Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
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User ID: 297
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
Update on the Black Teens Versus Pregnant Nurse story.
This twitter thread seems like a reasonable summary. I know it's not entirely unbiased, but absent additional contradictory evidence, the story seems to basically check out like this:
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Kids had checked out the ebikes for a ride, and docked them before the 45-minute "free" period ended, planning to undock them to resume riding. (This is apparently a pretty common practice?)
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They're sitting on the bikes chilling, when Comrie, the pregnant nurse, approaches and asks to have one of the bikes.
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The teens say no, unmoved by her appeals for consideration for her pregnancy.
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She scans (checks out) a bike one of the kids is sitting on, and tries to take it.
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The kerfluffle we saw on video ensues. The kids apparently filmed it with a legitimate fear that she would turn it into "gang of teens harasses pregnant white lady."
So basically, no one looks like an entirely innocent victim here. The kids were just hanging out in preparation to check out the bikes again, but since they were docked, you don't really get to "call dibs" on a bike you are not currently renting. Technically Comrie was entitled to take an available bike; the kids shouldn't have been squatting on them. They were also kind of jerks for not showing a little compassion for an obviously pregnant woman (their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx).
That said, deciding "Screw you, I'm taking your bike anyway, get off" wasn't great behavior on her part, even if legally justified. I cut her more slack because apparently she just got off a 12-hour shift, and she was pregnant.
However, even if the teens were perhaps being inconsiderate and less than gentlemanly, the narrative that's basically portrayed them as ganging up on her and trying to steal her bike appears to be inaccurate.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Becoming Radicalized by the Hugos
A Very Culture Warrish Review of A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
In which my fellow nerds will recognize the battlefield and everyone else will roll their eyes and not know who the fuck these people are.
Wordy Pretentious Preamble About My Reading Habits
Everyone remembers the Sad Puppies affair (and the sequel, the Rabids), right? It's been covered here (well, at the old place) before. At the time, I admit to some schadenfreude at the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I thought Vox Day and Larry Correia were making entirely too much of the fact that phallic rocketship stories don't win Hugos anymore. I actually read some of Vox Day's "Hugo Nominated" fiction. He is… not a good writer. I enjoy Larry Correia, but it's bubblegum bang-bang shoot'em up wish fulfillment, which is all well and good, but the same caliber as Ian Fleming's writing – entertaining and marketable and would make for great movies, but not really, well, whatever the Hugos used to represent. Ditto Brad Torgerson; serviceable prose, but fanzine-level execution.
As for the three Johns (Kratman, Ringo, and Wright), I've read all of them, and Kratman and Ringo tell rippin' good yarns with execrable prose and plotting. Only John C. Wright is actually a really good writer (though he does get a bit up his own ass, especially since his conversion to Catholicism).
I'm just saying, if the right wants to reclaim any creative spaces, they need to find better creatives.
Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.
Scalzi has since become ever more pretentious, ever more virtue signaling, ever more… well, VD would say "effeminate," I'd just say I started to recognize the sight of someone rolling over to show his belly, someone desperate to stay in the good graces of a clique where being a straight white male who cites Heinlein as an inspiration means he's always one bad Tweet away from being consigned to the outer darkness. My fondness for his books curdled, as I started to see his smarmy potato face in all his characters.
As went Scalzi, so went the Hugos, where for the past few years it seems like there's a little bit of straight white guy affirmative action so that John Scalzi and Clarkesworld can stay relevant, but basically it's a women's fiction award now, and if there's ever a white dude-dominated slate again (yet alone a white dude-dominated winners' list), Worldcon will burn.
And ya know, I don't hate women's fiction, or women in SF. I really am an omnivorous reader. But over time, some things have become hard not to notice. Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler (she's not). Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.
Vox Day and the alt-right say "Don't give money to people who hate you," but I am not alt-right and have remained determinedly apolitical in my media consumption. But gods help me I'm becoming one of those guys who side-eyes anything written post Great-Awokening by a chick.
Which brings me to…
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.
I know, I know, I should have paid more attention to that blurb.
I picked this up because it's a First Contact story that got batted around as some new hotness in SF, and I like alien stories with a modern perspective that are more original than "How will we repel the invaders?"
(I like alien invasion and other MilSF stories too, but like I said, I am an omnivorous reader.)
