Review: The Fifth Head of Cerberus

The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe is a work of anticolonialist science-fiction published in 1972. Personally, I am suspicious of anti-colonialist fiction of that age. Books may inadvertently take on certain colonialist assumptions and perspectives even while attempting to reject others. (Of course, we continue to do this today.) I was interested to see how Gene Wolfe’s first major book fared.

The book is structured as three novellas taking place in the same universe. There is a pair of twin planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, colonized by humans a few generations ago. It’s said that there was an indigenous population on Saint Anne (the Annese). However, there is barely any trace of them left. What’s there is veiled by layers of folklore, hearsay, and charlatanry.
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Waking up, past tense

Do you like waking up? Yeah, me neither. I prefer that all my waking be done strictly in the past tense, i.e. to be woke.

I’m looking at my drafts bin and I have a lot of stuff here that I never finished and never will finish. I thought I’d turn some of these ideas into a more casual blogging. How do you like this format? How do I like this format?

I have a draft dated to 2023, whose premise is “a linguistic analysis of ‘woke’”. Basically, I would use google trends and time-constrained google searches to identify the historical trajectory of the word and its meaning. I’ve done this a few times before, e.g. tracing the history of “No homo”.

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The NSFW game purge

Recently, Steam purged a bunch of NSFW games from its storefront. This occurred as the result of efforts from Australia-based anti-porn group Collective Shout who applied pressure through payment processors. Collective Shout is a “””feminist””” group, although nobody with a passing glance would recognize them as legitimately feminist. Its founder is anti-abortion, what does that tell you? Collective Shout has previously fought to ban GTAV, Detroit: Become Human, as well as rappers Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Tyler, the Creator.

The games that were banned on Steam primarily contain non-consensual and incest erotic content. I was curious what specific games were banned, and found a website dedicated to tracking it (warning: link contains thumbnails for NSFW games).

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Social justice and empiricism

I’ve toyed with the idea that one of the major values of social justice is basically empiricism.  Social justice contains certain theories, but you can’t just rely on theories.  Theories live or die by the whims of empirical reality.  In order to figure out the best way to live in a diverse society, we need to rely on observations.  In other words, we have to actually listen to people, not just make assumptions.

Of course, I would think that empiricism is a social justice value.  I spent a decade involved in skeptical and atheist activism, then departed for more social-justice-oriented waters.  It’s natural for me to draw mental connections and decide that actually, both of these things that I have liked are founded upon similar values.  Call it a personal pop philosophy.  If we’re being serious, I think most skeptics would not have thought to apply empiricism in the particular way that I do; and most social justice advocates would not name empiricism as one of their core values.

But maybe they ought to?  I think social justice could benefit from more attentiveness to epistemology.

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The cultural practice of community agreements

How many readers are familiar with the practice of community agreements? This was a widely extant practice in my experience with queer student groups and queer conferences in the US in the 2010s. At the beginning of almost every discussion, the moderator would establish some ground rules, usually using catch phrases as titles, written on a black board.

For example, “One mic one diva” cautions against interruption, while “step up step back” cautions against dominating the conversation. “Oops, ouch, educate” outlines appropriate steps when someone makes a mistake. “Don’t yuck my yum” cautions against derogating what others love. “Use ‘I’ statements” asks people to avoid generalizing their personal experiences. And there’s often a “confidentiality” agreement, which doesn’t have a catch phrase but is still obviously important. The particular choice of agreements may vary, and sometimes the same agreements go under different names.

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Is Kamala Harris Black?

Yes. Obviously.

Although, if we want to be pedantic about it, it’s less clear that she’s African American. In the US, “Black” is split into two groups: Black African and Black Caribbean. Harris is mixed race—Indian on her mother’s side, and Jamaican on her father’s side—which would classify her as Black Caribbean.

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Theories of “mind” for corporations

Jack Saint recently made a video remarking on Netflix, and how Netflix appeared to be criticizing itself. He was talking about the show Dahmer, which Jack Saint felt was exploitative. And then an episode of Black Mirror appeared to make the same point by portraying an exploitative documentary that was obviously in reference to Dahmer. I will not comment on either show because I don’t like TV enough to watch the stuff, and I only really enjoy watching youtubers talk about TV I don’t watch.

However, I do have an opinion on the supposed hypocrisy of Netflix, for putting out two television shows that thematically contradict each other. When a corporation like Netflix is hypocritical, that’s obviously quite unlike individual hypocrisy. It’s not a single individual saying something and then doing a different thing. It’s two groups of individuals who disagree with each other despite their common affiliation. The Dahmer creators don’t think it’s exploitative (or don’t care), and the Black Mirror creators do. The executives above them don’t care enough to intervene either way. There’s no real hypocrisy on an individual level.

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