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FarNearEverywhere

undereducated and overopinionated

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joined 2022 September 04 21:27:04 UTC 

				
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FarNearEverywhere


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
undereducated and overopinionated

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is the same attitude as removed the memorial to the Confederate Soldiers which is a really fucking stupid decision.


It was a civil war.  Now, since you are all going to have to live in the same country after the war, and these were (in some cases literally) your brothers and not a buncha foreigners, are you going to conduct yourself as "vae victis" or are you going to try and heal the wounds and all live together?


Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars.  Do you think North America would really have been better off to emulate South America, where nearly every country had a new insurrection and replacement as soon as the wind changed direction?


You may not like them, but if the entire fucking point of the war was "you are our fellow citizens, you can't just up and leave and start your own country", then afterwards you have to act like it.


And that includes memorials to young men who went out to fight not because they were ravening racists, but because they lived in a state where they were told to fight for their homeland.  "We shoulda wiped the bastards out when we had the chance" is only proving that they were right to fight against the aggressors, because that's how you're behaving.


Not every war is as simple as "they're the Nazis so that makes us the Good Guys" and civil wars are particularly tricky in that fashion.  And if you're saying "well they're not my fellow citizens, they're nothing to do with me", then they should have been permitted to leave and set up their own nation; the territory of the continent is big enough for two separate nation-states.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I believe this article falls under the "I never thought the leopards would eat my face, said the person who voted for the Face-Eating Leopards Party" umbrella.   This man is reaping the harvest of all the "I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself" seeds he and others have sown.  He allowed this 'Keisha' to set the tone from the start, instead of imposing his authority as the teacher in charge.  He stood back to let it all be student-led and then he was surprised when this happened?


What is going on here is the older generation being smacked in the face with their own irrelevance.  The twenty-year old Keishas, the graduates of courses he  and his ilk have taught for years, are the ones now shoving their way forward to be leaders and influences.  Did he step in to do anything when the white and Asian students were being bullied into silence?  Not that I can discern from the article.  And then, having sown the dragon's teeth, he is astonished and amazed when the crop springs out of the ground to attack him.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Schadenfreude all the way on this one.  If you're going to call yourself a sanctuary city, then live up to it.  Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling.  Funny how all those thousands of future productive citizens who will stimulate the economy by the advantages of immigration turn into resource sinks when they do show up in the big city that is built by immigrants and has plenty of jobs, instead of border towns and the south and western states, isn't it?




I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work




Particularly when you have people leaving food and water dumps in the deserts for the illegal immigrants because "no human is illegal!" and breaking laws.  If it's fine to break laws to support immigrants, why expect Abbott to abide by legal decisions?




"families and children who have fled their country due to injustices or threats against their lives, who have faced unimaginable obstacles to seek asylum"




So why is LA putting obstacles in their way?  Why doesn't it want to help people who have fled injustice and are in fear for their lives?


Yes, it's a stunt, but by God it's great to see the hypocrisy of the liberals exposed like this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is serendipity, because I was just going to write something on the recent winner of the Booker Prize.  The winner is a novel called "Prophet Song" by an Irish writer, Paul Lynch.


Before I start, I have to say that I am badly out of touch with literary fiction of the past twenty years or so; I stopped reading it around 2005, when John Banville's "The Sea, The Sea" was published.  So I don't know what the current trends are, or have been, and this is simply my immediate reaction to a book I have not read, and have no intention of reading, based on the reviews of what it is about.


So!  Paul Lynch wishes he was an American.  Or in second place, Canadian.  Because he has written the male version of "The Handmaid's Tale".  Here's the review by the Irish Times and I'll just pick out bits to let you know why I think this.


The main thrust of the story is that Ireland in the near future is now a totalitarian, dystopian state.  The good old Irish misery novel redux, sez you?  Ah, but in the prime of that novel, the Big Bad was the Catholic Church.  Even a sensitive soyboy liberal writer like Lynch can't pretend that the Church has anything like the power it used to have, so he has to settle for politics instead.  (And yes, I apologise for using a term like soyboy but that's the reaction his face and quotes evokes in me).


We got secret police and union leaders being disappeared.  Wait, is this 80s South America?  No, not even that interesting.  Canada is the Holy Land place of refuge, just like in "The Handmaid's Tale".  To be fair, traditional Irish emigration has also been to Canada amongst other places, but I don't think Lynch is making that kind of connection.  It's more the kind of converse you see when people claim in American elections that if X wins, they're fleeing to Canada ahead of the jackbooted fascists that will surely be coming for them.


And here's where it all falls down for me, because the political landscape Lynch is writing about is not Irish, it's the imported American culture war politics, and that's what leads me to believe Lynch secretly wishes he were an American/Canadian living amongst His People, not stuck in this benighted island (the accounts of his previous novels on the Wikipedia page about him are the standard Irish novel tropes, apart from the one imitating Hemingway).


Thing is, we've had our own home-grown Fascist movement, the Blueshirts (in analogy with Mussolini's Brownshirts and Hitler's Blackshirts) and indeed, one of our political parties and one of the parties in the current joint government are the heirs of that movement, Fine Gael.  But they're down with all the new liberal social progressivism; indeed, the current leader and Taoiseach is the half-Indian, openly gay, has a boyfriend but is in an open relationship (minor kerfuffle over pictures of him kissing a guy not his boyfriend in a gay club with mostly everyone coming down on the side of ‘not our business’, though here is the video clip about what that socialising entailed) Leo Varadkar, so what would be fascinating in a novel would be the exploration of how the social progressive agenda can fit comfortably alongside pro-business, pro-light touch regulation, pro-capitalism and indeed pro-law and order which is seen as developing into authoritarian and fascist regime.


But that’s not what Lynch gives us.


Instead, he’s writing “Suppose Donald Trump gets elected for a second time?” fiction but set in Ireland.  And here’s where I start quoting and laughing.


(1) Article about him winning the award:




After receiving the award, Lynch said: “This was not an easy book to write. The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters.”






…During a press conference later on Sunday evening, Lynch said he was “astonished” by the violent disturbances on the streets of Dublin last week.
“I recognise that energy is always under the surface, what’s happening in Dublin, we can see (the book) as a warning.”






Lynch said he was “distinctly not a political novelist” and his book is really about “grief”, as it tells the story of a woman who has her husband taken away by the newly formed Irish secret police.




Oh gosh wow, yeah, totally risking his career.  With a topic that is the received wisdom of the day, the favourite bogeyman of the chattering classes, and the subject of countless opinion pieces in online media, both traditional and social, about the horrible rise of fascism and the death of democracy in Western societies, particularly America.  Is he really trying to persuade us that the literary Cheka are going to wreck his career for touching this one?


That bit reminded me of nothing so much as this scene from C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”, where the liberal bishop claims he ran huge risks and his friend reminds him that all he did was surf the Zeitgeist:




"Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?"






"There are indeed, Dick.  There is hidebound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation.  But honest opinions fearlessly followed - they are not sins."






