Tag Archives: Culture

A phrase I nearly always distrust

‘We’ve got to take back …”

“Our Country”

“Our Awards”

“Our Government”

I’ve heard this uttered on the left and on the right. I’ve heard this uttered for deadly serious things like the country as a whole and less serious things like SF’s award The Hugo. Wherever I hear this I tend to cringe. The unspoken – but only just barely unspoken – underlying assumption is one of ownership and possession. The subject of the ‘take back’ it the rightful property of of those proclaiming the mission. An ownership that is exclusionary to a segment or population.

Sorry, that’s just not freaking true. It wasn’t ‘your’ country. It wasn’t ‘your’ award. It wasn’t ‘your’ thingie. Especially with something like our nation or our government it is ours, collective. You know, our government, our nation, our conventions, they are always changing. Not always in ways you like. Not always in ways I like, but it always happens and always will.

Reverse is a suitable gear only for automobiles.

 

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Exclusion Is Not The Answer

Recently author K.T. Bradford issued the challenge for people to for one year to not read anything written by a straight, heterosexual, while, cis-male author. The goal of the challenge, as I understand it, to expand the readers awareness and understanding of the world and its people by exposure to culture, thoughts, and individual from outside the main stream. Make no doubt I agree that the firehouse of material from mainstream media, print, TV, and film, is very much one in which the white, straight, cis-male voice is overwhelmingly dominate. I think it is a terribly good idea for everyone to read and write outside their comfort zone. All readers should seek out material that comes from author who are not like themselves. When you read only from people like yourself you do yourself and others a grave disservice. It is only by such exposure that we can learn what it means to be different and only when we learn that can we begin to have true empathy. That said, I think this exclusion of voice is a terrible concept. No one should be excluded because of the circumstances of their birth. The exclusion of any whole class of people, particularly based upon inherent traits, is an ugly action. Now supporters of challenge may feel that the firehouse of media is so overwhelming dominated by the straight, white, cis-males that the exclusion does no real harm and is justified in the name of social justice. To me such an argument only works if you take the mental step of not remembering that each and every one of those authors, straight, white, and cis-male, are all individual persons. They are not a class, They are not a category. They are people. They are individuals that, by participating in this challenge, your are slighting, excluding, and devaluing their voices. For well-established authors, choosing to not buy their books as part of this challenge is a very minor affair in terms of damage. A man like John Scalzi, an ally in this sort of action, has a well established and devoted fan base. His career is made. However a new voice, a new author needs every single sale he can get. He has to proved that the investment in his art by the publishers is well worth it. It is much more damaging to a first time novelist to have people excluding his work from purchase based solely upon his inherent characteristics that it is the well known and successful. I would urge you to expanding your reading. Expand your understanding. Expand your empathy, but do it by inclusion not exclusion.

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Myth, Culture, and The Moving Picture.

John Scalzi over at his blog whatever posted an essay in response to this blog post. Like Scalzi I would urge you to go read the pose and then come back to my thoughts.

While Scalzi addressed the idea of taking back SF conventions, award, and SF culture in general, I am more interested in the whole concept of the right myths to be telling.

Mr. Lehman seemed to be supporting a stand that principle American myths in SF were being undermined by ‘enemies’ and that it was important that the right myths be told, and written.

I agree with him utterly that myths are one of the primary definitions of a culture. Understand their myths and you have gone a long way to understanding them. Myths are also critical in the transmission of culture across generations. So there we are again in agreement.

What he seems to miss in my opinion is just how fluid myths are. They are never the same from tale to tale and their alteration, divergence, and mutations is part of what drives changes in culture. He speaks of the cowboy myth, one that was born of dime novels and expanded upon my film and television. I wonder which cowboy myths are the right ones? The Roy Rogers, white hates and black hats, never shoot anyone in the back, always tell the truth cowboys? Perhaps the gritty people are no good and you cannot depend on them myth of ‘High Noon?’ Or maybe the violent, murdering butchers of ‘Unforgiven?’ just within the cowboy myth and over a few short decades the meaning changed and the truth as I see it is that there is no ‘correct’ or ‘right’ cowboy myth. All of them speak to something about America and its people, all of them speak to the changes that she endured and continues to endure.

Myths change the people and people change the myths. It is a feedback loop of a dynamic unstable system. Science-fiction myuths used to be something else, but they changed as new voice came in, added their own experiences, as the culture changed and elevated myths that better spoke to them as that time. It is a constant process. It is not one driven because some people went to mechanical engineering school while others plotted and planned in social engineering schools. SF is a business first and what you see on the shelves today is a result of the market demanding it be there. (I speak of course concerning the traditionally published, outside of that everything in the world is available.)

