Rock Island

Concepts are not durable objects; they are highly subject to change as they are transmitted from person to person, as many people in the social sciences are fond of pointing out. This is part of the reason why the understanding of what it means to be "Stoic" has shifted so much in past couple of millennia. Because most people derive their understanding of philosophical concepts from sources other than philosophy classes, textbooks and primary sources, the pop culture version of stoicism bears only a superficial outward resemblance to the original.

Normally, this isn't much of a concern, after all, modern religious practice has pretty much nothing in common with how things were done when Rome was still the dominant power in Europe, and no-one seems to care that the term "Cynic" appears to have absolutely no relation to the school of Greek philosophy that it derives from. But Stoicism has become caught up in the periphery of the Culture Wars, and this has licensed pedantry about how it's "supposed" to be done.

When I was young, I understood "stoicism" to mean something along the lines of suppressing outward displays of emotion. Having emotions was all well and good, but displaying them in public, especially negative ones, indicated a lack of internal control. And I found this a useful way of understanding things. As a high school student in the 1980s, I found that classmates of mine would call me "nigger" to my face not out of any genuine racial animus, because they sought to get a rise out of me. One which demonstrated that they had a certain level of control. Learning to not respond to the provocations (something which I failed to completely master while still in high school), I found that people were less likely to deploy them.

But it was not a universal position. There were (and are, really) any number of people who felt that anger was the correct response to such disrespect. In this, we disagreed on how efficacious it was as a tool of changing others behavior.

A lot of the modern discourse about "real" Stoicism versus the pop-culture variety centers around the idea that mastering one's responses to emotions means suppressing the emotions (or the perceptions of them) themselves. And I can understand that. The difference between accepting something that cannot be changed and being resigned to something that should be changed is not self-evident to an observer. Accordingly, neither is the understanding that one cannot control others versus maintaining a pretense that no harm was done. As "Toxic Masculinity" has become something that must be stamped out, the difficulty in recognizing its constituent parts becomes clearer.

In any event, I find the discussion interesting, as it provides a glimpse into the broader conflict over the "correct" ways of being an acting. Given how rapidly the world changes, I doubt that there will be anything resembling a resolution before everything moves om. But even the partial insight is a useful too.

Another Round

Video game performers, like voice actors and motion-capture performers are currently striking, hoping to pressure video game studios into commitments around the rules for the use of generative automation tools to simulate their performances and to be paid for such uses as if it were new performance, royalties, in a manner of speaking.

In the same way as the broader entertainment industry strike earlier, I suspect that this is going to backfire to a certain degree, because there are always going to be small, independent studios that aren't covered by any agreement. A SAG-AFTRA member quoted in the NPR story on the strike casts the dispute as being one between studio executives and workers, because portraying corporate executives as greedy and hostile to those less well-off than themselves tends to be a winner, but unless the tools are expensive enough that only the major studios than afford to use them, the big names are as likely to be followers in the use of the technology as they are to be leaders.

And if they are followers, then all bets are off. Smaller studios, including those that are only a single person with some passion and a game idea, are going to be all over generative automated tools as a way of putting out games with the polish and appearance that the big studios manage. Sure, a lot of games indulge in quirky pixel art or proudly display graphics that haven't been cutting-edge for the past quarter-century, but a lot of that is driven as much by necessity as it is by aesthetics. After all, if people didn't want the latest and greatest, I'm pretty sure that Square Enix could have saved a fortune on their Final Fantasy VII updates by sticking to the animation style of the original. And some of what made Resident Evil so charming back in the day were clever uses of workarounds for the technology of the day; Capcom left the old look behind for a reason. Tools that allow lower-budget operations to put out better products will be adopted, regardless of how often SAG-AFTRA attempts to stand athwart progress shouting "Stop!"

One of the ways in which unions protect their members is by shielding them from competition; in this case from technology. But they can only shield members from organizations they have pull with. SAG-AFTRA may be able to intimidate some small studios by threatening to stifle them once they become large enough that they would need to rely on unionized labor, but that's unlikely to work on an individual or small group of friends who are working on a labor of love. And if these tools allow for these independent games to be competitive in the marketplace, they're going to attract more people to use them.

The answer to automation is always going to have to be the next thing. If automation is going to produce the next wave or jobs that only people can do, then the goal should be to start looking for that wave now, and bringing it about, rather than sitting on the shore commanding the tide to turn back. (After all, even kings know better than to think that would work.) But that's a serious ask for an organization that's built on protecting the ability of people to do things as they've been done in the past.

Unprocessed

Dame Caroline [Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons media committee] then wrote to Rumble, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook owner Meta asking if they would follow suit.

In her letter to Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski, she said: "While we recognise that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

"We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.

"We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour."
Rumble rejects MP's 'disturbing' letter over Russell Brand income

Expecting that someone would have their income withheld on the basis of accusations? No wonder "cancel culture" has acquired a bad name. The fact that legislators would feel that it is appropriate to ask that media platforms take unilateral actions without allowing the accused the chance to defend themselves against whatever allegations have been leveled speaks to the need politicians feel to mirror the judgements that are rendered in the court of public opinion. (And, of course, Parliamentarian Dinenage won't be on the hook if it turns out that Russel Brand is cleared, and sues over the withheld funds.)