"I know we used to talk that way.  I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow.  It all turns on what are honest opinions."






"Mine certainly were.  They were not only honest but heroic.  I asserted them fearlessly.  When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it.  I preached my famous sermon.  I defied the whole chapter.  I took every risk."






"What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came - popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?"






"Dick, this is unworthy of you. What are you suggesting?"






"Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now.  Let us be frank.  Our opinions were not honestly come by.  We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful.  At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause."




(2) Synopsis from Wikipedia tells us what the story is all about:




In a near-future Republic of Ireland, in the wake of a teachers' union strike, the right-wing National Alliance party seizes control of the government. The National Alliance gives the Irish national police (the Garda Síochána) and the judiciary far-reaching powers. The regime also establishes a new secret police force, the Garda National Services Bureau. The new government quickly repeals civil liberties; peaceful protests are broken up, and Irish citizens are arrested without cause and tortured.






Larry Stack, a teacher and trade union leader, is arrested and held without charge while attending a rally. His wife, Eilish, who is a scientist, is left to care for their four children and her father, who has dementia. Eilish petitions for her husband's release. The state soon descends into civil war, and Irish citizens who are suspected of being part of the resistance are arrested or killed. Eilish struggles to keep her family together during the civil war; she contemplates fleeing the country with her family, possibly joining her sister Áine in Canada.




Oh, Canada!  The dreamed-of paradise for the liberals who are terrified Trump is hiding under the bed!  There’s a lot to be discussed here, and I hope to get through it, if I can gather up my scattered thoughts into a bundle (maybe even a fasces?


(3) From the review of the book, which is a little bit critical of Lynch’s approach as a work of writing, not so much the politics:




In this Ireland there has been an unspecified “crisis facing the state”, which has allowed the government to establish emergency powers and create a secret police, the GNSB. We are, in other words, deep in dystopian hell – though shallow might be the better word. The best way of involving the reader in a world like this is through individual stories, and Lynch cleaves the reader close to the Stack family in Dublin.






They are Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist working in biotech, her husband Larry – deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland – and their four children Mark, Molly, Bailey and Ben. The story opens in grand style – “The night has come and she has not heard the knocking” – as the cops arrive to take Larry in for questioning. Larry has been negotiating for better pay and conditions for teachers, and has been publicly vocal in his support. There is a tense scene where “sowing discord and unrest” battles “exercising my rights under the constitution”.






But Larry doesn’t come back from his interrogation and Eilish, however much she believes that “there would be outrage” if the police overstepped the mark, is about to learn that constitutional rights depend upon people in authority being willing to uphold them. That brings to mind the still-fresh story of Trump’s desecration of constitutional norms in the United States; and when Eilish, like a frog in slowly boiling water, hopes that everything will be fine and she won’t need to take the kids to Canada as others are doing, we think of Jews who didn’t flee Nazi Germany.






Indeed, there is no shortage of heavyweight analogies here, and some good dramatic scenes too: when the family home is sprayed in red paint with the word TRAITER (if the devil is in the detail, then that misspelling is the mot juste); when Eilish runs from hospital to hospital in search of bad news, and is greeted with even worse; and the last pages of the novel, which seem to give the whole story purpose by twisting the reader into a fresh perspective on a timely issue.




There are a few points here where I laugh, and the one about the threat of the Teacher’s Union is one of them.  Up till about 2008 and the aftermath of the economic crash in Ireland, the teachers’ unions (we have four of them: one for primary school teachers, two for secondary school, and one for university lecturers) were about the most powerful unions in Ireland, able to wring concessions out of successive governments.  Whether you were the atheist, Labour Party Minister for Education, the slightly more to the right of centre centrist right wing party Minister or the slightly more to the left of centre centrist right wing party Minister, you could and can be heckled and booed at the union conferences.


I have no doubt that Irish governments would have loved to haul off teachers’ union big-wigs to the secret police headquarters, but they never had the public support until the economic crisis meant that now the government had a mandate to stand up to public sector pay demands and broke the unchallenged power of the teachers’ unions.


The rest of it is standard “oh noes the Trumpists are coming to haul us all off to the concentration camps!” stuff which, unhappily, has percolated over here as well.  Now, in the article about Lynch’s interview after winning the award, there is mention of the protests that happened in Dublin, and here’s where it gets a lot more complicated than a simple morality tale of the Bad Far-Right Desecration of Sacred Democratic Norms.


Yes, we’ve seen far-right, white nationalist, and white supremacist groups making incursions into Ireland.  Yes, we’ve had our own nativist party trying to get going.  And yes, our police force has long wanted more powers and more equipment in line with other, armed, police forces.  But all of this has been resisted, in a general, passive, way by the public.


However, and here is where the narrative departs from Lynch’s tale of secret police hauling away trade unionists, it is in response to the anti-immigrant rioting which was destructive and hitherto unknown in Ireland, that the ramping up of police powers happened.  In other words, it’s the liberal/left political inclination which is getting the law-and-order police state going, not the right.


That’s where the really interesting novel should happen, but instead even the reviewer drags out the comparison with Trump, and not with historically established leftist authoritarian states.


We’ve had a civil war in Ireland, and the historical parallels with people being killed, arrested, and so on are there to be made.  But not in the simplistic manner here.


As to the part where the reviewer purrs about the mot juste, that rattling noise you hear is my eyeballs rotating in their sockets.  Well of course the hate graffiti would be misspelled, after all we nice, right thinking people know that the lesser sorts are stupid and illiterate.  But they might also like to bear in mind that reports in America of such hate graffiti and similar incidents often turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by the very people claiming to be the victims in fear of their lives.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right now, you all are probably sick to the back teeth of the discussion about Amazon's "Rings of Power", but I have to talk about this or I'll explode.


I haven't seen episode four yet, it's upcoming over here but it has aired in the US.  I looked up some reviews (to see what is safe to skip if I watch this, because there's a lot of filler and not much plot in the episodes as yet) and I couldn't believe what the first one said, so I looked for a second one and yep, it's true.


The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!".  No, I swear, this is actually it.


Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who aren't too sure, a direct immigration reference.  So I suppose I should take it that Pharazon is Donald Trump surfing to power on a wave of Númenorean populism which is racist and fascists, and Tar-Míriel is Hillary Clinton who is the true Queen from whom he usurps her power.


This episode, by the bye, is called "The Great Wave" because of the nightmare Tar-Míriel has about the great wave coming in to destroy Númenor, and by now it can't come fast enough for me.  Excuse me while I run around screaming as though my hair is on fire, because I feel like it.


These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.  They cannot grapple with the deeper themes of death and immortality that Tolkien wrote into his work.  Everything has to be something snatched from American political slogans. The Númenoreans don't envy and hate the Elves for the immortality they cannot have for themselves, it's because dey took er jerbs.


Let's go back to the source, shall we?  From a very long and detailed letter of 1951:




The Downfall is partly the result of an inner weakness in Men – consequent, if you will, upon the first Fall (unrecorded in these tales), repented but not finally healed. Reward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment! The Fall is achieved by the cunning of Sauron in exploiting this weakness. Its central theme is (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition.






