Zephyr Dear

Here's hoping this experiment goes well. Design by Ross Nover. Crotchety grousing, as ever, by yours truly.

If you'd like a poster version, it's available here.

I don't know if I've ever seen a film deal with slavery in the way that 12 YEARS A SLAVE does, and that's a good thing.  The film is based on the 1853 autobiography of the same name by Solomon Northrup, a free black man from New York who in 1841 is abducted and sold into slavery.  Here Solomon is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose expressive eyes are this film's secret weapon.  Ejiofor establishes an immediate connection with the audience.  We feel his pain in every scene - even when he doesn't speak.  Ejiofor is probably a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination and after seeing this, he might have even displaced my previous front-runner, Tom Hanks for CAPTAIN PHILLIPS.

12 YEARS is an unsettling film because of how it's the rare film about slavery that feels first-person from the perspective of the oppressed.  Usually, films set in the Civil War manage to center on a white protagonist who is of course, on the side of the righteous.  Even when evil white slavers abound, those films manage at least one prominent progressive thinker.  There's always a white man there fighting for what's right, metaphorically nodding his head at the antagonists and going, "These hillbilly assholes, amiright?"

We get no such relief in this film. The character we identify with is not some crusader who maintains a safe distance from the ugliness. Slavery is an evil, to be sure, but we're usually kept from the worst of it. John Ridley's screenplay and Steve McQueen's direction unfortunately don't afford us that separation.  The film is told exclusively from Northrup's perspective.  When he's given his first beating - the raw, brutal introduction to the fact that his life as a free man is over - we experience it almost as much as he does.

It's the sort of moment that makes one realize just how easy it is to have your own liberties taken from you.  It's impossible to watch that scene and not put yourself in Northrup's shoes.  The man beating him won't stop until Northrup ceases protesting that he's a free man.  All he has to do to make it stop is admit he's a slave.  In an action movie, our tough-guy hero would refuse to break, preferring death to debasing himself before his foe.  But here, where every lash makes us wince in empathy, we understand why Northrup realizes it's futile to fight, even as we understand we'd have given in ourselves.

The film chillingly captures how quickly a life in bondage meant keeping one's head down, looking out for oneself, and not rocking the boat, even if it means turning a blind eye to the suffering of a fellow slave.  Early on, Northrup is put on a boat bound for the south with several other slaves who have been wrongly kidnapped.  At first, it appears three of these men might work together, realizing their mutual plight.  However one of those slaves doesn't even make it to port alive.  The other is reclaimed by his legal master almost as soon as they dock.  Northrup calls after him as he rushes away, desperately hoping that the slave will tell his master that one of the other shackled men is a freeman.  But it's futile, the slave's know they have no rights and so they have no inclination to stick out their necks for each other.

This scene is echoed throughout the film, first when a female slave - hysterical after being separated from her children - is led away into the woods by two of the slave overseers. By then, we know that a best case scenario for her fate there is pretty unpleasant.  Northrup watches.. and does nothing. He continues going about his work. This is life on the plantation.  If a slave wants to survive, he doesn't cause trouble for himself.  It's an unconventional move for a film like this. It's the rare movie with the guts to show its hero standing by idly while a woman is dragged off to be beaten, raped and murdered.

This underlines another conceit of the film. Because we remain wedded to Northrup's experience throughout the film, we're not grated the respite of visiting life outside the plantation. There are no scenes of honorable men working to outlaw slavery. There are no scenes of Northrup's family trying to find it.  In short - there is nothing that allows the audience hope that we will see a conclusion to this living nightmare.

In a movie like TAKEN, though we might understand it's a horrible fate for the teenage daughter to be sold into sexual slavery.  As much as that might be the catalyst for the plot there, I don't know if the audience ever feels for the character.  Indeed, the threat of sexual slavery is played like an abstract concept in TAKEN. It doesn't feel as unflinchingly visceral as Northrup's enslavement here does.

There is no escapism here.  This is no fantasy.  Last Oscar season I praised DJANGO UNCHAINED for providing a cathartic revenge fantasy against slavers and those who collaborated with them.  This season I'm left to praise 12 YEARS A SLAVE for the opposite reason.  We don't get to see the slave owners beaten and humiliated.  There is no retribution against those who have gleefully dehumanized those they see as their "property." We feel every ounce of futility in the situation.  In the rare moments when Northrup shows some defiance, our first impulse isn't to cheer, but to be concerned that he's putting himself at risk.

Indeed, the time comes when he does cross some of the slave overseers and they promptly lynch him. Though his attackers are chased off before he's fully strung up, the noose is pulled tight enough that Northrup must stand on his toes to get any slack.  In an agonizing unbroken shot, we see him struggle to maintain his footing while the many other slaves continue to go about their business nearby.  They willfully ignore his plight, for making trouble would only land them in the same predicament.

The film starts off being a study in how slave masters dehumanize their "property" and in this scene, it's fully demonstrated how effective that is. The slaves come to even see each other as unworthy of help or human decency. There is no empathy for him, and as we watch in horror, we remember how earlier, Northrup himself turned a blind eye to similar suffering.

I couldn't help but think that the hypothetical "studio version" of this concept would have Northrup as a man of great resolve who never breaks, always does the right thing, and who spends the movie actively planning how to escape.  After all, cinematic narrative demands an active protagonist, doesn't it? There needs to be change in the character, a goal he's actively working for. Isn't that what we are lead to believe.  Think of this version as "The Shawshank Redemption of slavery."

But that's not what we get at all. Northrup breaks.  He surrenders to his circumstances because to do otherwise would provoke his death.  It's a critical storytelling decision that that really drives home the enormity of the living hell of being a slave.  McQueen wields that facet of the film with great care. If you don't walk out of this film moved by Northrup's experience, you might not have soul.

It would be simplistic to say this makes the film an extended exercise in the message "slavery is bad."  I imagined some hardened cynics might claim the script isn't more profound than that, and it is here where I would counter that a film is "about" more than it is about.  Years ago, I was quite critical of Crash, which for me, did amount to little more than a pretentious expression of the idea "Racism is everywhere and it's bad."  The film was about as unsubtle as a jackhammer wielded by Ace Ventura.  Every character seemed on the verge of breaking out into "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" from Avenue Q.

What keeps 12 YEARS A SLAVE from feeling equally heavy-handed is how personal it is. Crash proceeded from the extremely misguided notion that the only way to explore its theme was to show bigotry from all sides.  The main cast included over a dozen characters in interlocking stories, all united by the theme of race.  When that many characters share screentime, no one gets explored in depth, and thus everyone got reduced to an archetype (or stereotype if you're feeling ungenerous.)  There was less viewer empathy because the narrative kept switching gears like a web-surfer falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

12 YEARS A SLAVE is as deeply personal as any film I've seen this year.  GRAVITY had the IMAX presentation and the 3D cinematography to draw the audience into the experience emotionally.  This film accomplishes the same feat largely on the back of Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance.  In a world where school textbooks are white-washing the history of slavery, 12 YEARS A SLAVE is not just an important film, but a necessary one.

This Kickstarter I am working on is ending relatively soon and it is not yet funded. Check out this beautiful game play clip, and help me fund it if you can! The $64 tier features prints from Aaron Diaz, KC Green, David Hellman, and me!

scalegame:

SCALE game play clip for the Kickstarter. Scale the moon, flood the earth the sail it.

The title of a new paper from three economists at the Federal Reserve is bloodless: "Aggregate Supply in the United States: Recent Developments and Implications for the Conduct of Monetary Policy"

But its conclusions are chilling.

The paper offers a depressing portrait of where the economy stands nearly six years after the onset of recession, and amounts to a damning indictment of U.S. policymakers. Their upshot: The United States's long-term economic potential has been diminished by the fact that policymakers have not done more to put people back to work quickly. Our national economic potential is now a whopping 7 percent below where it was heading at the pre-2007 trajectory, the authors find.

As Dave Reifschneider, William Wascher and David Wilcox sum up in their abstract, “The recent financial crisis and ensuing recession appear to have put the productive capacity of the economy on a lower and shallower trajectory than the one that seemed to be in place prior to 2007.”

What seems to be happening, they argue, is that people who lost their jobs in the recession have now been out of work for years, leading their skills to atrophy and them to become less attached to the workforce. As those workers’ productive capacity diminishes, so does the total potential of the U.S. economy.

The authors argue that while the “natural” rate of unemployment — the proportion of joblessness in a fully healthy economy — has likely risen due to the recession, that effect should be dissipating. “We see the evidence of recent years as suggesting that the natural rate of unemployment may have moved up between and 1 percentage points since the onset of the recent recession,” they write. “However, the evidence also suggests that the factors leading to this increase have begun to reverse and that further increases in aggregate demand might therefore bring about further healing in the labor market.”

But beyond analyzing the economic situation in which the United States finds itself, the Fed staffers make an important argument worth considering for policymakers here and around the world.

There is a tendency to think of a nation’s “aggregate supply,” or potential output, as something that exists outside the realm of influence by short-term economic policy. The economic potential, after all, comes from the education of its people, the richness of its land, the quality of its machines — all things that a central banker can’t do much of anything to influence.

In other words, supply is “exogenous” to a policymaker’s economic model. But that may turn on its head in circumstances like the present. They write:

The implications for monetary policy may differ sharply from what is commonly presumed because much of the supply-side damage could be an endogenous response to weak aggregate demand. If so, then an activist monetary policy may be able to limit the amount of supply-side damage that occurs initially, and potentially may also help to reverse at a later stage such damage as does occur. By themselves, such considerations militate toward a more aggressive stance of policy and help to buttress the case for a highly aggressive policy response to a financial crisis and associated recession.

In other words, when there is weak demand and people remain out of work, the cyclical downturn can become a structural downturn. That means that policymakers should move particularly aggressively to keep that from happening.

It’s not a new argument; the activist wing within the Federal Reserve has been making this argument for years now, pulling their hair out trying to urge their own colleagues and fiscal policymakers in Congress to do more to try to avert a loss of America’s long-term economic potential. But expect this new paper to help their case.

It’s his father, Rafael Cruz. One of Rafael’s many insane rants, which David Corn reported on last week:

A Ted Cruz spokesman claims that these “selective quotes, taken out of context, mischaracterize the substance of Pastor Cruz’s message.” Corn thinks that response isn’t going to cut it:

Does Ted Cruz believe it’s a joke to accuse the president of trying to destroy God? Or that his father was kidding when he suggested Obama is “wicked,” asserted that the president is attempting to “destroy American exceptionalism,” said he wants government to be God, and insisted that “social justice is a cancer”? As for attacking the son with the father’s statements, the senator did not explain why it’s unfair to hold him accountable for remarks made by a person Cruz’s campaign routinely deployed as an official surrogate. According to campaign disclosure records, Cruz’s Senate campaign paid Rafael Cruz about $10,000 in traveling expenses in 2012 and 2013. And in August the conservative National Review noted that the father-son duo had forged a “political partnership,” reporting: “Cruz has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick.” Put it this way: Rafael Cruz is far closer to Ted Cruz and his political endeavors than Jeremiah Wright was to Obama and his campaigns.