A Half-Built Garden is very likely going to wind up on the Hugo shortlist this year, and probably has a decent chance of winning. It's a well-written, creative story that brings some interesting ideas to the table, it's innovative science fiction…
.. and it's also a meandering, actionless piece of women's fiction dwelling on pronouns, interstellar consent culture, lactating breasts, and internal monologues that all but drowned me in estrogen.
I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).
A Half-Built Garden is "Aliens arrive, people have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end."
(1/3)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
(2/3)
The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon
The year is 2083. Earth's climate has suffered and we're not out of the woods yet, but the world is finally getting its shit together enough to undo some of the damage.
There are basically three factions in the late 21st century:
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Environmental Cooperatives, sort of NGOs on steroids who have vaguely-defined authority over most environmental concerns and are doing the actual work of repairing the environment. How exactly they obtained their authority is never really explained, but presumably it's something like "Everyone finally realized we're all going to die if we don't listen to the environmentalists." Okay. They have lots of virtual meetings and talk about species and ecology preservation, carbon emissions, virus containment, and weather forecasting. They invented this whole new kind of networking called the "dandelion networks" which are kind of like Twitter except very peaceful and everyone reaches a consensus and they are resilient against disinformation and wrongthink.
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Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them. When the aliens arrive, NASA is ecstatic to become relevant again.
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Corporations. When the environmental cooperatives effectively took over the world (it's never put this way, but it seems like basically they run everything and the governments with… armies and nukes just… let them) the corporations had the choice of getting with the program or fucking off to their own micronations. They decided to fuck off to literal and/or figurative islands. So the remnants of late-stage capitalism now exist in little "aisland" enclaves of their own where everyone plays status-seeking corporate reindeer games while trying to stay relevant by offering goods and services to the environmental cooperatives and governments. They aren't literally given black hats but the author's voice heavily implies they are bad guys who want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth. (Spoiler: They are the bad guys and they want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth.)
Aliens Arrive!
They land on the Maryland shore, just outside of Washington, D.C., and are stumbled upon by our first person POV protagonist Judy Wallach-Stevens, a Jewish lesbian who lives in a large manor house with her polycule, including her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified). Judy does ecology stuff for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, but mostly she cooks. She seems like a really interesting and original char-
About the Author:
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots, and the Imperfect Commentaries collection. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She creates real versions of imaginary foods in her crowded kitchen, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.
… okay, well, Larry Correia writes himself as his MC too, so anyway.
Judy and her wife happen to be carrying their infant daughter while out for a stroll, and this turns out to be significant, as the aliens are matriarchal and bringing your children to diplomatic negotiations is a sign of good faith. So by sheer coincidence, while baby and hir two mommies are staring at the spaceship that landed on their front lawn, they have initiated peaceful contact with their visitors, who respond in kind by sending out one of their own with her children.
Or Hor or Its or Zis… this book was full of neopronouns, though actually the humans were more varied than the aliens.
The "Ringers" are actually two species, who made contact with each other ages ago. Since then, they have searched the galaxy for other intelligent races, and found mostly dead worlds where civilizations once existed. It turns out that most races fall into an industrial death spiral: their technological advancement outpaces their ability to manage their environment, and they all wind up making themselves extinct. The Ringers avoided this by going into space, treating their homeworlds as mere raw materials, and have thus concluded that intelligent species are not meant to be planet-bound. When they picked up radio signals from Earth, they sent an expedition to save us.
This is the central "conflict" of the story: the Ringers believe that humanity has to leave Earth or die. Judy and her eco-coops insist they're actually fixing their world (yes, the whole book is literally a Tikkun Olam meme), but the Ringers claim that Earth is already doomed.
I put "conflict" in scare quotes because it's implied that the Ringers might try to force humans to leave Earth. Except.. other than a few tense conversations where Judy says "What if we don't want to?" and the Ringers say "But you have to!" there's never really any kind of threat. The Ringers sent a diplomatic mission, not a warship, and while there's some talk of nanotechnology and how the Ringers could conceivably start disassembling Earth right out from under us (they are apparently advanced enough to have started building a Dyson sphere back home), there's never any indication that this was actually something they had in mind. They just sort of assumed they'd explain the situation to us in a reasonable manner, and humanity would agree that their solution makes sense.
So all that is interesting enough as a setup. The rest of the book is mostly about the nation-states and the corps and the coops all jockeying to influence the aliens, while the aliens are playing politics in return. Eventually Judy and her wife and child and some corp reps go to the alien home system, there is a bit of nefariousness, but nothing that can't be solved with impassioned speeches inspired by Star Trek (literally).