The Númenóreans dwell within far sight of the easternmost 'immortal' land, Eressea; and as the only men to speak an Elvish tongue (learned in the days of their Alliance) they are in constant communication with their ancient friends and allies, either in the bliss of Eressea, or in the kingdom of Gilgalad on the shores of Middle-earth. They became thus in appearance, and even in powers of mind, hardly distinguishable from the Elves – but they remained mortal, even though rewarded by a triple, or more than a triple, span of years. Their reward is their undoing – or the means of their temptation. Their long life aids their achievements in art and wisdom, but breeds a possessive attitude to these things, and desire awakes for more time for their enjoyment. Foreseeing this in part, the gods laid a Ban on the Númenóreans from the beginning: they must never sail to Eressëa, nor westward out of sight of their own land. In all other directions they could go as they would. They must not set foot on 'immortal' lands, and so become enamoured of an immortality (within the world), which was against their law, the special doom or gift of Ilúvatar (God), and which their nature could not in fact endure.






There are three phases in their fall from grace. First acquiescence, obedience that is free and willing, though without complete understanding. Then for long they obey unwillingly, murmuring more and more openly. Finally they rebel – and a rift appears between the King's men and rebels, and the small minority of persecuted Faithful.






...In the second stage, the days of Pride and Glory and grudging of the Ban, they begin to seek wealth rather than bliss. The desire to escape death produced a cult of the dead, and they lavished wealth and art on tombs and memorials. They now made settlements on the west-shores, but these became rather strongholds and 'factories' of lords seeking wealth, and the Númenóreans became tax-gatherers carrying off over the sea ever more and more goods in their great ships. The Númenóreans began the forging of arms and engines.




From a letter of 1956:




The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.




I don't know if swearing is allowed in our new realm of liberty and justice for all, but how the fuck do you, self-proclaimed huge Tolkien fans, read the above and come away with "Got it, the rebellion in Númenor was all about demagogues stoking fear of immigrant labour taking native jobs"????


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!


Years ago, for my sins, I worked in a small local grocery store (the tale of how to fuck over and exploit your employees while becoming a millionaire when a million was real money is one for another day).


On a night shift I was unlucky enough to be robbed by the professional thieves.  The slickness of the job is that one distracts you by asking you to get them something off a shelf behind you/serve them at the deli counter while the other one grabs around for whatever they can lift - luckily the till was shut, but at that time when we sold lottery tickets the money was kept in a cashbox under a shelf, and Thief Two leaned over and grabbed that while Thief One distracted me.


Needless to say, my employer ate the face off me, but what could I do?  Oh, and around the same time there was a spate of armed (for the value of "armed" when the thief had a knife) robberies from petrol stations and small shops, and my employer instructed us that should someone come in and threaten us with a knife to open the till, we should lock the till, throw the key where they couldn't get it, and be prepared to be stabbed to protect our employer's precious sweet money.  I think the expression on my face probably conveyed "Hump that for a game of soldiers", because they became quite insistent on how it was my duty to risk injury or death so they wouldn't lose out on a day's takings.


This is why (1) I think the teens who shoplift for a laugh, as well as the idiots on the reddit site who go on about how it's not stealing and besides the stores have insurance, etc. should get a damn good slap until they have this nonsense knocked out of them and (2) there are people who shoplift because they genuinely have no money and are hungry or their kids are hungry.  The vast majority are not these cases.


They're professional thieves and they will use kids and even babies in their stealing (it's an old trick to bring prams or buggies into the store, hide the goods under the child, then scream your head off about 'don't touch my child' if a shop assistant or security guard tries to search them).


Re: security guards - now that anyone can walk into a store, grab something off the racks or the shelves, and walk right back out while telling you to fuck yourself, because any attempt to even lay a hand on them is ASSAULT, THAT'S ASSAULT, I'M SUING YOU AND THE STORE, there's not much they can do in reality.




    

  • Establish two new diversion programs — “Second Chance” and Re-Engaging Store Theft Offenders and Retail Establishments (RESTORE) — to allow non-violent offenders to avoid prosecution or incarceration by meaningfully engaging with services to help address underlying factors that lead to shoplifting.
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  • Install resource kiosks in stores to connect individuals in need to critical government resources and social services.
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  • Launch an employee support program to train retail workers in de-escalation tactics, anti-theft tools, and security best practices to help keep them safe in the event of an emergency and to support employees who have been impacted by thefts.
    • 





Nice policy. I'll tell you the three things this will achieve:


(1) Sweet


(2) Fuck


(3) All


As for "second chance" for non-violent etc. that might work if it's a kid and you get them young enough before they've started their career of petty juvenile crime and you get them out of their home environment of thieves and worse.  Leave them in their criminal family and the environment of "take the suckers for a ride, wrap the social workers around your little finger, spout the line about how it's all society's fault" will undo any good you try to do.


If it's adults, forget it.  You have women training their four year old kids to be thieves, what snowball in hell's chance do you think they're going to reform?  Here's a typical case plucked from the headlines in my own country, which leads me into the "connect individuals to critical government resources and social services".


You think the woman in that case isn't connected with social services etc.?  You think that her lawyer, representing her after 158 previous convictions, isn't going for the sob-story angle about "Murphy had lost her job and fallen into homelessness because of a “bad drug addiction” in hopes that this time yet again a judge will fall for it and go easy on her?


As for "train employees in de-escalation tactics", oh yeah that's gonna work.  "Oh please, Ms. Shoplifter, I know systemic racism and poverty have impacted you which is why you're grabbing a carefully calculated amount under what would get you done for a felony, but if I just ask you nicely you'll hand everything back".


Sure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nobody likes being called names.


Where were you protesting when everyone and their dog is putting up "Republicans are evil" on comments, posts, and general "look we all know they're Nazi fascists, why can't we call them Nazi fascists"?


The "groomer" label clearly hurts and strikes a nerve.  You are (presumed from what you say) a Democrat and don't like being called a paedophile?  Welcome to being Catholic, where there are all too many people willing to split hairs about "acskhully if you compare the number of Catholic priests to teachers regarding paedophile offences, priests still score higher by that measure" and the jokes.


You're not a paedophile.  How do you feel about drag shows in schools, drag story hour in libraries, drag kids, and classroom chats about "if you like playing with trucks/dolls, maybe you're really a boy/girl" for four year olds?  Teacher complaining that the new Nazi fascist 'don't say gay' laws mean they can no longer tell their class all about how they're poly and have both a husband and a girlfriend?  Hawaiian schoolteachers who pull the old "homophobes are actually closeted gays" claim about "if rightwingers say we're groomers for talking about LGBT issues with kids, then they're really paedophiles themselves" before they themselves get arrested for having sex with a 13 year old student?


No, it's not fun or nice or pleasant to endure when you're on the receiving end of it.


But flaming out with "if you really believed this was serious, you'd be setting teachers on fire" rhetoric (I accept you don't mean that literally) doesn't help either.


