When did we become jaded?

Orac writes about an anti-vaxxer, Austin Bennett, who walked up to a California senator on the street and shoved him because he was insufficiently appreciative of his conspiracy-theory ravings. That that movement is working itself up towards more violence is troubling (they’re following the trajectory of the anti-choice movement, right down to screaming that they’re killing to protect the children), but what also bothers me is that the rhetoric is so unhinged. He has a collection of Austin Bennett videos at the link, and I listened to bits and pieces of a few of them, and my god, he’s nuts. In the one in which Bennett shoves Senator Pan — he’s so shameless, Bennett recorded it and posted it on YouTube — and Orac summarizes it neatly.

Bennett encounters Sen. Pan around the 9 minute mark, and he shoves him around the 9:50 mark. The rest of the video reveals a profoundly scary guy ranting about chemtrails, toxins, and taking action right into the camera. I have to give Sen. Pan a lot of credit. I’m not sure I could have remained as calm as he did if someone like Austin Bennet came up alongside me and started ranting about aluminum, toxins, and chemistry. Before Bennett encountered Sen. Pan, he spent nearly a solid nine minutes ranting about chemtrails, the wickedness of the world, and a variety of other disturbing religious things.

A disordered kook can ramble on for years with increasingly disturbing, weird, unhinged from reality ideas, and we let it go on and on, gathering momentum, acquiring followers, and we do nothing until after it crosses the line into violence. I am not saying contrarian ideas should be suppressed somehow, but I’m just thinking that if this guy cares so much about chemistry and toxins and immunology, maybe he should put his effort where his mouth is and actually get educated on those subject…and maybe if he’s unwilling to invest in learning that ought to be at the forefront of our conversation about him. It’s the same with the creationist I encounter — their understanding is an inch deep, they’ve grabbed onto a few sciencey-sounding buzzwords and a tiny number of rhetorical points, and they repeat them tediously. It’s enough to persuade people who are even more ignorant.

Fortunately, creationists haven’t resorted to much violence. The anti-vaxxers are working themselves up to it.

The patriarchy has deep roots, it’s going to hurt to dig them out

Jeanette Ng won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and this is how her speech began:

John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists. Yes, I am aware there are exceptions.

Welp, that set a few people’s hair on fire, but she’s right. Corey Doctorow agrees.

I think she was right — and seemly — to make her remarks. There’s plenty of evidence that Campbell’s views were odious and deplorable. For example, Heinlein apologists like to claim (probably correctly) that his terrible, racist, authoritarian, eugenics-inflected yellow peril novel Sixth Column was effectively a commission from Campbell (Heinlein based the novel on one of Campbell’s stories). This seems to have been par for the course for JWC, who liked to micro-manage his writers: Campbell also leaned hard on Tom Godwin to kill the girl in “Cold Equations” in order to turn his story into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.

So when Ng held Campbell “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists,” she was factually correct.

It reflects my experience as a reader of science fiction, too. I got hooked on this stuff as a boy in the 1960s, and initially read all the old classic authors — Asimov, Clarke, etc. — and was fascinated with all the robots and spaceships and hyper-advanced gadgetry that they wrote about, but failed to notice that they weren’t very good at writing about people. Then I stumbled onto New Wave writers, and Ursula Le Guin, and Joanna Russ, and all these other amazing writers who had escaped the orbit of the John W. Campbell school, and discovered that the JWC stable tended to be not-very-good writers, period, because that wasn’t what he cared about, which is a strange characteristic for an editor.

Also, when I finally discovered Heinlein in my mid-teens, I freakin’ hated his books. They were long-winded exercises in self-indulgent misogyny. I don’t think he needed JWC’s coaching to be an asshole, he was one naturally.

Here’s another take on Campbell.

Ng’s assessment of Campbell is undoubtedly informed by Campbell’s personal politics and beliefs and those who have written about him. Campbell argued that African-Americans were “barbarians” deserving of police brutality during the 1965 Watts Riots, as “the “brutal” actions of police consist of punishing criminal behavior.” His unpublished story All featured such racist elements that author Robert Heinlein, who built upon Campbell’s original story for his own work titled Sixth Column, had to “reslant” the story before publishing it. In the aftermath of the Kent State massacre, when speaking of the demonstrators murdered by the Ohio National Guard, Campbell stated that “I’m not interested in victims. I’m interested in heroes.” While difficult to presume where Campbell’s beliefs would place him in modern politics, it is apparent that Campbell would disagree with many of the beliefs held by modern America.

I’ve read enough Campbell to guess he’d be cheering for Trump — the pseudoscientific racist genetics, the anti-immigration stuff, the contempt for anyone who rocks the boat, he’d definitely be a Trumpkin.