What I find fascinating about the Cruzes is that they really do have a unified Christianist-Tea-Party worldview.

Rafael Cruz is a Dominionist, who believes that America is a Christian (not a Judeo-Christian) nation, and that its laws should be a version of Christian sharia, not secular arrangements for a diverse society. Ted Cruz, for his part, wants to shred the post-FDR safety net, balance the budget now, even during a lingering depression, and return to a bare-bones federal government that he believes was the intent of the Founders. Both are fundamentalists with fundamentalist texts: the entire Bible, including the Old Testament, and the Constitution as viewed by Americans more than two centuries ago. Both these belief-systems are responses, it seems to me, to the bewildering complexity of modern life, the globalized economy, and resentment of the claims of the poor and sick and needy. And for these very reasons, they are absolute and rigid. In a time of widespread economic distress, they are also very potent populist appeals to an imagined past that was once simple, Christian and just.

They are best seen, to my mind, as prophets, not pols. Only a prophet would risk throwing the entire world economy into a second Great Depression, shutting down the federal government, and wrecking the credit of the United States in order to protest a duly enacted law. But prophets are dangerous in politics – and Cruz is a very gifted demagogue. He was, after all, brought up by one.

Mike from Mother Jones writes, "Josh Harkinson profiles David Bronner, the 40-year-old, hallucinogen-dropping, Burning Man-attending scion of the Dr. Bronner's soap empire, who channels roughly half of the company's substantial profits into activism, including the Washington State GMO-labeling bill that voters will decide upon tomorrow. Bronner, who favors the labeling of foods with GMO ingredients, has been arrested for planting hemp seeds on the DEA's lawn and for a performance-art protest where he milled hemp seeds in a cage outside the White House. He also sued the DEA (and won), so that his company could legally obtain hemp oil as a soap ingredient. Since David took over, Dr. Bronner's sales have soared. It's on track to bring in $64 million in revenues this year. But in a strike against corporate greed, Bronner has capped the company's top salaries at five times that of the lowest-paid warehouse worker."

At first, David Bronner (Jim's son) wasn't sure he wanted to become the next standard-bearer for the soap-making clan. After graduating from Harvard in 1995 with a biology degree, he wound up in Amsterdam and immersed himself in its psychedelic drug culture. "I just had my life explode on many levels of identity," he recalls about a late-night ecstasy and LSD trip at a gay trance club. These experiences and a lot of reading eventually opened his eyes to the value of his grandfather's All-One philosophy, and the power of the soap company as a vehicle for change. In 1997, he let his dad know that he was ready to work for the family business, but only "on activist terms." A year later, his father died of lung cancer and Bronner, at the age of 25, became the new CEO.

Early on, Bronner decided that he'd rather feel good about his job than worry about making a ton of money. In 1999, he capped the company's top salary at five times that of the lowest-paid warehouse worker. He employs a lot of people he met at Burning Man, including Tim Clark (official title: Foam Maestro), a buff guy whose job mostly consists of driving a psychedelically painted foam-spewing fire truck to music festivals, which is about as close as the company gets to actual marketing. (Dr. Bronner's has run ads in Mother Jones.) Bronner also employs lots of grandmotherly ladies like office manager Nina Vujko, an intensely loyal, 32-year employee whose office is plastered with photos of her coworkers' babies.

Limiting executive pay and spending virtually nothing on advertising left a lot of extra cash for improving the products and funding social campaigns—which have often gone hand-in-hand. For years, the soap had included an undisclosed ingredient, caramel coloring. As the new CEO, Bronner wanted to remove it for the sake of purity, but feared that die-hard customers would assume the new guy was watering down the product. So he decided to incorporate hemp oil, which added a caramel color while also achieving a smoother lather. But there was a hitch: A few months after he'd acquired a huge stockpile of Canadian hemp oil, the Bush administration outlawed most hemp products. "Technically, we were sitting on tens of thousands of pounds of Schedule I narcotics," Bronner recalls.

How Dr. Bronner's Got All Lathered Up About GMOs

The trash is a mundane place to find the magical work presented anonymously as "The Box of Crazy". This could be the next Codex Seraphinus! Or, perhaps, it's marketing for something or other. In any case, the William Blake-esque paintings are a particularly fine touch. Business Insider, collating the work of Redditors, runs through components of its rather too-neat origin story. Sometimes, I wish people could just enjoy a good yarn rather than focusing entirely on finding details that permit the shouting of "Hoax! Hoax!"—but such are our times.

Cory: You took a bunch of runs at building a world where a million stories could unfold—The Carpet People, Truckers, and, finally, Discworld. Is Discworld’s near-total untethering from our world the secret of its staying power? 

Terry: It isn’t our world, but on the other hand it is very much like our world. Discworld takes something from this world all the time, shows you bits of the familiar world in new light by putting them into Discworld. Is that staying power? You tell me.

Cory: What’s the secret to Discworld’s unplumbable depths, and is there something a big world lacks when compared to one that’s smaller (in more than one way), like the Carpet?

Terry: We know about Earth; we know an awful lot about the solar system. When you do Discworld, you, the writer, can more or less change anything if you want to, if you can make it fit. It means you’re god, and that’s a great responsibility.

As a writer, you can take bits of the universe and put it in your own new universe. Working in Discworld, you use the word sandwich, and you think: Can I do this? Now I’ve got to have a reason why a sandwich is a sandwich—in our world, it was named after the man associated with its invention, the Earl of Sandwich. Can you have your own universe and still have sandwiches? You have to do it all yourself and decide if you need to open the door into our reality at the same time.

Once Discworld started moving, as it were, it started moving almost of its own volition, because I would write a Discworld novel, and that novel required that such and such should be available, or whatever, and that means that the next time, that’s real in Discworld and the thing grows. And I must say it grows to be rather bigger than a carpet—but with care, it can have just about anything in it.

I’m finishing up Raising Steam, in which the railroad comes to Ankh-Morpork, and an awful lot of things have to be made and discovered until you get to the top of that pyramid. You can’t have Vaseline until someone’s invented something else. You have to create and understand a lot of things before you can move on. And so, since I work on Discworld almost all the time, it grows because I need it to.

Cory: Do you think that there’s any way you could have kept us in the Carpet for anything like the number of books that we’ve gotten from Discworld?

Terry: I was about to say “No,” but right now I wonder. . . . If the idea had taken, I don’t know. I really don’t. But how would it be? It would be almost a kind of . . . People in the Carpet are more or less tribal. What would happen if I . . . You’ve got me thinking!

Cory: Contrariwise, I feel like Dodger could have been the start of its own saga, about any number of characters from Dickensian England—do you think the world of Seven Dials has enough material to fuel a Pratchett engine through quite so many books?

Terry: The answer is yes. Because it’s all there. The people Dodger meets are real, the places he goes are real, and all I have to do is put in that little touch of fantasy, i.e., Dodger himself. Queen Victoria was real, though it’s hard to believe—and she’s free; you don’t have to pay to use her. There’s a whole lot of people that Dodger could have met. I’m pretty certain he’s going to meet Darwin or his grandfather (more likely) at some point.

If I run with it, no limitations, I could keep it going, I think. I know a lot of the stuff. I know how they talk, I know the history. It doesn’t really matter if I put a bit of fantasy in to make the pie rise. You can go into the world of “What if?”

Cory: So much of your work is about the legitimacy of authority. You write a lot of feudal scenarios, but you also seem like a fellow with a lot of sympathy for (and suspicion of!) majority rule. The witches gain authority through cunning and compassion (Nanny Ogg), through knowledge and force of will (Granny Weatherwax). Kings rule by divine right and compassion for the land; Vetenari, out of the practical fact of his ability to control the city’s factions. The Carpet People is shot through with themes of who should rule and why. Where does legitimate authority spring from?

Terry: The people! The only trouble is the people can be a bit stupid—I know that; I’m one of the people, and I’m quite stupid.

Lord Vetinari is that wonderful thing: a sensible ruler—that’s why he’s so popular. Everyone grumbles about him, but no one wants to chance what it would be like if he wasn’t there. I like Vetinari. I don’t mind authority, but not authoritarian authority. After all, the bus driver is allowed to be the boss of the bus. But if he’s bad at driving, he’s not going to be a bus driver anymore.

Now, an interesting sideline on this is the question of the writer’s position is vis-à-vis authority.

A journalist looks at authority as a target as a matter of course. You don’t actually have to fire, but you see it as a target. Since I am tainted as a journalist, I can’t separate that out from being a novelist, and my personal view is that you look askance (at the least) at authority. Authority must be challenged at every step. You challenge authority all the time to keep it on its toes. Vetinari works because there aren’t enough people who think he’s doing a bad job; they’re all factions, in any case. So he balances the world. It’s not everyone being happy, but rather not too many of them being unhappy.

Now you, Cory, seem like a fellow with a lot to say about authority yourself. Where would you say legitimate authority springs from?

Cory: This is a question I’ve put a lot of thought into as well. I think that just authority arises from systems that fail gracefully. That is to say, the important thing isn’t what happens when the ruler does something that you agree with—the important bit is what happens when she does something stupid and terrible.

I am far more interested in graceful failure than blazing success. If you select a leader by a means that contains robust oversight, a meaningful recall mechanism, and recourse to alternatives (an independent judiciary, say) in the event of substantial wrongdoing, the authority is legitimate, because if things were going badly off the rails, you could replace her. 

This is something that worries me about Lord Vetenari. He is, like all of us, imperfect. Lacking any checks on his authority (apart from civic uprising), he is likely to fail badly, even though he succeeds brilliantly. 

All that said (and to your question below): the *reason* to have authority is to simplify the task of getting on together. But technology lowers coordination costs and so undermines the case for governance in some instances. I generally refuse to predict the future (on the grounds that SF writers who dabble in futurism are like drug dealers who sample the product—unlikely to come to a good end). But when pressed, I say, “To imagine the future, imagine the cost of coordination trending towards zero in more and more domains. Now we make encyclopedias and operating systems the way we used to organise bake sales. What if we could build skyscrapers that way? Airplanes? Air traffic control systems?

The Carpet People concerns itself with many questions of infrastructure and public works—another theme that has featured in many of the most enjoyable Discworld novels, especially Going Postal/Making Money. Ultimately, it comes down to the builders, the wreckers, and the free spirits. Now that we’ve arrived at a time of deep austerity, what do you think the future of infrastructure is?

Terry: To crack and fall away, I sometimes think. From what I see around me, it’s people doing it for themselves. We know the government is there, but we know they have no real power to do anything but mess things up, so you do workarounds.

On the matter of builders, wreckers, and free spirits, I’d say that Tiffany Aching [beginning with The Wee Free Men] is a builder. Moist von Lipwig [beginning with Going Postal] is a free spirit, but also a builder—I think people can go in and out of sequence. My dad was a mechanic; maybe my interest in builders starts there. You made your own catapult. You made your own crystal receiver. He encouraged in me that kind of thing. Even if it was dangerous, he took the view that I ought to be clever enough to know what I was doing.