Because going back to being Catholic, this is the trap that gets sprung: "if you pro-lifers really believed it was murder, you'd be doing more than arguing about laws" somebody goes out and does violence "oh my god, we always knew that this wasn't about alleged baby murder, they just want to coerce women into forced birth, see how they're all murderers and arsonists and bombers!"


There's no way to win about that catch-22, so "groomer" is a very mild response, considering.


But you are free.  If you genuinely feel that this is a place of oppression for you, then leave and be happy elsewhere.  Good wishes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The thing is, despite all the chat about "representation", they're not doing it for a black audience.  Does anyone doubt that if they thought that dropping Arondir and Dísa made it more appealing to China, they'd do it in a heartbeat?


And if they are doing it for representation and a global audience, they better fit in some Indian, Chinese, Filipino, and as many South American actors in new roles as they can get for the next episodes and seasons.  I mean, how can people watch a show if they can't see faces like their own in it, and right now if they're not white, they've got a couple of black actors and some ambiguously brown ones?  If they're not black, who is representing them?  There are trailers etc. in Hindi - do you mean that Indians can watch a show that doesn't have Indian actors in it in main parts to be Representative?  I am shocked, shocked I tell you!


It's for easy publicity: we are making a Big Deal of Diversity, aren't we wonderful, please buy a subscription to our streaming service to watch our very expensive show.




unless whiteness was a critical part of the story




Ah ha ha ha ha ha.  Excuse me a moment while I wipe away tears of laughter, and no, I'm not laughing at you.


Is blackness a critical part of the story for Black Panther?  Wouldn't it be just as good if we had our fictional magic science African kingdom with diverse actors, e.g. some Chinese, Hispanic, Pacific Islanders, etc. in supporting parts on-screen so people could have Representation and See Someone Who Looks Like Me?


After all, if we are supposed to accept magical meteors and special metal and mystic herbs and all the rest of it that made Wakanda super-advanced, why are we objecting to seeing Asian faces there?  Wakanda isn't real, vibranium isn't real, the heart-shaped herb isn't real.  It's all fantasy and made-up, not real history, right?  So objecting to Asian and Latinx Wakandans is motivated solely by racism.


When Tolkien invented his universe, first it was for the languages to have a proper setting.  Secondly, it was to make "a mythology for England".  Everywhere else was having cultural renaissances, from the Celtic Revival to various European countries (see for example composers going back to and being influenced by native folk music of their respective lands).  But what did England - not Britain, but England - have?  Not the Arthurian legend, see here from a letter of 1951:




Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.






Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.




1937:




Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?




1938:




The language of hobbits was remarkably like English, as one would expect: they only lived on the borders of The Wild, and were mostly unaware of it. Their family names remain for the most part as well known and justly respected in this island as they were in Hobbiton and Bywater.




1943:




For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)),




1944:




As to Sam Gamgee. I quite agree with what you say, and I wouldn't dream of altering his name without your approval; but the object of the alteration was precisely to bring out the comicness, peasantry, and if you will the Englishry of this jewel among the hobbits. Had I thought it out at the beginning, I should have given all the hobbits very English names to match the shire.




1954:




Middle-earth is just archaic English for ἡοἰκονμένη, the inhabited world of men. It lay then as it does. In fact just as it does, round and inescapable. That is partly the point. The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History, and we here see the process culminating. If you or I or any of the mortal men (or hobbits) of Frodo's day had set out over sea, west, we should, as now, eventually have come back (as now) to our starting point. Gone was the 'mythological' time when Valinor (or Valimar), the Land of the Valar (gods if you will) existed physically in the Uttermost West, or the Eldaic (Elvish) immortal Isle of Eressëa; or the Great Isle of Westernesse (Númenor-Atlantis). After the Downfall of Númenor, and its destruction, all this was removed from the 'physical' world, and not reachable by material means. Only the Eldar (or High-Elves) could still sail thither, forsaking time and mortality, but never returning.




1956:




There is no special reference to England in the 'Shire' – except of course that as an Englishman brought up in an 'almost rural' village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham (about the time of the Diamond Jubilee!) I take my models like anyone else – from such 'life' as I know.




Another letter of 1956, where he was getting stuck into a Dutch translator who took it upon himself to put his own interpretations on everything (very pertinent for our Amazon showrunners):




But, of course, if we drop the 'fiction' of long ago, 'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world – least perhaps of any in Europe on Holland, which is topographically wholly dissimilar. (In fact so different is it, that in spite of the affinity of its language, and in many respects of its idiom, which should ease some part of the translator's labour, its toponymy is specially unsuitable for the purpose.) The toponymy of The Shire, to take the first list, is a 'parody' of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and presumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour.




1959, for a Polish translator:




As a general principle for her guidance, my preference is for as little translation or alteration of any names as possible. As she perceives, this is an English book and its Englishry should not be eradicated.




Now, if Middle-earth was just Generic Invented Fantasy World, then it wouldn't matter. Cast black, white, red, yellow, brown, purple, green and indigo actors in the parts!  But Tolkien was very clear that Middle-earth was not an invented world, it was meant to be our own world as we have it right now, just that the tales were set in a very distant, mythological past.  So the English parts are meant to be English, and that does mean white.  The peoples of the North-West are, by and large, white. The Elves are white (and, as an aside, the black-haired grey-eyed ideal of beauty for them is based on his wife Edith, there's your romance element).


"Hamilton" pulled it off by making all the cast (except King George and I think one or two of the Schuyler sisters?) non-white.  If you're going to change up LOTR or the Rings of Power, then the least mendacious way to do it is cast everyone as non-white, that way you can claim with a straight face that you are casting the best actors not casting on skin tone alone.  Not alone one black elf, all the Elves, including Galadriel and Elrond, are black/Hispanic/whatever.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Sanderson: I simply support an institution that wants to kill them




That's the thing that annoys me the most.  The trans activists who shout that their enemies want to literally kill them.  That they're being genocided.  Tha the Trans Day of Remembrance is some sort of Holocaust memorial.  When the murder rate of trans people is about the same as that for women, and the murders are often of sex workers (a profession already risky even for cis people) or might have been for other reasons (e.g. drug deals gone wrong).  When they are getting more and more protection, support, laws, even the damn flag being shoehorned into the Pride flag.


"No no no if you don't tell us we're fantastic and give out puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery on the bare word of anyone who walks in and goes 'I want that' then it's genocide, literally a genocide!"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If they're getting rid of genuinely offensive or hurtful names, okay fine.  But renaming a bird that may be called, say, "Smith's Wren"?  Why?  The only reason I can see there is "Smith is an Old Dead White Guy".


This reminds me of what a lot of the liberal Protestant churches did in regards to LGBT+ matters.  Think of all the LGBT+ people who would love to come to church, except they've been turned off Christianity by the bad old, mean old, regressive, 'that's a sin' teachings of the past!  So they junk the 'offensive' doctrines, kick out the traditionalists/have a public, messy, divisive split, and then sit back and wait for the flood of new LGBT+ and allies congregants to fill the churches.