And that's pretty much it. There is a lot of talking and soapboxing. Every conflict is solved by talking and being more empathetic.
The first is when Judy is invited to visit one of the corporate "aislands" with her new alien friends (who insist on Judy coming along because having made the proper initial diplomatic overtures, they consider her to be Earth's spokeswoman, more or less), and she brings along a weapon that will DDoS the corporate networks. See, the coops' computer network was almost taken down by a virus, which they are pretty sure was caused by the corporations, so Judy's activist parents from a radical Jewish commune cook up a poorly thought-out plan to stick it to the corps. But the whole time Judy is carrying the device around in her pocket she's feeling really bad about using it and feeling sorry for all these capitalist planet-rapers who are, after all, still people just like her. Then one of the capitalist planet-rapers detects the device in her pocket and they talk it out and Judy hands over the device. Then they go to a party and eat lots of food and Judy and the aliens go back to Maryland.
Later, there is another conflict where some of the coop folks want to sabotage the aliens' communications gear. There is some scuffling – someone actually uses a judo throw on someone! Judy lectures everyone about what an immature species we're being. They talk it out.
Finally, they go to the aliens' home system, and the aliens and humans argue a lot, and then the humans demand that they not be "colonized," and the aliens recognize their demand for affirmative consent. They talk it out. The end.
Sigh.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
(3/3)
DEI…. in Spaaaace!
You've already picked up all of the major Culture War points, but I cannot emphasize just how very, very much a product of a bonafide card-carrying SJW this book is.
Pretty much everyone is queer and/or genderfluid and/or female, except (you guessed it) the unambiguously villainous corporate types (the ambiguously amoral corporate types are genderqueer, and the sympathetic ones are female) and a few government drones. Oh yeah, and the aliens. The male aliens get to be likeable, because the females are in charge.
There are multiple conversations about pronouns and nametags. A minor plot point is that the aliens are matriarchal and so it matters to them who actually gives birth, and Judy's transman housemate is really upset that she didn't put her foot down when the aliens were asking hurtful questions. We also learn that her transman housemate was (of course) abused and almost driven to suicide by bigoted parents who live in one of those conservative enclaves where people are still technophobic, transphobic, and religious.
The wrong kind of religious, I mean. We get multiple digressions about Judy's Jewishness. Growing up in an ultra-leftist Jewish commune, one of the defining moments of her childhood is that some asshole kids drew swastikas on her schoolbooks. In the 2060s. At the corporate-hosted reception for the aliens, she stands around angsting about whether the food (made out of corp-paste or something) contains shrimp or pork. And there's a long talk with the other human mommy in the book (I'll get to that) about the Holocaust. See, the governments and corps put on a display to summarize Earth's history for the aliens, and Judy is very upset that they didn't mention the Holocaust. Like, very upset, in tears.
I don't care about a lot of the woke shit and the neopronouns. I mean, realistically, transpeople are not going away. A writer who writes a story set in 2083 that isn't post-apocalyptic might try to wave away genderspecials as a fad that died out in the 30s, I guess, but otherwise, sure, they are probably a part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.
The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it. Our resident Joo-posters I'm sure will have much fun with this, but I mostly shrugged it off, other than, ahem, noticing it. Yes, I did also notice that no one else gets to be religious and not a backwards technophobic asshole. (The aliens have some sort of "spiritual but not religious" thing going on and they even have what I suppose is supposed to be a touching scene with Judy and her transman housemate. The alien wants to do a ritual, Judy can't because she's afraid it might violate her own religion, so the transman, after carefully questioning the alien about what exactly their beliefs entail, overcomes his childhood religious trauma to participate.)
There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household. But they have a very serious relationship talk with the alien in which they say hey, we kind of like you, and he says well, I kind of like you too, and then they have a threesome.
So human dick is out of the question, but two lesbians are totally DTF with a headless alien spider-thing who is male enough to make hentai jokes.
Even that didn't really squick me much, though. (Larry Niven was writing about alien sex in the 70s.) What did squick me? What made me want to DNF it? (I did finish it.) The many, many, many fucking mommy moments. Yes, I get it, the author is trying to make mothers important characters, not like groty old white dude engineers. Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.
