tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6484802926221807432024-03-19T06:06:06.129-07:00Very Rarely StableMy name is Daniel Copeland. Immanuel Kant was a real... I like quirky humour, Im incurably philosophical, and I hail from the Antipodes (New Zealand rather than Australia, but still). For my living, I take notes in lectures at the University of Otago on behalf of students with disabilities.Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.comBlogger149125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-11377733921757269892019-11-03T00:26:00.001-07:002019-11-03T02:13:51.895-08:00Why you’re wrong about “Joker”<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2019/11/why-youre-wrong-about-joker.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-NTgAawpPoNtqHf0XjuEEQvBSnhZZKByd6nCCsN_b3HGY9yei4uElV3LwRxO0N4BDnfghalHRNv5lKBqpikNUmxH8qc2wtwe1MMkvBv6Sr7HbpYmeV_j0Kqbxg4q4MsTG1JiyWQ6SMkq2/s400/joker-joaquin-phoenix.jpg" width="500" height="309" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="474" title="Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker" alt="Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker" /></a></div>
<p><strong><a href="https://veryrarelystable.dreamwidth.org/5249.html">Crossposted from Dreamwidth</a></strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> is not a comic book movie,</strong> at least in the sense of giving you anything you would remotely expect from a comic book movie. It has some character names and place names the same as in the comics, and near the end there’s a scene which will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows anything about Batman, but there are no superpowers, no costumes, no heroes, no fantasy or science fiction elements at all. People who enjoy comic book movies but not bleak gritty character dramas won’t like it. People who enjoy bleak gritty character dramas but not comic book movies will find nothing objectionable in it.<br />
<br />
<em>(Mild spoiler warning, by the way. I don’t get into specifics but you may find the edge of surprise dulled on some elements of the movie if you read this post before you see it.)</em></li>
<a name='more'></a><li><strong><em>Joker</em> is not a mass shooter manifesto.</strong> It doesn’t make out that Arthur’s deadly violence is a good response to his situation. It’s sympathetic, but in the same way the Hitler movie <em>Downfall</em> was sympathetic – it shows you why you do not want to be Arthur. It depicts a society strained to breaking point, and Arthur is that breaking point. Some people were worried there would be shootings at American cinemas; well, that’s part of living in a country that thinks weapons are a human right, not anything to do with the content of a movie. Nor is Arthur an “incel”. His romantic hopes are frustrated, but neither he nor the movie faults the young woman in question for frustrating them, and it’s not what drives him to embrace violence.</li>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> is not “triggering the libs”.</strong> I’m honestly tempted to wonder what brilliant stealth leftist came up with this take and got it shared around. A society breaking under the strain of socioeconomic inequality; a marginalized character experiencing oppression before the audience’s eyes; and the whole catastrophe is set off by (a) a gun and (b) the defunding of mental health services. Who tricked all the conservatives into thinking this supported <em>their</em> side? I mean, hey, if your idea of “triggering the libs” is to show compassion to people struggling with mental illness, I’m not going to complain. You go ahead and trigger those libs. On that note—</li>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> is not a “descent into madness”.</strong> I’m honestly impressed at how sensitively the film portrays the experience of mental illness. When Arthur gets that warning phone call from his boss and the sound fades out and the room seems to be pressing in on him – yes, that’s exactly what a shut-down feels like. Going in, I was worried they were going to go down the “he goes mad, loses control, and kills people” path, a route so well-worn by now it must be cutting into bedrock. They didn’t, but a lot of reviewers seem to have seen that anyway. More than one has described Arthur as a “narcissistic psychopath”. In fact he’s the first onscreen Joker who isn’t a narcissistic psychopath. Nor does he exhibit manic behaviour, another first. Arthur’s uncontrollable laughter and his delusions and I think his smoking are symptoms of his illness. His violence is not. His first couple of killings are self-defence; all the rest are cold, deliberate choices. When he kills, he’s not losing control. He’s <em>taking</em> control.</li>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> does not paint a hyperbolic caricature of its antagonists.</strong> As a neurodivergent person I promise you: what Arthur faces in the movie is what we face every day. Unlike Arthur I have a supportive family and a lot of kind friends, but this good fortune doesn’t erase the contempt and the mockery and the name-calling and the occasional water-balloons and eggs, nor assuage the cumulative effect of being routinely disregarded and excluded and passed over and left out of things. If this is not happening to you it’s because you are not neurodivergent. I’ve mentioned before the time when I described some of this to a casual acquaintance and the response was a sympathetic “Wow, I guess some people just have mental problems.” No, this is how people <em>treat</em> people with visible mental problems.</li>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> does not refute the concept of male privilege or white privilege.</strong> Arthur has male privilege; he doesn’t have to fear sexual harassment even when he’s being beaten up, let alone in the normal course of his day. Arthur has white privilege; the police interview him very politely several times before there’s any question of them shooting him. What Arthur lacks is neurotypical privilege, which is when people listen to what you say instead of mocking your appearance in public and throwing things at you in the street. If you want to argue that “privilege” is a misleading word, since it doesn’t necessarily imply that someone is <em>privileged</em> in the colloquial sense, I sympathize, but this is the terminology we’re stuck with.</li>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> is not Todd Phillips whinging about people not laughing at the <em>Hangover</em> series.</strong> Yes, this is a take I’ve heard, and I give it full marks for inventiveness. But it doesn’t fit the movie very well. OK, yes, we’re supposed to sympathize with Arthur when he attempts to do stand-up comedy, but “attempts” is very much a key word in that sentence. If that scene is a symbol of the <em>Hangover</em> series, then what Phillips is telling us about the <em>Hangover</em> series is that he screwed it up and it was shit.</li>
<li><strong><em>Joker</em> does not ruin the <em>Batman</em> mythos.</strong> This was part of the “hyperbolic caricature” take; the idea was that Thomas Wayne, in particular, turns out to be a bad person, which then casts Batman’s life-long quest to avenge him in a rather unpleasant light. Well, frankly the saintly depiction of Thomas Wayne in the <em>Dark Knight</em> Trilogy always struck a false note for me, and was only prevented from ruining the movie by his very limited screen time. (A billionaire CEO who takes time off from CEO-ing to be a life-saving doctor? Really?) The fact is, Gotham is a shitty city with people in it who have the money to fix its shittiness but choose not to. There’s a limit to how good those people can believably be.<br />
<br />
If you can see past the limits of Arthur’s manifestly unreliable viewpoint, <em>Joker</em> portrays Thomas Wayne as a middling-decent man whose shortfall of empathy for the underclass is due to distance rather than callousness. That, and the fact that three people he’s responsible for have just been, you know, brutally murdered. It would have made him a <em>more</em> callous man if he’d paused, in that moment, to consider whether they’d done anything to bring their own deaths upon themselves. And I can hardly blame him or Alfred for taking it the wrong way when some dirty man off the street reaches through the gate of Wayne Manor and fondles his kid.<br />
<br />
Now, how would you build a new <em>Batman</em> franchise out of this? Assuming Joaquin Phoenix can be persuaded to break the “Joker” curse and become the first actor ever to play the character in more than one live-action feature, here’s my sequel concept.
Twelve years after the murders of the Waynes, Gotham is split into the very rich in their fortress houses and the very poor in the slums and back streets. The police are semi-militarized and brutally gun down anyone who inconveniences the rich, but no-one protects poor people from being robbed and killed in the streets. Obviously this is a spawning-ground for organized crime.<br />
<br />
A Manson-style cult following has grown up around Arthur, and is being quietly financed by rich gang bosses (with names like “Cobblepot”, perhaps?) who find the chaos and the fear and the drain on police resources convenient for their own purposes. Arthur continues to try and maintain control in the only way he knows how, but he’s now surrounded by people who measure worth by kill counts, and he knows if he shows a hint of weakness he’ll be their next trophy. His uncontrollable laughter has come back.<br />
<br />
...And then a shadow shaped like a bat begins appearing in alleys and on rooftops, targeting those who prey on the poor but refusing, unlike the police, to use deadly violence. Let’s have Bruce Wayne get kidnapped by the Joker cult and escape, and then spend some time knocking about the slums incognito and seeing Gotham from underneath. Let’s have him call the police on a robbery, and give him a big character moment when the police mistake the victims for perpetrators and shoot them. This prompts him to (a) fight the criminals himself, (b) work outside the police system, and (c) never use a gun. His character progression must lead him to realize how his parents’ insulation from Gotham’s underclass helped create the forces that killed them.<br />
<br />
Because I’m quite sure of two things about this movie: there is no way DC is going to let this success lie while the DCEU flounders, and no way it can be shoehorned into the DCEU continuity.</li>
</ul>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-22576345191844290812019-08-14T21:04:00.000-07:002019-08-15T01:37:43.168-07:00Economics... again. (Sigh.)<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/oliver-twist-review-740959" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMmMdBqswOfFNW5wz9dho8XxZU_DBMbGIRybhUGfkyWLO-MsWuGK1lZOLG4vYyFu_MuoFXxVHr126jZoRvy8a9Lje9iGJZrb5Z8rXgTxMnX7aM7Ye7xApngg0kQLfrQE-OOns6XodbQOxf/s400/olivertwist.jpg" title="Please sir, may I have some more?" alt="Please sir, may I have some more?" width="500" height="383" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="588" /></a></div>
<p>In April, New Zealand’s Labour-led government raised the minimum wage from $16.50 to $17.70 per hour. Basic economic theory, which I have perforce become acquainted with over seven years of taking undergraduate notes in a far-flung range of subjects, would predict that the unemployment rate must rise proportionally. Being also acquainted with the methods by which economists arrive at basic economic theory, I am therefore entirely unsurprised to read that</p>
<blockquote>New Zealand’s unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent in the second quarter of 2019 from 4.2 percent in the previous period, compared to market expectations of 4.3 percent. That was the lowest jobless rate since the second quarter of 2008, when it was 3.8 percent. Unemployment rate in New Zealand averaged 5.99 percent from 1985 until 2019, reaching an all-time high of 11.20 percent in the third quarter of 1991 and a record low of 3.30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007.
</blockquote>
<p class="cite">—<a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/unemployment-rate"><em>Trading Economics</em></a></p>
<p>In case you’re wondering, yes, the second quarter of 2008 was towards the end of the Labour Party’s previous term in government, as was that record low in 2007, and 1991 was in the first term of the National government before them. <em>Trading Economics</em> has a graph of the New Zealand unemployment rate for the last thirty-three years, which I’ve taken the liberty of colour-coding rather crudely in Paint according to the leading party of government. (Note for Americans: in New Zealand as in most of the rest of the world, the <em>left</em>-leaning party is branded red and the conservative party blue.)</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/unemployment-rate" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE8LBq5LKN2j5ma_L3zsxREjhXkueLY5UtKYL56d69vnmYzN6sUVC7EIh3vhE750G4TYlbIpDbfaFvoahOtVO1pgHMWbC0L88-zO_ssSboXPUSBzC5i8OkB5o-BtLCsKvrTEqyRXgishsQ/s1600/new-zealand-unemployment-rate.jpg" width="500" height="208" data-original-width="730" data-original-height="340" /></a></div>
<p>I don’t want to read more into this than is warranted. National took the reins of government from Labour twice during this period, and both times came shortly after worldwide financial crises, so I’d be cautious about blaming them for the big upticks in unemployment at those times. Crises aside, the longer-term trend is downward. What I do want to point out is that there is no sign of the upward drift that orthodox economic theory would lead us to expect during Labour’s tenures, despite the fact that they raise the minimum wage every year by much bigger increments than National does.</p>
<p>This semester I’m taking a first-year economics class, again. It’s struck me right from the start how much it’s re-treading ground I’ve been over and over since the first time round, seven years ago. If that doesn’t sound surprising, by contrast I’ve been assigned to papers in various health professions each semester since 2013, and every year there’s been a module on cancer, and every year there’s new insights about how cancer happens and what healthcare providers can do to fight it. That’s what progress looks like. That’s how you know a discipline is open to learning new truths.</p>
<p>In fairness, this semester’s lecturer has mentioned a few things which, in previous economics classes I’ve been to, have been skated over completely. He did take care to point out, for example, that sometimes people don’t buy certain goods or services not because they don’t <em>want</em> to pay the market price but because they <em>can’t</em> – the first time I’ve ever heard this distinction highlighted. (Unfortunately he seems to have missed some rather major implications of it, but we’ll get to that.) Also he’s promised an upcoming block of lectures on market failures, which up till now I haven’t heard economists talk about to students below third-year.</p>
<p>Still, as in previous years, the lecture material treats labour as just another good or service, which workers sell and employers buy. When you draw a supply-and-demand graph, the demand curve slopes downward, meaning that the more something costs, the fewer people will be willing to buy it and the less of it will get bought. Meanwhile the supply curve slopes upward, meaning the more it costs, the more people will be willing to sell it and the more of it will be available for sale. Where the two curves cross, the amount people are trying to buy equals the amount available for sale, and the price at which that happens is the market price or “equilibrium” price. They’re called “curves” but they’re usually graphed as straight diagonal lines. The slope of each curve is called its “elasticity”.</p>
<p>I’m not allowed to ask questions in lectures, and after any lecture there’s usually a few students wanting to talk to the lecturer and their practical need for information obviously takes precedence over my idle curiosity. But after the lecture introducing the concept of a supply curve, I had a rare opportunity for conversation. <a name='more'></a>Rather than let out every expostulation I’ve had to swallow in an economics lecture, I just asked: Could there be such a thing as a negatively elastic supply curve (i.e. downward-sloping, i.e. the higher the price the <em>less</em> you sell)? The lecturer seemed blindsided by the question, so I clarified: Suppose you had to make a certain amount of revenue within a given time or go bankrupt, then if the price went down wouldn’t you have to sell <em>more</em> of the goods to meet your target? And what would the equilibrium price be? Well, he said, in that situation the concept of equilibrium wouldn’t really apply. But it was hard to believe such a situation could occur across a whole market.</p>
<p>So I came clean, or a little bit cleaner. Couldn’t it happen with labour in some markets, I asked? If you need to make a certain minimum amount each week in order to eat and pay the rent, then if wages go down aren’t you obliged to take on more hours? Well, you could argue that, he said. In fact, did I know there was a study on New York taxi drivers that found that was pretty much what they did? That they worked each day until they’d reached a particular total amount from their fares, working long hours when there weren’t many passengers and knocking off early on busy days? (I didn’t let on that that very study was one of the inspirations for my question.) It just went to show, he said, that people weren’t always rational – a rational taxi-driver would do the long hours on busy days, save up, and take the day off when business was slow.</p>
<p>I had another lecture to go to, so I didn’t stop to argue the rationality point. What I thought, though, was: Look, I’m trying to save money for an overseas holiday hopefully next year. You’re telling me that, if my wage were to go down for some reason, thus delaying my holiday, the rational response would be to take fewer work hours – thus delaying my holiday even longer. Rational? Really? What about if the stakes were not travel next year, but rent next fortnight and groceries tomorrow? In any situation where you have a limited time to make a minimum amount of money, doesn’t that flip the rationality of your choices?</p>
<p>The very next lecture I attended brought up the question of the minimum wage. If you have a mandatory minimum wage that is above the market wage, then according to orthodox economic theory it’s going to cause unemployment. Again, think of those criss-crossing supply and demand “curves”. The minimum wage is a horizontal line cutting across the graph above where those curves intersect. Because it’s higher than the market wage, demand is lower – fewer people are prepared to employ workers for whatever particular job the graph is about. But for the same reason, supply is higher – people are prepared to put more hours into that job, and some people now want to work in it who didn’t previously want to at all. The gap between the amount of work available and the amount of work sought is unemployment.</p>
<p>I’ve heard all that and had to type it down, gritting my teeth, before. But one thing that distinguishes this particular paper from other first- and second-year economics papers I’ve taken notes for is that the lecturers actually back up what they say with empirical evidence, albeit still fairly scanty evidence by the standards of science and health-science papers. First he showed us a graph with the average unemployment rates in states with minimum wages and states without minimum wages, respectively, and sure enough the states with minimum wages had higher unemployment. But, he said, we can’t stop there. There might be some other reason why the first line is higher. (For instance, unemployed people might vote in left-leaning governments who then institute minimum wages.) You have to hold everything else the same, so that the only thing that changes is the minimum wage, before you can be sure.</p>
<p>And then he showed us a study where they had done just that – watched the unemployment rate in two adjacent American states with very similar economies until just one of those states raised its minimum wage. Did that state’s unemployment rate go up as a result, compared to the other? It did not.</p>
<p>His hypothesis was that when their wage went up, employees felt more satisfied with their work and became more productive, as a result of which employers were able to afford to cover their increased employment costs. Well, sure, that’s possible. I can’t help feeling it’s a bit fortuitous, though. It’s not like any worker can keep on getting more and more productive indefinitely as a result of something so intangible as satisfaction. Seems a bit of a bummer, if you’re trying to capture a general cause-&-effect link that your theories say must be there, that it gets drowned out by what has to be a particular, local, context-sensitive circumstance.</p>
<p>At the very least, isn’t it worth considering the alternative hypothesis that the labour supply curve is negatively elastic? That most workers are like the New York taxi-drivers and me with my travel savings, and take more time off when they can meet their needs on fewer work hours? That the supply and demand curves on the labour graph slope in the same direction, so you wouldn’t expect the gap between them to get bigger as you move up the wage axis? And wouldn’t that also neatly explain the failure of New Zealand’s minimum wage and unemployment rate to correlate over time?</p>
<p>Presumably this condition wouldn’t go all the way down the graph. People can’t work twenty-four hours a day for free without sleep or lunch breaks. Eventually you would reach a point where, from working too long in too poor conditions on too little money to buy decent food, you’d be so unwell you’d collapse at your work-station. Below that point your personal labour supply curve would once again be positive – you wouldn’t be able to work any longer if your wage was cut again, no matter how much you might need the money.</p>
<p>The implications get a bit scary. Remember, when the supply curve slopes downward, there is no equilibrium. Remember also that what’s imposing this condition is the worker’s need to make a certain minimum income in order to survive; if they hold out for higher wages and shorter hours and every available employer says “no,” their children starve. Hence, if my hypothesis is correct, then absent a minimum wage (whether imposed by the law, by union agitation, or by competition with government welfare payments), the “market wage” will sit exactly at the workers’ point of collapse. If that seems improbable, I recommend a look into what labour conditions were like before we had unions and the welfare state, and still are like in low-wage countries that those institutions have not yet reached. Charles Dickens’ <em>Oliver Twist</em> is an emphatic but not exaggerated depiction.</p>
<hr />
<p>If this blog actually had any readers, and if any of them followed the <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/search/label/economics"><span class="cybertext">economics</span></a> label, they would find that my other big problem with undergraduate economics is its definition of the word “welfare” and its conflation of “willingness to pay” with <em>ability</em> to pay. Yes, these two things together constitute one single problem.</p>
<p>Let’s start with “willingness to pay”. It means what it looks like it means, i.e. how much any individual consumer is prepared to pay for a good or service. If the price is lower than that amount, they’ll buy it; if it’s higher, they won’t. Either way, they end up enjoying what they value more – the good or service if they buy it, the money if they don’t. That way, the people who value it most will be the ones who get it. If the supply of gluten-free food runs short, for example, and the suppliers put the price up, then presumably the people with coeliac disease will pay the higher price while the fad dieters won’t, and so the people who really need it will be the ones who get it.</p>
<p>Already you’ll have seen the problem, and as I say this lecturer (for the first time in my economics note-taking experience) has alluded to it. Sometimes the people who would be most <em>willing</em> to pay a high price, on account of needing the product the most, are not in a position to be <em>able</em> to pay the high price. He’s even stated outright that the same dollar makes more difference to a poor person than it does to a rich person. But although he’s acknowledged both these things, he doesn’t seem to have spotted the implications for the concept of “welfare”.</p>
<p>“Willingness to pay” is measured in dollars. Subtract the actual price you paid from your “willingness to pay”, and the result is the “surplus value”, i.e. how much better off you are for having made the purchase. The seller also enjoys surplus value, calculated by subtracting their “willingness to sell” from the price they actually get, i.e. how much better off <em>they</em> are for having made the sale. And in economics, “welfare” equals the total surplus value from all transactions across the economy. “Welfare” in this sense is what economists seek to maximize.</p>
<p>Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “welfare” I instinctively think of something a bit more closely connected to human wellbeing. Let’s suppose a government is choosing between two different economic policies. One would improve “welfare”, in the technical sense, by one million dollars, all of which would be enjoyed by one single billionaire. The other would improve “welfare” by one hundred thousand dollars, which would be shared evenly among one hundred homeless people. Which policy is better? By the technical definition of “welfare” it has to be the first policy; the second one creates only 10% as much surplus value and thus results in a 90% “deadweight loss”. But I think it’s pretty clear that giving a hundred homeless people enough money to rent a house for a month or two and buy job-interview suits and make a start on their dental hygiene improves human wellbeing vastly more than nudging up the number in a billionaire’s bank account by an increment he’ll barely notice.</p>
<p>This much of course I’ve complained about many times before. I even know the economic jargon to put it in: instead of maximizing aggregate surplus value from transactions, we should be trying to maximize the aggregate <em>utility</em> of surplus value from transactions. But recently our lecturer said something with implications that, once you think in terms of “ability to pay” rather than “willingness to pay”, are frankly rather horrifying, and I really hope he just hadn’t thought through those implications.</p>
<p>The topic at hand was price ceilings. When the government imposes a price ceiling on a good or service which is lower than the market price, this is bad because more people want to buy the thing and fewer people can sell the thing and so you end up with a shortage. That, again, I’d heard several times before. But, said the lecturer, there’s another bad consequence as well. Some of the people who now succeed in buying the thing before it runs out will be people whose “willingness to pay” is below the market price – who wouldn’t have bothered shopping for it before the government implemented the price ceiling. And some of the people who miss out on the thing because of the shortage will be people whose “willingness to pay” was much higher. So the thing will have been taken away from people who really value it and provided to people who don’t, and that’s a problem.</p>
<p>Which is a good and reasonable objection as long as you can be absolutely sure that it really is <em>willingness</em> to pay, and not <em>ability</em> to pay, that determines demand in this market. If not, well, run through that last paragraph substituting “ability” for “willingness”. Some of the people who buy the thing before it runs out will be people who <em>can’t afford</em> the market price. Some of the people who miss out will be people whose <em>available funds</em> were much higher. Basically the argument boils down to “Poor people are benefiting from this thing instead of rich people, <em>and that’s bad.</em>”</p>
<p>So basically I’ll award economics half marks for effort, but it still really has a long way to go before it can claim the status either of a science or of a boon to society. To achieve either, it must subject its core theories to the possibility of falsification by empirical facts. Maybe if I keep saying this over and over, an idle Google search will bring it to the eyes of someone who can actually do something about it.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-76800384388456646912019-07-31T02:59:00.000-07:002019-07-31T03:04:03.461-07:00Love and thunder<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/15/thor-is-a-woman-in-new-marvel-comicbook-series" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNBka9YsZBXSwEG_RzUxKyL8eWFYUEOxqnPOADbUx2LfQI4zZkuDuEqzpdKJiXyzBhm5fB8jg5pw4yXJQwU1qLjy5bunfbdLHszsAueuqTg0qBaAXcigBkub-Jex6I4ecJ-XPF-bSeugo9/s400/mjolnir_ifshebeworthy.jpg" width="500" height="372" data-original-width="917" data-original-height="683" title="Whosoever holds this hammer, if *she* be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor." alt="Whosoever holds this hammer, if *she* be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor." /></a></div>
<p><a href="https://veryrarelystable.dreamwidth.org/3991.html"><strong>Crossposted from Dreamwidth</strong></a></p>
<p>It’s official: in a couple of years’ time there’s going to be a fourth <em>Thor</em> movie in the MCU, and it’s going to be titled <em>Thor: Love and Thunder</em>, and it’s going to feature Natalie Portman as the Mighty Thor and be directed by Taika Waititi. I can’t wait.</p>
<p>There’s a contingent of YouTubers who see it as their bounden duty to pour vitriol on anything with the faintest whiff of “political correctness,” which in practice includes all female-led fantasy, science fiction, and superhero movies. Some disavow any misogyny and I guess quietly hope we won’t go look up what they’ve said about <em>Captain Marvel</em> and <em>Mad Max: Fury Road</em> and Rey in <em>Star Wars</em> and the latest <em>Ghostbusters</em> and the Thirteenth Doctor on <em>Doctor Who</em>. Others are louder and less coherent – “<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">liberals are ruining my childhood, literally no-one asked for this, let’s burn Marvel to the ground!</span>” style of thing.</p>
<p>I mean, one of the complaints is true: Portman isn’t anywhere near as big and muscular as the Mighty Thor. But if that’s your main problem, I have something devastating to tell you about Mark Ruffalo.</p>
<p>If you’re even less familiar with Marvel comics than I am and not clear how Natalie Portman can play Thor, what with him being male, here’s the basics. In the comics, unlike either the Norse myths before them or the movies after them, anyone who can lift Thor’s hammer Mjolnir gains not only his powers but his identity. The usual Thor is a guy called Donald Blake, but there have been several others, including an alien called Beta Ray Bill and a frog and, in a comics run in 2014–2015 titled <em>The Mighty Thor</em>, Blake’s on-again off-again love-interest Jane Foster, i.e. Natalie Portman’s character from the first two <em>Thor</em> movies.</p>
<p>The <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">let’s burn political correctness to the ground!</span> brigade of course hated <em>The Mighty Thor</em> and campaigned for it to be cut short, and some of them claim credit for it ending – which it did with the completion of its story arc, making that claim roughly as plausible as most of the other things these people say. They also say, for instance, that no-one liked <em>Captain Marvel</em> either, a movie which made over a billion dollars at the box-office; and that everyone hated the bit in <em>Avengers: Endgame</em> where all the female heroes band together, a scene which I’ve elsewhere seen criticized only for being too little too late.</p>
<p>So why am I looking forward so eagerly to <em>Thor: Love and Thunder</em>? Most people who write enthusiastically about the MCU seem to have started as comics fans. I suppose I might have been one if things had gone slightly differently, but in fact I never got into any comic as a kid; I was a Tolkien geek instead. And it’s not far to go from Tolkien to Norse mythology. So with most MCU characters the movies are my first sight of them – but not with Thor and his associates.</p>
<p>I did become aware, obviously, that Thor had been reinterpreted as a cartoon character, and I was enough of a purist (you’ll be shocked to hear) that I found this mostly annoying. It didn’t help that the cartoon character was blond, clean-shaven, and a bit of an airhead, where the god is supposed to be ginger-bearded and short-tempered. Worse, not all comics writers have any clue about Shakespearean English, and you’d get sentence constructions like “he didst goeth,” which to me is chalkboard-nails, microphone-feedback, corner-of-tabletop-in-the-elbow-nerve infuriating.</p>
<p>(Not that Thor should technically have been speaking Shakespearean English at all, of course, but even I can forgive comics writers for not filling their dialogue bubbles with Old Norse.)</p><a name='more'></a>
<p>The first <em>Thor</em> movie was... fine, I guess. I accepted the premise that the gods were extraterrestrial beings who had made contact with Earth in the past, and that the stories about them were mediaeval Earthlings’ limited perspective. There were some things that didn’t quite sit right – how did storytellers know a thousand years before the fact that Loki was going to turn out to be treacherous? – but you expect that with movies.</p>
<p>Thor didn’t really change much from there for a while. I mean, he learned the big lesson about self-sacrifice making you worthy that was obviously supposed to be the moral of the film. But in Joss Whedon’s <em>Avengers</em> titles he was a secondary character, basically there to provide a stylistic counterpoint to all the lasers and spaceships and robots. And in <em>Thor: The Dark World</em> he was static; only Loki got a character arc in that movie. (I’ll come back to Loki.)</p>
<p>The plot of the first <em>Thor</em> movie was Shakespearean in nature, centring on the kingship of Asgard and Thor’s position as Odin’s successor to it. I guess the film-makers wanted to set a suitably operatic tone for these divine characters. But the thing about Odin in the myths is, he’s a god. He’s immortal. He’s not going to die until the end of the world, at which point his kingdom will die with him. He doesn’t need a successor, and Thor isn’t one.</p>
<p>We see Thor in the myths from two sides, broadly speaking. The side that’s drifted out into present-day popular culture, and I guess inspired the Marvel character, is Thor as we see him at Ragnarök: the warrior-god refusing to surrender even when all hope is lost, not because he still believes he can win but because the only way he’ll ever go down is fighting. That’s the side of his personality that the Russo brothers drew out in <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em>.</p>
<p>Of course the outcome is somewhat different. In the myths Thor wins and dies, killing the Midgard-Serpent minutes before succumbing to its venom; in the movies he loses and lives, failing to stop Thanos and being spared to chew on that failure. I guess that’s why in <em>Avengers: Endgame</em> we see the Thor that’s most removed from his mythical roots – a Thor who’s given up and fallen to self-pity. This for me was the darkest cloud on that otherwise excellent movie, but seeing as the whole point of Thor in <em>Infinity War</em> was the tragic failure of his Asgardian honour code, I can’t see what other character arc they could have given him.</p>
<p>Since that’s what we see in the Ragnarök myths, it’s kind of ironic that it’s the <em>other</em> side of the mythical Thor that comes out in the movie <em>Thor: Ragnarok</em>. When he’s not facing the end of the world, Thor is a gruff but jovial adventurer, who rides around the Nine Worlds in a goat-drawn chariot fighting giants and monsters and getting into scrapes that challenge his dignity and/or masculinity. In one story, for instance, he visits a city called Utgard and is bested in a series of rigged challenges posed by its trickster king, a figure not a million miles away in personality from the Grandmaster of Sakaar. In another, Mjöllnir is stolen by a giant who demands the love goddess Freyja’s hand in marriage in exchange for its return; when Freyja rejects the deal (with earth-shaking scorn), Loki and Heimdall between them persuade Thor to marry the giant himself, disguised as the goddess by a veil over his head.</p>
<p>Mind you, the stories we have are late documents from Iceland, on the periphery of the Thor-worshipping world, written by Christian monks trying to preserve a record of their past religion so that future generations would be able to understand references to it in old poems. It’s possible that the people who actually worshipped him would have been a bit more reverent.</p>
<p>Even so, Thor was always a Jovial god, with a capital J. Roman writers trying to explain the Germanic gods in their own terms identified Thor with Hercules, but German and Anglo-Saxon writers trying to explain the Roman gods in <em>their</em> terms identified him with Jove, i.e. Jupiter or Zeus, and the day of the week which the Romance languages call “Jove’s day” (<em>giovedi</em>, <em>jeudi</em>, <em>joi</em>, <em>jueves</em>) is “Thor’s day” – Thursday – in the Germanic ones.</p>
<p>(Unexpectedly, both sides agreed that Odin was the same person as Mercury, or Hermes. There are a number of theories as to why, which I don’t have space to go into.)</p>
<p>Why Jove? Partly because they were both thunder-gods, but also at least partly because of their matching personalities – jolly, boisterous, loud-voiced, and fond of festivity. Scandinavian folklore after Christianization attributes thunderstorms to “the good old fellow”. For this aspect of Thor, no other MCU movie to date can hold a candle to <em>Ragnarok</em>. That’s why I’m excited to see that Taika Waititi is coming back to direct <em>Love and Thunder</em>.</p>
<p>Well, that and because Waititi is my personal favourite film-director. That’s only slightly because he’s a fellow New Zealander; Peter Jackson lost my favour quite a while ago. Waititi’s other works include <em>Hunt for the Wilderpeople</em>, which combines humour and tragedy with a near-unbearable poignancy, and <em>What We Do in the Shadows</em>, which looks wryly in the frustrating face of modern life and slaps it with a glorious custard-pie of a send-up of every vampire movie cliché ever. The pool of people with the rare blend of skills and talents to make such high comic art shrank significantly in March 2015 with the death of <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2015/03/goodbye-and-thank-you-sir-terry.html">Sir Terry Pratchett</a>. If any studio ever obtains the rights to make a Discworld franchise (Sir Terry safeguarded those rights very carefully after getting some monumentally stupid movie proposals in the 1980s), Waititi should be the first director they contact.</p>
<p>We’ll address the elephant in the room in a moment; first, I promised I’d come back to Loki.</p>
<p>Loki is the most dynamic character in the Norse myths. He begins as a loyal subject of Odin and companion of Thor who just likes to play pranks on people from time to time; throughout the course of the stories there’s a cycle where his pranks inspire others to distrust him, in response to which he plays nastier pranks, until eventually he murders Baldr and curses the rest of Asgard and is bound to a rock until Ragnarök, when he will fight alongside the giants and monsters to destroy humanity and the gods.</p>
<p>The MCU has essentially run this character progression in reverse. Loki starts by betraying Asgard to the giants and murdering humans for Thanos, turns tormented antihero in <em>The Dark World</em>, and in <em>Ragnarok</em> he becomes, well, a loyal companion of Thor who likes to play pranks on people from time to time. In <em>Infinity War</em> his redemption arc reaches its fitting culmination, albeit rather earlier in the movie than is entirely satisfying.</p>
<p>Thor needs Loki, whether as a foil or a sidekick, even more in the movies than in the myths. They’re two sides of a coin: brawn and brain, honour and guile. I’m curious to see what the MCU will do with the character thread left hanging by <em>Endgame</em>. Will Loki reset to his pre-<em>Dark World</em> state of development? Will we have to watch him go through the same arc all over again? Will they start the new Loki where the old one had got to by <em>Infinity War</em>, and handwave away what happened in between? None of those feel right, so I’m hoping there’s a further option I haven’t thought of.</p>
<p>There is, obviously, no trace of Jane Foster or a female Thor in the mythology. But I’m not so much of a purist as to place source-faithfulness over all other qualities in an adaptation. It’s more important to make sure that you tie up all your loose story threads. And Jane and Thor’s relationship is a big loose thread in the MCU. Thor’s whole motivation in <em>The Dark World</em>, such as it was, was to save her life and persuade Odin and the Asgardians to accept her as his partner. That movie’s end-credits scene featured their final reunion. And then in <em>Ragnarok</em>, the only reference to Jane is
</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXOOP-msHQ" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpzTnddsP-GGhV-Rv7zSZKx1NXEU6asQK3QInc0BWxgpowmFOwNQEmQbtvNP33O7lDs0iIs71SVWLYZnkAVW_Xml7En7GwRtHIWYm3SuPKehkTNkABKLH_js8GQCO-XMfDcf0c1miQ1FLt/s320/janedumpedthor.gif" width="500" height="194" data-original-width="498" data-original-height="193" title="“Sorry to hear that Jane dumped you.”" alt="“Sorry to hear that Jane dumped you.”" /></a></div>
<p>Insofar as <em>Ragnarok</em> had a weakness, that was it. At the time Natalie Portman had said no to further MCU movies owing to a dispute with a Marvel executive who has since left the company, and I think Kevin Feige figured that part of <em>The Dark World</em>’s lacklustre box-office was the chemistry or lack thereof between Jane and Thor, so they decided to scrap that story element. If they were hoping the fans would just forget about it, they failed at least in my case; it made me want to know what had happened between them in the meantime. <em>Love and Thunder</em> will finally fill that gap.</p>
<p>(Afterwards I realized there was an answer ready to hand. Between <em>The Dark World</em> and <em>Ragnarok</em> in the MCU chronology comes <em>Avengers: Age of Ultron</em>, in which Thor again does the exact thing that angered Jane in <em>The Dark World</em> – he leaves Earth to go fight monsters without her. But even if that is the answer, it still needs to be made explicit.)</p>
<p>Now in the <em>Mighty Thor</em> comics, Jane is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. One of the effects of wielding Mjolnir is that it purges your body of toxins and restores it to full vigour... and chemo drugs count as toxins whereas cancer is your own tissues growing over-vigorously, so Jane’s bouts as Mighty Thor basically kill her (temporarily, of course, it’s a comic). I gather she’s since taken on the mantle of Valkyrie. It’s going to be a huge challenge to turn that storyline into a comedy movie, but if anyone can do it, Taika Waititi can.</p>
<p>While he’s doing that, the rest of us have to do something about the culture of rage and entitlement in fandom. I mean, I’ve seen people argue outright that <em>Game of Thrones</em>’ final season would have been better-written if only the fans had got angrier earlier. Sure, that’s how it works – artists intentionally pour years of their life into crappy work but will instantly improve if they’re threatened and insulted enough. <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">(that was sarcasm.)</span> The same happened with <em>Star Wars: The Last Jedi</em> and I think it’s only going to get worse when Episode IX comes out this year, no matter what the movie is like.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what to suggest, except maybe... not threatening artists? Not yelling insults at them? Learning to criticize art and media without demanding perfection as of right? Yeah, that.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-8617779356227931092019-07-24T04:47:00.000-07:002019-07-24T04:47:21.511-07:00The summer of ’69<style type="text/css">
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<p>When I was three years old, my father tried to trick me into believing a tall tale – or so I concluded at the time. He told me that a man named Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Moon twelve years before, and had said “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Now it had not escaped my notice that my mother called my father Neil instead of Daddy, whereas “Arm-Strong” sounded like the name of a story-book giant; and also, somewhat crucially, Dad neglected to mention anything about a spaceship. I therefore pictured a world-bestriding Titan with Dad’s face and beard (because of the name) lifting up one monstrous foot into the heavens. Even to three-year-old me, this seemed a bit beyond the bounds of physical possibility. Yet Dad kept an utterly straight face and clearly expected me to believe him.</p>
