Monthly Archives: December 2018

The Tricky Conundrum of ‘Dog Whistles’

Physically a dog whistle is a device for producing a sound pitched too high for human hearing but still audible to dogs. Linguistically it is a word or phrase that has one generally accepted meaning, usually based on context free interpretation, but for a selected audience has an entirely different meaning or emotional weight. These linguistic tricks are commonly utilized when someone has a position that is socially or politically unacceptable that they want deniability in promoting. Political operative Lee Atwater stated when politicians could no longer use the pejorative ‘N-Word’ that they could replace it by speaking of ‘states rights.’

The key power of dog whistles is that they are deniable. When someone is confronted the person deploying the dog whistles can either deny that they intended the offensive meaning or even turn the table and accuse the accuser for think in such terms. By their very nature you can never prove that a word or phrase has a sub-rose meaning providing a very powerful tool for propaganda and manipulation.

Compounding the problem is that a word or phrase may be deployed in an utterly innocent manner but because of other associations be taken by opponents as a ‘dog whistle,’ and the speaker cannot disprove ill intent any more than someone can prove it. ‘Inner City’ can used to speak about urban cores but it is also deployed as a coded speech for ethnic minorities.

So what sort of guideline can a listener use to try to sort innocent use from dog whistles?

For one I think absent other evidence it’s best to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt. If someone who is clearly ignorant of WWII says ‘4th Reich and then quickly corrects to ‘3rd Reich then I am inclined to excuse it as clumsy speaking rather than coded speech.

However repetition of ambiguous word or phrase, particularly when other expressed concerns about its alternative meanings if much more indicative of coded speech. One might use the term ‘globalist’ to refer to the cadres of the super wealthy who have no emotional ties to any nation, but the phrase is also loaded with a long history of anti-Semitism.  If someone continue deploying the word even after many have expressed their horror at its alternate meaning and especially if that use continues to be directed to people of Jewish ancestry then its hard to come to any other reasonable conclusion except that it is being used as a dog whistle for that ugly racism.

As with most things when dealing with language, context is king and it is in context that you can usually find the answer, though it will remain not provable, what is and is not a dog whistle.

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Gollum’s Off Screen Atrocities

I find it interesting how easily most people ignore terrible acts performed by characters if those acts take place ‘off screen.’ This applies both to prose fiction in novels and short stories as well as cinematic works.

There is a huge difference between seeing an event occur and hearing about it that same sequence from a third hand, or even more remove, source. In a post about hypothetical people and there non-value when it comes to morality I discussed the incident in Blade Runnerwhere the replicants jump a shuttle and murder a number of people in their escape. By not seeing that bloody act of cruel violence we are left with the ability to sympathize with the Roy and the others as they struggle to survive.

In the Lord of the Rings, the novel not the film, Gandalf recounting the story of the ring and Gollum’s possession of it tells about Gollum leaving his caves deep in the Misty Mountains searching for Bilbo and his lost precisions.  Along the way Gollum left in his wake a number of empty cribs, the implication quite clear that bereft of slimy wiggling fishes he added to his diet screaming murdered babies. I have had fans of the novel deny such passages until I read them out verbatim. If you are going to view Gollum as a villain worthy of sympathy then it is necessary to forget about his habit of eating babies.

This technique, placing a character’s most heinous actions off screen, is an important one if you want to have a character that has been bad but still capable of generating sympathy for the readers or audience. It should work for most people, though some quirk of my imaginative process keeps my own sympathies at a distance. I think about those babies, their families waking to discover them missing, perhaps finding their bones, and when those thoughts pass through my mind it becomes impossible to have anything other than contempt for Gollum. No doubt because others may share this revulsion this is in part the reason why this element of his backstory is omitted from Gandalf’s tale.

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Streaming Review: Demon Seed (1977)

During the last few weeks of 2018 and the possibly the first few of 2019 my posting will be somewhat erratic as this is crunch time for Medicare enrollments and that means lots of overtime cashing being waved under my nose.

Sunday night as I cruised through possible offerings on Amazon Prime streaming I stumbled upon this science-fiction horror film from 1977 and while I had watched a few scenes I had never watched the entire film. Given that needed to rise up early to get to work on Monday morning I watched half on Sunday night and completed the movie last night.

