NK Jemisin wins, so the haters gotta hate

NK Jemisin won another Hugo award this year — her third in a row — and she gave a powerful acceptance speech. Read the whole thing, but this was a notable piece.

But this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers—every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, that when they win it it’s meritocracy but when we win it it’s “identity politics” — I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger in their direction.

Exactly right. The most fervent practitioners of identity politics are the old white guys who feel their entitlements are being challenged.

Here’s another excerpt:

I have gritted my teeth while an established professional writer went on a ten-minute tirade at me—as a proxy for basically all black people—for mentioning underrepresentation in the sciences.

I’m not sure who that was, but I know there’s no shortage of racists ranting about “identity politics”, so the field is wide open on that one. I thought immediately of Vox Day, though, who called her an educated, but ignorant half-savage and has long been whining about all the SJWs in science fiction.

So I had to go look and see how Vox Day was taking this repudiation of his position and the ongoing defeat of his slate of “puppies”. Not well, I’m afraid. He’s plumbing deep wells of dishonesty now. You see, that a group of people he detests are winning all the rewards and recognition means the he thinks he has won — after all, giving an award to a half-savage means the Hugos have now self-destructed and there’s nothing left but a great big crater. And even better, he thinks he has nuked the Hugos for the past three years now.

It’s a thriving crater populated with new and interesting writers, but he’s not going to read any of them anyway.

But what most appalled me is that he quotes the full text of Jemisin’s speech…but removes all of the punctuation and paragraphs, and then sneers mockingly at it. The comments are full of people thinking that Jemisin is illiterate because of that intentional dishonesty, and whining about how women can’t write.

That’s the kind of poison I’d expect of a hack like Vox Day, but what really disappoints me is that he quotes Robert Silverberg.

But in her graceless and vulgar acceptance speech last night, she insisted that she had not won because of ‘identity politics,’ and proceeded to disprove her own point by rehearsing the grievances of her people and describing her latest Hugo as a middle finger aimed at all those who had created those grievances.

He says “her people” and “identity politics”, not noting his own hypocrisy, and bashes her for vulgarity.

You might want to read these reviews of Silverberg’s own book, Up the Line.

Robert Silverberg wrote this libidinous, vulgar carnival ride in 1969 and it was nominated for the Hugo Award. This represents my 25th Silverberg work reviewed and I have come to accept that his lasciviousness makes late era Heinlein look like a boy scout. There is just going to be sex in a Silverberg work, lots of it, and this one has all the sensitivity of a bawdy limerick, reminiscent of Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love and All You Zombies – readers of those books will instantly know what I’m talking about.

Robert Silverberg was clearly a big fan of sex back in the late 1960s, and I’m sure he wasn’t the only one. But in Up the Line, he absolutely revels in it. He doesn’t miss a chance for his (all male) characters to fornicate with women at every possible opportunity both in the future and the past, in dozens of exotic time periods in Byzantium, Constantinople, Rome, etc. The act may be as old as time, but that doesn’t stop Time Courier Judd Elliot from trying to bed his great-great-great grandmother Pulcharia with a lusty enthusiasm and complete disregard for all social taboos that have existed for millenia. Sure, it’s generally a serious no-no in society to screw your ancestors, but when she is as saucy a sex-kitten as Pulcharia, well who can blame Judd? At least that is the irreverent tone this book tries to achieve, billing its main character as the “Tom Jones of Time Travel”.

So when did 83-year-old Silverberg become a hypocritical prissy prude? I’ve read lots of Silverberg, and it’s absurd for him to look at Jemisin’s speech and complain about “graceless and vulgar”. He’s written much more vulgar stuff — and what’s really got him upset is that a black woman was bold and critical.

Beware the trap of imagining that you are a logical, rational human being

This is my sabbatical year, so I’m not going to be getting those fawning adoring messages

from any students this year. I am so accustomed to being held in reverence, as a kind of saint, like this:

“I only now [received] your beautiful and exquisite message… I thank you for your infinite understanding and sensitivities which are always beyond measure.”

Those are the words of Nimrod Reitman, in an email to his Ph.D. advisor, Avital Ronell, a professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University. As many now know, Ronell was found by NYU to have sexually harassed Reitman.