<p>What did Neil Armstrong and his companions actually accomplish? What has humanity gained that we wouldn’t have gained without going to the Moon? Was it merely an “unlikely piece of art”, albeit a “triumph of our aesthetic instincts” constituting “the culmination of the Romantic cult of the sublime”, but “undertaken for no meaningful scientific purpose”, as <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/852955/sublime-romanticism-moon-landing">a recent opinion piece</a> would have it? Not according to at least one astrophysicist:</p>
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<p>In case you didn’t play the video for whatever reason, Dr Smethurst identifies five pieces of scientific knowledge we wouldn’t have had without the Apollo missions. One, surprisingly to me, is the distance to the Moon. One is an explanation of a phenomenon called solar wind. More as you’d expect, we learned what stuff the Moon is made of and how that stuff is arranged, which then allowed us to figure out how the Moon was originally formed. (Turns out to be quite dramatic, if you haven’t seen it before.)</p>
<p>NASA nowadays gets about an eighth the proportion of the US budget that it did back then – from 4% down to 0.5% – and yet you still see people arguing that space research should be defunded to pay for hospitals. Guys, there’s vastly more money being sunk into corporate subsidies and the military; why not complain about those instead of squabbling over the tiny scrapings they leave behind? The thing about science, the point of acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s sake, is that you <em>cannot</em> know what that knowledge is going to turn out to be useful for until you’ve got it. You like hospitals? It would be a pretty poor hospital that didn’t have an X-ray machine, but X-ray machines could never have been invented if people hadn’t been doing purely curiosity-driven research on radiation decades before. As far as I know space research hasn’t turned out anything quite that directly useful for human health. Yet.</p>
<p>Also, let me be direct: people want to know stuff. Quite a lot of debates in ethical philosophy become a whole lot easier if you allow that happiness is about knowing fortunate truths as well as having pleasant sensations. That’s why it wouldn’t be ethical to make everybody happy by spiking the water-supply with some euphoriant drug, or to euthanize an old lady’s pet when she moves into palliative care and tell her for the remainder of her life that it’s being looked after. People want to know the truth. We’ve always wanted to understand what the Moon is and how it got there. Finding the answers was a service to humanity.</p>
<p>All the same, it seems kind of a small return for the phenomenal amount of money that the American taxpayer poured into Apollo throughout the 1960s. Come to think of it, the government’s commitment to the project is remarkable in itself. Public support for Apollo was far from unanimous, given the many other social and economic concerns facing the country at the time. It had been pushed along for seven years by Lyndon B. Johnson through his Vice-Presidency under John F. Kennedy and his own term as President. Then in 1968 the Republican Richard Nixon was elected (Kennedy and Johnson having been Democrats). Nowadays the story would end with Nixon cancelling Apollo on a promise to free up the money for social rejuvenation, then actually spending it on a massive tax-cut for the top income brackets. Apparently Presidents didn’t disrespect their predecessors’ legacies quite that much in the ’60s.</p>
<p>Three other names help to explain why Apollo had to go ahead come what might: Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, made it undeniable that the Soviets could pull their weight in science and technology, a field in which the US had previously been rather complacent. Gagarin, the first man in space, showed it hadn’t been a one-off. And when Oswald shot Kennedy dead in 1963, Johnson’s Presidency stood or fell on how well he was seen to honour Kennedy’s aspirations. In fact a month or two before his death Kennedy had decided to scrap Apollo in favour of a joint Soviet-American Moon endeavour, but that never became public knowledge.</p>
<p>Unfortunately Kennedy also left another legacy: the Vietnam War. Not that he started it, exactly – there had been conflict there, and the United States had been meddling in it, for years before – but Kennedy was the President who committed the US to military intervention. It raged on, dividing the American public, throughout the ’60s, and ended up outlasting the Apollo programme by several years. Odious and expensive though it was, neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor Nixon wanted to be the first American president ever to lose a war. It has been speculated (and is repeated as fact in some quarters) that the real purpose of Apollo was to distract Americans from what was happening in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Whilst a certain degree of cynicism is warranted and indeed necessary in political studies, I don’t find that the rule “Always assume the worst possible motivation” generates much better predictions of government policy than “Always give the benefit of the doubt,” except insofar as it errs on the side of vigilance. Better is “Politicians are no more altruistic, honest, or intelligent than anyone else, and to get things done they have to placate millions of people with conflicting priorities.” A much cheaper way to distract the public from Vietnam would have been to distribute psychedelic drugs <em>en masse</em>. As things turned out, psychedelics became identified with the anti-war subculture shortly before getting banned, but that wasn’t inevitable in the mid-’60s.</p>
<p>Looking at the period from fifty years’ distance, it’s hard not to see a certain congruence between the psychedelics and the Apollo programme. Both were motivated to cross the boundaries of the very world and see things no-one had ever seen. It doesn’t feel coincidental that the ’60s was also the decade of the Civil Rights movement and the Sexual Revolution and, a month or so before the first Moon landing, the Stonewall riot. The phrase “To boldly go where no man has gone before” predates “One giant leap for mankind” by less than three years.</p>
<p>So then what happened? The science fiction writers who were bold enough to foresee a Moon landing before 1970 also all thought we’d be on Mars by 2000. It’s always easy to think up ways that problems and disappointments are one’s political opponents’ fault, so it won’t surprise you that I place a large chunk of the blame on Reaganism. You can’t slash taxes for decades and still fund an Apollo. The Space Shuttle programme that was meant to follow it was plagued by the characteristically Reaganistic combination of cutting corners on safety measures and requiring conspicuous success from every project, with predictably disastrous consequences.</p>
<p>Maybe that op-ed piece wasn’t completely off the mark: Apollo’s primary significance is as a work of art rather than a scientific venture. It became a symbol, a sign showing future generations forever after that we are not stuck in the world we know, that just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done – like, say, allowing people of the same gender to marry, or electing an African American to the White House. It takes commitment and care and perseverance and the humility to listen to criticism and learn from past mistakes, but it can be done. Every giant leap is actually a concatenation of small steps.</p>
<p>Just in case you were wondering – the time interval from the launch of Sputnik to Armstrong’s one small step was roughly as long as we now have to solve climate change. Worth thinking about.</p>
<p>I still look up at the Moon every so often and think about it – this thing so familiar and so remote, this alien planet that every generation of humanity has known from infancy. Contrary to some people’s fears at the time (C. S. Lewis, for instance), knowing that humans have touched it for me deepens the wonder rather than deadens it, because it brings the Moon out of the backdrop and onto the stage. Maybe we’ll go there again one day; maybe we need to let our wisdom catch up with our hope before that can happen. But we know it can be done, and that’s never going away.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-33061356965007309102019-05-28T18:03:00.000-07:002019-05-31T03:50:11.261-07:00Now our watch is ended<style type="text/css">
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<p><a href="https://veryrarelystable.dreamwidth.org/2936.html"><strong>Crossposted from Dreamwidth</strong></a></p>
<p>So everyone’s angry with the way <em>Game of Thrones</em> ended. Some people are being very rude about it. I gather someone’s started a petition to have the final season rewritten, and presumably to have watched <em>Game of Thrones</em> in the first place these people have to be over the age of seven. I haven’t heard for a fact that Dave Benioff and Dan Weiss have received death threats, but with all the entitlement and nerd-rage fizzing in social media right now it would be more surprising if they hadn’t.</p>
<p>I’m not <em>completely</em> happy with it myself, mind you. There are some things that I think went wrong, and I’ll get to some of those. I’m also aware that quite a few of the things I’m OK with a large number of other people aren’t, and I don’t feel like picking fights for no reason. But I feel the sweeping judgements people have made about Benioff & Weiss’s writing competence are unwarranted, especially considering how well they did for so many years before this. Also, you can’t watch anything <em>Thrones</em>-related on YouTube now without screeds of whinging in the comments, and it’s getting irritating.</p>
<p>Everybody’s saying the last season was “rushed”, and that’s true to an extent, but I don’t think it’s the root of the problem. The problem is that there’s a difference between <em>advancing</em> a narrative, which Benioff & Weiss have been doing solidly for years, and <em>resolving</em> a narrative, which they’ve just had to do without assistance from their source material. You can <em>advance</em> a story indefinitely given starting premises and a reasonably realistic imagination; but realism won’t <em>resolve</em> it for you, because reality, not being a story, never gets resolved.</p>
<p>Which may or may not be the underlying reason for the source material problem. It’s been eight years now since the last <em>Song of Ice and Fire</em> book came out, and George R. R. Martin has stopped making promises about when <em>The Winds of Winter</em> is due. And there’s at least one more book to come after that one. Supposedly. Apparently Martin gets a lot of personal remarks about his age and health in this context, which I think is uncalled-for. I think Martin could live to be three hundred years old, and fill a bookcase with <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em>, and it would still be no nearer ending. I have seen no evidence that the writing of <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em> is a process with an end-point. Seven-part stories don’t have whole new protagonists appearing and plot arcs blossoming in Part V.</p>
<p>I gather Martin wanted the show to run to ten seasons, and Benioff & Weiss pushed for seven, and what we ended up with – eight, with the last two shortened – was the compromise they settled on. It certainly did feel rushed, but I don’t know that lengthening seasons 7 and 8 out to ten episodes each would have fixed that. I think the series as a whole could have done with one or two less subplots; most of the Sand Snakes and Euron Greyjoy threads in particular could have been dropped without too much violence to the overarching story, and then we’d have had a bit of breathing room to resolve a few other things. (Bear in mind that Benioff & Weiss already cut a bunch of subplots out completely, to complaints from book fans.)</p>
<p>Now I’ll move on to the main specific complaints; some I agree with fully, some partially, some not at all. Here I really do need to cut for spoilers.<a name='more'></a></p>
<p><strong><em>It was out of character for Daenerys to turn evil.</em></strong> No it wasn’t. I must confess Daenerys’s story caught me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. I was so pleased with myself for spotting how Jon Snow’s arc was following the pattern of a traditional fairy-tale that I didn’t notice that Daenerys’s arc at the same time was following the pattern of a classical tragedy, complete with rise, hubris, and downfall. Her utter conviction in her own goodness – in sharp contrast to Jon Snow’s restless self-doubt – was bound to get her into trouble eventually.</p>
<p>“But she wouldn’t suddenly start burning innocents.” You guys remember 7x04, right? When she burned the Lannister army? Yes, they were enemy soldiers, but they weren’t attacking anything strategic at the time, they were just marching home. Remember the following episode, when she executed the Tarlys to terrify the surviving soldiers into bending the knee? Remember how she justified those killings to Jon and Tyrion as “necessary” in subsequent episodes? Didn’t you find that just a little bit chilling?</p>
<p>Also in 7x04, you may remember Missandei explaining to Jon Snow that, for her Essosi followers, Daenerys was “not our queen because she’s the daughter of some king we never knew. She’s the queen we chose.” But now go back through Daenerys’s scenes throughout the first six seasons and see why, in her own words, she herself believes she deserves the Iron Throne. From the moment Viserys dies and makes her (as far as anyone but Ned Stark knows at that point) the last living Targaryen, it’s all about her birthright. “Breaking the wheel” is a secondary ambition, and not one, when you think about it, that sits well with the idea of rule by birthright.</p>
<p>“But it was too sudden, there wasn’t enough build-up to it.” That’s arguable. I take the point. I think I see what Benioff & Weiss were thinking when they chose to write it this way; it may not have been the best idea or the best-executed one – it worked for me but not, it seems, for others. I think they were trying to make the turn in Daenerys’s character function both as a tragic catastrophe (which has to have the weight of the whole plot making it inevitable) and as a shocking twist (which has to come, if not out of nowhere, at least out of left field, if “left field” is what I mean). That’s a delicate balancing act to pull off.</p>
<p>So why did they make it a twist? Not just for the heck of it. The horror of Daenerys’s final speech to her troops depends on the audience’s guilt for our complicity in her killings up until the end; lean any harder on the hubris, and she’d have lost our sympathy too early for that to work. Now I have a suspicion that that speech was actually written a decade ago, when the series began – Daenerys’s promises of genocidal “liberation” read better as a critique of Bush-era American imperialism than of the Trumpist version, which sees no need to pretend it’s doing any good for anyone but the US. But there’s a more perennial message here, going back at least to George Orwell and <em>Animal Farm</em>: liberation through lethal violence becomes oppression at the instant of its victory.</p>
<p><strong><em>The whole storyline about Jon Snow being the true heir was wasted.</em></strong> Well, that was kind of the point. Years ago when Jon Snow’s true parentage was a wild fan-theory with an annoying name, I thought it had to be wrong because <em>Game of Thrones</em> didn’t do true heirs and rule by birthright and all that nonsense. One persistent theme of the whole series is that a person’s birth and breeding tell you absolutely nothing about their competence to lead. I thought then that that would be negated if Jon Snow turned out to be the “true heir”, and I think now that it would have been negated if he’d ended up on the Iron Throne.</p>
<p>“Then why make his arc a fairy-tale at all?” Good question! Jon Snow’s encounters with supernatural powers, and especially his resurrection from the dead in 6x02, allowed the show to explore themes of mortality in a way that a mere political tragedy, no matter how grand in scale, couldn’t have touched. Those events willy-nilly shape his story into a fairy-tale structure, and the unexpected inheritance of a crown is part of fairy-tale convention. But why go <em>that</em> far towards fulfilling the convention and then pull out?</p>
<p>What if Jon had been acknowledged as king in the end? Even supposing he refused the crown, I for one would have found that a little bathetic, as I do the climax of <em>Harry Potter</em>; it’s just a bit too cheerful to really pay off the darker sides of the story leading up to it. What if we’d never been led to believe he was Ned Stark’s bastard to begin with? Then he would have been a totally different character and <em>Game of Thrones</em> would have been a totally different story. What if he really <em>had</em> been Ned Stark’s bastard, or Rhaegar Targaryen’s? Then I think we’d have lost a keystone of the show’s critique of heredity-based government – the demonstration that the system can be thrown into utter disarray without any such intention on the part of the person doing the throwing, simply by virtue of the facts of their parentage becoming known.</p>
<p>What Jon’s Targaryen birth actually accomplishes, in the end, is the fatal unbalancing of Daenerys’s moral scales. Remember, her certainty of her own right to rule has rested for nearly the whole show on her birthright as the Targaryen heir. This is her one peaceful means of gaining the support of the lords of Westeros, who owe <em>their</em> positions to birthright and are therefore obliged (however grudgingly) to uphold it; but still more, she makes it the foundation of her sense of self. Jon’s senior claim therefore not only leaves military strength as her sole route to power but undermines her very identity. Her failure to inspire love in Westeros – again in contrast to Jon – meanwhile gnaws away at her self-belief from the other side, whilst also closing off the option of leading a people’s rebellion the way she did in Slavers Bay. Terror becomes her only means of recovering her selfhood.</p>
<p>If you buy that the tragic fall of Daenerys Targaryen was always to be the pinnacle of the series, then the fact that Jon Snow’s true identity led up to <em>that</em> rather than to a coronation shouldn’t come as a let-down. If the show had managed to pull the former off properly, the latter would have come with it. To fix the one would have fixed the other.</p>
<p><strong><em>We were robbed of a Jon Snow vs. Night King deathmatch!</em></strong> Oh, naff off. Did you also complain when Thor failed to kill Thanos, or when Gollum destroyed the Ring instead of Frodo, or when Luke Skywalker forgave Darth Vader and threw his lightsabre away?</p>
<p>There is an iron law in dramatic fiction that, if you get to hear the characters’ plans, those plans are going to go wrong. This is because – except maybe in oral storytelling – there’s no point in giving the audience the same information twice. The same principle explains why it’s so disappointing when books and movies and shows end by giving you the exact climax they’ve been promising you the whole time: you’re not getting anything <em>new</em>. (This is possibly another reason why I find the ending of <em>Harry Potter</em> unsatisfactory. It would have been better if Neville Longbottom had turned out to be the Chosen One.)</p>
<p>A better suggestion I’ve seen is that the Night King should have been destroyed neither by Arya nor by Jon but by Theon Greyjoy. That would have given the episode a bit of extra thematic depth, for sure: death incarnate defeated by the broken man in final recompense for all his sins and failings. But it would have done so at the expense of robbing Arya’s character arc of what climax she had, which was little enough. We’ll get to that.</p>
<p><strong><em>The battle with the Dead wasn’t climactic enough.</em></strong> I feel you, I really do. I thought that confrontation was going to be the final climax, as you’ll have gathered from <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2019/04/game-of-thrones-pre-season-8-thoughtdump.html">my pre-season 8 musings last time</a>. That was, of course, because I wasn’t reckoning on the tragic downfall of Daenerys Targaryen. I should have known that a story about the struggle between good and evil within the human heart would never end with an external conflict. All the same, it still feels like it was <em>meant</em> to be the climax – like that final shot of Melisandre falling in the snow in the dawn-light was meant for the closing shot of the entire show.</p>
<p>How could that have gone better? They could hardly have had the Battle of Winterfell without the dragons, so it wouldn’t have worked to switch the two events around and put Daenerys’s attack on King’s Landing first. The only solution I can think of would have been to make the Dead more of a problem, make the victory over them at Winterfell only partial, and set things up so that the fall of King’s Landing somehow triggered a second and more devastating attack, leading to the real conclusion. But you’d have had to write the show differently for years beforehand to pull that off.</p>
<p>Well, when I say for years – actually, you might only have needed to change one particular event in the prior season. Up until this year, 7x06 was the most whinged-about episode of the series. Well, I mean, yes, there <em>were</em> plot problems in it that could have done with tweaking, and also they should have killed off one or two more sympathetic characters to keep the stakes high; but the real problem for me was the moment when a whole squad of wights dropped dead just because the heroes killed the White Walker who’d raised them.</p>
<p>Some day I want to watch a show where there’s a monster with a hive-mind that assimilates its victims, like the Dead on <em>Game of Thrones</em> or the Borg on <em>Star Trek</em>, but where they don’t resort to having a Night King or a Borg Queen controlling them all so the heroes just need to take out that one individual and they’ll win the whole battle at once. It’s not just a boring cliché, it makes the monster vastly less of a threat. I mean, imagine if <em>Game of Thrones</em> had had every soldier and knight instantaneously surrender the moment their lord was killed; they’d have been laughed off the air halfway into the first season. So why do writers – writers in general – think it’s any better to nerf their inhuman antagonists this way?</p>
<p>Imagine, instead, that the Dead were banished by casting some kind of magical protection around Winterfell and the North like there used to be on the Wall. Imagine that we found out there was some kind of trigger, but we didn’t know what, that could break the protection and bring the Dead back. Imagine if the trigger turned out to be lots of people dying in one place at once...</p>
<p>Would that have been any better than the show we had? I don’t know. You’d still have the problem of the two climaxes. You’d still have to destroy the Dead before Daenerys could do her “We’ve ‘liberated’ King’s Landing, now let’s ‘liberate’ the world” speech, because a tyrant so self-deluded as to talk like that when there were still zombies killing people around the place would not be much of a threat.</p>
<p><strong><em>Look how many story threads got built up and then fizzled out.</em></strong> This one is definitely true. I’m not just talking little details like what the spiral patterns meant or who that woman with the mask was in Qarth way back in season 2. Remember where Arya’s story seemed to be going? She was a Faceless Man, remember? She was a super-skilled trained assassin who left the assassins’ guild because she had too much conscience to kill innocent people who didn’t want to die. And she could disguise herself as anyone, provided that that person was actually dead and she could take their face. And she used those skills to avenge the Red Wedding in 6x10 and 7x01, and then we never saw them again.</p>
<p>Well, OK, she threatened Sansa with her Faceless Man training later in season 7, or pretended to for Littlefinger’s benefit, I’m still not sure which. But she never actually <em>used</em> it again. This is why I’m not keen on the idea of taking the Night King kill away from her. Her last human kill was Littlefinger in 7x07, and that was a public execution that didn’t require stealth. Nor did we get any prickly moral questions with Arya, as we did so prominently with Daenerys, about the fact that we’d been persuaded to basically cheer for murder simply because the victims were all bad people. She did, at least, get some closure in her relationship with Sandor Clegane. That was satisfying, as far as it went.</p>
<p>With Jaime it was worse. What exactly was the point of having him survive the Loot Train and leave Cersei and be spared execution and fight against the Dead? It’s not as if he achieved anything in that fight that any other veteran soldier couldn’t have. Mind you, I wouldn’t say (as many do) that his death in the doomed attempt to save Cersei undid all his character development and put him back where he started. Trying to lead your sister out of a burning city so she can turn her back on power and start a new civilian life in Pentos is not at all the same thing as having sex with her and pushing your host’s young son out of a tower window in the hope that he’ll die and not tell her husband about it. It’s the difference between conniving and forgiveness – although of course Jaime never manages to forgive himself.</p>
<p>Still. Euron Greyjoy? Really? Euron should have been brought in a season earlier than he was, if they wanted him for a foil for Jaime, or else left out entirely. And he and Brienne should have had more time together, even if not (cough) <em>together</em> together. That relationship was underdeveloped.</p>
<p>But the most undercooked of the stories was Bran’s. I mean, what even <em>was</em> that? He disappeared for the whole of season 5, for the gods’ sake. We got to see some of the past through him, which was cool, and that’s how we found out about Jon’s true parentage. No complaints there. And he could “worg” into the minds of ravens and other creatures, and nothing came of that. And he could cause effects in the past, albeit without changing the present, and nothing came of that.</p>
<p>And then it turned out that being the Three-Eyed Raven turns you autistic except you actually stop <em>feeling</em> the human connections instead of having the feelings and not knowing what you’re supposed to do about them, which, OK, I’ll take it, but it kind of came out of nowhere. Contrary to Meera’s plaint that “You died in that cave,” this didn’t come on until he got back to the Wall, i.e. Benioff & Weiss didn’t think of it until season 7. I suppose you could call it character development, in that he certainly changed, but it didn’t actually take him anywhere. There was no <em>direction</em> to the change.</p>
<p>And then out of nowhere Tyrion names him King and all the big Lords go along with it. What?!</p>
<p>I mean, hey, if autism is a qualification for high political office now, I’m not complaining...</p>
<p>No. For that to work you would have had to do something completely different with his character from the moment he becomes the Three-Eyed Raven. Throughout season 7 you would have to have him quietly solving problems more cleverly than Varys, Tyrion, and Littlefinger combined, to the point that come the climax everyone was <em>relying</em> on his ideas. It also wouldn’t have hurt if he’d exerted some magical power against the Dead, via his ability to manipulate the past, and if that had turned out to be necessary in the Battle of Winterfell.</p>
<p>How that suggestion fits in with the other plot suggestions I’ve already made is left as an exercise for the reader.</p>
<p>Finally, it’s excellent that the Iron Throne is melted; that’s what I’ve been hoping to see happen to it from the very beginning of the show. And sure, it’s kind of funny that the Seven Kingdoms are now down to Six. And I get that they couldn’t have squeezed a whole bunch of politicking into the dénouement, extra runtime or no. Still, I feel it would have been neater if they’d ended up naming <em>seven</em> new monarchs – Sansa obviously being Queen in the North, Yara Queen of the Iron Islands, and so on – and then declaring that the Seven Kingdoms will henceforth be ruled by majority vote in the Council of Seven or some such.</p>
<p>(Don’t get me wrong. Sam Tarly is right; they ought to be a democracy. But democracy requires a whole electoral apparatus in place that they haven’t even got the beginnings of yet – not so much as a King’s Court or a Council of the Wise. Hopefully Sam, as Grand Maester, will gradually sneak the founding institutions in under the lords’ noses.)</p>
<p>Lots of people have come up with alternative endings to the story in lavish detail. All the ones I’ve sat through make Daenerys not a tragic hero after all, which I think is fundamentally missing the point. I’ve made some forays in that direction myself, as you’ve seen, but as I say I think you’d have to go quite a way back into the past seasons to fix it properly. You’d end up rewriting <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em> altogether and I gather Martin doesn’t like that sort of thing.</p>
<p>And if you’ve got <em>that</em> sort of time on your hands, you’re surely better off writing your own fantasy series. Seems more fun than complaining about other people’s, anyway.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-91204322111911768922019-04-13T18:09:00.000-07:002019-04-13T21:46:29.655-07:00Game of Thrones: a pre-Season 8 thoughtdump<style type="text/css">
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<p><strong><a href="https://veryrarelystable.dreamwidth.org/2669.html">Crossposted from Dreamwidth</a></strong></p>
<p>To get this out of the way first: a large proportion of my family and close friends don’t watch <em>Game of Thrones</em> for various reasons. I gather this makes them feel a bit left out of some online conversations, since <em>Game of Thrones</em> has pervaded pop culture so thoroughly by now. I can relate. When I was a kid at primary school, we were the only household that didn’t have a TV. For context, in 1980s New Zealand there were exactly two TV channels, of which only one had children’s programming; so every day, every kid in the school had seen the exact same TV the previous afternoon, which made it ideal fodder for conversation icebreakers and small-talk. Every kid, except us. At the time I blamed this fact for the social difficulties which later turned out to be autism.</p>
<p>...annnd I’m already getting sidetracked in the first paragraph. What I was <em>going</em> to say was, I know how something just being popular with other people creates social pressure, even if it’s unintended, for you to join in and pretend you enjoy it as well. And honestly <em>Game of Thrones</em> is not for everybody. I’m going to be talking about its merits quite a bit, so I want to be clear from the get-go that if it isn’t your thing then it isn’t your thing and that’s fine. (Though I should warn you that I’m assuming my readers are familiar with the series, so this post will be both confusing and spoilery to those who aren’t.)</p>
<p>Indeed, you’ll notice as we go through that I’m not doing comparisons with the books very much, and the reason for that is that the books aren’t <em>my</em> thing. I’ve kind of skimmed through them and occasionally browsed a page or two in bookshops, but I haven’t read them properly, and that’s because I can’t. I understand (and I’ll get into) the reasoning behind the “any character can die” dynamic, and it works onscreen for me, but on the page I don’t get the intended effect. My emotional brain basically goes “Well, if I’m going to be punished for caring about these characters then I’m not going to care about them any more.”</p>
<p>I’m not entirely sure what difference the transition from page to screen makes. I used to think it was because the TV characters had faces and I couldn’t help empathizing with them, but the characters on <em>The Walking Dead</em> have faces too and I gave up on that a couple of seasons ago because I was disengaging from the characters for much the same reason I do with the <em>Game of Thrones</em> books.</p>
<p>Ahahahaha. Yes, yes, I mean the <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em> books, <em>A Game of Thrones</em> being the title merely of Book I (roughly equivalent to Season 1 of the show). In <em>this</em> instance I’ll grant the book purists the point: <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em> is a much more appropriate title for the series as a whole.</p>
<p>Whilst most fans as far as I can tell are loving the way things have developed in the later seasons, there’s also a dissatisfied contingent who argue that the whole thing started to go downhill as soon as the showrunners got ahead of George R. R. Martin’s published material. They seem to particularly dislike the way the characters have now fallen into some pretty solid coalitions of people who mostly trust each other, leaving behind all the politicking and betrayals and whisperings and jockeying for power – the game of thrones – that characterized the earlier seasons.</p>
<p>Not to be overly snarky, I think these people are missing the entire point of the series from start to finish. <strong>(This is as good a point as any to cut for spoilers.)</strong><a name='more'></a> The very first scene is a Night’s Watch ranger deserting his post north of the Wall for fear of the White Walkers. I don’t think this is a coincidence; I think it’s meant to set the tone for the whole story. You’re supposed to keep the White Walkers in your head as you watch all the goings-on in the brothels and the marketplaces and the corridors of power.</p>
<p>Through the first few seasons the reminders are subtle and infrequent, but never quite absent; they intensify as the series goes on. This is the whole point of the story. The game of thrones going on in the foreground is supposed to fill you with trepidation lest the petty infighting among the living should prevent them from banding together against the army of the dead and so doom them all to destruction. Now, with the final season upon us, the resolution of the story looms. Of <em>course</em> all the political machinations are fading into insignificance.</p>
<p>What these people seem to like the most is something other people criticize it most heavily for – this second group largely composed of people who’ve seen one or two episodes before realizing it wasn’t their sort of thing. The word “amoral” gets bandied about a lot in this connection, the idea being that there’s no justice to be had, so the show asks you to sympathize with people who’ve done horrific things. While, as I say, if it’s not your thing it’s not your thing, I don’t think “amoral” is at all a good description. “Moral ambiguity” is nearer the mark but still not quite there.</p>
<p>Certainly, <em>Game of Thrones</em> up until now hasn’t followed the traditional fantasy convention of putting all the Good Guys on one side and all the Bad Guys on the other and having them scrap it out, the archetype being <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>. In the early seasons, when the focal conflict was between Houses Stark and Lannister, there were sympathetic characters on both sides, and the whole tragedy of the thing was watching them being forced by their circumstances to kill each other. In this respect <em>Game of Thrones</em> is less like <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> and more like Homer’s <em>Iliad</em>, which pits Greeks of varying virtue against equally variable Trojans.</p>
<p>On the other hand, nothing cosmic hangs on the outcome of the <em>Iliad</em> beyond the petty caprices of the gods. On that front, Martin I think has chosen rather to contrast his story with Tolkien’s, a decision he signals by heralding the threat with White Walkers instead of Black Riders. In both works, the forces of evil encroach upon civilization from the outside; but whereas in <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> the battles serve to hold back the encroachment long enough to let Frodo get in and defeat Sauron, in <em>Game of Thrones</em> they serve, like the politics, to weaken the world of the living and bring evil closer to triumph.</p>
<p>But it’s also often claimed – as a positive feature of the show by some, a negative by others – that the individual <em>characters</em> in <em>Game of Thrones</em> are all amoral except for a few who end up getting killed or tortured. This claim I think is mistaken; I was about to say “simply” mistaken but it’s not, it’s complexly mistaken.</p>
<p>Martin himself describes <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em> as a battle between good and evil, but not (he explains) across a battlefield; rather, the battle is fought in the human heart. It’s not that there are no good or evil characters on <em>Game of Thrones</em> – it’s that every character is both good and evil, and which impulse they will choose to act on always hangs in the balance.</p>
<p>Again, the contrast with Tolkien is illuminating. For all that he was a devout Catholic, Tolkien doesn’t seem to have believed very strongly in repentance or redemption, at least to judge by Middle-Earth. Boromir is the only true penitent I can think of, and that’s only on the point of his death, after an entire arc of pretending to comply with the directive to destroy the Ring in order to get close enough to seize it. Though Frodo does well (we’re shown) to accept Gollum’s repentance and spare his life, Gollum himself is treacherous and comes to a bad end. In the <em>Silmarillion</em> we have a repeated pattern where a villain – Melkor, Sauron, Maeglin, and I think more besides – is captured and spared, makes show of repenting and is forgiven and allowed to rise to a place of honour, only to betray his benefactors and destroy everything they’ve built.</p>
<p>Contrast all that with the situation you have in <em>Game of Thrones</em>, where no less than four characters actually <em>kill children</em> (or, in one case, attempt to), and then are given redemption arcs. Three of these are straight from the books. It’s not that their sins are glossed over; Jaime Lannister, Sandor Clegane, Theon Greyjoy, and (on the show) the Red Priestess Melisandre all suffer for what they have done. The point is, they choose to become better. We are shown the evil within them so that we can then watch the good triumph over it.</p>
<p>This moral ambiguity – no, I think moral <em>conflict</em> is the phrase I was looking for – is one facet of <em>Game of Thrones</em>’ famously “grimdark” nature. Again this is a quality of the show that turns a lot of people off, and again there’s a contingent of fans who come to the show especially for it and are now complaining it’s being lost, and again blaming the showrunners for departing from Martin’s vision. And again I disagree, though with qualifications.</p>
<p>There’s been a fad for grim-&-gritty shows over the last decade or two; not just <em>Game of Thrones</em> but <em>The Sopranos</em>, <em>Breaking Bad</em>, <em>The Walking Dead</em>, <em>Vikings</em>, <em>Black Sails</em>, <em>Westworld</em>, and more. And there are at least some people who’ve come to feel that anything not grimdark must be for kids, which others have quite rightly rejected but in some cases over-zealously.</p>
<p>What defines grimdark? Moral ambiguity, or conflict, is one diagnostic feature. Another is the absence of any superhuman purpose or force of destiny keeping things on track; the characters’ choices have real and permanent consequences. That means, in particular, that primary characters can be killed in combat or dragged off and executed. And just as the characters are not shielded from the reality of violence, nor is the audience.</p>
<p>Once again, you can point to the <em>Iliad</em> as a precursor, although in that instance there certainly <em>are</em> superhuman entities at work – they’re just not any better at keeping things on track than the humans. To this day the <em>Iliad</em> is hailed as the most realistic literary depiction of war ever produced, and a large part of that is the graphic yet matter-of-fact descriptions of exactly what happens to a human body when you hit it very hard with a sharp piece of metal. The violence in <em>Game of Thrones</em> is in the same tradition.</p>
<p>I’m OK with this. Graphic violence in media is an acquired taste, in the same vein as other initially scary or intense experiences like climbing mountains or drinking whisky or eating super-hot chillis. Again, if it’s not your thing it’s not your thing, and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to keep it out of reach of children. Since obviously violence in real life is morally charged, I can see why depictions of it raise concerns about their effects on people. I’m not going to sidetrack myself on the validity of those concerns; suffice to say I’m pretty sure it’s more complicated than either “no effect” or “monkey see monkey do”.</p>
<p><em>Depicting</em> violence is not the same thing as <em>glorifying</em> violence. In some ways, if you’re going to have violence on your show, it might be better to make it graphic and be honest about the huge harm it does. These days, honestly, it’s sanitized violence that creeps me out – when punching people in the face is presented as good clean fun, when stabbing or shooting someone causes them to fall over and expire tidily with only the teensiest trickle of blood and maybe a few poignant last words. If you don’t like the ugliness of real violence, then maybe have your characters solve problems without using violence at all. Just a thought.</p>
<p>But <em>Game of Thrones</em> is not grimdark for grimdark’s sake. <em>Game of Thrones</em> has what Tolkien, in his famous essay <em>On Fairy-Stories</em>, called a “eucatastrophe”: a moment when the plot threads come together to reverse the hero’s fortunes and bring good unlooked-for out of bad, thus ushering in the happy ending that Tolkien argued was intrinsic to the fairy-tale form. That eucatastrophe occurs, of course, at the end of Season 6 episode 2 – the Easter Sunday to the Good Friday of Season 5 episode 10, the resurrection of Jon Snow.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5e2wDHDQuAp00F2ntNkk_gcXsZcxglcgXoMnAsk_gMPBKRV9JDfvXcFTqyZz1rSL2FWnDMrKmviS_9dhrrhe3URp3vtVY79QMrNAhAzZrCzm5RpQ5iGqMbUKr4B-3kteJ1S5Q_UAGoLpp/s1600/jon-awake.gif" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="327" title="Jon Snow lives" alt="Jon Snow lives" /></div>
<p>And the thing is, you need the grimdark up until that moment to make that moment work. You need to think Jon Snow really is dead for good, until suddenly he isn’t. That’s tough to do with the main character of a fantasy story. Look at comic books and the associated movies, for comparison. Much as I will fight anyone who disses <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em>, we all know Spider-Man and Black Panther aren’t dead for realsies. The question in suspense for <em>Endgame</em> is <em>how</em> they’re going to be brought back, not <em>whether</em> they’re going to be brought back.</p>
<p>Given that resurrection is conventional in fantasy, how do you make it miraculous again? What you have to do is make it clear from the get-go that it isn’t something readers should expect in your fantasy world. And you also have to make it clear that nobody has plot armour, not even protagonists. And the only way to do that is to kill off central and/or sympathetic characters unexpectedly, which is exactly what <em>Game of Thrones</em> is notorious for doing. Ned Stark, Khal Drogo, Lommy, Jeor Mormont, Ros, Talisa Stark, Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark, Oberyn Martell, Ygritte, Jojen Reed, Ser Barristan Selmy, Princess Shireen Baratheon, and Princess Myrcella Baratheon all died to pave the way for Jon Snow.</p>
<p>My answer, then, to the accusation that <em>Game of Thrones</em> lost its mojo and became commonplace and tiresome when things finally started going right for the characters, is that all the stuff the accusers evidently preferred was never anything more than the drawing back of the bow. Now the arrow is in flight and nearing its target. I won’t claim the shift in tone was carried out perfectly; the earlier seasons so belaboured the impossibility of getting where you’re trying to go in Westeros that now that the characters <em>are</em> regularly getting where they’re trying to go, it feels a little cheap. But what’s the alternative? Another three seasons getting Arya back to Winterfell and Daenerys across the Narrow Sea?</p>
<p>I left a snarky comment on one YouTube video bemoaning the “decline” of the show into “bad writing” (on the basis that it’s now “predictable”, i.e. actually resolving its storylines):</p>
<blockquote>How could the last two seasons have gone and still been in accordance with the tone set by the previous ones? Simple.
