Altered Carbon: Interestingly problematic

Good news, everyone! In the future, we’ll have flying cars! And the world will be deeply multicultural, a melange of different ethnicities, all working side by side, with equal status. That’s the bright side of the science fiction universe in Netflix’s Altered Carbon.

Now the bad side. The key innovation in this story is the ability to upload and download minds. Everyone is walking around with a little disk in their neck that archives their mental state and memories continuously; some people also have a kind of brain wifi that allows them to periodically upload everything in their head to a remote backup. This means that if someone dies, they can just cut out that disk, insert it into a new body, and voila, you are revived! Unless someone shoots you in the neck, unfortunately; destroying the archive is Real Death. If you’ve got the wifi option, you can also restore from the last backup.

Wait, what’s so bad about that? It’s effective immortality! That’s where the series is most interesting, in exploring the consequences of radical new technology. One of those consequences is that income inequality skyrockets off the charts; imagine if Jeff Bezos were immortal, and could hang onto and build his wealth for centuries. It also creates new opportunities for strange situations. Is it justice if you abolish the death penalty, and instead just freeze bodies and extract their minds and store them for centuries? How about if you use the bodies of convicts to temporarily implant other people’s disks, so that people who’ve lost their bodies can be reanimated? What if one way to punish people is to restore their minds to a body not their own: a little girl wakes up to find herself in the body of a middle aged woman, or a woman finds herself in the body of a man (there are some potential positives to explore in that part of the story, but this show doesn’t really get into them)?

This is not a technology that will ever be achievable, just like those flying cars, but it’s provocative to think about it, and the series does take advantage of a lot of the weirder possibilities and complexities, so there’s a cerebral side to it all.

There is, unfortunately, a downside to the implementation, the problematic part. It’s taken a hint from Game of Thrones, and there is gore and gratuitous nudity galore. One minute you’re thinking about the implications of being able to shuttle minds from one body to another, and the next there is a bloody gunfight, with an additional twist: in the aftermath, you get to graphically gouge out the mind disk from the necks of the casualties and crush them to make them really dead. There are many scenes of torture and bodies getting hacked up (it’s OK, kiddies, the victim’s minds are being preserved while all the horrors are perpetrated). It was…distracting, to say the least.

Similarly distracting: if a young woman is playing a significant role anywhere in the story, it’s pretty much guaranteed that she will appear naked, full frontal, before the end of the series, and will probably be in a sex scene. Offhand, I can think of only one exception. The male protagonist and a few others will also get a nude scene or three, but it’s almost an iron-clad rule that the significant female characters are going to have to flaunt everything at some point. It reaches peak absurdity in one scene where the hero stumbles into a clone bank, and a woman downloads her mind into her clone, jumps out stark naked and unarmed, and tries to fight him…he guns her down. So her mind reanimates another clone, she stupidly jumps out starkers again, and he blows her away. Repeat that half a dozen times, to no purpose at all, except to splatter the room with blood and fetchingly undressed corpses. It’s kind of peak misogyny.

Buried deep in this story, there is a fascinatingly twisty, dystopian tale with some intelligence to it, but it’s so thoroughly swaddled in blood and breasts and bloody breasts that I just don’t think it’s worth the effort to extract it. It’s a shame that such an interesting premise gets lost in mindless gore and sex (I don’t object to gore and sex, if it advances the story or enriches the world — this doesn’t). Read the book instead. It’s violent too, but at least the imagery won’t stupefy you.

Boy, in the future, people sure do get naked a lot, and commit a lot of murders, nothing like the present. Unless I’ve been attending the wrong parties and the wrong gunfights.

A work of prophecy!

A cartoonist in the 1920s predicted what would happen if we invented pocket telephones.

You are saying to yourself, “But he couldn’t imagine people inventing an off switch?”, to which I reply “Maybe he’s also predicting people’s inability or unwillingness to learn how to use the off switch,” which makes this a double prophecy. I may have to start worshipping W.K. Haselden, the creator of the cartoon.

Blame and credit goes to humanity, not holy books or secular screeds

In the Larry Nassar case, Rachael Denhollander gave a strong and very religious statement.

Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you. I pray you experience the soul-crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me — though I extend that to you as well.

Not to diminish the crimes committed against her and the other girls abused by Nassar, but that’s sugar-coating the Bible. She may have personally found solace in religion, but Christianity, as practiced by most Christians, does not extend grace and hope and mercy to everyone — it has been used as a weapon against black people, against gay and lesbian people, against trans men and women, against Jews and atheists. It is a blunt instrument that can be wielded in the aid of just about anyone, and against just about anyone…including, often, women.

For the record, it should be noted that the abuser read the Bible, too — Nassar was a practicing Catholic.

Former MSU employee Larry Nassar was a catechist for St. Thomas Aquinas Church’s seventh grade class, though the parish is not eager to claim him.

Nassar also served as a Eucharistic minister at St. John Church and Student Center, also part of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, according to the spring 2000 edition of Communiqué, the magazine of the College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Denhollander is aware that there’s more to moral behavior than the Bible. She has rebuked the church.

Yes. Church is one of the least safe places to acknowledge abuse because the way it is counseled is, more often than not, damaging to the victim. There is an abhorrent lack of knowledge for the damage and devastation that sexual assault brings. It is with deep regret that I say the church is one of the worst places to go for help. That’s a hard thing to say, because I am a very conservative evangelical, but that is the truth. There are very, very few who have ever found true help in the church.