Judy and her wife literally change a diaper at the moment of first contact. We are constantly treated to descriptions of Judy nursing, how her breasts are feeling, taking nursing pads out of her gear, checking medications for nursing safety, hey, did I mention yet that the main character is a nursing mother nursing throughout the book? (So is the alien girlboss in charge of their expedition.)
One of the other characters, who is so brilliant and important that she's called back from leave to help talk to the aliens, is a NASA engineer who's also a nursing mother. She and Judy talk to each other about aliens and the sociological ramifications of Star Trek captains (yes, seriously) as they "gently sway in sync" while nursing their babies.
Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.
If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.
The greatest sin of A Half-Built Garden as science fiction is that it turns the entire saga of mankind's (hah, see what I did there?) first contact with aliens into a bunch of table talks about boundaries and consent. And I mean this literally, in every sense – one of the big table talks is on Earth, where the aliens come to Judy's Seder gathering. There's another on a corporate "aisland" (the one where Judy is worried about whether corp-food is kosher.) The last one is in the Ringers' home system, where besides asserting their right to self-determination, the humans lecture the aliens about their wrongbad gender essentialism and explain that humans aren't actually sexually dimorphic and give a speech about gender fluidity that could have come straight out of a LGBTQ+ DEI session. At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary (no, I am not making this up), and then we get the big reveal that Judy's wife is, in fact, a transwoman.
Congratulations Earthlings, you've spread ROGD to the stars!
For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer. The aliens are genuinely interesting (and alien), the situation that she sets up is plausible and has plenty of potential for actual conflict (which does not have to be armed), and I have to admit that her prose was above my usual expectations for SF&F. A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
I feel some sympathy for OP that he's so clueless and has had so little experience or advice that he thought "Hi, we've had some positive interactions in class so... wanna fuck?" would be an acceptable approach.
But my sympathy is limited - unless he's literally impaired (i.e., autism spectrum, and even then, most folks on the spectrum are able to learn some baseline rules, particularly when it comes to asking people for sex), this was just unbelievably stupid.
I've seen a number of posters suggest that he was done in by bad/disingenuous feminist dating advice, implying that women will tell men "Yes, we like to fuck just as much as you do!" and that means you can approach a woman for sex the same way you wish a woman would approach you for sex. But I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?" That's a relationship that usually develops from mutual attraction and having hung out together enough that clearly there are some sparks, but neither one (claims) to want a "relationship."
(Do I think "FWB" is generally a stable kind of relationship? No, and I believe that very few women really want to be someone's FWB, it's something they settle for while trying to secure a real commitment.)
So this poor guy wasn't ill-intentioned, but he made an absolutely horrible social blunder, one that anyone, man or woman, could have told him was a blunder, and unfortunately he's suffering the effects people usually do when committing a massive faux pas. It sounds like the consequences for him are that she's told all her friends (and realistically, would you expect her not to?) and he's probably sunk what dating prospects he had at that school. This is sad, but unless this becomes a story of him being charged with actual sexual harassment and academically punished (which I'll grant is certainly within the realm of possibility), I don't think he's suffering more than you'd expect. He fucked up, and fucking up has consequences.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
8mo ago
I'm a little bit surprised that Ilhan Omar came to Marbach's defense.
Optimistically, I'd like to think she actually believes that stuff about freedom of religion.
Cynically, I suspect she is just anticipating a fight over what her religion believes about LGBT folks.
Even more cynically, I wonder if she just saw an opportunity to slag a Republican Jew.
But I am often surprised that people are surprised that yes, orthodox Christians do in fact believe you (yes, you) are going to go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ. Yes, that means they literally believe every last atheist and Muslim and Jew and pagan and Hindu and Buddhist is going to burn in hell forever. (And a lot of the Protestant denominations include Catholics, Mormons, and JWs in that bucket.)
It's almost as amusing as watching liberals in Virginia discover recently that mainstream Muslims are mostly not, in fact, "queer-friendly."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
I wish we could all just agree that sex is biological and gender is a social role. So if someone wants to say "Some days I feel masc, but other days I'm more femme," okay, whatever Demi Lovato. I'm even willing to use whatever pronouns you prefer, even if that means changing them from time to time (so long as you let me know what they are today and aren't going to throw a tantrum if I sometimes make a mistake). If attention-seeking teens want to claim they are Ψ-gendered today, you can accommodate them if you wish without agreeing that their physical bodies are in some Ψ state that is neither male nor female.