<h3>Season 6</h3>
<ul><li>Jon and the Hound are dead. The Northern Houses drive out the Free Folk, exiling them once again beyond the Wall along with Ser Davos and any Night’s Watch members who sided with Jon.</li>
<li>Daenerys spends the whole season in the Dosh Khaleen. Ser Jorah dies of greyscale, first passing it to Daario, who is caught and killed by the Dothraki but again passes the infection to his killer, who brings it back to Vaes Dothrak, and in the final episode Daenerys contracts it.</li>
<li>The slavers retake Meereen and kill Viserion and Rhaegal; Varys and Tyrion are enslaved. Euron sells Yara to the slavers, cue explicit rape scene.</li>
<li>Ramsay Bolton recaptures Sansa, kills Theon, and eventually is not defeated in battle but stabbed in the back by Littlefinger, whom we then get to watch having extremely disturbing sex with Sansa. Brienne, unable to rejoin Sansa, sets out to get help from the Blackfish, but she and Podrick are caught and hanged by the Brotherhood Without Banners.</li>
<li>Arya chooses to kill Lady Crane and, over the course of the season, abandons all shreds of her conscience. In the season finale she kills Jaqen H’ghar and becomes the leader of the Faceless Men.</li>
<li>Cersei’s plot proceeds as per the existing show.</li>
<li>Sam Tarly pretends Young Sam is his son and is tried and ultimately executed for breaking his Night’s Watch vow to “father no children”.</li>
<li>After Hodor dies, Bran is caught and turned into a White Walker.</li></ul>
<h3>Season 7</h3>
<ul><li>Dorne and Highgarden rebel against the Crown and are put down by the Lannisters. Ellaria and Olenna are nastily killed by the Mountain; one of the Sand Snakes survives, flees to Braavos, and hires the Faceless Men to kill Cersei.</li>
<li>The Iron Bank engage Euron, the re-enslaved Unsullied, and the Sons of the Harpy to collect the Crown’s debt. The Lannisters are victorious after a season’s worth of skirmishes and intrigues. Varys manages to talk his way into his masters’ good books, whereas Tyrion is kept on a chain and made to entertain people. Varys promises to help him but over the course of the season it becomes clear that this is not in his interests and he breaks his promise, whereupon Tyrion kills him.</li>
<li>In the final battle Tyrion is captured by the Lannisters and brought before Cersei, where he makes a convincing case for sparing his life but she kills him anyway. She is then killed by Arya. Littlefinger is in King’s Landing by this time, playing both sides against each other and becoming powerful as he always does. He gets the “me on the Iron Throne” part of his wish but misses out on the “with Sansa by my side” part because Arya (who, in this version, remember, has become a remorseless assassin) kills her as well.</li>
<li>Ser Davos and Tormund find the <a href="https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Horn_of_Winter">Horn of Joramun</a> and quarrel over what to do with it. In the final episode Ser Davos tries to destroy it; Tormund kills him and blows it. The Wall falls and the Dead enter the Seven Kingdoms.</li>
<li>Daenerys sort of wanders around Essos gradually developing greyscale and going mad. By the time she finally catches up with Drogon in the final episode she’s suicidal and commands him to kill her. He does.</li></ul>
I don’t think we need a Season 8 in this scenario.</blockquote>
<p>Is that (I did not say but implied) the show you would rather have watched?</p>
<p>Now since I’ve mentioned the sex scenes, I don’t suppose I can avoid discussing them; though – unlike the grimdark – I haven’t heard anyone complain that <em>Game of Thrones</em> doesn’t have enough sex or nudity. I’ll start with the nudity. I’ve heard some people say that they didn’t mind the violence or the swearing but they got sick of seeing boobs in every episode. I’ve heard others say that they were attracted to the show by the nudity, although they would have preferred to see more penises, but the violence put them off.</p>
<p>For the most part the show treats nudity as inherently sexual. Social nudity from the books – such as among the Summer Islanders, or women’s fashions in the city of Qarth – largely disappears. Public nudity does occur in non-sexual contexts, but it’s always presented as an exceptional display of vulnerability, of something that would usually be private. So while I, as you know, very strongly hold that nudity is not about sex, I acknowledge that in <em>Game of Thrones</em> they’re intertwined and best treated together.</p>
<p>Not that it’s without nuance. I’ve had occasion <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2017/05/nudity-ethics-and-etiquette.html">before</a> to compare the two scenes (in Season 5 episode 10 and Season 6 episode 4, respectively) where Cersei and Daenerys each emerge from a temple where they have been held captive by their enemies and walk naked before the people of the city. Cersei’s nudity demonstrates her powerlessness in the hands of the Sparrows, and King’s Landing responds to it with violence. Daenerys’s nudity demonstrates her faith in herself and her power over the fire she set in the temple, and Vaes Dothrak responds to it with worship. (Cersei, to complete the parallel, burns <em>her</em> enemies’ temple in Season 6 episode 10.)</p>
<p>As to the sex, there are two separate complaints. I know, I know, there are a myriad of specific complaints, but they fall into two broad streams. One is that <em>Game of Thrones</em> objectifies women, particularly in the way it depicts rape; the other is that it has sex scenes and sex scenes are dirty and yucky. You’ll probably already have guessed from my tone what relative moral weight I assign to each. As always, if sex scenes aren’t your thing then they aren’t your thing, and I will never tell you that you ought to watch them – I just object to the insinuation that I must be a person of low tastes because I watch them.</p>
<p>This time, we can’t reach for the “Homer did the same” excuse. The <em>Iliad</em>’s main plot is set in motion by a dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon over their property rights in Trojan sex slaves, and its background is of course the adulterous affair between Paris and Helen. Yet, pivotal though sex and rape are to the story, they are never described in plain words. The reader or hearer is expected to fill in for themselves what happens when two lovers enter a bedchamber or a warlord orders female captives to his tent.</p>
<p>I’m not going to argue why I don’t think it’s immoral to have sex scenes in a book or a show, because frankly I think the burden of proof is on those claiming it <em>is</em> immoral. Artistically, however, every element of a narrative work has to be judged by how well it advances the story. Do the sex scenes in <em>Game of Thrones</em> advance the story? Would the show be diminished if they were merely hinted at from context? I mean, apart from the view that the whole thing is just an excuse for the sex scenes anyway (like when Ian McShane described it as “only tits and dragons”).</p>
<p>Honestly, I think it would. One of the major themes of <em>Game of Thrones</em> is the discrepancy between how the nobility present themselves to the common folk and what they’re actually like. For that to work, you need to see the times when the image and the reality diverge most strongly – and unless the nobility of Westeros are very much more noble than our own leaders, those times more often than not are going to involve sexual misconduct. There’s a reason why Littlefinger makes his income running a brothel: that’s where you see the rich and powerful at their most compromised. Which unusually neatly explains both the character motivation and the thematic relevance of this story element.</p>
<p>Once again Jon Snow is the key – Jon Snow, his supposed bastardy, and his actual parentage. None of that would work unless he came from a society that both valued chastity enough to treat the offspring of illicit sex as “lesser”, and violated it often enough to need a whole social category to contain such individuals. Such a society is necessarily both hypocritical and unjust, and when you have hypocrisy and injustice it is best to lay it bare. To sneak the sex away behind curtains and tent-flaps and bushes and scene cuts and discreet camera angles would imply that there was after all something wrong with sex <em>per se</em>, which would undermine the show’s case against the hypocrisy of condemning bastardy.</p>
<p>Which is all well and good, but by that logic, we would expect to see an awful lot more male characters nude than we do. We would expect to see sexual situations from the point of view of the female gaze approximately half the time, instead of three or four times in seven seasons. I fully agree with the complaint about the lack of penises. On the rare occasions when we do get to see them it’s played for the gross-out value, not sexualized the way the show does with female bodies. Curiously convenient, how challenging societal hypocrisy happens to involve pandering to the straight male market. No, I don’t have a defence this time. <em>Game of Thrones</em> could and should have done better.</p>
<p>The problem becomes particularly acute when we come to the intersection of violence and sex – <em>Game of Thrones</em>’ notorious rape scenes. Martin is perfectly right to argue that it would be dishonest to talk about war and leave out the rape; rape has been central to war as long as there has been war, as the <em>Iliad</em> illustrates. On the face of it, given its grimdark ethos and its frankness about sex, it makes perfect sense for <em>Game of Thrones</em> to address rape head-on... if only, if <em>only</em> the sex didn’t have to pass through the filter of straight male desire before hitting the screen, until the rapes seem calculated to titillate as much as to horrify.</p>
<p>OK. Now I’ve offered separate justifications for the violence and the sex being shown explicitly, albeit with a change of focus for the sex; does that mean I think the explicit rape is also justified? Truthfully, no. Or at least it should have been shown far more sparingly, and otherwise left to the imagination.</p>
<p>Why the inconsistency? Because the arguments for the violence don’t work when it’s <em>sexual</em> violence, and the arguments for the sex don’t work when it’s <em>coerced</em> sex. The violence is explicit to imbue it with the visceral horror of serious injury; but rape onscreen mostly just looks like sex, since the viewer isn’t actually inside the victim’s head. Conversely, the sex is explicit to challenge the hypocrisy of pretending to abhor it, since most of us actually seek it; but there is nothing hypocritical about abhorring rape.</p>
<p>What I <em>can</em> say is that there has been a sudden drop-off in the incidence of rape scenes on <em>Game of Thrones</em> ever since the end of Season 5. In fact, in all of the last two seasons there was only one, that being part of the punishment Cersei devises for Septa Unella, and that was handled much more sensitively – we see Unella bound to a table, we hear her screams, but we don’t get shown what she’s screaming about. That was in Season 6 episode 10, and there was no rape at all in Season 7. Better late than never, I suppose.</p>
<p>Right now, I’m approaching Season 8 with trepidation. I probably won’t get to see Episode 1 for a few days after it airs, for boring reasons, and so I’m going to be dodging spoilers for a while. At least I don’t have a Tumblr any more.</p>
<p>Part of the appeal of <em>Game of Thrones</em> has always been how good it is at keeping its many story threads running, making sure that every setup eventually leads to a payoff. But it’s a lot easier to give the impression you’re doing that when you’ve still got chapters left unwritten to defer some of the payoffs to. At the conclusion, all those bills come due. I’ve seen stories with as much promise as <em>Game of Thrones</em> stumble at the end before now.</p>
<p>I didn’t originally intend to get as deep as this – this post was going to be mainly predictions for what would happen in Season 8, because I made some bold ones last year that came true and I hadn’t written them down, particularly the fate of Littlefinger. But that feels like a bit of a tone-slump now. The only one that feels like I’m sticking my neck out is: I don’t think the Blackfish is really dead. We saw no kill and no body in Season 6 episode 8, which isn’t how <em>Game of Thrones</em> kills its characters. We got the news of his death from a character who had every reason to lie. If Sandor Clegane can come back after a season and a half when we thought we’d seen him dying, Brynden Tully can come back from a rumour.</p>
<p>Right, I’d better get this posted before it goes out of date.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-85054176249239523252019-03-24T03:26:00.001-07:002019-03-24T03:26:23.504-07:00The challenge of weeding out racism<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://gulfnews.com/world/oceania/new-zealand-pm-jacinda-ardern-wearing-hijab-meets-christchurch-terror-attack-victims-families-1.1552726262565" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5PHGYb4RzgZpE2euG6iyEI6PgUc0MvsUe2QdawjC7jpl_xzPBpn_ZeONFHWk5JgKfNQpjk1Aan4PMGszai-_jhIiTd6IW_lfKPn_B1St2jW-e1kFfRz4PBvns4rG7-B6E8oQCOFyxXSKt/s1600/jacinda.jpg" width="500" data-original-width="750" data-original-height="563" title="Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wore hijab to speak to grieving Muslims" alt="Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wore hijab to speak to grieving Muslims" /></a></div>
<p>Like many New Zealanders, I was inspired by our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration in the wake of the terror in Christchurch that “This is not us.” I took it as a signal of our intentions for the immediate future. From now on, from this day forward, this is not us. From now on we are vigilant for the early warning signs of white supremacist violence. From this day forward we reject every expression of racism and hatred and stop it in its tracks. To this promise we pledge ourselves. So say we all.</p>
<p>Taken as a statement of New Zealand’s past and present – the comfortable bubble we were all living in up until that Friday – I’m afraid it was inaccurate, as many other New Zealanders have sad cause to know intimately. We are a nation where cries of “Go home!” follow brown-skinned people down the street. We are a nation that elects <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Prosser">anti-Muslim racists</a> to Parliament and appoints their party leader to the second-highest position in the land. We are a nation whose primary political divide in our most recent election was between those who were racist against Māori and Pacific Islanders and those who were racist against Asians.</p>
<p>I happen to have the tremendous good fortune of being a white man; the only racism I’ve had come my way was a couple of the half-dozen occasions when I’ve been mistaken for Jewish. And yet even from this position of privilege I’ve seen plenty of racism directed at others. How much more visible must it be to those on the pointy end?</p>
<strong>(Content note: If racism in New Zealand is the last thing you need to be reminded of just now, I’d advise not reading any further.)</strong>
<p>There was the guy in the supermarket who yelled “Come <em>on</em>, [racial epithet]!” when a South Asian worker, busy arranging trolleys, briefly got in his way. There was the guy who expressed regret, in tones of deep distaste, at how his country was being “taken over” by “persons of a yellow persuasion”. There was the guy on the bus who hypothesized that the East Asian owners of the internet café next to the bus stop had taken down the bus timetables to fool potential customers into parking there. There was the guy who, having come off his bike to avoid a car rounding the corner, shouted not “Watch where you’re going!” nor “I’ve got a right to use the road too!” but “Bloody Asians!”</p>
<p>I’ve heard people yell at the television “You’re not Māori!” when a commentator claimed otherwise who didn’t look Māori enough for their judgement. I lived through the time when Ardern’s party (before she entered Parliament) blocked Māori customary property claims to the foreshore and seabed while allowing commercial ones, and sold this policy to the nation as “the Māoris want to stop you going to the beach” (to complete the irony, the Māori claimants more often wanted to <em>ensure</em> public access to beaches). I heard people then joke, since by then our laws had abandoned the racist <a href="http://www.nativecircle.com/blood-quantum-issues.html">blood quantum</a> criterion for telling who counts as Māori, that maybe they would still be able to go to the beach if they “feel Māori”. It wasn’t that long ago. New Zealand is still pretty much the same people now as it was then.</p>
<p>Once, conversing about my job with a social work lecturer after class, I happened to mention that in my dentistry classes there was a high proportion of Asian students. Insofar as I had a point it was to puzzle over why so few Pākehā students were going into dentistry (the paucity of Māori and Pacific Islanders in the health professions is, alas, less mysterious). But the lecturer – whose inclusive attitudes I had until that point admired – took me to be saying something quite different. “Yeah,” he said, “they shouldn’t let them in to take those places off <em>our</em> people, should they?”</p><a name='more'></a>
<p>I could go on for much longer if I cared to, and I haven’t even started on the online racism yet – the infamous comments sections on Stuff, the rants that come up on political Facebook groups. Despite the narrative that we on the Left comfort ourselves with, it’s not all coming from the Right. Jacinda Ardern is Prime Minister because Winston Peters lent Labour and the Greens the support of his New Zealand First party to form a coalition government; his votes came from a contingent of people, thousands strong on Facebook, whose chief quarrel with Ardern’s National Party predecessor was that he was too soft on immigration, and whose chief quarrel with immigration was that it brought too many Asians into the country. There are many, many New Zealanders to whom it is an article of faith that our present housing shortages and rising inequality are because of Asians taking all the houses and jobs. I know this because of the hours of my life I’ve wasted arguing with them.</p>
<p>Winston Peters is not a xenophobe; he’s a cynic who knows xenophobia will always get him re-elected (which is telling in itself). As long as he talks a tough line on Asian immigrants during election season, always skating just shy of being incontestably racist, he doesn’t have to actually <em>do</em> anything about immigration policy once in office, and indeed he never has. But only one strategy has ever shut him up, and both Labour Prime Ministers he has partnered with have now deployed it: make him Foreign Minister.</p>
<p>Ardern also made Peters Deputy Prime Minister, and you can see him in the background of many of the photos of her visiting the mosques last weekend. He’s been remarkably quiet, listening to his boss flatly contradicting the keystone of his campaign platform and getting international acclaim for it. His anti-Asian rhetoric has in the past included the obligatory fearmongering about Islam. It would take more powers than are in heaven and earth to make Peters publicly apologize for anything, but I hope he is using this time to do some deep critical self-reflection.</p>
<p>Speaking of which – I’m relieved to say that I have to go back to my childhood to remember <em>myself</em> saying anything that was overtly racist (as opposed to thoughtlessly racist, for which I make no such claim). There were the playground rhymes with the N-word, and the ones mocking East Asian people. There were the jokes mimicking East and South Asian patterns of speaking English. There was a kid I was close to at age twelve because we were both outcasts, who thought New Zealand should be for white English-speaking people and Māori should be grateful that Captain Cook brought motorbikes here in 1769, or something; I was impressionable enough to think, briefly, that he had a point. By sheer good luck I happened to read a newspaper article around that time quoting, or more likely misquoting, a Māori person as opining that Pākehā ought to assimilate to Māoritanga or leave the country, and I had enough nascent rationality in my tender brain to realize that this was the only logically consistent way to apply nationalist sentiments to New Zealand.</p>
<p>If you’ve been developing the impression that I’m about to tell you each of these little acts of racism is just as bad as the terror that shook our nation a week ago, I hope the fact that I just indicted myself is enough to convince you otherwise. Ardern is right: the terrorist chose New Zealand not because his acts would go unnoticed here but because they would be especially terrifying bursting into our peace. But before he committed those acts he had to hide among us and build up his cache of weapons. To hide, he must have been blending in with the crowd somehow. And this guy was not some kind of genius master of disguise. His prejudice against Muslims, his suspicion of immigrants, his contempt for people of colour, didn’t ping anybody’s radar because they weren’t all that unusual coming from a white man in New Zealand.</p>
<p>I have nothing but praise for the police officers who arrested the terrorist on that terrible Friday and stopped the killings. I do have to wonder, though, why our intelligence services hadn’t previously noticed what an awfully large amount of guns he was purchasing. It’s not like New Zealand doesn’t have government agencies to interfere with people’s business. Six or seven years ago the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) got caught illegally spying on New Zealand citizens. Another five or six years before that, the police arrested a number of Māori activists and environmentalists in what became known as the Urewera Terror Raids. Before that again, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) imprisoned <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Zaoui">a Muslim refugee</a> for about a year on suspicions of terrorism, later shown to be baseless. Yet all indications are that neither the GCSB nor the police nor the SIS were keeping any tabs on white supremacists. Not worth their while, apparently.</p>
<p>I’m a white man, as I’ve already mentioned, and there is a well-known psychological phenomenon where people genuinely don’t notice things that are not in their interests to notice – after all, the brain doing the noticing is the same brain calculating the interests. I’m autistic, what’s more, which makes me less skilled than many at picking up social and political subtext. What I’m saying is that if <em>I</em> can see for myself that New Zealand has a racism problem that we need to do better on, anyone else is without excuse.</p>
<p>Yes, I’m afraid I do have a specific “anyone else” in mind. That person is well-known New Zealand Left columnist Chris Trotter, blogger of <a href="https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com"><em>Bowalley Road</em></a>. His responses to the shootings on that blog have, I’m sorry to say, severely diminished my respect for him as a political commentator. The first one begins with the terrorist’s name, in bold and capital letters, which is why I’m not linking to it. It goes on to describe him as a “lone wolf”, a phrase which Trotter must have known would be a red rag to a bull; to diagnose him with a mental illness, explicitly declining to provide evidence by calling it “axiomatic”; and to conclude that “we must not for one moment entertain the notion that there was something we could have done” to stop him. Which, by the way, means also not entertaining the notion that we can do anything to prevent the next one. Cheers.</p>
<p>Which pales in comparison to the second <em>Bowalley Road</em> piece on the topic, in which Trotter advances a conspiracy theory. I was going to call it a “bizarre” conspiracy theory, but actually it’s a pretty run-of-the-mill one among political pundits these days. The idea is that the terrorist’s super secret plan is to scare the public and/or the government into doing whatever the pundit politically opposes, so if they do that then the terrorist is winning, so obviously the solution is for the public and the government to align with the pundit’s political preferences instead.</p>
<p>I mean, OK, Trotter is a pundit, so this is nothing too shocking so far. Where it gets weird is exactly <em>what</em> political opinion the terrorism was, apparently, stealthily designed to promote: social justice progressivism. You see, if we’re not careful, the Cultural Left will start holding racist conservatism responsible for the shootings. And then “those even further to the left” will – horrors! – start spreading the idea of “White Privilege” (scare-quotes and scare-capitals both Trotter’s), which apparently now means <em>not</em> that there are many problems which affect people of colour more than white people and none really <em>vice versa</em>, but rather that the murders are the fault of every New Zealander for living in a colonial nation. Phase III is of course the collapse of democracy, dogs and cats living together and chaos in the streets.</p>
<p>Honestly, I wondered for a moment there whether Trotter’s computer had been hacked and someone else was writing his blog, because he notes that “those even further to the left” include quite a few members of the Green Party – when up until now, Trotter’s has been one of the more prominent voices pushing the narrative that the Greens aren’t really Left at all and any day now, wait for it, any day now, they’re going to sell out Labour and form a coalition with the National Party instead, no seriously, just wait, any day now... I also can’t help noting the irony of a free speech campaigner arguing that there are some political opinions too dangerous to talk about.</p>
<p>On the question of responsibility, there’s a distinction to be made. If someone breaks into a building at night and steals stuff, obviously that person, and no-one else, is to blame for committing the burglary. Their guilt is not in the least mitigated if it turns out there was a security guard on duty who wasn’t paying attention. But the burglar’s unmitigated guilt doesn’t let the security guard off the hook. I would think said security guard’s employers would be having a very serious talk with them the following morning about alternative career paths.</p>
<p>New Zealand’s security services and law enforcement, and yes, to some degree New Zealand society as a whole, are like that security guard. We’re not the burglar; that would be the terrorist. We’re not the burglar’s accomplices or confederates; that would be the white supremacist ideologues who enculturated him with his vile ideas. But the racism tolerated in New Zealand – the jokes, the stereotyping, the scapegoating of immigrants, the dismissal of Māori concerns, the handwaving away of bigotry as long as it comes from people who look enough like us – provided the cover under which he laid his plans and prepared his weapons. We failed in our vigilance. To that extent, it falls on us all to do better.</p>
<p>Trotter has followed those two posts with a third that, at least, falls within the bounds of something a sensible person apprised of the facts could reasonably say, albeit partly by contradicting the first two. He notes, for instance, that “there is within [societies like New Zealand] an irreducible quantum of malicious prejudice... there will always be some for whom the messages of love and respect are interpreted perversely as threats to themselves and their culture,” which doesn’t sit well with his earlier assertions that “New Zealanders have nothing to reproach themselves for” and “New Zealanders are good people” – unless the people he’s referring to don’t count as New Zealanders on account of their malicious prejudice (what’s called the No True Scotsman fallacy).</p>
<p>Trotter points out, truly enough, that it isn’t possible to cut off the flow of information between white supremacists; not without cutting off everyone’s internet and shutting down the news media, and furthermore censoring huge chunks of Western history and culture, because the Christchurch terrorist and his predecessors drew a lot of their inspiration from there. Hence the “irreducibility” of malicious racism. I don’t think we need to despair so quickly.</p>
<p>First of all, the degree to which racism is still tolerated in our society offers a way to shore up some of our defences: stop tolerating it. That of course will call to mind what most people identify with social justice progressivism under the name “political correctness”, and what social justice progressives themselves refer to as “callout culture” – screaming at everyone for the tiniest infraction, making up new infractions when you can’t find one. I’m not saying this isn’t a real problem in progressive discourse, though I would point out that it’s a problem progressives are aware of and trying to solve. But it’s not what I’m talking about.</p>
<p>As with criminal deterrence, making the penalties surer is more effective than making them harsher. Let the jokes fall flat. Challenge statements that embody stereotypes – I don’t mean bark at people, I mean make them explain what they mean in front of everybody. If the racist remark comes from a stranger on the street, I’ve found simply staring at them can produce all sorts of frantic self-justification, which means they know they’ve violated a social norm. This is a norm we want to strengthen. Every little helps.</p>
<p>White supremacists have been ramping up their efforts in recent years for one very simple reason: they’re losing the war and they know it. Too slowly, but surely, racist structures are crumbling or being replaced. People of colour are moving upward in Western societies, and non-Western countries are becoming more prosperous and less dependent on Western charity. Colonial injustices are being resolved. Racists can see all this and it horrifies them. Obviously they can’t accept that it’s a natural consequence of people applying reason in the service of empathy, which is why they’re coming out with all the ludicrous nonsense about secret Jewish master-plans to replace the white race with Muslims and black people, or whatever. White supremacist ideology bears this certain mark of evil, as C. S. Lewis once said of the Nazis and the British imperialists: only by being terrible does it avoid being farcical.</p>
<p>What they’re drawing on, meanwhile, is centuries of racist history presented as a grand procession of great white men; a view of history due entirely to the selectiveness of our cultural education, so that in a typical world history textbook you might get a chapter on Julius Caesar, a page on Genghis Khan, and a paragraph on Qin Shi Huangdi. You can see how that might give some people the impression that only white men have ever done anything worth talking about. Closer to home, at primary school in the 1980s I learned lots about the Anzacs and the Otago gold-rush, a little bit about the Treaty of Waitangi, and nothing at all about Parihaka and the prisoners who built so much of my home-town’s landscape. This too is changing, again slowly, but in the right direction.</p>
<p>New Zealand is in for some painful conversations in the next while about where we went wrong and what we could have done better. This is my contribution. I think we can find hope in the fact that we’re already moving the way we need to be moving; but we need to redouble our efforts. Friday 15 March 2019 showed us all too clearly what we stand to lose if we don’t.</p>
Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-49542265154498648652019-03-15T03:40:00.000-07:002019-03-15T03:50:09.344-07:00The Ides of March<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/111089917/climate-change-strike-this-is-why-kiwi-kids-are-bunking-school" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBHCm2_l2i211Kz9N6moHdZ41VpzXsaxRTSMZt2t96zEwJfIXJ3eg-ciaR1du0rWe05uRGhoyMkEf-8nnrP0J9qgqz5PAhk8bx7aCtDe-pt9Lp_kyGJ-MRcX8BdXR8JTfXFmgreYLT76BT/s500/schoolstrike.jpg" width="500" height="281" data-original-width="1240" data-original-height="699" /></a></div>
<p>Today I saw the best and worst of what people can be. The best, first-hand; the worst, mostly via Facebook. I live in Dunedin, which is about a five-hour drive away from Christchurch, southward down the coast. I’m going to start with the bad thing, even though it happened later, so that I can end with the good thing. Quite apart from the fact that the good thing deserves the attention more, I believe that’s the way the world is going; courage is, gradually, conquering hate.</p>
<p>Today New Zealand got in the world news for about the worst possible reason. Our decades-long run without a public mass shooting has been broken, and the number of people killed in political terrorist acts in the entirety of our history has gone up from three to over 40. In Christchurch, this afternoon, during the Friday prayer, a white man walked into the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton in the central city, sprayed the place with bullets, and fled. Soon afterward, a white man walked into the Linwood Islamic Centre a few kilometres across town, and began shooting.</p>
<p>Co-ordinated attacks by two shooters, or did the Riccarton shooter get in his car and drive to Linwood? I’ve heard both, and at a time like this I think it’s especially important to be mindful of the limits of one’s knowledge. The police also found at least one car bomb and defused it. The number of people killed is currently estimated to be in the 40s. Several of them are known to be refugees from the war in Syria, some of them children. One man has been arrested and charged with murder. Three others have also been arrested; last I heard, one had been released and the other two were being questioned. Presumably the police cordoned off the area and took in anyone who happened to have a firearm in their car.</p>
<p>I gather the shooter livestreamed the attack, and also published a manifesto online, just in case anyone was in doubt that the main motive for terrorism is notoriety. I understand that the local internet providers have been working to take them down, and good on them. Let me copypaste a Facebook post by a friend of mine who’s seen the manifesto:</p>
<blockquote>Here’s a few quick facts from this shooter’s manifesto that he published online, so that you don’t have to read his pathetic excuses and unintelligent hate-speech.
<ul><li>He isn’t even a Kiwi. He’s an Australian citizen who was here temporarily. A little ironic considering he’s anti-immigration.</li>
<li>He originally planned to attack the mosque in Dunedin, because of a video on Facebook that he saw from the Otago Muslim Association.</li>
<li>He was most influenced by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candace_Owens">Candace Owens</a>. I really hope that she faces the consequences of her disgusting rhetoric over this.</li>
<li>He supports Trump’s nationalist and anti-immigration stances.</li>
</ul>
There’s literally nothing else of value. Don’t read it.</blockquote>
<p>I have not seen either the video or the manifesto. I have seen the shooter’s name. It will never cross either my mouth or my fingers. May it be swiftly forgotten.</p>
<hr />
<p>Now for the good thing. I didn’t hear about the shooting until this evening because, when it was happening, I was regretfully heading back to work after attending the Dunedin branch of the School Strike For Climate. It was <em>astonishing</em>. I’ve been in many protests in my time, helped orchestrate a fair number of them, and I have never, ever seen one as well-organized and inspiring as this. I’m pretty sure I have, at times in the past, tutted and waxed superior over the maturity of teenagers, for which I humbly apologize. I won’t do it again. I think the last time I saw George St filled like that was when they threatened to take away Dunedin Hospital’s neurology unit, and before that the war on Iraq. <em>And this was put together by high school students.</em></p>
<p>For all that pundits make money touting this or that existential threat to civilization that we all need to be shaking in our shoes about, climate change is the only one that’s both real and imminent. (Nuclear war is a genuine danger but a remote one. Peak Oil is a secondary consequence of the same institutional stupidities that are causing climate change. Nothing else qualifies.)</p>
<p>It’s already begun; New Zealand has had a “hundred-year flood” every year for over a decade now, two of them right where I live and two more just out of town on the Taieri Plain. I knew when last winter was unseasonably mild that an unprecedentedly hot summer was on its way; I even went around telling people there were going to be big bushfires in Australia. I didn’t predict they would come as far south as Tasmania, and I certainly didn’t count on them hitting New Zealand as well, but both things happened. These events are a tiny foretaste of what is to come if we don’t take drastic action.</p>
<p>New Zealand doesn’t account for much of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but because of our small size we’re a good location for experimental social changes that the world can then scale up from. After both our major political parties embraced neoliberalism in the 1980s, neoliberals elsewhere in the world pointed at us – prematurely, it turned out – as a success story. A decade ago we got the opportunity to lead the way as developers of smart green technology, and we squandered it and hung our economy on milk instead. Can’t we please be world leaders again?</p>
<p>It’s easy to fall into despair over the magnitude of the problem, and that despair is a major contributor to the political inertia that has caused it. That’s why today’s demonstration brought tears to my eyes. Today I saw teenagers with a better handle on grassroots political organization than my generation ever had. Today I saw where the political will can be found to solve this problem. Today I know there is hope.</p>
<hr />
<p>On this day 2062 years ago, a determined posse of political activists, deeply concerned for the integrity of the Republic of Rome, publicly murdered the man at the hub of the changes that they feared, and so brought about the very crisis they had hoped to avert. Their act fell short, however, of the ineffectuality of terrorism, because Julius Caesar was a genuine centre of power. Terrorism by definition strikes at the powerless; it is the epitome of cowardice. And it never succeeds. Mohandas Gandhi in India eschewed violence, and India broke free of the British Empire. The IRA in Northern Ireland embraced violence, and Northern Ireland remains a British province. The numbers across history bear out the lesson of these two examples; violence, even against legitimate targets, reduces a political movement’s chances of success by over half. <em>Terrorist</em> violence guarantees failure.</p>
<p>So, out of the action today that deserved the world’s attention and the action that hijacked it, I know which one I believe represents the future. I stand for courage, I stand for truth, and I stand for hope.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-12919838596688671162019-03-08T16:21:00.001-08:002019-03-08T16:21:41.873-08:00Captain Marvel: movie review<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ-GykMJyDWdUyHc0YnumJNzs3m_ObYaNmgcnAmvBhD7BjutItIQyO2xFd3PnWil-7ncrkXiecLpcbzNvKrD4qDXVP_zEPBDM0C2J2UHKGmmVcCzhi2hlsMO2x_kpLUUwK-72cOZxCEKHQ/s1600/captainmarvel.jpg" data-original-width="960" data-original-height="540" width="500" title="Captain Marvel movie poster, showing Brie Larson as Carol Danvers, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Jude Law as Yon-Rogg" alt="Captain Marvel movie poster, showing Brie Larson as Carol Danvers, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Jude Law as Yon-Rogg" /></div>
<p><a href="https://veryrarelystable.dreamwidth.org/2190.html"><strong>Crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog</strong></a></p>
<p>Just for fun, how many movies do you imagine fulfill all the following criteria?</p>
<ul><li>Based on comic books, or about superheroes, or both</li>
<li>Released in cinemas</li>
<li>The title consists solely of the protagonist’s name and/or hero pseudonym</li>
<li>The title protagonist is female</li></ul>
<p>Well, I can’t be bothered tracking down movies from every country in the world. But on Wikipedia’s lists of American movies there are, as of the release of <em>Captain Marvel</em> earlier this week, exactly six. The other five are, in order of release: <em>Tank Girl</em> (1995), <em>Barb Wire</em> (1996), <em>Catwoman</em> (2004), <em>Elektra</em> (2005), and <em>Wonder Woman</em> (2017). The 1984 movie <em>Supergirl</em> apparently was British, not American, but you can go ahead and include it if you like.</p>
<p>By contrast I count about 49 American movies which fulfill all the other conditions but have a male title protagonist. That’s being conservative, because I chose not to count titles containing epithets that refer to their heroes but aren’t their actual names, like “The Dark Knight” or “The First Avenger” or “Man of Steel”. If I had chosen to include those, that would have added at least another half-dozen to the male list and exactly one to the female list: <em>My Super Ex-Girlfriend</em> (2006). I also didn’t count sequels even when the title was just the character’s name and a number (e.g <em>Deadpool 2</em>), which would have lengthened the male list by another dozen or so and the female list not at all.</p>
<p>You could argue that manga should be counted as comic books, which adds exactly one more American movie to the female list, namely <em>Alita: Battle Angel</em>, again released only weeks ago. And if you want to include movies named for more than one character, that brings in things like <em>Batman & Robin</em> and <em>Batman v. Superman</em> on the male side, and one lone female character taking second place in the title of last year’s <em>Ant-Man and the Wasp</em>.</p>
<p>The YouTube comments on trailers for <em>Captain Marvel</em> are full of remarks like “Ooh, a strong female character, how novel” and “I don’t go to Marvel movies for the politics.”</p>
<p>Mind you, having now seen the movie, I can tell you there’s another strain of YouTube comments that’s even more ironic: the kind that go “I don’t need to see the movie now, they put the whole thing in the trailers.” The trailers are almost entirely taken from the first half-hour or so. The rest of the movie then takes the premise set up in that half-hour and unabashedly flips it upside-down to lie waggling its legs undignifiedly in the air.</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Spoilers both great and small below the cut.</strong></p><a name='more'></a>
<p><cut text="Major spoiler alert">So, Skrulls are <em>not</em> the bad guys. The Skrulls in this movie are the <em>good</em> guys. They’re fighting for their independence from the Kree, who are not a race of noble warrior heroes but a violent expansionist empire who spread nasty propaganda about the people who try to escape their colonial rule. The Skrulls are not trying to invade or infiltrate Earth; there was one Kree scientist working undercover on Earth who had realized the truth and managed to get some Skrull refugees into hiding but then was killed by a Kree strikeforce led by Carol Danvers’ Kree mentor, and the Skrull “invaders” are refugee soldiers trying to find their families.</p>
<p>I’ll come back to this matter later. First, I’m going to start with the things I liked least about <em>Captain Marvel</em> so I can build up to the good stuff. That’s going to be difficult, though. Not because the movie is perfect – it isn’t. But I’m having trouble picking out specific bad points. I just came away with a hard-to-pin-down feeling that it wasn’t quite as good as it could have been.</p>
<p>Well, I mean, one concrete thing was the idea that when Skrulls shape-shift, their new body is indistinguishable from the one they’re copying “right down to the DNA”, and yet they apparently don’t copy the brain well enough to pick up long-term memories. There are several rants’ worth in there about the mangling of molecular biology in science fiction movies. It would have been better just not to bring up DNA testing as a potential means of Skrull detection in the first place; after all, <em>Captain Marvel</em> is set in the ’90s, when sequencing DNA took months and cost thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>No, look, I’m not going to go there, because it was a very minor annoyance, much less egregious than the silly science in some of the other movies (no, Ultron, picking up a city off Earth and dropping it from a great height would never do one whisker more damage than just blowing up whatever energy source you planned to lift it with), and, more to the point, it didn’t contribute to the faint nagging dissatisfaction I’m talking about.</p>
<p>Another point, I guess, was that <em>Captain Marvel</em> didn’t tie in as well as it could have to the established MCU. I thought they didn’t come up with the acronym “SHIELD” until, was it <em>Iron Man</em> or <em>Thor</em>? We <em>do</em> get to see how Nick Fury lost his eye, and where the name of the “Avengers Initiative” first came from, but there’s a plot point late in the movie which (a) isn’t properly explained and (b) causes continuity problems with the larger story.</p>
<p>The Tesseract turns up, and the villains are after it. Carol Danvers decides, for no reason she bothers explaining, that it’ll be safest hidden on Earth. She then leaves it to SHIELD to deal with; the last we see of it, it’s on Fury’s desk. So – um – what was all that stuff with the ice and the laser beam at the beginning of <em>Captain America: The First Avenger</em>? And why were SHIELD so scared of it in <em>The Avengers</em>, with all the isolation they’d put around it when Loki came looking for it? Why did they think Steve Rogers would know more about it than they did, if they’d already had it in their possession in the ’90s?</p>
<p>While we’re talking about continuity problems, for that matter, didn’t we find out in <em>Captain America: The Winter Soldier</em> that SHIELD had been infiltrated by Hydra agents all this time? I thought, going in, that the Skrulls were going to be involved in that storyline somehow. They weren’t. But I don’t think it was continuity errors that bugged me either.</p>
<p>Grace Randolph of the YouTube channel <em>Beyond the Trailer</em> comes close to picking it out, I think, in <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=_fTAtszt-aQ">her review</a> of the movie. (As I write I’m still waiting for her to put out a spoiler review for <em>Captain Marvel</em>, because she generally goes into more depth in those.) Unfortunately she expresses it by saying that Carol Danvers in the final act of the movie becomes a “Mary-Sue”, which is a term I no longer use because more often than not these days it’s tainted with misogyny. I don’t think Randolph is using it misogynistically here, but so many other people do.</p>
<p>The general idea of a “Mary-Sue” is that she’s a character with either abilities or moral status that she hasn’t earned in the course of the story. If she wins the entire conflict without being challenged, or if the author expects you to cheer her on and boo-hiss at her enemies without her having done anything particularly meritorious beyond being polite to people, that’s a Mary-Sue in the original sense of the term.</p>
<p>It’s a fair enough criticism that if you want your readers to see your character as a brave warrior or a wise leader or a noble hero then you need to make them <em>do</em> things that are brave and wise and noble. And it’s natural but bad, when you’re writing, to think of your characters as people and not want to hurt them. Both are hurdles a lot of writers need to learn to get over.</p>
<p>But far too often in practice “Mary-Sue” means a female character who has the dreadful, dreadful temerity to do the same things that male characters do and expect to get the same credit. I once saw a YouTube whining at length about “Mary-Sues” in a certain popular fantasy TV show, where the guy defined the term as “a character with powers that aren’t justified in their backstory” and then applied it to a character who had become a competent assassin after <em>three seasons</em> of training to be an assassin. Guess the character’s gender. Go on, guess.</p>
<p>Even Randolph applies it in her <em>Captain Marvel</em> review, by way of example, to Rey from the latest <em>Star Wars</em> movies, on the grounds that she masters her Force abilities and lightsabre technique without us really seeing her learn how. I disagree, but that’s a different movie and I’m not going to go there now.</p>
<p>Randolph’s point is that the same is true of Carol Danvers. After her full powers are unlocked she doesn’t need any time to figure out how they work, the way Tony Stark had to with his suit in <em>Iron Man</em>. The first time she flies (on her own, without a plane), she does it gracefully; she doesn’t seem to need any practice to calibrate the power of her full-body energy blasts; and so on.</p>
<p>And this is <em>kind</em> of approaching where I feel the movie fell short of perfection. But it’s not quite there. First, Rey was indeed similar in <em>Star Wars</em> and that didn’t bother me the same way; and second, <em>Captain Marvel</em> takes pains to establish that Danvers doesn’t need to learn to rein in her power like the Hulk – she needs to learn to stop holding back and unleash it. That’s what her main arc is about, a neat reversal of the standard superhero trope. If you can believe a human body can absorb the energy of an explosion and turn it into superpowers, you can believe a human brain can rearrange itself to understand how to use those superpowers.</p>
<p>Yet Randolph is right that somehow it doesn’t feel like quite as much of an achievement as it should. Why is that? The closest I’ve come to an answer is by comparing <em>Captain Marvel</em> with its DCEU predecessor <em>Wonder Woman</em>. <em>Wonder Woman</em> also goes off the rails a bit in the final act, because the DCEU brand is about big characterless battles with generic CGI monsters, and yet to me the Diana-Ares duel was more compelling than the ending of <em>Captain Marvel</em>.</p>
<p>I agree with those commentators who say that when you have a character who’s too strong to be challenged externally, like Superman, you need to throw them into internal conflict – a point where the MCU generally shines and the DCEU, except in <em>Wonder Woman</em>, flounders. Where did Diana’s internal conflict come from in the final act of <em>Wonder Woman</em>? I hate to say it, but it centres on her love for Steve Trevor and his act of self-sacrifice – she can’t love humanity because it killed him, and she can’t hate humanity because it included him. The conflicts Danvers faces in this movie just never get that personal.</p>
<p>And yet one of the <em>good</em> things about <em>Captain Marvel</em>, I would have said, is that Carol Danvers don’t need no man. Though she and Nick Fury spend a good portion of the movie getting into and out of danger together, there’s no hint of any romantic attraction and the movie is better for that. I get the vibe that her Kree mentor Yon-Rogg has feelings about her that aren’t entirely appropriate, but Danvers doesn’t seem to reciprocate and again that’s a good thing.</p>
<p>So no. Danvers is better for not having a boyfriend. <em>And yet</em> it would have made the final act so much more satisfying if she could have had a stronger personal stake in the welfare of someone on Earth – someone in her lost memories. What could possibly be the solution?</p>
<p>Well, frankly it’s staring me in the face now that I think about it in these terms. This movie would have been far more satisfying in the end if only Danvers and Maria Rambeau had been romantic partners as well as best friends.</p>
<p>Of course that would have had knock-on effects through the whole memory-loss plot element as well. It would have made the initial reunion between Danvers and Rambeau, the fact that Danvers doesn’t remember their past together, vastly more emotionally charged. But again I feel this would have been a <em>good</em> change – even though this was part of the story where I didn’t particularly feel there was anything missing.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. Maria Rambeau is a great character as-is. She represents Captain Marvel’s anchor to the Earth in more ways than one. Not only is she the most prominent living person in Danvers’ pre-explosion memories, she’s also a living picture of what Danvers’ life would have been if she’d stayed behind. Being a fighter pilot and a single mother, she’s a person of extraordinary courage and motivation. As a character, she doesn’t need to be a love interest. But I think Danvers’ arc would have been more satisfying for her <em>having</em> a love interest, if and only if that love interest was another woman, and Rambeau would have been the logical choice.</p>
<p>Yes, I know, everyone ships Steve and Bucky, and fair enough. Yes, the attempt to straightwash Steve with Sharon Carter was one of the clumsier things the MCU has done. But even without a romantic dimension, Steve and Bucky’s friendship feels deep enough to me onscreen that I can buy it as a story-driving motive. Possibly that’s because we’ve seen Bucky die, we thought, and then gone with Steve through the ordeal of rescuing him from Hydra and having to fight Tony Stark over him. Nothing so traumatic happens to Rambeau; it’s <em>Danvers</em> who’s been apparently killed and come back with no memories. For me, <em>Captain Marvel</em> is the first MCU movie where, even without taking issues of representation into account, the story really needed a same-gender romance to make it complete.</p>
<hr />
<p>But now, on to better things. Where to start?</p>
<p>Visually I think this is one of the better MCU movies. The space settings are, I don’t know, less cluttered somehow than the <em>Guardians of the Galaxy</em> movies or <em>Thor: Ragnarok</em>, while at the same time brighter and clearer than the first two <em>Thor</em> movies. The visual elements never overwhelm the storytelling as they do in every DCEU movie (even, eventually, <em>Wonder Woman</em>). But perhaps the most important visual element was the one I didn’t notice until I thought about it afterwards; the digital de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson back to how old he was when he was first becoming famous. I think this is the first movie I’ve ever seen where they’ve managed to make an age change look unobtrusively real.</p>
<p>In tone, <em>Captain Marvel</em> is relatively light, with frequent comedic moments. Many of these revolve around Goose the “cat”, in conjunction with Nick Fury. A lot of people love the laughs in the MCU, but I have seen others complain about what they call <em>bathos</em> – where a joke drains the meaning out of a scene. Each MCU director has dealt with it in different ways, the most successful in my book still being Taika Waititi’s seamless weaving of the comedy into the story of <em>Thor: Ragnarok</em>. <em>Captain Marvel</em> isn’t quite that good, but it’s equal to anything Joss Whedon pulled off (and for all Whedon’s faults, that was one of his strengths).</p>
<p>Brie Larson as Carol Danvers has to carry the movie, and for my money she pulls it off – with teamwork from Samuel L. Jackson, Lashana Lynch, and Ben Mendelsohn, mind you. Danvers is driven like Steve Rogers, sassy like Tony Stark, genial like Thor, and self-assured like T’challa. As I’ve already mentioned, her character arc is not the well-trodden path of the over-confident hero who has to learn control, but the opposite one, where the hero has to break free of the limitations they’ve been labouring under. I don’t think that arc is complete yet; I’m more eager than ever to see what happens in <em>Avengers: Endgame</em>.</p>
<p>As Danvers grows in power her conflict moves from external (breaking free of Skrull captivity, chasing down the Skrull “invaders”) to internal. She has to overcome the quasi-religious ideology that the Kree have indoctrinated her with – to scrape away her entire worldview and start again from the beginning. I have to say, I can relate, which might help explain why I find her character arc more satisfying than Grace Randolph does.</p>
<p>The real strength of <em>Captain Marvel</em> is its social commentary. Of course, politics as such is nothing new to the MCU. I can’t resist repeating here a reply I left on one of those YouTube comments I mentioned earlier complaining about the politics:</p>
<blockquote>Let me get this straight. You’ve watched, what is it by now, 20 movies? more? in which—<br />