Oh, wait. I never get those. It could be that I’ve never written a “beautiful and exquisite message” — I tend to be brief in email — or it could be that Ronell built a cult-like relationship with her professional dependents. That’s an ugly outcome, and part of a deplorable pattern. Your students are not your acolytes, and that sort of behavior should be discouraged, a point the author of the article makes strongly. But then, unfortunately, he goes on to write this:

Many commentators on social media express have expressed familiarity with the kind of dynamic at play in the Ronell case. Yet I did notice that many of these commentators were not in academic philosophy.

I suspect that the culture of argument in academic philosophy helps counter tendencies towards sycophancy. We show respect to each other by posing the best challenges we can to each other’s ideas. Putting tough objections to philosophical heroes is something we are trained to (love to) do.

Well, gosh, good thing the mode of thinking in my discipline makes that behavior unlikely. We are above all that, so it’s unlikely to be a problem for us.

I’ve heard that kind of argument so many times before, and it’s a sign that someone in that discipline is about to fail spectacularly. “We’re skeptics, we rigorously criticize bad ideas so that’ll never happen to us” or “We’re scientists, science is objective and impartial so abusers can’t thrive in our ranks,” and then whoops, boom, pratfall.

I’ll go so far as to say that having the attitude that the culture in your little domain of thought makes you immune to the foibles of those other poor thinkers over there is exactly the kind of arrogance that makes you susceptible to failure. It’s a fallacy to think that rationalism makes one resistant to bad ideas — we’re all human here, which means we’re all going to fuck up. Rationalizing away your fuck-ups just means you’ll repeat them, and make them increasingly worse.

At least, that’s what I’ve learned from many decades of involvement in groups with a tendency to praise their own rationality. It’s not a promising development.

Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on 8 counts, Paul Manafort was found guilty on 8 tax and bank fraud charges.

“Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis added. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

Good question.

Guess how Fox is handling the convictions?

That War on Christmas is always a great distraction.

I think it might be appropriate to rename the Naturalistic Fallacy the Peterson Fallacy

It’s an honor he deserves. First he was extrapolating from lobsters to people with a lot of naive and misunderstood neurobiology and evolutionary biology, and now Jordan Peterson is misreading a paper about ants to misapply it to humans.

Because “the West” and “capitalism” are social constructs that ants are not aware of. Unfortunately for Peterson, an ant expert stepped right up.

Maybe Peterson will announce that he’s a myrmecologist next?

Anyway, I read the paper. He doesn’t get it. The research shows that when fire ants are excavating narrow tunnels, where only a few at a time can be at the digging face, they optimize their behavior, avoiding a mad, industrious rush that would merely clog the tunnels and hinder hauling grains of dirt away. They did things like remove the 5 most active digging ants, and found that there was no reduction in the rate of digging, because others would readily step forward to fill in. It’s not at all about what fraction of the population are doing their fair share of the work; it’s about an optimal strategy for a specific task.

I guess he thought he was making a joke to reinforce the biases of his followers — but instead people who know something about ants and logic have turned him into the joke.

The movie this week is…Christopher Robin. Why does this genre even exist?

My son Connlann with his bear, Ragey.

OK, so my wife was interested in seeing Christopher Robin, so we did. It’s mostly harmless, a silly children’s movie, that mainly suffered because it was predictable and didn’t have much of a sense of humor over a patently absurd situation.

But it got me wondering about teddy bear movies. There’s a surprising number of them for what is actually an extremely limited genre. There’s this one, and two Paddington movies, and the bro-dude version, Ted. Why? And when you think about it, their plots are painfully similar.

There is a family. The male figure is a bumbling jerk who doesn’t appreciate the importance of love and family (Ewan McGregor, or Hugh Bonneville, or Mark Wahlberg), and the movie is entirely about his redemption as he learns to love others. The female figure is an attractive, interesting person (Hayley Atwell, Sally Hawkins, Mila Kunis) who is totally wasted in the role — she’s there to prop up the male figure’s character development. In all but Ted there is a sad, wise child or two, pining for their poor daddy. The magic bear shows up, who is basically a kind-hearted naif who keeps screwing up, and there are a series of misadventures that lead to Ewan, Hugh, or Mark growing up and becoming a more mature, doting husband/papa/person.