The problem with following the judgements of the court of public opinion is that they are fickle. This makes substituting those judgements for due process a more dangerous practice than it is often given credit for. The public is not accountable to anyone for popular opinions. Once can imagine a vocal segment of the public being up in arms over YouTube demonetizing a person's videos for some breach of the terms of service, where the public is on the side of the video creator. Legislators will have a difficult time in asking companies to follow their own rules if they advocate for those rules to be set aside every time they start feeling the heat from some or another group of their constituents.

But more importantly, deciding that the processes and procedures that organizations and institutions have for investigating and sanctioning violations of rules need not apply when some number of people are sufficiently vocal about it, or someone is accused of something unpopular has the effect of turning rules and the like into means of punishing people for being unpopular or the targets of public anger, rather than being the result of a formal finding of fact - even if that finding of fact becomes a mere formality. Concepts like democracy and the rule of law are not meant to be weapons wielded against those who are out of favor, because the perception that they are is what splits societies. Especially when it appears that people in government are looking to the private sector to get around the rules that government has set for itself and/or expects the populace at large to follow. This is what lends the letter from the UK's House of Commons media committee an air of illegitimacy. Russel Brand has been accused of "inappropriate and potentially illegal" activity; and while those accusations may be very credible, he hasn't been convicted of anything yet. Placing the focus on victims shouldn't be a means of circumventing that.

Russel Brand, like a lot of people who deliberately set out to push people's buttons, hasn't done himself any favors with his behavior. That's what makes him so vulnerable to this sort of tactic. It's easy to take the allegations being made as the truth of the matter, even though, to the best of my knowledge, no charges have been filed and all of the accusations have been made anonymously. This forces any accountability to be outside of the formal structures of the legal system. Parliamentarian Dinenage doesn't have many options in calling for accountability other than to appeal to the private sector directly. (This still doesn't make it a good idea.) Mr. Brand, having made himself look bad in front of the court of public opinion (likely because he didn't predict that behavior that he thought was simply "edgy" when he did it would morph into "predatory" several years later), now finds that the public believes him capable of open sexual misconduct.

This leaves legislators in a difficult position. The public has a habit of expecting elected officials to mirror their attitudes and preconceptions back to them. And failing to do so can result in a challenger running on a promise that they will do so. That promise may be implied far more often than it's openly stated, but its there nonetheless. And the public, being merely a rather large mass of individuals, is incapable of being consistent; there will always be people for whom this or that outcome trumps other considerations. And it's worth noting that politicians are members of the public themselves. Be that as it may, however, I think that it's important that people in government not advocate for going around government; it just doesn't end well in the long term.

Props

I'm not very good at modern video games, especially the big, "AAA" titles that sit at the top of the market. They require skills and reflexes that I no longer have, and lack the time to regain. Fortunately, I can get a sense of these games without having to play them myself, given the substantial number of people who hope to game their way into, if not internet stardom, a workable sideline by posting videos of themselves playing on YouTube.

And this is how I came to learn of Final Fantasy 16. It's an action-adventure game, that takes a lot of the elements that have found their way into the Final Fantasy franchise over the decades and seeks to tell a new, and somewhat mature, story with them.

One of the primary plot elements is a group of people (or non-people, really) termed "bearers." Bearers are, unlike the rest of the population, capable of using magic naturally, and as a result of this are despised and enslaved by the non-magical populace. (People born into the aristocracy often exempted, of course.) It's one of those design decisions that the cliché "bold choice" was specifically coined for.

The problem is that the delivery is about half as subtle and nuanced as carving "slavery and prejudice are bad" into an anvil and dropping it on someone's head would be. And it's not helped by the fact that model of slavery being presented is modeled on the practice of chattel slavery in the Americas, but without having any discernible basis in the economics of the setting.

The people I'm watching play the game have not finished it yet, so I don't know everything the designers have done with the story element, but, for the time being, the whole thing seems to be driven by the desires of national leaders at some point in the past. I'll be pleased if it turns out that there is some sensible reason that fits in with the world as they've built it, but I'm not expecting much change.

A common problem with including "difficult" topics in popular media is that people tend to forget that bad ideas didn't take hold because they were bad ideas; but because in the context in which they operated, they seemed like good ideas. Having the main characters of Final Fantasy 16 pushing back against a society that embraces slavery would likely work better if the slavery in question seemed to exist for any other reason than to have the characters fight against it; or for the audience to pat themselves on the back for being incensed by it.

Erosion

The actors are joining writers who walked out in May, concerned about pay, working conditions and the industry's use of artificial intelligence (AI).
SAG strike: Actors join writers on Hollywood picket lines

I suspect that if the actors' concerns about the use of artificial intelligence tools to replace them in the future are founded, their days are already numbered. The question then becomes if they can make the studios go down with them.

