Category Archives: Culture

Thoughts of the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump

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Yesterday, July 13th, while delivering his usual lies, threats, and promises of vengeance Presidential candidate Trump was nearly assassinated by a gunman.

I have nothing but contempt and antipathy for Trump, the man who has more to damage our political system than anyone else. Should an artery in his diseased and putrid brain burst tonight causing him to assume room temperature I would not only not lose a moment’s sleep over it I would consider it a stroke of good fortune.

That said, and as I have said before, there is no room in our system of government for political violence. Full stop. What transpired yesterday is terrible for our nation, terrible for our culture, and terrible for our future. Here, in no particular order, are some thoughts on the matter.

1) When you normalize and excuse political violence you get more it and you will not be in control of it. Be it street level violence ‘punching nazis,’ mocking and inventing fantastical conspiracies following a brutal attack on political spouse, or an entire political party proclaiming violence insurrectionist as martyrs and hostages, the result is more violence and the degradation of our political life.

2) Grand conspiracies are fantasies no more real that the armies of Barad-dur. It is a deeply human thing to believe that order and reason move the world but love gunman are the rule and not the exception. Overly complex plots to employ ‘false flag’ are the stuff of bad thrillers not reality.

3) Early reports have a terrible error rate and rushing to judgment on them is an act of foolishness.

4) Today people are dead who were not dead Friday. Have some considerations for those killed and injured before you go

5) No one know how this will move the electorate or if it will at all. This election is so ahistorical we have no comparable past to judge it against by which we can make any reasonable assumptions for the future.

6) The elected officials and parties are revealing who they are. Some are coming out with sentiments of consolations and wishes for speedy recoveries while other are quick to deploy attacks and manipulated the event for their partisan advantage. Take note who is doing which.

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Narratives are Dangerous

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It has been proposed that what makes humans different from other animals is that we are rational and thinking beings. But we are not alone in that quality. Numerous animals, some not very closely related to us by the great sifting of evolution appear to rationally solve problems to achieve intended goals.

I think one of the very important ways that humans are unique is that we are narrative animals. We can’t be certain that other animals do not have stories that they pass to one another but the evidence for it is quite slim. It is what humans do, we endlessly craft stories to explain the world. At one time those stories imagined beings of cosmic powers and childish desires to explain the seasons, the weather, and why life at times is glorious and sometimes cruel.

The trouble is that we love stories so much that the inherent attraction they display draws us away from reality. Every con man is a storyteller, every politician is a storyteller, giving stories a far greater consequence than mere entertainment.

Seductive narratives blind us to reality. Once we have accepted a narrative as truth the actual truth becomes less important. Narratives from people we trust, the counter narratives our allies spin about our enemies, and the narrative we tell ourselves all bend and distort our ability to see what is actually there.

It is said that every villain is the hero of their own story and that is true, but it elides an important element, that the story they tell themselves where they are heroic is as fabricated as their heroism.

The NAZI’s vile, evil, and murderous campaign across Europe could not have existed without the false, defamatory and insidious story at the heart of antisemitism. The NAZIs could only see themselves as heroes in a story about an insidious global conspiracy. That is one reason why I despise stories that use deep and vast conspiracies as part of their world building. They are a powerful form of storytelling that makes a random, chaotic world comprehensible but always at the cost of some invented cabal that all too easily can been seen in the ‘real’ world. Neo-Nazis adopted a love for Carpenter’s They Livebecause they saw the vast conspiracy that Carpenter constructed as his satire on capitalism to actually be about their imagined global fight with their imagined foes. The trope of the vast hidden conspiracy used for aliens is all too easily repurposed for any outgroup.

This is the danger of narrative. Narratives can inspire killing. Everyone practices storytelling and every need to be aware of the power that they unwittingly possess.

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Gaiman, Hero Worship, and Human Frailty

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Numerous people throughout fandom are shaken to their cores as allegations are leveled at yet another beloved icon this time Neil Gaiman. I will not be going into the accusations as I have too little knowledge of what is precisely asserted to have an educated opinion.

Neil Gaiman has been a beloved writer in the genre spaces for some time. There have been numerous stories of his kindness and repeated examples of how he has brightened the darkness for other, often with wise comments on this mad industry and its often heavy psychological toll.