It’s not the Bible, it’s not God, it’s not Sacred Reason, it’s not conservative or liberal, it’s the people. What matters is humanism. Churches are poor places for that, but it’s not just the church — atheism can be severely anti-humanist, too.

By the way, does this sound familiar?

The reason I lost my church was not specifically because I spoke up. It was because we were advocating for other victims of sexual assault within the evangelical community, crimes which had been perpetrated by people in the church and whose abuse had been enabled, very clearly, by prominent leaders in the evangelical community. That is not a message that evangelical leaders want to hear, because it would cost to speak out about the community. It would cost to take a stand against these very prominent leaders, despite the fact that the situation we were dealing with is widely recognized as one of the worst, if not the worst, instances of evangelical cover-up of sexual abuse. Because I had taken that position, and because we were not in agreement with our church’s support of this organization and these leaders, it cost us dearly.

“we live in a loving, compassionate, exceptional country.”

Except for the hateful, cruel, petty people who live in it.

I’d vote that we deport Bad Santa there to some shithole country elsewhere, but I’m afraid that no matter where he is, he’s already squatting in that hole.

I was so impressed when the young woman who was brought here when she was 2 says she didn’t have health insurance for 18 years, and the Republican in back triumphantly announces that she didn’t have health insurance either, and that’s how she lost her eye. Yeah, that’s a great argument for your political party, lady.

Charles Darwin and every scientist ever

I have a long day ahead of me and lots of annoying little responsibilities to take care of and am feeling a little overwhelmed — there’s even more to do next week — so this was a perfect start to my day. I am not alone!

I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders. I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids & today I hate them worse than everything so farewell & in a sweet frame of mind, I am

Ever yours”

—Charles Darwin, 1861

You can pick up a copy of The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects right now. It’s a little book, only … 338 pages? Suddenly filled with a sense of failure and despair again.

Caucusing while brown

This is the time of year when states that use a caucus system, like Minnesota, will have caucus training. Flawed as it is, it’s part of the package, and if you want to be politically effective, it’s perfectly normal to learn how to do it. We’ve never had a complaint about training people, and it’s bizarre to think that someone would complain about learning basic civic duties.

But then, this is a rather white part of the state. Caucusing while brown would be a whole different story…at least as far as Republicans are concerned.

Warnings from GOP legislators that Muslim voters plan to “infiltrate” Republican caucuses appear to have galvanized Muslim efforts to get out and caucus. But Muslim leaders say the rhetoric has extended well beyond the content that the two Republican representatives have shared.

It started with a Facebook post that said a “Macalester professor from Bangladesh” led a recent caucus training at a mosque. Dave Sina, chairman of the 4th Congressional District GOP, wrote that the training “encourages them to infiltrate them all, Republican, Democratic as well as Green and independent.” The post went on to say that “the easiest is the Republican, because they don’t show up.”

As the article points out, this is training to participate in elections, which has rather different implications than infiltrate. They are proposing entirely legal activities which are in fact encouraged by society. I watched the introduction to this training video on facebook, and while I’m not at all a fan of ISAIAH, a group that tries to encourage non-partisan political partisan by faith groups, everything the speakers say is exactly correct, fair, and just. (I’m not a fan because of sour grapes — I’d like to see more secular training).

But read the comments. People are freaking out. She talks about how to “build political POWER”! The Muslims are going to take over! They’re TAKING OVER! We’re DOOOOOOOOOMED! You can almost hear the shrieks of horror at the idea that minority citizens of the state might actually get out and vote.

By the way, it’s true that Republican caucuses are small. At the last one, the Republicans just held it at someone’s house; the Democrats took over a big meeting room at the big bar in town, and had volunteers at stations to help guide the mobs of people who showed up to their positions and to explain the procedures. It was standing room only.

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere

This is where fighting gets you.

Amazing find!! This was shared today on one of the snake pages, nothing about the location but it would’ve been in south east Asia somewhere.
A King Cobra (the worlds longest venomous snake) has attempted to catch, kill and eat this Reticulated Python (grows to be the longest snake in the world) and has been coiled and strangled by the python and died in the process. Both were dead when found.
The King has met its match…

Eagles & Patriots fans: watch your behavior if you’re in Minneapolis this weekend

The Superbowl is in Minneapolis this weekend, and I’m happy to say I’m staying 150 miles away from that mess. Various outlets are busy trying to inform the influx of visitors about Minnesota culture, and this is one absolutely essential point.

Be ready to experience first-class passive aggression. If someone says your old school Ron Jaworski Eagles jersey is “interesting,” they are not a fan. If someone says, “I’m not mad,” they are, in fact, mad. If you get to a 4-way stop at roughly the same time as another driver(s), your best bet is to just abandon the car, get out, and walk to your destination, as who gets to go first will never be resolved by conventional means.

The 4-way stop thing? Totally true, unless one of the people was born out of state, like me, and exasperatedly cuts the friendly waving short and accelerates right on through. What they don’t say about the passive-aggressive stuff is that everyone is going to be very polite to all these East Coast people, but deep down…they hate them. Especially the Philadelphians. No, wait, especially the Pats fans. We hate them with a white hot passion. They will be boorish and crude and impolite, and all the natives will be seething inside, regretting that they left their Viking axes at home, or there would be some churls waking up in Hel with their brains draping their shoulders, I tell you what.