a weapons dealer discovers the moral bankruptcy of the arms industry; a troubled man confronts his own inner tendencies towards violence; a disabled man dedicates his life to punching Nazis; the heir to an imperial monarchy grapples with his nation and family’s violent past; an African leader chooses to share his nation’s wealth in order to help black people in other parts of the world; a gifted kid has to deal with criminal gangs formed after the government stepped on working-class people’s attempt to better themselves; a group of escaped convicts beat the system to save the galaxy from power-hungry tyrants; all culminating in a story demonstrating the falsity of Malthusian resources-before-people ideology...<br />
—and then Marvel puts up a movie with a female protagonist, and that, <em>that</em>, to you, is the first sign of a “social and political agenda”.</blockquote>
<p>Not that <em>Captain Marvel</em> hits you over the head with politics, exactly. But when political questions impinge on the characters’ lives, the movie doesn’t shy away from them. It turns out to be one of those little ironies that, before the movie came out, some guy photoshopped the poster to make Brie Larson smile and passed that around as an “improvement”, because in the movie, a guy comes up to Danvers shortly after she’s landed on Earth and tells her to smile because it would make her prettier. She nicks his motorbike.</p>
<p>Politics sits at the root of the plot. Danvers lost her memory destroying an experimental spacecraft so that hostile aliens couldn’t get their hands on it. Why was she working on a spacecraft? Because she and Rambeau had volunteered for that secret project with one Dr Wendy Lawson, actually a Kree scientist working against her own rulers to help the Skrull refugees. Why were Rambeau and Danvers working on that project in particular? Because in 1989, when the incident happened, the US Air Force didn’t let women fly combat missions. That’s within living memory. I don’t know about younger viewers, but someone my age can’t file that away under “oh well, that was the past” like I can with the more blatant sexism of 1918 British society in <em>Wonder Woman</em>.</p>
<p>Kudos also to the screenwriters for making the Kree-Skrull war more interesting than “The ones who look human are the good guys and the ones who look like orcs are the bad guys.” That sort of stereotyping has been a problem in fantasy literature of all media since long before <em>The Lord of the Rings</em>. I mean, in Tolkien’s time it was an improvement that the all-evil races weren’t actual humans of colour. But I think it’s time we got past the very concept of an all-evil race. As it stands, the fact that the people we first hear of as “terrorists” turn out to be “refugees” is probably the most blatant bit of political allegorizing in <em>Captain Marvel</em>.</p>
<p>Dr Lawson (one of two characters played by Annette Bening – it makes sense when you see it) meanwhile stops the movie from falling into the same error the other way around and making the Kree an evil race. The Kree government and their enforcers are an evil empire, but that doesn’t taint every individual Kree with collective guilt or any such nonsense. We may yet see villainous Skrulls in future MCU outings; I hope they come with continual reminders that their villainy is an individual, not a racial, trait.</p>
<p>Anyway, what we have at the end of the movie is a hero who just might have a chance in a one-on-one fight with Thanos, and I presume that’s what we’re going to see in <em>Avengers: Endgame</em>. The Russo brothers have a good track record so far with the arcs of characters other people have invented; let’s hope they keep it up.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-90919260911622249222019-02-13T16:27:00.000-08:002019-02-13T19:20:45.984-08:00Did I always know I was bisexual?<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiT8GvwOCe5-K1wEfgelExK7caVEhG6vrXAZRh1oBFjuDawDOvRyQ7eOH6-ZiPKlanQpZiwe1EmNvu7F-nhYpnqa03j-gyw4y60oGVRjzHrg2MumHBTCjtWSUI3r5k3-iIlhe6QvuKliF-/s1600/bisexual.jpg" width="500" height="400" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="640" title="I am bisexual" alt="I am bisexual" /></div>
<a href="https://veryrarelystable.dreamwidth.org/1600.html"><strong>Reposted from my Dreamwidth blog</strong></a>
<p>How long have I known I’m bisexual? A simple question with no simple answer. Someone passed a meme around on Facebook last week saying “It’s fine if you haven’t always known,” which prompted me to reflect.</p>
<p>I have <em>accepted</em> it for seven or eight years, I suppose. But was it a matter of learning something about myself I didn’t previously know? Or was it just that I started to be honest with myself about something I’d always known? Neither of those sits quite right with my memory.</p>
<p>I didn’t come out to anyone but my partner for several years after this realization. Even now, although I openly identify as bisexual online, you wouldn’t guess it from my life in physical space. Primarily, of course, my partner and I were and are in an exclusive relationship and already had been for years before, so I’m not seeking romantic or sexual partners of any gender and have no intention of doing so.</p>
<p>(This is something people sometimes misunderstand, so in case this concept is new to you: no, that doesn’t mean I’m not really bisexual or that I’ve “chosen a side”. I’ve chosen a <em>person</em>.)</p>
<p>But it took years for me to summon up the courage to come out at all, even online. I’ve never taken part in any Pride event, publicly or otherwise, nor any other LGBT-related social activity. Last year a friend invited me to a “coming out stories” session as part of a campus LGBT awareness week; I chickened out.</p>
<p>I grew up Evangelical, which in New Zealand isn’t quite as tightly bound to conservative politics as it is in the US, but on some issues there is definitely a Godly side and a Satanic side, and at least back in the ’80s and ’90s sexual orientation was one of those issues. Meanwhile in the secular culture which I encountered at school, to be gay was the very depth of loserdom, the nadir towards which lesser losers such as geeks and nerds and the arty-farty were presumed to be drawn.</p>
<p>Once I entered an environment where I had to justify moral positions with reasoning, I quickly accepted (intellectually) that there was no justification for opposing same-sex relationships. With a personal history shaped by Evangelicalism and Kiwi-bloke toxic masculinity, however, my emotional reactions took over a decade to catch up – and indeed, acknowledging my own bisexuality was a late stage in that very process.</p>
<p>Nowadays my only contact with the Evangelical community is through my family and some old friends, and if they’re any indication then the norm seems to be shifting. But that’s only a few people, and those few might just as easily be drifting away from the norm as drifting along with it.</p>
<p>Anyway, my single biggest reason for delaying coming out publicly was that I felt a bit presumptuous suddenly identifying as a member of a community which I knew very little about and had a history of being uncomfortable with.</p>
<p>There existed in my teenage years a movement which called itself “Gay” and “Queer” – yes, “Queer” – with its own symbols and aesthetics and its proprietary words, including “bisexual”. This movement seemed entirely alien to everything that was familiar to me, and of course both sides of my cultural background actively encouraged that alienation. I didn’t see any connection between the rainbow flags and the pink triangles and the fishnets and sequins, on the one hand, and my own developing sexuality on the other.</p><a name='more'></a>
<p>I certainly <em>did</em> like girls; there was so little education about sexuality in New Zealand high schools of the time that I would have thought that that precluded me from being anything but heterosexual, if I hadn’t already thought that being a faithful Christian would protect me from being anything but heterosexual.</p>
<p>I nursed unrequited crushes on two or three girls because I thought that was what love was. I looked at girls in swimsuits at the pool and felt happy in an excited kind of way and then guilty because that was Looking Upon a Woman to Lust After Her (<a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=MT5:28&version=KJV">Matthew 5:28</a>). I vividly remember, early in my teenage, seeing a photo of a young woman topless with her breasts in full view, and suddenly <em>getting</em>, all in one go, what all the fuss was about breasts.</p>
<p>(Between my autism and my Evangelicalism I was so sheltered that this photo wasn’t in a brown-paper-wrapped magazine nor any remotely sexual context; it was in a little booklet on Māori culture in the Otago Museum gift-shop, the purpose being to demonstrate typical Māori dress prior to European colonization.)</p>
<p>But I didn’t <em>only</em> like girls, and this is where I feel like I’ve always known I was bisexual and that what changed in my mid-thirties was that I started to admit it to myself. As early as age eleven I used to undress in front of the mirror and look at my own body and get the same sort of happy feeling I got from the girls at the swimming-pool; I’ve much more recently learned that, back when homosexuality was treated as a mental health condition, that was the number one early-warning diagnostic symptom.</p>
<p>This had nothing to do with the fact that it was <em>my</em> body. It just happened, back then, to fall within the range of bodies I found attractive, with the added advantage that I could look at it as long as I wanted without bothering anybody. I had the same feelings about some of the guys in the changing-rooms after PE classes, although of course that environment was also where the toxic masculinity peaked and I had to be very, very careful about where my eyes went.</p>
<p>Actually... here’s something I’ve never told anyone, and you’ll soon see why not. When I was twelve, I think it was, there was one particular guy I remember; slim, muscular, blond and handsome. I felt drawn to him in a way I didn’t understand. I concluded, with all the enthusiasm of an adolescent Christian, that what I was feeling must be a call from the Lord to bring him to the faith.</p>
<p>That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was not far behind. When you had a call from the Lord to bring someone to the faith, according to the paradigm we got at church and youth group, what you did was approach them and talk to them about it, and you had to make sure to let God’s love for them shine out of you as you did it. God would help you, the Bible promised, with the words to say (<a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=MT10:19-20&version=KJV">Matthew 10:19–20</a>). So I decided I had to do that.</p>
<p>Mistake number three, which I imagine someone without autism probably wouldn’t have made, was taking the opportunity when the two of us were in the changing-room of a swimming-pool and very nearly naked. The promised help with words did not come; I smiled at him and said his name in a tone intended to convey the compassion of God, and then my mind went blank.</p>
<p>I presume he concluded, perfectly reasonably in the circumstances and with rather better insight into my motivations than I myself had, that he was being hit on. I know that what followed was one of the worse beatings I endured at that most violent time in my life. Probably homophobia was part of it, but given how creepy I was being I can’t bring myself to blame him now.</p>
<p>Thankfully I never made quite that concatenation of mistakes again. But I did continue to have feelings for guys as well as girls, and to staunchly deny to myself that they were the same kind of feelings. The guy in my high school Latin classes who shared my interest in languages? Just a good friend and a nice person. Slim muscular guys with their shirts off? I’m just wishing <em>I</em> looked like that.</p>
<p>There did come a time when I was seventeen, walking through the Botanic Gardens with a friend – not the guy from Latin, another one – and I turned to look at him and out of the blue, I don’t know why, something about the angle of his face, I was suddenly seized with the urge to kiss him. Needless to say, I didn’t act on it, but I couldn’t deny to myself that I had felt it. Instead, I concluded that I had been tempted by Satan to commit an abominable sin.</p>
<p>Fortunately, it wasn’t long after that that I went to university and had to learn to reason about my beliefs properly, and the idea that it was wrong for a man to kiss a man was one of the first things to go (though I think the idea that there was such a person as Satan may have gone even earlier). But emotionally I stayed stuck at the point of “Same-sex attraction is not bad, but it would be bad if it happened to me.” In which illogical position I settled for a decade and a half.</p>
<p>During that time I continued to notice people in public spaces and have to quickly double-check their gender to see if I was allowed to be attracted to them, and to be struck occasionally by how handsome a few particular men’s faces were, and also to fill out online quizzes and insist that <em>no I am absolutely 100% heterosexual not the least soupçon of same-sex attraction </em>here<em> not that there’s anything wrong with that.</em></p>
<p>I can remember reading a commentary on <em>Harry Potter</em> back when Livejournal was the big thing, and the commentator was arguing that Harry must be bisexual because he keeps noticing how handsome other male characters are, Tom Riddle in particular, and straight guys just don’t see things like that. <em>Yes we do,</em> I thought. <em>I’m straight and I notice how handsome other guys are. It’s because, um, we’re gauging how much competition they pose when we’re trying to attract women. Yeah, that’s it, yeah.</em></p>
<p>Of course, as well as being a place where ideas are put through the wringer, university is also a place where young adults congregate in large numbers and the authorities, in sudden contrast to high school, couldn’t care less whether they’re having sex. (I gather they used to oppose mixed flatting, but that was all over by the ’90s.) Meanwhile, while homophobia was still active and pervasive, <em>gay</em> was no longer the worst thing you could possibly be or call someone.</p>
<p>At the time, graffiti at Otago University would take weeks rather than hours to disappear. In the men’s toilets, in amongst the toxic masculinity and the boring jokes, you could read messages proposing sexual encounters on the spot to any stranger with the inclination, followed by “Leave date and time.” Often these were followed by a date and time in someone else’s handwriting. Usually, this would be followed in turn by a message in the first handwriting along the lines of “Where were you? I waited half an hour!”</p>
<p>I would read these scrawls and I would think: <em>...hmmmm.</em> Of course it would be disgusting to have sex with a stranger in a public toilet, and of course I had one set of social anxieties making it completely impossible to do that with a guy I didn’t know and another set of social anxieties making it equally impossible to do it if it turned out to be a guy I did know. It went without saying that such a thing would never happen. And of course it never did.</p>
<p>But still <em>...hmmmm.</em></p>
<p>I finally started to get a clue, I think, as a result of working on a Sex Issue of Otago Polytechnic’s monthly student magazine <em>Gyro</em>, now defunct, which I helped edit for four years. The previous year we had caused a bit of a scandal by printing a Sex Issue with a cover photo of a topless porn-star (whom we’d interviewed for the magazine); this had been modified from a design of mine by removing the male nudity that I had conscientiously put on for gender balance. I’m still a little cross about that.</p>
<p>This time, whilst my attitude towards feminism could still have been characterized as “favourable but clueless”, my co-editor for the first time was a woman. Mindful of the criticism from the previous year, I put some extra effort in to try and achieve wokeness in the illustrative as well as the textual side of things. But mine wasn’t the final say in graphics design, and I found when the magazine came back from the printer that a few things had been changed; and the changes showed a subtle but consistent trend away from the gender balance that I taken such trouble over.</p>
<p>In the page on LGBT acceptance, the photo of two topless women embracing on a bed was still there, but the photo of two naked men embracing in a shower had disappeared. Another page, I had headed with two vintage nude beach photos I’d Googled, one a woman and one a man, in remarkably symmetrical positions; in the printed version the man had had his colours inverted to turn him into a photographic negative.</p>
<p>Something bothered me about that, I realized, and it wasn’t just gender politics. My versions of the pages had held an appeal for me that was now missing. I wanted to see two men sharing a shower. I wanted to see a male model nude on a beach. I had inadvertently performed a controlled experiment, and the result was significant: I liked men.</p>
<p>Not long afterwards a new science book about sex got in the news: Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s <em>A Billion Wicked Thoughts</em>. I’ve since read it, and I’m only half impressed. They go off on all kinds of flights of evolutionary fancy that aren’t warranted by their research. But the research itself is legit. (I think. I may be biased by the fact that their depiction of male sexuality happens to capture my own to a T, which may not mirror the experience of other readers.)</p>
<p>And one finding that got into the media was that men all over the world like penises, as evidenced by their internet porn searches. Did that mean – could I – was I <em>allowed</em>—?</p>
<p>So I tried looking at myself without the “I am heterosexual” lens I’d been defensively clutching, and discovered that yes, everything fell neatly into place. I didn’t immediately leap to “I am bisexual”; I did what I think many starting self-explorers have done and coined a new term for myself.</p>
<p>That term was “sesquisexual”, from the Latin <em>sesqui</em> “one and a half”. I still felt that it would be presumptuous to claim a bisexual identity, for the reasons described above, and also because (despite the emphasis I’ve placed on them here) my attractions to men have never overshadowed my attractions to women, and I thought “bisexual” implied “roughly 50-50”.</p>
<p>(It doesn’t, by the way. If you have <em>any</em> attraction to more than one gender, you get to call yourself bisexual if that feels like it fits.)</p>
<p>I gave up “sesquisexual” without ever having tried to make it happen when I discovered that unfamiliar LGBT terms – <em>dyadic</em>, <em>lunarian</em>, <em>quoiromantic</em>, and the like – made me anxious. (“What if I’m not really bisexual after all and I’m one of these things instead and I’ve got it all wrong and made a fool of myself and blundered into spaces that aren’t mine to enter...?”) I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, so I decided not to add to the confusion.</p>
<p>I spent a few years dropping kind of awkward hints on this blog, because I kind of wanted people to know but jump over to the bit where they’d already accepted it. Then in October 2016 somebody had apparently decided it was Coming Out Day and a meme came down my Facebook feed saying “Hello, I Am Bisexual”, to look like a name-badge, and it had a <span class="cybertext">Share</span> button.</p>
<p>I sat looking at it for at least ten minutes, breathing deeply. But in the end I reasoned that there was not going to be a <em>better</em> time to come out, and I clicked <span class="cybertext">Share</span> before I could overthink it.</p>
<p>In the couple of years since, I’ve been getting more comfortable identifying as bisexual at least online. During that time I’ve come to realize that it was never about “Those strange bisexual people – I have to be one of them now.” It is and always was “These experiences that are so familiar to me – that’s what ‘bisexual’ always meant.”</p>
<p>Now I want to draw a couple of lessons to justify this long diversion into my personal life. If you’re in a similar situation, you are under no obligation to come out to anybody else if it would make you unsafe or disrupt your relationships or even if you’re just not comfortable with it. That’s your choice. But I want you to know that there is nothing whatever to be gained by trying to fool <em>yourself</em>. Be honest. Look yourself in the mirror and call yourself what you are. I wish I had done it ten years earlier than I did. That’s the first one.</p>
<p>And second, ignorance and misinformation on this topic do active harm to children and adolescents, far more than could plausibly accrue from whatever knowledge you might be trying to shield them from.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-42792840225980814712019-01-12T07:40:00.000-08:002019-01-12T15:28:13.088-08:00Why nudity is worth defending<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href=https://elvertbarnes-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/06/4th-world-naked-bike-ride-streaks.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPzMlQ9nFYW7IL9mE1n-zBnB46FrOhLsF_nYy9UIEgmMcKh-46DHS4bPVwWgJe3EJfZUMbVdCsNXDeWwZar8MtVUzL1CVp5wW-6-PHleCKEdGW9yfzKXdDuyDEQVrQiB-xTu_7UzU0W6AQ/s1600/wnbr_whitehouse.jpg" width="512" height="333" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="665" title="Riders in the 2009 World Naked Bike Ride pause in front of the White House" alt="Riders in the 2009 World Naked Bike Ride pause in front of the White House" /></a></div>
<p>Nudity ought to be legal and accepted everywhere it is physically safe. The fact that it is not is a societal injustice. I know most of you aren’t going to agree straight off the bat, so let me lay out my reasoning and see what you think.</p>
<p>Admittedly, it’s not a <em>major</em> societal injustice. There are other injustices with more dire consequences for more people, that more deeply undermine our ability to trust each other and are more urgent priorities. Relatively few people share my autistic sensory aversions to clothing, and those aversions don’t usually rise above the level of mild discomfort unless it gets very hot or the clothing in question is wet. (Swimming-togs feel like knives cutting me.) But most of the time, I think, struggles against different injustices help rather than hinder one another. Raising people’s awareness of one injustice makes them more alert to other injustices, not less. It isn’t a competition.</p>
<p>First point: People deserve a degree of respect simply on account of being people. That includes being able to go about one’s daily business without harassment from one’s fellow citizens. There is no amount of clothing one might wear or not wear that would make one <em>deserve</em> to be yelled at, ogled, pelted with rubbish, or chased off the streets. It is therefore unfair to yell at someone, ogle them, throw things at them, or chase them away because of what they might choose to wear or not to wear.</p>
<p>Second point: Injustice is fundamentally the same thing as unfairness. We just tend to reserve the weightier word for when there are graver consequences, such as when discrimination is enforced by the police or when it prevents people from participating fully in society. Therefore, if people are threatened with arrest or prevented from participating in society due to what they are wearing or not wearing, that is an injustice. If the law allows or prescribes for it, the law is unjust.</p>
<p>Third point: People are in fact harassed, arrested, and ejected from public places if they go nude. We’ve just agreed that this would be an injustice if it happened; well, it <em>does</em> happen, and therefore it <em>is</em> an injustice.</p>
<p>Finally, this particular injustice is enforced by society as a whole, not just by officers of the law. That makes it a <em>societal</em> injustice. The fact that nudity is not legal or acceptable is a societal injustice. There you go.</p>
<p>Somehow this is easier to see when the body taboo in question is that of a culture that isn’t our own – when it’s Arab police forcing women into hijab or French police forcing them out of it, Victorian missionaries imposing Western clothing on Pacific Islanders or that one group of Pacific Islanders (the Kwaio on Malaita in the Solomons) who impose toplessness on Western visitors. But an injustice is an injustice, and it is in the nature of societal injustices that they feel like ordinary common sense to enculturated members of the societies that enforce them. Which would include ours. Which means that just because wearing clothes feels like ordinary common sense to us, doesn’t mean that it’s not a societal injustice.</p>
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<p>Now, how serious an injustice is it? Is anyone seriously hurt by having to wear clothes (obviously not counting us autistics and our autistic sensory issues which make us, as we are reminded daily, such a nuisance to normal people)? Well, there are a couple of problems that I think are bound up with it.</p>
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<p>One concerns body image. Many people hate their bodies and live with misery over their perceived bodily flaws. Negative body image has been plausibly implicated in potentially life-threatening eating disorders. And negative body image appears to be connected with the fact that we only get to see a narrow range of highly idealized human bodies in the media – the ever-encroaching and ever more visually flamboyant media, as it becomes ever defter at Photoshopping out the imperfect. It’s reasonable to suppose that if we were able to see what real, non-idealized bodies actually look like, it would take a lot of the pressure off.</p>
<p>Except we don’t have to suppose it any more, because it’s been confirmed by research. A <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9846-1">2018 study</a> in the <em>Journal of Happiness Studies</em> found that participation in naturist activities had a significant positive effect on body image, which in turn had strong positive effects on self-esteem and life satisfaction. In line with the hypothesis we’ve just proposed, it appears to be seeing other people naked, rather than being naked oneself, that produces the positive effect.</p>
<p>It’s hardly news, of course, that body image is a problem in our society. For decades we’ve had public health campaigns and inspirational memes trying to counteract the problem by telling us to “Love your body, it’s beautiful!” I must point out that when you add in the societal prejudice against nudity, you get the composite message “Love your body, it’s beautiful, but wrap it in cloth because it’s disgusting!” – the inconsistency of which, I can’t help thinking, probably has a lot to do with why the idea isn’t catching on as well as we’d have hoped.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><a href="https://roseaposey.tumblr.com/post/39795409283/judgments" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiByvV-PJq0msIiri3ehkealbK6mVSjdvM49g39d7jnb6fGIZnLkPD1G6MjEM4EDuz867Nap3cQQWj9PGD7BID0CXB-UvzMDRQ_ohsiIaeym2O4K-dPiiGpGjKAknAfh6VBk4IcSuCz9sTh/s320/judgments_rosealake.jpg" width="237" height="400" data-original-width="1143" data-original-height="1600" title="Rosea Lake’s 2012 photograph “Judgments”: a woman’s leg marked with skirt length labels from “matronly” and “prudish” on the calf up to “asking for it”, “slut”, and “whore” at the buttock" alt="Rosea Lake’s 2012 photograph “Judgments”: a woman’s leg marked with skirt length labels from “matronly” and “prudish” on the calf up to “asking for it”, “slut”, and “whore” at the buttock" /></a></div><p>Second, there’s the excuse we still continue to make for sexual assault and rape. “She was asking for it, dressed like that.” “What did she expect, going out with practically nothing on?” “You can’t blame him, she wasn’t leaving much to the imagination.” “Sexually assaulted, you say. What were you wearing?” ...and on and on and on. There is no evidence to support any connection between one’s choice of attire and one’s risk of being attacked, and yet the myth persists.</p>
<p>Why? If there’s no connection in reality, what fools people into thinking there is one? Consider what girls get told from their pre-teen years on: “Don’t wear your skirt too high or your neck-line too low or your leggings too tight or your sundress too loose or your crop-top too brief or your shoulders too exposed, because it’s ‘distracting’ to men.” Let’s be clear on this. The problem isn’t that men think women’s bodies are nice, which is just as well because there’s no way to change that (no, covering them up doesn’t work). The problem is that men think women’s bodies are permission.</p>
<p>Why do men think women’s bodies are permission? There are several contributing factors, such as that many more men still see women as lesser beings than will admit it. But it can’t be helpful that our culture considers some parts of the human body to be inherently sexual regardless of the intentions of their owner. Once you accept that, the rest is just quibbling over where to draw the boundaries.</p>
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<p>After grumbling on Facebook recently about having been unable to cool off at a summer music festival because of families with kids using both swimming-holes, I had a friend earnestly explain (thereby inspiring me to write this article) that it was an issue of social norms, however outmoded those social norms might be. I mean, I know social norms do go over my head quite often, but this particular one forces me into discomfort every day of my life, and even I can’t miss that. In any case, it kind of proves my point. It <em>is</em> a social norm. An unjust social norm is a societal injustice. That’s exactly the problem.</p>
<p>The question at issue was: how does social nudity sit with the consent ethic? Sexual activity morally requires the continuing consent of all participants, including any onlookers. Nudity is widely <em>perceived</em> as sexual even when it isn’t intended sexually. Does it follow that nudity therefore requires consent from every onlooker who perceives it as sexual?</p>
<p>Before you answer “yes,” consider what that implies in the light of what we were just discussing a moment ago. Short skirts, visible cleavage, skin-tight clothing, and bare midriffs are all perceived as sexual by some people. For that matter, existing while young and female is perceived as sexual by some people. If being perceived as sexual is our standard for seeking consent, then logically we’re going to end up requiring all young women to ask people’s permission to enter public spaces while lightly dressed. That would contradict the principle of bodily autonomy which is the foundation of the consent ethic.</p>
<p>Which was where social norms came in. I don’t imagine that my friend meant that consent is required before you deviate from any social norm, because in that case I’d be in serious trouble. I think the idea was that you’re supposed to seek people’s consent for things that are generally perceived, according to prevailing social norms, to be sexual – including nudity.</p>
<p>There’s nothing unreasonable, given the current state of society, about asking consent before taking your clothes off. But remember, the consent ethic is founded upon bodily autonomy, and bodily autonomy should not wait upon social norms. Imagine a society where it is the norm for young women to stay cloistered indoors because their presence is deemed too provocative for public spaces. If a young woman in that society defies the norm and walks down the main street visibly female, many of the men who see her will unfortunately have sexual thoughts about her. The society in question may well respond by arresting her or worse. Is she doing anything <em>morally</em> wrong?</p>
<p>Now by focusing on women and on issues that disproportionately affect women, you may feel that I’m evading a significant point. Male nudity is a bit different. The way our society sees it, female nudity is an invitation, but male nudity is a threat. And not an entirely imaginary threat either, I’m afraid. Some men use it as a form of sexual harassment. But there’s every difference between merely having visibly ungloved hands and actively shaking your fist in someone’s face, and that distinction applies equally to other body parts.</p>
<p>Or it would, if those body parts were a common sight. As it is, indecent exposure owes its power to the shock value of the naked body. Take that shock value away by normalizing nudity, and these men have lost their biggest weapon. Even in the law (though the law is an ass) what’s forbidden, in New Zealand at least, is to display one’s genitals “intentionally <em>and obscenely</em>”. Which implies, since every word in the law is there for a reason, that it is possible to display one’s genitals not obscenely.</p>
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<p>After all that talk about injustice and morals and principles I imagine you’re expecting me to come out with some dramatic call to arms, but you can relax. I mean, if you <em>want</em> to do big nude protests and so on I will support you all the way, of course. But there’s a thing that happens on the internet when people set out to combat societal or political injustices, where you can get accused of being in favour of the injustice if you don’t oppose it enthusiastically enough. I promise I won’t start that. If you, unlike me, are comfortable wearing clothes, and social nudity is not practical or not safe for you or you just don’t feel like doing it, then don’t.</p>
<p>That mentality is not at all restricted to the social justice crowd. It’s also how social norms, including unjust ones, get enforced. In extreme cases you can find groups where <em>every single member</em> privately admits that the norm is stupid, but publicly maintains it – and helps enforce it on other group members – because everyone thinks that everyone else believes in it. I don’t think the nudity taboo is quite at that point yet. But if you bring the topic up in private conversation, many more people than you’d think will admit that of course there’s nothing wrong with human bodies really, it’s just that they don’t want “that” sort of reputation.</p>
<p>Things are changing. Given that it was Europe that imposed the nudity taboo on so much of the world, there’s an irony in the fact that Europe is now the most nudity-friendly region. In America Christianity remains largely a force for conservatism, yet the American Christian naturist movement is much bigger than anyone would suspect who is a Christian or a naturist but not both. (I’ve been both, but not at the same time.)</p>
<p>The bad news is that norms don’t change by themselves; they change when people who realize that they need to change, do something about it. And while they’re changing, anyone who was enculturated to the old norm – that is, anyone who thought “This is normality, this is the way things are supposed to be” – feels uncomfortable about it because now things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be any more.</p>
<p>Which is understandable and I’m sure we can all find it in our hearts to ease the way for them; but when all is said and done, it isn’t a good enough reason to preserve societal injustices. Lots of people were very uncomfortable when the gay rights movement started becoming mainstream for much the same reason that they’re uncomfortable now about nudity; gayness was inappropriately sexual, something that could be tolerated behind closed doors and exploited for risqué comedy but needed to be kept off the public streets and away from children. That wasn’t a good reason to oppose gay rights and it isn’t a good reason to oppose social nudity.</p>
<p>So while I’m not asking you to defy the anti-nudity norm yourself and get naked and march in the streets unless you want to, I <em>am</em> asking you to stop enforcing the norm unless I have completely failed to convince you and you still genuinely believe that nudity is a bad thing. Don’t report nude photos on Facebook. Don’t tut over celebrities wearing revealing outfits to big public events. Don’t react with disgust, or prurience either, if someone has a wardrobe malfunction and shows more skin than is conventionally acceptable. And if someone tries to shock you with gossip about a mutual acquaintance doing life modelling or going to a nude beach or whatever, ask them straight out “What’s wrong with that?”</p>
<p>Let me leave you with this Petrarchan sonnet I wrote to sum up my feelings on the subject:</p>
<blockquote><em>Naked I came into this world of flesh at the same door that’s common to all birth, to find I could not walk upon the earth untrammelled by this clinging textile mesh. Reveal a human body, show afresh its ordinariness in all its worth – society’s horror, lust, and scornful mirth make an obscenity of guiltless flesh. No, I do not accept their useless shroud, upheld by, and upholding, that old stern deception whereby skin for sin is blamed. I’ll push the boundaries of what’s allowed, so future generations in their turn may then go naked and go unashamed.</em></blockquote>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-22284622255725761672018-12-27T22:50:00.000-08:002018-12-27T22:50:12.765-08:00The imminent and well-deserved demise of Tumblr<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Coming_Out_of_Her_Well" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg3VAlWhQNxPe6l_KN0EMLkTBQCUJE7Nc2pBaEV7Lny3y3cCeNqph8UorzKm_9TPNiw-SwwngpMxnIllm0nuSbn1sM-UuDzHaR9bLnjW4WrWKC0XqMKHX132YXpHyGxqrfDE-wc_5cKDxq/s1600/truth.JPG" data-original-width="470" data-original-height="600" title="Truth Coming Out Of Her Well to Shame Mankind" alt="Truth Coming Out Of Her Well to Shame Mankind" /></a></div>
<p>On 3 December Tumblr announced it was getting rid of adult content, starting in two weeks from the announcement. Tumblr management has never been competent at the best of times, but this takes the cake. This will kill the site.</p>
<p>Those of you who don’t have Tumblr accounts will scarcely imagine what a dumpster-fire this is. Just to start with, the main draw of Tumblr was that it was the one social media site that allowed adult content. What Tumblr has just done is basically what I’ve seen a couple of local hospitality businesses do – a pub on the Otago University campus years ago, and a café in Port Chalmers more recently. Both had quirky art-work that gave them an alternative vibe; both were bought by new owners who removed the quirky art-work and tried to rebrand them as bland mainstream venues; both promptly went out of business. The campus pub was eventually revived by a competent proprietor; the Port café is currently sitting empty, a monument to the folly of erasing a successful enterprise’s main point of distinctiveness. The same fate awaits Tumblr.</p>
<p>I was on Tumblr for nearly two years. My original hope, when I joined, was to spread <em>this</em> blog a little further, since after six years I have exactly two followers here. This was not to be, because Tumblr’s search software passes over posts that contain links to other sites – far from the only way in which Tumblr fails its users – which meant that the links to this blog were only seen by those few of my followers who happened to be online at the moment I posted the links. Additionally, I gained Tumblr followers relatively slowly; I think my peak following, after two years, was 182 including spambots. I think this may have been because I declared on my blog header that I was a nudist but didn’t intend to post any nude photos, which lost me both the people who think nudism is skeevy and the people who want to see nude photos. But I can’t be sure.</p>
<p>(Tumblr advertises itself as being good for artists. How are they any good for artists if they make posts with external links non-searchable, you might wonder, so that artists can <em>either</em> get their art seen <em>or</em> link to places where people can pay them for it, but not both? Well, they aren’t, that’s how. And yet, so many of us put up with them, until now.)</p>
<p>The announcement came in the form of an official letter from the Tumblr staff account, which I would go through and point out all the lies except that it’s <em>all</em> lies. The new guidelines ban, and I quote, “images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples,” in case you were wondering why the phrase “female-presenting nipples” became a commonly repeated joke in early December. So Tumblr is apparently enlightened enough to talk in terms of gender “presentation”, and yet reactionary enough to frame femaleness as inherently more sexual than maleness. Remember, this is not an <em>old</em> policy. This is a policy devised in 2018 by the curators of one of the internet’s biggest platforms for feminist and LGBT content.</p>
<p>Most of us first knew something was going wrong on 16 November, when the Tumblr app disappeared from Apple’s App Store. For those like me who used Tumblr on our computers rather than on mobile, the first sign was when Tumblr responded by suddenly making huge numbers of posts non-searchable, based on their tags – not just things like <span class="cybertext">#NSFW</span> and <span class="cybertext">#nudity</span> but hundreds more, some quite inexplicable. I never did find out why we suddenly couldn’t search for <span class="cybertext">#chronic pain</span>. Meanwhile, posts tagged with things like <span class="cybertext">#white supremacy</span> and <span class="cybertext">#white genocide</span> continued to pop up in search results.</p>
<p>Our first thought was that this was a ham-fisted attempt to deal with the exponentially-increasing nuisance of pornographic spambots. Any post on any subject at all whose count of responses reached five digits would suddenly start getting reblogged by porn-themed accounts with generic comments like “Cool, see my site here.” You could report and block, report and block, report and block, and new bots would keep on coming. They weren’t intended to attract the eyes of the bloggers they were harassing, but to piggyback off them to hoist their coders’ porn sites up the Google search rankings. You see, the way Tumblr works, if you reblog a post and add a caption, then there is now a link to your blog from every other blog that has also reblogged that post. If thousands of people have reblogged it then that’s thousands of links, all from legitimate content-bearing webpages that real people read, and that’s what Google’s search algorithms look for. So our first response was: well, yay that the staff are doing <em>something</em> about this at last, but they need to get a lot smarter about it, please.</p>
<p>Of course we were quite mistaken to think Tumblr management had suddenly started caring about their users’ experience of the site. The pornbot coders wised up within a week or two and reprogrammed their bots to use the tag <span class="cybertext">#SFW</span> and no unsearchable tags, which it turned out was all it took to get past the algorithms. Those of us who conscientiously tagged Pre-Raphaelite paintings as <span class="cybertext">#nudity</span> (so people could filter them out on their work computer just in case their boss looking over their shoulder got the wrong idea) continued to be punished for our honesty.</p>
<p>The next hypothesis was that it was about the child porn, and that does seem to be what sparked Apple’s ire. Tumblr’s strategy for dealing with paedophiles was exactly the same as their strategy for dealing with Nazis, to wit “have a <span class="cybertext">Block</span> function and let the users do all the work”. I’m glad to say I never saw any myself, but many other users had been making complaints to the staff about the problem for years, with the same results as every other complaint to the staff. Getting dropped from the App Store, now <em>that</em> was something they cared about.</p>
<p>But while the App Store incident undoubtedly fast-tracked the adult content ban, the truth is it had been coming for months. Like many other social media platforms, Tumblr’s business plan is to hire out their users’ eyeballs to advertisers. They evidently noticed that their site was getting popular with the social justice crowd and in particular the Black Lives Matter movement, and they apparently had a big plan in the works to capitalize on that. And many advertisers baulk at the idea of people seeing their ads right next to GIFs of sex acts. So the nudity had to go. We used to think that if Tumblr had just one virtue, it was that they understood that not all nudity is sexual and not everything sexual is degrading; now it turns out they just didn’t care about being degrading until there was money in it.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/TMW2018-08-22colorLARGE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghr3L1PS3Ew6mQ1E-PkUmKgSDrWdnO7tCM9212PgY1HKJZM6ZZoe0RuY9-Mc_0Pm0BO0YRp_lEMAOEQaelXQzixziEomeUR3tb72fvEPW5LZDF1fZ1e9ArYclgASDuxe3SgNtabyBxZAub/s1600/tomtomorrow.jpg" data-original-width="284" data-original-height="380" /></a></div>
<p>On top of all that, there’s a draconian piece of legislation coming into force in the United States next year called SESTA/FOSTA – I can’t be bothered looking up the acronyms but the ST in both halves stands for “sex trafficking”. Nobody with any human decency could oppose stopping sex trafficking, which makes it the perfect pretext for interest groups pushing less creditable agendas. Under the new law, social media hosts based in the US will be liable for allowing sexual solicitation on their sites, even unknowingly, even if it’s just one ad. This is why Facebook, from next month on, is going to start cracking down on anything that could remotely be interpreted as a sexual invitation, up to and including posts consisting of “looking for a good time tonight ;)”. This legislation will incidentally stifle discussion of sexuality or sexual orientation in social media; I’m pretty sure that’s a plus as far as its originators are concerned, but it might come as an unpleasant surprise for some of its more liberal supporters.</p>
<p>How deleting Facebook posts saying “looking for a good time tonight ;)” will contribute to stopping sex trafficking is: it won’t. But at least Facebook understands that you need human intervention to make this sort of thing work. Tumblr think they’re going to accomplish it with software, and indeed with ludicrously simplistic software. They’ve promised that nude paintings and breastfeeding photos and news articles about nude protests will be safe once they get their programs properly trained, but the algorithm they’re using could not possibly make such fine distinctions even if you trained them on all the data on the internet for a thousand years. You may have seen funny Facebook posts about the photo-captioning AI, trained on pictures of fields of sheep, that tagged all fields as “sheep” and failed to recognise sheep in any other context. It’s the same algorithm.</p>
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<p><strong>Nude images follow.</strong><a name='more'></a></p>
<p>Just to add insult to injury, the day the adult content ban came into force was 17 December 2018, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Presumably many of the supporters of SESTA/FOSTA belonged to that well-meaning subset of the population who think sex workers are best protected by stopping them doing sex work, and some to the overlapping subset who think sex work is sex trafficking by definition. But if you care about protecting vulnerable people you need to listen to them when they tell you what will and won’t protect them, and sex workers are unequivocal that these laws won’t protect them.</p>
<blockquote>These laws don’t do what they’re designed to do. They don’t stop trafficking, they actually make it harder to find victims... Also turns out if you remove sites used to screen clients, pimps spring up offering safe client lists. Removing advertising also forces sex workers out onto street corners.<br />
We’re about 160% as likely to be murdered as you are to get the clap, and about 4× as likely to be murdered as you are to go to the hospital for the flu. Consider... giving a shit about those numbers, maybe. That’d be nice.<br />
<br />
<em>That’s awful. How come people still do it despite the overwhelming danger?</em><br />
<br />
Because we’re locked in a cycle of criminalization with résumé gaps, limited access to education and resources, hugely affected by classism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny, and kind of have no other options if we don’t want to die, Brenda.<br />
<br />
“...Why are you so rude to civilians about sex work?”<br />
Because of the countless [messages] I get saying that any violence I experience is my own fault for being a criminal in the first place – sometimes this includes being trafficked as a minor – and if I don’t want to get raped I should just get a real job since nobody’s making me work corners now.<br />
Because the only time I’ve ever heard civilians talking about our safety even in the most left-aligned circles is when they’ve decided to take on the <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/sam-okyere-essi-thesslund/false-promise-of-nordic-model-of-sex-work">Nordic model</a>, and a couple days ago when a few people decided to throw in “sex workers on Tumblr” as a reason to get angry about the NSFW ban while having never said a word about us before.<br />
Because half of the people on twitter talking about SESTA/FOSTA have decided the primary issue is homophobia, not even bothering to nod at the whorephobia the entire bill was built and passed on.<br />
Because every “good ally” civilian complains about how meanly I word my posts, because they care about us and I don’t have to be so aggressive, it makes them not want to help us.<br />
Because even other sex workers treat people like me like shit and I am tired, I am so fucking tired of being friendly about this. I used to be! I used to be so fucking kind about this and what I got for it was this.<br />
So yeah, I’m gonna keep being snide about our death statistics. Because that’s what me being mean is, see, it’s saying “Maybe care about the fact we’re being murdered.” It’s not suicide baiting, it’s not telling people they should get raped, it’s not even calling them rude words. That’s the shit y’all throw at me.<br />
All I’m doing is making you a little uncomfortable, and you know what? You deserve to be.</blockquote>
<p>Those are the words of a person who was a sex trafficking victim as a minor, and is now a sex worker. If a person in that position says that cracking down on online solicitation isn’t going to help sex workers or sex trafficking victims, I’m sorry, I’m going to believe them. In case you missed it, the central point about online platforms is that they allow workers to screen out potentially dangerous clients without having to make any physical contact with them or rely on a pimp.</p>
<p>So why social media? There are sites specifically dedicated to sex services; why can’t sex workers use those instead? Because they are just as untrustworthy as the pimps, and for the same reason. Sex work is illegal nearly everywhere, so sex workers have no legal recourse against employers who steal from them, which the porn sites accordingly do. Yes, including that one that’s been selling itself lately as being enlightened and socially aware. <em>Especially</em> that one. Tumblr’s anything-goes adult content policy allowed sex workers to cut out middlemen of every variety. Not any more.</p>
<p>As I say, nobody with any decency could oppose stopping sex trafficking. And it would be hard to disagree with the statement that nobody ought to be forced into sex work by their economic circumstances. But if someone <em>has</em> ended up having to choose between a bed some stranger pays them to share and no bed at all, taking the bed away by force of law isn’t going to do them any good.</p>
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<p>I’m bisexual. It’s been seven or eight years now since I admitted this to myself and my partner; four since I quietly sneaked a mention of it into a discussion on this blog of something else; only two since I announced it on Facebook (by sharing a coming-out meme). It’s not a coincidence that two years is also about the length of time I had a Tumblr account for. I haven’t yet found another place where I can hang out with other bisexual people and get past the discomfort that still clings to the topic when you’re in the straight world.</p>
<p>Yes, yes, we’ve all heard it many many times. “I have nothing against gay people but I wish they wouldn’t keep shoving it in my face.” The thing is, every queer person quickly finds that for many of those who say this, any visibility whatsoever counts as “shoving it in their face”. I’ve seen such complaints erupt on a webcomic forum after one character in the comic expressed the hope that her son would find “a nice gal or fella to settle down with” – nothing more than that. Those two passing words “or fella” apparently constituted “shoving it in people’s faces.” Three years later one of the disputants is still coming back to vandalize the webcomic’s Wikipedia page.</p>
<p>In consequence, LGBT content on any broad public forum – material as innocuous as two women holding hands – gets relentlessly flagged as “adult”. We’ve seen this on YouTube and I believe Twitter as well. I don’t think their web programmers hard-coded them to automatically send the <span class="cybertext">#gay</span> and <span class="cybertext">#lesbian</span> tags to This Post May Contain Sensitive Content jail; I think homophobic users did the flagging and the algorithms noticed the correlation and finished the job. Again, on Tumblr nobody cared, until now. That’s why Tumblr became the home of the online LGBT community. Which was not without its negatives – you should have seen the endless sniping over whether asexual people belong in the community, or whether the word “queer” is a slur – but still, it was a place to be. Now all that is going away, and with it Tumblr’s hopes of monetizing the social justice movement.</p>
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<p>And then there’s us nudists. Now I didn’t post nude photos on Tumblr until the ban was announced, after which I did it in protest for the remaining two weeks before deleting my account; but everything I said above about finding a place where I can be open about my bisexuality goes a hundredfold for being open about my nudism. No, I can’t just choose not to be a nudist, because I have sensory issues with clothing, probably due to my autism, especially in hot weather. But if it’s difficult to be openly bisexual in today’s society, it is flat impossible to be openly a nudist. We have no allies who’ll help us raise a stink when our lives are cloistered away behind <span class="cybertext">#NSFW</span> filters, which we must therefore just grit and bear. Tumblr was a place where you could mingle in general society as a nudist. Not any more.</p>
<p>Of course, Tumblr management being the incompetents that they are, we also had no recourse when people came in sexualizing our lifestyle and reblogging our images amongst porn and voyeur shots, which was why I had that no-nude-photos policy. Still, we had a space where we could be ourselves amongst other people and just occasionally demonstrate to them that we’re just like everyone else except for not wearing clothes. Now that’s gone.</p>
<p>It’s not just nudists who are hurt by this. Plenty of people who aren’t committed to the lifestyle still like getting their kit off in the open air now and then, not for sexual purposes but just because it feels better. Plenty of people whose bodies don’t fit our culture’s constricting norms of what’s attractive found strength in taking photos displaying their uniquenesses without shame. Casual nudity and body positivity shade into full-on nudism without a sharp boundary. But all of that is only possible in an environment where you can be reasonably sure your body won’t be either censored or sexualized. Most social media sites censor it by default; those that allow nudity allow it only behind the Adult Content curtain, where it is exposed to being sexualized. Tumblr was the exception – not that you wouldn’t be sexualized, but other decent people would have your back. All gone.</p>
<p>Here are some examples of the sort of thing that could only have happened on Tumblr. All of them were flagged unsuitable in the fortnight leading up to the ban. The first is a whimsical photo taken in a fleeting (and certainly not sexual) moment, and yet its impact would be completely blunted if any kind of censorship were applied:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWb2Uog3VvQ-BXnbnj3pRK3OWKhhs-1rMX_D1G7rQe46syQkFNbXO7zXkcwW2cEKpE0WTynnZoi4zSmzcd1KJvVgRqx_iJ7ekK2KLcsBBfm89_tCxL79mAMZJY2_iwsrzxgMbzFsgi_xrl/s1600/butterfly.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWb2Uog3VvQ-BXnbnj3pRK3OWKhhs-1rMX_D1G7rQe46syQkFNbXO7zXkcwW2cEKpE0WTynnZoi4zSmzcd1KJvVgRqx_iJ7ekK2KLcsBBfm89_tCxL79mAMZJY2_iwsrzxgMbzFsgi_xrl/s320/butterfly.png" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="540" data-original-height="720" title="A butterfly alights on a young woman’s breast in the sunshine" alt="A butterfly alights on a young woman’s breast in the sunshine" /></a></div>
<p>Here’s a body positivity shot. Consider the story this person’s body tells and the courage it must have taken to tell it this way.