Because it's one thing to force the "motion picture industry" as it exists now to agree to avoid replacing actors with technology. It's going to be another thing entirely to make the aspiring moviemakers of the future go along. I am reminded of the web series "Red Versus Blue" which was made within various incarnations of the Halo video games. The fledgling filmmakers at Rooster Teeth recorded their own voice lines, but all of the visuals came from the in-game rendering engine. It may not be long before anyone with access to good text-to-speech tools will be able to effectively make a passable radio play on their own. And even today's tools, which don't really qualify for the label "artificial intelligence" any more than the software on ones PC does, can do enough heavy lifting that a single person could crank out enough text for a 90-minute production in fairly short order. If it comes to pass that tools capable of rendering close enough to photorealistic video become available to everyday (if perhaps somewhat more affluent than the norm) people, people are going to experiment with making short films, then something long enough for a television episode, then feature-length, themselves.

Early efforts will likely be laughably bad, made by creators too invested to be able to see that their baby is ugly. But they'll get better. Once upon a time, it took entire studios to make animated short films. That's no longer the case. If that change comes for feature-length movies, such that a small group, or even an individual, can make something that's "good enough," the Screen Actors' Guild may be able to slow the tide, or make a bit more money from it, but they won't be able to stop it. If it comes in, it's going to wash them away. They may be fighting simply to enjoy the beach while it lasts.

Do I Know You?

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson's son doubles down on anti-vaccine stance.

If Chester Hanks is well-known enough to have headlines written about him, one would think that he would be well-known enough that his name could be used in those headlines. But such is the way of things; Mr. Hanks and Mrs. Wilson are enough of a draw to entice people to click in the hopes of some juicy family drama; where the Chester Hanks is not.

It's often said that the news media acts to distract the public away from the pressing things that require their attention. But while it's possible to make the case that providing news should be a public service, I don't know if the case can me made that providing news should be an act of charity. Journalists have to eat, just like everyone else, and principles are inedible. And so headlines about the celebrity-adjacent trade in the names that are well-known, as people are more likely to click through and see the advertising that comes with the story.

And to be sure, it's likely a trivial story. (No, I didn't bother to actually read it. Why do you ask?) Chester Hanks is an actor, musician and son of a famous person. He's not a policymaker, executive or an advisor to same. He's just a guy who has decided that he doesn't care for vaccination. So what else is new?

Uniformly Pale

I was texting back and forth with my niece; I'd asked her what she knew about Cyberpunk 2077. She doesn't really follow video games (understandable) and so the answer was basically not much. So I asked her this:

Did you know that the guy who created the world originally is Black?

She didn't. And I'm not really surprised by this. While Mike Pondsmith has had recent articles penned about him in both Wired and The Atlantic (among others) due to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 being one of the most anticipated titles in gaming, the fact that he's Black is never really mentioned. It's beside the point of the pieces, which are basically there to credit him for his work on the cyberpunk genre. A quick Google news search brings up nothing about him that appears to emphasize this part of his life.

I mention this because when I asked my niece if the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has been created by a Black man, it was because I wanted her to know that Black people were involved in such things, because it's not often mentioned. Race isn't often a big deal unless it's the focus of a story, and that means that it is easy to miss.

To a certain degree, I don't want all of her role models to be Black, because that's limiting. Part of the problem with the quest for role models is that it can put people into the position of waiting for others who can't have or don't themselves need narrow role models. If Barack Obama had needed a Black role model to demonstrate to him that he could be President of the United States, he never would have become the President himself. Being the first at something, or even the first person one knows, means not having a role model to show you that it can be done. But I didn't want her to think that if she went into the production side of the entertainment business, that she'd be there alone.

Sure, there are Black movie directors and the like, but they're mainly known for making things for Black people, rather than general audiences. And the fact that they are Black is a major part of the news stories about them. And I think that this creates the impression that they are rarer than perhaps they are. Which contributes to a sense that the worlds they live in are almost completely White. When I worked for Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, people would sometimes ask me what it was like to be the only Black person there.

"I wouldn't know," I answered, "there are a fair number of Black people there."

Not that Wizards was as ethnically diverse as the nation as a whole; it was significantly Whiter than that. But it was nowhere near exclusively White, despite the fact that tabletop roleplaying, like Dungeons and Dragons or Cyberpunk are considered to be the sorts of nerdy pastimes that are engaged in almost entirely by White people; with only a few Steve Urkel types to break up the monotony.

And part of this is due simply to the fact that the Black people in the industry simply aren't talked about that much, leaving the impression that outside of a few independent creators who are women and/or non-White, that the whole place is populated by Gary Gygax lookalikes. Understandable, but it does a disservice.

Change of Venue

It's movie awards season, with the 92nd Academy Awards coming up in the beginning of February. And now that nominations have been released, there has been something of a teapot tempest over the lack of women nominated for Best Director. The director of Little Women, Amy Pascal, suggested that part of the reason may be that most (some 72%) of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are men, and they are voting for the movie that appeal to them, personally. People are, she says, voting for the movies, the stories, that are important to them, rather than out of any deliberate bias. The BBC asks if the demographics of the people who give the awards has an impact on the stories they prefer, and thus the people who receive the awards.

All the movies nominated this year are good, and I can’t believe Bafta voters are inherently racist and misogynist, but the telling thing with lists is that they without doubt reflect the personality of the person or people compiling them.
Jason Solomons, Movie critic and journalist.