However, I am reminded of a bit from the MCU series Loki when the titular character comments that ‘No one good is truly good and no one bad is truly bad.’

We are all shades of gray. Darkness and light lives in every person’s heart. We all have an impulse to be compassionate and caring and we all have impulses to hurt and dominate.

It is now likely that Gaiman will join a terrible list of former artistic talents such Joss Whedon, Roman Polanski, or Kevin Spacey. What are we to learn from this?

I think Frank Herbert, a beloved writer in his own right may have already tried to teach us something about this with Paul Atriedes. Heroes are dangerous to your health.

There is a school of criticism where it is considered critical to separate the artists from the art. Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains an outstanding example of writing with an empowering message about feminine strength told through the lens of superheroes and monsters. Gaiman’s writing about love and the fantastic remain unchanged, the text of the stories and novels are precisely the same as they were last month before this knowledge came to light. Polanski’s adaptation of Macbeth or his cinematic genius directing in Chinatown still speaks truth the corrupting nature of power despite the man’s vile actions as a rapist.

I am not here to tell you to not read or consume any particular artists work because of their reprehensible personal nature. That is a decision each person must make for themselves. It is the personal moral quandary of the audience. What I can say is that the work does not change.

What we should strive to do always with the artistic products we adore because they speak to our very souls is to never forget that all artists are human. All humans are flawed and never construct fantasies of perfect for the flawed people of this planet.

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248 Birthdays

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It has been 248 years since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. That nation born nearly two and a half centuries ago has never been far from perfect. It labor under the Absolute Evil of slavery and that has cast a long and terrible shadow across time. On the other hand, the aspirational ideals presented in that document has not only given fire to the fight against slavery and tyranny here and abroad but has severed as beacon to be our better selves.

Over the centuries we have explanted the notion about who matters and whose voices can be heard in the public square. What was once unthinkable in terms of human liberty are now enjoyed but there are more to unchain.

Recently the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) enacted a new test to determine in something was constitutional or not, the ‘history and tradition’ test. If something did not have an analog in the nation’s history or its tradition, a very slippery concept to applied fairly without biases of the head or heart, then it was in conflict with the supreme law of the land.

This is not only an invitation for personal preference to direct outcomes it is directly and thematically in opposition to our founding. A founding that proclaims that the traditions of the past do not fence in our present or future liberties. That because we have always had a king who should therefore always have a king. This nation is a bold experiment in new thinking not traditional customs.

For citizen of the United States of America this year is vitally important year. This election transcends petty policies and speaks to the very nature of the American system.

We can elect a corrupt, venal, criminal of a man who has no wish beyond his own greedy vices and appetites, throwing away two and half centuries of democratic self-governance, or we can accept that policy is less important that principal and keep him and his ilk out.

Like Klaatu said at the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still “The choice is yours.”

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Juneteenth: A day to Remember Dreams and Nightmares

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June the 19th 1865 is the day the freedom loving Texans were, at the end of a rifle, forced to free the people that they had enslaved, the final state of the traitorous Confederacy to do so. It was not the end of slavery in the United States that would come officially later the same year, but it was a vital and important step along the long rocky road to freedom. A road we still stumble down.

This is a day of celebration as it was the date that the United States Army freed the enslaved peoples of Texas partially validate the great principals upon which this nation is founded. It is also the day to remember the horrific hundreds of years of nightmarish torment our nation visited up a subjugated population. Like an element in a state of quantum state that is simultaneously wave and particle America’s history is both pride and shame.

That the founders of this nation expressed all too human hypocrisy does not negate the amazing ideal that ‘all men are created equal’ nor does that bold septimate absolve them of their evils. The inspiring belief that freedom and equality are due to all people has unleashed a forced unlike any other on this planet and the failures to live up to those aspirations is a source of shame but also a motivation to do better.

Far too many people only want to think of history in one mode or another. That the centuries of slavery are an original and inescapable sin upon everything this nation has achieved, or that the evils of the past are dead and bear no relevance today. Both extremes are wrong headed.  It is the wave and particle duality again. It is both things and it is neither thing. It is the history that we must celebrate and the shame we must never forget.

