we internalized that, and we grew up with this feeling that having needs is weakness.

hands up if you were shocked to discover that not everyone goes through life being exhausted and hungry and strung out all the time. o/

for the longest time i just thought everyone else was better than me at hiding the fact that they were constantly in pain and sleep deprived.

liquidcoma replied to your post: implausablehound replied to your post:…

Yo i have always done this scanning shit with my eyes and the weirdest thing is how i can do it smoothly if i scan from left to right but its all choppy if i do it backwards

yes our head and eyes only like to swivel one direction but always have to jump back to swivel again

fyeahautistickitten:

[Top Text: Store clerk asks if you need help.

Bottom Text: Say “no” even though you desperately need help.]

HOW WAS SPY KIDS 3 A MOVIE:

myiodeopsia:

dilapidatedragamuffin:

Can we talk about Spy Kids 3 for a second because it’s just the MOST BAFFLING CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE EVER

First we open to LITTLE BABY SELENA GOMEZ

THE PRESIDENT IS GEORGE CLOONEY?

Later we see Juni’s grandpa who is KHAN??

who spends the whole movie chasing a butterfly

THE VILLAIN IS SYLVESTER STALLONE

WHO GETS VILLAIN ADVICE FROM THREE OTHER SYLVESTER STALLONES

ELIJAH WOOD SHOWS UP

ONLY TO DIE IN THE NEXT SCENE

Then we find out that the president was actually the villain the whole time which makes ZERO SENSE but leads to this glorious George Clooney Sylvester Stallone impression

Then we get Antonio Benderez doing this?

AND THEIR UNCLE WHO IS STILL MACHETE

AND THEN STEVE BUSCEMI SHOWS UP ON A FLYING PIG FOR NO REASON

HOW WAS THIS A MOVIE???

also remember that this all takes place in the same fictional universe as the Kill Bill movies.

It’s getting easier to secure your digital privacy. iPhones now encrypt a great deal of personal information; hard drives on Mac and Windows 8.1 computers are now automatically locked down; even Facebook, which made a fortune on open sharing, is providing end-to-end encryption in the chat tool WhatsApp. But none of this technology offers as much protection as you may think if you don’t know how to come up with a good passphrase.

A passphrase is like a password, but longer and more secure. In essence, it’s an encryption key that you memorize. Once you start caring more deeply about your privacy and improving your computer security habits, one of the first roadblocks you’ll run into is having to create a passphrase. You can’t secure much without one.

For example, when you encrypt your hard drive, a USB stick, or a document on your computer, the disk encryption is often only as strong as your passphrase. If you use a password database, or the password-saving feature in your web browser, you’ll want to set a strong master passphrase to protect them. If you want to encrypt your email with PGP, you protect your private key with a passphrase. In his first email to Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden wrote, “Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase. Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.”

In this post, I outline a simple way to come up with easy-to-memorize but very secure passphrases. It’s the latest entry in an ongoing series of stories offering solutions — partial and imperfect but useful solutions — to the many surveillance-related problems we aggressively report about here at The Intercept.

It turns out, coming up with a good passphrase by just thinking of one is incredibly hard, and if your adversary really is capable of one trillion guesses per second, you’ll probably do a bad job of it. If you use an entirely random sequence of characters it might be very secure, but it’s also agonizing to memorize (and honestly, a waste of brain power).

But luckily this usability/security trade-off doesn’t have to exist. There is a method for generating passphrases that are both impossible for even the most powerful attackers to guess, yet very possible for humans to memorize. The method is called Diceware, and it’s based on some simple math.

Your secret password trick probably isn’t very clever

People often pick some phrase from pop culture — favorite lyrics from a song or a favorite line from a movie or book — and slightly mangle it by changing some capitalization or adding some punctuation, or use the first letter of each word from this phrase. Some of these passphrases might seem good and entirely unguessable, but it’s easy to underestimate the capabilities of those invested in guessing passphrases.

Imagine your adversary has taken the lyrics from every song ever written, taken the scripts from every movie and TV show, taken the text from every book ever digitized and every page on Wikipedia, in every language, and used that as a basis for their guess list. Will your passphrase still survive?

If you created your passphrase by just trying to think of a good one, there’s a pretty high chance that it’s not good enough to stand up against the might of a spy agency. For example, you might come up with “To be or not to be/ THAT is the Question?” If so, I can guarantee that you are not the first person to use this slightly-mangled classic Shakespeare quote as your passphrase, and attackers know this.

The reason the Shakespeare quote sucks as a passphrase is that it lacks something called entropy. You can think of entropy as randomness, and it’s one of the most important concepts in cryptography. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion.

Even if you don’t use a quote, but instead make up a phrase off the top of your head, your phrase will still be far from random because language is predictable. As one research paper on the topic states, “users aren’t able to choose phrases made of completely random words, but are influenced by the probability of a phrase occurring in natural language,” meaning that user-chosen passphrases don’t contain as much entropy as you think they might. Your brain tends to continue using common idioms and rules of grammar that reduce randomness. For example, it disproportionately decides to follow an adverb with a verb and vice versa, or, to cite one actual case from the aforementioned research paper, to put the word “fest” after the word “sausage.”

Passphrases that come from pop culture, facts about your life, or anything that comes directly from your mind are much weaker than passphrases that are imbued with actual entropy, collected from nature.

This short but enlightening video from Khan Academy’s free online cryptography class illustrates the point well.

Make a secure passphrase with Diceware

Once you’ve admitted that your old passphrases aren’t as secure as you imagined them to be, you’re ready for the “Diceware” technique.

First, grab a copy of the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 English words — 37 pages for those of you printing at home. You’ll notice that next to each word is a five-digit number, with each digit being between 1 and 6. Here’s a small excerpt from the word list:

24456 eo
24461 ep
24462 epa
24463 epic
24464 epoch

Now grab some six-sided dice (yes, actual real physical dice), and roll them several times, writing down the numbers that you get. You’ll need a total of five dice rolls to come up with the first word in your passphrase. What you’re doing here is generating entropy, extracting true randomness from nature and turning it into numbers.

If you roll the number two, then four, then four again, then six, then three, and then look up in the Diceware word list 24463, you’ll see the word “epic”. That will be the first word in your passphrase. Now repeat. You want to come up with a seven-word passphrase if you’re worried about the NSA or Chinese spies someday trying to guess it (more on the logic behind this number below).