The real problem is not with teenagers who are trying to carve out special, quirky new identities for themselves, it's with the grown-ass adults who take this shit seriously and then run conflict theory on it.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
24d ago
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people
All right, you have hit one of my pet peeves, because I hear this shit all the time from my nice progressive friends. It's just repeated ad infinitum, as an article of faith, as a proven, established fac, that JK Rowling "hates trans people," that she "wants to slander and eradicate them," etc. In unrelated hobby spaces, I've seen it argued unironically, in all seriousness, that she literally advocates "genocide of trans people" (and also that Harry Potter goblins were intended to be metaphors for Jews because she also hates Jews).
I have been a Rowling fan since before she got on Twitter. Yes, I actually like the Harry Potter books (despite being way too old for them). I've read all her Cormoran Strike novels, and even The Casual Vacancy. I follow her on Twitter and I read her blog. So I know whereof I speak, though I won't claim I can remember every single thing she's ever said in public.
I have never seen her say anything that approaches "hate" or "wanting to eradicate" trans people. She has said the opposite many times. She is a standard issue very liberal second wave feminist.
What does she say?
- She does not believe trans women are women.
- Therefore she does not believe trans women should play in women's sports or go to women's prisons.
- She believes trans people should be free to live their lives in peace without harassment.
- Some so-called trans women (like the sexual predators she highlighted) are bad faith opportunists claiming trans status for political purposes or because they would prefer to go to women's prison rather than men's prison.
I think all of these points are reasonable, and even if you disagree with some or all of them, none of them resemble anything like "hate" or wishing for a "trans genocide."
I would love it if you could point to me any public statement of hers, or even a reliable second-hand account of some alleged private statement, in which she's said anything that resembles what you are claiming.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
The Joo-posters are constantly arguing that Jews are essentially a malignant invasive species working for the benefit of their in-group (Jews) to the detriment of non-Jews, and that undermining Western civilization and trying to destroy white society is something they are naturally driven to do. In olden times, they would have just said this is because Jews are inherently wicked because God hates them. Nowadays, that doesn't sound very persuasive, especially to rationalists, so instead they make up HBD theories for why Jews are a uniquely pernicious tribe following biological imperatives.
I know this because it's not exactly a new argument, and you know this because you've been around long enough to have seen it yourself. Why are you pretending that HBD has only ever been about IQ? Even the people whose HBD arguments are primarily focused on blacks are quite open about their belief that HBD says blacks aren't just low IQ, but also impulsive, violent, criminally inclined, etc.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
You're essentially arguing that black and Latino students should just accept the reality that they aren't as smart as white people, and be grateful that there are white people around to serve as role models.
Even if this were true, our society is not constructed such that we can assert a modern-day Great Chain of Being and expect the people born into the bottom rungs to accept it.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Generic in-group bias would be a fully-formed explanation if the complaints about Jews were limited to their overrepresentation in banking and Hollywood, but the Jew-baiting posts very regularly make much broader assertions, that Jews are responsible for desegregation, affirmative action, increased immigration, laxer criminal justice, pornography, sexual liberation, feminism, and essentially, the entire liberal project, up to and including wokeism. Which is assumed to be a deliberate multigenerational campaign to undermine their neighbors and destroy their host society.
This only makes sense if you believe (a) Jews are just naturally evil for some reason; (b) it's some sort of biological imperative to conduct tribal warfare at a level that goes well beyond any "in-group bias" one sees in other ethnic groups. And some of the Joo-posters have made explicit HBD arguments to the effect that Jews just "evolved that way."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea?
I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.
Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.
Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.
But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."
As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).
I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
"Why does my outgroup push for obviously terrible things when we all know they don't actually believe the things they say they do?" Bonus: "Let me ask a leading question suggesting the uncharitable answer."
(Before you get indignant at my steelmanning the other side, I'll stipulate that I am not personally in favor of either open borders or lax criminal prosecution. Policy-wise, and probably even politically, I am probably much closer to you than the single college-educated women you so despise.)
Here's the actual answer: people in favor of open borders actually believe open borders are good. They are not nationalists and largely regard nationalism with distrust if not contempt; they believe freedom of movement, and particularly the freedom of people to seek better economic opportunities in wealthier countries, should not be hindered. They largely see Westerners living in wealthy nations as benefiting from a manifestly unfair birthplace luck-of-the-draw, and don't see why Guatemalans or Bangladeshis or Nigerians or Syrians should have to suffer just because they were not so lucky.