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Guilty on Every Count

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Yesterday after just 11 hours of deliberation on 34 felony county a New York City Jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of every charge. Not one count did they find him acquitted nor did they hang on any of the charges. They looked at the evidence presented by document and testimony and found that there was no room for reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

Of course, conservative partisans rushed to prostrate themselves before their Orange God-King protesting the trail, the verdict, the jurors, and every political opponent that could muster to mind. It has been decades since the GOP or the conservative movement possessed any fragment of principle or integrity. Terrified at the potential political fallout they huddle together and mutter their threats and plans of vengeance. Deep in their souls they know that this is a trap entirely of their own making.

The GOP has several opportunities to avoid this fate. They could have refused Trump entry to the party’s debates in 2016. They could have mustered the conventions against him. They could have impeached him when he corruptly used the office against a friendly nation for his person political benefit. They could have impeached him when he attempted to overthrow a fair and free election. They could have stood with due process as the justice system brought him to task for his crimes.

They did none of these things.

From their own selfish wants for lower taxes, more liberty to pollute, the puritanical need to impose their sexual mores on everyone else, and the need to have utterly unrestricted access to any firearm of that their little hearts desire, they have sold their souls, and betrayed the core concept of this great nation: No Person is Above the Law.

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Artistic Responsibility

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Friday night I went out to the movies and watched the big screen adaptation of The Fall Guyand had a pretty good time with a summer popcorn movie.

Before the film there were of course 20 minutes of trailers, and one trailer really pissed me off.

Fly me to the Moon a romantic comedy set in the days before the moon landing between a PR hack (Scarlet Johannsson) and a flight Director (Channing Tatum) as the PR hack tries to boost public interest in the upcoming lunar landing.

I can ignore/forgive the historical inaccuracy about public interest. Leading up to the landing this nation went space happy and after the landings interest waned from the fickle public. However, in the trailer it is also shown that fear of a failed landing prompts the PR Hack to produce a faked landing on a sound stage. This is where my blood boiled.

I think it is grossly irresponsible of the production, which began in 2022, to depict the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked. Yes, I understand that this is a comedy, and should be viewed in that light but the world we live in is one riven with conspiracy theories. One should not inject into a culture already diseased with conspiracies about election and life-saving vaccines anything that supports, even as a jest, conspiratorial thinking. People are dying from the conspiracy that the COVID vaccines are dangerous this is not the time to buttress such thinking.

John Carpenter when he wrote and directed, They Live meant it as a satire of Reaganism and what he viewed as the culture of greed in encouraged. However, his simplistic world-building of a secret alien conspiracy controlling and directing the planet’s governments and culture were readily accepted and embraced by neo-Nazis who view the entire film as an allegory that buttressed their diseased antisemitism.

Director Greg Berlanti and screenwriter Rose Gilroy have failed to learn from this terrible lesson and stand to do damage to our nation and our world for the sake of a few cheap jokes.

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The Man or the Bear?

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For the last couple of week social media has been roiled by the hypothetical question posed to women, if you were alone in the woods would you rather encounter a bear or a man?

When I heard this proposed I had an instant intuitive sense that most women would choose the bear. My impression of the social media fracas seems to support my guess and apparently there have been more than a few men flummoxed by the answer.

Photo Credit: Robert Mitchell Evans

There is no doubt that a bear is a dangerous omnivorous predator with many species presenting as quite territorial. Mauled by a bear is a very painful way to depart this sad world and I do not think for a moment that the women electing ‘bear’ are ignorant of the facts of these animals.

I know of no statistically valid way to produce an off the cuff probability of threat between a random bear and a random man, but I suspect that even if the odds were more dangerous with the bear that would remain the most likely election.

I think most men have little conception of what life is like for most women. The truth be told most people have little conception of what life is like for anyone other than themselves. The ability to project an empathic understanding of another person’s viewpoint and emotional state is a quite rare gift. But what makes the choice so often bear? Why are so many women, fully aware of the dangerous of a large predator, still willing to say ‘bear’ over men?

I think it is the subtle difference between terror and horror.

Bears can be terrifying, but people can be horrifying. A bear presenting a serious risk of injury or harm is much like a tornado. Terrifying to consider but also simply a force of nature. A bear, or a tiger, or a flood simply is without any moral qualification.

People, and men in this hypothetical, are not simply forces of nature and certain their action are bound by moral qualifications.