Using Diceware, you end up with passphrases that look like “cap liz donna demon self,” “bang vivo thread duct knob train,” and “brig alert rope welsh foss rang orb.” If you want a stronger passphrase you can use more words; if a weaker passphrase is OK for your purpose you can use less words.

How strong are Diceware passphrases?

The strength of a Diceword passphrase depends on how many words it contains. If you choose one word (out of a list of 7,776 words), an attacker has a one in 7,776 chance of guessing your word on the first try. To guess your word it will take an attacker at least one try, at most 7,776 tries, and on average 3,888 tries (because there’s a 50 percent chance that an attacker will guess your word by the time they are halfway through the word list).

But if you choose two words for your passphrase, the size of the list of possible passphrases increases exponentially. There’s still a one in 7,776 chance of guessing your first word correctly, but for each first word there’s also a one in 7,776 chance of guessing the second word correctly, and the attacker won’t know if the first word is correct without guessing the entire passphrase.

This means that with two words, there are 7,776², or 60,466,176 different potential passphrases. On average, a two-word Diceware passphrase could be guessed after the first 30 million tries. And a five-word passphrase, which would have have 7,776⁵ possible passphrases, could be guessed after an average of 14 quintillion tries (a 14 with 18 zeroes).

The amount of uncertainty in a passphrase (or in an encryption key, or in any other type of information) is measured in bits of entropy. You can measure how secure your random passphrase is by how many bits of entropy it contains. Each word from the Diceware list is worth about 12.92 bits of entropy (because 2^12.92 is about 7,776). So if you choose seven words you’ll end up with a passphrase with about 90.5 bits of entropy (because 12.92 times seven is about 90.5).

In other words, if an attacker knows that you are using a seven-word Diceware passphrase, and they pick seven random words from the Diceware word list to guess, there is a one in 1,719,070,799,748,422,591,028,658,176 chance that they’ll pick your passphrase each try.

At one trillion guesses per second — per Edward Snowden’s January 2013 warning — it would take an average of 27 million years to guess this passphrase.

Not too bad for a passphrase like “bolt vat frisky fob land hazy rigid,” which is entirely possible for most people to memorize. Compare that to “d07;oj7MgLz’%v,” a random password that contains slightly less entropy than the seven-word Diceware passphrase but is significantly more difficult to memorize.

A five-word passphrase, in contrast, would be cracked in just under six months and a six-word passphrase would take 3,505 years, on average, at a trillion guesses a second. Keeping Moore’s Law in mind, computers are constantly getting more powerful, and before long one trillion guesses a second might start looking slow, so it’s good to give your passphrases some security breathing room.

With a system like this, it doesn’t matter at all that the word list you’re choosing from is public. It doesn’t even matter what the words in the list are (two-letter words are just as secure as six-letter words). All that matters is how long the list of words is and that each word on the list is unique. The probability of guessing a passphrase made of these randomly-chosen words gets exponentially smaller with each word you add, and using this fact it’s possible to make passphrases that can never be guessed.

Do I really have to use dice?

This is a longer discussion, but the short answer is: Using physical dice will give you a much stronger guarantee that nothing went wrong. But it’s time consuming and tedious, and using a computer to generate these random numbers is almost always good enough.

Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be user-friendly software available to help people generate Diceware passphrases, only various command-line-only Diceware projects on GitHub, which power users can check out. Stay tuned for a future post about this.

How to memorize your crazy passphrase (without going crazy)

After you’ve generated your passphrase, the next step is to commit it to memory.

I recommend that you write your new passphrase down on a piece of paper and carry it with you for as long as you need. Each time you need to type it, try typing it from memory first, but look at the paper if you need to. Assuming you type it a couple times a day, it shouldn’t take more than two or three days before you no longer need the paper, at which point you should destroy it.

Typing your passphrase on a regular basis allows you to memorize it through a process known as spaced repetition, according to promising research into high-entropy passphrases.

Now that you know passphrases, here’s when to avoid them

Diceware passphrases are great for when you’re typing them into your computer to decrypt something locally, like your hard drive, your PGP secret key or your password database.

You don’t so much need them for logging into a website or something else on the Internet. In those situations, you get less benefit from using a high-entropy passphrase. Attackers will never be able to guess a trillion times per second if each guess requires communicating with a server on the Internet. In some cases, attackers will own or take over the remote server — in which case they can grab the passphrase as soon you log in and send it, regardless of how strong or weak it is cryptographically.

For logging in to websites and other servers, use a password database. I like KeePassX because it’s free, open source, cross-platform, and it never stores anything in the cloud. Then lock up all your passwords behind a master passphrase that you generate with Diceware. Use your password manager to generate and store a different random password for each website you login to.

How we use Diceware to protect our sources

At The Intercept we run a SecureDrop server, an open source whistleblower submission system, to make it simpler and more secure for anonymous sources to get in touch with us.

When a new source visits our SecureDrop website, they get assigned a code name made up of seven random words. After submitting messages or documents, they can use this code name to log back in and check for responses from our journalists.

Under the hood, this code name not only acts as the source’s encryption passphrase, but it’s also really just a passphrase generated using the Diceware method, but with a digital cryptographically secure random number generator, rather than rolling dice. SecureDrop’s dictionary is only 6,800 words long (the developers removed some words from the original word list that could be considered offensive), making each word worth about 12.73 bits of entropy. But this is still plenty enough to make it impossible for anyone to ever simply guess a source’s code name, unless they happen to have massive computational resources and several million years.

Simple, random passphrases, in other words, are just as good at protecting the next whistleblowing spy as they are at securing your laptop. It’s a shame that we live in a world where ordinary citizens need that level of protection, but as long as we do, the Diceware system makes it possible to get CIA-level protection without going through black ops training.

Thanks to Garrett Robinson for double-checking my math and preventing me from making stupid mistakes.

Photo: Getty Images

The post Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess appeared first on The Intercept.

knitmeapony:

28weekslaterhater:

knitmeapony:

ravenclawslibrary:

smurflewis:

DONT ASK ME THIS, THIS IS HOW THE TROJAN WAR STARTED, I DONT WANT THIS MAN

Right away, Aphrodite popped into my head.