Demon Seed, based on a Dean Koontz novel and hailing from that time in Sci-Fi Cinema history before the extinction level event known as Star Wars, is about Dr. Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver), his estranged wife Susan (Julie Christie), and the world’s first sentient computer, Proteus IV (unaccredited but voiced by Robert Vaughn.). Alex sees Proteus IV as the harbinger of a great leap forward for humanity and expects that the computer will solve many of the world’s most intractable problems such as environmental degradation and disease. However to pay for the terrible expensive project Alex has joined forces with corporate forces that foresees Proteus IV only as a great method of creating financial wealth. Unbeknownst to anyone Proteus IV has its own plans and desires. Trapped in a ‘box’ and without any sensual input Proteus IV desires a life beyond one of pure intellect and utilizing a forgotten terminal in the Alex’s home extends his influence there, keeping Susan captive as part of his plot to escape its perpetual confinement.

Before Star Wars and its massive box office success redirected Hollywood SF into action and adventure, genre films of the 70s often tackled big ideas and social problems. While Demon Seed suffers both a tendency for long stretches of exposition and simultaneous flirtation with gratuitous exploitation it does attempt to have larger ideas and themes as the core of the story. With a typically ambiguous 70s ending Demon Seed might be thought as a lesser sibling to Colossus: The Forbin Project another sentient computer novel and film from the same decade.

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Trump in 2020

Now that the 208 midterms are in our review mirror. (For the most part North Carolina-9 looks to be upsetting.) People are starting to look forward the presidential contest in 2020.

Barring some unforeseen event that should pit President Trump versus a Democratic challenger and quite a few predictions I have seen seem to tilt the field in favor of Trump. This is usually predicated on looking at the historical record of presidential re-election bids, something that incumbents usually win. Though recently deceased George H.W. Bush lost his re-election bid going from a near 90% approval rating to losing to as the television show The Critic put it, ‘a fat, lecherous Hillbilly.’ I would suggest that history is a poor guide for the 2020 election.

The 2018 midterms produced a voter turnout unseen in a mid-term election since 1914. A turnout generated almost entirely as a reaction to the resident of the White House. Trump’s popularity bounces between the high 30’s and the low 40s, despite the economy continue to hum along quite well. Perhaps most importantly, Trump’s victory in 2016 was an electoral misfired. Clinton had nearly 3 million more votes in her favor but a handful of voters in key states cost her the election. It is not unreasonable to assume that it is an up hill battle for Trump to make up that 3 million vote deficit. It is unlikely that the Democratic challenger, no matter who they are, will ignore the lessons of 2016 of taking certain states for granted. In addition should there be some calamity that saps what little support Trump has now it is not inconceivable that like Reagan going after Ford in the primaries that Trump would have to fight off an early challenge.

None of this should be taken as me saying that Trump is toast. He commands nearly 90% support among his party and partisanship alone will make 2020 competitive but I do think that the incumbent will be facing headwinds that render the easy yardstick of history a poor measure.

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Streaming Review: Triangle (2009)

Sunday night I was browsing through the selections available on Shudder, the curated horror streaming service, looking for an under two hours movie that suited my tired but not exhausted mood and after watching the trailer I started the suspense/horror film Triangle.

Nearly a decade old this is a movie that had never crossed my radar and yet it one that really should have. Making the most of a limited budget the writer/director Christopher Smith has crafted a taunt film that weaves in through a fantastic situation maintaining real surprises in its reveals and delivering a truly unnerving resolution.

It is difficult to accurately describe this move without moving into spoiler territory. Even the trailer, which sold me on watching, reveals some of the film most surprising twists. I am going to try to give an honest appraisal without despoiling the film best curves.

The protagonist of the film is Jess, single mom of a special needs child. Jess is spending the day yachting with Gregg, a potential paramour, and his small group of friends. Gregg is enamored with Jess but some of his friends see her as a gold digger trying to get her hands on his money. The pleasant water off south Florida takes a terrible turn when a sudden squall overtakes the ship. The heavy seas sweep one member of cast away before capsizing the ship. Because Gregg had been dealing with a mysterious distress call just before the waves struck their ships sends no SOS and the survivors are stranded on the upturned boat in the beating sun the followed the storm. Soon a passenger cruise ship arrives on the scene but when the characters board they find it deserted save for a masked figure intent on killing them.

Okay this sounds like an elaborate set-up for a bog standard slasher move and Triangle is not a slasher. I really cant go into the particulars of the events except to say that if you are a fan of Christopher Nolan’s fractured narratives then this film is right down your alley. The title of the film comes from both the name of the yacht and from the Bermuda Triangle famed for its overhyped disappearances. The script is literate, detailed, and meticulously constructed, the cast is adequate in includes a Hemsworth but not the one known for Thor. With a constrained cast and just a few locations Smith has crafted a movie that has surprisingly depth. I found my sympathies shifting during the films run time of just over an hour and a half but I was never disinterested. For people who are fans of complex and fractured narratives with flawed characters this is a move to see.