They (including even the women) do not think in terms of "military-aged men" (and definitely not in terms of "third-world men") and its implications.
They support lax prosecution of criminals for similar bleeding-heart reasons: they really do believe the rhetoric that fuels "defund the police" and BLM and "disproportionate impact on marginalized communities." They think they are being compassionate to the oppressed.
Stated more bluntly, you are asking "Why do they want to unleash hordes of violent rapists upon themselves?" You are "confused" because you don't believe that their motives are actually what they say they are, and you don't believe that they don't perceive the same outcome (hordes of violent rapists) that you do. Even if what you believe is actually correct, they don't believe that. They aren't endorsing it for some secret unstated reason they won't admit to.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
6mo ago
I have a genuine question, because I haven't been able to find a reliable answer:
Is the "blue octopus" actually an anti-Semitic dogwhiste, like, anywhere? Or is this an association that was just invented yesterday to pile on Greta Thunberg?
I've seen the infamous Nazi cartoon, of course, and it's not unique, but octopuses have long been used to symbolize conspiracies. A fishy alien thing with lots of tentacles reaching everywhere makes a pretty convenient metaphor for any group you're accusing of being sinister infiltrators.
I have never before yesterday, however, seen the claim that blue octopus plushies, specifically, are some sort of secret mascot used by white nationalists.
If they are, I seriously doubt that Thunberg was aware of it and deliberately signaling her own hatred of Jews. So this seems a lot like people freaking out over the "okay" signal.
I also suspect that, just like the "okay" signal, we're now going to see actual white nationalists unironically adopting blue octopus plushies as mascots.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
To be fair, you can hear that right from the horse's mouth. She herself relates this behavior directly to Tikkun Olam:
Whether or not you agree with individual Jews who believe that things that like gay rights and affirmative action are good, there is still a disconnect between "They're doing these things because they believe they're good" and "They're doing these things because they are driven by a Jewish impulse to corrupt and destroy." But I take it that you are, in fact, endorsing the HBD theory of Jewish nefariousness?
In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods and recognize the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, the world will have been perfected.
This is essentially what most religious adherents believe.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
You have a talent for writing lots of words, throwing down links, and copypastaing walls of text that dance around and suggestively pantomime a statement without actually directly answering the question. And as many other people have pointed out, selectively ignoring every time one of your arguments or citations is disproven, only to come back to it next time hoping no one will notice or remember.
So, I asked you if there is something specially malignant about Jews, and if you believe it's biological, and you give me a bunch of stuff about Tikkun Olam (yes, yes, we all know about Tikkun Olam, it's at this point a meme so old it's practically Boomer DR) and how it "suggests" that maybe in fact yes, Jews have evolved over thousands of years to become a uniquely insidious race with characteristics more threatening and hostile to outsiders than any other practitioners of a monotheistic religion. Such that it is now a biological imperative among anyone with Jewish DNA to try to subvert and destroy the society in which they live.
Would you say that is a fair characterization of what you believe? And if not, could you please be specific in explaining in what way I have misunderstood you?
Note that I am not even disputing, at the moment, your implicit equation of "supports liberal causes" with "wants to destroy civilization," though of course that is highly disputable as well. I'm giving you "Tikkun Olam" and asking what you think this actually says about Jews as a species.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Don't you see you are misrepresenting my point in the exact same way others misrepresent HBD: "Oh, so you're saying because of HBD there are no intelligent people in such-and-such group, and absolutely everyone from this group is smarter than that group." You are just using the exact same strategy here.
No, I'm sure you don't believe that literally everyone with Jewish DNA is a (figurative) lizard person.
What it appears you believe is that Jewish DNA means the "modal" Jew (the middle of the bell curve, if you will) is a lizard person.
When Jews are telling you they are promoting anti-racism because of Tikkun Olam why don't you believe them? I do.
Of course I believe that, but that doesn't say any of the things about Jews, or even Judaism, that you are extrapolating.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
This reminds me of my tenure on the Atheism+ forums, back before my redpilling/blackpilling (I don't know what to call it, since I didn't really change my beliefs, I just realized the people I thought were on my side, aren't).
A+, as you know, was woker than woke before "woke" became a thing. And one of my "WTF?" moments when I realized these people are fucking crazy is when they went hard on defending... Muslims. Not against general racism and bigotry, but against criticisms that the "New Atheists" had no problem applying to every other religion.