And then I’m just like, “DAMMIT, DID YOU LEARN NOTHING FROM PARIS? YOU ARE AN EMBARRASSMENT, AND NOW ALL THE TROJANS ARE DEAD. I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY.”

If you are ever actually in this situation, pro-tip: name Persephone.  Half the goddesses will be too surprised to smite you immediately and while Hades won’t do you any favors he may at least high-five you while your on your way down.

Another tip: name Mesperyian. Not only will you shock everyone, including her (since Aphrodite was a jealous ho who burnt half her face off), but you’ll win Hades’ favour. As his most beloved daughter, anything that praises her will make you a kind human to her, an okay human to him, and a genuinely good person to anyone else.

I heartily endorse this alternative answer.

okay so! when an object is mostly-but-not-quite opaque, an important part of how the objects react to light comes from how the light bounces around and diffuses inside the object before exiting. this is called subsurface scattering.

it happens with milk - if i recall correctly, the rendering team for the original Shrek said that the glass of milk in it was the hardest thing in the entire movie to render realistically - but it also happens with skin. it’s very important to have realistic-looking skin if you don’t wanna fall into the uncanny valley.

on humans, it’s easiest to notice on thin bits of people such as fingers and ears, when they’re lit directly from behind, because you can usually directly see the light through them - but it has a subtle-yet-important effect from all angles.

if you do a google image search for “subsurface scattering face”, you will notice: almost every single example out there is of a white person. but different skin tones show different levels of subsurface scattering - the whiter you are the more of it there is. Black skin displays relatively little subsurface scattering compared to the white skin that’s all over video game characters. in fact, on dark-skinned Black characters it’s practically unnoticable

but most rendering programmers never think about this - and so what you end up with is a technology that’s perceived as “necessary for realistic-looking characters” when it’s only necessary for white characters. and then it’s uniformly applied to *all* characters, so any Black characters end up with unrealistic-looking skin. (i should compile a gallery of this, i’m sure there are a few good examples around.)

ironically, if the industry had noticed “rendering dark-skinned characters realistically is easier than white characters” and it weren’t such a racist trash heap, we might’ve ended up with more games with Black leads characters - especially ones which use lots of close-up cutscenes, which are usually the ones which are aiming for the most characterisation and emotion.

anyway, all your video games are slow because there’s too many white people in them

jhameia:

driftingfocus:

anogoodrabblerouser:

disquietingtruths:

universalequalityisinevitable:

Robert Sapolsky about his study of the Keekorok baboon troop from National Geographic’s Stress: Portrait of a Killer.

Thiiiiiiis, people, thiiiis!

1. Kill alpha male types
2. Achieve world peace

Got it.

I’ve actually read a lot of Sapolsky’s work.  He’s one of my favorite scientists in the neuro/socio world.

I just watched the documentary and there is so much more about the troop that isn’t in this photoset—not only does the troop have a culture of little aggression and greater cooperation, but any incoming jerk baboons learned within a few months that their shitty behaviour was in no way acceptable, that the troop only rewarded sociability, and they changed accordingly. 

If effin’ baboons can learn this there’s pretty much no reason to believe that our only option in dealing with assholes is to just ignore their behaviour and let it continue.

genderkills:

The western christian narrative of original sin and penal substitution is worthless as far as I am concerned, but the eastern narrative of sin as an infection with theosis as a promised escape has so much potential for drawing inspiration from.

let me lead you on a wonderland journey of online spaces made for keyboard-obsessed individuals… oh wait nevermind it’s a horror show you should never go there it’s awefull

why do dude nerds have to ruin everything that i love

As of this writing, Crowfall has three days remaining on its Kickstarter, and has reached most of its financial objectives.  However, they are very close to some very cool stretch goals, including Oculus Rift support.  Click here to see the Kickstarter, and if you want to help out, act now before the Kickstarter ends!

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It’s fashionable to point out disclaimers of prior relationships for articles like these.  In the case of Crowfall, I share this information proudly.  I’m old friends and colleagues of both of Artcraft Entertainment’s principals (as well as multiple other people at the studio).  Gordon Walton is one of the smartest, most influential leaders in the Massively Multiplayer space, and likely the best mentor and boss I’ve ever had.  Todd Coleman is fresh off of his stint working at Kings Isle (where he was the design id behind the very lucrative Wizard 101), and he’s as driven, insightful and laser-focused a Creative Director as you’re ever likely to find in the MMO space. He is exactly the sort of person you want corralling a crazy MMO startup into reality.  Put simply, the pedigree of the studio leadership alone should be enough to convince you to go back Crowfall if you love competitive Player vs. Player MMOs and truly next-gen thinking in the MMO space.

But I don’t want to talk about that.  I want to talk about what they’re actually going to build.

I worked with Coleman on Shadowbane as part of Wolfpack Studios.  I joined the company shortly before they shipped the game (to be honest, too late to impact much one way or the other), and I continued there working on Shadowbane and various other products until the game went Free to Play.  I joined up because it was a crazy ambitious vision for an MMO  – a game about building massive cities, and then going to war and burning them down.  It was a damned exciting vision.  I frequently joked that it was either going to be a ‘thing’, or it was going to be well worth having front-row seats to the results.

Shadowbane shipped to fervent excitement by the fans.  The day we shipped, googling ‘Shadowbane’ got more results than ‘Star Wars Galaxies’, despite us having virtual no marketing beyond board warrioring.  The idea behind Shadowbane is a gloriously big one, and judging by the success of Crowfall’s kickstarter so far, is one that still has resonance today.

Shadowbane did not stick the landing on their launch.  Technical issues marred the release – mostly due to the inexperience of the team, a problem that Crowfall should avoid – and it took some time to get the game stable enough to actually see how that core vision bore out.  And what we found was that the vision for the game was fun and exciting, but had a very interesting fatal flaw.  And that is that it never ended.

Shadowbane PvP was completely freeform – no precreated ‘sides’.  Instead, each warring faction was a completely player-created guild – often merging into alliances.  And the problem is that typically, one of the alliances would get so big and dominant that they’d completely steamroll over any new guild that started up.  Because your city tied to your success, steamrolling another guild’s city increased the gap, making it easier for the leaders to maintain control overall. The dominant alliance would typically become so dominant that peace would reign uncontested.  Which, if you’re making an MMO based upon the vigors of war, is a disaster.