My parents were practical people. That’s the word that is missing here: practical about just about everything. The ground state of being of practicality. Sometimes things need tearing down—and that might be, as it were, the gates of the city. But if we talk without metaphors, I would say that building is best. Because it is inherently useful.

And you, Cory? Do you want to make the case for wreckers?

Cory: Never wrecking for its own sake. But disruption, yes, I’ll make that case. There is no virtue in the fact that all of us use toilets, but only some of us clean them. If we invented a machine tomorrow that obviated toilet scrubbing, that would be an unalloyed good, even though it also obviated the work of toilet scrubbers. 

That isn’t to say that a just or caring society should cast aside the toilet scrubbers. The Luddite fight is miscast as a fight against technology, but it’s not—the Luddites smashed looms over a difference of how to apportion the dividends from automation, not because they objected to automation itself.

Kevin Kelly has a marvellous “robotics curve” that goes: 

1) A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.
2) OK, it can do a lot, but it can’t do everything I do.
3) OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.
4) OK, it operates without failure, but I need to train it for new tasks.
5) Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to do, but what about me?
6) My new job is more fun and pays more now that robots/computers are doing my old job.
7) I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I do.

I’m not so sure about #6: we seem to be perfecting a system that only provides a living to financiers who invest in robots. This won’t work (if the bankers have all the money, no one can buy the things the robots make). We need a system that distributes automation’s dividends or we’ll end up with nothing at all.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about your books with feudal settings is that it seems you get something like the correct ratio of vassals to lords. I always get a sense that for every ermine-trimmed guild boss in Ankh-Morpork, there are a thousand potato farmers in a shack in a field somewhere. So much of fantasy seems very top-heavy—too many knights, not enough serfs. Do you consciously think about political and economic considerations when you’re devising a world?

Terry: I’ve never been at home with lords and ladies, kings, and rubbish like that, because it’s not so much fun. Take a protagonist from the bottom of the heap, and in the same way it’s good to have a female protagonist, as she’s got it all to play for. Whereas people in high places, all they can do is, well . . . I don’t know, actually: I’ve never been that high. If you have the underdog in front of you, that means you’re going to have fun, because what the underdog is going to want to do is be the upper dog or be no dog at all. And I’ve never felt the need to have lords and ladies as my champions, as it were.

In Ankh-Morpork there are notables, some of whom are stupid, and some of whom are useful and likeable, but it’s a mercantile place. It’s money that matters. And where do I get that from . . . ?

Cory: Damon Knight once told me that he thought that no matter how good a writer you are, you probably won’t have anything much to say until you’re about twenty-six (I was twenty at the time and he was my writing teacher, at Clarion—ouch!). You’ve written about collaborating with your younger self for the reissue of The Carpet People. Do you feel like seventeen-year-old Terry had much to say?

Terry: That’s the best question you’ve asked all day!

I think the he had a go, and it wasn’t bad. And then he was clever enough to read a hell of a lot of books and every bound volume of Punch. But when I was younger, I didn’t have the anger. I think you have to have the anger. It gives an outlook. And a place from which to stand. When you get out of the teens, well out of the teens, you begin to have some kind of understanding, you’ve met so many people, heard so many things, all the bits that growing up means. And out of that lot comes wisdom—it might not be very good wisdom to start with, but it will be a certain kind of wisdom. It leads to better books.

The Tiffany Aching series is what I would most like to be remembered for, and I couldn’t have written Tiffany Aching when I was seventeen. I just wouldn’t have had the tools.

But the question remains: As a writer of fantasy, can I be a proper writer? I don’t do literature, I do writing—you get paid for writing, for literature you just get plaques to put on the wall. I never really bother about it. I don’t think anyone in the genre does. It doesn’t really matter; it’s what you’re doing: you’re working. Writing happens; it’s what I do. I’m here; I do it. I like doing it. I like getting paid for it. I like the fun.

Being an author is not as much a job: it’s a life.

Thank you, Cory. It’s been fun.

Cory: “Being an author is not as much a job: it’s a life.”

Preach, brother!

It’s been fun for me, too. You certainly have your share of plaques on the wall and a richly deserved sword made of genuine sky-metal, but as a reader of your works, the thing that matters most to me is the books, for which I am heartily grateful.

First things first. Henry Blodget is completely right about bathroom attendants.

The Business Insider publisher wrote a piece Friday about New York restaurant Balthazar’s practice of having an employee standing in the rest room all day, wiping down the sink and helping customers who have just relieved themselves dry their hands. As Blodget writes, the practice is weird and creepy and uncomfortable, particularly in a small rest room.

Keith McNally, the owner of the restaurant, apparently was persuaded; he is eliminating the bathroom attendants so that Blodget and other Balthazar diners can now wash their hands in peace (after some hand-wringing over whether Blodget’s post cost three hard-working Balthazar employees their jobs, McNally made it known that other roles will be found for them inside his restaurant empire).

On one level, this is a silly little story that says more about the narcissism of the media types who eat at Balthazar (a Google News search turns up a whopping 1,500 results on the subject) than anything meaningful. But before the story is finally flushed down the drain, there is one aspect of the tale that speaks to something a little bigger.

The fact that Blodget (and all right-thinking people) are a little unnerved by bathroom attendants is a testament to the age we're living in: one where attentive personal service can be actually a disadvantage for a business. Consider some of my own personal preferences which seem to be widely shared:

I much prefer booking my own train tickets and hotel reservations on the Internet to calling an 800 number and talking to a human being.

I hate buying gasoline in New Jersey, where by law an attendant must fill your car up for you. I'd rather just pay at the pump and do it myself.

I don't like it when I stay at a nicer-than-usual hotel and they all but insist on carrying my bag to my room for me. If I just have one small bag, I'd really rather carry it myself, thank you very much.

When you see the world of early 20th century Britain portrayed on Downton Abbey, it is the opposite extreme. For the ultra-wealthy, there were servants everywhere, helping with the most menial tasks, like getting dressed. Even middle-class Britons had household help. Agatha Christie, born in 1890, later recalled that she couldn’t have imagined being so rich as to afford an automobile, nor so poor that she would not have servants.

But in the last century, per-capita incomes have risen dramatically, making the cost of hiring a servant higher. Meanwhile, technology has made the need for a house full of workers lower. Washing machines, modern kitchen equipment, clothing that you can put on without the assistance of a manservant or lady in waiting — all of these things made it practical even for affluent families to do without an army of servants.

At the same time, we’ve gotten more egalitarian as a society. Cost constraints aside, most people would find having a servant help them dress as uncomfortable today as Henry Blodget finds having a bathroom attendant help him wash his hands.

This is probably a case where preferences have evolved with practicality. As the 20th century progressed and wages rose, fewer people could afford servants and home technology improved, and so in contrast to Agatha Christie, someone growing up in modern times is unfamiliar with the experience of having people around all the time.

This is what progress looks like! And with the change at Balthazar, a century-long trend reaches its apex.

Let’s go to Kentucky, a deep red state which has nonetheless set up one of the best systems for getting health insurance for the poor. We have heard an awful lot of gripes from those with insurance on the individual market, and those with Cadillac-style plans who have been forced to adjust. But the people we haven’t yet truly seen or heard are those getting affordable insurance for the first time in their lives. Maybe I’m a squish, but this report from the NYT helped put some of the political cock-fighting into perspective:

The woman, a thin 61-year-old who refused to give her name, citing privacy concerns, had come to the public library here to sign up for health insurance through Kentucky’s new online exchange. She had a painful lump on the back of her hand and other health problems that worried her deeply, she said, but had been unable to afford insurance as a home health care worker who earns $9 an hour.

Within a minute, the system checked her information and flashed its conclusion on Ms. Cauley’s laptop: eligible for Medicaid. The woman began to weep with relief. Without insurance, she said as she left, “it’s cheaper to die.”

What price can you put on that? Or on this:

So far, [insurance agent Donald Mucci] has enrolled just a few longtime customers in exchange plans. They include Mrs. Shields, 49, a widow who had been rejected by insurance companies because she has diabetes. She is paying $745 a month for coverage through a program for people with pre-existing conditions, but the program will end in January.

Mrs. Shields, who has an annual income of about $17,000, qualified for a monthly premium subsidy of $232 a month. With Mr. Mucci’s help, she chose a silver-tier plan offered by Anthem that has a $2,450 deductible and a $4,500 out-of-pocket maximum. She will pay a monthly premium of $151 after the subsidy.Mr. Mucci said he would get a commission of $18 from the transaction. Before the health care law, he said, he would typically receive a lot more.

“Is it a win?” he said. “For Judy, it sure is.”

At the core of this technocratic edifice is something quite simple: the lifting of intense anxiety, the restoration of personal dignity, the chance to live better and longer, the opportunity to be free of physical pain. In the end, though I remain skeptical about whether the ACA is the best possible solution to the plight of those in such need, it is the only solution at hand. I want it to work. And I find the brutal attacks on it to be devoid of any true sense of what it feels to be alone and sick and terrified.

(Photo: Affordable Care Act navigator Adrian Madriz (R) speaks with Lourdes Duenas, who is looking for health insurance, during a navigation session put on by the Epilepsy Foundation Florida to help people sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act on October 8, 2013 in Miami, Florida. By Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty.)

[Content Note: Slavery, Racism]

Narnia Recap: In which the crew land on an island inhabited by apparently disembodied voices. 

Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 9: The Island of the Voices

Before we get to today's chapter, I need for us to scope out a bit and look at the layout of this book. To that end, here are some chapter headers:

1. The Picture in the Bedroom.
2. On Board the Dawn Treader
3. The Lone Islands
4. What Caspian Did There
5. The Storm and What Came Of It
6. The Adventures of Eustace
7. How the Adventure Ended
8. Two Narrow Escapes
9. The Island of the Voices
10. The Magician's Book
11. The Dufflepuds Made Happy
12. The Dark Island
13. The Three Sleepers
14. The Beginning of the End of the World
15. The Wonders of the Last Sea
16. The Very End of the World

All the chapters flow into one another, of course, but Chapters 3-4 are narratively connected as the story of Caspian and the Slavers, Chapter 5-7 cover Eustace's transformation and recovery, and Chapters 13-14 and Chapters 15-16 cover the final island (and Caspian's whirlwind romance) and the subsequent end of the world (and completion of Reepicheep's and the Pevensies' journeys). Chapters 9-11, which we're about to look at today, cover a startlingly long episode on the isle of the Dufflepuds.

I've done a word count analysis on the book (and this is one of the many reasons why I love ebooks), and the entire novel is roughly 52,820 words long. The Dufflepud interlude is 9,805 words long, or almost 20% of the novel. In contrast, the episode with Eustace (which is the one thing everyone remembers about the book) is 9,403* words long -- or 402 words shorter than the Dufflepud epsiode.

* Chapters 5-7 are 10,386 words total, but the first half of Chapter 7 is about Lucy having new clothes and playing chess, and thus I did not start counting until Eustace starts writing in his diary about the storm.

I point out these numbers because I think it's important to understand that we're looking at 20% of the novel and that clearly this episode was important to C.S. Lewis for reasons of his own. There's really no doubt in my mind that Eustace's transformation and allegorical conversion were important to him, and I am not prepared to assume that an episode which is longer than that episode wasn't also very important to him. Other people are free to interpret differently, of course, but this is my ground assumption going in, based (in part) on the numbers above.