Doctorow continues.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We’re trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We’re trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people [Harlan Ellison, fantastic writer, not such a nice person] whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

It’s not a coincidence that one of the first organized manifestation of white nationalism as a cultural phenomenon was within fandom, and while fandom came together to firmly repudiate its white nationalist wing, these assholes weren’t (all) entryists who showed up to stir trouble in someone else’s community. The call (to hijack the Hugo award) was coming from inside the house: these guys had been around forever, and we’d let them get away with it, in the name of “tolerance” even as these guys were chasing women, queer people, and racialized people out of the field.

Those same Nazis went on to join Gamergate, then take up on /r/The_Donald, and they were part of the vanguard of the movement that put a boorish, white supremacist grifter into the White House.

He’s talking about the Rabid Puppies, but I don’t think SF fandom was specifically responsible. We saw exactly the same phenomenon in skepticism/atheism with Elevatorgate and the slymepit. It’s everywhere. It’s like we entered the 21st century and scumbaggery blossomed everywhere. Arthur Clarke could predict geosynchronous satellites, sure, but he completely failed to anticipate the effect of selectively amplifying the voices of arrogant white male dudes, as SF, and science, and atheism, and everything had been doing for decades. What we’re seeing now is the effect of a patriarchal culture being shaken up, and the reactionaries fighting back.

This stuff matters. It’s deeper than any fandom, and it reflects a world-wide pattern of necessary change as the old order resists its slow, painful demise. Ng brings it right back to reality.

So I need say, I was born in Hong Kong. Right now, in the most cyberpunk in the city in the world, protesters struggle with the masked, anonymous stormtroopers of an autocratic Empire. They have literally just held her largest illegal gathering in their history. As we speak they are calling for a horological revolution in our time. They have held laser pointers to the skies and tried to to impossibly set alight the stars. I cannot help be proud of them, to cry for them, and to lament their pain.

Yes. The fascists and capitalists and corporate goons and colonizers have been running the world for a few centuries now, and it’s time to overthrow the old order. There will be great pain in the churn.

The National Embarrassment humiliates us all again

No one can keep up. Here’s an attempt to list the lunacies expressed by Trump just today.

So far today, Trump has called himself:

  • The Chosen One
  • The King of Israel
  • The Second Coming of God

Just thought you might like to know that the person with his finger on the trigger of America’s nuclear arsenal appears to be losing the last of his marbles.

He also called American Jews disloyal if they voted for a Democrat, threatened to turn captured ISIS members loose on Europe, claimed that victims of shootings in El Paso and Dayton loved him, suggested that suicidal veterans could be treated with a stimulant, and suggested once again that he’d run for president again after his second term.

But he wasn’t done!

Later, President Bone Spurs says he thought about giving himself a Medal of Honor.

How much longer must we suffer with this babbling boob running the country into the ground? I know. For as long as Moscow Mitch controls the Senate.

What if Robert E. Lee had been hanged?

I’m currently reading the biography of Grant by Chernow, and I’ve just gotten to Appomattox. It was kind of distressing reading. Robert E. Lee shows up all stuffy and pompous, and Grant is all charitable and humane, and everyone from Lincoln on down to the press and the Washington establishment, and apparently, Chernow, (all white folks, by the way) are patting each other on the back about how the generous terms given to the traitors will lead to reconciliation and unity, while I’m reading this from the perspective of the 21st century. I can’t help but think, given the century and a half of abuses and oppression, that maybe, rather than a grand gesture of forgiveness, it was all a terrible mistake. Maybe Lee and his generals should have been arrested and imprisoned, maybe even hanged. Maybe the tabled suggestion to restructure the borders and governments of the Confederate states should have been implemented. Maybe the much-praised gentleness of Lincoln and Grant at the end of the war was an overly kind gift to a nation of racists and terrorists that allowed the “original sin” of the United States to fester anew.

I’m finding it disconcerting that the account of the war itself praised Grant’s strategy of total war, and Sherman’s and Sheridan’s ruthless actions to bring an end to the conflict as quickly as possible, yet we abruptly switch to nothing but confidence that the conciliatory approach was the best way to handle the victory. It smacks of hagiography. It has led to a situation where Southern cities maintain celebratory statues of traitors, and name streets and parks and schools after them, and a still divided country where racism is tolerated.

What if, instead of trials, the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities had instead been embraced and forgiven, and even praised for their administrative and military skill, all in the name of smoothing over the transition to peace? Because that’s what we did, and the historians and biographers are still reassuring us that what we did in America was the wisest choice.

I haven’t gotten to Chernow’s discussion of the Grant presidency or Reconstruction yet, so maybe there’ll be a more balanced discussion of the failings of America’s post-war policies to come. Right now it’s all very Whiggish, and I’m feeling less impressed with Chernow.

Imagine a Federal leadership that had Lee sign his surrender at Appomattox, and then slapped irons on his wrists, put him in a wagon with bars, and shipped the racist slave-holding traitor off to trial in Washington. We’d be a better country now, I think, with precedent set.

I think I need to read a black scholar’s perspective on the Civil War, because these pleasant reassurances that our country did the right thing aren’t so reassuring any more.