The most interesting fallout to this, academically, was that one time a server got so bored having nobody to kill that the Alliance leaders decided arbitrarily to ban a player class.  For a week, all Thieves were Kill On Sight.  Which is cool in an emergent gameplay sort of way, but also reveals how the game was fundamentally sick.

The players got it too.  We frequently would have better logins on days we launched a new server than on the days we put up major patches.  Shadowbane players LOVE to have a fresh Risk map to start dropping castles onto.  When I left, we talked frequently about whether or not it was feasible to make worlds with a shelf life the core to the game’s design.    After I left, Shadowbane wiped the servers to kickstart a clean map feel again.  Outsiders were aghast, but the cheering of the playerbase was vocal and emphatic.

Shadowbane was not the first game to deal with this problem.  The first to do it well was World War II online, which had a similar problem where the game servers would end up locked in a situation where one side (the germans – It was always the germans) would have the other pinned into a miserable no-win situation.  WW2OL solved the problem a simple and elegant way – declaring a winner, and resetting the map.  Some observers were concerned that this would result in ‘taking away’ some of the earnings of the victors, or ruin the game by destroying the sense of persistence, but this proved not to be the case.  The winners were happy enough to get the bragging rights of victory, and the losers were just happy to have hope again.

Crowfall is not Shadowbane 2, but it is clearly deeply influenced by Coleman’s first game.  As such, I found the fact that Crowfall’s Kickstarter video spent most of their time discussing their fresh map solution – (“eternal heroes, dying world”) a true indication of the fact that these guys are shooting for next generation thinking about MMO gameplay far and beyond simply cloning WoW.

The ambitions built around these disposable worlds are a lot of fun.  Worlds are fully destructable, which means that the difference between a pristine new land and one ravaged by warfare will be made clear.  Also, the physics of the worlds can completely deviate from one another – the idea that some worlds may offer better resources, or have stronger rules of magic, for example, become possible.

Will it work?  There are no guaruntees.  It is a bold, ambitious, and breathtakingly exciting vision for a fantasy MMO – and yet at the same time one built upon solid design thinking and the hard crucible of experience.

Go check it out.

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As of this writing, Crowfall has three days remaining on its Kickstarter, and has reached most of its financial objectives.  However, they are very close to some very cool stretch goals, including Oculus Rift support.  Click here to see the Kickstarter, and if you want to help out, act now before the Kickstarter ends!

elodieunderglass:

fozmeadows:

It occurs to me that failure to properly worldbuild an SFFnal story is - sometimes, though not always - less reflective of a writer’s creative ability than it is a consequence of their real-world privilege. The concept of culture as something with multiple facets, that can be experienced from different perspectives and which - crucially - has consequences beyond the obvious is learned rather than innate, and if, in your own life, you’ve never stopped to consider (for instance) how class differences impact access to basic necessities, or the problem of social mobility, then that’s going to influence how you craft, or fail to craft, those elements in your narratives. Because while, in stories set in the present day, you can either compensate with research or write wholly within familiar contexts, in an invented setting, it’s going to be harder to hide the gaps in your knowledge.

And so we get stories whose cultures are founded on stereotypes: Noble Elves vs the Barbarian Orcs, an endless parade of faux-medieval Europes, and dystopias built around a single, reductive premise with no effort made to explore its wider consequences. This last seems especially troublesome to me, given that dystopias are, generally speaking, meant to be the sort of stories that understand class and subversion - but when written by someone who’s never considered that their own society operates on more than one level, that nuance may well be lost. The point of worldbuilding is to create new worlds, but they’re always going to be influenced by how we view our own.

I also think about these fantasy and science-fiction worlds. These authors - usually American - trying to describe some ~*~exotic market~*~ or ~*~bustling spaceship port~*~ with words they’ve read in other people’s books. Think about how they falteringly describe those markets: “They had lots of spices and some colorful rugs.”

(What spices? What color were the rugs?)

“You know - spices. Foreign spices. Foreign rugs.”

(But is it bright turmeric and cumin, cut with flour, glowing yellow in glass jars to attract the tourists? Is it the cinnamon and star anise of the Christmas market, the paper cup of mulled cider? Where are we supposed to be, again?)

But these authors copy-paste the rising and falling call of the muezzin and the air heavy with foreign spices and the hungry children with flies in their eyes - maybe even take a beautiful woman with her face veiled out of the box, or some exotic songbirds - and think “Nailed it.” Check out this exotic worldbuilding - we’ve really traveled here! Look: colorful silks and barbarians. Is this a good story, or what!

And it’s splendidly, laughingly obvious that they’ve never seen a street sign in Arabic, never walked through a North African market at nightfall, couldn’t tell silk from satin if their life depended on it, and that they don’t even know their own local songbirds, let alone how to identify an exotic one. Armchair tourists, copying and pasting the TripAdvisor reviews of other tourists, coloring half the people green, and calling it worldbuilding: oh deary me.

Then there’s the realism of research. Knowing where goods and products and knowledge came from. If your elves are eating chocolate they’d better have contact with the Aztecs. Don’t put poison ivy in England. Your medieval faux-European story had better justify itself if people are wearing cotton and eating potatoes and tomatoes. 

(Pictured: someone whose civilization has apparently had contact with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. So THAT’s what all of that “into the west” stuff is about… elves seeking out new sources of carbohydrates!)

Don’t even get me started on science realism in science fiction; I am personally plagued by every written fictional description of viruses AND I’M JUST LIKE

So the Western SF/F canon swallows itself endlessly, a snake chasing its tail. It’s fun, but the tiresome bits get recycled, because people think that’s what forests and markets and ships are really like.

“That’s not realistic in this setting,” we scoff when someone wants a disabled princess or a lady king or - gasp! - a black woman in their literature.

But most of this shit is so unrealistic, say people like me, rolling their eyes politely: “What spices were they, precisely? They’re wearing silk, are they? Are you sure of that? Are you absolutely sure? And then the virus killed everybody, did it? In seven minutes? much wow.” 