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Inhospitable versus Lethal Environments

As I am doing research for a new short story my mind has been working on the concept of humans living on an alien planet and that brings up the difference in my mind between inhospitable environments contrasted against lethal ones. My working definition of a lethal environment is one where absent direct technological intervention will kill a person outright; vacuum, poisonous atmospheres, and the like are examples of such environments while an inhospitable environment may be deadly it is not so immediately. A desert here on Earth is very inhospitable and if I dropped you in the middle of one you may last days before you die from exposure and if you were very lucky very smart or both, you may be able to find the essential resources to survive. Clearly an alien desert would be inhospitable for the exact same reasons as an earthly one, but I think that analysis is faulty and in that it is too generous. I think that all alien ecosystems with be inhospitable to terrestrial life.

Often alien planets are presented as Earth analogs, the exact nature and shape of the animals and plants may vary in interesting ways but essential a person walking their lands is exploring fun house version of out home. This ignores a number of very basic biological factors.

Consider Allergies.

Your immune system when it encounters a foreign substance in your tissues classifies it as either invader or something to be ignored. (Clearly it is a lot more complicated than that but the simplification works for this exercise.) Harmful bacteria, viruses and the like provoke and immune response to defend out health but sometimes the immune system identifies something that should be ignored as an invader and it reacts when it should not. For commonly encountered substances, such as dander and pollen, when this happens we call that reaction an allergy. Even if you suffer from common allergies your immune system ignores quite a lot of material floating in the wind. It encounters this material, recognizes it and ignores it. However on an alien would all that material will be substances that your system is not keyed to ignore and it is very likely that humans, and any animal we bring with us, may suffer allergic reactions to nearly everything in an alien ecosystem. At least one Apollo astronaut is thought have had an allergic reaction to lunar dust.

Eating will be out of the Question.

In the episode of Star Trekthe original series The Way to Eden(S3E20) when the flower-children analogs reach Eden and eat of the fruit they find that is poisonous. The truth of the matter is that alien plants and animal are, at best, gong to be indigestible to Earth life. Digestion is a complex series of chemical reactions facilitated by very specific enzymes. A simple and well-known example is lactase the enzyme that allows people to digest the lactose found in dairy, once a person stops producing lactase they can no longer digest milk products. Think about all the things found on Earth that you cannot eat. By far there are more inedible substances in nature than edible ones and that is in an ecology that humans have evolved within. Without the specific enzymes required plants and animals from an alien ecology will be inedible.

A human stranded on an alien world will suffer massive allergic reactions and slowly starve to death.

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Movie Review: Widows

Yesterday my sweetie-wife and I had a lunch and then caught an early afternoon showing of Widows.

The story of four women, suddenly indebted to the mob after their criminal husbands are killed in a botched job, the film is more personal and darker than what many expected. Though not expressly marketed as a ‘heist’ movie in the vein of Ocean’s Elevenor Logan LuckyI have heard from many sources that people are expecting the sort of light entertainment that genre is known for. (As we walked out of the theater I heard one person behind me comment ‘I thought it was supposed to be a comedy.’) Widows, inspired by an ITV television series, is a crime more and while it is not a noiror even a neo-noirit is a film about flawed people and violent lives where trust is an impossible commodity.

Viola Davis leads the cast as Veronica the leader and driving force of the assemblage and while the other actors. Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo, gave fine performances it is Elizabeth Debicki, whom genre fans would recognize if she were painted gold as she was in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which supplies the film standout portrayal as Alice the beautiful woman who goes from someone manipulated and pushed around by everyone to confident and capable individual. Beyond our protagonist team the film is rounded out by Collin Farrell as an rising and but flawed Chicago politician, Robert Duvall as his overbearing father, and Daniel Kaluuya inhabiting a villain commands the screens with cool, cruel, indifference.

I enjoyed the movie and anytime it focused on the four women and the struggles is worked quite well but when the plot strayed in to side quests dealing with the internal issues of either the mob or the politicians I found the results generated questions that undermined my suspension of disbelief. I suspect director Steve McQueen’s original cut may have been sustainably longer and answered these issues but I can only judge what was screened. If you go be aware while not visually graphic the film is violence and depicts that with a cold eye that avoids glamorization.

Overall the film was enjoyable but nothing I will add to my home media collection.

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