There is no perfect set of SF myths and stories anymore than there are for cowboys or knights. Trying to restrict it top a perfect set a platonic ideal of what SF is about is as futile as reducing a motion picture to a singe perfect frame and insisting that only that frame need be viewed.

New voices will always come in, they will always bring in new idea, some will be accepted, some will not. Some old ideas will endure, others will fade. It is the nature of culture to change.

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Rand Paul thinks you’re stupid

In the video above Senator Rand Paul, considered by many to be a viable and serious presidential candidate for 2016, plays both sides of the street. On one hand be pays homage to the scientific breakthrough of vaccines and their importance to public health, and on the other hand he spreads falsehoods and disinformation about vaccines that suppress their use.
When some uses the word ‘but’ you need to pay close attention. In most cases what follows that word is a negation of what went on before. Several times in the video Rand Paul praises vaccines and then with a ‘but’ turns on them in his friendly, folksy ‘gosh, I just love freedom’ manner.
There are three major flags in his discussion of vaccines in this piece.
1) He insinuates that simultaneous vaccinations are a bad thing, referring to spreading out the scheduled for his own children. There is NO evidence that multiple or simultaneous vaccinations are unsafe or compromise the immune system of the vaccinated. Spreading out the vaccinations creates no benefits and leave gaps for possible infection.
2) Senator Paul stress that Hepatitis B is transmitted by sexual activity and blood transfusions. This is true, but is a prevarication. There are multiple methods of transmission and infection for Hepatitis B that place children and new borns at risk. It is typical of a social conservative to show reluctance at vaccines that interact with a person’s sexual life, such as the HPV vaccine.
3) His worst offense and the one that has generated a bit of a media controversy from this interview is the senator repeating the idiotic and ignorant canard that vaccines can cause mental retardation. The day after this interview he has tried to ‘walk back’ the comment by asserting that he did not says that vaccines caused mental retardation merely that they were, his words, ‘temporally related.’ Instead of manning up and talking the heat for saying a damn stupid thing, he’s insisting that you should believe him and not your lying ears,

It is true that he praised vaccines in the interview; it is true that his children are vaccinated, and it is also true that he repeated and insinuated anti-vaccine myths, either because he himself believes them or he believes that it plays well to people who matter to him.

Either way it looks like Rand Paul thinks you’re stupid.

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Now My Problems with the Left

A few posts back I gave some of my reasons as to why I could not longer in any good conscience vote for the Republican Party. That does not mean I am all happy and satisfied when forced to vote on the Democratic side of the ballot. The issues I have the liberal side f the equation are less pressing than those I listed from the right, but they give me serious hesitation and also trouble my conscience. So in no particular order are some of those issues.

  • Identity Politics: There is a great tendency on the left to see people as the check boxes that they are assigned. Too many times have I heard responses start off with a recitation of a person’s categorization placing such labels above the person’s ideas in importance. I am far too much of an individualist to see people first as a label and secondly as an individual. They is not to say that as a culture we do not have miles go in fighting all manner of discrimination. Nor is it saying that the proper view of the world is to pretend to be colorblind. (Or any other kind of blindness) which invites someone to ignore the pain and struggle that others have faced and continue to face. However putting people in little boxes invites other forms of discrimination, such as expecting that person of a particular race, orientation, or what not is a traitor to their own if they hold contrary and unpopular views. The problem with bean counting is that in the end it reduces people to beans.
  • Paternalism: The liberals are far more likely than the conservatives to pass laws for someone ‘own good.’ Seat-belt laws, Helmet Laws, Smoking Laws, and so on, laws, taxes, and regulations meant to guide the common person towards the preferred behaviors. For years I have referred to this tendency as ‘the enlightened man’s burden.’ It springs from a conceit that they know best and it is an obligation to make sure that everyone lives in the manner that the enlightened know is best. Often couched in terms of societal costs (helmet-less riders cost us X dollars every year) it is an insidious argument freedom has no dollar value and as such always looses. People have a right to be stupid and free.
  • Luddism: From nuclear power, and genetic engineering, to vaccines there is a powerful tendency on the left to harbor fears of technology. The same people who would chastise conservatives for refusing to listen to climate scientists will happily embrace fears of GMO without any more scientific support than the conservatives that deride. They will happy boost for more space exploration, and yet protest the use of nuclear fuels for those same spacecraft. It is my opinion that the conservatives are often anti-science but that liberals are often anti-technology. (there is talk in the news today of GOP candidates and their anti-vax stands, but this idea is much more at home in the upper-middle class college educated left.)
  • Utopianism: The idea that humanity is perfectible seems to be a meme that is much more infection among the left. There seems to be a desire, a dream, to find the system that will bring out the perfect system where everyone is happy and there is no want. A place where racism, sexism, and other ills are diseases of the past. I think this is why the left has always flirted with socialism and communism. Communism really is an atheistic religion promising heaven on earth and an end to all suffering. I do not believe that people are perfectible. There will always be the base drives and desire that propel so much human misery. The idea that we can find a utopia is a delusion that distracts us from the work we can achieve.