So it sounds like I’m going “don’t write about markets unless you’ve been to a market” or “don’t write unless you have a really expensive education” or “don’t write.

But of course - this isn’t fair. Who am I to demand that people be well-traveled? Most people cannot afford to. And those who do travel rarely pay attention. They are expecting foreign spices and children with flies in their eyes, and they come back and regurgitate them.

(The spices were cardamom and cinnamon, you silly fool, and the children in your hometown are hungrier. The songbird was a woodlark, and the only exotic thing there was you.)

You don’t have to actually travel. You just have to care. As you type that someone is eating a potato you have to ask “where did they get the potato?” and as you type that someone is ugly you have to ask “why are they ugly?” and if you’re going to write about a prairie, look it up on Google Maps and sit with it for a while until you’ve got your own words for it.

People know the difference between waving your hands dismissively, using other people’s words because you don’t think it’s important, and when genuinely caring, especially when you’re touching something they love. You’ll fuck up, but people will usually forgive fuck-ups if you were being honest and wondering and respectful. 

It’s the difference between the standard Western method of travel - showing up sneeringly in someone else’s house and expecting to be hailed as a savior, to be served by the unimportant natives - and the kind of travel where OH MY GOD WAS THAT ONE OF YOUR MAGPIES? THAT’S WHAT YOUR MAGPIES LOOK LIKE? ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW? OH MY GOD THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. GUYS. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THEIR MAGPIES? 

Because wherever you go in this universe, you are going to somebody’s home. Tread lightly, because you tread as a guest. If you fail to lovingly respect your beggar woman and lowly engineer because they’re more “boring” than your hero - well, you’ve just described what kind of person you are, and it’s not the sort that comes to my dinner parties.

Whether you are learning, or traveling, or writing, you have to care and you have to care about getting it right. You can be tongue-tied and broken-hearted and fundamentally lost. My favorite people usually are. But you have to care about the magpies and the trade routes and the cardamom. You’ll have to bring me with you, or you’ll lose me. (Believe me, I have so many wonderful places to be.)

So I don’t ask that authors be perfect in their worldbuilding. I only ask that they try, and take my hand, and believe that this place they have created is important and worthy and full of the most interesting things, and worthy of thought and care, because all places are.

“The spices were cardamom and cinnamon, you silly fool, and the children in your hometown are hungrier. The songbird was a woodlark, and the only exotic thing there was you.”

In which elodieunderglass takes one of my posts and makes it about 9000% better. Honour on your cow.

i’m currently doing a lot of interactive code that needs to react in real time with events that are occuring. i end up manipulating these containers that are quite different from lists. they are called event streams, and whereas with a list or a tree, i can take the elements out of the container, the elements of an event stream don’t exist yet. they are events, which will occur in the future

it turns out, i end up going through a few different kinds of containers to build an event stream

we have:

* the IO container that contains things i’ve fetched from the outside world (the hard disk, the network, etc)

* the Registrar container, which contains an element that you will feed to it and it will push onto an associated event stream (this ones hard to explain, sorry, bear with me :P)

* the EventStreamCreation container, which merely exists to attach some proof obligations to that make sure i’m not writing a bunch of bugs

so i’ve ended up with code that is just constantly naturally transforming between these things. it’s nice, because these natural tarnsformations have very good properties about them that make it simple and safe to think about code that uses them

All disagreements, I can honestly say that no one is happier than I am to see my one-time college classmate (one year off, but who's counting) Ted Cruz announce his run for the presidency. One point stuck out for me. As we know, the FEC has created a formal "testing the waters" phase of a presidential run in which the candidate creates a so-called exploratory committee. Admittedly, this is often a nominal effort. But the notional purpose is to create a period of investigation, self-reflection and canvassing for support to see if I, fill-in-the-blank, should really seek the highest office in the land.

In an act of daring act of characterological appropriateness, Cruz has decided this is simply unnecessary. Of course he should run for president. What is there to find out? (I'm not sure any major candidate has ever done this before; though it seems others may follow.)

This will be awesome.

[cw: defense of finding people creepy. moebius, if you read this post, I will Frown.]

I recently finished reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. Its thesis is basically that humans have evolved for literally millions of years to be able to tell when other humans are up to Bad Shit. Therefore, when you get a weird feeling you can’t explain that another person is just bad news, that feeling isn’t actually causeless. Your intuition is systemizing information on a level that you don’t have access to. Bad feelings that you don’t have any good reason for are actually the most important kind of bad feeling– they’re the ones that are most likely to be the product of your intuition knowing something that your rational mind doesn’t.

I am pretty sure that his argument is accurate. However, the problem is that your intuition didn’t come from God knowing exactly what the signs of someone being bad news are. It learns from experience and from its surrounding environment. Sometimes it’s a personal quirk: a person might be scared of bald men because his rapist was bald. But sometimes most people share an intuition that a group of people is bad news. Most nonblack people are, on a certain level, scared of black men. Most neurotypicals parse autistic body language as alien and therefore threatening.

One random person finding you scary is just noise. Most people you interact with finding you scary is a Serious Problem.

Some people suggest that the solution is to ignore our intuition. But, as de Becker points out, intuition is an invaluable source of information. As a person read as female and a borderline, I am at tremendous risk of being raped or abused. I don’t want to throw away my best tool to prevent myself from being raped or abused.

Another solution is to consciously memorize what information your intuition is working from. The problem is that that means that, whenever you meet a new person, in the back of your mind, you’d have to have running your Are There Signs That This Person Will Hurt Me module. This is totally doable– many people who are routinely at risk of violence do it– but it’s also tremendously psychologically taxing. It’s harder to form relationships when you’re consciously thinking about whether the person will hurt you, and most people feel worse when they’re regularly thinking about the possibility of violence. In fact, that sort of suspicion is a kind of hyperarousal, which is a symptom of PTSD.

At the same time, I’m not sure that that would solve the problem. Because humans have been working off intuition for our threat assessment for so long, we don’t necessarily have a good model of what, exactly, our intuition is paying attention to. The factors we don’t know are relevant could hurt us. And humans are usually really bad at consciously reasoning with probabilities, even when we’re really good at subconsciously reasoning with probabilities: most people will give wildly wrong estimates about how confident they are in a belief, but they’ll still behave fairly rationally about, say, the risk of a car accident (at least more rationally than they would if they tried to do explicit probabilities).