Georgie Yukiko Donovan notes that awards are something of a stamp of approval, one that allows moviemakers to move up the career ladder. But she also feels that the money needed to successfully campaign for an award means that "gender, race, money and class" are important factors. Critic Melissa Silverstein feels that the generally older White male perspective of the majority of awards judges invalidates the experiences of people outside of that demographic, and when all of the nominations for an award reflect that, then the award should not be given.

But maybe there's a better option. If the Academy Awards are too important to a filmmaker's career to be left to the whims of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, then the Oscars should be replaced with an award that better reflects the population that's important to the film industry. While the Oscars, and other major awards, are important because the press pays attention to them, they're also important because filmmakers compete for them. The time, effort and money that go into campaigning for the Oscars are representative of the prestige that they bring, but they also contribute to that same prestige.

Since awards season concentrates on movies that have already been released, there is a certain amount of sway that a new award can have. I don't know anyone who goes to a movie and then declines to make up their mind as to whether or not they enjoyed it until they find out how many Oscar nominations it received. The public can have very vocal opinions as to what they like or dislike in cinema, and are more than capable to disputing the choices that awards bodies make. So why not look to an award that selects a slate of candidates that matches the demographics one prefers and compete for that award? Sure, it will take some time to shift the public's attention to the new award. But change always takes time. And I suspect that it would be simpler than either expecting Academy or BAFTA or what-have-you voters to leave their own likes and dislikes at the door, or making wholesale changes to their voting memberships.

It's true that Oscars mean a lot to people, and a new award won't mean as much. But that focus on this particular award creates a neediness that threatens to eventually undermine it. If people understand that there is some sort of diversity quota built into the awards, will they retain the faith that the movies selected have earned their positions on the merits, or come to believe because someone else has determined the winners in advance, they awards are somewhat fraudulent. And if the current awards electors are simply middlemen, why not dispense with them?

Evidence

I came across the picture above in a social media post that (sadly) degenerated pretty much immediately into sniping between camps. I can understand why some of the faithful were aggrieved at the comparison, but I found it ironic that they felt the need to comment on the post and tell people: "If you don't believe in the Bible, then don't read/talk about it."

But Spider-Man isn't really all that much different than a classical Hero, like Heracles (Hercules) who has also been appropriated for modern comic books (despite the medium's general aversion to religion). One wonders, if there were a great catastrophe today, 1,000 years from now, would people think that some segment of the population regarded Spider-Man as a demigod? Or even a full-on deity? Would they be able to differentiate the stories that we tell to entertain ourselves or to make particular points from the stories that we understood to be true? Would there be arguments about whether these stories were meant to be history or allegory?

Back in the days when the scriptures of most modern religions were written, diaries weren't a big thing. The authors didn't include footnotes to tell us what they were thinking or attempting to get across to a reader. And so we argue about their intent, and their understanding of the world, and a lot of that argument is shaped by our modern opinions of what people were like back then. (And, it occurs to me, our opinions of ourselves as compared to them.) If you're convinced that ancient peoples were ignorant dirt farmers who needed to impose a cosmic order on a world they didn't have the knowledge to understand, that casts their belief systems in a much different light than an understanding that they were devout folk who were much more open to the divine.

And so I find myself wondering what people are going to think of us, when they look back after the centuries, especially if something happens to disrupt the transfer of knowledge into the future. Are we going to be seen as simple-minded ignoramuses, inventing stories of colorful strongmen to re-assure ourselves in an uncertain world? Morally insecure sophisticates, seeking to banish moral ambiguity? Overwhelmed and fantasizing about being powerful and animalistic?

I suspect that however the future looks back on us, we'd find it simplistic and, in being so, inaccurate. But I suspect that it will also be contentious. And I wonder what we'd make of that.

Not All Superheroes

The various media that make up pop culture can be useful places to explore current events and aspects of current society. Not all media however are suitable for this, and Marvel Comics' misleadingly titled What If? Magik Became Sorcerer Supreme is, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

(Overanalysis Mode: Engaged. And, by the way, if you're not familiar with the character of Magik, who is soon to be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'll give a brief rundown at the end of this post.)

One of the themes that What If? Magik Became Sorcerer Supreme attempts to tackle is abuse. This makes sense, given this history of the Magik character, as she was transitioning from minor incidental character to superheroine. But given that the book is a one-shot and only has a total of 28 pages (including several given over to full-page advertising) to tell a story, the shortcuts that needed to be taken seemed to undermine the entire enterprise.

The biggest difficulty that I had with the book was with Doctor Strange, and how he interacted with the character of Magik. The book opens with an adolescent Magik hitchhiking away from Westchester, New York, where the X-Men are headquartered. Resigning herself to the need to project some sex appeal to get a lift, she takes off her hood to allow her hair to be visible. This results in her being picked up by a man who, predictably, turns out to want sex in return. Doctor Strange enters the picture at this point, as Magik first flees the man, then starts beating the tar out of him with a broom when he corners her in an alley. Believing her to be some sort of sorcerous monster, Doctor Strange swoops in with a comically oversized battle-ax, saying:

"I'll admit this one probably had it coming, but your redneck reign of terror still ends tonight, creature."