And, to that end, I want to take a week to establish the scene a little first.

The Caspian Dream Team (Caspian + Edmund + Eustace + Lucy + Reepicheep) will land on an island which is immaculately kept, yet strangely devoid of life. It will soon become apparent that the island is inhabited by a race of invisible "servants" called Dufflepods, and that they need Lucy to sneak into the local Magician's tower in order to read a spell which will make them all visible again. Lucy agrees, finds and reads the spell in the tower, and then meets the Magician, who aids the party before they depart again.

Now let's get some details on the page.

1. The Dufflepuds are slaves. This is a position that I am making based on my understanding of how words work. I will point out here that the lines between Slave, Servant, and Serf has often been extremely blurry. Yet most places in most times acknowledge that servants retain basic civil rights, and the Dufflepuds do not: the Magician Coriakin violates their bodily rights by transforming them from a Standard Fantasy Setting Dwarf to a "monopod" shape. Furthermore, there is no suggestion that the Dufflepuds can leave Coriakin's service -- they seem entirely confined to the island, without boats or sea-craft to escape. And there is no suggestion that Coriakin could be asked to leave: Aslan will assert that Coriakin has complete rulership over the island.

In Chapter 9, the Chief Dufflepud will explain how they were transmogrified by Coriakin:

   ‘Well,” said the Chief Voice. “It’s like this. This island has been the property of a great magician time out of mind. And we all are—or perhaps in a manner of speaking, I might say, we were—his servants. Well, to cut a long story short, this magician that I was speaking about, he told us to do something we didn’t like. And why not? Because we didn’t want to. 
   Well, then, this same magician he fell into a great rage; for I ought to tell you he owned the island and he wasn’t used to being crossed. [...] I say he goes upstairs and puts a spell on us. An uglifying spell. If you saw us now, which in my opinion you may thank your stars you can’t, you wouldn’t believe what we looked like before we were uglified. You wouldn’t really. 
   So there we all were so ugly we couldn’t bear to look at one another. [...] I do assure you that we couldn’t find anything in the way of a spell for taking off the ugliness. [...] well, to cut a long story short, whether we did right or whether we did wrong, in the end we see a spell for making people invisible. And we thought we’d rather be invisible than go on being as ugly as all that.

In Chapter 11, Coriakin will confirm that he did in fact transmogrify the Dufflepuds against their will, but considers the change "for the better" and thus outright refuses to change them back, despite their express wishes:

   “And now that they’re visible, are you going to let them off being ugly? Will you make them as they were before?” 
   “Well, that’s rather a delicate question,” said the Magician. “You see, it’s only they who think they were so nice to look at before. They say they’ve been uglified, but that isn’t what I called it. Many people might say the change was for the better.”
   [...] “Oh, the funnies, the funnies,” cried Lucy, bursting into laughter. “Did you make them like that?”
   “Yes, yes. I made the Duffers into Monopods,” said the Magician. He too was laughing till the tears ran down his cheeks.
   [...] “Will they have to be turned back into their proper shapes?” asked Lucy. “Oh, I do hope it wouldn’t be unkind to leave them as they are. Do they really mind very much? They seem pretty happy. I say—look at that jump. What were they like before?”
   “Common little dwarfs,” said he. “Nothing like so nice as the sort you have in Narnia.”
   “It would be a pity to change them back,” said Lucy.

And also in Chapter 11, Aslan will assert that Coriakin is the ruler of the island, and that the Dufflepuds are his subjects. Aslan won't confirm that Coriakin is morally right in transmogrifying his subjects, but given that he was willing to interfere earlier in Chapter 10 when Lucy was considering whether or not to cast a beauty spell, his lack of interference over Coriakin's transmogrification spell is telling. Especially since Coriakin appears to consider Aslan his superior in a sort of rulership hierarchy.

   “Welcome, Sir, to the least of your houses.”
   “Do you grow weary, Coriakin, of ruling such foolish subjects as I have given you here?”
   “No,” said the Magician, “they are very stupid but there is no real harm in them. I begin to grow rather fond of the creatures. Sometimes, perhaps, I am a little impatient, waiting for the day when they can be governed by wisdom instead of this rough magic.”
   “All in good time, Coriakin,” said Aslan.

2. The Pevensies immediately side with Coriakin. Despite the fact that this whole journey has been one long tale of slavers and pirates and Calormen slavers and more pirates and slavers, the Pevensies immediately jump to the conclusion that the Dufflepuds, while slaves, don't need freeing and that their evil master who trespassed on their bodily autonomy probably isn't all that bad. This is essentially asserted on the grounds that the Dufflepuds sound like members of a lower (and less educated) class.

   “But a magician!” said Caspian.
   “I know,” said Lucy. “But he mayn’t be as bad as they make out. Don’t you get the idea that these people are not very brave?”
   “They’re certainly not very clever,” said Eustace.

After Lucy makes the Dufflepuds visible again, and after she has had confirmation from Coriakin himself that (a) he transmogrified the Dufflepuds against their will, and (b) he did so out of anger at them for not following his orders as master of the island (i.e., not for an actual good reason, and while asserting that they are slaves entirely to his will) and (c) that while he has the power to change them back he refuses to, Caspian et. al. will pack up and leave after mooching off the Dufflepuds (for food) and Coriakin (for magical ship repair) without a backwards glance for the people they are leaving in the worst of slavery.

And it's okay because Coriakin is white and serves English food ("an omelette, piping hot, cold lamb and green peas, a strawberry ice, lemon-squash to drink with the meal and a cup of chocolate to follow") and is not a Muslim from Calormen. And this is something people need to keep in mind when discussing the racism in these books. It's not just that Lewis makes the Calormen have slaves so that he can criticize them for it; it's also that he gives white men slaves and praises them for their forbearance in only striping away their fundamental physical forms from them when a less-kind master would do so much worse:

   “Yes—we’d get on better without [the Chief], in a way. Of course I could turn him into something else, or even put a spell on him which would make them not believe a word he said. But I don’t like to do that.

3. The Dufflepuds are stupid and disobedient in ways which justify their slavery. Coriakin (and, implicitly, Aslan) justify the transformation of the Dufflepuds on the grounds that they deserve it for being stupid and disobedient; indeed, Lucy and Eustace were already jumping to that excuse in Chapter 9 (as seen above).

In Chapter 9, the Chief says that the Dufflepuds were given an order they didn't like, but doesn't elaborate on the details:

   Well, to cut a long story short, this magician that I was speaking about, he told us to do something we didn’t like. And why not? Because we didn’t want to. Well, then, this same magician he fell into a great rage; for I ought to tell you he owned the island and he wasn’t used to being crossed.

In Chapter 11, Coriakin will state that the Dufflepuds needed to do the work in order to survive (i.e., raise food for them to eat), but then his details of the necessary work don't correspond with a life-of-death need (e.g., the Dufflepuds supposedly weren't working efficiently enough):

   “What was it you uglified them for—I mean, what they call uglified?”
   “Well, they wouldn’t do what they were told. Their work is to mind the garden and raise food—not for me, as they imagine, but for themselves. They wouldn’t do it at all if I didn’t make them. And of course for a garden you want water. There is a beautiful spring about half a mile away up the hill. And from that spring there flows a stream which comes right past the garden. All I asked them to do was to take their water from the stream instead of trudging up to the spring with their buckets two or three times a day and tiring themselves out besides spilling half of it on the way back. But they wouldn’t see it. In the end they refused point blank.”
   “Are they as stupid as all that?” asked Lucy.
   The Magician sighed. “You wouldn’t believe the troubles I’ve had with them. A few months ago they were all for washing up the plates and knives before dinner: they said it saved time afterward. I’ve caught them planting boiled potatoes to save cooking them when they were dug up. One day the cat got into the dairy and twenty of them were at work moving all the milk out; no one thought of moving the cat. But I see you’ve finished. Let’s go and look at the Duffers now they can be looked at.”

The setting of Chapter 9, however, silently notes (though it's unclear whether Lewis intended this or not) that the Dufflepuds are extraordinary gardeners and grounds-keepers:

   For when they had crossed the sandy beach they found all silent and empty as if it were an uninhabited land, but before them there were level lawns in which the grass was as smooth and short as it used to be in the grounds of a great English house where ten gardeners were kept. The trees, of which there were many, all stood well apart from one another, and there were no broken branches and no leaves lying on the ground.
   Presently they came to a long, straight, sanded path with not a weed growing on it and trees on either hand.

This is established in order to set the lonely scene of the "deserted" island with invisible voices, but it indicates that the Dufflepuds have continued working even after cutting all ties with Coriakin, and that their work is not purely survival-oriented. They're not planting fields and keeping cows all day exclusively; at least some of them are meticulously maintaining garden paths and cutting grass lawns and weeding a ginormous area.

All of this points to Coriakin lying about his harsh punishments being necessary for the Dufflepuds' survival: either they have enough surplus of work or he has enough surplus of magic to be accomplishing all this extra non-survival oriented gardening. Either way, this is not a subsistence situation where a single mistake will mean the widespread death of the community. And that in turn suggests that Coriakin's "justification" (which was hardly a justification in the first place because there is no evidence whatsoever that transgressing the bodily autonomy of the Dufflepuds made them safer or better fed) for his actions is no more than a false narrative to cloak his tyranny.

There's a lot that needs to be said about all of this, and it's very difficult to get it all into one post.

For one, I've previously pointed out how incongruous this episode is in light of this series as a whole and this book in particular. Book 1 in this series was about freeing the native Narnians from a tyrant, though I noted at the time that a suspicious amount of ink was spilled over explaining that Jadis was a tyrant not because of her actions but because of her parentage (as a Not-Daughter-of-Eve) and her social standing (as the Emperor's Hangwoman). Book 2 in this series was about freeing the native Narnians from another tyrant, though again I noted how problematic it was that the new ruler of the Narnians was still not himself one of their own and was instead the son of their oppressor. And Book 3 has heavily featured King Caspian freeing slaves, though I have noted that he freed them from people of color / different religion heritages, and that he demanded the ex-slaves turn around and line his own coffers with tribute.

It is very strange, from a thematic viewpoint, for Lucy and Edmund to not assume that they are here to depose Coriakin as they once did Jadis and Miraz. Deposing tyrants, particularly tyrants who transmogrify the locals, is kind of their thing. And, indeed, it is strange for Lucy and Edmund to almost immediately assume that Coriakin is better than the Dufflepuds are making him out to be, merely because the Dufflepuds seem uneducated; the Beavers weren't exactly non-working class, though (again) I think it is important to note that they laid out Ten Reasons Why Queen Jadis Is A Bastard Child Changeling Not A Daughter Of Eve as opposed to delving in the whole tyranny thing. And it is additionally strange that Caspian, who has seen slavery from the inside (LOL) and who has recently seen the terrible effects of transmogrification on Eustace, so thoroughly decides that Coriakin has every right to keep slaves and transmogrify them at will.