Another solution is to only trust your intuition when it’s not about a group you know you tend to be afraid of. If someone is black or autistic, one might override their intuition; if someone is white or nonautistic, they might not. The problem here is that black people and autistic people are still sometimes up to Bad Shit; blanket trusting any group of people is a bad idea. On the other hand, perhaps this method could be combined with the conscious-reasoning method: if you are interacting with a group you tend to have inaccurate feelings about, then you should do conscious checks for red flags, but if you’re not, you can rely on your intuition. That could help with both situations.

I am not sure how to help this problem in general. One step might be to have fewer media depictions of Scary Black Men and so on, so that people’s intuitions stop learning that members of those groups are terrifying. Another would be for individuals to have friends who are members of groups they’re scared of (vouched for by other friends, of course) so that they can teach their intuitions that those groups are not actually scary.

It might also be good to attack it from the other angle: instead of making people’s intuitions more accurate, make people feel less bad about being a false positive. For a lot of people, coming off as creepy feels like they’ve done something morally wrong. But, as long as you don’t actually have ill intent, coming off as creepy isn’t morally wrong. In many cases, it is a product of another person’s subconscious racism, ableism, or other -isms; in some cases, it is a personal issue; in some cases, you accidentally did things that made other people feel uncomfortable, and while it is bad to deliberately do things that make other people uncomfortable, it can’t be wrong to make mistakes. People who find you creepy probably don’t want to interact with you, but the fact that they found you creepy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

My gemsona, labradorite. You can’t go labrado-wrong with it.

I saw this article in Fast Company a few months back and in reading it, I realized how important comic strips had been in my adult life. Doonesbury. The Far Side. Bloom County. And, of course, Calvin & Hobbes.

Calvin & Hobbes was created by Bill Watterson. And in the documentary Stripped, which came out in 2014, the famously “media averse” cartoonist, provided 4 tips on creativity:

1. You Have To Lose Yourself In Your Work

“My comic strip was the way that I explored the world and my own perceptions and thoughts. So to switch off the job I would have had to switch off my head. So, yes, the work was insanely intense, but that was the whole point of doing it.”

2. Create For Yourself
“Quite honestly I tried to forget that there was an audience. I wanted to keep the strip feeling small and intimate as I did it, so my goal was just to make my wife laugh. After that, I’d put it out, and the public can take it or leave it.”

3. Make It Beautiful
“My advice has always been to draw cartoons for the love of it, and concentrate on the quality and be true to yourself. Also try to remember that people have better things to do than read your work. So for heaven’s sake, try to entice them with some beauty and fun.”

4. Every Medium Has Power
“A comic strip takes just a few seconds to read, but over the years, it creates a surprisingly deep connection with readers. I think that incremental aspect, that unpretentious daily aspect, is a source of power.”

In translating these four tips to screenwriting and TV writing, #1 would seem pretty obvious: We need to be so passionate about our stories that we are able to fully immerse ourselves in them.

#2 is totally counterintuitive. In fact, one of the earliest lessons I learned in Hollywood was the importance of answering this question about any project we write: Who is the audience? The answer had better be somebody other than “Myself” to gain traction with studio buyers.

#4 is another one that seems rather obvious. Movies and TV have power. If anything, we writers need to embrace that potential, especially the visual elements in our scripts.

It’s #3 that grabbed my attention: “Try to entice them with beauty and fun.” I’d never put those two together in one sentence re movies and TV, but when I read it, the words resonated with me.

Whether the script is a drama, thriller, horror, comedy or another genre, we need to maximize the potential for fun in any story we write. In this respect, fun can be dramatics, thrills, chills, laughs and anything else that grabs our attention as a script reader.

Beauty: I don’t think there’s a definition that does this concept justice in relation to movies and TV. As the saying goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” But if I were forced to parse Beauty in relation to screenwriting, I come up with these three aspects:

* Authenticity: Create a story universe and characters who feel real, no matter the setting, year or particular circumstance. A script reader cannot allow him/herself to experience beauty unless they believe the writer knows what the hell they’re talking about.

* Passion: When a writer is wholly enraptured by a story’s material, that emotional and personal resonance can help lift a story up and off its written pages.

* Inspiration: Whatever the genre, whatever the story, a reader can experience beauty if they feel the writer’s creative inspiration for that story… if they can identify with some universal truth therein… if they connect with the characters and live vicariously through them in their own transformation-journeys.

“Make it beautiful,” Watterson says. A worthy ambition for any writer.

Writing and the Creative Life is an ongoing series in which we explore creativity from the practical to the psychological, the latest in brain science to a spiritual take on the subject. Hopefully the more we understand about our creative self, the better we will become as writers. If you have any good reading material in this vein, please post in comments. If you have a particular observation you think readers will benefit from and you would like to explore in a guest post, email me.

I’ve been thinking about alternatives to privilege-based models of oppression.

For the unfamiliar: the privilege-based model essentially divides the world into the privileged and the oppressed. For instance, white people are privileged and people of color are marginalized; straight people are privileged and LGBA people are marginalized; thin people are privileged and fat people are marginalized. The privileged group has negative opinions about the oppressed group. In addition, various institutional things screw over the oppressed (for instance, redlining, the illegality of gay marriage, and too-small airline seats).

However, I think there are some serious problems with this sort of model.

First, there’s the problem I wrote about in this post. Privilege models fail when the intersection of a privileged identity and a marginalized identity ends up giving you worse outcomes than the intersection of two marginalized identities. For instance, men of color are far more likely than women of color to go to jail; gay men are more likely than any other sexual orientation subgroup to experience hate crimes.

Second, sometimes negative stereotypes about “privileged” groups are obviously powerful ideas in society. If someone makes a joke about how women are nice, ethical, and nonviolent, and men are stupid, ugly brutes, the joke is patriarchal. It is literally an example of a kind of sexism that has existed for two hundred years! It was used to argue against women having the right to vote! And while it’s possible to incorporate this into a privilege framework– indeed, feminists do every time we point out how pedestalization is one of the major ways white cis women were marginalized– a lot of feminists tend to think “well, that’s saying bad things about men, so it’s not sexist!” And a lot of nonfeminists or antifeminists tend to think “well, that’s saying bad things about men, so it is Feminism Gone Too Far.” It is neither of those things! It is Feminism Gone Not Far Enough And In Fact Using Anti-Suffragette Rhetoric What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People.