While it's understandable that Doctor Strange believes that he's just rescued a man from being severely injured or killed by something masquerading as a "malnourished child," the fact of the matter is that the man was attempting to rape that same child. The "probably" seems misplaced.

And where the comic falls down is that Doctor Strange never seems to get any better about his treatment of Magik as the book quickly moves on. Despite being told more than once that he's doing the very things that other people have done to her with nefarious intent, Doctor Strange seems intent on restraining Magik until she gives in; which she does with remarkable speed, given how Doctor Strange is behaving.

Of course, being a comic book, things all turn out for the best, with Magik accepting Doctor Strange's tutelage, and embarking on a course that promises to turn her into a magical powerhouse (to go along with her mutant power), but it's unclear to me if the whole thing is really subversive or really tone-deaf, because Doctor Strange, in effect, forces himself on a young woman who has been running from years of abuse. The odd part of it all, is that the book seems to understand how bad Doctor Strange's choices are, even if Doctor Strange seems incapable of doing so. And even though Doctor Strange is setting off Magik's "abuser" sirens like a five-alarm fire.

And this, to me, is where the story seems broken. (Apologies for the long set-up.) In the end, Magik bears the responsibility for understanding that Doctor Strange is one of the Good Guys. Despite the fact that he seems incapable of behaving any differently from men who have set out to abuse her in the past, the story requires that she trust him and allow him to teach her, so she does. The book is so invested in its portrayal of Doctor Strange as arrogant, self-centered and out-of-touch that it makes Magik bend to that. And in doing do, takes on a strange feeling of "Not all men."

Not all men who abduct you are abusers. Not all men who pursue you in the face of "no" are bad. Not all men who attack your self-esteem are toxic. Not all men who see you as an end to their own goals have contempt for you.

And maybe these aren't the worst lessons in the world; even if I find them a bit suspect in a medium that's typically aimed at boys and young men. But I would submit that to really do them justice, and place them in a broader context where they don't seem like abuse apology, requires more than twenty or so pages of a one-shot comic book.

(Overanalysis Mode: Dis-engaged.)

Backstory: The character of Magik started out simply as Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina, the much younger sister of the X-man Colossus. She first appears as a small child when the international X-Men team was introduced in the mid-1970s, and would occasionally show up as a plot element. Eventually, she was abducted and taken to Limbo (one of Marvel Comic's versions of Hell) by a sorcerer/demon, where she learned some limited magic. Since time passes in Limbo much faster than on Earth, she also effectively aged several years over less than a day. Once returned to Earth, she became a member of the X-men's "junior" team, The New Mutants, as she also manifested the mutant power of creating disks of energy that allowed her to teleport. The What If? scenario posed by What If? Magik Became Sorcerer Supreme posits that Illyana instead ran away from Professor Xavier's school, and after apparently fighting off a number of sorcerers and mundanes alike who had designs on her, is brought to the attention of Doctor Strange.

All the Same

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's home turned out to be in the path of the Woolsey fire in southern California, and it was saved, at least in part, by a private firefighting crew hired by their insurance company. Presumably because sending people out to make sure that the house didn't burn to the ground was less expensive than paying to have it rebuilt and replacing a bunch of the stuff that's in it.

But, there has been a fair amount of controversy about this. The Atlantic takes some time to speak to the hullabaloo, while also laying out a brief history of firefighting in America. The story concludes as follows:

“Are the present examples (Kanye West et al.) the thin end of a wedge that will lead to the wealthy buying better services in all these realms: education, policing, healthcare, firefighting?” [University of Kansas historian Victor] Bailey wondered. “Or are we already a long way down this path?”

Well, to answer Mr. Bailey's question, we're already a long way down the path. After all, the wealthy can pay for private schools for their children, private security for their property and persons, pay the prices that physicians charge for whatever procedures they wish and a host of other things. And they already can have access to better firefighting, through the simple expedient of moving to a location where a number of other wealthy people live and paying the requisite taxes. In fact, they can do that for everything on Mr. Bailey's list. What Zip code one lives in goes a long way towards determining the baseline quality of public education, police departments, local medical services and the fire departments. We know this already, right?

The aspect brought up by the Woolsey fire is that merely being in proximity to wealth doesn't allow one to avail themselves of the supposedly superior private services that the wealthy can buy for themselves. Being able to get into the right Zip code may grant access to the "better" public schools that the 1% can send their children to. But if they hire private tutors for their children, their less well-off neighbors are still shut out. But that logic falters somewhat in this case. While firefighting is a publicly-funded service in many places, this is less often the case for homeowners insurance, except in the case of certain lines, like flood insurance, that private insurers are less interested in taking on. And it's hard to make the case that the homes of the wealthy should be allowed to burn simply to keep them on a par with their neighbors, when it's understood that this will result in a claim that will need to be paid - the money that the insurance company saved by protecting the home, rather than rebuilding it, can go to other people. This is not to say that preventing the destruction of the home is a benefit to others. But the extra money spent is deadweight loss, and that does no-one any good.

At some point, we're going to have to answer the question of what is money for. If, through a myriad of individual choices, people decide to make some fraction of the populace wealthy, what are they allowed to do with that wealth? If the only permissible expenditures are useless frivolities, is that genuinely going to address the perceived disparities? I'm not sure that it will, but perhaps we'll find out.