As with my post on the Republican Party, the subject of the post and comments is the liberal philosophy and the Democratic Party. You are welcome to comment but stay on topic.

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A Bad Idea

Anyone who knows me is aware that I hold anti-vaxxers in the same sort of contempt that I reserve for creationist and anti-evolutionist. Recently I spotted a proposal that parents should be required to confer with a physician before being allowed to opt out of getting their children vaccinated.

No! This is a terrible idea.

When justice Alito was up for confirmation to SCOTUS one of the things that troubled me from his judicial history was upholding a law that required married woman confer with their husband before obtaining an abortion. Granted it gave the husband no legal standing, he had no way to legally forbid the process, the woman merely had to inform and confer with her spouse on the matter, the decision was still hers. It was a terrible idea for the exact same reasons as this proposal about vaccinations.

Freedom of speech and expression is not just a positive right. In addition is have the freedom to express your ideas, you are free from having to participate in expression of ideas. Compelled speech is not free speech.

Ban unvaccinated children from schools. I support that.

Require the vaccinations for public health. No trouble with that at all.

But for heaven’s sake do not infringe on freedom of expression to get there.

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Why I Cannot Vote Republican

For many years my natural political niche was Republican. In 1994 I was quite happy to see the House switch parties. There still are a number of points that cause me to be uncomfortable when I vote on the left side of the ballot. (Those I will save for another post on another day.) However the evolution of the Republican party and conservatism in general has driven me from their support. The following points are not meant to be exhaustive but merely the most important issues that make, for me, a Republican impossible. (Any I am talking primarily about national politics, not local.)

  1. Torture:   There simply is no other way to put it; the Republican Party made this country a nation that tortures. They refuse to correct their mistake, standing firm on the weasel euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation.’ Torture, the abuse of prisoners, is an immoral and evil act. I may not be religious, I may not be Christian, but I will not endorse such evil. (There are times when I wonder what a Republican Christian imagines he or she would say to their God when they face the final judgment. What argument can support trading torturing human beings for tax cuts?)
  2. Marriage Equality: One of my philosophical passions is equality. I do not see the animal ‘gay marriage.’ In my mind there is not such animal. There is only marriage. I can remember back in the 80’s, long before this bubbled up into the national political fight, coming to the conclusion that no logical argument support banning gay people from marriage. Nothing in the decades in-between has altered that conclusion.
  3. Anti-Abortion Absolutism and Hypocrisy : There is no reasonable compromise that can be forged with the Social Conservative on abortion. Any agreement is merely a stepping stone for further restrictions on the march to total prohibition. There are those who accept the argument that this is really a personal liberty issue, defining the unborn fetus as a person whose liberties outweigh all others, but I do not believe that this is the sincere motivation for the abolition at all. IF you accept that the fetus is a person with all the right and protections of a person (which I do not) there can be no moral justification aiming all criminal charges in the direction of the providers and not the woman. Here is no moral argument supporting excepting for rape or incest. Anyone who supports the death penalty for murder for hires would have to support it for abortion. No, the real issue here is an attempt to roll back the sexual revolution. Hence the Conservatives issue with the HPV vaccine. Nothing that makes sexual encounters safer can be tolerated.
  4. The Iraq War: I was against the invasion when it happened and nothing has come to light to present the Iraqi dictatorship as an imminent danger to the United States. The War was foolish without any serious thought given to the post war environment. The major players in the Republican field supported the war and continue to do so. State

5. Fiscal Hypocrisy: Hypocrisy is the normal state of affair in politics. The Filibuster is scared when you’re the minority and a nuisance when you are in the majority. However the central conceit of Republican is their supposed fiscal sanity. 2000-2008 proved the lie to that illusion. Deficits only matter when they can be used to bludgeon the Democratic Party. Given the chance the ‘conservatives’ rushed to war and paid for it on the government credit card.

