Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

The last time we discussed the way conservatives tend to get all their news from Right-Wing Media (RWM), people mostly used the word “bubble” or “cocoon”.

For me, both metaphors don’t quite hit the nail on the head. The point about a bubble is that it’s fragile, it inevitably pops. The point about a cocoon is that it’s temporary, a place to be safe while you grow up. The teenagers I know call our town “The Bubble”, because it’s so sheltered compared to the wide world — but they all know they’re going to be leaving The Bubble very soon, breaking out of this cocoon to flutter free.

I’m still fumbling for the right metaphor, but for right now I think of the RWM ecosystem (noösystem?) as a hall of mirrors, where everywhere you look you see a reflection of yourself.

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Part of the fannish web blew up this week because of an interview with Lino Disalvo about Disney’s upcoming animated movie, Frozen. One thing that’s different about Frozen is that there are two female leads in the “Princess” position (critical for Disney marketing purposes), Elsa and Anne. Disalvo said:

Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, ’cause they have to go through these range of emotions, but they’re very, very — you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna (Kristen Bell) being angry.”

Many people have taken serious umbrage at the implication that animating girls is *hard* because they all look alike, or something — especially given that the two female leads in Frozen look a *lot* like Rapunzel from Tangled:

I had the feeling that Disalvo was trying to say something specific that he couldn’t articulate, so I asked for help. A reader who’s a professional animator explained:

What he’s trying to say is, in every Disney movie I can think of, all of the women are very contained and “pretty.” It’s more how seriously you want the audience to read the character.

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At this point, all Democrats and a sprinkling of Republicans call the House GOP’s threat to not raise the debt ceiling “hostage-taking” or indeed “economic terrorism”. When Obama absolutely refuses to negotiate about the debt ceiling, then, we think “that’s right, we don’t negotiate with terrorists” and nod firmly.

Breaching the debt ceiling would mean defaulting on the US’s obligations. It’s not about refusing to run up more debt, it’s about refusing to pay debts we’re already run up. The results would likely be catastrophic, for the US and for the rest of the world.

Obama *did* negotiate with Republicans to avert a 2011 debt ceiling breach, but it was really ugly. He seems to have hoped that it was a one-time thing, but Republicans clearly didn’t feel that way.:

[Senator (R-KY) Mitch] McConnell said he could imagine doing this again.

“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”Now the Republicans have taken the same hostage, again — as could have been predicted by anyone who’d ever heard of Danegeld.

The thing is, though we may say “don’t negotiate with terrorists”, that’s complete (and dangerous) bull. If someone takes hostages, *of course* you talk with them. You negotiate because calming the situation and getting the hostages out alive is far more important than “standing firm”.

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Reality in the sense of “Reality TV”, i.e. “not reality”. A performance.

Right now I see people from Karl Rove to Paul Krugman saying that the GOP’s determination to “defund Obamacare or bust” is quixotic, self-defeating, or just plain crazy.[1]

I don’t think it is. I think that, for the Tea Party end of the GOP, the attack on Obamacare makes good business sense. It’s just a question of what business they’re actually in — and I don’t think that business is politics in the sense of law-making. Their business is performance.

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In my last post I mentioned some things I was disappointed by in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, but that’s not by any means my opinion of the book as a whole. Indeed, I found it fascinating, mind-opening and for the most part convincing in its core thesis: that money did not arise out of barter, as the story is usually told, but out of debt. Graeber argues that debt as a social obligation is much older and more universal than money, and he demonstrates it with wide-ranging knowledge of history and anthropology.

One of the many insights I got from the book was into the nature of the Jewish High Holy Days, the “Days of Awe”. Not because Graeber discusses them specifically, but because of this passage, describing Early Modern England (based on the work of Craig Muldrew):

In a typical village … everyone was involved in selling something, however just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would hold a general public “reckoning”, canceling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods. [Debt, p.327]

Graeber notes that “the circular cancellation of debts in this way seems to have been quite a common practice in much of history” [p.400-01], though he gives no other details.

When I read Graeber’s description of a yearly circular debt cancellation, I immediately recognized the Days of Repentance.