At one point, the forum got trolled hard by a poster from one of the hater-forums who monitored them, a set of people running an account that adopted the persona of a gay man who proceeded to post long effort-posts about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia, and how seeing the latter "triggered" him, as a gay man, despite the fact that he was an atheist.
The mods on the A+ forum proceeded to take him very seriously and started modding comments that were too "Islamophobic."
He also declared that the term "homosexual" was homophobic. The mods proceeded to mod anyone who used the word homosexual.
I was one of the few people who pushed back and kept getting in arguments with him, until he eventually DMed me and let me know what the game was. I already suspected something of the sort, because to any sane person his arguments were so transparently nonsensical. But the mods and the other SJWs on the forum ate it up.
As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.
This does happen to an extent. Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.
But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies. I have a lot of other uncharitable and blackpilling thoughts I've been tossing around and trying to decide how much of it is Chinese Cardiology and selection bias.
I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Anti-racism: White people have no ethnic identity, they do not get to ethnically advocate for themselves, they do not get to oppose demographic replacement in polite society, they do not get their own ethnic spaces. At the same time, criticizing Jews is strictly prohibited.
Do you think that anti-racists, and particularly Jewish anti-racists, would agree with you that that is an accurate description of what "anti-racism" means?
If not, do you think the discrepancy is because:
a) They are all lying.
b) They are all acting according to anti-white racial instincts they may not even be conscious of?
c) You are not accurately or charitably describing their actual beliefs?
Bonus question: Since you claim being "anti-racist" and believing in "Tikkun Olam" is a tribal, HBD-determined behavior, how do you explain all the Christians and atheists and agnostics and people of other faiths who are also fully immersed in "anti-racism" (and other liberal projects you ascribe to the Jews)? Are they:
a) Useful fools who've been assimilated and converged by the Jewish agenda?
b) Getting pinged by Jew-signals in their own Jewish DNA?
c) Acting according to their own tribal instincts which might occasionally overlap with those of Jews?
d) Actually formulating beliefs based on their own reason and morality, which might happen to be similar to beliefs that some Jews formulate based on their own reason and morality?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
You are doing a lot of subtle shifting of goalposts, as usual.
But I understand your answers to the above questions to be (b) and (a), respectively. So basically, Jews do what they do (specifically: try to destroy non-Jews) because of HBD, and everyone else follows their agenda because Jews have so cleverly crafted and sold a narrative to them. Is that accurate?
Follow-up question: do you have any theories as to why it is only Jews who have this genetic impulse to destroy all members of their outgroup and do so in such insidious ways? Or do all tribes have this impulse, but Jews have some special advantage that makes them better at it?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
11mo ago
HBDers are ideological descendants of the Eugenics movement, which was as progressive as it gets.
I don't think this is true.
The "scientific" theories behind HBD are certainly descended from the eugenics movement. But early eugenicists were, as you say, progressive and thought their ideas would improve the human race. They thought this would be good for everyone, including blacks. They weren't trying to breed black people out of existence or marginalize them or just consign them to their miserable plight as hopeless inferiors.
Modern HBDers, by contrast, are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the plight of non-whites. Their approach is not one of trying to improve race relations or the human race. They're tribalists, and HBD offers a convenient narrative why Our Tribe is superior and Their Tribe is awful.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Your thesis is quite coherent if one believes, as you do, that the Holocaust is a hoax and Jews are waging a shadow-war against Western civilization.
If one doesn't believe that, well, you still make a convincing argument that the Holocaust is overemphasized in American education and that Jews still suffer from a neurotic fear of persecution that is dramatically disproportionate to the actual level of threat offered to them. (I actually do believe this.) But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
These words like "genetic impulse to destroy all members of their outgroup" and many others you've scattered through your posts is just your own weak-manning, feel free to copy + paste anything I've said that you object to because you aren't characterizing my position accurately.