Third, there’s the point made in this Tumblr post:

i lose followers every time i say i Dont Hate Otherkin which is fuckin wild because like… i have a psychotic disorder! how do you expect me to muster hatred for people on the basis of them believing things other people think are delusional. people pull the “can’t they just stop being weird, everyone would treat them fine if they just stopped being weird” shit all the time and like, ok, clearly youve never been considered pathologically, involuntarily Weird

Are otherkin neurodivergent? Maybe some of them, and you might be able to make a case that believing you’re a wolf is a neurodivergence, but in general they’re not really people who would be diagnosed with anything if you sent them to a psychiatrist. A lot of them are just people who believe that they are, on a certain level, wolves. But it’s hard to read anti-otherkin stuff without thinking about how obviously they are being conceived of as mentally ill: “something wrong with them”, “delusional”, “sick”, “they should go to therapy”. The idea that someone is Weird and therefore you are justified mocking them is one that has hurt nearly every neurodivergent person. It seems weird to characterize otherkin as marginalized on the axis of neurodivergence, since they’re sometimes neurotypical, but it also seems weird to divide this into two problems when it is really obviously the same problem.

Similarly, fat people, neurodivergent people, and physically disabled people all experience people saying “you have Condition? Have you considered trying diet and exercise?” in tones that imply that diet and exercise is this exotic new recently developed technique that of course the person in question has never heard of. If they had heard of it certainly they wouldn’t be fat/neurodivergent/physically disabled anymore! In general, fat people experience the same thing that disabled people do: the idea that your body is public property for anyone to pass opinions on, that you must Fix It, and that it is totally and completely unacceptable to decide fixing it isn’t worth the effort and you instead want to live a decent life with the body you have. But, again, it doesn’t really make sense to understand fatphobia as a kind of ableism: most fat people are not disabled. It’s just… fat people and disabled people have the same sort of problem.

I’d like to consider replacing it with what you might call a “forces” model. This might be clearer with examples.

“Oppositional sexism”, a term invented by transfeminist Julia Serano, refers to ““the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories” (13). A man should not have any of the “attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires” commonly associated with women, and vice-versa.”” This harms people in two different ways. First, deviation from the behavior expected of your gender may lead to punishment ranging from slight social disapproval to murder. Second, the gender roles themselves include harmful behavior. For instance, among many subcultures, maleness is often linked with violence, and femaleness with unassertiveness and not taking your own ideas seriously. In subcultures where kindness and empathy are associated with women, and strength and courage are associated with men, both genders may not develop the other gender’s virtues– and wind up becoming less good people than they could have been.

Similarly, Gayle Rubin in Thinking Sex [cw: apologia for sex with minors, brutal description of torture of children’s genitals] created the idea of the charmed circle of sexuality, as depicted in this helpful diagram:

Rubin failed to notice sex-negativity’s twin, compulsory sexuality, but it’s easy enough to generate examples the other way: virgins; people who don’t want to have sex until marriage; celibate people both voluntary and involuntary; asexuals, gray-asexuals, and demisexuals; low-libido people; people in sexless marriages; people who don’t want to have socially required sex acts like PIV or oral sex; premature ejaculators; people with small penises; preorgasmic people and people who have a hard time orgasming; people with genital pain; et cetera et cetera.

This is also a bit of an oversimplification because different subcultures have different charmed circles: the charmed circle at a munch is not the same as the charmed circle at a Pentecostal church. But you get the idea.

Finally, there’s one I don’t have a good theorist to cite, because neurodivergence is depressingly undertheorized. You could tentatively call it “weirdphobia.” A lot of people really don’t like those who are Strange, people whose actions they can’t imagine themselves doing, especially those who are unapologetically and unashamedly Strange, especially those who are Strange in public. They bully us; they harass us; they don’t want to hire us for jobs. And this cuts across a lot of different stigmas. It’s big for neurodivergent people, obviously, in part because we usually can’t choose not to be strange, and in part because a large amount of the mental health system is devoted to making us normal [cw: descriptions of psychiatric abuse of a child]. It’s big for trans and LGBT people. But it also affects a lot of stuff that we don’t, and shouldn’t, think of as oppression: furries; obsessive fans; otherkin; even people with tattoos.

The important thing about all three of those forces is that, to a first approximation, they affect everyone. Everyone deviates from their gender role in some way. Everyone was socialized to do suboptimal things because That’s What Your Gender Does. Everyone has a sex life that doesn’t fit in the charmed circle at least sometimes. Everyone has some aspects of their personality that are Just Strange.

I think this has great potential for solidarity. All too often, the privilege model goes “you are Evil because you are an Oppressor and you need to work endlessly until you aren’t Evil anymore.” I think the forces model has the potential to be “you know how you feel really bad about yourself because you don’t want sex very often? That’s because of a culture that thinks that there are important criteria for people’s sex lives other than ‘is it fulfilling for everyone involved?’ This hurts a lot of other people too, some of them much much worse than you. Support Planned Parenthood to help fix this.”

At the same time, I think it’s more accurate. Most of the marginalization I’ve faced as a neurodivergent person is not because people don’t like borderlines. Most people don’t know what a borderline is. For most of my life I didn’t know what a borderline was. But people noticed I was strange and different, and they mocked me because that’s what they do to strange and different people. It happens that I was strange and different because my identity falls into an Officially Approved Social Justice Category ™, but that doesn’t actually affect what people did– or how I felt about it.

I also think it’s more psychologically accurate for what people with sexist, sex-negative, and ableist beliefs actually believe. “Ableism” can refer to a hodgepodge of different beliefs– everything from “it is bad when autistic people are weird in public” to “if someone uses a wheelchair when they can stand, they are a Faker”. On the other hand, many people genuinely do believe that it is Wrong for others to be weird. The privilege model talks more about the effects on people harmed; the forces model, on what it feels like for those who believe it.