Comment if you like, but the subject of the thread is the Republican Party. Deflecting to the Democratic Party and its sins is off topic.

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Random Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo Attack

I have been deeply busy in copy-editing my novel and as such I have neglected this here blog. Now I am sick with flu and my head is in a perpetual dizzy state. However I will attempt to put down at least some of the thoughts that have been running through my brain since this horrific attack in Paris.

  1. These murderers are nothing more than vicious, savage barbarians. An attack on free expression is an attack on civilization. The slaughter of unarmed people is not an act of war, or courage, or defiance. It is barbarity.
  2. The writers, editors, and artists at Charlie Hebdo, in my opinion not speaking as to French law, have a right to free expression and being insulting, offensive, or blasphemous does not restrict or rescind that.
  3. Some have argued that it is wrong to ‘punch down.’ That is to mock or satirize people from disenfranchised or marginalized populations. I disagree. There is no state of being that immunizes anyone from mockery. Any idea is subject to ridicule.
  4. That said I am sure that there are those would who advocate I should use the blog to reproduced the images that some found so offensive as symbolic stand for the ideal of free expression. I can stand for the ideals of free expression without being obligated to reproduce content with which I disagree.
  5. From what I have seen the images in question are neither worthy in an artistic or satirical manner. Simply being insulting isn’t satirical, being offensive doesn’t mean you had anything interesting to say. I particularly do not agree with images that mock the entire religion. The trouble is with radicalized fundamentalist at war with modernity, not the entire 1.8 billion followers of that religion.
  6. Throughout the world there is a problem with fundamentalist thought and mind-set. In my country is it Christian fundamentalism in politics that is the trouble. All religions have such extremist, not all are violent, but more than most people generally think.

Those are my thoughts on this flu fogged day.

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Thought of the Cuba re-engagement

I have been dreadfully busy the last few weeks. The dayjob has hit it peak crush and OT is plentiful. There are stirrings in the writing the department that may herald good news, but it is too early to tell more than that. So my poor blog has been a wee bit neglected. However the news on Cuba is so big I just have to comment.

I confess to being torn on the issue. On one hand Cuba is a brutal, murdering dictatorship.The less we have to do with such beasties the better. That island is no workers paradise. It pretty much flows from the definition of paradise that people would claw to get into one, not out.

One the other hand out five decade policy simply is not working. We have not crushed Castor’s government, and for fifty years the people of Cuba have suffered. The pragmatist in me is repelled that the thought of continuing a policy that doesn’t work.

We engaged with the Soviets, while keeping a strong commitment against their totalitarian rule and in the end they fell. In part because of the seduction presented by the engagement, the people could experience a better life, they could suffer McDonalds and want more. So engagement is not always appeasement and it can help us spread freedom to people who need it.

Yet we have also seen that engagement appears to the failing in China. Those brutal rulers seems to be navigating their way out of communism and into Fascism. this transformation is being fuel my American enterprise utilizing the cheap labor, but the price in the end may turn out to be quite high.

So engagements can work and it can fail. Did the Administration do the right thing?

I don’t know.

 

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A Snapshot of the current economic picture

So last night a friend and I were were discussing politics, life, the universe and everything. He seemed incredulous that I thought that from some measurements and perspectives the economy was doing quite well and that from other points of view it was doing quite poorly. I believe that it was his impression that the economy was doing poorly. This morning after having blood drawn I went and looked up a few graphs to illustrate what I was talking about.

All of the graphs come from the same source the Federal Reserve at St. Louis.

So street level, how does this economy look to the person who is working for a living?

Employment:unemployment

So from this graph it’s quite clear that employment, while improving has yet to recover fully from the disastrous financial crisis of 2008. Bad for the working person.

Household Income
household income

Median Household Income has only recently began to recover from the 2008 crisis. As you can see in the graph, the household income continues to fall even after the recession had ended. Bad for the working Person.

Stock Prices

Stock prices

Stock prices have fully recovered are in fact higher than before the crisis. The stock market  is going like gangbusters.

Corporate Profits

Coporate profits

Corporate Profits have fully recovered from the crisis and just as with stock prices are now higher than before the crisis.

I think that this is one of the essential driving forces in the ‘throw the bums’ out mood of the electorate in the 2014 Midterms. The working person isn’t feeling like that they are in an economic recovery, their view is that jobs are scare, the jobs available are not as good as the ones that they used to have and that their incomes are low. Where this leads I do not know, but it will be interesting.

 

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