A clothed shot, even with the clothing adjusted to display the scar, just wouldn’t convey the same message:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibxCVLualAQ5riz9tEWaTFkL_TIKr6G5Nrjkg2E6IkhDlO972eHzDLYnsjOmp14jFCl5yU7WcrbCXDT9rvDtaUh4I4gbhImGLonX8H28InF0f_uLrn9t-8k9b9wjZhJI8Z-qJd7iBA-zTW/s1600/mastectomy.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibxCVLualAQ5riz9tEWaTFkL_TIKr6G5Nrjkg2E6IkhDlO972eHzDLYnsjOmp14jFCl5yU7WcrbCXDT9rvDtaUh4I4gbhImGLonX8H28InF0f_uLrn9t-8k9b9wjZhJI8Z-qJd7iBA-zTW/s320/mastectomy.jpg" width="213" height="320" data-original-width="540" data-original-height="810" title="A nude woman poses to reveal her mastectomy scar" alt="A nude woman poses to reveal her mastectomy scar" /></a></div>
<p>And finally, a photo with far less artistic merit, but again certainly with no sexual content. The point here is that this is just an ordinary day in an ordinary life – a beach visit in summer. Nothing remarkable about it except for the absence of clothing – which is exactly the point:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS3cbpYezMlgh8sM5LnnVj_9WZtNIWsM4Q53fCdhDZGadJMzhv3Q_62EKIBHtsjLVkKrdg8bxsRZLtAPhOFe1rPru6uaSGRfKeaMrzAZrACm7_E_b3RTdv2strMcSbpFcNPUe8ppSiL3Cf/s1600/myself.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS3cbpYezMlgh8sM5LnnVj_9WZtNIWsM4Q53fCdhDZGadJMzhv3Q_62EKIBHtsjLVkKrdg8bxsRZLtAPhOFe1rPru6uaSGRfKeaMrzAZrACm7_E_b3RTdv2strMcSbpFcNPUe8ppSiL3Cf/s320/myself.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="375" title="Me nude at Pūrākaunui Beach on my 40th birthday" alt="Me nude at Pūrākaunui Beach on my 40th birthday" /></a></div>
<p>Now that people know what they’re missing, I think there’s hope that we’ll get a new platform within a year or two. In the longer term, we’re going to keep having this kind of problem until there’s a fundamental shift in society’s attitude to bodies and sexuality. We thought Tumblr was helping facilitate that shift, if only through apathy. I’m still annoyed (maybe you can tell) that they’ve fallen through. But now that I know how far you can trust them, I won’t be going back.</p>
Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-62511342991826877402018-10-04T20:29:00.002-07:002018-10-04T21:35:46.879-07:00Cannabis<style type="text/css">
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<p>So it turns out the Otago University Proctor has been burgling student flats and nicking people’s bongs. There was a big protest against him last week, which I sadly couldn’t attend due to a class. I remember a time when the student libertarians could make common cause with us campus Lefties on cannabis decriminalization, if nothing else, but all the right-swinging commentary I’ve seen on the issue this week has been of the bog-standard cookie-cutter “if you think this is abuse of power go live in North Korea” variety.</p>
<p>It is morally wrong for a person in authority to break into people’s private spaces and remove things unless their authority is specifically and publicly constituted to grant them the power to do that, and the Proctor’s is not. This follows so straightforwardly from the trust principle that I can’t be bothered laying it all out. It is equally clearly morally wrong to constitute <em>any</em> authority to give its bearer the power to break into people’s private spaces and remove things unless the things in question pose sufficient risk of harm in that space to outweigh the breach of trust occasioned by the break-in. Any law which grants (for example) the police such powers is an immoral law and ought to be both changed and, until it is changed, resisted. Again, taking the trust principle as the basis of morality, which I do, that follows as night follows day. And I’ve argued the trust-morality connection over and over again on this blog, so I shall skip over that too. The only remaining question, and the topic of this post, is: does cannabis pose a risk of greater harm than is caused by arrests, seizures, prison sentences, and permanent criminal records?</p>
<p>The answer to that question is as follows:</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Well, that was easy. See you next ti—</p>
<p>...oh, all <em>right</em>. Here, have a graph. If you click it, the link will take you to the data behind it.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Development_of_a_rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_of_potential_misuse_(physical_harm_and_dependence,_NA_free_means).svg#Data" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEsSooTTlr67f2nr5_yRORPPyRcVVnoRixJvqhtGFgCmpPFxajtmIV01d9VjtIIjQwPawPvAvotvk0Yj3a11LuT_-lNlBy-vvleLryRX-cVFqeahUK4gai6kil-b607V4G8cplgOT7LqMG/s1600/drugharm.jpg" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="600" /></a></div>
<p>There are exactly <em>zero</em> confirmed cases of death from cannabis use – in stark contrast with alcohol and tobacco, both of which are legal. For addictiveness it’s roughly on a par with caffeine. It is associated with the same sorts of respiratory injuries that tobacco is, but that’s (as far as researchers can tell) because it’s delivered as a smoke and so comes along with tars and similarly harmful products of combustion. Hence if your drug laws are to have any semblance of logic or consistency, either you must allow cannabis or you must ban alcohol and tobacco. And if you’re thinking about the latter option, the United States already tried that with alcohol and it was a disaster.</p>
<p>Cannabis does bring a heightened risk of developing schizophrenia if it’s heavily consumed in adolescence. That, I’ll grant you. And it is reasonable to ask how, once legalized, it would be kept out of the hands of teenagers, given that the surest way to get teenagers to try something is to tell them it’s for adults only, as the tobacco companies know to their tremendous profit. But I’ll tell you a big secret: prohibition isn’t keeping it out of the hands of teenagers either. If you sell a substance legally, you’ll probably think twice about selling it to under-age people because that’ll get you in trouble. If it’s a prohibited substance you’re in trouble anyway, so why narrow your market?</p>
<p>The damping effects of cannabis on motivation are much better-known than the medical evidence for them actually warrants. Part of the problem is that people assume the cause upon seeing the effect. I have long hair that I can’t seem to get the knots out of, and I don’t wear shoes much, and so I have often been asked by complete strangers where they can score some pot in Dunedin; whereas you probably wouldn’t make that assumption of an internationally successful scientist and author like, say, <a href="https://blog.seattlepi.com/marijuana/2014/10/23/carl-sagans-long-lost-deep-thoughts-on-marijuana-and-the-war-on-drugs/">Carl Sagan</a>. On the handful of occasions when I have smoked pot, I’ve found my motivation increased rather than lowered – one time I stayed up all night writing.</p>
<p>I won’t deny there are people who take up cannabis and proceed to lose all interest in life; but, as is typical with other substance dependencies, I suspect you’ll find this is a sign of underlying stressors like an abusive home life or an unsustainable work or study schedule with no other way out. And if someone <em>is</em> having substance problems, it’s easier for a legal supplier than an illegal one to refuse their business, as G. K. Chesterton long ago pointed out with regard to alcohol. Perhaps this is why Portugal has experienced such a drop in drug-related social problems since they legalized all recreational drugs there.</p>
<p>There are of course many wild claims out there about the health benefits of cannabis; if you believe some people, it’ll cure everything from cancer to the common cold. It’s hard for researchers to find out which of these claims have substance on account of, you guessed it, prohibition. I mean, sure, a government can license a pharmacology institute or whatever to do controlled experiments, but they can’t exactly license the entire supply chain so the institute can get hold of enough of the stuff to run anything with a meaningful sample size. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that cannabis is an effective painkiller, and last I heard there was some evidence – at a “not sure yet but worth following up” level – that it might slow the progression of some cancers.</p>
<p>Even if you want to be cautious about recreational cannabis, there is absolutely no justification for keeping it from being used as a medicine. Obviously it wouldn’t come from the pharmacist as a cigarette, since smoke and tars do so much damage to your lungs. And it’s a bit slow to get working when taken orally, hence why people sometimes get into trouble the first time they try edibles, eating more and more just because it hasn’t hit yet. The fastest form of delivery might be a nasal spray; your smelling nerves take in molecules from the air because that’s how smell works, and they’re a direct channel to the brain because that’s how nerves work. For people with impaired olfactory function, an inhaler might be a second option.</p>
<p>Actually I started writing this a few days before the protest. I was editing some lecture notes in a university library a couple of tables away from the door to a videoconference room, and three students went in and proceeded to hold what was evidently the Nay side of a video-link debate on the legalization of cannabis. The male one of the three had a particularly loud and annoying voice, but all of their arguments were so stupid that I must, in charity, suppose that they had been roped in to argue the Nay side without believing a word they were saying. (This is why I’ve never done competitive debating.)</p>
<p>Their worst argument of all was against medicinal cannabis. We don’t need it, said Mister Loud Voice, because <em>we’ve already got painkillers</em>. Maybe if I hadn’t had so many pharmacy lectures in the last few years that wouldn’t have sounded quite so head-smackingly silly. Yes, we have other painkillers. We have paracetamol (what North Americans call acetaminophen), which is safe unless you have liver disease. We have non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like aspirin and ibuprofen, which are moderately safe unless you have stomach ulcers or acid reflux. We have corticosteroids, which do nasty things to your bones if taken for any length of time, and we have opioids, which right now are killing Americans in record numbers as the cohort who got addicted to them <em>en masse</em> in their teens enter retirement. A lot of elderly people have both liver and stomach trouble and can’t really afford to make their bones any weaker than they already are. What possible justification can there be for denying them a safe, effective painkiller?</p>
<p>Close behind was the bit where they said their main concern about cannabis was that it might lead people on to other, more harmful drugs. Yes, I’m sure that happens. But do you know <em>why</em> it happens? It happens because once you’ve got into cannabis, well hey, you’re already breaking the law and thumbing your nose at a disapproving society, so why not go for a harder-core experience? The same happened with alcohol when that was prohibited. Once again, legalization would lighten the problem, not worsen it.</p>
<p>All the same, that argument does illuminate the cultural mindset that hangs like a ball-and-chain about the ankles of the legalization movement. The basic problem is one of our mental categories for hazardous substances. Some substances are <em>filth</em> and some are <em>poisonous</em> and some are <em>medicines</em> and some are <em>chemicals</em>, but the troublesome class here, the one cannabis has been put into, is the class we think of as <em><span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span></em> (The exclamation mark should be pronounced as a horrified gasp.) I can’t just call them “drugs”, because that word, like “chemicals”, has an application which is scientifically meaningful, morally neutral, and vastly broader than the colloquial one. Drugs in the scientific sense do include cannabis, and also alcohol – the phrase “drugs and alcohol” makes about as much sense as “vehicles and cars” – and caffeine, and nutmeg, and St John’s wort, and moisturizers, and anything else that has a dose-dependent effect on the human body or mind.</p>
<p><span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> as a subclass of drugs share no common attribute but that they are illicit. But because they’re a culturally recognisable category, it’s easy to think of them going together. Thus, to Mister Loud Voice and millions like him, cannabis goes naturally with heroin and cocaine and methamphetamine because they are all <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> The government in its infinite wisdom has recognised that people should not use <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> and so has passed laws against them. If you let people use one kind of <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> then you are declaring that <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> are OK after all, so of <em>course</em> they’re going to move on to other kinds of <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> as well. In case you haven’t guessed, I think the very concept of <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Drugs!</span> hinders rather than helps us in developing rational drug safety policies. But that’s by the by.</p>
<p>So if there’s nothing wrong with cannabis, why is it illegal? I don’t think Mister Loud Voice used that particular argument, but others certainly have. The answer, of course, is that most law-makers think that way too. But why did it <em>become</em> illegal in the first place? Recreational marijuana, previously the most popular legal alternative to alcohol, was banned in the US just when Prohibition was lifted and all the enforcement officials were looking for new jobs. Medical cannabis followed in the 1970s as a casualty of Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs. And the US has enough clout internationally that a lot of other countries still think it’s an example worth following. I’m chary as a rule about Big Bad Government conspiracy theories, but in this case we have a paper trail and a confession:</p>
<blockquote>The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war Left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.</blockquote>
<div class="cite">John Erlichman, Assistant to President Nixon for Domestic Affairs, <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1">speaking to <em>Harper’s Magazine</em></a> in 1994</div>
<p>And nowadays of course you have the private prison industry in the US, which has threatened to sue several states if they legalize cannabis and thus reduce the prison population with its convenient supply of cheap labour and legal inability to vote. So in summary, the Proctor of Otago University has committed burglary against the community he is tasked with serving in order to uphold a legally-sanctioned societal prejudice known to be based on fifty-year-old racist lies. I would have joined in the protest if I could. Consider this my contribution.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-33104401720808204162018-08-23T21:07:00.001-07:002018-08-23T21:07:42.031-07:00In defence of multiculturalism<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.distractify.com/trending/2017/03/02/Z8qNTd/future-that-liberals-want-twitter"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTtO-e7PaGXs4JMCN3p__JYGppKJYUuJakk5Ip577TcQdMaoJyrWZkEp2eEMYgCi9qWLpa-6jW9UBE62HIx51Er3ork9ZTjF1twnFK_o88sUc9D0VIQbBKLmvgYV-Vylqn2co3Z460x8Ni/s400/futureliberalswant.jpg" width="400" height="209" data-original-width="1440" data-original-height="754" title="“This is the future that liberals want”: a woman in full-face hijab sitting next to a transgender woman on public transport" alt="“This is the future that liberals want”: a woman in full-face hijab sitting next to a transgender woman on public transport" /></a></div>
<p>Though this blog could very well be retitled <em>Stuff I Disagree With</em>, I try not to argue with the same person two posts in a row, especially when it’s someone who is mostly on the same side as me. So I’m sorry to have to pick on Chris Trotter again. But his recent <em>Bowalley Road</em> post <a href="https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2018/08/checkmate-in-two-years.html">“Checkmate In Two Years?”</a> needs a response. I’m not debating its major thesis – I don’t know whether the present media flap over free speech for “alt-right” bigots will or will not blow up into an electoral defeat for Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-Greens government in 2020. I can’t see it myself, but Trotter has historically been better at predicting New Zealand election outcomes than I have. But I have some things to say about the points Trotter raises along the way.</p>
<p>Let’s start with this:</p>
<blockquote>There’s a saying, often attributed to Voltaire, which declares: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” The free speech controversy, by identifying multiculturalism as the concept Kiwis are not allowed to critique without drawing down the unrelenting wrath of its state-sanctioned and supported defenders, has caused many citizens to wonder when and how “nationalism” and “biculturalism” became dirty words.</blockquote>
<p>Do I have to pull out <a href="https://xkcd.com/1357/">that <em>xkcd</em> cartoon</a> again? When did Southern and Molyneux get arrested? Because I don’t remember seeing that bit on the news. People <em>protested</em> against them, yes. That is to say, people <em>criticized</em> them loudly and angrily. There’s a saying, often attributed to Voltaire, which declares—</p>
<p>OK, cheap shot. Again, I’m not here to rehash <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2018/07/dont-let-fascists-steal-free-speech.html">my previous post</a>. I’m here to talk about “multiculturalism” and “nationalism”, and in New Zealand that means giving biculturalism a look-in as well. Trotter’s post makes as good a springboard as any.</p>
<p>First up, either Trotter or I must be confused about what “nationalism” means. Trotter says</p>
<blockquote>A country whose elites have signed up to an economic philosophy based on the free movement of goods, capital and labour – the three fundamental drivers of globalization – is more or less obliged to adopt multiculturalism as it core social philosophy.<br />
Old fashioned New Zealand nationalism, and its more recent offshoot “biculturalism”, were products of a country which saw itself as offering something uniquely and positively its own to the rest of the world. It is probable that a substantial majority of Kiwis still subscribe to this notion (although a significant minority still struggle with the concept of biculturalism).<br />
What the free speech controversy of the past four weeks revealed to New Zealanders was that too forthright an expression of cultural nationalism can result in the persons advocating such notions being branded xenophobic or racist – and even to accusations of being a white supremacist, fascist or Nazi.<br />
The battle for free speech cannot, therefore, be prevented from extending out into a broader discussion over whether or not New Zealanders have the right to reject the downsides of neoliberalism, globalization and multiculturalism. Is it any longer possible to advance the radically nationalistic idea that the nature and future of New Zealand is a matter which New Zealanders alone must decide, without finding oneself pilloried on Twitter or banned from the nation’s universities?</blockquote>
<p>Abstractions are always fuzzy around the edges, and “nationalism” shades into “racism” along one edge and “patriotism” along another. Still, Trotter is here giving the term a usage that I do not recognise. As I understand the word, the central concept of nationalism is to connect political sovereignty within a given state to membership of some particular ethnicity, understood as being the rightful owners (in some sense) of that state. Foreigners and immigrants, except for expatriates of the favoured ethnicity, are to be excluded from the political process. Typically this exclusion is to be accomplished by exclusion from the territory, sometimes with the alternative option of cultural and linguistic assimilation into the favoured ethnicity. It is not about “offering something uniquely and positively our own to the rest of the world”. It’s about keeping something uniquely and positively our own all to ourselves and the rest of the world can naff off.</p>
<p>What does Trotter mean by “the nature and future of New Zealand is a matter which New Zealanders alone must decide”? Is the “New Zealand” whose future is being decided exactly the same entity as the “New Zealanders” doing the deciding? Is there a concern that the New Zealand electorate might start accepting votes from citizens of Sri Lanka, Ghana, or Luxembourg? Or does the sentence mean “People of Pākehā and Māori ethnicity have a special right to exert political control over the lives of anyone, of any ethnicity, resident in the territory governed from Wellington”? (That’s insofar as “Pākehā” <em>is</em> a distinct ethnicity, of course. I’m not clear what we white New Zealanders have, as Pākehā, that’s “uniquely and positively our own” and couldn’t just as readily be found among, say, white Australians or English-speaking white South Africans.)</p>
<p>A lot of the opposition to global neoliberal capitalism is framed in terms of the threat it poses to the “national sovereignty” of individual countries over their own economies and ecologies. If this is where Trotter is coming from, then my only quarrel with him is his choice of words. I don’t like the idea of land or other local resources being owned and controlled by people who don’t live or pay taxes or buy goods and services in the area. But I also don’t like the “national sovereignty” framing. It doesn’t bother me that the people who own the farms or mines or whatever aren’t New Zealanders; it bothers me that the feedback loop between cause and effect is severed, that a small group of powerful people can wreak extensive damage on the landscape and economy without experiencing any consequences to discourage such behaviour. If some corporation is polluting rivers in Otago, it’s not important to me whether their headquarters are located in Auckland or Beijing.</p>
<p>But at least Trotter does offer <em>some</em> explication of his use of the term “nationalism”, however incomplete. That gives me some idea what he’s talking about. Not so “multiculturalism”. That word he never unpacks. It is evidently associated with “neoliberalism” and “globalization”, but more than that is hard to discern. So I genuinely don’t know whether what I will defend for the rest of this post under the name “multiculturalism” is the same thing as what Trotter is opposing, or at least lending support to the opponents of, under that same name. Bear that in mind as we proceed.<a name='more'></a></p>
<hr />
<p>Multiculturalism, as I understand the term, is the idea that different ethnicities can coexist with each other, or should coexist with each other, or do coexist with each other. No ethnic group, and no ethnic group’s way of life, is superior to others; all are valid systems for coping with the world. Therefore, there is nothing to fear from encountering cultures different to one’s own. No culture can claim to be truer or realer than others. It is never the case that one culture’s way of doing things is objectively the “right” way of doing things, simply because there is no neutral frame of reference from which to make such a judgement. Therefore, no ethnic group has any business trying to force members of other ethnic groups to give up their own cultures and adopt the first group’s culture.</p>
<p>Let me start by laying to rest one reasonable, but misguided, fear: that if cultures are allowed to freely mingle, they will become diluted and indistinct, and everything that makes <em>our</em> culture unique (whoever “our” culture might be) will fade away and be lost – the horrifying image of the “melting-pot”. What actually happens when cultures meet is quite the opposite. They borrow ideas and artistic motifs from each other; they learn how to make each other’s food; they create whole new cultural experiences that neither one would have come up with by itself. The example most likely to be familiar to my readers is the English practice of drinking hot tea from porcelain cups – quintessentially English, and yet it must have begun with someone only a couple of hundred years ago saying “Let’s pretend we’re Chinese,” because both tea and porcelain are imports from East Asia. Or consider how much less distinctive Italian cuisine would be without pasta (from China) and tomatoes (from the Americas). I could list more examples at great length.
It’s not a melting-pot, it’s a smorgasbord.</p>
<p>Anthropologists in the early twentieth century, when respecting other people’s cultures was a startling new idea for Europeans, would have disagreed. Margaret Mead argued that Pacific Island cultures did best when they were left pristine, untouched by outsiders. The social problems she saw in many of the Islands she attributed to contact with Europeans. This was far from her only or even her biggest mistake, but it was a mistake. Mere cultural contact doesn’t cause social harm. The problems Mead saw have a far more sinister origin. Europeans didn’t just make contact with the Pacific, and they didn’t just migrate into it. They <em>colonized</em> it. They took the land by armed force, they destroyed cultural centres, they imposed laws that made the local people second-class citizens, they beat children in schools for speaking their own languages, and they backed it all up with the fear of hell-fire. <em>That</em> sort of behaviour is what destroys a culture.</p>
<p>Since we’re on the subject of cultural sharing and colonization, I suppose I need to quickly mention what’s called “cultural appropriation”, which is the intersection of the two. Much digital ink has been spilled over what it means and what it doesn’t mean, and I can’t do it justice without giving it a post to itself. It doesn’t mean white people doing yoga; it means white people claiming authority over the meaning of yoga. When a colonizing ethnic group picks out images or expressions from a colonized ethnic group, discards their original meaning and uses them with some other meaning, and then the new usage becomes so widespread that the colonized group can no longer use them to convey their original meaning because the colonizers’ new meaning gets in the way, that’s cultural appropriation. Often the new meaning is no more than “Look at me, I’m a [member of colonized ethnic group], aren’t I funny / sexy / spiritual / rebellious?” Think “tribal” tattoos, topless Pacific Islander pinups, Native American feather bonnet Halloween costumes, and T-shirt logos of the Hindu sacred word <em>Aum</em> (ॐ).</p>
<p>The deepest kind of cultural sharing is the opposite of appropriation; you learn the <em>meaning</em> of the image or expression from the other culture, and you take it to heart, and you give proper credit for where it came from. But of course if you’re doing that, you are already being multicultural. Multiculturalism facilitates the free sharing of ideas, and the free sharing of ideas is an inescapable prerequisite for both science and democracy to function. It won’t have escaped you that this is also one of the central arguments for free speech. If you believe in free speech – at least, if you believe in it for this reason – then in all consistency you must also believe in multiculturalism.</p>
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<p>Multiculturalism shades into what’s called <em>cultural relativism</em>, which in turn shades into social constructivism and idealism and various other less-than-creditable philosophies. You’ll often see cultural relativism portrayed, by its opponents, roughly as follows: “All cultures’ beliefs are true, including the ones about gods and demons and magic. All cultures’ practices are moral, including genital mutilation and human sacrifice and cannibalism. The only standard for assenting to a belief or practice is whether it is believed or practised by a <em>bona fide</em> culture, whatever that is. No genuine cultural belief or practice is ever wrong.” Do we really have to accept this?</p>
<p>I wish I could dismiss this as a pure straw-man, but alas, it’s not. My own university degree is in cultural anthropology, and this semester I have for the first time been set to take notes in an introductory cultural anthropology paper. And I am cringing, absolutely cringing, at some of the things I’m having to write down. Especially when anthropology lecturers talk about the health professions, of which I have extensive lecture-room experience. In the last month I have heard, and had to type without adding any dissenting comment (because that’s the rule of my profession), that people don’t need protein because some cultures understand food in different terms; that Tibetan herbal remedies must be effective because they contain so many ingredients; that the use-by date on a bottle of cough syrup is a power play by “biomedical” technocrats. (For the record, pharmaceutics break down over time into waste products, some of them dangerously toxic.) Cultural anthropology, my own degree, is turning out to be the single most evidence-scorning discipline that I’ve ever taken notes in – and I’ve done <em>economics</em>.</p>
<p>But cultural relativism doesn’t have to go that far, and it can’t be thrown out the window completely. Cultural relativism means taking the perspective of another culture to the point that you can see how their beliefs and practices make sense. Every culture’s beliefs and practices make sense within that culture; when they stop making sense, they stop being believed and practised. Cultural relativism in this sense is a methodological tool without which no study of any culture can be done. I have been unable to track down which philosopher it was who first pointed out that no language has a word meaning “I wrongly believe that...”, but whoever it was, their insight applies just as well to cultures as to individuals. Existential beliefs serve the same functions in people’s minds, behaviours, and social interactions regardless of whether they happen to be correct or incorrect. If you want to empathize with someone who believes the Earth is flat, “Imagine if you believed the Earth was flat” is the wrong formula. The correct formula is “Imagine if the Earth <em>really was</em> flat.”</p>
<p>You also have to do cultural relativism in the other direction. With cultures that aren’t your own, the difficult part is getting to the point where their beliefs and practices make intuitive sense. The, well, not exactly easy, but <em>easier</em> part is analysing the economic, environmental, and historical circumstances that led them to those beliefs and practices. With your own culture it’s the other way around. Presumably your own beliefs and practices already make sense to you; the great difficulty is in realizing that “<em>Why</em> do they make sense?” is even a question. This epiphany is perfectly in line with the core principles of science. Just as all astronomy depends on realizing that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, and all biology depends on realizing that humans are not the centre of the biosphere, so all studies of humanity depend on realizing that one’s own culture is not the centre of the human world. There is a reason why anthropology no longer addresses, as its core question, “Why are brown people funny?”</p>
<p>So where does science fit in? One school of anthropology would have it that science is merely one more cultural belief tradition, that its claims to objectivity and legitimacy are nothing but manoeuvres for power, that scientists and doctors are the priesthood – in white robes, no less! – of the West’s most prominent fundamentalist religion. They allude to Thomas Kuhn’s <em>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</em> and snidely insinuate that scientific discoveries are purely political events. They call science “Eurocentric” on account of its being dominated by dead white men, a criticism which quietly slips out the back window when they start expounding <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel">G. W. F. Hegel</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx">Karl Marx</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber">Max Weber</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim">Émile Durkheim</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss">Claude Lévi-Strauss</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault">Michel Foucault</a>. Outside of anthropology departments not many people hold this view consistently, but lots of people from time to time find their politics rubbing up the wrong way against particular scientific findings, and they predictably mine this school of thought’s talking-points for gotchas even while happily citing science on other topics where it <em>is</em> convenient to them. No political party or movement that I’m aware of is free of this particular hypocrisy.</p>
<p>You’ll have gathered that I think this view is wrong. Again, I don’t have the space to argue the point here (how often do I say that?) Science is simply what we call ordinary applied curiosity about the world when it gets complex and far-reaching enough that we have to pay people to do it. Every culture I know of has a vibrant empirical information-gathering tradition, at least in aspects of life where there’s a clear connection between accuracy and survival. Most hunter-gatherers would put Western experts to shame with their in-depth knowledge of natural history and forensics. I have <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2017/06/were-maori-first-new-zealanders.html">had occasion before</a> to describe the phenomenal navigational achievements of the Pacific Islanders. And of course Europeans were late-comers to the scientific enterprise as we know it, following on the heels of the Chinese, Indian, and Muslim civilizations.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhZ4nhC59ANlBbl9jiitRY36dRpMgL8Dav6MpeeBr1YXyzwinKOLDs1uIdOjfkbxpM2q78eEpNhP_mTMcbRHeVlOmTlWuc2iL0Fu9vB_iFMnxAkRRUmMW5dMdpoXBWKSL6KSVf170JHwI1/s1600/mosquitoes.jpg" data-original-width="383" data-original-height="307" title="“The mosquito bites bring on, according to the same authority, deadly fevers; the superstition probably arises from the fact that mosquitoes and fevers become formidable about the same time.” —Richard Burton, 1850s, on Somalian folk beliefs" alt="“The mosquito bites bring on, according to the same authority, deadly fevers; the superstition probably arises from the fact that mosquitoes and fevers become formidable about the same time.” —Richard Burton, 1850s, on Somalian folk beliefs" /></div><p>It must be conceded that it was in Europe that people first banded together to apply this practical curiosity to the deep questions of existence, like “Where did the world come from?” and “Why are people people?” There have been various self-congratulatory theories as to why. Personally I think it’s mainly because Europeans in the seventeenth century urgently needed a new way of addressing such questions that didn’t involve <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion">setting people on fire</a> – something their contemporaries on other continents were mostly managing, by that point, to avoid. That headstart gave Western scientists of the following centuries an entirely misplaced sense of superiority, which led them to dismiss all other cultures’ knowledge (as well as that of their own working classes) as “superstition”. (“Superstition” included, among many other things, the quaint beliefs that cow pox is protective against smallpox and that malaria is carried by mosquito bites.)</p>
<p>The irony is that science thrives on positing new ideas and challenging old ones, both of which would only be enhanced by regular exercises in making sense of the unfamiliar and re-examining the familiar. I do still get frustrated with those science writers, and they are not few, who shrug off cultural relativism root and branch as irrationality. But having observed at first hand both cultural anthropologists and scientists – yes, “biomedical” scientists in particular – lecturing undergraduate students on these matters, there is no longer any doubt in my mind that the anthropologists are the ones coming to the table in bad faith. That is a pity. Multicultural science would be science improved, and the good news is that the scientists are gradually getting there even without the anthropologists’ help.</p>
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<p>So what happens to biculturalism? It’s a legitimate question. For readers not from New Zealand, biculturalism means “two cultures”; it’s how our national ethnic profile was reconceived around the late 1970s and 1980s when it became generally acknowledged that Māori culture was not, after all, going to disappear. Not coincidentally, this was also the time when Māori people began organizing to demand and win their rights under the <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2015/02/whakamanatia-te-tiriti.html">Treaty of Waitangi</a>. I was a small child at the time – <em>just</em> young enough, I believe, to have received instruction in Māoritanga from my very first day at school – so I can’t tell you from direct experience how much of an adjustment in attitude this required from Pākehā adults. I do know that many of my parents’ generation (though not my parents themselves) have never made that adjustment.</p>
<p>Biculturalism means public signage in English and te Reo Māori, Māori greetings in broadcast media as well as a dedicated Māori television station, Māori art motifs in the branding of government documents, and a few hours set aside each semester for health professions students to learn about things like why you don’t sit on the bedside table if you’re visiting a Māori patient in hospital. It doesn’t, so far, mean Pākehā internalizing Māori values or adopting Māori standards of public comportment, nor that Māori are no longer judged by Pākehā values and Pākehā standards of comportment. It doesn’t mean that employers won’t discriminate against job applicants with <em>tā moko</em> facial tattoos, though it probably does mean that they won’t admit to it. To be fair, it does seem to have brought about a general grudging acknowledgement that Māori culture is part of New Zealand’s soul; something worth preserving and perpetuating; something to show off one’s knowledge of when overseas.</p>
<p>In 2008 John Key’s National Party became the government in coalition with the Māori Party, an arrangement which proved distinctly one-sided. Six years previously, however, Don Brash had pulled National out of electoral free-fall with a speech appealing to Pākehā resentment of the Māori renaissance. And back in the 1990s, National got elected and re-elected on promises of curtailing the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process. At every stage, the objections raised to biculturalism were exactly the same as those being raised to multiculturalism. It’ll destroy our national unity, it’ll erode away our European heritage, I can’t understand their funny language, hang on weren’t they cannibals before we came along, can’t we just all be New Zealanders?</p>
<p>This much is true: in the 1990s, National’s more liberal supporters did like to counter the Left’s picture of a bicultural Aotearoa with “No, I think we should be a <em>multi</em>cultural country.” I think this was mostly about opening up New Zealand to international developers, a process somewhat at odds with the aspiration of returning stolen land to Māori. It also, obviously, allowed them to present themselves as having the more enlightened view of racial justice while maintaining their political alliance with those who took offence at hearing the National Anthem in te Reo Māori at international sports events. “Multiculturalism” in that time and place had the same kind of associations and implications that “All Lives Matter” does in the late 2010s, with biculturalism in the place of Black Lives Matter. Trotter’s objections to the term are to that extent fair.</p>
<p>But that was the 1990s. Since then the Māori Party have come and gone; whatever else one might say they achieved, they did get the National Party to stop pandering openly to anti-Māori bigotry. And I think that particular character flaw is getting rarer now than it was in 2002. Once upon a time you could get the nation’s attention with a book titled <em>The Travesty of Waitangi</em>. Now even the anti-Māori racists have to call themselves “Hobson’s Pledge”, a reference to Governor William Hobson’s words upon the signing of the Treaty, to avoid being jeered off the public stage. (Hobson said “<em>He iwi tahi tātou</em>,” and had his grammar gently corrected by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dne_Heke">Hōne Heke</a> to “<em>He iwi </em>ko<em>tahi tātou</em>” – “We are one people.” Don Brash and his fellow passengers on the ship of fools that is Hobson’s Pledge read this as “Cultural distinctiveness is bad and government policy should ignore any ethnic disparity in social, economic, or health outcomes.”) There is not at present any serious danger of Māori losing the gains they made in the 1990s and 2000s; the pressing task is to extend those gains towards true equity with Pākehā.</p>
<p>Biculturalism was fundamentally the recognition that Māori continue to suffer social and economic injustices as a result of colonization by Pākehā which cannot be set right without restoring the status of Māori culture as a legitimate framework for life in Aotearoa, plus the choice to use the Treaty of Waitangi as the basis for the process of restoration. No aspect of that is contradicted or threatened by multiculturalism in the sense that I’m defending in this post – don’t be fooled by the contrasting terms. If anything, the presence of multiple different cultures should help persuade us Pākehā that it’s not our way or the highway.</p>
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<p>And now for the elephant in the room. Go do an image search for <span class="cybertext">multiculturalism cartoon</span> with SafeSearch off.</p>
<p>Revolting, isn’t it?</p>
<p>Well, I feel that vindicates my hypothesis that overt racism is driven by the patriarchal view of women’s bodies as property, with men of unapproved ethnicities as thieves of that property.</p>
<p>(If you can’t see the cartoon I’m talking about, try adding <span class="cybertext">"that's my daughter"</span> to your search terms. Graphic content warning for rape and racism. No, I’m not showing it here. Or linking it. Or describing it.)</p>
<p>Trotter doesn’t mention Islam at all in the post I’m answering. That’s why I’m calling it the elephant in the room. I’m going to assume, from charity, that he moves in different online circles from me and just didn’t know that “multiculturalism” as a pejorative is a dog-whistle for Islam. Scroll down through that Google search and it will soon become clear. There are multiple entangled moral issues here which, at the risk of becoming repetitive, I don’t have space to deal with in this post. We can simplify considerably by noting that anti-Muslim bigotry shares a basic mindset with other bigotries. The hated group are all the same and can’t change – they share an essence of evil. Every one of them is morally responsible for the bad actions of any one of them, because those bad actions arise from the shared evil essence. They lack moral instincts and empathy; their motives are purely predatory or else senselessly hateful. Any appearance to the contrary is a pretence, and a sinister pretence at that. They are dirty and sexually deviant. They are after “our” women, and their long-term strategy is to replace us. There can be no negotiation, compromise, or accommodation with these people; they must be excluded from our territory by force, and if necessary by deadly force.</p>
<p>Bigots will find means to justify their prejudices when under threat. Typically this means compiling long lists of bad things done by members of the group they hate. Now, there are over a billion Muslims in the world, of whom roughly 24 million live in western Europe and maybe two million in the United States. If Islam has <em>no</em> effect either way on violence, then the proportion of violent criminals in the Muslim population will be the same as that in the population at large, a few percent – which makes tens of thousands of violent Muslim criminals in the US and hundreds of thousands in Europe. If it were one-hundredth of that, a few hundredths of a percent, that would still make hundreds in the US and thousands in Europe. And yet anti-Islamic bigots present lists of only dozens as damning evidence against Islam. I have seen the same done against transgender women and also (lest I get complacent about my own group’s virtue) against Trump voters. It only takes four or five repetitions of something for it to <em>feel</em> like a pattern, but that’s a flaw in the cognitive software of the human brain.</p>
<p>Suppose, on the other hand, that you <em>did</em> find a statistical correlation between Islam and violent behaviour. Would that then justify tearing down mosques and banning immigration from Muslim countries and whatever other measures the bigots want to see? Well, put it this way. There is a category of the human race who are vastly more likely to commit violent acts than those not in the category, and by “vastly” I mean typically at least an order of magnitude. For sexual violence it’s <em>two</em> orders of magnitude, i.e., the ratio of members to non-members of this group among sexual assailants is about a hundred times as high as that ratio in the general population. These people occupy nearly all of the positions of power in our society – to the point that it’s the <em>denial</em> of that statement that carries a whiff of conspiracy theory. Should we exclude these people from the political process for the safety of democracy? Should we restrict their ability to enter Western countries? If not, then we cannot in all consistency justify doing the same thing to Muslims.</p>
<p>If you’ve ever read this blog before, then you’ll have guessed that the group I’m talking about is <em>men</em>.</p>
<p>Let’s turn things down a notch. Not everyone who feels threatened by Islam is the kind of know-nothing I’ve been talking about so far; they’re just the loudest and most obnoxious kind. And, after all, I do believe our society should take steps to limit male violence and mitigate male power, so my analogy by itself doesn’t rule out taking some kind of precautions against fundamentalist Islam. I don’t get to drop the mic yet. Islamic countries at present are doing relatively poorly on a number of well-being measures, notably democracy and women’s rights, and worldwide more terrorist violence is committed in the name of Islam than any other cause. (Worldwide, but not in the US; there it’s eclipsed by white far-right extremists.) Does this constitute a problem for multiculturalism in the sense I’ve been talking about? Does it challenge the proposition that all cultures, including Islamic cultures, are valid ways of life that should be allowed to run free in society?</p>
<p>First of all, the general validity of all cultures does not entail that all cultures have an exactly equally good response to every single challenge. Islam does seem to have a problem with terrorism, but then Catholicism by the same token has a problem with child sex abuse. Evangelical Christianity has a problem with racism, at least in America. And of course all three have a problem with homophobia. It so happens that terrorism by its nature is something done loudly in public, whereas child sex abuse is something done quietly behind closed doors; and also Western news media have a lot more Catholic viewers to keep mollified than Muslim ones, which they accomplish by treating terrorism as a systemic failing of a whole religion and sex abuse (when they report on it at all) as an individual failing of particular priests.</p>
<p>You’ll also notice I said that Islamic countries are doing poorly on well-being measures <em>at present</em>. That’s not a trivial qualification. If I were to be whisked away in a time-machine and marooned in some century between about the eighth and the fifteenth, and was told I could choose whether to be dropped off somewhere in the Islamic world or somewhere in Christendom, I would unhesitatingly choose the former. Muslim polities then were more liberal, more scientifically advanced, more medically advanced, more peaceful, and more prosperous than Christian ones. Granted, there are passages in the Qur’ān that encourage violence, but you can find worse in the Bible. If liberal Christians today can intellectualize and theologize and spiritualize and generally waffle away Biblical violence, there’s no reason why liberal Muslims can’t do the same with Qur’ānic violence – and indeed they do. The reactionary condition of the Islamic world today demands an explanation beyond “Because Islam.”</p>