War of Words

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Yoda

Not a Chance

"I was the first guy on TV to say 'Give Trump a chance.' I f---ed up. Sorry," Chappelle said during a routine at the event, according to MSNBC's Willie Geist.
Dave Chappelle Regrets Saying to Give Trump a Chance: "I F---ed Up"

I don't get it. I don't understand how in effect saying, "Hey, let's allow the President to actually do some things, and then judge whether or not he's any good," counts as "fucking up." Because that implies that the correct course of action was not to extend to President Trump any benefit of the doubt - once the predetermination was made that Donald Trump was going to be a bad president, the appropriate thing is to act as if he's already done it.

This isn't a matter of tit for tat or raising the overall level of discourse. David Chappelle giving President Trump a chance before deciding to criticize him will not make a lick of difference when the political pendulum swings back the other way. I don't believe for a moment that people make their decisions that way. If right-leaning celebrities decide that a Democratic president is the worst thing ever (and I suspect that many of them will decide just that) they'll choose to criticize, or hold their fire based on what they think is best for them in the moment (whatever criteria they use to determine that), not on what others have done in the past.

As far as we in the public are concerned, whether or not we decided to give President Trump a chance or protest everything that seemed to offer a reason was immaterial. Regardless of what one thinks of the republican form of government, the fact remains that President Trump had the support of enough of the Republican voter base that most Republican members of Congress couldn't simply dismiss whatever he put forth out of hand without jeopardizing their own re-election chances. And so to the degree that the viewership of Saturday Night Live leans Democratic, the fact that they are of a mind to oppose the president doesn't matter in the slightest. The election was in November. The shouting that came after the vote tallies was simply the last resort of people who were, for the time being, politically powerless.

And in that sense, declining to "Give Trump a chance," is simply another form of partisan virtue signalling. While that may have its uses, declining to participate in it shouldn't be considered fucking up.

The Amored Warrior

When I was in high school, Robotech came out on television. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Robotech was a show cobbled together out of three Japanese animated science-fiction shows: Super-Dimension Fortress Macross, Super-Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada. In their native Japanese, the three shows were completely unrelated, and while the writing staff as Harmony Gold managed to alter their plotlines and backstories fairly competently and create a fairly workable meta-plot that wove the three together, there were still enough plot holes make the whole thing resemble Swiss cheese. But I was in high school - what did I care? In any event, my linking up with other fans of the show introduced me into a rather remarkable world of "Giant Robot" anime. That world turned out to have two primary branches. And at the base of one of them, the same one from which the shows that became Robotech grew out of, was Mobile Suit Gundam.

American cartoons, like G. I. Joe or Transformers were basically brawl-of-the-week-club. The "bad guys" would come up with some sort of scheme or plot, and attempt to put it into action. The "good guys" would sorté out to stop them, a battle would ensue and the bad guys would lose, returning the world a a whole to the status quo, after which a short Public Service Announcement would run. What set Gundam, and many other Japanese shows (imported the the United States or not) apart from this, was that there was a continuing storyline, and while the giant-robot throwdown was important, it wasn't the whole story.

Despite being just as much a 30-minute toy commercial as Transformers was, Gundam was also a drama, and one with a remarkably compelling story at its heart. The basic gist was this: In the 21st Century, mankind was united under the auspices of the Earth Federation; basically the United Nations. The national boundaries that had defined nation-states were gone. Earth was overcrowded, at least as far as the leaders of the Federation were concerned, and so they embarked upon an ambition program to colonize space in the immediate neighborhood of the Earth and the Moon. By mining the Moon and every asteroid they could catch for resources, the Earth Federation managed to construct hundreds of large O'Neill cylinder-style space stations (which the animation staff for Gundam simply copied more or less verbatim from the original designs), and clustered them into large groups called "Sides" at various LaGrange points in the Earth-Moon area. Then they began sending people to them. In a lot of science-fiction, it's the wealthy people who move to space. In Gundam, it was poorer people who were sent to be space colonists. Which makes a certain amount of sense. Space stations are relatively fragile. One errant asteroid or out-of-control cargo vessel can ruin your whole day.

Space colonies, like other types of colonies, have a habit of wanting to be independent, and that drive for independence eventually broke out into a shooting war. With giant robots. But it's not as silly as it might sound. Gundam pioneered what is now referred to as the "Real Robot" genre in animé. While the show doesn't always reflect them, the Mobile Suits that various characters piloted had descriptions and statistics that were meant to give you an idea of how these things fit into the real world. The RX-78-2 Gundam has a set height. Which is how they were able to build a "life-size" model of the thing and put it on display:

Big, isn't it? (Photo by Yoshiaki Miura in The Japan Times)

It has a defined (if not exactly realistic) weight, the machine-guns mounted in it's head are 60mm caliber, et cetera. This isn't to say that it's hard science-fiction, far from it. But it's defined in real-world terms.

In the end, Mobile Suit Gundam is a coming-of-age-story set against the backdrop of a civil war that rages through space and various places on the Earth and Moon. One where giant robot war machines fill in for tanks, space fighters, helicopters and any other of a number of more mundane types of military hardware, yet without completely displacing them. And it's one of my longest-lasting hobbies. From time to time, rather than grouse about current events or pontificate on things, I'll talk about this instead. Not from the point of view of an expert, but rather as a long-time fan. It should make for a nice change of pace.