Which... doesn't really happen.  They get a lot more out gay, lesbian and trans clergy and bishops (if they're a denomination that has bishops) but congregants?  Ordinary people in the pews?  Not so much.  What tends to happen is that the split means a small, LGBT+ majority church here, and a somewhat larger (but still smallish) traditional church made up of those who were kicked out/left over there, which tends to maybe be a bit more vibrant and growing.


So they torpedo everything they used to have, but don't get the wished-for replacement numbers of the new people to fill in for the traditionalists who left, or to replace their aging/dying liberal remaining congregations.


And that's what I think will happen here.  "Let's get rid of all these Euro-centric names, and the masses of BIPOC people who would love to become birdwatchers will turn up!"  Except I don't think "that bird has a Western, Anglo name" is what is keeping black, Asian, Latino etc. people out of birdwatching.  People who are inclined to "I've been calling it Bewick's Wren for thirty years, I'm resigning from this club" will leave or give up the hobby or form their own, separate group.  People who never even heard of "Bewick's Wren" are not going to suddenly turn up because now it's called "Long-tailed Wren" or the likes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's a lot, lot simpler than you're imagining.   You ask "Peter Thiel launched a dating site, all men signed up, where are the women?" and then presume "it is because young women hate conservative men".


No, it's because young women have no idea that Peter Thiel launched a dating site, they don't know who he is, and they don't see why they should care.  There are a heap of dating sites out there, what makes this one stand out?


I only know about this site because I hang around this place and Scott's place.  Hint: both places are majority male. Where are all the women?  Well, we've had some discussion about that.


Did Thiel or whoever is running the site for him go out and advertise to women?  Make their new site known?  Go onto women's social media, take out print campaigns in fashion magazines, etc?


I'm not surprised it's all guys signed up, because it's all guys who heard about it, because it's mostly all guys who know who Thiel is, and mostly all guys who congregate in the spaces where "Hey, Thiel is setting up a dating site" is going to be news that gets disseminated.


EDIT: You didn't even tell me the name of the place, I had to go look it up for myself LIKE A PEASANT 😂


So - it's called "The Right Stuff" and straight away, that is a name that will appeal to men but not women.  The first thing I think of when I read that name was the movie and book.


Second, it's invite-only?  That makes it a lot harder to sign up to it, surely?


It was founded/co-founded by a woman, so I don't know why it's having such trouble.  But maybe if it's being promoted in a bubble, that also is part of it - not everyone who is conservative/on the right is in a particular right-wing bubble like this one seems to be.


I'd advise change the name, go out beyond the bubble, and soften the "this is for right-wing conservatives!" messaging (as even to me, it makes it sound like they want you to be one of those pinafore and head-scarf wearing small splinter Protestant denomination types), and go more on "ready to move on to something that might be The One?/match up with people who share your interests in common" and soft messaging - yes, this is where saying you didn't vote for Hillary won't get you ostracised.  Cut way back on the politics, people are presumably signing up to this app to find someone to have fun times with, not to refight 2016 election all over again.


I'm gritting my teeth as I say this, but make it fluffier.  Not like this since this is terrible, as it's way too negative and the fashion choices on the women are awful.  Nice-looking guys smiling as they walk their dogs type of thing.  Wholesome, but not too wholesome, a hint of "hey, want to have fun?" rather than "are you ready to commit to life-long marriage and four kids after the first date?" imagery.  Show one of your girls finding a date on this app and having a great time!


EDIT EDIT: Looked up the website and yeah, this is not going to attract women. Gosh sakes, people, is it against your religion/political alignment to hire some professional consultants about graphic design?  This is the second worst use of billionaire money I've seen since Bezos got taken for a ride with "The Rings of Power" - $60 million per episode?  Yeah right, and 80% of that went on nepotistic hiring of egregious executive producers, hookers and blow.


Criticism: too much blue.  Some blue is good, and they are trying to go for a clean look, but it's too blue and too flat.  Use lighter shades of blue, and not so much white space.  Some elements are good - the bits about "less talking, more dating" and "find the right match" - but some aren't (the girl in the cowboy hat looks trashy, not conservative, sorry I don't make the rules).  "Getting back to normal" is clunky, junk the directness and go more vague - "we don't ask for your pronouns", that kind of thing.


Calligraphy - the design with the font is all over the place.  Having the "Right" element in what looks like cursive may be an attempt at branding and your unique selling point (this is for the "right" wing to find the "right" people), but the font itself is not that pleasing and it makes the word stand out in the wrong way - the eye stumbles over it.  Pick a different font, put all your name - The Right Stuff - into it, and then you can use "Right" as the branding element on the rest of the site.


Name - yeah, this is the part that does not work for me.  Too much like a masculine interest (the movie about the test pilots) and too political.  Ease back on that emphasis, it sounds too much like "this is for hardline right-wingers only, not mushy centrists".  Honey, not vinegar: you're trying to entice in the 'shy Tories', as it were.


I'd suggest changing the name to something like "Inspire" and use cloud/wind related imagery (in blues and white) to go with the meaning both of "breathing" and "giving someone the urge to be creative".   Much less "this is a political site for political people" (which is the major turn-off) and more "this is for fun, but also finding someone who is more than just a fling" and "find someone who resonates with your beliefs and interests".  Above all, get some marketing and design people in to fancy it up and sell it to a wider, female, audience.  The girl in the hat and boots may look cute and fun to guys, but to women she looks "Oh - one of those floozies, huh?  What kind of girl do you think I am?"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Culture War or fashion news?  You decide!


So Sam Brinton, former deputy assistant secretary since they have been fired, appeared in court in Las Vegas on Wednesday on one of the two charges against them for stealing luggage.  This was just a bail hearing, so nothing juicy to report yet.


Well, except for clothing choices.  Whether advised to do so by counsel or whatever, for their court appearance Mx. Brinton decided to go for male-presenting and masked.  If they were wearing their red lipstick, nobody knows.  No heels, jewellery, dresses, or capes today, just a black suit and shirt with white tie combo (not too impressed with that myself, it's a bit retro but however).


So being out, loud and proud non-binary/gender fluid/trans (as the case may be) is okay when representing the government, but when it's your own case, convention wins?  General opinion seems to be that "when showing up for bail on a charge of stealing women's clothing, better not to dress in women's clothing" which is fair enough.  But it just amused me that once they're in real trouble (as distinct from the stories they told of being beaten by their parents and abused by torture camps), they drop all the affectation and try to look as normal as possible.  Be interesting to see what they wear to the Minneapolis hearing, when/if that happens.


(What also amuses/interests me is the quick No True Scotsman turnaround where the former poster non-binary person for the campaign against conversion therapy is now somehow "we knew he was dodgy all along" once the negative publicity starts).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Or maybe he's asking "what is all the begging about, where is the money actually going?"


Which is a question I'd like answered myself.  I regularly get the begging headers on the Wikipedia pages and mostly ignore them.  Then I read that there's a Foundation supposedly in charge of the thing.  Okay, fine, need some kind of management.