<p>And if various other issues I’ve touched on would need their own post to explain properly, this would take a whole <em>book</em>. Colonization is part of it. Oil is another; mineral wealth tends to enrich only a very small fraction of a country’s population, because its value isn’t enhanced by labour and hence can’t be threatened by industrial action. Largely because of the oil, foreign powers have bombed and invaded and disrupted elections in the Middle East more than any other geopolitical region, and you can see how this would confirm and perpetuate any cultural narratives to the effect that said foreign powers are allied with the forces of cosmic evil. That then casts a pall over ideas associated with such powers, like, oh, let’s say, democracy and women’s rights. Which is not to say that there aren’t proponents of those ideas within the Muslim world, because there are, many and courageous. Just because Westerners haven’t heard of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.</p>
<p>Here’s something else Westerners haven’t heard of. One talking point of the “Because Islam” theory is that Israel sits right in the middle of the Middle East, an oasis of liberal democracy if not exactly of peace. It can’t be geography making the difference; it must be that Israel isn’t Muslim. Except that there is another oasis of liberal democracy emerging as we speak in Muslim North Africa, so far completely unacknowledged by Western countries: the Democratic Republic of Somaliland. No, not Somalia, Somali<em>land</em>. Here, <a href="https://nationalpost.com/opinion/geoffrey-clarfield-no-pirates-allowed-inside-the-successful-yet-unrecognized-democratic-republic-of-somaliland">go and read about it</a>. Then maybe write to your political representatives about persuading your country to officially recognise it. Somaliland is Muslim, unlike Israel, but like Israel it is a new state with no historical inertia binding its government to religious institutions, and even more than Israel it has the good fortune to have had women active in building it from the beginning. It follows that Islam <em>per se</em> does not impede progressive or liberal values in a society. It further follows that the existence of Islam is no argument against multiculturalism.</p>
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<p>New Zealand can be a bit complacent about race relations sometimes. After all, we can always with perfect truth claim to treat both immigrants and indigenous people better than Australia does. But that’s a pathetically low bar to clear, and we need to do better.</p>
<p>For a start, the excuses people all over the English-colonized world give for their suspicion of immigrants are even more transparently bullshit in New Zealand than elsewhere. We are one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries; we have plenty of room. If more people came to live in our cities, we could shift our economy more towards manufacturing and technology and away from dairy-farming, which would mean <em>less</em> stress on our natural environment. Nor would we have to farm more intensively to feed them, because we already grow far more than we ourselves eat; net immigration just means that that food will be consumed here instead of exported. Yes, we’d need to invest a bit more in our infrastructure, but you can do that when you have more people in the country being productive, and our infrastructure is overdue an upgrade anyway. And contrary to what people fear, immigration has been shown in multiple studies to <em>enrich</em> economies and <em>reduce</em> crime.</p>
<p>I can understand people who don’t know these things (and they are not well-known) being a bit cagey about immigration. And I know people do not suddenly change their minds when presented with new facts in public debate; not when they have face to lose in front of their allies. All the same, it’s telling that their next rallying point is reliably something along the lines of “But too much immigration too fast will make New Zealand look unfamiliar. Immigrants should have to learn to assimilate into our culture.” Let’s consider what this entails on the level of individual justice. “Sorry, madam. Sorry, sir. I acknowledge that you’re experiencing hard times where you live and that we’re, comparatively, sitting pretty. I can see that your skills – a doctor and a computer engineer, well done, you must be dedicated workers – are just the sort of thing our economy needs. New Zealand would clearly be an ideal place for you to settle down. But I’m afraid that your presence here makes us look just that little bit less like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footrot_Flats"><em>Footrot Flats</em></a> cartoon, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”</p>
<p>Trotter objects to opponents of multiculturalism being “branded xenophobic or racist”. I wonder what he would say if he had spent the time I have in recent years trying to convince people on Facebook that the solution to child poverty and homelessness in Auckland is not to close the gates to immigration from East Asia. “I’m not being racist, but there are too many of them.” There cannot be such a thing as “too many” of something unless there is something bad about that thing that accumulates with increasing numbers. “I’m not being racist, but I don’t recognise my country any more.” Why not? I do. Neither Pākehā nor Māori culture is in any danger. There are now cultures here that weren’t here before, but that’s only a bad thing if there is something bad about those new cultures.</p>
<p>And if you’re against multiculturalism, and don’t want to be accused of xenophobia or racism, then frankly I think the onus falls on you to explain exactly what that “something bad” is.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-1139177428524134192018-07-26T22:35:00.001-07:002018-07-26T22:59:43.883-07:00Don’t let fascists steal free speech from us<style type="text/css">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/07/controversial-canadian-speakers-cancel-nz-event.html" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1uL_Dvl9E27Ga2XklT2ErKn61cDtN2tdrn8TB4FEPRjD6kA6onQavNq5Un6DvUbpxPHqb6zmSi78BVG-IoN55G1R_XQKa-5cys3QLLbgeKnT_RxAj20MuzkK61quG1yc_C_T01S6DK3KU/s320/Lauren-Southern-Stefan-Molyneux.jpg" width="320" height="183" data-original-width="1120" data-original-height="640" /></a></div>
<p>Two “alt-right” speakers from Canada, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, have decided <a href="https://www.radiolive.co.nz/home/on-demand/drive/2018/07/it-s-on-again--lauren-southern-and-stefan-molyneux-to-speak-at-s.html">they will, after all, go ahead</a> with their visit to New Zealand (<a href="https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/07/controversial-canadian-speakers-cancel-nz-event.html">temporarily cancelled</a>) where they will espouse their views. The venue is, as I write, being kept secret. Previously, they wanted to speak in an Auckland venue called the Bruce Mason Centre, but were denied that opportunity at the instruction of Auckland Mayor Phil Goff. This has raised concerns about freedom of speech in New Zealand, and not just among those who agree with their position. Chris Trotter, New Zealand’s most respected Left blogger, has taken up the cause in several recent posts on his blog <a href="https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com"><em>Bowalley Road</em></a>.</p>
<p>I’ve been drafting this post for two years now; the issue keeps coming up and going away again, and I have to change the bits where I relate it to current events. It’s a bit bigger than I can really pin down in one post. I’m going to skip out some things I originally planned to say about particular progressive concerns that some believe constitute assaults on free speech – trigger warnings, safe spaces, cultural appropriation – because they just make the whole thing too unwieldy. I may devote more blog posts to them in future. Today my topics are: What is the ethical basis of the right to free speech? What sort of policies do we need to build around it? And what are its limits?</p>
<p>Political discussions frequently open with assertions of rights that the disputants hold to be incontrovertibly inviolable – endowed, in the famous words, by the Creator. But what makes a right a right? Why is it that some good things you might want are your “right” to enjoy, while others are merely privileges? What makes the difference? And what if one of your rights can’t be granted without breaching someone else’s rights? What do you do then? This sort of question is why I like to go back a bit further, behind the concept of rights to their basis in ethical philosophy.</p>
<p>In case you’re a new reader, I’ll just quickly run you through my basic moral philosophy. Morality isn’t something objective, not if by that you mean it’s something “out there” in the universe, independent of our minds. You can’t logically prove a “should” statement from an “is” statement without at least tacitly calling in another “should” statement, and if you try to prove that second “should” statement you just go around the circle again, and so on forever. And perhaps that’s just as well, because if morality <em>was</em> something “out there”, then any intersection between moral facts and human well-being would be coincidental. Appeals to moral authority, even cosmic moral authority, don’t help: “You <em>should</em> obey the authority” is just another “should” statement and another trip around the circle.</p>
<p>Hence, morality is subjective. But “subjective” is not the same as “arbitrary”. To call something “subjective” just means it’s an experience that people have rather than a thing in the universe – it’s “in here” rather than “out there”. Sweetness is subjective, but no-one disagrees as to which is the sweeter of maple syrup and grapefruit juice. You <em>can</em> justify a “should” statement; you just have to back it with an “I want” statement. (<em>I want</em> to be healthy, therefore I <em>should</em> exercise more than I do.) As a social species, pretty much anything we want requires cooperation with other people, and cooperation requires trust, so we evolved moral instincts to allow us to trust each other. Therefore, in my view, trust is the basis of all morality.</p>
<p>To earn trust, your actions must fulfill three conditions. They must be <em>benevolent</em>; they must be <em>consistent</em>; and both of these facts must be <em>clear</em> to other observers. Benevolence alone is not quite enough. Pure benevolence, the greatest good for the greatest number, is the moral philosophy known as <em>utilitarianism</em>. The harmonics of cold calculating efficiency that cling around that word somewhat misrepresent the idea; “utility” in the philosophical sense includes beauty and joy as well as usefulness. However, the “calculating” part is bang-on. Utilitarian philosophers spend a lot of time balancing harms and benefits and fretting about whether they’ve left something out. And I don’t know about you, but that makes me nervous. I can’t help worrying that they might end up putting the things I care about on the “sacrifice for the greater good” side of the equation.</p>
<p>When you factor in the consistency and the clarity, utilitarianism gives way to a couple of other moral schemas. One of them is virtue ethics – if you practise being a good person until it becomes habit, your actions will be clearly and consistently benevolent. This isn’t particularly relevant to today’s topic, and I mention it only for completeness. The other one, however, is the answer to our question: the origin of rights. To be clearly and consistently benevolent is to commit to doing some good things all the time for everybody while refraining from doing some bad things ever to anybody. When a society makes such a commitment, whether in law or custom, it thereby grants its members the <em>right</em> to enjoy the good things and the <em>right</em> not to suffer the bad things. That’s where rights come from.</p>
<p>And that helps us answer our other question. When you have to choose one right over another, you should honour the one that best serves the principle of trust. Suppose you’re a surgeon, and you have in your hospital five people urgently needing different organ transplants and also a healthy young person who’s come in for a sports injury. A utilitarian calculus might prompt you to at least consider killing the young person to harvest their organs, sacrificing one life to save five. But of course if you did that, no patient could ever trust you again not to kill them for their organs. The trust principle would therefore accord with what (I sincerely hope) your moral instincts tell you and render such a course of action unthinkable.</p>
<p>Since the seventeenth century most of the questions vexing Western political theorists have been variations of “What is the right balance between peace, justice, and freedom?” When you find yourself facing a trade-off between the three, how do you choose which to preserve and which to sacrifice? (This is not quite the same as the question actually driving social progress, which is “How many crumbs do we have to give these annoying poor people before they’ll shut up and go away?”) What’s often not noticed is that peace, justice, and freedom all have the same end-goal, i.e. not having to fear violence any more. Peace means you don’t have to fear violence from strangers. Justice means you don’t have to fear violence from your neighbours. Freedom means you don’t have to fear violence from the state.</p>
<p>But you can never have complete freedom in any society, because freedoms are necessarily in tension with each other. If you are free to do some particular thing, that means I am not free to stop you from doing that particular thing, and <em>vice versa</em>. So, for instance, you are free to play irritating contemporary music and there’s not much I can do about it, but I am not free to walk around in public wearing the amount of clothing I feel physically comfortable in. If I call the police and complain about your music I’ll be ignored, unless it’s very loud; if you call the police and complain about my nudity I’ll be arrested. Conversely, if I try and cut the power cord on your stereo I’ll be the one in trouble, whereas if you threaten me with assault unless I put some clothes on the authorities will probably agree I had it coming. (As you see, legal freedoms tend to get skewed towards majority cultural groups and away from, in this case, those of us who have autistic sensory issues.)</p>
<hr />
<p>Now we can narrow in from freedom generally to freedom of speech in particular. <a name='more'></a> Many liberal and centrist writers who know perfectly well that freedoms and rights have to be traded off against each other nevertheless pick out freedom of speech as the one which must never, ever be traded away. Steven Pinker is one of them, and he explained why in <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/01/26/why-free-speech-fundamental/aaAWVYFscrhFCC4ye9FVjN/story.html">a <em>Boston Globe</em> op-ed piece</a> after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France a few years ago. I’ve kept it in the drafts of this post even though it’s old now because it’s the most succinct defence I’ve seen of the free-speech-before-all-else position. Let me go through it point by point.</p>
<blockquote>The first reason is that the very thing we’re doing when we ask whether free speech is fundamental – exchanging and evaluating ideas – presupposes that we have the right to exchange and evaluate ideas. In talking about free speech (or anything else) we’re <em>talking</em>. We’re not settling our disagreement by arm-wrestling or a beauty contest or a pistol duel. Unless you’re willing to discredit yourself by declaring, in the words of Nat Hentoff, “free speech for me but not for thee,” then as soon as you show up to a debate to argue against free speech, you’ve lost it.</blockquote>
<p>In general principle this is obviously true. But I can’t help noting that someone could argue for censoring speech in certain contexts or media, and avoid contradiction by themselves abstaining from those contexts and media. There’s no contradiction in saying on TV that some things shouldn’t be printed in magazines, for instance, or writing a book telling people to stop using the internet. And if you think I’m quibbling, consider what we routinely do with speech expressed in the medium of spray-paint on public transport conduits and buildings.</p>
<p>This is a central point in the case before us. Mayor Goff did not, after all, prevent Southern and Molyneux from speaking at all in Auckland; he merely shut them out of the Bruce Mason Centre. That doesn’t immediately mean that his ruling did <em>not</em> constitute an assault on their right to free speech, but it does mean that we need more information before we can conclude that it <em>did</em>. We shall quickly run into absurdities if we conclude that it is always wrong to stop anyone from saying anything anywhere. Is it an assault on free speech to take down the Ten Commandments in courtrooms or to cut creationism from school science textbooks? Is it an assault on free speech to revert vandalism on Wikipedia or block pornbots on Tumblr? Is it an assault on free speech on Chris Trotter’s part to filter out “defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful” content from <em>Bowalley Road</em>’s comment section?</p>
<p>Ten years or so ago I think, the Otago University Students’ Association (OUSA) resolved to support the then-active campaign to legalize gay marriage in New Zealand. Student association membership at the time was opt-out instead of opt-in, which I still think was a better system. Now there were a couple of people at Otago who didn’t like other people having gay sex, and they wrote essay-length letter after essay-length letter to Otago’s student magazine, the <em>Critic</em>, arguing that it was dictatorial to “force” students to belong to an association whose political views they disagreed with. (For the record, when I was on the OUSA executive in 1999 and a student applied for exemption from OUSA membership on religious grounds, we granted it unanimously without discussion.) The <em>Critic</em> dutifully printed their letters for months, but eventually decided they’d had enough and closed that line of correspondence. There followed howls of protest – on the noticeboards, if I recall correctly – at this atrocity against free speech and the imminent descent into Stalinism it surely presaged. Then the whole thing fizzled out.</p>
<p>Pinker goes on to say</p>
<blockquote>Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history – one that is prior to every other discovery – is that our traditional sources of belief are in fact generators of error and should be dismissed as grounds for knowledge. These include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophecy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty.<br />
How, then, can we know? Other than by proving mathematical theorems, which are not about the material world, the answer is the process that the philosopher Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course, depends upon the exercise of free speech. We offer these conjectures without any prior assurance they are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.</blockquote>
<p>Once again, clearly true as it stands. Certainly, disagreeing with somebody is no excuse to stop them saying what they’re saying. You might be the one who’s wrong. But notice again that this doesn’t cover everything. People talk a lot without raising any ideas about reality at all, and often the ideas they <em>do</em> raise have been refuted already. Much speech is dedicated to peddling faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophecy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty. Some exercises of speech actively stymie the “refutation” part of the Popperian process, for the public if not for the experts; journalistic insistence on “balanced coverage” has done serious harm to the vaccination cause and the fight against climate change, in particular. (A recently-viral Twitter post quotes a journalism professor: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true.” But with technical subjects like climate change and vaccination, that’s not so easy for people who instead of science studied, for example, journalism.)</p>
<p>The process of rational debate, as Pinker elsewhere convincingly argues, requires at least a tacit agreement on the part of the debaters to respect each other as people. You can’t persuade someone they’re wrong by telling them to shut up. In theory, you come up with reasons why they should change their mind, and in return you agree to change <em>your</em> mind if they come up with good enough reasons to do so. In practice, of course, changing your mind about something you were just challenged on involves a certain loss of face, and it’s not something many people do on the spot. Still, reasoned discussion is the only way two people who disagree can come to agreement without coercion, which makes it vital for society-wide cooperation and hence morally sacrosanct. (It doesn’t have to be a formally structured debate to count as reasoned discussion.) Any controls on speech which curtail reasoned discussion are therefore, to the extent that they do so, morally wrong.</p>
<p>But not all discussion is reasoned. I’m not talking here about things like “Anecdotal evidence is good enough for my case but nothing short of mathematical proof will do for yours,” or “Let’s compare the real-world outcomes of your politics to the ideal end-goal of mine,” which, while regrettably common, can be countered within the debate itself. I’m talking about deeper breaches of the rule of respect, such as “Your ethnic group are cognitively impaired,” “Your gender is incapable of rational thought,” or “Your religion’s secret agenda precludes good-faith argument.” It’s not <em>just</em> that these statements are hateful; it’s that they license their makers to disregard any contribution from a speaker of the targeted ethnicity, gender, or religion. In a word, they curtail reasoned discussion, and are therefore morally wrong for exactly the same reason that controls on reasoned speech are wrong. And it won’t have escaped you that these exact positions are characteristic of the “alt-right” fascist movement.</p>
<p>Pinker rounds off his case with a political point:</p>
<blockquote>How did the monstrous regimes of the 20th century gain and hold power? The answer is that groups of armed fanatics silenced their critics and adversaries. (The 1933 election that gave the Nazis a plurality was preceded by years of intimidation, murder, and violent mayhem.) And once in power, the totalitarians criminalized any criticism of the regime. This is also true of the less genocidal but still brutal regimes of today, such as those in China, Russia, African strongman states, and much of the Islamic world.<br />
Why do dictators brook no dissent? One can imagine autocrats who feathered their nests and jailed or killed only those who directly attempted to usurp their privileges, while allowing their powerless subjects to complain all they want. There’s a good reason dictatorships don’t work that way. The immiserated subjects of a tyrannical regime are not deluded that they are happy, and if tens of millions of disaffected citizens act together, no regime has the brute force to resist them. The reason that citizens don’t resist their overlords <em>en masse</em> is that they lack common knowledge – the awareness that everyone shares their knowledge and knows they share it. People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.<br />
Common knowledge is created by public information, such as a broadcasted statement. [Hans Christian Andersen’s] story of <em>The Emperor’s New Clothes</em> illustrates the logic. When the little boy shouted that the emperor was naked, he was not telling [people] anything they didn’t already know, anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes. But he was changing their knowledge nonetheless, because now everyone knew that everyone else knew that the emperor was naked. And that common knowledge emboldened them to challenge the emperor’s authority with their laughter.</blockquote>
<p>Pinker’s reasoning is once again impeccable, but another round of explication couldn’t hurt. Let’s say I live in the shadow of a murderous despotic regime, and I would like to see it overthrown. Do I set out to overthrow it all on my lonesome? Of course not; I would be throwing away the life of the one person I <em>know</em> opposes it – me – without achieving any good in the process. I can’t act unless I know I have lots of people behind me. So let’s say I’m pretty sure lots of people want the regime overthrown. Now do I stand up to overthrow it? Still no. They’re all in the same position as me; they can’t act, even to support me, until they know they have lots of people behind them. Nobody can act until everybody knows that everybody will act. If I don’t print enough pamphlets, nobody will turn up to my revolution except my mum. All the regime needs to do to stay in power is confiscate my printer.<p>
<p>So we need to be very cautious indeed about ceding governments or government agencies (or their crony corporations, as with the ongoing Net Neutrality battle in the US) the authority to shut off channels of common knowledge. At the same time, as I’ve explained above, “Never stop anyone from saying anything on any platform for any reason” is too broad a rule. I’d honestly like to see less heavy-handed policies toward graffiti, especially in New Zealand where most public buildings are so hideous that spray-paint can only be an improvement; but it would be a step too far to make magazines print every letter they receive, to swamp school libraries with pseudoscience, or to prohibit moderation of internet forums. That way 4chan lies.</p>
<p>Pinker doesn’t raise the platform side of the question. He does note the need for some controls on content:</p>
<blockquote>It’s true that free speech has limits. We carve out exceptions for fraud, libel, extortion, divulging military secrets, and incitement to imminent lawless action. But these exceptions must be strictly delineated and individually justified; they are not an excuse to treat speech as one fungible good among many. Despots in so-called “democratic republics” routinely jail their opponents on charges of treason, libel, and inciting lawlessness. Britain’s lax libel laws have been used to silence critics of political figures, business oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, and medical quacks. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous exception to free speech – falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre – is easily abused, not least by Holmes himself. He coined the meme in a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld the conviction of a man who distributed leaflets encouraging men to resist the draft during World War I, a clear expression of opinion in a democracy.</blockquote>
<p>Do Southern and Molyneux’s “alt-right” fascist statements fall into these exceptions? The things they say about Muslims and feminists would arguably qualify as libel if they were said about an individual person instead of whole blocs; but saying bad things about people is only libel if you know they’re untrue, whereas Southern and Molyneux seem sincere in their bigotry. It’s very likely that ideas such as theirs inspire some of the people who believe them to attack Muslims, but is the causal connection between their speech and someone else’s action strong enough to qualify as incitement? I’m not sure if there <em>is</em> a right or wrong answer to that question.</p>
<p>To sum up so far, the content of Southern and Molyneux’s speech puts it outside of the domain which the right to free speech exists to preserve – new ideas, reasoned criticism, speaking truth to power – but it does not clearly fall into the domain which is so harmful as to justify the state taking steps to shut it down, and we want to keep that second domain as tightly defined as possible so as not to grant the state scope to stifle dissent. The next question is: did Mayor Goff’s action in denying them the use of the Bruce Mason Centre constitute the state shutting them down? Or was it the same sort of thing as an internet forum blocking discourteous commentators or the <em>Critic</em> closing that tedious correspondence? Randall Munroe’s <a href="https://xkcd.com/1357/"><em>xkcd</em> cartoon on the subject</a> is required reading here:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://xkcd.com/1357/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/free_speech.png" data-original-width="566" data-original-height="577" title="Public service announcement: the right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The First Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences. If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door." alt="Public service announcement: the right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it. The First Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences. If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door." /></a></div>
<p>Nobody in New Zealand that I know of has suggested <em>arresting</em> Southern and Molyneux for what they have to say, but there certainly were calls for Immigration to deny them visas to enter the country, and for citizens to physically bar their entry to their speaking venues. And given that the Bruce Mason Centre was denied them, I have to suppose that if they had gone there anyway and unlocked its doors and switched on whatever lighting and PA system it might have and plugged in microphones and started talking, some kind of Council officials would have turned up to eject them. Once again, we have what looked like a reasonably clear boundary (state censorship is bad, citizen boycotts are fine) but the case before us straddles it.</p>
<p>If you’re having trouble guessing, from what I’ve been saying so far, which side I’m finally going to pick, it’s because I had similar trouble when I was writing it. Usually I have a clear idea what my conclusion is before I sit down to write a post, but this was not one of those times. My moral instincts in this case do not pull me strongly in either direction. I have to draw on premises which are clear in other cases and see what I can conclude from those. The main precepts that seem relevant to me are:</p>
<ol>
<li>People should not have to live in fear either of the state or of each other. (This is the trust principle which I laid out in the first section.)</li>
</ol>
<p>Therefore,</p>
<ol start="2">
<li>The state should not be granted power against any group that other groups would not agree to have wielded against themselves.</li>
<li>Members of minority groups should not have to live in fear of violence or discrimination from the majority.</li>
</ol>
<p>OK, then, let’s imagine that the situation were turned around. I wouldn’t want to be denied a visa because of my political views; therefore, I must consider it a good thing that Southern and Molyneux weren’t denied visas because of <em>their</em> political views. But the Bruce Mason Centre? Not such a big deal. Any venue has a finite number of bookings that can be made in a given period of time. Some groups will miss out. Those groups would usually just have to find another venue. It would concern me if that same group were then banned from seeking an alternative like a church hall or something, or from taking to the streets with a megaphone. But the way things actually played out I can’t honestly see that Mayor Goff crossed a line. He didn’t exercise any power that a private citizen couldn’t have exercised who might happen to hold the keys to a hall or be a magazine editor or web forum admin. Sorry, Chris.</p>
<hr />
<p>Are we finished? We are not finished. We have seen that the state’s power to interfere in public discourse must be kept within strict limits; but we have also seen that some of the things “alt-right” fascists say are themselves morally wrong for the same reason that state attacks on free speech are wrong, and that they erode away the rights of minorities to live without fear of violence or discrimination. Whatever limits we rightly put on the state, we as citizens therefore have a moral duty to counter the fascists ourselves by other means. How do we do that?</p>
<p>That was the basis of Chris Trotter’s argument against Goff’s action in denying Southern and Molyneux the use of the Bruce Mason Centre; not so much that it <em>was</em> an unwarranted use of state power as that it allowed them to <em>claim</em> it was an unwarranted use of state power and thus get to play the victim, like football players feigning injury to get penalties against their opponents. Certainly that is a favourite tactic of “alt-right” fascists, one carried over (I imagine) from their roots as internet trolls, who love to cry “Free speech!” when they’re being shown the door – the “you” in Munroe’s cartoon above. Now we have people like Milo Yiannopoulos seeking invitations to speak on US college campuses for the express purpose of being disinvited. We have white nationalists actively seeking to get punched on camera by antifascists so that they can look like the good guys. That’s not something made up by namby-pamby centrist no-violence liberals; it’s an explicit strategy confirmed by a reporter who <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/news/2017/10/04/25451102/we-snuck-into-seattles-super-secret-white-nationalist-convention">infiltrated a racist convention in Seattle</a> last year.</p>
<p>Thus far I agree with Trotter’s <em>Bowalley Road</em> post <a href="http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/2018/07/do-we-really-lack-courage-to-debate-alt.html">“Do We Really Lack the Courage to Debate the Alt-Right?”</a> Shutting down Southern and Molyneux won’t have harmed their cause; kicking them out of the country would have helped it. But I fear his suggested counter-strategy is hopelessly naïve.</p>
<blockquote>But just imagine if, instead of asking the Minister of Immigration to prevent Molyneux and Southern from entering the country, the New Zealand Federation of Islam Associations had invited them to debate the Islamic religion with a couple of their faith’s most accomplished scholars. In the face of the Canadians’ openly hostile reading of the Koran, the Federation could have transformed their assailants’ prejudice into a profound “teaching moment” for all New Zealanders. Rather than the caricature of Islam presented by its enemies, we could have heard the true voice of the Prophet and gained a much deeper understanding of his message...<br />
What they would have been very loath to upload, however, would have been images of them being soundly defeated by Muslim scholars; or floundering before the questioning of participants in TVNZ’s town-hall meeting...<br />
Had we been mature enough, as a free and democratic nation, to meet the challenge of Molyneux and Southern in such a fashion, the two Alt-Right Canadians would have had nothing to show their followers. But we New Zealanders would have had something to show the world.</blockquote>
<p>People have tried to debate “alt-right” fascists before, and that is <em>not</em> how it pans out. I presume Trotter will remember the <em>Campbell Live</em> episode four years ago when television presenter John Campbell tried to interview then Prime Minister John Key about government intelligence agencies spying on New Zealanders, and Key responded to every question with “New Zealanders don’t care about that. New Zealanders care about snapper fishing quotas.” And you could see Campbell getting more and more frustrated as the segment went on, while Key was clearly baiting him on purpose and loving it. Key was not a fascist – his government (among many less creditable things) banned physical punishment of children and legalized gay marriage – but that sort of debate tactic is where the “alt-right” <em>lives</em>. Ignore questions, bait your opponents, and make sure your audience see them get het up while you laugh.</p>
<p>The “alt-right”’s central tactic is, whether by design or through trial and error, much cleverer than Trotter gives it credit for. Ian Danskin has explained it at greater length than I can do justice to on his YouTube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/mrskimps/">Innuendo Studios</a>. Here are a couple of his videos; I’ll give a quick summary of each in case you don’t have the leisure to watch them right now. They’re part of a longer series called <em>The Alt-Right Playbook</em>.</p>
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<p><em>Control the Conversation.</em> “Alt-right” fascists make bad arguments on purpose. The point is to deflect the conversation away from the central issue to a peripheral one, and they have learned that there is no more effective way to do that than to make a bad argument on the peripheral topic, because bad arguments are bait to progressives who want to look intelligent and woke in front of other progressives. You end up never discussing the real point. The “alt-right” themselves aren’t interested in looking intelligent and woke; they’re interested in looking strong and certain, because that appeals to authoritarian personalities, who nowadays make up the rank and file of the Right. And the Right sells certainty better than the Left sells truth.</p>
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<p><em>Never Play Defence.</em> Frequently arguments with “alt-right” fascists follow a common cyclic pattern. He says something short, quippy, and wrong; you give a detailed correction; he picks out one tiny detail of your correction and says something short, quippy, and wrong about it; and the cycle repeats. Mostly his short, quippy, wrong remarks are accusations rather than discussions of the point. On a personal level this is about putting you in a box, a category of people who can be disregarded. But there’s a bigger game going on as well. If he’s always accusing, you’re always explaining, and, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” The point, again, is not to win the argument. The point is to make that box they’re putting you in – be it “cultural Marxism”, “reverse racism”, or “failed manhood” – instantly recognisable for use against other progressives in other conversations.</p>
<p><em>The Alt-Right Playbook</em> is mostly about internet debates. In live debate there’s a further tactic available to those who don’t care about the truth, originally perfected amongst creationists and named “the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop">Gish Gallop</a>” after one of them. This is especially effective, perhaps, in debates against academics. Academics are trained to lecture, which means spinning each point out so that your students have space to take it in and note it down. The Gish Gallop is the opposite of that: you spit out a rapid series of tangentially related assertions too fast for your opponent to answer more than a selection of them, thus giving the impression that your position has more support than you can discuss in detail and, still more, that your opponent is feeble and can’t keep up.</p>
<p>I don’t think a live debate between Southern and Molyneux on the one hand and a distinguished Islamic scholarly team on the other would have been the triumph Trotter imagines. I think it would have been a stream of nasty personal attacks and unfounded assertions from the Canadian side, too thick and fast for the scholars to reply to. Above all, Southern and Molyneux would have done everything in their power to goad their opponents into a rage, and then drawn the moral “That rage is the true face of Islam; that’s where terrorism comes from.” And I don’t think the TVNZ town-hall meeting would have been any better. Certainly they would not have been “floundering”. I think they would have deflected any inconvenient questions as blatantly as John Key deflected John Campbell’s, and repeated a small selection of <em>ad hominem</em> accusations as many times as possible. The point, remember, is not to convince those who don’t agree with them, but to make a common language of hatred available to those who do.</p>
<p>Putting Trotter and Danskin’s insights together, you can see the real power of the “alt-right”’s strategy: <em>shutting them out and debating them both advance their cause</em>. If you’re querying how effective this is, remember their guy is in the White House right now.</p>
<p>So if we can’t shut them out and we can’t debate them, what do we do? Indulge me while I examine what I think is one more <em>wrong</em> answer, by James Robb of <a href="https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/"><em>A Communist At Large</em></a>. Robb agrees with Trotter that Southern and Molyneux ought to have been suffered to speak in the Bruce Mason Centre, on the grounds that any attack on free speech is an attack on the working class. There’s something a little off-kilter about a revolutionary Marxist appealing to the Constitution of the United States of America, but that is what Robb does in his piece <a href="https://convincingreasons.wordpress.com/2018/07/14/how-not-to-fight-the-right-a-case-study-in-abject-liberal-left-politics/">“How Not to Fight the Right – A Case Study in Abject Liberal-Left Politics”</a>.</p>
<blockquote>Nor should we grant to the bourgeoisie the prerogative to determine what constitutes “hate speech,” “advocating terrorism,” “sedition,” “inciting racial disharmony,” nor any other of the myriad categories of forbidden expression that clutter the law books. It is not for the ruling class to judge whether the speaker is motivated by sincere faith or hatred... The simple unqualified defence of freedom of expression such as that laid out in the First Amendment to the United States constitution should be our starting point.</blockquote>
<p>That’s a position I can respect – so far. Robb goes on to assert that</p>
<blockquote>No, “right-wing extremism” does not “reach into our communities” from the outside, nor are our communities being torn apart by the “subversive strategies” of “right-wing extremists.” Rightist political ideas are alive and well already in our class-divided communities, <em>generated from within</em> and constantly reproduced by the social relations of capitalism in decay. What we are witnessing is not a harmonious society being subverted from outside, but rather, the capacity of capitalist society to sustain the institutions of bourgeois democracy withering away.</blockquote>
<p>I am becoming increasingly suspicious, I must confess, of revolutionary Marxism’s penchant for expounding theory-laden hypotheses about sociopolitical phenomena without backup argumentation as if they were self-evident truths. Robb’s prescription is</p>
<blockquote>...Auckland Peace Action reveals the utter impotence of liberalism in a period of sharpening political class polarization. <em>Hate</em> is the inescapable counterpart to oppression. The justified hatred of the oppressed towards their oppressors is an absolutely necessary weapon in the fight against oppression. The task of the moment is not to “say No to hate” but to <em>turn the hatred of the oppressed in the appropriate direction</em> – against the ruling class, their governments (state and municipal), and their political parties. The rightists understand this well – hence their unending efforts to get us to turn our hatred inwards, at ourselves and each other. What is needed is to arm our class politically, so that the rightists’ appeals to turn our hatred against ourselves fall on barren ground.</blockquote>
<p>The problem with this is that hate is an exceedingly blunt instrument. I’ve spent hours of my life that I will never get back, in recent years, trying to do something approaching what Robb suggests – convince working-class New Zealanders on Facebook that the inequalities our country faces are due to the last National Government’s unjust employment policies, not to its permissive immigration policy with regard to East Asia. Invariably the bulk of the responses were along the lines of “Yes, we know it’s the employers’ fault there are so many Chinese here.” No, Chinese people being here are not a problem, the problem is employers getting away with underpaying immigrants who can’t stand up for themselves, how about we run a campaign for immigrant workers’ rights? “Well, there’s still too many of them coming in, we need to shut off the tap.” Mind you, the particular Facebook group I’m thinking of is skewed towards supporters of Winston Peters, of whom Robb makes the surreal understatement that he “has engaged in scapegoating of immigrants himself in the past.”</p>
<p>The instinct to divide the world into an Us and a Them, goodies and baddies, Jedi and Sith, Elves and Orcs, is deeply rooted in the human psyche. It is not alone, and it can be kept under wraps by nourishing its equally deeply-anchored rival, the instinct for empathy. But it <em>will</em> surface given encouragement. And the worst thing about it is that it’s <em>not</em> a mindless animal rage. We are quite adept at making connections between outsider groups and noticing which ones seem to be associated with our enemies. I never once encountered racism against Māori or Pacific Island people in that Facebook group, rampant though those attitudes are on the New Zealand Right; it was Chinese and Indian immigrants who were seen as benefiting from National policies and thus deserving of hate. At least one contributor actually said in so many words “I hope Winston keeps the Asians out but not the Pacific Islanders.”</p>
<p>That in itself tells against Robb’s insinuation that racism is a cunning ploy by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class. There’s plenty of evidence that class divisions create injustices and hurt people on the bottom of the pile; I know of none whatsoever to support the claim that they are the root of all other divisions in society, nor that working-class anger would naturally gravitate to its just targets in the ruling class, and no-one else, absent ruling-class propaganda. It is no longer surprising to me that most Marxist revolutions outside the Soviet bloc ended up being as much about nationalism as socialism, distant though nationalism was from Marx’s own thinking. Foreigners are allies of the bourgeois enemy, and to hate one is to hate the other.</p>
<p>Robb’s final paragraph verges on conspiracy theorizing:</p>
<blockquote><em>That possibility</em>, the potential counter-mobilization, is what Mayor Phil Goff feared – not the rightists themselves, who pose no threat to capitalist law and order, and certainly not the ridiculous threats of disruption from tiny left groups – and <em>that</em> is what he moved to pre-empt.</blockquote>
<p>I am inescapably reminded of the guy I met once who suggested that Otago University’s <a href="https://www.otago.ac.nz/ncpacs/index.html">National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies</a> must be secretly intended to research how to <em>start</em> wars rather than prevent them. His reasoning: Otago University is a bourgeois institution; the bourgeoisie like war; therefore... And it’s not too far away from the argument I had a few weeks ago, with Marxists who in this case are friends of mine, on the notion that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are “both on the same side” (on account of neither one being a Marxist, you see). But I didn’t write a blog post on that then because I didn’t want things to get nasty, and I will resist the temptation to go further along this tangent now.</p>
<p>How then <em>do</em> we counter the “alt-right”? I think Danskin’s recommendation is the best starting-point. Avoid getting dragged into debates with them, for a start. Tell the truth, publicly, about the things they tell lies about, but don’t start by explaining what their position is so you can point out where they’re going wrong; start with the truth. (This is going to be a challenge for me, since basically all my writing is inspired by reading something I disagree with.) Sometimes, however, especially on social media, “alt-right” fascists can worm their way into existing conversations, and it’s hard to get rid of them without making it look like you had no answer to their lies. In that case, what I suggest is this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Ask them the central, relevant question of the debate. One sentence. Something that will require <em>them</em> to explain something.</li>
<li>When they deflect it, ask it again, in the same words.</li>
<li>Resist the temptation to explicate at length how they’re going off-topic. A short phrase like “Non-answer noted” is ample.
Ask them the question again.</li>
<li>Ignore indirect accusations altogether. If they come at you with a direct accusation, give it <em>at most</em> the one word “No.”