But outside the thematic issues of this series, I'm bothered by the narrative of the Dufflepuds for another reason. I happen to know a thing or two about the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery in the U.S., as I was a history major for some time and took several classes on slavery in America and the associated civil war. And one thing I remember very clearly is that (a) one of the major justifications for slavery has been the notion that slaves need to be enslaved in order for them to survive (i.e., they cannot survive on their own without the orders of their masters) and (b) slaves used this presumption of their poor intelligence to actively resist their enslavement. In an online article I found for linking to this concept, James Sweet writes:

   [...] slaves registered their displeasure by slowing work, feigning illness, breaking tools, or sabotaging production. These everyday forms of resistance vexed slave masters, but there was little they could do to stop them without risking more widespread breaks in production.

Slowing work by, say, gathering water from a spring instead of a stream? Breaking tools by boiling all the seed potatoes before planting? Sabotaging production by stopping the milking in order to move the milk from the cat instead of the cat from the barn?

It's important to understand that these events were not secretive or widely unknown. People who supported the institution of slavery not only knew about these incidents, but also published them widely in order to support their propaganda that slaves were too stupid to survive as free people. That Lewis included what could be taken as signs of resistance in his novel doesn't mean that he recognized (or intended us to view) these actions as resistance; it could just as easily have been intended to show the reader that the Dufflepuds are too stupid to deserve freedom.

In another article I pulled for linkage, I found this candid outline of the justifications for slavery to be more than a little on-topic for this episode:

• Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact...

See Coriakin stating that he'll free the Dufflepuds someday and Aslan cautioning him to be patient and wait.

• Defenders of slavery argued that if all the slaves were freed, there would be widespread unemployment and chaos. [...] Defenders of slavery argued that the institution was divine, and that it brought Christianity to the heathen from across the ocean. Slavery was, according to this argument, a good thing for the enslaved. John C. Calhoun said, "Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually."

See Coriakin stating that the Dufflepuds would be lost, confused, adrift, and starving if he didn't command them. (Despite the fact that he hasn't had any contact with them since they turned invisible.)

• Defenders of slavery turned to the courts, who had ruled, [black people] had no legal standing as persons in our courts — they were property...

See Coriakin's total assurance that he can turn the Dufflepuds into whatever form he wishes, because he owns their bodies as his own property.

It has been noted once or twice in these deconstructions that C.S. Lewis was not American, and that is true. But he would hardly have been totally unaware of the institution of slavery, nor of the arguments for and against it. Indeed, he was aware enough of the institution as it relates to an economy, since he made slavery a central part of Caspian's early arc in this book, and Caspian held forth at length his views on how and why slavery is a bad thing. We cannot assume that Lewis, an educated man, then forgot all about slavery and its existence a few chapters later. Yet the Dufflepuds are never acknowledged as slaves, and Lewis is careful to assert on multiple occasions that Coriakin owns the island: this is affirmed by the Dufflepuds and by Aslan himself. His ownership of the people is obviously present in the text, but largely implied by virtue of his owning the land, as opposed to buying the people.

And I think it's noteworthy that while the Lone Islanders were (a) white, English-coded people, (b) being sent to foreign lands, (c) to serve people of color who are coded in the books as Islamic, the Dufflepuds are essentially their exact opposite. They are are (a) foreign and othered (initially described as "common" and "[not] so nice", then transmuted into silly "funnies") and coded as uneducated and not possessing religious sophistication (Aslan refuses to show himself to them as it would frighten them), and (b) they reside in the place of their slavery and indeed are said to own no part of the land. Instead, the land-owner and subsequent owner of their persons is (c) a white Christian man who is coded as entirely comfortable with English customs.

I doubt that Lewis intended these chapters to read as apologia for slavery; I am guessing, based on Caspian's passionate speech against the institution, that he would be unhappy with such an interpretation of his book. But I do think that this episode with the Dufflepuds is another example of the pervasive racism in these books, and not just of the "Christian slave-owner good; Muslim slave-owner bad" variety, although that is clearly here as well.

But despite LWW and PC (and now VoDT) being ostensibly about overthrowing tyrants and freeing the enslaved, the books could be more accurately described as overthrowing the illegitimate. Jadis is a tyrant, but she is also not a Daughter of Eve. Miraz is a tyrant, but he is also the previous king's brother rather than his lawful son. The Calormen slavers are tyrants, but they are also people of color trying to assert ownership over English Christians.

Once the illegitimate are overthrown, the Pevensies seem perfectly happy with supporting "legitimate" tyranny. The four Pevensies become absolute monarchs over Narnia, despite having no real connection with the land, no experience or training in rulership, and no reason for us to believe they'll be good masters of their Talking Animal subjects. (And an argument could be made, and indeed would later be made in Disney's Prince Caspian, that the Pevensies failed to establish the necessary measures to protect the kingdom from the Telmarines, though this is not strictly canonical to the books.) Later, Prince Caspian is crowned king, despite the fact that he is demonstrably willing to favor his Telmarine subjects over his Narnian ones, and despite his problematic assertion that all Telmarine things are now to be called "Narnian" and actual facts be damned. And now the Pevensies and Caspian are more than willing to support Coriakin's tyranny as soon as it becomes clear that Aslan has sanctioned it.

These aren't isolated themes in these books: the entire series is built around the assumption that Talking Animals / Dufflepuds are unsuitable to rule themselves and that they require a divinely-appointed (and upper-class English men and women) to govern them. And it's always, inevitably justified by the Talking Animals / Dufflepuds being silly and stupid and uneducated and therefore unworthy of self-governing. The Son of Adam / Daughter of Eve / People From England rulership rule will be set in place at the very beginning of the world, depending on how you interpret The Magician's Nephew. It's entirely possible to view what happens on Coriakin's island in this 20% of the book as no different from what has happened in every other book in this series so far, wherein legitimate tyranny is given a free reign -- whether it's King Peter and Prince Caspian drawing swords at counsel meetings, or King Caspian discriminating amongst his subjects when picking his crew, or Aslan pouncing on agnostic dwarves for the crime of being agnostic, or Coriakin transforming his subjects into whatever form his whim favors.

It's just harder to see these books as celebrations of legitimate tyranny when so many of the villains are themselves tyrants. We tend to think that the problem with Jadis and Miraz wasn't that they were illegitimate, but because they were... you know... tyrants. And yet apparently that question of legitimacy mattered to C.S. Lewis, because I can think of no other reason why we'd need a genealogy chart for Jadis when she was turning people to stone. And I can think of no other reason why he didn't notice that here he has Coriakin turning people to monopods. Both of those things are magical tyranny. It's just that the latter person had a permission slip from Aslan.

As a final note, this episode with Lucy becomes particularly poignant and depressing for me when you remember that she and Trumpkin are supposed to be dear friends. And yet she's okay with others of his race being enslaved and tormented, just as long as they weren't very pretty to begin with. Terrible Bargain, indeed.

@ narnia.wikia.com

California left turn: There is a left turn lane, but no left turn light. You hold your breath and dodge through a yellow or red light.

Massachusetts left turn: There is no left turn lane or light. You squeeze your car between the lanes in the middle of the intersection while waiting for a yellow or red light.

Western Washington left turn: There is a left turn lane with a dedicated light. You turn in an orderly, polite fashion when the light directs you to.

Eastern Washington left turn: You can pretty much go whenever. It’s not like there’s anyone coming.

Emily Esfahani Smith explains:

Brain size generally increases with body size across the animal kingdom. Elephants have huge brains while mice have tiny ones. But humans are the great exception to this rule. Given the size of our bodies, our brains should be much smaller—but they are by far the largest in the animal kingdom relative to our body size. The question is why. Scientists have debated this question for a long time, but the research of anthropologist Robin Dunbar is fairly conclusive on this point. Dunbar has found that the strongest predictor of a species’ brain size—specifically, the size of its neocortex, the outermost layer—is the size of its social group. We have big brains in order to socialize.

This helps explain why socialization is so strongly connected to our happiness:

When economists put a price tag on our relationships, we get a concrete sense of just how valuable our social connections are—and how devastating it is when they are broken. If you volunteer at least once a week, the increase to your happiness is like moving from a yearly income of $20,000 to $75,000. If you have a friend that you see on most days, it’s like earning $100,000 more each year. Simply seeing your neighbors on a regular basis gets you $60,000 a year more. On the other hand, when you break a critical social tie—here, in the case of getting divorced—it’s like suffering a $90,000 per year decrease in your income.

Maggie has shared a couple (here, here) articles on Thorium as a super-fuel. This sounds like a fantastic implementation!

Via IndustryTap:

Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine.

Current models of the engine weigh 500 pounds, easily fitting into the engine area of a conventionally-designed vehicle. According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.

Over the weekend, Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin reported that much of Obamacare’s flaws were not due to the president’s lack of attention or focus:

On the balmy Sunday evening of March 21, 2010, hours after the bill had been enacted, the president had stood on the Truman Balcony for a champagne toast with his weary staff and put them on notice: They needed to get started on carrying out the law the very next morning. It was not ready even though, for months beginning last spring, the president emphasized the exchange’s central importance during regular staff meetings to monitor progress. No matter which aspects of the sprawling law had been that day’s focus, the official said, Obama invariably ended the meeting the same way: “All of that is well and good, but if the Web site doesn’t work, nothing else matters.”

But they also report that healthcare.gov was “was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law — sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition.” Andrew Sprung sees the logic of this strategy:

The dominant charge in the incompetence indictment is that political considerations drove policy. But in this case, the “political considerations” consisted of sidestepping sabotage or trying to avoid providing new fodder for it. Perhaps in some cases, fear of taking propaganda hits should not have trumped operational considerations. But that’s easy to charge in hindsight. And the “political” considerations — evading sabotage — were in service of getting the law implemented well.

… [I]t seems clear to me that Obama should have drilled deeper into the administrative structure of the website-building project. Charges that the tech project  did not have the right leadership or management structure seem well founded.  Perhaps the responsibility for failing to find that leadership can be laid at the doorstep of DeParle, or Lambrew, or Sebelius, or Obama, or all of the above.  But the decisions that Goldstein and Eilperin detail are not on their faces irrational. The damage done to the law and to the country by Republican sabotage, on the other hand, is unmistakable.

Drum adds, “No federal program that I can remember faced quite the implacable hostility during its implementation that Obamacare has faced.” Tomasky searches for a parallel:

Has there ever been a law in the history of the country as aggressively resisted by the political opposition as this? Republicans didn’t do this with Social Security. Most of them voted for Social Security. They didn’t do it with Medicare. They, and the Southern racists who were then Democrats, didn’t do it with civil rights. There was a fair amount of on-the-ground opposition to that, but it wasn’t orchestrated at the national level like this was. And when the Voting Rights Act was passed the year after civil rights, Southern states in fact fell in line quickly. Check the black voter-registration figures from Southern states in 1964 versus 1966. It’s pretty amazing.

No, to find obstinacy like this, you have to go back, yes, to the pre-Civil War era. The tariff of 1828, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which led to the civil war in “Bloody Kansas” and ultimately to the Civil War itself.