No one actually questions the existence of a talking, sentient stuffed animal. It is simply accepted. This is weird, and in addition to the predictable plot, kept drawing me out of the movie universe. I mean, even the endless string of superhero movies have moments of self-examination, where people wonder why these super-beings are here, and there are even plots where normal humans struggle to control them. But walking, talking teddy bears? How sweet! Let’s have conversations.

I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do if a favorite childhood toy showed up one day (it doesn’t help that my childhood favorite was Horrible Hamilton), and started bumbling about, giving me life advice.

At least that’s an easy one to answer. I have a lab! I can never understand why these sentient stuffed animals aren’t being whisked off for a detailed analysis.

I guess that means I wouldn’t grow and develop as a functioning, socialized human being, but at least I’d be a step closer to understanding consciousness, the mind, and alternative patterns of cognition than you are, so there.

Consequences

Some people experience them, some don’t. Among the deservedly punished is Kevin Spacey, a great actor, not a particularly good person. His latest movie just opened.

On a grand total of 10 screens nationwide.

It brought in precisely…$126.

Despite its all star cast — including Ansel Elgort, Taron Egerton, Emma Roberts, Jeremy Irvine, Cary Elwes, Judd Nelson, and Billie Lourd — it brought in an abysmal $126 in total.

All those other people were also punished, unfortunately, as well as the backers and swarms of people who made the movie. I guess the message will sink in that Spacey is box-office poison.

I gotta start hawking a supplement of my own

Did you know we’re in the midst of a vitamin D deficiency epidemic? By the standards of the Endocrine Society, 80% of Americans have inadequate vitamin D levels. You better go buy some pills! You better buy Michael Holick’s books! He’s the guy who is obsessed with warning everyone about their dangerously low vitamin D, and he’s not kooky at all.

The Boston University endocrinologist, who perhaps more than anyone else is responsible for creating a billion-dollar vitamin D sales and testing juggernaut, elevates his own levels of the stuff with supplements and fortified milk. When he bikes outdoors, he won’t put sunscreen on his limbs. He has written book-length odes to vitamin D, and has warned in multiple scholarly articles about a “vitamin D deficiency pandemic” that explains disease and suboptimal health across the world.

His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs. What if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn’t a lack of food, but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight? “I sometimes wonder,” Holick has written, “did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia?”

I’ve seen this phenomenon in educated people before: they latch onto one explanation for something, and suddenly they apply it to everything, regardless of the evidence or lack thereof, and insist that it is the One True Theory, and all must bow before it. For other examples, see the Aquatic Ape Absurdity and Brian Ford’s Bullshit. It’s the lure of the Umbrella Hypothesis, braced by a little factlet of truth.

So yes, you can be deficient in vitamin D, and it can lead to real diseases. It’s just that here in developed countries with actual policies that lead to reasonable monitoring and addition of supplements to key foods (milk has been supplemented with vitamin D for over a hundred years to prevent rickets), we’re fine. You don’t need to go to extremes to correct an imaginary deficiency.

Except that inventing imaginary problems and selling the cure is extremely profitable.

Since 2011, Holick’s advocacy has been embraced by the wellness-industrial complex. Gwyneth Paltrow’s website, Goop, cites his writing. Dr. Mehmet Oz has described vitamin D as “the No. 1 thing you need more of,” telling his audience that it can help them avoid heart disease, depression, weight gain, memory loss and cancer. And Oprah Winfrey’s website tells readers that “knowing your vitamin D levels might save your life.” Mainstream doctors have pushed the hormone, including Dr. Walter Willett, a widely respected professor at Harvard Medical School.

He’s been getting paid a thousand dollars every month for his vitamin D promotion! He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical companies! The tanning bed industry donated $150,000 to his research!

I’ve been missing out on the gravy train, and I’ve got to start hawking my own supplement. I thought of one. You know, I bet you’ve eaten hardly any spiders lately. It’s true, isn’t it — they aren’t part of our usual cuisine, and no one spices their food with ground-up spider bits, except for those wierdos in Cambodia, so I can argue without being gainsaid that almost all of us have a spider deficiency. I can even make up statistics, like that 99.7% of Americans haven’t eaten any spider at all lately, and trust that no one will say I’m wrong.

Now I just need a common disease that I can blame entirely on arachnoinsufficiency, and before you know it, Gwyneth Paltrow will be knocking on my door.