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I was surprised by the romantic historical ignorance about work in Yves Smith’s post on The Rise of Bullshit Jobs. It’s annoying, because I agree with Smith (and David Graeber, whom he starts out quoting) that

most people work longer hours than they should and consume too much, and many would benefit from increased free time to spend with family or relaxing.

But then he goes and quotes Yasha Levine, talking about
The Invention of Capitalism by economic historian Michael Perelmen:

Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?…

A romantic vision of the pre-industrial “rural communal lifestyle” is also my biggest criticism of Graeber’s Debt, though he romanticizes the forager (hunter-gatherer) communal lifestyle instead.

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Long time no blog! I went on vacation, and then I had to do all the work I didn’t do while I was on vacation. And now Labor Day, the school year, and the High Holy Days are charging down upon me, but I’m determined to get back on the horse.

One of the things I took on vacation was the used Nook I recently got from a friend. I hadn’t had it for very long, but I was already becoming used to taking long fanfic with me instead of always having to read it at my desk, and to reading larger print when I feel like it. The Archive of Our Own lets you download stories in various formats, so I’ve been saving them as EPUBs and loading them onto the Nook.

So of course one of the things I *did* on vacation was get the Nook wet. Not even in the ocean — my water bottle opened in my bag. I rescued the Nook almost immediately, put it inside a bag of rice and left it there for a week, but I think I killed it — when I plug it into the computer the computer doesn’t even recognize that there’s anything *there*. The Bronte sisters’ faces just keep mocking me.

“Crumbs, I said, “maybe I’ll look into getting another one. All I want is something to read black & white text on, I don’t need WiFi or a color screen. How hard can it be?“

I can hear you laughing, you know.

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Pacific Rim hasn’t done as well in the US as had been hoped (for a nearly-$200-million movie), though it’s racking up enough bucks internationally that there will be a sequel. I think its comparative failure here was because the marketing was wrong.

The marketing, and the reviews, said that Pacific Rim is “by fanboys, for fanboys”. But let me tell you, I know a LOT of fangirls, and we have fallen for this movie hook, line and sinker.

At least in the US, the marketing tagline for Pacific Rim was “To Fight Monsters, We Created Monsters”. And this is what the trailers showed: giant invading alien monsters, battled by equally giant robots, controlled by square-jawed men. I was *deeply* unimpressed with the first trailer I saw, and wrote the movie off as “another take on Transformers, probably based on a comic or video game I’ve never heard of. Boring, loud, sausagefest, skipable.”

But this isn’t what the movie is about. It’s not about how “we created monsters” or “we made giant scary robots, powered by men.” The *point* of Pacific Rim, at least as far as the fangirls (and similar) are concerned, is we fight giant aliens with giant robots powered by our soulbonds. What’s driving the robots (“Jaegers”) isn’t “a man” or even “a human being”, it’s a relationship.

Cut for massive, total spoilers for the film.

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Andrew Sullivan has been having a discussion about suicide. He quotes Clancy Martin:

“[E]very suicide’s an asshole,” wrote Mary Karr, in a poem about [David Foster] Wallace’s death. “There is a good reason I am not/ God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.” Suicide, seen as among the most selfish of acts, pushes a button in us that even murder doesn’t.

I have repeatedly heard grieving people rage at the selfishness of a suicidal love one, how the person would never do that if they actually cared about their family and friends.

Speaking as someone who’s been depressed to the point of suicide (though fortunately never consciously attempted), this is bunk. When you’re that depressed, it feels as though everything you do or touch is horrible, and that your continued existence will be a burden to your family. You really, truly believe that they will be better off without you.

Now you may say, “but how could they believe that?!? They’d
have
to
be
crazy …
oh.”

Well, DUH. Depression doesn’t involve just a disorder of emotion, it involves disordered thoughts, as well. The most prominent of these thoughts is hopelessness, that there is no way out.

Discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation under the cut

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Currently there’s a huge discussion going around science fiction & fantasy circles about (sexual) harassment at cons. Ground zero is Reporting Harassment at a Convention: A First-Person How-To by Elise Matthesen, which has been posted at John Scalzi’s blog, Jim Hines’ blog, and Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, among others.

In brief: Mattheson was harrassed[1] at WisCon by a fairly prominent professional editor, reported it to his employer and to the con, and they listened. Her article is a discussion of the procedures she and the people she dealt with followed, with advice for other people who might find themselves in a similar situation.

Mattheson did not say so, but the harasser was Jim Frenkel. Apparently, he is known for inappropriate behavior of the sort colloquially known as “creeping”, but while there have been informal complaints before this no-one has been willing to make a formal record.

What kind of thing is covered by “creeping”?

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Andrew Sullivan has been doing one of his mostly-reader-email series, this one on What Is a Bisexual, Anyway?. In honor of Pride Day and Brenda Howard, a bisexual activist who was one of the main organizers of the first Gay Pride parades, I’ll chime in with my opinion as a scientist and a bisexual.

I’m using this headline because I have often seen people ask, “Do bisexuals really exist?”, to which my reaction is: I’m standing right here, what part of my existence is difficult to believe in? It’s much more difficult for me, personally, to believe that monosexuals[1] really, truly exist.

I’m not *actually* saying that there’s no such thing as monosexuals, I’m just saying that the evidence doesn’t point in the direction of monosexuality being the default for humans. You accept my existence — and the validity of my experience — I’ll accept yours.

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From Andrew Sullivan, I learn that Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs, was asked by Annasue McCleave Wilson of Publisher’s Weekly, about the protagonist of the book:

I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

Messud exploded:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? … If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

The New Yorker wrote:

This critical double standard—that tormented, foul-mouthed, or perverse male characters are celebrated, while their female counterparts are primly dismissed as unlikeable—has been pointed out many times before. But Messud’s comments seemed an occasion to examine the question again.

As a reader of fanfiction, I spend a great deal of time thinking about stories, discussing stories, and comparing my reactions to a story to other readers’ (or viewers’) reactions. It’s disconcerting to read the responses from Donald Antrim, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, and Tessa Hadley — all writers of Serious Literary Fiction — who are clearly operating in a different critical landscape with different assumptions than I’m used to. Everything seems so much more tidy and certain where they are for both writers and readers, while I keep thinking “What do you mean we, Kemo Sabe?”

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I was not looking forward to Star Trek: Into Darkness, though I am a ST: The Original Series fan.

By which I mean, because I am a ST:TOS fan.

[the following post is *spoiler-free* with regard to ST:ID — I started working on it weeks before the movie came out. I’ll put up a spoilery post at some other time.]

The thing about ST:TOS that you whippersnappers may not realize is that it was both radical and transformative. I can talk for hours about Gene Roddenberry’s many faults, but he actually had a political vision with Star Trek. He wanted to show a universe — a future — in which peace, diversity, and rationality are not only desirable, they are *possible*, we *can* get there from here.

And it started with the casting.

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Brand, Gerhard. “Lolita.” Magill’s Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1-2. Literary Reference Center. Web. 13 May 2013.

The novel works on many levels: It is a remorseless satire of middle-class, immature America and a seriocomic commentary on Continental-American cultural relations. More profoundly, it is a moving romance in the medieval tradition of courtly love, with the afflicted Humbert Humbert displaying his derangement by obsessional devotion and self-pitying masochism. He submits himself to his emotionally unattainable mistress as her slavish servant, glorying in her cruelly capricious power over him.

[emphasis mine] The medieval tradition of courtly love is calling, they want an apology. Flogging would be traditional.

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This Film Is Not Yet Rated does a great job of exposing many of the deep problems with the movie industry’s MPAA ratings, but I think it overlooks a big one. It seems to me that the movie ratings board hands out R and NC-17 ratings based on two general factors: how much they dislike the violence, and how much they like the sex. Just as pornography has been defined as “what turns the Supreme Court on”, NC-17 is defined in practice as “what turns the Ratings Board on”.

Cut for a major work in the canon of Western art, may be NSFW in parts of the US.

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