“So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets. I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around…. The only real measure of their well-being we have is the number of piglets per birth, and that’s at an all-time high,” – Dave Warner, spokesman for the The National Pork Producers Council, in 2012.  For video of what is being done to these animals, see my earlier post here.

It's eight months to the day since I started this thing.  For those of you who have endured from day one: thankya kindly.  For those of you who dropped in along the way: welcome.  For those of you who have some sadomasochistic tendencies and are really excited to see me continue with either Ender's Shadow or Speaker for the Dead, leave your preferences in the comments below.  The Ender's Game movie (which was in development hell back in the late 1990s when I first read this book) opened Friday and everything I have seen, such as Ana Mardoll's film corner, suggests that it is terrible.  So I'll get you some commentary on that as well in due course.  You know; once I somehow obtain completely legal access to the film.  But first, the final chapter, which gets better as it goes along.

(Content: abuse apologetics, ableism, colonialism apologetics. Fun content: pirates, Phoenix Wright, aliens Jesus.)

"As much as anything, I think the videos saved me.  The prosecution edited them, but we showed the whole thing.  It was plain that Ender was not the provocateur.  After that, it was just a second-guessing game. [...] We got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him.  After that, it was simple."

OBJECTION!

It's like some kind of nightmarish reversal of presumption of innocence.  Graff has apparently been acquitted because no one can prove that murdering Stilson wasn't a completely essential module of Ender's curriculum.  Murder is presumed necessary unless proven optional (which I guess fits with the rest of the military philosophy we've seen so far).  I hope Ender wore a helmet in the courtroom.  You know, to protect him from all the kangaroos.

They also discuss how Ender is never coming back to Earth, despite Demosthenes pressuring the Hegemon.  Graff says Demosthenes has retired, and refuses to reveal Valentine's identity, which I guess is a not-terrible thing to do.  He does say that Demosthenes wasn't really the one who wanted Ender back on Earth--Locke did (while publicly arguing that Ender needed to stay away) and Demosthenes talked him out of it, what with the whole Invincible Warrior God-Child thing Ender would have had have going for him.  They're all going to rest instead.  Anderson's the new football commissioner.  Graff is the first Minister of Colonization, because clearly a life in military education makes him... an ideal policy-maker for the appropriate way to organise and disperse the human population?  ("The second rule of Colony Club is you do not talk about Colony Club.")  Mind you, Graff does have the mind of a colonist in the old meet-new-people-take-their-land-and-commit-war-crimes style.

"As soon as we get the reports back on the bugger colony worlds.  I mean, there they are, already fertile, with housing and industry in place, and all the buggers dead.  Very convenient.  We'll repeal the population limitation laws [...] and all those thirds and fourths and fifths will get on starships and head out for worlds known and unknown."

You know, I hadn't thought about it until last week's comment thread, but why aren't there queens on any of the formic colony worlds?  Why didn't Ender have to bust planet after planet to eradicate them all?  And why in the world would formic housing and industry be remotely suitable for human use?  Colonists are going to get to these worlds and find decaying, rusty cemetary-cities filled with the desiccated husks of millions of nightmares.  Honestly, who wants to sign up for that instead of, you know, base camp?  I want to hang out at base camp.  Forget hive cities.

Back in space--Ender's remained on Eros for a year.  He's been awarded the rank of admiral, because that's how the space navy works, obviously, and that gave him the authority to watch Graff's trial, so he knows everything now, knows how Stilson and Bonzo died, hears the case made against him by eeeeevil psychiatrists:

[He] listened as the psychologists and lawyers argued whether murder had been committed or the killing was in self-defense.  Ender had his own opinion, but no one asked him.  Throughout the trial, it was really Ender himself under attack.  The prosecution was too clever to charge him directly, but there were attempts to make him look sick, perverted, criminally insane.

Trying to court-martial a colonel by instead expounding roundabout ableist psychological slander against the colonel's prize student who is the favourite person of everyone on the entire planet does not sound like the actions of someone 'too clever'.  That sounds hilariously inept.  You court-martial Graff by asserting that he gambled humanity's survival on the belief that a miraculous military strategist would find a way to survive a fistfight to the death, and put it on Graff to somehow prove that it was necessary to do this, despite the thirty-six other genius commanders all performing so well without killing two classmates.  Then you move on to handling Ender by screaming "THERAPY, THERAPY FOR EVERYONE, IS ANYONE PAYING ATTENTION" and so forth.  Obviously.

All of Ender's friends go home, one by one, and he watches the videos of their triumphant returns, but then nothing more until the first colonists start to come to Eros, because apparently the secret headquarters of the International Fleet makes a much better docking hub than, say, the other non-secret place we know to exist that is called Inter-Stellar Launch.  My god.  Did they just cancel the military now that the formics are dead?  Is that how that works?

The one thing he could not bear was the worship of the colonists.  He learned to avoid the tunnels where they lived, because they would always recognize him--the world had memorized his face--and then they would scream and shout and embrace him and congratulate him and show him the children they had named after him and tell him how  he was so young it broke their hearts and they didn't blame him for any of his murders because it wasn't his fault he was just a child-- 

He hid from the as best he could.

Sounds about right, yeah.  Ender refuses to let himself off the hook for Stilson, for Bonzo, for the entire formic civilisation, and I suspect we're supposed to think he's being too hard on himself, but anything less would be even more terrifying, and so this rings true.  All too much of human history (and present) tells us how quickly we forgive murderers if they're on 'our side'.

And then one day, as Ender is helping with starship construction--he's decided he needs a new profession, also a good move--Valentine appears and asks him to go with her on the first wave of colony ships.  Two years from their perspective, fifty years to the rest of the universe.  Valentine implies that it's quite intentional that they would never see Peter again, and apologetically adds that she made sure Ender can't go back to Earth, because Peter is halfway to ruling the Hegemon's Council already.  The war on Earth a year earlier was ended by the culmination of Peter's plan, Locke and Demosthenes combining their forces like the Wonder Twins: Shape of--an insufferable snob!  Form of--a screaming racist mob!

"He decided to be a statesman?" 

"I think so.  But in his cynical moments, of which there are many, he pointed out to me that if he had allowed the League to fall apart completely, he'd have had to conquer the world piece by piece.  As long as the Hegemony existed, he could do it in one lump." 

Ender nodded.  "That's the Peter that I knew."

Yeah, Ender, that does sound like someone you'd feel superior too.  That rat bastard of a brother of yours who just goes and benefits from saving the world.  I have a wild guess that exactly zero of those still-breathing civilians would prefer to be dead as a statement on Peter's supposed moral vacuum.

"Funny, isn't it?  That Peter would save millions of lives." 

"While I killed billions." 

"I wasn't going to say that."

Well, what were you going to say, Valentine?  Because that's a really weird thing to just throw in there.  Peter has always been about power over people; wanting to have as many subjects as possible is exactly in-character for him.  Your conviction that he's made of murderousness is fanon.  But Valentine explains that Peter intended to use Ender as his last stepping-stone to planetary domination, so she threatened him with compilations of videos of him tormenting Ender as a child and pictures of slaughtered squirrels, "enough to prove in the eyes of the public that he was a psychotic killer".  Remember what I said before about this book being consistently sympathetic and positive about having and handling mental illness?  I take it back.  Mental illness is only a reason to be sympathetic to people we like; for the people we hate, it's an incurable condemnation and a weapon to be used against them.

Valentine further explains that in her final Demosthenes essay she announced that she was going to take the first colony ship out, and for some bizarre reason Graff announced that Mazer Rackham was going to be the pilot, which probably confused a hell of a lot of people who aren't very familiar with relativistic time dilation or who would like to know what qualifies a military tactician from eighty years ago to drive a modern civilian space ark, and that Ender would be the colonial governor--though Valentine quickly adds Ender has time to cancel the announcement if he doesn't want to, which is I guess the kind of agency that you get when it's your loving sister manipulating you instead of the military dictatorship.  Ender agrees, he says, because he wants to see the formic worlds and try to understand where they came from.

Just saying: not hard to empathise with a corpse.

The voyage passes uneventfully (hah, no, Card went back and wrote an entire interquel about it, which I made the mistake of reading) and years pass on the colony world as Ender learns to govern and sets up an economy and tries to study what remains of the formics.  There isn't a lot, because their species had a literal living social memory and so they never kept books or whatever--though I wonder if they didn't have, say, specialised drones whose job it was to maintain continuity of thought, or if they just had flawless/eidetic memory or what.  Regardless, Ender looks at their architecture: strong roofs hint that winters were hard, staked fences show that there are wild animal problems:

And from the slings that once were used to carry infants along with adults into the fields, he learned that even though the buggers were not much for individuality, they did care for their young.

So, the vast majority of the population are made up of female drones that can't reproduce anyway, and all young are derived from a tiny handful of queens, but they lack the specialised labour to maintain nurseries and instead prefer to have random drones haul larvae around while they're doing agricultural work?  I'm guessing this is a remnant of the original story where the aliens functioned in some completely different, vastly more humanoid way?

The colony stops caring much about what things are like back on Earth, although they hear that Peter finally becomes Hegemon.  Valentine, still writing under the Demosthenes name, writes history books, seven volumes of the human-formic wars.  She says she'll write one more, the life of Ender Wiggin, but Ender tries to talk her out of it.  When there's a year left before the next colony ship arrives, Ender goes to scout out a new place for a village, and takes an eleven-year-old kid named Abra with him as his, I don't know, caddy.  Three days away from their town, they find strange hills:

A deep depression in the middle, partially filled with water, was ringed by concave slopes that cantilevered dangerously over the water.  In one direction the hill gave away to two long ridges that made a V-shaped valley; in the other direction the hill rose to a piece of white rock, grinning like a skull with a tree growing out of its mouth. 

"It's like a giant died here," said Abra, "and the Earth grew up to cover his carcass."

It looks, in point of fact, exactly like Fairyland in the mind game.  There's an overgrown playground nearby, like the one where Ender fought the child-faced wolves.  The formics built it, fifty years earlier, during the war.  Ender tries to send Abra away; Abra warns Ender that it might be a trap; Ender says he doesn't care if they want revenge.  They keep flying (apparently they've been in a helicopter all this time?  Three days by helicopter seems like a hell of a long way between the only two human settlements on the planet) and find the cliff and the ledge and the tower at the End of the World.  Ender leaves Abra in the chopper and climbs the wall. The same room is there, with the mirror that showed Peter's face, though it's just a dull sheet of metal with a rough humanoid face scratched into it.  Behind that, a dormant, silk-wrapped pupal formic queen, and Ender instantly knows that she carries enough fertilised eggs to start a colony on her own.  She links to his mind, the philotic effect, and Ender realises why he had so many nightmares at Eros--as the formics traced his mind back through the ansible and tried to understand him.  She shows him her birth, the old queen preparing her, memories of the campaign as the human fleets destroyed the formics over and over.

She had not thought these words as she saw the humans coming to kill, but it was in words that Ender understood her: The humans did not forgive us, she thought.  We will surely die. [....]

We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind.  We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again.  We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams.  How were we to know?

Ender takes the cocoon and promises to find her a world to start again.  When he returns to the colony, he writes a book, a history of the formics from the memory of the queens.  They lament the tragedy of the wars, and it's really very beautiful aside from the terrifying undercurrent of pro-colonialist appropriation apologetics:

But still we welcome you as guestfriends.  come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us.