And then I read that the Foundation has, to use a technical term, a metric fuckton of money (allegedly).


So yeah - where's all the money in the begging campaigns going, then?  Jannies do it for free, after all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The sanctuary city lot never said "yeah there's an optimum number of immigrants and our share would be X" or "economic migrants are definitely not covered", it was all pious "why are the horrible rednecks oppressing the mothers and children fleeing for their lives from despotic regimes? why are they not letting them through and helping them settle in their states?"


Now suddenly there's such a thing as a "fair share" of people you can take in?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.




Halle-freakin'-lujah!


I don't want smart ads. I don't want tailored ads.  I don't want "we've been snooping on what sites you browse for the past six months so we think we can sell you this particular crap".


If I want a good or service, I'll look it up.  I don't buy unsolicited rubbish, and I haven't the money for the stuff they want me to buy, anyway, so I'm bad fit for their "if this bozo spends thousands, we'll get a cut" commission.


You tell me that kicking up about this shit means it will be hobbled?  Sign me up to put the hobnails on and start the kicking!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I like Freddie, and I know he's solidly in a liberal to progressive milieu of who he grew up with, went to school, got jobs, is friends with, and so on.


But this one has a really defensive tone to me, rather than his usual way of making an argument.


The bathroom argument is so damn ridiculous on every side.  My default opinion on this was "I don't care, there's no way I'm going to be looking into your knickers and so long as you just use the bathroom because you need to go to the loo, no skin off my nose".


But I am being made to care, because first it was that trans people would literally die you bigot if they couldn't use the right bathroom, and now if he's going to go all "Why do you care what bathroom someone uses?" on me, then I'm punting it back at him: why is it such a big deal for trans people to use the "gender I identify with" bathroom, then?  If nobody is going to be protected from assault whether or not there are laws about "only biological men here, biological women there" then, uh, neither are trans people going to be protected from assault if there are laws about "any gender can use this bathroom".  But we absolutely gotta get the second set of laws, because, well, we gotta.


What 'any gender can use this bathroom' does is make it easier for creepy people to take advantage.  And yes, Freddie, there are creepy people out there.  All the "you conservatives are only scaremongering, that thing you are whipping up outrage about will never happen!" scolding  sounds a lot less convincing when there are cases like the "I'm a real woman and I can prove it by getting two women pregnant while I'm in the women's prison" guy.  And there are cases like that, it's not an isolated incident, and they happen precisely because of the "gotta give the trans people legal protection and legal rights" rush, which is then abused by the creepy, the predatory, and the grifters.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm about 40% through Michael Lewis's book on Sam Bankman-Fried, and so far I find it intensely frustrating.


Yes, hindsight is no guide to what people knew or thought at the time, but putting what Lewis is describing with how Bankman-Fried operated is making me want to tear my hair out.  Of course the guy isn't one bit interested in how other people feel or if he makes them feel bad, of course he's convinced that if out of 100 people, 99 say "black" and he says "white", he's right and they're wrong.  But Lewis, even at this early point, is so clearly enamoured of Bankman-Fried that he can't bear to criticise him directly; even at the places where it finally looks like he'll have to admit "Yeah, Sammy-boy screwed that one up", at the last minute he swerves to how Bankman-Fried was actually in the right, or it wasn't his fault, or or or.


That being said, there is useful information here, if Lewis can't help white-knighting for Bankman-Fried he also can't help being the investigative author that he is.  Armchair psychology is a dangerous pastime, but I have to say that my snap judgement of "So what is going on with SBF?" is that he's a child.  He can't cope with boredom, and anything that doesn't interest him is dumped into the bin of "boring and irrelevant".  There's indications that something was going on with him as a kid; possibly on the autism spectrum, possibly ADHD - that would account for the kind of stimming he does (bouncing his leg, fidgeting, as well as the after-the-fact knowledge that he was hopped up on stimulants).  And yet his parents seem to have done nothing about it.


Oh, the parents.  Wow, that's some description of the Bankman-Fried family life, and makes me understand even better why they were so greedy about stripping everything they could out of FTX/Alameda Resources as Sam's, and hence their, personal cash cow as described in the law suit against them.  They seem to have (emotionally) neglected their kids and been totally incurious about them, or at least about Sam, but very conscious of their own adult interests as Stanford academics and liberal, Democrat, supporters.


Maybe I'm biased by where I'm currently working, but the description of kid Sam makes me wonder why the hell the parents weren't bringing him for psychological assessments?  Maybe they were, and that part of the story isn't being told to Lewis by Bankman-Fried, but they just... weren't very much there, from what I'm reading:




The Bankman-Frieds weren’t big on the usual holidays. They celebrated Hanukkah but with so little enthusiasm that one year they simply forgot it, and, realizing that none of them cared, stopped celebrating anything. “It was like, ‘Alright, who was bothered by this fact? The fact that we forgot Hanukkah.’ No one raised their hand,” Sam said. They didn’t do birthdays, either. Sam didn’t feel the slightest bit deprived. “My parents were like, I dunno, ‘Is there something you want? Alright, bring it up. And you can have it. Even in February. Doesn’t have to be in December. If you want it, let’s have an open and honest conversation about it instead of us trying to guess.’” Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want. The family’s indifference to convention came naturally and unselfconsciously. It was never, Look how interesting we are, we don’t observe any of the rituals that define so many American lives. “It’s not like they said, ‘Gifts are dumb,’” recalled Sam. “They never tried to convince us about gifts. It didn’t happen like that.”




If you take one thing away about explaining how and why Bankman-Fried acted the way he did, it's that line:




Sam, like his parents, didn’t see the point in anyone trying to imagine what someone else might want.




And so, as long as he does okay in school and doesn't get into trouble, he is just left to get along.  They do put him into a fancier school since he's smart - and again, Lewis is good on that.  Bankman-Fried is smart, but he's not super-smart, and he finds himself later on among kids who are just as smart as he is, or even smarter.  And Bankman-Fried seems to have constructed his sense of self around always being right; everyone else can be dumb and stupid and boring and wrong, but he's right.


That's where Lewis frustrates me.  He doesn't seem to see where he - or his hero, Sam - is contradicting himself.  So the arts, for example English, are stupid and dumb and academic shell-games.  (But his parents are academics - are they and their work, too, only engaged in "a bullshit distinction dreamed up by academics trying to justify the existence of their jobs"?).  Having airily dismissed Shakespeare, later on Lewis gushes about a game Bankman-Fried and a colleague at Jane Street play, which shows how smart Bankman-Fried is: a bog-standard word game based on puns, which requires some quick thinking but isn't that extraordinary. And at another point in the book, we get Bankman-Fried dismissing any attempts by adults at nuance about religious beliefs as more bullshitting, that belief in God is a binary question, yes or no.