If a bear mauls you, it does so without volition it is simply following millions of years of evolutionary programming. A man who assaults you does so because he has made a choice. A man is someone capable of understanding the consequences of his actions and has made the calculus that his victims pain, suffering, and trauma are of no consideration. Or worse to be valued and enjoyed. The man knows what harm he causes and elects to cause it. That is true horror in a manner that is not produced by a bear or a flood or a tornado. All of which can cause grievous bodily harm or death but only the man wants to cause it.

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On Fictional Cursing

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Recently on the social media sites where writers congregate there has been a small discussion on the subject of invented curses. Should a writer just use the curses that everyone uses and is familiar with or invent new one for their fantasy and far-future settings.

Invented cursing like artificial slang is a very touchy thing to pull off. Those of us geeks old enough to remember the original run of Battlestar Galactica recall the programs invented curse words like ‘frak’ and ‘feldercarb.’ (I am not cure of the spelling of that last one.) Which were one-for-one replacements for ‘fuck’ and ‘bullshit.’

This ‘just replace it with an invented word’ style of fictional cursing misses the point and understanding of cursing. Cursing is transgressive.

Cursing is about violating the ‘good taste’ and decorum of your culture. It is shocking and emotionally powerful because it is breaking norms and rules. If all you do is change ‘fuck’ to ‘frak’ then in effect you are saying that this alien culture thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years in our history is just the same as ours today. Possessing the same values the same taboos and therefore the same sense of what is proper and polite.

That’s just lazy.

Plus, it misses the chances the golden opportunity for the writer to show us something about the new culture without stopping for exposition.

A culture with a lot of religion on its history or its current make up will have curse derived from that sense of religion.  No culture that doesn’t have some belief in torturous punishment through damnation is going to have the curse ‘damn you.’ If a culture places no important on familial bloodlines and lineages, then they are not going to use ‘bastard’ as an insult.

Star Trek’s Vulcan are a fiction race that prides itself on total control of their emotional reaction to the point that they insist that they have no emotions. Displaying and suggesting a Vulcan has displayed emotion would be an insult and transgressive. While they are not given to angry outbursts, I could see a Vulcan character calmly looking upon an enemy and saying,’ I have no doubt that gives you,” then with a pause for emphasis ‘joy.’ A stinging insult and rebuke delivered with a flat affectation.

So, think about the cultures your create and then ponder deep on what they consider transgressive and there you will find you curses and insults.

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The Word ‘Enemy’ is Dangerous

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A friend retweeted a Twitter posting where a conservative supposedly defined ‘woke.’ The tweet contained nothing that any linguist would consider a ‘definition’ but rather a word-salad screed about what they considered the dangerous aspects of ‘woke’ including unsupported assertions of ‘death cult’ and the like. My friend commented in his retweeting that it is was important to know ‘the enemy.’

Now, I am not going to get into the futile and unproductive argument over what is ‘woke.’ In my opinion that term is used as carelessly as ‘fascist’ was deployed by many for decades prior to our current social political crisis.

What I am fascinated with is the term ‘enemy.’ An enemy is someone or faction that you cannot reasonably work with without degrading or corrupting your own standards. The overuse of ‘enemy’ in domestic political terms leads to a breakdown of governance.

If you want to tax high income people at a greater rate than others, that doesn’t make you an enemy. Policy, in general, isn’t the basis for enmity but rather disagreement. It is possible to have serious, vigorous, and even heated debates and arguments over policy without being enemies.

However, when you describe your political opponents as wanting to ‘destroy civilization’ and ‘end the nation’ then you make it impossible to work with them. Your very language has placed them beyond the pale of acceptability and that chains your own actions.

Look at the war in Europe. Many people on both the left and the right see the vital importance in assisting a democratic and free nation in defending itself against a brutal, savage war launched by its dictatorial neighbor. And yet that assistance to held captive and withheld because to actually do the work to get it out requires working with the ‘enemy.’

On a less critical issue, keeping an insurrectionist out of the presidency, political aid is coming from those who served with the insurrection in his previous administration. I have no love for Pence. I know that given the chance he would harm those I care about with his deluded sense of morality, but I will not label him an ‘enemy’ making it impossible to work with him.  I will accept his assistance but never forget what it is he is and what he would want to achieve.

The word ‘enemy’ is dangerous and should be applied quite carefully.

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