They did 'start it', as wars of annihilation go, but it's hard not to see this as the kind of thing that makes people think it's okay to co-opt the possessions of subjugated cultures, dressing up in warbonnets for Halloween and fracking for oil on sovereign First Nation land because, really, it's all our country now and all that killing happened a long time ago and it's not like those people are really around anymore, right?  And now we have the slaughtered people literally forgiving and welcoming their killers.

Ender signs this book as the Speaker for the Dead and it starts a tradition back on Earth, people who arrive at funerals and say "what the dead one would have said, but with full candor, hiding no faults and pretending no virtues", which just sounds like the most passive-aggressive eulogy in the history of I'm-just-being-honest-here.  The religion spreads; among the colonies, it's the only one that matters, because apparently Jesus' jurisdiction doesn't extend into space.

When Peter reads the book, he calls Ender by ansible, seventy-seven years old to Ender's twenty-three, asks Ender to write his biography as the Speaker, and pours out his life story.  (It's not told here, obviously, because it's a retcon in addition to being a huge spoiler, but since there is no way I'm wading through the entire Shadow series, I'll mention that at this point Peter is married to Petra and they have like a dozen kids.)  The Hive-Queen and the Hegemon become "holy writ", because in addition to being the greatest general of all time and a starshipwright and a governor and a judge, Ender is also a prophet and poet, I guess?

One day, Ender asks Valentine to leave, says they should skip across the galaxy at lightspeed and let centuries fall away.  Especially disturbing:

"We have to go.  I'm almost happy here." 

"So stay." 

"I've lived too long with pain.  I won't know who I am without it."

Gluuuuuuuuuurge.  Apparently no one else in the last decade has thought to suggest that Ender should get a therapist either.  But he does have a real goal, because he needs to find a world for the formic queen to hatch, so they travel, Andrew Wiggin the Speaker for the Dead and Valentine Wiggin "writing down the stories of the living while Ender spoke the stories of the dead".  And for once I don't know what happens next.

I will confess that I hated this chapter the first time I read it.  What a backhand, what a theft, to have everything that the heroes suffer for be taken away: it didn't have to happen, it was a tragedy that it happened, it would have been better if they had failed.  That is a bitter fucking pill to swallow, especially for a teenager who thought he was smarter than everyone else and wished he could make the bullies see just how much better he was than them.  (By 'he' I mean 'me', if that could be more obvious.)  In theory, it's what gives the book its weight and teaches kids the value of compassion and communication, and rescues the book from the last 300 pages of 'I have to torture him to make him stronger and save everyone' by explaining that it was all for nothing.

Except... well, the last-minute twist comes in the final ten pages and the "I did what I had to do" abuse and endangerment and murder got the whole book.  They say that François Truffaut once claimed it was impossible to make a true anti-war movie because any war movie by its nature glorifies war.  (I'm going to crack again and just link to TVtropes' "Do Not Do This Cool Thing"--they may be stamp collectors, but that's a hell of a collection.)  The pro-empathy, anti-abuse, anti-violence message at the end of this book is about as compelling and hilarious as an abstinence message would be at the end of Fifty Shades of Grey.  (Worse, actually--Fifty Shades does make sex look terrifying.)  And while we might be told the war wasn't worth it, nothing has yet tarnished Ender's flawless goodness in the eyes of the narrative, despite that time he murdered a boy on the playground because they shoved him, and everything he's done since then.

After this comes Speaker for the Dead, the story that Card actually wanted to tell, for which he turned Ender's Game from a short into a novel-length backstory.  In theory, that whole book is the response to this one, and I'm curious enough to keep reading it, though I'll have to track down a copy first--I think my mother still owns one.  (I'm sure as hell not giving Card any more money.)  And there is also Ender's Shadow, which tells Bean's story during these same few years, from childhood to the destruction of the formics, which I do own.  Bean is a better person than Ender in most ways, and I think I might actually enjoy that one, which makes me want to leave it until I've endured Speaker.  Not sure.  Thoughts from the audience?

As a terrifying epilogue, next week I'll go back and look at the introduction to Ender's Game.  It might seem weird to leave it for now, and I've wanted to make reference to it in just about every post since I started, but I've left it this long intentionally.  After all, everyone in the introduction has already read the book--that's why I wanted to do so as well, and that's why it scares the hell out of me.  So that'll be fun.

[Content Note: Transphobia and Gender Binaries, Castration, Racism, Sexism, Spoilers for the Ender's Game movie.]

ENDER'S GAME may be the prettiest movie I ever hated.
— Ana Mardoll (@AnaMardoll) November 2, 2013

I wasn't planning to see Ender's Game in theaters because Orson Scott Card tastes like hate and Harrison Ford tastes like Unconcerned Straight Privilege, but a complicated series of events conspired to land my butt in the theater last night, hence the above tweet.

Now, I'm not going to do a full deconstruction of Ender's Game, because it would consist of me saying "Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy" approximately 800 times in a row, like Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy. Etc. Because, seriously, you should go read Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy because his Ender's Game posts are pure awesome.

But I will, very briefly, touch on all the ways this movie gave me Angry Feels.

1. Binary Genderizing. This movie enforces a totally unnecessary and violently-enforced gender binary early on. The Shouty Sergeant who is settling the new kids into their new room mentions that there are girl-bathrooms and there are boy-bathrooms and if anyone is ever in the wrong bathroom at the wrong time, he'll slice their genitals off. HA HA WHUT. There was absolutely no reason to put this in here, and I don't see how reassuring the Conservo-Parents in the audience that the future doesn't have shared bathrooms via a castration joke is the way to go.

And while it's possible that the trans students get to pick a bathroom when they enroll in Battle School, that still doesn't help the students who can't or don't want to pick, and additionally there is a strong sense to the scene that genitals = gender and that is so fucking problematic I don't even. Like, why was this scene here? Congratulations, Hollywood, you are more transphobic than Pat Robertson. (And this is particularly lolsobby after Harrison Ford tried to insist that they'd cleaned up all of Orson Scott Card's homophobia. "But it didn't have enough transphobia, so we fixed that for him!" ~ words that Harrison Ford didn't say but could have, and been entirely factual while doing so.)

2. LOL UR RATING. I will also note here that as this is a castration joke sandwiched between Ender beating Stilson to death and Ender beating Bonzo (near) to death, this movie was naturally rated PG-13. Ratings have always been highly politicized and essentially meaningless, but it seems like they're becoming more so. I don't really care, except that the next time the protagonist isn't a Conservo-Dream White Boy, they'll slap an R on the movie because gob forbid children see things that aren't Conservo-Dream White Boys. Oh, and also, this movie is about a person remaining innocent and blameless while committing genocide, so there's that. (And, yes, Ender maybe doesn't think he's blameless -- although that's left very ambiguous; you could easily interpret him as thinking he IS blameless but his commanders aren't -- but the vast majority of the audience will leave feeling like Ender is innocent because he was tricked, etc. so the end result is the same.)

3. Actually Let's Talk About That Genocide Thing A Bit More. I've always been more than a little peeved at the ending of Ender's Game because the whole setup is that he was training in simulation, and then SURPRISE! it wasn't a simulation and the Buggers have been exterminated and Achievement Unlocked: Innocent Genocide. But, the thing is, Ender was in training to go and do that exact thing. Even if he backed out at the last second because he had doubts, all the simulation data they'd gathered from him would have surely been enough for the adults to manage to do the same stuff he pioneered, but in real time.

You can't pull the "but I thought I was playing video games!" innocence card when the 'video games' were training for doing the exact same thing for realsies in a couple of weeks AND when everything you were doing in training could reasonably have been used by others (who are clearly watching you) to do the exact same thing for realsies. What I'm saying is, I do not and never will buy this book's insistence that Ender Wiggin could not possibly foreseen that he was orchestrating a genocide, merely because he was doing the genocide slightly earlier than he'd intended.

Which doesn't mean I don't think all-of-the-above couldn't be explored as an interesting moral conundrum. "At what point am I responsible for the tactics / tech I develop and how it's used" is actually a very good and relevant moral question, with far-reaching impacts from everything to drone attacks to social media sites crafted without anti-stalking policies. But Ender's Game doesn't explore that question because it's too busy painting Ender Wiggin as more innocent than Baby Jesus Christ.

4. Fucking Racism. The thing I hated most about this movie in real time was that the whole thing appears to be about black people learning to defer to white men. UGH. And this is a shame because I was initially very pleased at how may people of color are in this film -- it's entirely possible that Ender and Harrison Ford and the kid who played Bernard are the only main characters who are presented as white. But. The Shouty Sergeant, who is black, has as his most pivotal moment a bit where he salutes Ender (after he'd initially promised he'd never salute him) in order to give him Conservo-Dream White Boy confidence.

And Major Anderson is played by the always-awesome Viola Davis (who deserves better movies than she gets, alas), and her job is to rage-quit because Harrison Ford is a dehumanizing monster and he's all "meh, don't let the door hit you on the way out" and then we never see her again, dammit. And while the sub-text of the movie is that she's right and he's not, (a) that doesn't mean we get any real vindication of that (like bringing her character back at the end to court-martial Ford's ass or something) and (b) I'm really not convinced that 80% of the audience will come away with the idea that the Buggers weren't really a threat, despite Ender holding that view. American xenophobia + decades of monster movies + cultural assumption that population expansion means invading already-occupied places = muddled message, to say the least.

Also: Any fat acceptance credits I would have wanted to give to the movie for making Bernard a main character in his own right (and seriously, that bit was awesome and I wanted to weep because fat boys are never lovely main characters in their own right) was instantly dampened by my literal shock and fury that they merged Bonzo The Most Beautiful Boy In The World with Rose The Nose because it wouldn't be a conservo-dream nightmare movie if the ethnic-looking villain who has to be beaten up by the White Boy wasn't also less conventionally attractive than the white boy (in addition to being more violent, by authorial fiat as opposed to by actual body count numbers), because this is American dammit and we like our heroes pretty and our villains ugly.

5. And, Finally, Petra. Oh my god, Petra. If you've been reading Will Wildman's posts (and my associated comments), you're probably entirely familiar with my issues with book!Petra. She's consistently weaker and stupider than all the other boys in the Dream Team, which is probably not incidental in a book where it is world-canon that girls are poorly suited for Battle School. And her badass talent, sniping, isn't precisely useful in a universe where she never leaves the commander's tactical tent. And to top it all off, Orson Scott Card basically made her Stupid Judas, who nearly gets Ender killed when she badly misjudges the intensity of Bonzo's rage and deliberately leads Ender into a deadly trap. So there's all that.