Hold on to that thought, because then later on we get Lewis tut-tutting at the co-founders who, not unnaturally, panicked over four million in a cryptocoin gone missing and want to tell the investors that money is lost.  But Bankman-Fried wants to go ahead and keep trading because maybe it'll turn up, who's to say that it's not there?  Now, "do we have the money?" is a pretty fucking binary question, yes or no, but this time Sammy-boy, in Lewis's telling, is all about the nuance or the inherently probabilistic situation.


So things like that, where Lewis or Bankman-Fried or both of them turn on a dime when it suits the narrative purpose for Bankman-Fried to be The One Guy Who Is Always Right, are very frustrating.  But I can't say the book is bad, because yeah, it's helping me understand some of what was going on in Bankman-Fried's mind.


A guy with a low boredom threshold, very probably a couple of neurodevelopmental disorders that never got addressed in childhood because his parents were so out to lunch, who only cares about a set of things he finds fascinating and judges those around him by the same yardstick: if you like what he likes, then you get paid some of his attention.  Anything else? He just ignores, because he learned as a kid that he could ignore the boring shit school and other places tried to instil in him, and get away with it.  Hence why he plays video games while on video calls and similar behaviour, or why he says "yes" and then never shows up - he learned that the quickest way to get people to stop nagging was just agree with them, but you have no intention of doing the thing.  No matter how Lewis tries to dress it up as some kind of constant calculation as to best use of time, "assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time", what it really is, is Bankman-Fried lying because he doesn't care about you or making commitments you think he will carry out when he has no intention of doing so, because he can't see the point in trying to imagine what someone else might want.


And that's how you end up with a massive financial fraud trial - because he doesn't care about anyone else, since he can't manage to quite see other people as real or valuable, and he's a child who never grew up.


Not care about anyone?  But what of all the EA stuff - is that a lie, too?


I think Bankman-Fried is a good example of what Chesterton said about modern philanthropy and Humanitarianism:




The modern humanitarian can love all opinions, but he cannot love all men; he seems, sometimes, in the ecstasy of his humanitarianism, even to hate them all. He can love all opinions, including the opinion that men are unlovable.




Bankman-Fried loves the theory because you can play all the number and math games with it, working out probabilities and maximum values and so forth.  But humans as humans?  Messy, confusing, boring and stupid.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Magazine decides to become arm of political activism in support of the party of Tweedledee.  Is shocked, shocked! when party of Tweedledum gets into power and amongst other matters cuts funding to magazine/its pet topics".


Well, at least now we know.  I don't mind reading partisan media when I know which side of the fence they're on, and that can even be a valuable experience to hear from the other side.  Some bunch pretending they are "the facts are impartially in support of our guys" are not neutral, whatever they may like to think.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is possibly only very vaguely Culture War, but it's an update on the Sam Brinton luggage stealing saga.  Before I begin, I want to say that this is not to dunk on the Biden administration or even non-binary persons.  It's simply because this story is so ridiculous it is laugh out loud funny.


Seems like (and I have no idea if this is really true, but if it isn't, it should be) our person is a three times thief - allegedly.  A Tanzanian-born fashion designer has now come forward, claiming her suitcase went missing back in 2018 and that subsequent photos of Brinton in particular outfits were her clothes.  Yes, it's the Daily Mail, but it's got the best gallery of photos of what the designer alleges are her clothes and then photos of Brinton in similar outfits.


That would seem to answer the question "What does he do with the clothing in the luggage he steals?" 😁


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
With regards to Tolkien, the anti-racism thing has become a necessary defence because of people accusing him of anti-Semitism (the Dwarves are coded Jewish, you see, and only care about gold) and racism (the Orcs are black-coded, a thing I only read the other day).  These people claim flat-out he was a racist (because old, white, Catholic, English guy who didn't write in trans queer BIPOC differently-abled characters in polyamorous gender-queer relationships, and I wish I was exaggerating greatly instead of only a little about that, See what Amazon thought would sell "The Rings of Power" to an audience with their English version of the superfans video.  Would be a decent interview if all the references to 'representation' and 'queerness' were stripped out).


That's not even taking the quotes that we do see in the Selected Letters, which slightly better critics have used (the critics above just took a general statement that 'of course Tolkien is racist' and ran with it):




(1) From a letter of 1955:






I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue




See?  He said the Dwarves were Jews (no, he didn't, but that doesn't stop the critics) and look what he says about Dwarves in "The Hobbit":




There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.




There you go: the stereotype of the Jews being money-grubbers! Anti-Semitism!




(2) From a 1958 letter about a proposed film of "The Lord of the Rings":






The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.




That one will get you, whoever you are, into trouble.  Is he saying that Orcs are Central/East Asians?  No, but if someone reading that doesn't make allowances for "least lovely types", "to Europeans", and "degraded versions" of "corrupted human form", then they will get "Tolkien says Orcs are East Asians because East Asians are ugly slant-eyes".  I honestly don't know where the "Orcs are black" thing came from, unless it's from the movie versions which are dark-skinned (some of them).


Racism simpliciter is also attributed to him because of the Haradrim and Easterlings: all the good guys are white, all the bad guys are black (or at least brown and yellow).  We don't get any black or brown people on the side of the heroes.  Never mind that he wrote a sharp letter to his publishers about a Swedish translator who was putting in his own interpretation of events everywhere:




From a letter of 1961






Here [in Mordor] rules the personification of satanic might Sauron (read perhaps in the same partial fashion [as other identifications Ohlmarks has made] Stalin).






There is no 'perhaps' about it. I utterly repudiate any such 'reading', which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought. The placing of Mordor in the east was due to simple narrative and geographical necessity, within my 'mythology'. The original stronghold of Evil was (as traditionally) in the North; but as that had been destroyed, and was indeed under the sea, there had to be a new stronghold, far removed from the Valar, the Elves, and the sea-power of Númenor.




And from a letter of 1954




Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists' – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only 'hallows' were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.




So was he a racist?  By current 21st century progressive standards, yes (and sexist and homophobic, no doubt).  Was he a racist by the standards of his day?  I don't think so, but of course Bad Things Are Always Bad and there is no context, so he has been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty.  Hence the necessity to use the shibboleth of "anti-racist" when trying to defend, or at least be neutral about, him.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I saw that, and I'm laughing.  They wanted this, and now they're getting it.  The Sad and Rabid Puppies campaigns were all about the Hugos being a cosy little arrangement where the people 'in the know' got their favourites pushed, and the response was all "nope, not us, each con is its own thing, it's the people who registered to vote who make the decisions" at the same time as they were publicising that Worldcon owned the Hugos so you grubby lowlifes can just forget about it.


Well now, China is hosting Worldcon and, as they say, when in Rome... and all the outrage is superfluous because they wanted the principle of "we can select a slate of nominees and award winners on DEI and LGBT+ and other progressive grounds", and now that principle of "we can select the criteria according to which any work is judged permissible or deplorable" is being used against their pet causes.  Too bad, they set this up and it's one more example of "but how was I supposed to know the leopards would eat my face?"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I honestly don't know how to feel about that little story in Aella's Substack.  First off, there's no definition of "my parents were violent" other than "they hit me". So was that smacking/slapping, or was that punching with a fist? Leaving marks?