Geek Lust

Now that geekery has become mainstream, geeks, no longer united by the disdain of society in general, have separated themselves into a bewildering array of different camps, some of which now seem to derive as much enjoyment from antagonizing each other as they do from their chosen hobbies. One particularly vocal subset of geekdom has devoted itself to crusading against the depictions of women in speculative fiction (including interactive fiction, such as games and the like; and simply artwork). And one of the new targets has become "boob armor." While a precise definition of boob armor is more or less non-existent, in general it refers to any personal body armor, worn by women, which is specifically shaped around a woman's breasts individually; although some usages appear to also take issue with more or less any armor that is shaped around the bust. While for some commentators, armor that appears to place more of an emphasis on sex appeal than protection is the target, for others, the whole concept is offensive, and needs to be stamped out.

Have fun storming the castle, gang!

Not that I think that the common use of women in speculative fiction as sex objects is at all helpful. Don't get me started on the shopworn trope, typified by Red Sonja, of "the Sexy Swordmaiden;" I'm trying to avoid going off on rants. But I think that seeking to eliminate particular depictions of women in specific media are unproductive, because that's not where the issue lies.

Boob armor is a symptom of 1) a marketing strategy that uses depictions of unlikely (although perhaps delusional is a better word) versions of the female form to draw in an overwhelmingly male demographic by appealing to a desirable (and of course, out of reach) fantasy life; and 2) the idea that most, if not all, of a woman's appeal resides in two glands (and perhaps some underlying fat) that rest on the wall of her chest. After all, we are talking about the "Tits" in "Tits and Ass." It's no coincidence that no matter how otherwise naked you depict a woman, certain parts of those two areas must be, ahem, "left to the imagination," unless you want it rated NC-17.

1) Is easily dealt with. It simply takes better material on the market. Generally speaking only pornography relies exclusively on sexuality as a marketing tool. More mainstream games, books, art, movies and other media typically are selling something else. They haul out the sex when they're either doing it poorly, or aren't sure that they can break through the clutter to make a big enough splash. If we presume, for the moment, that an original video game with decent gameplay and an engaging storyline doesn't need to fall back on T&A to the same degree as a lower-grade game, if at all, then the easiest was to push most of the openly exploitative stuff out of the market is to create more original, user-friendly and engaging video games. Will it keep people desperate to break into the industry from trying to drum up sales with naked sexuality? I suspect, after a while, that it will. After all, buggy whips are difficult to come by these days.

2) Is more pernicious, as it is a broader social issue. The sexualization and objectification of women in geek culture is a symptom the sexualization and objectification of women in the broader culture. I understand the idea of wanting geeks to be ahead of the curve on this one, as they often are in technology, but I don't know that the society as a whole is taking its cues from geek culture

"Sex sells," we hear over and over again. Which is true. Sex, however, isn't the only thing that sells. But if you're otherwise peddling crap, it doesn't hurt to have it as a fallback position. And to me, that's a side effect of the vaguely puritanical society that we live in. I can create a television show aimed at second-graders and load it up with all sorts of "fantasy violence," but I have to avoid open sexuality. Of course the issue isn't simply limited to children's programming because our attitudes around sexuality isn't limited simply to children. While it's often said that men are "programmed" to want sex, it's just as easy to say that men are expected, if not socially obligated, to want sex. I still remember discussions with peers where I found myself needing to defend a disinterest in someone I was "supposed" to want to go to bed with. Couple this with a standard of feminine beauty that seems to rely almost entirely on a combination of unlikely genetics, photomanipulation and outright delusion, and you have a recipe for dysfunctional attitudes towards sexuality. And we haven't even started on the infamous stereotype of the geek's discomfort around women.

In the end, geeky discussions of the portrayals of women in speculative fiction are going to have to be folded into the mainstream discussion of the roles of women in media and the purposes of various media forms, given that this isn't a geek thing. It's unlikely that geekdom will ever shed its reputation for sexism. But it may be able to compartmentalize it.

Profiling

So, apparently, in response to Beyoncé Knowles-Carter's Super Bowl show, which I haven't seen for myself, this popped up today on LinkedIn.

It sparked a debate, which quickly descended into smug self-righteousness, accusations, threats to report to moderators and even a couple of invocations of innocent until proven guilty.

But for me, it was the text at the bottom of the picture that stood out. "Confidential for law enforcement use only." Now, I don't know what the rules are for releasing High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area information to the general public, but this profile dates back to 1999, so I don't think that Detective Erbis actually released classified information, in that I suspect that whatever classified status this had has long lapsed. And, one will note, the Social Security Number has been redacted and there doesn't seem to be anything else sensitive on the form. But a few people did mention the "Confidential" label at the bottom of the page.