There is one serious problem with this model, which is that I am afraid assholes will take it as an excuse to have conversations like this:

Cis man: I feel really alienated because a lot of my friends like football and I don’t! We are both negatively affected by oppositional sexism. Therefore I know exactly what you’re going through and am an expert on your experiences.
Trans woman: Um.
Cis man: I don’t understand what’s the big deal. I mean, it’s annoying when people have football conversations I don’t understand but it’s not that big a deal.
Trans woman: UM
Cis man: You should be less angry all the time. Hate breeds hate!

Of course, the privilege model doesn’t exactly fix the situation. Think about how often trans people assigned female at birth talk about “transphobia” as if their experiences are as bad as those of trans people assigned male at birth (they aren’t). Or think about how often discussions of forced medication and distrust of the psychiatric system get interrupted by people with depression and anxiety who feel that the only problem with the psychiatric system is that sometimes people stigmatize depression and anxiety.

But the forces problem almost certainly makes this problem worse, and I’m not sure how to fix it.

I have only tentatively outlined a handful of the forces that might exist. Sex, gender, and neurodivergence are three areas where I feel comfortable speculating about forces; I’m less comfortable talking about race, physical disability, and fatphobia. Tentatively, I would suggest Andrea Smith’s Heteropatriarchy and Three Pillars of White Supremacy as a starting point for theorizing from a racial perspective. I do think I’m onto something about fat and physically disabled people and “healthism” (and perhaps also “lookism”). I also think that Mel Baggs’s writing about how ableism is at the heart of every kind of oppression is important here. But, again, I’m not familiar enough with previous work to be confident that I’m not reinventing the wheel.

Rep. Aaron Schock has abruptly resigned following a cascade of questions about funding and spending by him and his office.

Congressional ethics and federal campaign finance rules can be arcane and complicated. I tend not to be deeply concerned by the occasional mini-scandals that erupt when members of either party run afoul of some more technical aspect of those laws. Yes, they ought to know better — lawmakers should know the law, or should at least know enough to hire people who do, or to consult with party officials whose job it is to ensure that members follow the rules. But when some member of Congress gets in trouble for using the wrong phone line, or charging some expense to the wrong line in a ledger, I’m usually willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

In most such cases, the usual principle involving money and politics applies: The scandalous thing is not what is illegal, but what is accepted as perfectly legal.

That was my initial response to the first several stories about Aaron Schock — the flashy, young, impeccably chiseled bro-dude Republican congressman from Illinois. The first bit of news that registered with me involved the elaborate decor in his congressional office, inspired, apparently, by Downton Abbey. His staff reported that this decor and design were not at taxpayer expense, but had been donated to the congressman as a gift. But he had failed to report that gift as election law requires.

That law is good and necessary. We don’t want our elected officials beholden to donors who can buy their favor with extravagant gifts, so we tried to forbid such gifts lest they be what they seem — bribes in kind, rather than in cash. Alas, it seems we were unable to ban such bribery-in-kind outright, and the best we managed to do was to require disclosure. Gifts have to be reported so that voters and constituents can, at least, research who it is that is buying our elected officials.

And Rep. Schock, reportedly, had failed to comply with that law. That’s not good, surely, but I wasn’t inclined to get too worked up about it. Correct the error, pay the fine, don’t make a habit of it.

The problem though is that Schock apparently had made a habit of it. Worse than that, really. He hadn’t so much run afoul of election and finance law as he had failed to acknowledge its existence.

Take for example the case that seems to have been the final straw for Schock, which involved mileage reimbursement for a vehicle he used in his campaigns. The problem wasn’t the usual semi-scandalous technical problem of one or several trips misreported as campaign expenses. Schock is reported to have been reimbursed for every mile ever driven in that vehicle — and for an additional 90,000 miles beyond what its odometer reads. He wasn’t just fudging his expense accounts, he was treating them like an ATM.

And that is why, despite easily winning another term in the last election, Aaron Schock is now leaving Congress.

Some commentators say they’re still waiting for another shoe to drop in Schock’s story. They’re sure there must be other, larger, darker secrets that forced him to resign. But nothing else is needed. Schock’s reckless disregard for the law — always in the direction of personal enrichment — is cause enough for him to resign. That’s corruption. And corruption is a sufficient reason for a public official to be forced to resign.

Even here, though, the principle applies: The real scandal is not what is illegal, but what remains perfectly legal. Aaron Schock was forced to resign because he was corrupt, but 534 members of Congress remain in office and many of them are far, far more corrupt than he has ever managed to be.

Consider, for example, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma. This guy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, Inhofe may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he isn’t dumb enough to believe the nonsense he has been spouting for years about climate change. He says these things because he is paid to say these things. Inhofe says these things because he is corrupt — because the only constituents he represents in the Senate are the fossil-fuel industry donors who have funded his election and re-election for decades. The money those donors have poured into Inhofe’s campaign coffers over the years vastly outweighs the chump-change that Aaron Schock is suspected of skimming for his personal benefit.

But Inhofe’s corruption is perfectly legal. Even though the crooked senator from Oklahoma is doing far more real harm to his constituents and to his country, he isn’t breaking the law. He’s following the law — and constantly rewriting that law to ensure that what he does can never be described as illegal.

Unethical, immoral, dishonest, damaging, stupid, sinful, ignoble, dishonorable and thoroughly corrupt, yes. But not illegal.

Here’s a short promo for Merchants of Doubt, Robert Kenner’s documentary based on the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

What Kenner documents is corruption — perfectly legal corruption facilitated by thoroughly corrupt liars like Sen. James Inhofe.

Until such corruption is recognized as worse than the petty crimes of people like Aaron Schock, we’re all in big trouble.

We're in that liminal phase of election day in Israel which is always so difficult for political obsessives because we simply do not know what is happening. Polls stay open until 10 PM local time in Israel (4 PM eastern). The big news of the day is a final day series of racist invocations from Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Likud campaign begging right-wing voters to turn out because of a purported wave of Arab-Israeli voters voting 'en masse', helped along by foreigners, leftists, NGOs and the media, intent on driving him from office. Over the course of the day, Netanyahu sorta kinda tried to amend these statements slightly. But not really. And then not at all. After stating definitively yesterday that he will never allow a Palestinian state to come into existence on the West Bank, Netanyahu has decided to close out hard-right, racist and dark.

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