This movie does a lot to try to circumvent that, but there's a lot of potholes you need to watch out for when side-stepping a cliff. Petra offers to train Ender, but since there's no time for Dink to eventually do the same, there's a strong undercurrent of Token Girl* = The Gentle One (Because Ovaries Make You Motherly). And then Ender starts sniping things perfectly within a day, so that rather undercuts Petra's badassness, plus his first foray into the games isn't to win because Bonzo is wrong, but is instead an impulsive move to Save Petra because otherwise she might get laser-tagged in a game of laser tag. CHIVALRY TO THE RESCUE! And then Ender teaches Petra self-defense, which makes no sense whatsoever because it's been established that self-defense classes are part of the mandatory curriculum and Petra has been there longer than Ender, but Ender (a) has a penis and (b) has an older brother, so obvs he knows more about self-defense than SOME GIRL.

* Yes, there are other girls in movie!Battle School, yay. No, none of them have names or talk to Petra. This movie does not, to my recollection, pass Bechdel.

When the Dream Team finally starts running Simulations (Except For Realsies), I nearly laughed out loud when Mazer says that Petra "has been trained to fire" the uber-weapon because SHE PRESSES A BUTTON. That was her training: "Petra, when the gauge says full, you press this button." ~ Petra's teacher, presumably. And while this does put Petra at the forefront at the climatic (and obscenely pretty, like seriously it is gorgeous) final battle, she is (a) still just taking orders (as opposed to Alai and Bean who have been given fuller reign to implement their own tactics) and (b) the suggestion in the movie is that, since firing the Big Weapon is Petra's only job, therefore she has been doing absolutely nothing in the previous battles. Ugh.

And then... Petra is the one who pushes the button that kills everything. And all I could think of in that instant is that this shouldn't be Ender's story. This should be Petra's story. Yes, Ender was the tactical mind behind getting her there, but she fired the bullet that killed an entire species. And she gets nothing. No time to mourn or rage or anything because she's too busy mothering Ender while he mopes. This story isn't about her, and yet this story should be about her. This is as much her story as it is Ender's, and the film-makers and the author didn't respect that reality. Didn't care. It's not even her story in-universe, because it's Ender who the Buggers credit with the destruction of their species and we're supposed to figure that they would know. Everyone, even the Buggers, ignore the young woman who actually has their blood on her hands.

Because she's a young woman and young women aren't really important, I guess.

And before someone pops up to say that Orson Scott Card eventually re-wrote the whole thing from Petra's point of view -- in between the Bean re-write and the re-write from That One Fly Who Was Trapped In The Conference Room And Saw The Occasional Meeting -- that's kind of my point. The Conservo-Dream White Boy got the first book, and got the first (and I'll bet only) movie, and the story about The Girl Who Destroyed An Entire Planet was left later. If the author got around to it. If the fanbase could be arsed to read it. If Hollywood wanted to invest millions into what is essentially a remake but without a Conservo-Dream White Boy protagonist.

That kind of pisses me off. I want Petra to be the star of her own story. I think the fact that she isn't, is important.

But at least I have Catching Fire to look forward to.

no worries. i’m sure at the time i would’ve sensed internalized transphobia from a mile away, but i am actually only happy you have gotten past it.

to be honest, i don’t even remember it. i’ve gotten so much shit from folks in response to defending all members of the trans community (as if such a thing truly existed) that i actually didn’t recall it in specific.

what i will say, is that i hope in your future you will continue to fight your own ideology.

what do i mean by that? ideology in this case is another word for “idealism” in the german philosophic sense. ok, that sounds pretentious, what the fuck am i on about? i mean that we come to things with certain categorial and conceptual knowledge, we come to empirical knowledge already tainted by ideology.

the counter-strategy to this is materialism. another jargony word, but it is rather simple, and the meaning is just “how does my category of self reproduce itself, and how does that constrain the knowledge i have or believe is possible?” so how, in the mundane crass finite way, do humans continue existing, since they don’t exist atemporally or essentially?

the answer is by examining “means of production” which is again another fancy way of saying not simply how do we produce more humans (like babbys) but how do we produce ourselves, as individuals, over and over again each new day, each hour, each minute?

i put this to you because i worry given the context of your performance that you are attracted to other ideologies. that categorical knowledge appeals to you and guides you against the nature of messy compassion you really need to survive. i say this with deep sympathy, because dominant ideology is cruel, and you must survive. i fucking insist.

but to be concrete, i can’t respect a vegan that doesn’t take serious the conditions of production of food for the humans that labor in it. why? the categorical information about the feelings of any species other than my own is secondary, because i recognize that as an individual i can do nothing for any other species. only with the cooperation of my entire species can i extend any compassion.

and so you must ask yourself the only thing you can as an individual, have i done everything in my power to understand the economic system that motivates people, for instance, to consume animals? have i done everything in my power to examine why i feel free not to act as other people, as independent fully from all other histories, and only appealing to transcendental morality? (this secondary question is critical for white men to examine.)

if you are the man i think you could be, you will see the answer is “not yet.” and if you are like me, in some time you may think to yourself, “only if all of humanity is without suffering can we really extend our compassion, and the cause of our suffering is…” if you are me in specific, you would say “class society” at the end of that sentence, but you are your own man, so i leave it to you.

in any case, i hope this sufficiently redeems you in your own eyes and reminds you that i am merely a man with other concerns for justice, and that what you may apologize to me for is for yourself—if you want to really apologize to me you must know what upsets me. and the above is only a glimpse of it.

that said, you have my love and support and respect as a brother, and i wish you strength on your journey to better understand yourself and your species.

how do I get a poster of this??

Richard Vedder warns that American universities are on a “tax-exempt debt binge” that will only end in disaster. ”A decade ago, no one seriously predicted cities would go bankrupt, forcing municipal bondholders to absorb large losses,” he writes. “In a few years, we will probably be hearing similar stories about some universities”:

Schools are exuberantly borrowing, in some cases issuing 100-year (century) bonds. Some bond offerings are justified, even wise, as schools are taking advantage of low interest rates to reduce future debt-service obligations. But a lot of this activity is financing construction of high-end student housing, faddish “centers” and stadiums. … Ohio State University borrowed $500 million for 100 years, mostly to build new dormitories. Will the buildings last as long as the debt used to pay for them? Not likely. The University of California issued $860 million in century bonds last year and, as an encore, an additional $2.39 billion in conventional debt recently. (If that sounds like a huge amount, consider that Harvard University, which has about 22,000 students compared with the UC system’s more than 225,000, is more than $6 billion in debt – about $300,000 for every student.) These debt-financed building sprees are increasingly troublesome at a time of unsustainably rising college costs.

"Hey, evolution, what are you doing for Halloween?"

"Well, I made this moth, and then I dressed it up like two flies feeding on a big wet pile of bird crap."

"Um."

"I even made it smell like bird crap.”

"I see."

"Isn’t it awesome?"

"Why couldn’t you just do ‘sexy cat’ like everyone else?"

Toronto's crack-smoking mayor drunkenly called Toronto radio host Bill Carroll, to defend Toronto's crack-smoking mayor: "How do you know when you're being videotaped?" [SoundCloud]

Type:Rider is one of those game concepts that doesn’t exactly scream thrill-a-millisecond, but that’s because it’s too busy artfully scrawling, scratching, writing, and typing it out to care. It’s a fairly basic platformer, but the twist is that all levels are themed after various evolutions of the written word. I suppose you could call it edutainment (there are even quick, optional passages about the origins of each script that appears, if you care to read them), but it’s also a very beautiful, well-constructed experience. You take satisfying, just-floaty-enough leaps between letters, dancing on air between centuries of human knowledge. There’s a free demo if you’d like to try it out, or you can find more details below.

(more…)

When Brandon Whitmer criticized cops in Columbia, S.C. for focusing on small-time drug raids instead of solving violent crimes, interim police chief Ruben Santiago had words for him.

@Brandon whitmer, we have arrested all the violent offenders in Five points. Thank you for sharing your views and giving us reasonable suspicion to believe you might be a criminal, we will work on finding you.

The post was deleted almost immediately, but not before it was noticed and screencapped. In the resulting furore, Santiago lied about it.

This is Interim Chief Santiago posting. I was just notified that one of my staff members deleted my post. I put everyone on notice that if you advocate for the use of illegal substances in the City of Columbia then it's reasonable to believe that you MIGHT also be involved in that particular activity, threat? Why would someone feel threaten if you are not doing anything wrong? Apply the same concept to gang activity or gang members. You can have gang tattoos and advocate that life style, but that only makes me suspicious of them, I can't do anything until they commit a crime. So feel free to express yourself, and I will continue to express myself and what we stand for. I am always open to hearing how our citizens feel like we can be effective in fighting crime.

After Popehat inquired after it, however, Ruben Santiago was forced to admit being a liar.

Chief Santiago did write those two posts. I believe the original comment was misconstrued. I appreciate you reaching out to CPD.

Chief was trying to say that he puts would-be-criminals on notice — if you commit a crime or plan to commit one, CPD will work hard to investigate and press charges according to the law.

It’s easy for social media posts to be misunderstood. The man who was so-called threatened openly admitted that he was not offended and appreciated the work of CPD.

Earlier this week, Forbes put out a “World’s Most Powerful People” list with Putin at the top. I wasn’t kind. (It’s a bit of an epic smackdown, if you want to watch). Simon Tisdall was also gob-smacked:

[T]he praise for Putin from Forbes, a magazine that supposedly champions individual free enterprise, as a man who “has solidified his control over Russia”, is jaw-dropping. If power is to be measured by the successful imposition of authoritarian governance, then surely Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator, should be Forbes’ No 1? On this basis, Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin would qualify for emeritus awards.

In point of fact, Putin’s power is largely illusory – a false idol erected and nurtured by a phalanx of Kremlin cronies, and maintained through control of Russia’s fast-depleting oil and gas revenues and an ever more repressive grip on civil society and the media.

The whole farce was obviously a way to get media attention (success!) but also an obvious product of Obama derangement syndrome. Some people cannot see foreign policy in anything but crude schoolyard terms – in which case, Obama’s willingness to give Putin the Syria WMD brief was clearly a sign of the president’s comparative weakness. This vote was obviously designed to stick the president in the eye. And have you looked at Forbes lately? They make Buzzfeed look like a virgin when it comes to advertorial.

More to the point, we’ve seen that Russia’s oversight has – so far – resulted in an unexpected success in destroying the chemical weapons sites by the deadline, which is today. You won’t hear that on Fox – but it’s a huge success. Obama’s avoidance of getting dragged into Syria’s civil war was obviously a wise move; to get an end to Syria’s WMDs at the same time is pretty damn cool. The outcome was a win-win for both Obama and Putin – and the world. And Obama made it happen. Not so powerless after all.

Happy Halloween!

Texas struggles to convince Tea Partiers they won't have to fight the UN for control of the Alamo.

Security researcher Dragos Ruiu has been painstakingly untangling a weird, scary piece of malicious software that compromises the BIOS of the computers it attacks, allowing it to infect machines with different operating systems. He's dubbed it "badBIOS" and has seen it infect machines that aren't connected to the Internet. It appears that its initial vector may be a USB exploit, spreading by memory stick, but after that, it appears that it continues to communicate with other infected machines by ultrasonic networking through its hosts' mics and speakers (!). On Ars Technica, Dan Goodin has a deep dive into the strange, freaky world of badBIOS.

Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected machine that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when one of the machines had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped.

With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on.

"The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things. Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It was weird."

Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps [Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]