Nothing else. Ask them the question again.</li>
<li>If they send you private messages with nasty threats or insults, <em>immediately</em> screenshot them and post the screenshots in the public thread. Blank out any sensitive information about yourself or innocent third parties, obviously. Answer as above.</li>
<li>Be courteous and patient with all good-faith participants in the conversation. Speak the truth, addressing <em>them</em>, not the fascist.</li>
</ul>
<p>Remember, what they want you to do is (a) explain at length, thus putting you on the back foot; or (b) get angry and yell insults so they can look like the good guy; or, failing that, (c) have them blocked or banned so they can boast about how they were too much for you – and in all cases, stick you in a “can be ignored because...” box, because their longer-term goal is to make those boxes familiar features of public discourse. There’s no ideal response (and for violent individuals a ban may be necessary to keep people safe), but failing to answer a question at least won’t make them look strong or certain. Do <em>not</em> seek out such confrontations. Do <em>not</em> supplement these tactics with scornful or angry replies, no matter how well-deserved.</p>
<p>And what do we do when they hold public events? Well, this is probably the best idea:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1807/S00620/anti-racism-event-re-lauren-southern-on-28-july.htm" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg8nH3IkgNyqA7909HFWJVrG_KkweGXHpv49lzti4xdDLZBsxNV9xDKOcxnIyHMS3-LKjHNnYw0NbXZdDYClhK6fmE1aBSMnmLgMLwE4y12l2GZ33RXtSNnrnHWq4VlkNpuZ8g0tdJf-MB/s1600/loveaotearoa.jpg" data-original-width="682" data-original-height="960" title="Love Aotearoa / Hate Racism rally poster: a rally to be held in Mangere, Auckland, on 28 July 2018" alt="Love Aotearoa / Hate Racism rally poster: a rally to be held in Mangere, Auckland, on 28 July 2018" /></a></div>
<p>It’s still possibly a bit reactive, in that “Hate racism” gives the fascists a toe-hold in the context. But at least it doesn’t name them. It would have been best to hold it on the same day and time as their meeting, so as to starve them directly of the audience and media attention that they thrive on; but I appreciate that they’ve cancelled and rescheduled, which makes that difficult to synchronize. The important thing is to turn out to this in numbers. Almost makes me wish I lived in Auckland so I could go there.</p>
<p>In the meantime, freedom of speech is precious. The “alt-right” has already managed to get it associated with them in public discourse. Let’s not let them take it from us – either by expanding the state’s powers to silence them or by endorsing their interpretation of it as a right to dominate conversations and be listened to.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-90519449537051019202018-06-01T05:34:00.001-07:002018-06-01T05:34:10.667-07:00Against enforced monogamy<style type="text/css">
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<p>The issue of sexual violence has never gone away. The <span class="cybertext">#metoo</span> movement is just one more response to it, though so far one that’s been getting more notice than many. In the last, I don’t know, month or so, the media at large has at last started to notice the well-established connection between misogynistic violence and mass shootings, and the word “incel” – involuntarily celibate – has achieved a greater currency than it had before. I gather “incel” was first coined to describe the experience of being queer and unable to find someone of the gender you like who likes people of your gender, but it has now unfortunately been very firmly appropriated as a self-identifier for that subset of men who (a) aren’t getting sex and (b) believe they are <em>owed</em> sex. And this of course has led to suggestions that maybe mass shootings would be averted if more women would “take one for the team” and have sex with incels. Because, apparently, some people aren’t content with being horrible human beings in the privacy of their own homes.</p>
<p>I have seen it claimed, mind you, that incels aren’t real because it’s not actually hard to find someone to have sex with and these men must be just being needlessly picky (or obsessive) about their choice of partner. I can’t hold with this. For <em>some</em> people it may be easy to find people to have sex with, but there are many circumstances which make it difficult for others. One, as already noted, is being the only queer person in your offline circle. Various disabilities – physical and social – have similar effects. It’s not the not getting sex that makes incels horrible people, it’s the belief that they are owed it. Men who believe they’re owed sex are horrible people whether or not they’re getting it, which brings this digression nicely back to the point.</p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago a guy walked into Santa Fe High School in Texas and shot people, killing ten of them. Following <a href="https://veryrarelystable.tumblr.com/post/174140281948/lolnoodle-%E3%83%84">an excellent suggestion</a> that’s been passed around Twitter and Tumblr, I’m going to refer to the perpetrator as “Shooter #101” (this was the 101st mass shooting in the United States this year). The mother of one of the dead, Shana Fisher, has claimed that her daughter was repeatedly harassed by Shooter #101 for a date and ultimately turned him down publicly in front of the school, and that she was the first person he shot. Several articles on the incident have used this for a lede. Apparently it hasn’t been corroborated by witnesses – which is bad enough, but I’ve worked in journalism in a very small way, I can understand going ahead with the article on the assumption that the mother knew what she was talking about. What’s not forgivable is that <em>this</em> was how they framed this element of the case:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgVCEJ6z8jWhhFNm8c0jcO9Kpiu6z6KMbsXi2kuQHoSbWxNr5miIiPGT5XcxfkcyvzXIF4GpRI7JxQImrWkPw5canjZBSB4jgkOa99i0uBWFhBVRCPk6wA-gfsq6JQj2qdVt6ope7S5FeI/s320/santafe1.jpg" title="Spurned advances from [Shooter #101] provoked Texas shooting, says mother of girl killed (NZ Herald)" alt="Spurned advances from [Shooter #101] provoked Texas shooting, says mother of girl killed (NZ Herald)" /><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwL4Vey0ai8rqr_lTEdKmCqVi6ckDWhWHa0Yl8QheSW65DYpj4mIN19L3ByGvAN_uW7tlMm7MJf7JgV3idhoDyaMhF9HxsXNhI5mGZbDtmI5nzl5G7YCTISm_2KY-VDljjlLnGkVz7VEHP/s320/santafe2.jpg" title="Texas school shooter killed girl who turned down his advances and embarrassed him in class, mother says (LA Times)" alt="Texas school shooter killed girl who turned down his advances and embarrassed him in class, mother says (LA Times)" /></div>
<p>And these are far from the worst. You see the narrative being put forward here? Men (overwhelmingly) do the shooting, but never fear, we can always find a way that it’s ultimately a woman’s fault. Women are put on earth to meet men’s needs, and men go astray when women fail to fulfill that function. Men’s sexual and romantic yearnings give them a proprietary right over women’s bodies, attention, and time. Most commentators would recoil from this position if it were stated openly; the danger of framing male violence as the headlines above do is precisely that this narrative sneaks under the radar as a tacit premise instead of being exposed to challenge as an explicit proposition. To men who do believe that women owe them sex, this subtextual confirmation helps that belief fit just that little bit more comfortably into their picture of the world.<a name='more'></a> (If you’ve ever wondered why some stripes of liberalism place such a high value on freedom of speech, even abhorrent speech, this sort of thing is why; but that’s a topic I can’t treat adequately in an aside.)</p>
<p>So it’s not especially surprising that some people have been raising solutions involving women meeting men’s needs more than they currently do. That <em>New York Times</em> article proposing “redistribution of sex” was (I’m very nearly certain) intended to lampoon the concept of redistributing wealth; the outrage at its face-value proposal, while entirely just, played straight into its author’s hands. A cogent criticism would have been to point out the rather large differences between sex and wealth, such as that (a) your paycheque isn’t your body and (b) no-one ever starved to death for want of sex. But other suggestions have been made in all seriousness which are equally objectionable on the same grounds.</p>
<p>On the day of the Santa Fe shooting the <em>New York Times</em> ran another article about Jordan Peterson, who I’d barely heard of before this month, and his call for “enforced monogamy”. Peterson hastened, on his blog, to clarify: “enforced” only means enforced by social conventions, not a police state à la <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em>, and also this is standard anthropological terminology and the <em>New York Times</em> interviewer is a fool for not knowing that. For the record, my degree (from way way back in the day when I was studying for myself instead of taking notes for other people) is in cultural anthropology, and I’d never heard of it.</p>
<p>In Peterson’s own words:</p>
<blockquote>Men get frustrated when they are not competitive in the sexual marketplace (note: the fact that they <em>do</em> get frustrated does not mean that they <em>should</em> get frustrated. Pointing out the existence of something is not the same as justifying its existence). Frustrated men tend to become dangerous, particularly if they are young. The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation.<br />
That’s all.<br />
No recommendation of police-state assignation of woman to man (or, for that matter, man to woman).<br />
No arbitrary dealing out of damsels to incels.<br />
Nothing scandalous (all innuendo and suggestive editing to the contrary).<br />
Just the plain, bare, common-sense facts: socially-enforced monogamous conventions decrease male violence. In addition (and not trivially) they also help provide mothers with comparatively reliable male partners, and increase the probability that stable, father-intact homes will exist for children.</blockquote>
<p>I’m going to lead by example here, and coin a less misleading term and refer to it as <em>conventional</em> monogamy. I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Peterson has got his basic facts right and conventional monogamy does indeed reduce male violence. It’s not implausible on the face of it. Certainly violent crime has fallen in many frontier situations when women start moving in and marrying the men. If so, the introduction of marital monogamy by Christianity and Roman Empire Judaism (a fusion of the Abrahamic precept that a man may have sex only with his wives and the Graeco-Roman law that a man may only have one wife) could be considered a major moral advance in civilization, on the order of the abolition of slavery. It does not follow that this is the last moral advance that could be made in this area, nor that monogamy <em>per se</em> is the critical element.</p>
<p>Certainly marriage has evolved since the West first became Christian. In the early Middle Ages, marriage was a property transaction plain and simple, to cement an alliance of purely economic interest between two patrilineal families, with women as the currency. Whatever its effects on violence, this system was no improvement as regards gender justice, and in Northern Europe it was indeed a major step backwards. From the Church’s point of view, marriage was a safety-valve so that people who already sinned in thought by desiring sex didn’t also sin in deed by having it with more than one person. Celibacy was better. (In a sinless world, according to St Augustine, people would have sex only when they rationally decided it was time to procreate, and there wouldn’t be all this distracting business of lust and orgasm and pleasure attached to it.)</p>
<p>Needless to say, people went on feeling lust and pleasure and also falling in love, usually not with their designated spouse, as people everywhere always have. In the twelfth century a new attitude arose, beginning in southern France and northern Italy, which celebrated erotic love as a high and noble feeling, one that could help you make good decisions that would increase your happiness (previously it had been held on a par, in that regard, with being drunk). At this point, however, love still had nothing to do with marriage; the ideal was a steamy adulterous affair between a knight and his lord’s lady. The most familiar surviving example of it as a literary trope is probably the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, which was indeed inserted around this time into the much older canon of Arthurian lore. The Church responded with the same kind of ineffectual spluttering it would later use to counter the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the modern period another change began: people started connecting marriage with love. This I think must be considered another moral advance, as it granted a greater degree of agency to women and allowed people to act on their desires, at least some of the time, without having to weave a web of deceit around them. The latter was one of the big points of contention between the Catholic Church and the Protestant reformers, who threw out the ideal of celibacy in favour of marital fidelity. Shakespeare’s <em>Romeo & Juliet</em> is a milestone in the process; previous versions of the story had presented the moral “Don’t let your teenagers follow their hearts or they’ll kill themselves,” but Shakespeare made it “<em>Do</em> let your teenagers follow their hearts or they’ll kill themselves.”</p>
<p>But just because romantic monogamous marriage is an improvement over what went before doesn’t mean it’s the best we can possibly do. The romantic ideal creates problems in its own right. If being in love with someone means you’re supposed to marry them, what do you do if they don’t love you back? Nine centuries of love literature answer: keep wooing until you win them. Far from assuaging the violent anger of the incels, this is one of the roots of their toxic belief that women owe them sex.</p>
<p>Conventional monogamy, whether romanticized or not, has further problems. Not least, whatever side benefits it might bring in reduced male violence, it invariably fails at its stated purpose. Humans have sex in private and cannot directly scrutinize one another’s sex lives, and therefore no-one ever refrains from having sex they want to have for the sake of a social convention. Personal conviction, yes; social convention, never. What they do instead is deceive their families and friends and throw shrouds of secrecy over their connections, which is corrosive to social trust. Society counters with chaperoning and other forms of surveillance, which is also corrosive to social trust. Shame is a weapon and, like other weapons, should only be used when necessary to prevent worse harm.</p>
<p>Most people want sex, and most people understand that most people want sex, so when society forces them to pretend they don’t want sex, any protestation of not wanting sex is read as part of that pretence. The 1944 song <em>Baby It’s Cold Outside</em> remains contentious to this day: the female character keeps on saying “no, I have to go home, people will talk”, yet everything but her words indicates she would prefer to stay the night with the male character, which is what ends up happening. As an autistic person prone to misreading conversational subtext, I can sympathize with the argument that the convention of waiting until the wedding eliminates any ambiguity in your partner’s “yes”. But I think it fundamentally misguided in two respects. First, consent is only meaningful if it’s revocable; and second, it’s that very convention that creates the ambiguity in the first place.</p>
<p>When any penalty, even a “merely” social penalty, is applied to unapproved sexual connections, it always falls disproportionately upon women, for the simple reason that women about 99% of the time are the ones who are going to come down with an incriminating pregnancy (and incidentally, societies that strictly police sexual norms also strictly police gender norms and try and push that number up to 100%, but that’s outside of today’s topic). The other party can always choose to walk away and deny any involvement, and any penalty for non-monogamy creates an incentive for him to do so. Homophobia is a conspicuous exception to this rule, but of course homophobia specifically penalizes sex acts that are unlikely to cause pregnancy.</p>
<p>Finally, conventional monogamy frequently traps people together in a relationship that makes one or both of them miserable. One would hope this would happen less often if they loved each other to start with, but that’s not guaranteed to last, and more to the point “love” as in erotic attachment isn’t a safeguard against abuse. If not supplemented with a big dose of respect and empathy it becomes mere possessiveness.</p>
<p>So it’s well worth asking exactly what conventional monogamy does to damp down violence. Maybe we can jigger together a new system that keeps doing that, whatever it is, while smoothing out some of the flaws in the old system. Western countries largely abandoned conventional monogamy in the 1960s, apart from pockets of Christian subculture like the one I grew up in, and sure enough there followed a wave of violent crime. That sounds pretty indicative – until you learn that the wave went into reverse in the 1990s and has continued to trend downwards. Because I’ll tell you what didn’t happen in the 1990s; Western countries didn’t all pick up conventional monogamy again. Something else made the difference, and that already tells us that there <em>is</em> something else that can make that difference.</p>
<p>Why do men hurt people less in conventionally monogamous societies? Partly because they aren’t competing over women quite as much. A man in a monogamous society might still have affairs with dozens of women all over the show, of course, but he can’t claim <em>exclusive</em> sexual access to more than one of them and expect it to stick. His incontinence doesn’t condemn other men to a life of loneliness. Partly because a man in an exclusive relationship with a woman has to listen to what she says some of the time, and <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2016/10/why-women-are-better-than-men.html">women are better than men</a>. And partly because exercising self-control in one area of life makes you better at using it in another. So what we need is a social movement that encourages men to (a) exercise self-control, (b) listen to women, and (c) not treat them as trophies to fight over.</p>
<p>Is this a good time to mention <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/about-us/news/largest-global-study-violence-against-women-finds-feminist-m">the 2012 study</a> that found that the single biggest factor for reducing violence against women was strong, autonomous feminist movements in their communities?</p>
<p>Why America has so many mass shootings these days is either a bit puzzling or thunderingly obvious, depending on which aspect of it you’re trying to explain. The obvious part is “Why America?” It’s the guns, guys. The puzzling part is “Why these days?” <em>Individual</em> homicides, like most forms of violence, have become less frequent; why aren’t mass shootings doing the same? Partly it must be the notoriety afforded by America’s sensationalistic news media, hence the call to refer to mass shooters by number instead of name. But looking at the demographics of mass shootings, why is it young white conservative men who seek that notoriety? Why do so many of them have a history of abusive behaviour towards women?</p>
<p>Unrequited love and sexual frustration are risk factors, but these by themselves don’t drive men to murderous behaviour. Men go on killing sprees, or become terrorist bombers, or perform other acts of mass violence, when they believe they have been <em>wronged</em>. You can’t believe you’re wronged unless you first believe you had a right to something. And that brings us full circle: mass shooters believe that women owe them sex. Conventional monogamy doesn’t counter that belief; feminism does. Which may (along with the guns) help explain the correlation with conservative beliefs. Young conservative men don’t listen to feminists.</p>
<p>So, Jordan Peterson, in the highly unlikely event that you’re reading this – if you’re serious about quelling male violence, now you have a better idea of what sort of politics you need to be promoting to accomplish that.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-27357789222733435412018-04-23T22:01:00.000-07:002018-04-23T22:07:55.893-07:00Science belongs to every culture<style type="text/css">
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<a href="https://royalsociety.org.nz/who-we-are/contact-us/"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgCpG1TKq_G6g1YCxiBbYyIQT_clo4PqGgGEODvvg4SvWg3B1xAqGKnnZr95qojD8kR4_Fvgo90fMhI92S3foII8Tb_u70TFTTuzOd0LGSKbOwLGaSkJj4oqpdFY0DQ2EpsV8NG2zPB2Bx/s1600/RoyalSocietyNZ.jpg" data-original-width="255" data-original-height="255" style="float:right;" /></a>
<p><em>I submitted this to <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff-nation/assignments/share-your-news-and-views">Stuff Nation</a> after <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/103044604/in-science-ambiguity-and-the-supernatural-are-anathema">this piece</a> by one Bob Brockie, complaining about the New Zealand Royal Society’s choice to officially acknowledge the <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2015/02/whakamanatia-te-tiriti.html">Treaty of Waitangi</a>, came across my Facebook feed. They haven’t published it, so I guess I’m free to put it here.</em><p>
<p>Bob Brockie thinks that the Treaty of Waitangi is irrelevant to the scientific endeavour, and the Royal Society of New Zealand ought therefore to ignore it. I think he’s wrong, and I’ll show you why.</p>
<p>First of all, while the phrase “the principles of the Treaty” does sound worryingly vague, its twenty-year history in legal usage has pinned down its precise meaning. I don’t think Brockie is aware of this. The principles of the Treaty are often summed up as: partnership; protection; and participation. Partnership would mean granting Māori people and Māori institutions equal say with Pākehā in decision-making around science, such as what areas of research should be given priority over others. Protection would mean respecting Māori cultural sensibilities just as much as Pākehā ones in ethical deliberations over research on human subjects. Participation would mean ensuring that Māori and Pākehā have equal opportunities to become scientists and to benefit from science and technology. I can’t imagine that Brockie would object to any of that; so I presume he just didn’t know what “the principles of the Treaty” are.</p>
<p>Second, Brockie is simply wrong to assert that, in the humanities, “everybody’s opinions or beliefs can be of equal value and should never be challenged.” Of course, many humanities academics make the equal and opposite error of claiming that the sciences do not teach critical thinking, and therefore the humanities ought to be in charge. Nor are science and the humanities “parallel universes” with little to say to each other. To take just a couple of examples: history and archaeology greatly enrich each other, while literature and the arts contain a goldmine of long-term information about the human mind that can benefit psychology.</p>
<p>Personally I would go so far as to say that the humanities themselves constitute a science as rigorous and empirical as any other. As geology is the science of rocks, and astronomy the science of stars, the humanities are the science of meaning. I do share Brockie’s suspicion of postmodernist ideology, which in my opinion has greatly hampered progress in the humanities. But other scientific fields have also had their fads and fancies, such as behaviourism in psychology, or group selection in evolutionary biology.</p>
<p>Finally, while Brockie is strictly correct that traditional Māori belief “has its roots in the supernatural and vitalism”, he is mistaken if he thinks that this in any way distinguishes it from traditional Pākehā belief, with its heavens and its hell, its angels and devils and immortal souls, and its fixed Platonic or Aristotelian essences. I think Brockie here falls prey to a common confusion between two related, but distinct, meanings of the word “science".</p>
<p>If by “science” we mean any systematic endeavour to understand the world through strictly empirical investigation, then I quite agree with Brockie that this is the only source of reliable knowledge. But “science” in this sense does not exclude the knowledge of non-Western cultures, of which the traditional navigation methods that brought the ancestors of the Māori across the Pacific Ocean to these shores are a shining example.</p>
<p>If on the other hand by “science” we mean the body of knowledge that the West has gradually accumulated since Francis Bacon and Copernicus, then of course this tradition has drawn more heavily on European thought than on other cultures’. But “science” in this sense has no especial claim to be more reliable than other systematic, empirical traditions of knowledge.</p>
<p>I don’t claim to know very much about traditional Māori lore, and yet I can name four points on which it beat the West to the scientific punch off the top of my head:</p>
<ul>
<li>Western tradition gives the universe an eternally pre-existing God; Māori lore states that it began from nothing (<em>Te Kore</em>).</li>
<li>Western tradition has God create plants and animals in separate kinds from the beginning; Māori lore acknowledges the familial kinship of all life.</li>
<li>Western tradition puts the seat of consciousness and will in the heart; Māori lore puts it in the head.</li>
</ul>
<p>And on a more mundane but practical note,</p>
<ul>
<li>When Western doctors were still cross-infecting patients left, right, and centre, Māori practitioners had long been guarding against sickness by washing their hands after dealing with blood.</li>
</ul>
<p>I imagine it’s this sort of thing that the President of the Royal Society had in mind in recommending that scientists “embrace the research methodologies of multiple knowledge systems”, as Brockie complains. I can report that pharmacists are only now beginning to investigate traditional Māori healing practices (<em>rongoā</em>); an initial study found that many of the plants used contain pharmacologically useful substances – and that’s as far as they’ve got.</p>
<p>Obviously more progress needs to be made, and obviously it won’t be made by uncritically accepting whatever cultural traditions tell us. But it won’t be made by uncritically throwing them out either. Nor will it be made by walling off the different fields of knowledge from each other. “Sticking to one’s knitting” is not the way to go.</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-76847252250489271112018-03-21T04:37:00.001-07:002018-03-22T15:10:27.315-07:00What economic and government systems do you think function best?<style type="text/css">
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<p><em>Last week one of my Tumblr followers asked me the above question. I <a href="https://veryrarelystable.tumblr.com/post/171780160443/what-economic-and-government-systems-do-you-think">wrote down</a> as many things as I could think of in the time I had, which wasn’t everything. I started putting down justifying arguments for each point, but found that this was making it far too long for a Tumblr post. So I’m repeating my answer here, with a few more points and some argumentation to back it up and hopefully a bit more coherence (but you be the judge of that).</em></p>
<p>I try to keep my thinking grounded in empirical evidence, but I only have so much time for doing research and what I do find is inevitably biased by being filtered through my own perspective, which is not neutral but was formed through many years of political involvement. I began my political life in 1996, at the age of 18, in a protest against Otago University raising tuition fees. It was a big protest, because at that point New Zealand tertiary institutions had only been charging tuition for a few years and it had caught a lot of people by surprise. So there were a lot of dedicated protesters involved. Many of them were Marxists, so I started off as a kind of Marxist camp follower leaning towards anarchism of sorts. I still feel loyalty to this crowd, and there are some social values that I still think Marxism captures better than most other politics. But looking at the empirical evidence I am unable to endorse the prototypical Marxist plan for achieving those values.</p>
<p>In particular, countries that remodel themselves from the ground up with armed Marxist revolutions <em>always</em> end up as repressive, poverty-stricken dictatorships. I know of no exceptions. Some are worse than others – if I had to choose, I’d much rather live under Fidel Castro or Muammar Gaddafi than Pol Pot – but none of them have ever produced the communist paradise, or even the socialist interim state, that Marx envisioned. In a few places in the world you can see a Marxist regime and a liberal regime side by side, with the same geopolitical and environmental conditions, and compare their socioeconomic outcomes; the liberals (West Germany, South Korea, Botswana) always do better than the Marxists (East Germany, North Korea, Zimbabwe). And really, Marx should have known better, given that the prime real-life event he used to exemplify his theories was the French Revolution, which had exactly the same effect in installing the Napoleonic Empire.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaLfQORiDtICjQghDAGPe54dRRGl1El9B1YYV072-8XijxStKD8__7DKMEtgOrjG8dIG9Ln2OYx-3ygtQT4vChmaa6ZCHqIHiohwHWXZlNoi213b1L9G9lG2LfuQlFs4fiFwm47_a1Fc6H/s320/Koreas.jpg" width="320" height="213" data-original-width="920" data-original-height="613" alt="The Koreas from space at night" title="The Koreas from space at night" /></div>
<p>Empirically, the systems which function best, in the sense of facilitating human life, health, knowledge, freedom, prosperity, and equality, are those known as “mixed economies”, like those of Scandinavia and Japan and formerly New Zealand. These combine open but well-regulated markets with stable democratic government, progressive tax systems, state-owned infrastructure, and high public expenditure on social welfare, health, and education. But of course there are still a great many areas in which I believe progress could be made. And here they are.</p><a name='more'></a>
<ul>
<li><strong>Empowerment of women.</strong> I hope I don’t need to explain how this is a matter of justice in and of itself. It’s also one of the prerequisites of the demographic transition whereby nearly all married couples in modern societies have zero to three children instead of six to ten, which is why civilization hasn’t yet been destroyed by a population explosion. Most mixed economies already have that under control, of course. But further, when women’s status and success is determined by how good they are at appeasing and/or impressing men, that creates a toxic dynamic which fosters sexual misconduct. In such an environment, where high status is a man’s ticket to sexual indulgence, it’s the aggressive, arrogant, and rapacious men who win leadership contests – and then everybody is worse off. Therefore, every society needs to implement zero tolerance for sexist discrimination, and to name and shame sexual predators. If other factors besides discrimination and sexual predation are at work, then those factors too need to be identified and counteracted.</li>
<li>As a corollary of the above, <strong>birth control including abortion</strong> must be made freely available and readily accessible. (I have a whole post devoted to <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2017/03/why-abortion-isnt-murder.html">why abortion isn’t murder</a>; if you disagree, please argue with me there rather than here.) Besides being another prerequisite for the demographic transition, birth control is central to women’s liberation, because biology has made sexual reproduction in placental mammals such as humans a highly asymmetric process where the pregnant partner bears a massively greater portion of the physical costs than the other, and most women belong to the pregnancy-prone demographic for a large part of their lifespan. What for cisgender men is a science fiction or horror scenario – the prospect of a foreign organism commandeering their organs for sustenance – for cisgender women is something they have to plan against every time they interact with a man who might lust for them. This fundamental asymmetry is key to the gender power imbalance already mentioned. Anything a society can do to alleviate it, it should.</li>
<li>As another corollary, each society should <strong>accept, normalize, and celebrate the full human diversity of gender and sexuality</strong>. Here we’re starting to get into cultural rather than organizational matters – what <em>meanings</em> people read in things – which economics and government can influence only indirectly. Laws formalizing gay marriage or banning homophobic and transphobic discrimination won’t erase bigoted attitudes in the population. But they will create an environment in which queer people feel safer being visible in public, and queer people being visible in public <em>will</em> gradually chip away at bigoted attitudes in the population. Again, this is a goal primarily worth pursuing for its own sake, with the side benefit that if people accept that there are multiple different ways sexuality and gender can work, they’re unlikely to feel that one particular pattern (such as men sexually preying upon women) is just the way things have to be.</li>
<li>While we’re on the subject of discrimination, society must work towards <strong>eliminating racism</strong>. That means laws against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and culture. It means a zero tolerance policy for violence that is racially motivated. But there’s more to it than that, because racial biases get perpetuated in vicious circles within the socioeconomic system. For instance, African Americans find it harder to get bank loans because they’re higher credit risks because they find it harder to get loans. Such sticking-points in the system need to be identified and, wherever possible, sanded off by policy. Racist cultural attitudes are harder to target; it’s easy enough to pass a law banning “hate speech”, but it’s unclear whether such laws fix the problem in the long run or merely drive racism under the surface to fester. But certainly policy can encourage <em>positive</em> representations of people of colour and of minority ethnicities, which can help insofar as stereotypes are a product of the human brain heuristic that says “Whatever I see a lot of is the way things are.”</li>
<li>For broadly similar reasons, society should <strong>normalize disability accommodations</strong>. In research and development policy, new technologies for overcoming impairments should be a high priority. And I say that in full recognition that such technologies will eventually eliminate my job (<a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2018/02/is-writing-on-wall.html">if wrongheaded University practices don’t get there first</a>). Once again, this isn’t just about being nice to disabled people. People who can’t participate fully in society can’t contribute fully to the economy. Accommodations make us more useful, not more of a “burden”. But again there are sticking-points in the system to contend with, and cultural prejudices to be overcome.</li>
<li>Actually, a great deal of marginalization is driven by the idea that <em>those</em> people – whether the point of difference is culture, religion, sexuality, gender identity, or mental health – are “funny” or “just weird”, and therefore it’s OK to laugh at them, call them out in the street, publish embarrassing photos of them, mock them for comedy purposes, etc., etc., etc. The laughter, you’ll find, is generally driven by discomfort, whether in the form of disgust or fear. <em>They’re not bad people but there’s too many of them. Do they have to get in everyone’s faces like that? Can’t they just be normal? Can’t they at least </em>pretend<em> to be normal instead of confronting us with our discomfort?</em> It would solve an awful lot of problems, eventually, if we could <strong>stop stigmatizing people who are harmlessly “weird”</strong> and reserve our disapproval for behaviour that is actually harmful or dangerous. But we’re getting a bit removed from what a political and economic system can do. I suppose public awareness campaigns couldn’t hurt.</li>
<li>Most modern societies that I can think of could use a good dose of <strong>body positivity</strong> – the above point repeated but for deviant bodies instead of behaviour. We do need to do something about obesity, and I’ll touch on that lower down, but shaming people for being fat has been abundantly shown <em>not to help</em>. And fat-shaming isn’t driven by a concern for health anyway; that’s just a cover for hatred. Then there’s sexual objectification, which brings us back to my opening points about gender and sexuality. A living human body is first and foremost a living human being, neither an ornament to be stared at nor an obscenity to be covered up, as I’ve said before. I know my recommendation here is going to be a step too far for many readers, but for the record, it is: <strong>legalize and normalize non-sexual public nudity</strong>.</li>
<li>While we’re at it, it might help to <strong>legalize recreational drugs</strong>, then subject them to the same safety regulations and consumer controls as all other products in the market. This seems to be working pretty well so far in Portugal. There should probably be a graded system of health controls based on how habit-forming a given substance is, and for highly addictive ones like heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, or tobacco, publicly funded programmes to help wean people off them. At present in most countries the legal status of a substance is based not on toxicity or addictiveness but on knee-jerk prejudices. In New Zealand, alcohol, tobacco, and even opiates are easier to get legally than cannabis. Your doctor can prescribe codeine, and the hospital has morphine. But a chronic pain sufferer who could be helped by cannabis has to grit and bear it, or risk arrest. Our new Prime Minister promised to change this. I do appreciate it takes time.</li>
<li>Speaking of addictive toxic substances, we need to put <strong>some kind of control on sugar</strong> and maybe saturated fats as well. A tax would probably be the simplest from the consumer’s point of view, as the information about the healthiness of the food would be incorporated in the price. But this has the obvious drawback that it would start as a price hike to the cheapest foods, which would hit poor people the hardest. I think there would be compensating benefits, such as better oral health and less obesity-related disease, but those would take time to come through. Here in New Zealand, actually, the solution is pretty simple, and I’ve <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/04/the-social-justice-case-for-sugar-tax.html">suggested it before</a>: take <em>off</em> the 15% Goods & Services Tax, currently levied on everything sold by any business larger than a garage sale, from foods <em>without</em> sugar. That way we make life easier for those who are struggling while at the same time implementing a major measure on that keystone principle of public health policy, “Make the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice”.</li>
<li>On the same principle, let’s have <strong>carbon taxes that actually work</strong>. We had some, briefly, in 2008, and then the National Party got elected and changed the rules so that they didn’t actually accomplish anything. While we wait for the world’s governments to get their act together, <strong>disinvesting from polluting industries</strong> should at least send some kind of signal about what sort of behaviour is acceptable in the 21st century. The motto needs to become “Make the Sustainable Choice the Easy Choice” rather than what it seems to be at present, which is “Make the Sustainable Choice the Ostentatiously Virtuous Choice”.</li>
<li>For environmental hazards of a less global scale than climate change, it might be worth trying out <strong>environmental unions</strong> to hold particular assets, especially forests and rivers, in trust. Any enterprise which wanted to exploit or pollute the asset would have to pay the trust the value of the damage done; the trust would deploy that money for clean-up and repair. This would (if I’m right) have two advantages over running all environmental protection measures through the state: the unions would be more responsive to local changes in the environmental asset, and less vulnerable to being abolished with the stroke of a pen at the whim of a new government. In places where indigenous organizations already play an advisory role in environmental consultation, as Māori <em>iwi</em> do in New Zealand, they should be the ones holding the purse-strings of the trusts.</li>
<li>And since we’ve mentioned unions, let’s have <strong>trade union engagement in social welfare</strong>. I think not having had this in the 1980s is the single biggest reason why New Zealand is a <em>former</em>, rather than a current, mixed economy. The Scandinavian countries all had it, and their unions stayed strong when everybody else’s imploded – a thing that happened just after a whole lot of young workers looked around and said “What has the union ever done for me?” On the other side, I’ve suffered through the indignities of getting the unemployment benefit in a neoliberal country, and I’m convinced that organizations chiefly concerned for workers’ welfare would manage it hundreds of times better than ones chiefly concerned with saving taxpayer money and making the Government’s unemployment statistics look good. Unions have connections full of information about where jobs are scarce and where labour is in demand. If the beneficiary automatically became a member of whichever union got them a job, that’s a win for both parties.</li>
<li>Whoever ends up in charge of connecting workers with work, they need to <strong>prioritize “Which job is best for this person?”</strong> over “Which person is best for this job?” I’m sure to conservatives that will sound like bleeding-heart sentiment that could never work in the real world where competence makes a difference. In which case they need to go back to their economics textbooks, because this is simply the logic of what they call “comparative advantage” applied on an individual instead of an international scale. The maths is the same whether it’s countries or people, guys.</li>
<li>On the other end of the equation, I believe <strong>business firms need to become democratic</strong>. Presently most large business organizations are run as monarchies or satrapies, where highly centralized leadership hand-picks its own successors without input from the rest of the organization. These structures should give way to democratic worker co-operatives with strong representation from consumer and environmental advocacy groups. Democracies function better than monarchies, and businesses function better when they let workers self-organize and cooperate. This needn’t interfere with them functioning externally as businesses selling goods and services in the open market. And if the workers were all shareholders in the business, then come budget-setting time, accounting could tell them “We can raise your wages now, or we can raise your share dividends next year – over to you.”</li>
<li><strong>Tertiary education should be free.</strong> I’ve <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/02/bring-back-free-education.html">argued this one before</a> too. Study is a full-time job, and knowledge is a public good. It’s not as radical a change as it sounds; the government would still pay the educational institution at the time of study, and the student would still pay the government after graduation. The question is how much the student’s payment to the government should be conceived as a tax, and how much as a loan repayment. I believe the student’s payment to the government should be proportional to the benefit the student receives in terms of the boost to their income, and that it should not affect their credit rating. Which is as much as to say, it should be 100% tax and 0% loan repayment.</li>
<li><strong>The internet should be a public asset</strong> like other infrastructure. Reverse its financial flow so that ISPs buy content from content creators rather than selling hosting space to content creators. Anyone could still post anything to the internet, but if some piece of content got a lot of hits then the uploader’s ISP would start crediting their account and maybe eventually send a paycheque to their bank. Of course you’d need checks against people downloading and reuploading other people’s content, but that’s within reach of present technology. You could then <strong>scrap most other intellectual property controls</strong> – HBO wouldn’t have to worry about people downloading <em>Game of Thrones</em> and not paying them any money, because people downloading <em>Game of Thrones</em> would be paying them money. Which would cut off probably the biggest avenue for malware, that being illegal torrenting services that people can’t seek legal remedies against without getting in trouble themselves.</li>
<li><strong>Universal basic income</strong> or some equivalent. Nobody should starve just because they fell through the cracks in the system. It would be good to have everyone employed, but as technology improves various jobs will continue to become obsolete, and not everyone can re-train to be a programmer. UBI is being tried in a few places and it seems to be working.</li>
</ul>
<p>And then there are all the things I don’t have good ideas about, like how to fix the societal autoimmune disease that is the present state of criminal justice while still, you know, deterring crime; or how to manage international trade so that it enriches both poor people in poor countries (as globalism does and the old system did not) and poor people in rich countries (as the old system did and globalism does not); or how to get the mineral nutrients we flush into the ocean back into farm soils without depleting island ecosystems. And of course it’s entirely possible that any or all of my suggestions are barking up the wrong tree completely. What do you think?</p>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-46265687472417370762018-02-26T02:28:00.001-08:002018-02-26T13:42:01.885-08:00Is the writing on the wall?<style type="text/css">
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<p>At the top of this page, for the last five years, my blog header has announced that my job is to take notes in lectures at the University of Otago on behalf of students with disabilities. This is still the case this year – but it may not be next year. I love this job and I want to come back to it as long as I can, but I’m not sure there will be anything to come back to. I think the University (not the Disabilities Office but someone higher up) is trying to stealthily disestablish my position.</p>
<p>In mid-2012 when I started working here, I was given nine lectures a week – nearly twenty hours of work, since I have to edit the notes after I’ve taken them. Then from 2013 to 2015 it was more like fifteen or sixteen classes, dominated by dentistry, over thirty hours. Not quite full-time, but enough to save money for a holiday in Japan. In 2016 the hours dropped off a bit and I started an expensive course of dental treatment and my savings carried me, narrowly, through the summer. But then last year the bottom fell out of the student enrolment for the service I provide. From fourteen or so note-takers the Disabilities Office went down to two, of which I was fortunate to be one. Most concerningly, every one of the students enrolling had been enrolled in previous years; not a single one was new to the service. This year I’m back down to nine classes and, once again, all the student names are ones I’ve seen before. Sorry, let me rephrase that. Once again, <em>both</em> the student names are ones I’ve seen before. I gather I’ll have a few extra classes from a couple of additional students, but not every week. Something has gone wrong.</p>
<p>Apparently, according to my supervisor, the University’s official position is now that we shouldn’t be providing notes for people who don’t absolutely need them, because no-one’s going to be taking notes for them out in the real world and they need to practise doing it for themselves. I’m still not sure how that translates to <em>absolutely nobody new</em> signing up for note-taking; I suspect, but don’t know how I could find out for certain, that the University has stopped mentioning the service in their marketing or at Orientation or wherever my clients used to hear about it before. That means that when my current students graduate and leave, I – like a couple of hundred other Otago service staff members so far – will be out of a job.</p>
<p>(The other option, as I’ve been reminded since I first wrote this post, is peer note-taking, which is when the University pays another student in the disabled student’s class a lot less than they pay me to hand in a copy of their own notes. This has helped me out on occasions when I’ve fallen ill and not had time to arrange a swap with another professional note-taker. But it’s not going to be the same quality as what I do, because they don’t have the training I’ve had, they mostly don’t have my typing speed, they won’t have developed a good system of digital shorthand like I have, and being busy students they don’t have the time I do to devote to editing. Also, I’m told – I can’t substantiate this – if the disabled student and the student note-taker don’t get on, it’s not unheard-of for the note-taker to do bad notes on purpose to hand in while keeping the more accurate version to themselves. Hiring professionals does make a big difference. Switching to purely peer note-taking would still constitute a huge downgrade to the service the University offers.)</p>
<p>I know, I know, mine is not a neutral viewpoint. As both an employee whose livelihood depends on this service and a disabled person myself, I am obviously not going to feel very good about this. But frankly, the University’s reasoning is bullshit. It’s the same tired justification that’s always trotted out for denying accommodations to disabled people: “Take away the crutches and they’ll learn to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Well, see, the thing is, those are actually rather apt metaphors, but not the way their users intend. Taking away someone’s crutches and pulling people up by their bootstraps both, if you were to demonstrate them literally, have the same effect: the victim falls flat on their face.</p>
<p>But isn’t one of the goals of education to allow people to integrate freely in society and thus live life to the fullest extent of their capabilities? Absolutely. But taking away accommodations does the <em>opposite</em> of that. It’s true that the world outside the tertiary education sector doesn’t have many note-takers, but I would venture to suggest that that’s because the world outside the tertiary education sector doesn’t have many lectures. Dentists don’t have to type for hours every day, but dental students do. The University’s new policy will mean there’ll be people who couldn’t follow their dream career in dentistry because they couldn’t type; which, given Otago has the only Dental School in the country, is a gross dereliction of duty.</p>
<p>Some disability advocates declare that disability is “socially constructed”. This is neither false nor nonsense, but it’s so misleading as to leave people less enlightened after they’ve heard it than before, unless they’ve taken a cultural anthropology course or similar and learned what this progressive-intellectual shibboleth actually means. It emphatically does <em>not</em> mean that disability is all made up. It emphatically does <em>not</em> mean that people are only disabled because everyone around them treats them like they’re disabled. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. Let me explain.</p>
<p>The word “disability” is often used as a synonym for “impairment”, but there’s a subtle distinction which is worth highlighting. Impairments are not socially constructed in any meaningful sense. An impairment is what you physically can’t do with your body that most people can, or can only do with great effort that most people can do easily. (I’m including your brain as part of your body, obviously.) A disability is what obstacles your impairment poses for you as you participate in society – as you work, as you study, as you socialize, as you consume entertainment, and so on. An impairment cannot be removed at will, or it wouldn’t be an impairment. To remove the obstacles to social participation that constitute a disability, society must accommodate impairments. People with impairments are disabled because society doesn’t acknowledge the impairments <em>enough</em>.</p>
<p>An example to make the distinction clear. Short-sightedness, long-sightedness, and astigmatism are all visual impairments. But only very severe forms of these conditions are disabling in our society, because the accommodations for the milder forms – eyeglasses and contact lenses – are accepted without question as normal. If your bank made you take your glasses off “so we can see your face properly” and then made you fill out forms in tiny print without them, <em>then</em> you’d be disabled. If you had to take them off to get your driver’s licence photo and then weren’t allowed to wear them while driving so law enforcement could match you to the photo, then you’d be disabled. If all eyeglass-frames came in one ugly, ill-fitting style, and the people selling them told you you should be grateful to have glasses at all, then you’d be disabled. If strangers and casual acquaintances came up to you in the street suggesting you’d be rid of the need for that contraption on your head if only you would try the new eye-strengthening course they’ve been doing (it’s called Sight Naturally, it’s based on ancient tribal colour lore, you never see the tribespeople in <em>National Geographic</em> wearing glasses, do you?), then you’d be disabled.</p>
<p>There’s a confusion here, by the way, which applies especially to mental and intellectual impairments. Lots of people say they’re in favour of helping people with such conditions. But when they say that, they’re picturing treatments which will wipe away the impairment and turn the patients “normal”. Failing that, they’d rather mentally impaired people disappeared behind institutional doors than be out and about on the street where decent people might bump into them (think of the children!) At a disabilities conference that I, yes, took notes for to earn a bit of extra cash last year, one speaker described dinner party conversations where she would mention that she worked in a mental health facility. “It must be hard keeping them contained. Was the woman who killed herself one of yours? You’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t such a drain on society.” Then she would reveal the truth – that she was paid to test the facilities in the capacity of a client. “Oh, but <em>you</em> don’t seem like you’re about to stab us!” “No, but the night is young.” The goal of mental health treatment, as of all disability accommodations, isn’t to turn the client “normal”. It’s to give them their life back.</p>
<p>From all this it follows that, if you remove a disability accommodation that was previously available, <em>you are creating disability</em>. You are <em>disabling people</em> who happen to have impairments. That stain will be on the University’s hands if my job disappears next year or the year after. I hope their lavish new landscaping project is worth it.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I have the rather urgent concern of finding an alternative source of income. Because I’m disabled too. I’ve <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2017/07/am-i-benefit-fraudster.html">previously mentioned</a> the social anxieties which make applying for work a terrifying ordeal for me. But that terror is upon me. The writing is on the wall.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-5992805780944950232018-01-29T18:25:00.000-08:002018-02-01T14:57:58.682-08:00Economics, the evidence-free discipline – from the horse’s mouth<style type="text/css">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, “What would I do if I were a horse?”</blockquote>
<div class="cite">Ely Devons, British economist</div>
<p>Ever since I started working in a job that periodically puts me in economics lectures, I’ve noticed that economists have a very different idea of what constitutes evidence for their statements than what scientists do. And when I say “noticed”, I mean it’s been <em>thunderingly obvious</em>. The health sciences, in particular, spend hours upon hours drumming into their students’ heads how much it takes to call your practice “evidence-based”. In economics lectures I’ve heard lecturers say outright, “If your analysis of the data disagrees with economic theory, trust economic theory.” Economics is at about the stage medicine was at in the mid-nineteenth century, when blood-letting and cold showers were the go-to treatment for every ill because physicians <em>knew</em> how the body worked, damn it, and didn’t need jumped-up empiricists coming in telling them how to do their job thank you very much.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7eo8t4SF2UEZMU5sEByijo7wzJlnWHG-gJGNTVKgultGniZOCrTvEaJi3GuaBQHY2-x3rwK2h3fVklL71-bwKilKOC75ONPlHO6dlxxMfagrNEeD3UB7qTG1-Q0XojUKdFGFjINtfzkgd/s1600/bloodletting.jpg" data-original-width="420" data-original-height="687" title="Bloodletting" alt="A nineteenth-century physician practising bloodletting" /></a></div>
<p>But I don’t think nineteenth-century physicians ever proudly declared that their theories were evidence-free and thought it a mark of superiority. Yet I encountered economists saying exactly that, in an article from only a year ago, in a debate with a libertarian on Tumblr recently. I’m referring to the Mises Institute’s “<a href="https://mises.org/blog/ten-fundamental-laws-economics">Ten Fundamental Laws of Economics</a>”. The list includes some uncontroversial items, but also contentious ones such as “Productivity determines the wage rate”, “Labour does not create value”, and “Profit is the entrepreneurial bonus”. It ends with Law 10: “All genuine laws of economics are logical laws.” This is explicated as</p>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Economic laws are synthetic <em>a priori</em> reasoning. One cannot falsify such laws empirically because they are true in themselves. As such, the fundamental economic laws do not require empirical verification.</blockquote>
<p>Which basically translates to “Anyone who disagrees with us is wrong by definition.” This is not about economics being a “soft science” rather than a “hard science”. This statement makes economics as practised by the Mises Institute <em>not a science at all</em>.</p>
<p>The phrase “synthetic <em>a priori</em>” is, in this context, pure bafflegab, but unfortunately it’s going to take a bit of unpacking. The philosopher Immanuel Kant divided truths along two lines. First, they can be “synthetic” or “analytic”. An analytic truth is basically simply a definition of a word: the usual go-to example is “All bachelors are unmarried,” which is true because being unmarried is part of the definition of being a bachelor. A synthetic truth is one that can’t be derived from the definitions of words alone, such as “I have two cats.” Second, truths can be <em>a priori</em> or <em>a posteriori</em> – Latin for “from before” and “from after”, respectively. An <em>a priori</em> truth has to be true in any conceivable universe; you know it is true before you go investigating. “One plus one equals two” is an <em>a priori</em> truth. An <em>a posteriori</em> truth is one that might or might not be true, and that you therefore can’t know is true until somebody investigates, such as “I have eaten the last of the cheese.”</p>