I’ve been saying this for decades!

As Matthew Herron points out,

The intelligent design blogs I read, when they’re not busy vilifying “Darwinists”, spend much of their time extolling the super-duper complexity of life, but here’s the thing: no one is arguing that life isn’t complex. To my knowledge, no biologist has ever argued that, and if they have, they’re wrong. As Strassmann and Queller point out, Darwin and Paley both proposed explanations for complexity, and one of those explanations turned out to be right. As much as its advocates want it to be, complexity is not evidence for intelligent design.

When Intelligent Design creationists play at being scientists (Hi, Stephen Meyer, you boring fraud you), this is all they do, parrot articles that explain the bewildering complexity of the cell, as if that means it must have been designed. That’s all Behe does, is natter on about how complicated biology is, and then make an unfounded leap from “it’s too complex for me to understand” to “therefore, the god who designed it must be really smart”, not addressing the issue at hand…was it designed at all?

Then all of their fans chime in at any criticism of the ID argument with repetitions of the “It’s really complex” claim, which is totally fucking irrelevant. It seems to impress the rubes, though.

At least my spiders love me

Her mama put baby Iliana in my lap this morning. She looked at me, her little chin crinkled up, her lip trembled, and in moments she was howling with tears running down her cheeks. So that’s how my week is going.

It could get worse. Today begins my week of meetings and appointments and duties in the run-up to the first day of classes, next Wednesday. I’m expecting to walk into classes and see the Iliana Reaction on the faces of all of my students now.

Synergy: Norovirus will allow you to poop and puke on ecological communities more effectively!

Have you ever taken a vacation on a cruise ship?

Why?

I’m just curious because these things have negative appeal to me. Going out on a floating hotel to circle around in the water, spewing sewage into the ocean, descending en masse on tourist traps, confined to a totally artificial environment surrounded by people with more money than sense? Eww. I really don’t get it, but these abominations are monstrously profitable.

And then…these are basically glamorous plague ships. To be fair, Tara does nod to an explanation for why people like them, but the negatives loom too large in my mind.

I know plenty of people love cruises. The convenience of seeing a variety of places without having to plan them individually; the all-inclusive meals; the variety of entertainment options; and for those with kids, the special activities provided for youngsters. I get it. But as an individual trained in microbiology and infectious diseases, what I see when contemplating such an excursion is the potential to be trapped with thousands of others in a confined space, suffering from gastrointestinal aliments like norovirus and E. coli, respiratory infections including influenza and chickenpox, or, as a recent Scientology cruise demonstrated, measles. And that just doesn’t sound like a fun vacation to me.

This hardly a secret: Just this week it was reported that inspectors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave the Carnival ship “Fantasy” one of the company’s worst ever sanitation inspection reports. (The Carnival Corporation & plc made close to $19 billion in full revenues in 2018.)

Read the rest to learn more about norovirus than you ever wanted! She doesn’t even get into the environmental catastrophe that is a cruise ship.

The system is broken

Eugene Robinson on Trump…or more accurately, the total failure of our political system.

The astonishing thing is that the president of the United States is, let’s face it, raving like a lunatic — and everyone just shrugs.

The nation is still reeling from two mass shootings. The financial markets are yo-yoing by hundreds of points. A bomb in Afghanistan, where we’re still at war, killed 63 revelers at a wedding. Tension between the United States and Iran continues to mount. North Korea keeps testing new missiles. India is playing with fire in Kashmir. Hong Kong has been convulsed for months by massive protests seeking to guarantee basic freedoms.

And Trump obsesses about buying Greenland.

The truth is that we don’t have an actual presidency right now. We have a tiresome reality show whose ratings have begun to slide — and whose fading star sees cancellation on the way.

That’s the thing: Trump is obviously incompetent and dangerous, a demented narcissist who is sailing the ship of state, and everyone, except his deluded base, knows it. Yet nothing is done. The Democratic leadership cowers in fear of disrupting the ‘process’, while the Republican leadership just wants to hold on to their power. We need more than an election of a better person, we need an overhaul of the whole rotten fabric of our political institutions.

If you care about secular America…

You might want to join this project. Dr. Juhem Navarro-Rivera gives an introduction to his Secular Voices panel at Skepticon (a five hour long video? That’s the entire afternoon/evening lineup — Juhem is just in the first hour, don’t be afraid).

Or, in short:

Understanding the secular vote in 2020

This project will help develop a a unique panel of nonreligious Americans who will answer monthly surveys during the 2020 campaign to learn more about the politics of this important, growing, and not well-understood group.

He’s looking for volunteers to contribute their opinions (Hey! You can do that!) to build a picture of the scattered, splintered secular community and their views on politics. Most of the polling work is done by outsiders who don’t even know what questions to ask of godless people, so this is going build an informed perspective from the inside. It’s currently a work in progress, sign up to help shape the story.