Then Author #1 is too glib about 'how it all would have gone'.  Asking to be referred to the foster system?  Even as a bluff, that means they had no fucking clue what that would be like in reality, and if they were the 'good child' doing well in school and winning music competitions, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they had no problems about having clothes to wear, enough food, or heat in the house, etc.


Which is not to say that outwardly respectable nice middle-class families can't be violent and abusive!  But I do wonder what the real situation was.  Maybe the parents were violent, or maybe Author #1 (and siblings) did have psychological problems they don't admit, or blame on their parents, or brood too much over "I was abused" when what they mean was "When I wanted something and my parents didn't give it to me, I pitched a fit, and they gave me corporal punishment because that's how they were raised".


I don't know.  But the more I read, the less I believe the parents were "violent" and "beat/hit" that person.




Go to their workplace, tap a glass until you have everyone's attention, and tell them all that your parent assaulted you last night, and could everyone please tell them not to attack children. A lot of people would want to avoid the shame of that occurring again.




And then Dad stands up, apologises, and says "Well you can see for yourself what Junior is like; last night he refused to do chores and back-answered his mother, so I swatted his backside.  That was the 'assault', folks".  And everyone in the workplace thinks he didn't hit you half enough if you're pulling this self-dramatising shit.  Seriously, a genuinely violent parent is going to drag you out of there, beat the living crap out of you for pulling a stunt like that, and you end up in the hospital.  Somebody really living in fear of violence is not going to recommend 'strategies' like this, except as part of wish-fulfilment revenge fantasy daydreams of "I'll show them!"




I generally don’t endorse lying, but giving yourself a physical injury to blame on your parents at as evidence might be a viable strategy here, might embarrass your parents more, and is something that’s hard for them to physically prevent you doing to yourself.




This is also fucking terrible advice, I thought Aella was supposed to be smart?  Now you're labelled as self-harming, which does make you the 'problem child', and you are revealed to be a liar trying to get your parents into trouble.  You'll have a psychiatric label slapped on you, be dosed up to the gills on medication to stop you doing anything like that again, and may well end up in the foster care system anyway, plus everyone will feel sorry for your parents and the terrible kid who tried to persuade everyone they were abusing them by faking an injury.  What kind of lame-brained notion is this?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have to wonder if this is going to end up like Irish referenda on social liberalisation (e.g. divorce); the pro- side argue each time that the loss doesn't represent the true views of the country, that there was misinformation and fear mongering and outside interference, and they're going to go again.  Then eventually after a series of votes, where they finally get "yes" by a very slim majority - that's it.  The people have spoken.  No more referenda, this is now the law of the land, sorry "No" side you had your chance and don't get another chance to campaign (unlike us who got three or four goes to get the result we wanted).


I will be interested if the pro-Voice side push for another vote down the line in X months/year's time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's only March, is it flippin' Pride Year all the year round now?   How many Pride nights and days can be crammed in?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment.


He is not impressed with how FTX and its web of companies was run, and he makes no bones about it.  The recurring refrain all through is "However, because this balance sheet was produced while the Debtors were controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried, I do not have confidence in it, and the information therein may not be correct as of the date stated" for all the balance sheets he's quoting.  He was the guy put in to handle Enron when it was wound up, and he says (reading between the lines and you don't need to do much of that) that the FTX mess is even worse than that:




I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.






Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.




He throws shade everywhere:




The FTX.com platform grew quickly since its launch to become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Mr. Bankman-Fried claimed that, by the end of 2021, around $15 billion of assets were on the platform, which according to him handled approximately 10% of global volume for crypto trading at the time. Mr. Bankman-Fried also claimed that FTX.com, as of July 2022, had “millions” of registered users. These figures have not been verified by my team.




(Translation: Bankman-Fried is a lying liar)




The FTX Group received audit opinions on consolidated financial statements for two of the Silos – the WRS Silo and the Dotcom Silo – for the period ended December 31, 2021. The audit firm for the WRS Silo, Armanino LLP, was a firm with which I am professionally familiar. The audit firm for the Dotcom Silo was Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates that they are the “first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland.”




Ouch.  As if Zuckerberg didn't have enough problems with the Metaverse already.  Is this really the kind of PR he wants associated with it? 😁


What really interested me in all this, though, was the interview/transcript of a Twitter conversation with Bankman-Fried that Kelsey Piper published in Vox the other day.  I have no idea what Bankman-Fried is trying to achieve here, but it's pretty plain that he is in a state of denial and is not accepting any responsibility for the eventual outcome.  He admits he fucked up, but then shifts into blaming others, including his co-founders, and everyone who advised him to file for bankruptcy.  Reading Ray's declaration, it sounds less like "I was advised" and more like "I was told do this or else", but whatever; now he is spinning a story (and I don't know if he believes this himself or was just trying it out on Piper) that if he had toughed it out and refused to file for bankruptcy he would have been able to cover most of the debts and settle up within a month or two:




I fucked up. Big. Multiple times. You know what was maybe my biggest single fuckup? The one thing everyone told me to do. Everything would be ~70% fixed right now if I hadn’t. Chapter 11. If I hadn’t done that, withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole. But instead I filed, and the people in charge of it are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame. I might still get there. But after way more collateral damage. And only 50/50.




Considering, according to the filing, that amongst the lawyers he consulted about that, one of them was his dad - ouch again.  Sorry Dad, Sonny-boy is lumping you in with the bad advisors who led him astray.  But he is in a state of delusion that he could have fixed this, or can fix it.  He still can't admit he messed up because he was too greedy and not as smart as he thought he was, and all that rationalist woo about risk and utility maximisation was only a cover for bad decisions and fraud.




At the same time, negotiations were being held between certain senior individuals of the FTX Group and Mr. Bankman-Fried concerning the resignation of Mr. Bankman-Fried and the commencement of these Chapter 11 Cases. Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School. A document effecting a relinquishment of control was prepared and comments from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s team incorporated. At approximately 4:30 a.m. EST on Friday, November 11, 2022, after further consultation with his legal counsel, Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately agreed to resign, resulting in my appointment as the Debtors’ CEO. I was delegated all corporate powers and authority under applicable law, including the power to appoint independent directors and commence these Chapter 11 Cases on an emergency basis.




I would definitely recommend reading this document to get a picture of what was going on.  There is no way, unless he's trying to set up for an insanity plea or operating under impairment due to drugs/mental health problems, that Bankman-Fried can deny it was all down to him.  He pretty much owned or controlled every entity that was going on, it was him and literally about three others who made all the decisions, and they seem to have treated the interlocking parts as their own private piggy-bank (e.g. "three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million").  Then read the Vox article to see how he is admitting all his EA/altruism talk was basically telling them what they wanted to hear so he'd be popular and well-liked and they'd trust him, because getting people to like you is winning and winning is all that counts.


And this set-up was having billions of dollars in investment funding thrown at it, and it was less well-organised than a school bake sale when it came to handling and keeping track of what money was coming in and where it was going.