I am obviously phrasing it in a more blunt way, because you try to put it in a more evasive and less obviously culture warry way, but I genuinely do not see how my characterization is inaccurate. Why don't you explain it to me, as I've asked you to do numerous times? You do believe Jews act as they do for reasons that can be ascribed to HBD (i.e, genetics), yes? You do believe that Jews act to undermine and disempower their outgroup, yes? (Perhaps "destroy" assumes too much - maybe they'd be satisfied with complete subjugation?) I understand why you don't want to be pinned down admitting, in those words, that you believe Jews have a genetic impulse to destroy all members of their outgroup, because that would require showing your power level too blatantly, but no, I do not believe I am weakmanning you. You believe Jews are hostile and dangerous to non-Jews, that they are this way for genetic reasons and therefore it is a predilection that all Jews possess, even if they deny it or are unaware of it, and they are, if not uniquely so, then at least unusually energetic and successful at prosecuting tribal warfare, with the end goal of suppressing or extirpating rival tribes, across a span of millennia. Is any of that not correct?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
I once had a post written about JK Rowling and her most recent book, The Ink Black Heart, and then decided it was too nerdy and never posted it. Thanks for this - coincidentally, I had another effortpost written and almost ready to go, and then thought it was maybe Too Online and nerdy to post here. But since you led the way, I will post it shortly.
Now - I have been following the Rowling/TERF wars for a while now, and I have to take issue with a number of points in your narrative.
Disclaimer: I am kind of a fan of Rowling. Both for her books (yes, I came late and old to Potter fandom and still liked them - sue me - but I also like her Cormoran Strike novels and I even think The Casual Vacancy was pretty good), and for her principled stance and willingness to take the immense amount of shit she's taken without backing down or turning nasty and bitter.
Now, just for starters, I realize this is a semantic battle that's lost, but I will nonetheless keep pointing it out: "TERF" at least originally meant Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Radical feminism is a specific school of feminist ideology, it doesn't just mean "feminists who are really zealous and strident." It's actually quite fringe in modern feminism. Rowling is a feminist, and could probably be described as a Second Wave feminist, but she is certainly not a radical feminist.
I would also dispute the "Trans-Exclusionary" label, but that's somewhat more subjective, depending on what you mean by "exclude."
Criticism of Rowling began in 2020 when she exposed criticism of certain linguistic tendencies that she had progressively seen engross within her social circles. An article was posted on Devex with the headline…
Actually, it began earlier than that. At one point she "liked" a Tweet by an actual TERF, got called out on it, and sort of walked it back, but there had been hints earlier. 2020 was when she basically went "mask off."
She had become more fervently anti-trans since then, to points which are often hilarious.
I have been following Rowling on Twitter since before she got Voldemorted, and I actually do not think she is "anti-trans" except in the sense that no, she does not believe that TWAW. Of course this is enough to make her a transphobic bigot who is Literally Killing People, according to trans activists, but her actual position, every time she talks about it, is basically standard old school liberalism. She does not hate trans people or want them back in the closet or legally denied the right to live as women, and I think "anti-trans" is frankly a lie that trans activists keep pushing despite her actual words on the subject.
Has she become increasingly more willing to snap back at people who are taking shots at her? Yes. I have yet to see her actually say anything that could be called "bigoted" in good faith.
But it is important to point out that J.K. Rowling is a legitimate opponent of transgender ideology.
This is true, but again, I think some clarification is called for. "Opponent of transgender ideology," especially here, can sometimes be read as "Thinks trans people are gross and mentally ill," or even suggests that she's some sort of tradcon. She is definitely not. She's an opponent of the excesses of the modern trans movement, and putting trans women in women's shelters and prisons, etc. She is not an opponent of trans people having civil rights, being free to live their lives as trans people, etc.
Her most recent books have delved into themes that are consistently similar to the themes she has espoused. One book is literally about a detective trying to solve the case of a male serial killer who dresses up as a women in order to fool and kill biological women.
Okay, that book is Troubled Blood, and I've actually read it. I'm afraid you are just repeating a lie that her critics (most of whom did not read the book) made up. There is a single scene in that book where the serial killer dresses as a woman to avoid detection and escape. He is otherwise a plain old straight dude who likes killing women, but it is never implied that he's trans, or even gay, and dressing as a woman is not a recurring MO of is.
Rowling gives extremely large donations to many charities who are their ideological enemies, as well as essentially banning transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse.
She funded a women's shelter specifically for biological women. So far as I know, she has not otherwise "banned transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse," and I doubt she even has the power to do so.
Now, I'm off to finish my somewhat related post about another famous fantasy author and fandom.
Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -
First They Came for the Fantasy Authors
Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.
(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)
Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.
From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.
For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."
Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.
Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.
Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.
So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)
In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."
But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)
You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")
So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.
Can You Cancel a Bestseller?
Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.
JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)
They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.
(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)
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