<p>Two lines of distinction potentially divide a set into four subsets, in this case analytic <em>a priori</em>, analytic <em>a posteriori</em>, synthetic <em>a posteriori</em>, and the one we’re interested in, synthetic <em>a priori</em>. Three of these are uncontroversial. All philosophers agree there is no such thing as an analytic <em>a posteriori</em> truth, and most philosophers agree there are analytic <em>a priori</em> truths and synthetic <em>a posteriori</em> truths. The big disagreement over Kantian philosophy is over whether there is such a thing as a synthetic <em>a priori</em> truth – whether there is anything that has to be true in any conceivable universe, but that can’t be reduced to definitions of terms and logical deductions from such definitions. The Mises Institute puts economic principles in this category. What would this mean?</p>
<p>Kant himself populated the synthetic <em>a priori</em> category with mathematical truths like “One plus one equals two”. Personally I’m inclined to the school of thought that mathematics is in fact analytic. There are arguments to be had on both sides, and I won’t go into them. I suppose the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem">four-colour map theorem</a> might count as synthetic <em>a priori</em> – no-one has ever created a map that needed more than four colours to fill it without any two areas of the same colour touching, and somebody has proved that this is indeed impossible via a computer program, but the proof is too complex for a human mind to comprehend. The point is that no-one can even <em>imagine</em> such a map. It’s inconceivable. For the Mises Institute’s “laws” to be synthetic <em>a priori</em>, it would have to be the case that no-one could even <em>imagine</em> a world in which productivity did not determine the wage rate.</p>
<p>The Mises Institute might respond that someone who thinks they’re imagining a world in which productivity doesn’t determine the wage rate is kidding themselves, just as someone who thinks they’re imagining a five-colour map is kidding themselves (your mental picture is just a vague squiggle; you aren’t filling in the details). But it is not at all difficult to imagine a shareholder-profit-maximizing corporation deciding to funnel 100% of the profit margin from a productivity boost into shareholder dividends instead of wages. Nor is it hard to imagine every other firm in the market doing the same, thus leaving no competing employer to whom the employees could defect. The Mises Institute is committed to the claim that this scenario is not merely <em>implausible</em> but <em>unimaginable</em>. Either that, or the phrase “synthetic <em>a priori</em>” in their statement is bafflegab.</p>
<p>Of course, if economic principles are not synthetic <em>a priori</em>, then what the Mises Institute is doing is making up excuses for why their beliefs shouldn’t be exposed to empirical testing, and if you find someone doing that then they’re up to something dodgy. My Tumblr correspondent claimed that societies organized according to these theories could produce and distribute goods and services “way more [efficiently] than any Marxist or Keynesian society can.” Well, that’s an empirical question. I have sat through more than enough economics lectures to be well aware of the theories as to why the free market is <em>meant</em> to be the most efficient means possible of maximizing production and optimizing distribution of goods and services. But only empirical data can tell us whether it <em>is</em> the most efficient means possible. Any attempt to put it beyond the reach of empirical investigation, such as the Mises Institute is here guilty of, suggests that its proponents fear it would disappoint them.</p>
<p>And before someone asks, yes, for all the respect I have for the Marxist community for the work they do in activism towards social change, I do have to concede that Marxists are equally prone to shielding their theories from the possibility of being refuted by reality. I have written about that elsewhere on this blog, if you care to go looking. But Marxist theories don’t at present dominate the global economic system. Capitalist ones do. The point is that only reality can tell you what’s true. Nineteenth-century medicine wasn’t dislodged by some other theory-driven approach; it was corrected by recourse to empirical evidence. In economics as in medicine, when the “experts” cling to their pet theories over reality, people die. We need evidence-based economics and we need it yesterday.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-862746555231457712018-01-08T18:53:00.000-08:002018-01-11T20:10:26.095-08:00I support Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller<style type="text/css">
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<p>There’s a news video from New Zealand going round the world at the moment. It was taken by a casual attendee at the Rhythm & Vines Festival in Gisborne for the New Year. Two women, one of them topless, are walking through a casual crowd; a man watches them pass, then sneaks up behind the topless woman, gropes her, and runs away. Both women turn around, walk over to the man, and hit him. The women are Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller and her friend Kiri-Ann Hatfield. The man who assaulted Anello-Kitzmiller hasn’t been named.</p>
<p>Why am I just telling you what happens in this video, instead of showing you? Because I wanted to show you Anello-Kitzmiller’s statement on the incident instead. I’ve never previously seen the ethical core of naturism and body-positive feminism stated so comprehensively and so succinctly.</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1qa0hZeDKX4" frameborder="0" gesture="media" allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">...I would like to point out that I had that body art done at the festival. There was actually a stall selling the “glitter tits” get-up, and I paid to have it done, as well as many other girls I saw walking around with it. In addition to that, the waterslide at R&V was handing out $50 to the first man and woman to go down the slide naked, and another $50 to the next man and woman. I saw plenty of naked men that day getting absolutely no harassment for revealing themselves. There were naked men in the mosh; my best friends got naked and ran through the crowds; I saw plenty of guys walking around with no shirt on and a handful of girls as well.<br />
<br />
So I want to ask you, what is the difference? Both men and women have nipples, although men’s nipples are seemingly useless and <em>my</em> breasts are there to feed children, should I ever choose to have them some day. The difference is that women have been over-sexualized for way too long and it needs to stop. I wanted to share my body because I think it’s an important step to normalizing the naked body and desexualizing [it]. The more often people see nudity, the more they realize... that it’s nothing to gape over. Nudity at festivals helps erase pornstar ideals of what our bodies “should” look like. My breasts are not sex toys. They are not an invitation. My body is beautiful, and no matter who says otherwise, it cannot and will not demean my own self-worth. Nor should it for anybody else.<br />
<br />
I’ve been accused of “trying to turn New Zealand into America” in a few comments. This is a narrow-minded accusation. Besides, the similarities are there regardless. The amount of naked people running around at <a href="http://www.splore.net/">Splore</a> in New Zealand would be severely overwhelming for those of you who couldn’t handle a few bouncy “glitter tits” at R&V. I will say that the majority of New Zealand has seemed to be more conservative than Portland, Oregon, but sexual harassment happens everywhere, all over the world. I have never experienced so much hostility at a festival before, but I don’t doubt that there are festivals in the States where the crowd is also less free-spirited than others.<br />
<br />
I have been accused of “asking for it” too many times to count. It’s disappointing that people really believe that what you’re wearing has any connection to what you actually want. Comments stating that I was “asking for it” or that I “had it coming” are promoting rape culture. When you say something like that, you are justifying that man’s actions when he violated my rights to my own body, and you are telling other like-minded people that, should they ever want to sexually assault or rape another human being, it’s OK. It is <em>never</em> OK and we are <em>never</em> “asking for it”.<br />
<br />
...The cool thing about being able to get naked at festivals and like-minded events is that you don’t have to get naked if you don’t want to. Do what you’re comfortable with and only do what makes you happy. I personally love being naked because it made me realize that I am indomitable. Nothing anybody says about me or my body could ever wound me. At Rhythm & Vines both men and women came up to me and told me that I was disgusting, that I should cover up, that I [should be] ashamed, that I was a slut, but I kept my top off all night and I danced until 6am and I had the best time of my life regardless.</blockquote>
<p>On “trying to turn New Zealand into America”, I’m surprised that such an accusation was ever made, because I was under the impression that it was more the other way around. It’s American censoriousness in particular that nudists tend to blame for the restrictive nudity rules on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The recent movement to banish breastfeeding from public spaces – a bizarre bit of prudery unheard-of even in Victorian times – is as far as I can tell very largely American, and doesn’t seem to have taken hold here. I think the truth is that the United States contains both the most and the least nudity-friendly places in the English-speaking world; Portland, Oregon, is evidently among the former.</p>
<p>[EDIT: A Tumblr mutual informs me that the last part of that sentence is sadly not true. However, the United States does contain San Francisco, where public nudity was temporarily legal, and Brattleboro, Vermont, where it still is. Also, I’m ashamed to report that my attention has been drawn to a recent incident in Auckland where a woman was evicted from a bus after a fellow passenger took offence at her breastfeeding. I still think this is far from the norm in New Zealand, but I can’t in all honesty maintain that it “hasn’t taken hold.”]</p>
<p>While New Zealand sadly doesn’t attain Brattleboro standards of body acceptance, our nudity taboo is far from absolute. My town hosts a nude rugby match most years, though they’re not doing it this year; the Kawarau Gorge bungy-jumping station used to let people jump naked for free until they found they were losing too much money; and the whole country had a “National Nude Day” (mostly pubs offering specials to naked customers) for a few years about a decade ago. I used to belong to a group that went walking nude in the bush around Dunedin, and most people we met responded positively. And, as Anello-Kitzmiller points out, nudity is at least tolerated at many New Zealand summer festivals – a tradition going back to Nambassa in the 1970s – and was specifically encouraged at Rhythm & Vines. Which means that everyone who’s commented to say her toplessness was “inappropriate” is simply wrong.</p>
<p>That is, however, a minor error compared to the premise that, <em>if</em> her nudity had been inappropriate, <em>then it would have been OK</em> for the man who harassed her to do what he did. Of course, personally I think that nudity ought to be acceptable everywhere it’s physically safe. But even given that we can’t snap our fingers and wish for society to outgrow all its repressive norms overnight, there is no way sexual harassment is an allowable means of enforcing those norms. If female toplessness <em>had</em> been banned at Rhythm & Vines, then the proper response would have been for a security team member to bring her a towel or spare shirt and explain their standards. The assailant would <em>still</em> be no more justified in his actions than a truck driver is justified in killing cyclists who stray into the wrong lane.</p>
<p>The other argument is of course that old chestnut “He’s a man, he couldn’t help himself.” There were half a dozen other men in that video and <em>they</em> somehow managed to help themselves (although they didn’t help Anello-Kitzmiller by doing anything like intervening). And it wasn’t as if he took one look at her breasts and zoned out or something; he waited until she had gone past and then made his move. The assault was a deliberate choice on his part. If he had genuinely been unable to help himself, then he should have been under restraint or at the very least in the care of a minder. Since he <em>was</em> able to help himself, deterrent action such as Anello-Kitzmiller and Hatfield took was the appropriate response.</p>
<p>Frankly, I think “He couldn’t help himself” and “Her nudity was inappropriate” are both smoke-screens for our society’s ugly underlying attitude. Both are nonsensical on the face of it, but both make sense if you make one abhorrent ethical assumption: “Men may act on any sexual impulse they feel towards women.” Then everything falls into place. Skimpy clothing becomes inappropriate anywhere sexual activity is inappropriate. The assailant couldn’t help how he <em>felt</em> about Anello-Kitzmiller’s breasts.</p>
<p>And no, you can’t take gender out of it by restating that as “People may act on any sexual impulse they feel towards anybody.” Our society does <em>not</em> condone women acting sexually, nor men acting sexually towards men. Accordingly, men are granted much broader freedom with our bodies in casual contexts like music festivals. The festival <em>I</em> go to at New Year’s doesn’t encourage nudity, yet there were plenty of men going shirtless in the heat this year. If I, a bisexual man, had sneaked up behind one of them and groped him, and he’d (rightly) hit me, how many people do you think would have defended my actions on the basis that he was “asking for it”?</p>
<p>(In case you’re wondering why I, a nudist, go to a New Year’s festival that doesn’t allow nudity, it’s partly a shortage of options down this end of the country but mainly about the music. I love traditional folk music and I have bigger autistic sensory issues with loud thumpy contemporary music than I do with clothing even in the summer heat. And I wear a kilt, which helps. And for the hottest days there’s a small swimming-hole upstream of the main one where hardly anyone goes.)</p>
<p>The same assumption again must be behind the frequent rejoinder: “Men are turned on by breasts. How do you intend to change that?” There’s no need to change men’s feelings. What needs to change is how men consider themselves entitled to <em>act</em> on their feelings. Suppose you’re hungry in the supermarket – I’ve used this analogy before – and you walk past a big bulk bin full of chocolate chips or something. Do you dig your hand in and grab? Not if you’re over the age of about four. Do you stand there staring and drooling? Not if you have any self-control at all. And chocolate doesn’t even have human rights. The problem is not that men think breasts are nice; the problem is that men think breasts are permission.</p>
<p>Which gives us good grounds for hope that men <em>can</em> change. Men do seem to have evolved to like the look of breasts – I’m afraid there’s not much evidence for the idea that this response is created by society or culture. But society and culture <em>do</em> determine what constitutes an acceptable or an unacceptable way to behave. Our culture needs to change, and it can change if we put in the work. I salute Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller for her contribution to that work, both by displaying her body and by penalizing that man for disrespecting it. Whether you join her in the former effort can only be your own personal choice; but we all need to contribute to the latter. Let’s build a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault and harassment at every level of society we can influence, starting now.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-82549185231591208882017-12-06T02:55:00.002-08:002017-12-06T02:56:18.031-08:00TERFs are wrong – why that’s a problem for the Left<style type="text/css">
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<p>“TERF” stands for “transgender-exclusionary radical feminist”. The term is very, very familiar to anyone who follows LGBT and feminist issues on social media, and probably quite obscure elsewhere. For what’s supposed to be a network for mutual support and protection, the online LGBT community spends an extraordinary amount of server space debating who belongs in it and who doesn’t. Nowadays it’s generally accepted that transgender people do belong; the big debate, online, is over whether asexual people do. But “<em>generally</em> accepted” isn’t the same as “<em>universally</em> accepted”, and the ones who don’t accept it can get pretty nasty sometimes.</p>
<p>TERFs don’t accept transgender people’s identifying gender, and in particular they don’t accept that trans women are women. Like other transphobes, TERFs read transgender women as “men pretending to be women” – a misframing which does real harm (an identity is not a pretence), but fundamentally a matter of perception rather than of fact. What distinguishes TERFs from other transphobes is the motive they ascribe to transgender women for this alleged pretence, namely “...so they can rape lesbians.” That <em>is</em> a matter of fact, and the facts are clear. Transgender identities are not motivated by a desire to rape lesbians. TERFs are wrong. I’m not debating this point any further. I’m not going to waste space rehashing here what I’ve already written about gender identity, when trans people are far more worth listening to on the subject than I am; and the rape accusation is preposterous, but the people who need convincing of that aren’t likely to listen to me.</p>
<p>So why am I writing this? Because, preposterous as it is, TERF ideology is a necessary logical consequence of three propositions which the Left today holds dear. Since TERFs are wrong, one or more of the three propositions must be false. We need to find out which one and stop using it – even at the cost of having to mince words like moderate liberals instead of making bold sweeping proclamations about overthrowing oppressors and remaking society. The three propositions are</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Feminism.</strong> Women do not yet enjoy basic rights equal to men. This is due to men’s actions, and social structures upheld by men’s actions.</li>
<li><strong>Social constructionism.</strong> Most, if not all, things we perceive as enduring realities are in fact products of societal roles and institutions – gender most pertinently.</li>
<li><strong>Dialectical materialism.</strong> Institutions such as the state exist to allow powerful classes to exploit powerless ones. Classes are distinguished by having divergent material interests, and individuals act in their class’s interests, so the exploitation can only end if the powerless class overthrow the institutions.</li>
</ol>
<p>See what follows when you put these together? Men, the powerful class, materially exploit women, the powerless class, by impregnating them. A woman is someone who can get pregnant and a man is someone who can make a woman pregnant; those are the material interests by which alone the two classes are meaningfully distinguished. Any other distinction is merely a gender <em>role</em>, socially constructed to maintain the power of men over women. If someone who can make women pregnant adopts womanly roles and calls themself a woman, it must be somehow a subterfuge to advance the interests of men, and the only way that makes anything remotely resembling sense is if they are trying to infiltrate the ranks of those women who have refused to act as brood-stock – i.e., lesbians. Hence TERF ideology. If we agree that the conclusion is preposterous (and if you don’t, please take the debate to a different post) then one or more of the premises must be false. Our remaining task is to find out which. Let’s examine them one by one.</p><a name='more'></a>
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<p>First, briefly, the feminist premise. I’m not going to take up any space with this; I’m as certain that it’s <em>true</em> as I am about pretty much anything in politics. Women are disrespected, disregarded, underpaid, discriminated against, sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, held responsible for men’s sexual behaviour towards them, and refused basic healthcare on specious moral grounds. If you’re new to my blog, I promise you can while away hours reading the posts I’ve written on the subject elsewhere; again, if you disagree I’ll ask you to take the debate to one of those posts instead of this one. This can’t be the false premise we’re after. We must pursue the other two.</p>
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<p>Next we turn to the social-constructionist premise. You might be surprised to see this among the pillars of TERFism, as it’s frequently employed to <em>defend</em> transgender people against gender-essentialistic transphobes. A little thought should reveal the fundamental misguidedness of this approach. Social constructionism would have it that people learn their gender identity from their upbringing: those raised as girls identify as women, those raised as boys identify as men. Well, our society tries very hard to force gender identities on trans children during their upbringing, <em>and it doesn’t work</em>. Trans girls forcibly raised as boys become trans women. Trans boys forcibly raised as girls become trans men. There’s something innate about gender identity that society just can’t get at, and trans people are the proof – a proof that was rejected by the psychological establishment for decades while it used social-constructionist theories to justify extreme gender enforcement practices like cutting up intersex babies’ genitals. Surgery for the body and social construction for the mind, parents were promised, and you’ll never know the difference.</p>
<p>Social constructionism’s appeal to the Left is manifold. For many young people who learn about it during tertiary study, it’s the first coherent alternative they encounter to the idea that things just are the way they are and imagining them otherwise is stupid – that pink for girls and short hair for boys are as permanent features of the world as cats purring and dogs barking. If that’s what you’ve always thought, of course it feels liberating when you find out how much of the world is actually just make-believe. Also, it’s a collectivistic sort of idea, and in Left parlance words like “collective” and “community” are often contrasted positively with the supposed “individualism” of the neoliberal system. This, as I’ve <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/valuing-individuals.html">said before</a>, gets our values and goals exactly backwards; fair pay, safety at work, bodily autonomy, marriage equality, disability accommodations, etc., are all <em>individual</em> rights. But it’s true enough that our chief weapon in the fight for those rights is organized collective action. (Neoliberals and conservatives, conversely, talk about individual responsibility a lot, but apparently an individual’s chief responsibility is to function smoothly as a unit of abstract collective entities like “the economy” or “the traditional family”.)</p>
<p>Less creditably, social constructionism is still occasionally used to cast doubt on scientific ideas that happen to be politically inconvenient. Of course the findings, theories, methods, practice, and philosophy of science can and should be critiqued continually; that’s the path to progress. But when someone calls the very <em>concept</em> of science a social construct just when someone has asked them for the evidence backing up their own claims, you can confidently bet they haven’t got any. And social-constructionist “critiques” tend to be laughable. Have you ever seen someone trying to do something technical that you were competent at, and they were about to make a beginner’s mistake with ghastly consequences? Suppose you tried as politely as possible to put them right and avert the disaster; and suppose that they turned around and shouted in your face, “Or maybe you don’t know everything! Ever think of <em>that?</em>” Social-constructionist criticism of science typically strikes roughly that close to the mark.</p>
<p>Proponents of social constructionism seem to mean two different things by it, and to switch between the meanings as convenient. We’re dealing here with a <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey">motte-and-bailey argument</a>, or perhaps a <a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity">deepity</a>. That is, in one sense the claim that gender (or IQ, or whatever) is socially constructed is defensible but of little consequence; in the other it’s profound and far-reaching, but faultily reasoned. Let me explain.</p>
<p>Some things are social constructs in anyone’s book, and “weak” social constructionism starts with these: institutions such as money, property, political office, national borders, the law, the calendar, or the road code. These things matter to our lives, but they only exist because we all agree to pretend they exist. Were I teleported right now to any country that doesn’t take New Zealand currency, I would be instantly penniless. Social construction is how we persuade each other to agree to the pretence. But we build constructions around things that aren’t make-believe as well. Most of you are not (unlike me) such damn fools as to have deliberately given yourselves a shock from the mains in your youth to see whether electricity was real. You knew it was real because of warning stickers on electrical equipment, the height of the fuseboard in your house, the connotations of words like “electrifying”, TV or movie electrocution scenes with those little crawling blue lightning-bolts everywhere – in short, because of the social constructions around it.</p>
<p>But you can’t do much with weak social constructionism. It’s a novel insight but I’ve yet to find a problem you can solve with it. It doesn’t offer a tool to effect cultural change, nor a licence to disregard science. You could peel off the warning stickers and start calling things “electrifying” when you mean “sentimental”, but that wouldn’t make it any safer to put your fingers on the terminals of your bedside lamp and turn the switch on. And it doesn’t have any bearing on whether gender identity is make-believe. If that’s what you want, you need “strong” social constructionism.</p>
<p>Years ago I started writing a post on this blog about the practical applications of social constructionism, and stopped because I realized in the process that there weren’t any. At that time the Wikipedia article on the topic had a concise explanation of strong social constructionism, now edited out, which read</p>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">...all reality is thought, all thought is in a language, all language is a convention, and all convention is socially acceptable, hence, it uses language to socially programme.</blockquote>
<p>“All reality is thought” is a philosophy called <em>idealism</em>, and the problem with idealism is it naturally reverts to another philosophy called <em>solipsism</em> (“All reality is <em>my</em> thought”). <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=3YWDi5G-FT0&t=1168">The Ruler of the Universe</a> in Douglas Adams’ <em>Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</em> series is a solipsist: he doesn’t believe in any reality external to himself, physical or social. That’s no use in this discussion. Social constructionism isn’t going to work if there is no society. But <em>non</em>-solipsistic idealism just doesn’t make sense. Idealists have never solved what they call the Problem of Other Minds. To you I am part of your external reality, just as to me you are part of my external reality. If your external reality is a product of your mind, I must be a product of your mind. Need an analogy? Solipsism is the belief that the entire internet is stored on your own computer; idealism is the belief that the entire internet is stored on your own computer except Facebook.</p>
<p>One might argue for a subtler version of “All reality is thought”: there may exist a reality external to our thought, but we can never apprehend it until it enters our thought. True enough, but that by itself is weak social constructionism. To make it strong, we must also posit that the parts of reality that we do apprehend can never be affected by the parts of reality that we don’t apprehend – and we have no grounds for positing any such thing. René Descartes made an identically flawed case for separating body from soul in what we still call “Cartesian” dualism. “I think, therefore I am,” he pointed out; he could be absolutely sure his consciousness existed. His body, however, might for all he knew be an illusion. Therefore, he reasoned, his consciousness could not be an effect caused by his body. The argument does not follow unless we assume that things we are sure of cannot be caused by things we aren’t sure of, which is not evident at all.</p>
<p>And then we jump from “All thought is in a language” to “All language is a convention”, and thus commit the cardinal logical fallacy known as <em>equivocation</em>. It’s not that either statement is wrong by itself. Thoughts are neural representations of things in the world, and for one thing to be a representation of another thing there must be some systematic correspondence between them; you can call the system of correspondence a “language” if you like. But “All language is a convention” is only self-evident if it refers to languages of communication between individuals, such as spoken language. You can’t prove that schemas of neural representation are social conventions merely by using the same word for them, “language”, that you use for protocols of communication. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the claim that everyone’s thought is confined to the vocabulary and grammar of the language(s) they have learned to speak, a mainstay of strong social constructionism – has never been substantiated.</p>
<p>Strong social constructionism thus fails to demonstrate either that reality is constructed or that such construction is social in nature. TERF ideology’s second premise is tottering – but, alas, not yet falling. We have had to admit that at least <em>some</em> things are social constructs. Is gender identity a social construct, like money, or a reality with social construction around it, like electricity? Scientific consensus points towards the latter, but TERFs will argue that the science is ideologically driven. And even if gender identity <em>is</em> a biological reality, there are species – I believe <a href="https://comicsalliance.com/animal-gender-roles-cartoons-humon/">cuttlefish are best known for it</a> – in which some males appear female in order to sneak past other males to the females they’re guarding, which is within shouting distance of what TERFs accuse trans women of doing. I should emphasize that there is <em>zero</em> evidence for this system in humans, but there’s zero evidence for most of TERFs’ other empirical claims and that hasn’t stopped them. So we can’t stop here. We need to examine the third premise of TERF ideology as well.</p>
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<p>Dialectical materialism is the founding principle of Marxism. Observing the predatory exploitation rife in industrial capitalist Victorian England, Karl Marx sought a theory of society that would challenge rather than justify the status quo. He found half of it in <a href="https://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2014/12/hegel-has-lot-to-answer-for.html">G. W. F. Hegel’s concept of dialectic</a>. Where other philosophers explained the world as a static structure, Hegel envisioned it as a dynamic clashing and resolution of opposing theses. He and Marx alike saw the French Revolution as a hopeful precursor of the final climax of history, which was to be the synthesis of the last thesis and antithesis standing. However, Marx found Hegelian dialectic airy-fairy and theological, more concerned with abstractions than with empowering the downtrodden. So the second half of dialectical materialism is the materialism: production is the engine of society. The last thesis and antithesis are the working class who produce value through their labour and the ruling class who confiscate that value and redistribute crumbs of it as wages. Since the ruling class need the working class’s labour but the working class don’t need the ruling class’s rule, the final victory will go to the workers.</p>
<p>For much of the Left, Karl Marx remains the highest authority in political theory. Occasionally I see Marxists disagree with him on some minor point, and for some reason feel the need to laugh it off by remarking “Well, it’s not as if we’re Christian fundamentalists and Marx is Jesus.” I hate to break it to you guys, but speaking as an ex-Evangelical it’s exactly as if you’re Christian fundamentalists and Marx is Jesus. (I exaggerate; Marxists don’t sing songs about Marx very often.) It goes far beyond the way physicists talk about Newton or evolutionary biologists talk about Darwin. Newton and Darwin are interesting chiefly for the work that has been done since their time refining and expanding on their achievements. Their theories are the starting-points, not the end-points, in their respective disciplines. By contrast, Marx and Jesus have in common that their followers think they are the <em>final</em> answer to the questions asked of them. Evangelicals think Jesus is the cure for every trouble, and otherwise intelligent Marxists have been known to address complex socioeconomic conundra with this GIF and nothing else:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ_bUx46JdKPK_qrA5DBuIGTvG5JY_WfbHH9-wJR-XsuNpj6slXwnJh55ZiLUGVu6GThMniSziyXj9rP0uc_8On2n-jTzrhzrVCqo-k56PyxWPoi7yhxtVLE65xgkvw3E2w_rBduGBylxk/s1600/marxgif.gif" data-original-width="399" data-original-height="265" title="Portrait of Karl Marx, zooming in" alt="Portrait of Karl Marx, zooming in" /></div>
<p>The mark of a scientific hypothesis is that it is laid open to refutation by empirical evidence. The twentieth century saw dozens of experiments in revolutionary Marxism, all of which followed a remarkably similar trajectory. Not one of them came near even the interim socialist state that Marx thought would precede true stateless communist society, let alone the communist society itself. All instead became brutal patriarchal dictatorships where truth was censored and dissent could get you tortured or killed. Marxists correctly assert that this wasn’t what Marx had in mind, but seldom admit even a theoretical possibility that he might have got something important wrong. When I was in student politics the excuse was always that communism had been infected with the poison of Josef Stalin; nowadays it seems to be more popular to argue that all the communist regimes were infiltrated by the CIA – which necessarily entails that Marxist revolution is fatally vulnerable either to infection by Stalinism or to infiltration by the CIA. There’s no way around it: Marxism must be either overhauled or scrapped.</p>
<p>So where does dialectical materialism go wrong? Well, starry-eyed socialist movements reliably become murderous communist dictatorships when they start purging the slightly better-off peasants as “class traitors”. Dialectic is reputed to challenge hard epistemic boundaries between categories of people, but here it reinforces them: you can’t have one foot in each camp. That’s because material interests are held to be the thing that distinguishes class from class, and dialectic dictates that the classes must clash. Sound familiar? As we saw, this is the core of the bizarre accusation that TERFs level at trans women. The difference is that where Marxist dialectical materialism divides society down lines of production, TERF dialectical materialism divides it down lines of <em>re</em>production. Is that what TERFs get wrong? Can we fault them for that alone and carry on with our Marxist programme unchanged?</p>
<p>Not if we want to retain our commitment to feminism. Men commit over 95% of all sexual assaults, most of them against women. Yet it’s women’s sexual behaviour that is most heavily policed by patriarchal society. If a woman gets pregnant in unapproved circumstances it’s her, and not the other party, that bears the penalty. And yet terminating unwanted pregnancy, or even preventing it through means other than sexual purity, is frowned upon as well. The one premise that makes sense of all these contradictions is that men seek to control women’s sexuality and reproduction for their own benefit. If there was ever such a thing as exploitation, that’s exploitation. The fault does not lie in the element where TERF ideology deviates from Marxism. It must therefore lie in one of the elements that TERF ideology shares with Marxism.</p>
<p>Hegelian dialectic is supposed to be the ultimate antidote to essentialism, the notion that things and people have fixed “essences” that never change. The fault in it is that it doesn’t deserve this reputation. It is a halfway-house between essentialism and the real antidote. Where essentialism posits fixed essences that never change, dialectic posits fixed essences that change only in collision with opposing essences. Thus a boss or manager who thinks they’re a comrade of the working-class is kidding themself, and a person with a penis who thinks they’re a woman is kidding themself. Managers cannot be comrades until the Revolution abolishes class, and impregnators cannot be women until the Revolution abolishes gender. Essentialism sees the world as a rigid structure staying in one place; dialectic sees it as a set of rigid structures moving around, bumping into each other and shattering.</p>
<p>The truly radically anti-essentialist view would be that there were never any fixed essences or rigid structures to begin with. The universe is a sea of unique entities interacting with each other; society, as a subset of the universe, is a network of unique individuals in relationships with each other. This big picture, however, is too complicated in its full detail for the human brain to grasp, so we categorize and label things and people to cut down the complexity to something our cognitive faculties can cope with. Our categories and labels often do reflect real clusters, local peaks in the distribution of things, out in the world; but those clusters are not held together by any shared “essence” beyond the fact that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. This is the grain of truth in social constructionism, the contaminating error being the idea that redrawing the category lines somehow changes the things within them. If you want a name for this philosophy, I think it’s what Buddhist philosophers refer to as <em>śūnyatā</em> – “emptiness”.</p>
<p>Now I’ve seen TERFs argue that a gender identity programmed into the brain would be a fixed essence, thus making acceptance of transgender identities an essentialistic stance. So I need to take a moment to explain why that’s wrong. Sex differentiation goes back far enough in our species’ history, and is relevant enough to our reproduction, that you’d expect us to have evolved brain circuitry dedicated to telling us where we fit into it; and evolution being the haphazard, good-enough-will-do process that it is, you’d expect the occasional mismatch between brain circuitry and genitalia. Gender essentialism asserts that a person’s genitals (or gonads or sex chromosomes) indicate their true essence more reliably than their identity does. But since there is no such thing as a true essence, this assertion is meaningless. Words mean what we choose to use them to mean. We call a person a woman if she identifies as a woman or a man if he identifies as a man not because their identity constitutes their essence, but because that’s the decent thing to do.</p>
<p>What would happen to Left politics if we replaced Hegelian dialectic with śūnyatā? Would we have to surrender to the corporations? Would we lose our drive for solidarity? Would the line between oppressor and oppressed become impossibly blurred? Obviously I don’t think so, as I accept śūnyatā and I still swing Left. Considering society as a network of relationships makes more sense of the world, I find, than dialectic. Marxists call it “false consciousness” when workers show more loyalty to their boss than to workers from other places. Why this happens takes some explaining, if your theory of politics is based on people acting in the interests of their class. If on the other hand you’re thinking of networks of relationships, the mystery dissolves: the workers have a relationship, albeit exploitative, with their boss, but no relationship at all with the distant workers. Far from downplaying the importance of solidarity, this perspective underscores the importance of building relationships across groups with common interests. The union movement would remain crucial to the Left cause.</p>
<p>But there would certainly be changes. We would stop pinning our hopes on one glorious apocalyptic coming revolution and start making concrete changes for good in the present. We would stop sabotaging our own cause by telling people voting is pointless because “if it changed anything it would be illegal” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. I often see leftists of various colours rejecting initiatives that are steps in the right direction, such as Fair Trade or the Universal Basic Income, on the basis that they don’t start by uprooting the system. That attitude would have to go. Anger is appropriate when people are getting hurt; not when they’re getting helped but it doesn’t look like the Revolution you were promised. The path to a better world is not going to involve you pointing an Uzi at your boss or the cops. The small (but alas non-zero) percentage of leftists for whom that’s the whole point would no longer be welcome.</p>
<p>As for the LGBT community, if śūnyatā became a guiding principle, all the hurtful time-wasting arguments about who The Acronym does and doesn’t stand for would fade away. People’s access to support would not be determined by whether they fit some arbitrary definition, but by what their needs were and what was the kindest thing to do. And nobody would be a TERF.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-39330057300169452452017-10-20T03:40:00.002-07:002017-10-20T03:40:40.670-07:00I thought I would feel better about this than I do<style type="text/css">
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<p>As of when Winston Peters finally made up his mind who to go with yesterday, Jacinda Ardern is now Prime Minister of New Zealand, in a coalition government formed of Labour, New Zealand First, and the Green Party. I have mixed feelings about this. There was no big surprise in the special votes; as commentators evidently better-informed than me predicted, they took two seats off National and handed one to the Greens and one to Labour. And, as any New Zealander with half a brain could have told you, the prospect of a National-Green coalition (raised in all seriousness by some pundits evidently lacking that endowment) was a chimaera.</p>
<p>The good part of my mixed feelings is obviously that we’ve got a new government, which – if not for the presence of New Zealand First – would have been the left-most one of my lifetime. In concrete terms, this country’s decades-long trajectory towards Dickensian inequality and poverty might actually go into reverse. We might get a liveable minimum wage. We might get housing for homeless people. We might get unions strong enough to make a difference. We might get an economic strategy that doesn’t depend on turning our rivers into sewers and lying to the world about it.</p>
<p>The bad part starts with New Zealand First. I don’t <em>think</em> we’re in for a three-ring circus like the National-New Zealand First coalition government of 1997, because this time Winston hasn’t brought in a cadre of loudmouths with egos as big as his own. Jim Anderton’s old gibe, calling the party “Winston First”, is even truer now than when he made it in the 1990s. But I don’t know, and I’m not looking forward to finding out, how much of its left-wing promise the Labour-Greens bloc has had to concede in order to secure Winston’s support.</p>
<p>I do know, as I’ve said on this blog more than once, that Winston’s anti-immigrant stance is a cynical façade put on to garner votes. I also know that Winston is 72 years old, and likely to retire within a decade – possibly by next election, depending on how well his health weathers old age. What happens to New Zealand First then? Will it crumble, leaderless, into irrelevance? Or will Winston be succeeded by one of his many sincerely racist admirers? And then will New Zealand have its own <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/07/racism-is-crawling-back-out-from-under.html">Brexit</a>, its own <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/11/are-you-awake-yet.html">Trump</a>, to deal with? These questions scare me.</p>
<p>Also not comforting is the fact that National still has two more seats than Labour and the Greens combined. I’m not confident enough in my expectation of a stable coalition not to worry about what that will mean if it does fall apart; and I’m bamboozled, frankly, by the fact that it happened at all. How does a government preside over as big a social and economic crisis as this one has and still attract more votes than its competitors? What does it say about my country’s soul that nearly half of us are prepared to shrug off the child poverty and homelessness we’re seeing now as long as the men in suits get to hang on to more cash come tax time? Are we all clones of Cersei Lannister?</p>
<p>I don’t like not understanding these things, I honestly don’t. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick to claim to be mystified by your opponents’ stupidity and malice, and more to the point it’s purely performative. It makes a good show if all you want is to assure people on your own side that you’re one of them, but it doesn’t budge your opponents an inch except to confirm their belief in <em>your</em> stupidity and malice. And if you really care about your political ideals, it’s your opponents you want to be shifting. The fact that I don’t understand what motivates people to vote National means I have no idea how we can motivate them to vote more leftward. Maybe that’s the real reason why this election result brings me so little joy.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-40088233247307932902017-10-06T16:32:00.002-07:002017-10-06T16:33:53.578-07:00Mass shootings are not a mental health problem<style type="text/css">
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<p>A few days ago, an old white man fired a lot of guns into a crowd of people at a music festival in Las Vegas. Apparently he also shot at a nearby fuel storage site in a failed attempt to cause an explosion. You can find his name on the news sites; in the distant hope of setting some kind of example with the ultimate goal of <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4Z7VkWcwLk-SjFJc00tdmI1eW8/view">cutting off the notoriety</a> that motivates others to emulate these killers, I’m not going to repeat it. He killed 59 people, I think the current count is, and wounded a number estimated at over 500. Some people are calling this the biggest mass shooting in US history, which of course has prompted others to bring up bigger ones, like the Greenwood Massacre of 1921 and the “Battle” of Wounded Knee in 1890. Perhaps they mean the biggest mass shooting by a single shooter.</p>
<p>Last month I said the following about the politics of climate change in the hurricane-torn US, and it goes treble for gun control and mass shootings:</p>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">More often, however, “Don’t politicize this problem” means “Your politics offer a better way of fixing it than mine do, and I’d rather people didn’t figure that out.” I can sympathize with a preference for peace over contention, but politics can be operationally defined as the set of problems which are more important than not being contentious.</blockquote>
<p>Gun control laws work. They don’t prevent every single possible shooting, but they cut them down dramatically. Here in New Zealand, we have civilized gun laws. You cannot buy a gun in The Warehouse here like you can in Walmart in the US. You can’t open-carry in New Zealand. Nobody keeps a handgun for “protection” – you don’t need one, because you know other people don’t have them either. The last time anyone shot and killed members of the public here was in 1990, when I was twelve, at Aramoana north of Dunedin. (There have been a handful of incidents since when angry men shot their family members.) In Australia thirty-five people were killed at a place called Port Arthur in 1996, so they tightened up their gun laws and the government bought everybody’s guns off them, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since. You can Google other countries and their gun laws and mass-shooting prevalences for yourself. You’ll find the pattern holds.</p>
<p>Yes, there have been scary incidents in my life when I was exceedingly grateful that the person confronting me wasn’t allowed a gun; and no, they weren’t carrying guns illegally. Turns out our firearms licensing laws actually do make it difficult for dangerous people to get hold of them. So not many people in New Zealand want American-style gun “freedom”. But I’ve met one or two who do, enough to have figured out what’s wrong with their arguments. First up: no, America, you do not have more freedoms or better-functioning democracy as a result of your guns. New Zealand has the same freedom of expression that you do, rather better freedom of religion in practice, a much more representative electoral system, far less gerrymandering, automatic voter registration, and vastly more time to vote when elections roll around. Your idea that your guns keep dictatorship and corruption at bay is a peculiarly American fantasy.</p>
<p>The guy I’m thinking of reckoned the whole problem with American mass shootings was that they let people have guns without taking a mental health exam. He was recommending target-shooting as, he said, a tremendously calming sport. Apparently it’s meditative to squeeze a trigger and see a hole appear in the centre of a target. I told him this wouldn’t work for me because I have terrible, terrible aim. I can’t skip a stone over a lake or win a game of pool against a three-year-old or get past level 1 of a first-person-shooter video game. I didn’t add that I would fail his mental health criterion, that I have exactly the same psychiatric diagnosis as <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/a-reply-to-elliot-rodger.html">the guy who killed six people in Santa Barbara in 2014</a> – and also, at his age, the same difficulties with romance and sexuality that he was so enraged about.</p>
<p>Now if you’re wondering, no, I’ve never killed anybody, and no, I don’t think I would have done if only I’d had access to a gun at age 22. Which just goes to show: mental health is not the problem. Though hyperbolic, Michel Foucault’s assertion that mental health diagnoses are primarily a method of social control isn’t completely off the mark. I’ve seen an otherwise pleasant-seeming person try to get library security to eject another library user who was making a bit of noise, not because of the noise primarily but because – in a harsh, horrified whisper – “She’s a <em>handicap!</em>” As a funny-looking person myself (my fashion options are basically “deliberate eccentric” or “aimed at normal and missed”), I occasionally get things thrown at me in the street: usually water-balloons, once an egg, once a lighted cigarette. One acquaintance, when I mentioned this, responded with sympathetic incredulity “I guess some people just have mental problems.” No. This is how people <em>treat</em> people with mental problems. This is the behaviour of a mentally normal human being towards someone they feel entitled to disrespect.</p>
<p>I’d be remiss if I didn’t concede that like most laws, in practice if not on paper, gun restrictions disproportionately target people of colour. That has certainly been the case in New Zealand, from 1869 when selling guns to Māori became a crime to 2007 when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_Zealand_police_raids">armed police</a> stopped traffic and raided people’s homes and arrested seventeen people, most of them Māori, on dodgy charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act. It’ll be the tenth anniversary in about a week, and I don’t think we should let them forget. But to suggest that Americans of colour are better off with their on-paper right to bear arms would be a joke in very poor taste. Ask Tamir Rice or Philando Castile how that worked out for them.</p>
<p>There’s always a lot of discourse about either race or mental illness after mass killings, depending on whether the killer was white. You don’t hear so much about gender, despite the fact that <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/10/why-women-are-better-than-men.html">it’s a better predictor of deadly violence</a> than either. I know of only one mass shooting by a woman ever, that being the one that inspired the Boomtown Rats song <em>I Don’t Like Mondays</em>. What does seem to come out repeatedly when people analyse these killers’ backgrounds after the police have shot them dead is anger, hatred, possessiveness, and entitlement, and especially towards women. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that people remember the Las Vegas killer pushing his girlfriend around.</p>
<p>Anger and possessiveness are going to take a lot of time and work to expunge from the culture. In the meantime, the quickest way to make a difference is to prevent these people from getting their hands on the means to kill dozens from a distance. In the longer term I can’t help thinking that the American sanctification of the right to bear arms – that is, the right to have the power to kill – itself encourages the attitude that deadly violence is an appropriate response to perceived social wrongs. Either way, America, you’re never going to fix this problem you have without gun control.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-648480292622180743.post-60758943617808735102017-09-26T17:31:00.000-07:002017-09-26T20:23:15.219-07:00We don’t know how our election went yet<style type="text/css">
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<p>I shouldn’t think anybody gets their news about New Zealand from this blog and has been waiting on tenterhooks. But in case <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2017/09/just-one-reason-to-vote-left-this.html">my last post</a> left you wondering, I had to go back to hospital again and it turned out to be a kidney stone rather than the gastrointestinal issue I was diagnosed with at first. Oh, the election? How did that go? Who’s going to govern New Zealand for the next three years? The answer, I can reveal, is: we don’t know either.</p>
<p>No party commands a majority in Parliament. On the votes so far counted, the neoliberal National Party has several more seats in Parliament than the edging-towards-social-democratic Labour-Greens bloc. But the key phrase there is “so far counted”. I’ve seen several media commentators jumping the gun at this point and talking about what happens next as if the count was over. It isn’t. New Zealand electoral law allows for people to cast what are called “special votes” before election day, if they’re not going to be in their home electorate on election day, or if they’re not enrolled to vote yet and want to cast a vote at the same time that they enroll instead of waiting, or there’s a few other things, I think. (Lately we also allow people to vote early just because they want to, but those don’t necessarily count as special votes.) The point is, special votes aren’t counted on election night. They’re counted over the next couple of weeks, since a lot of them have to come in from New Zealanders travelling overseas. So we don’t have them yet.</p>
<p>Special votes often swing one or two seats – generally not enough to upset the election result. This year, however, there was a record number of special votes, amounting to about 15% of the ballots. Before the election there were predictions of a “youthquake” driven by the rise of Jacinda Ardern. Some commentators are saying that didn’t happen after all. Those commentators, I hereby confidently predict, are going to end up with egg on their faces when the special votes come in. Elections across the Western world have been going quite differently, the last couple of years, from what pundits have predicted; it’s a good bet that the “youthquake” and the record special vote are the same thing. I’m not counting chickens.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, unless the special votes are wildly out of kilter with the other 85%, it won’t be enough to change the practical outcome of the election, which is that either bloc will have to make nice to Winston Peters and his New Zealand First party in order to gain a majority. This is the third time he’s held this position. In 1996, having campaigned on a promise to get rid of the National government, he supported National, who made him Deputy Prime Minister. In 2005 he supported Labour, whose then leader Helen Clark made him Minister of Foreign Affairs – but that time arguably there was a real risk of a Left government forming without him, if only Clark had had the stomach to reach out to the Greens. Now he’s back in the kingmaker seat again. Whether the final distribution of votes between Left and Right will influence his choice remains to be seen.</p>
<p>I’ve <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/06/donald-trump-winston-peters-and-adolf.html">had occasion before</a>, on this blog, to talk about what kind of a politician Winston Peters is. With apologies to those of my readers who don’t watch <em>Game of Thrones</em>: back when <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2017/08/dont-let-them-defeat-us.html">Metiria Turei resigned</a> from the Green co-leadership, a Facebook friend of mine compared her to Ned Stark and National to the Lannisters. (Another objected that <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/new-zealand/government-debt-to-gdp">Lannisters always pay their debts</a>.) On that analogy, Winston Peters is Littlefinger, playing off all the parties against each other and thriving on division – if Littlefinger, instead of being a preternaturally cunning manipulator, were a cynic who’d happened to find a single unvarying tactic that, depressingly, always worked. Think of Donald Trump for a moment (sorry). Remember how a lot of people last year were pinning their last desperate hope on the possibility that he was just faking it for votes? Winston is like if Donald Trump had been just faking it for votes. He runs the same campaign every three years, like clockwork, blaming immigrants for New Zealand’s troubles; then he gets voted back in, shoots his mouth off a lot, and does nothing whatsoever about immigration.</p>
<p>He does, nevertheless, do considerable damage to New Zealand political life by keeping open and inflamed the festering sore that is anti-Asian racism in this country. It’s 2017 and we still can’t have a sensible conversation about immigration policy without scads of conspiratorial rubbish about clandestine Chinese takeovers – asinine comments on the level of “Asians aren’t bad people but there’s too many of them.” To give credit where it’s due, National no longer pander to this particular prejudice, which is not to say that they’ve repudiated racism in general. I have lived to see the Left-Right cultural divide in New Zealand turn into a question of which kinds of racism we have to tolerate: racism against Asian and sometimes Jewish people, or racism against Māori, Pacific Islanders, and Muslims. No wonder it’s difficult raising political enthusiasm in young progressive types these days. And no wonder the electorates with the largest Asian populations were those which saw the support for National rise. I blame Winston.</p>
</div>Daniel Copelandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05944461326199566111noreply@blogger.com0