Taken at face value, it certainly appears that Detective Erbis released confidential information about Jay-Z in order to discredit Beyoncé, apparently because he was upset that Beyoncé's halftime show was a show of support for Black Lives Matter. Now, whether or not Black Lives Matter is correct in their understanding of the interactions between the Black community in the United States and the institution of law enforcement, part of what motivates them is the idea of a double standard - that the rules of engagement with White people are one way, and the rules of engagement with Black people are another. And an officer appearing to flout confidentiality laws to take political potshots at a Black person in the public sphere plays into that. Taken at face value (which, again, I don't) it seems as though the detective simply doesn't care that the profile is labeled "Confidential." It's of use in making his point about hypocrisy, and so he posts it publicly.

Black Lives Matter isn't about beating up on law enforcement. It's a statement of fear that an institution specifically charged with protecting the public is selective about which segments of the public it wants to protect. Just as Deterctive Erbis takes Beyoncé's marriage to Jay-Z as an indicator that she's not serious about protecting the lives of other Black people, his public release of a document clearly marked "Confidential" can be taken as an indicator that he's not serious about the rule of law. Likely both sides will find their supporters. The court of public opinion, I have found, has lax standards for evidence, and doesn't guarantee a right to counsel.

Bang, Bang

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
Donald Trump, speaking at Dordt College

While this statement has lit up the news media, and people are busy being shocked, shocked, that he said such a thing, Mr. Trump is merely pointing out something that has been true of American society for as long as there has been a United States, not to mention humanity in general - when people want something from you, they'll forgo hold you accountable for things in order to get it.

We have seen this in celebrity culture over and over - motion picture stars or recording artists time and again getting away with things that would land most of the rest of in jail or put an end to our future career prospects. It's common enough that the uproar over Donald Trump making that point doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sure, Mr. Trump chose a particularly graphic and extreme example, and we're unaccustomed to people openly making the point that they're popular enough to get away with assault with a deadly weapon, but he wouldn't be the first person, and wouldn't be the last, to be popular enough that people would look the other way.

Of course, Mr. Trump's statement is unlikely to be literally true - and it's just as unlikely that he honestly expects that it would be. But it's the sort of over-the-top and bombastic statement that he's become known for, and it part of the reason why so many of his supporters back him. Again, he's ignoring social convention (or "political correctness," as Trump himself might term it), and simply making the point in a way people understand. And he's pretty much correct in the overall sentiment, which is that his backers don't really care about the things that they're being told about him by his critics, and are choosing to stand by him.

Donald Trump's candidacy is showing more staying power than many people would have thought it ever could, and in doing so is beginning to shake up the American political scene. It will take more than him making a throwaway remark about shooting someone to change that.

Show, Don't Tell

So I found this on LinkedIn. It's interesting in that it is willing to show someone double-flipping the bird, but at the same time is unwilling to simply spell out "fucking." It occurs to me that we're now in a situation where we seem to be actively maintaining "fuck" (and its derivatives) as inappropriate language, despite the fact that it's effectively entered into everyday language, and the concept behind it is apparently considered acceptable for a professional networking site.

I am given to understand that it was the Puritans who decided that sexual and scatological language be lumped into the same category as taking the Lord's name in vain. I think that they would be pleased to find that it has been coded into law, although I suspect that they would be more displeased that people are not routinely prosecuted for violations. But now that the Puritans are long dead, their hang-ups about language seem pointless.

Fashionably Crazy

From the Counter Couture exhibit at the Bellevue Art Museum. A lot of the clothing that was displayed must have taken a lot of effort. I found myself wondering what today's fashions would be like if the wealthy and powerful of the 1960s had adopted clothing like this, which, in a lot of ways mirrors the sort of fashion that had attracted the upper classes - intricate (and thus likely very expensive), impractical for anything resembling work and difficult to keep clean.

Lances Ready

When I was young, gender issues were commonly framed within the not-entirely-serious idea of the Battle of the Sexes, and, as they say, all's fair in love and war. People's understanding of how gender and gender identity influence people and work within the world have changed, but all's fair in love and war has not. And so when I read Noah Berlatsky's New Republic article using reaction to the news that Kermit the Frog has a new girlfriend to address the fact that the public typically only engages with issues of domestic violence when men are the perpetrator, my first reaction was to shrug.

Back in the days of The Muppet Show, Miss Piggy never met a problem that she couldn't "karate chop" a solution to - and that included her disagreements with Kermit. Mr. Berlatsky takes exception to the fact that this was often found to be hilarious, and, in all honesty, rightly so:

When women (or female pigs) hit men, it's funny because it's unexpected—and because it violates our sense of how gender roles should work; when men are beaten, they cease to be men, and become emasculated and feminized. Likewise, Piggy’s karate-chops are funny because women who are powerful and violent cease to be classically female, and become swaggeringly masculine. That turns Piggy into a feminist icon, to some degree—but it's also why she's treated, throughout Muppet shows and movies, as a joke.

However, there is, and, I suspect has always been, some discomfort with Miss Piggy's way of solving problems. A discomfort that perhaps leads Megan Carpentier, writing in The Guardian, question the accuracy of the narrative, and perhaps to indulge in a little of what we would typically label victim-blaming:

It’s now clear that [Kermit] was also always colluding with the producers and directors to make sure that Miss Piggy looked like a violent, egotistical harridan and he was seen as the sensitive, Rainbow-Connection-bleating ex-hippie who gracefully put up with both her personality and living in her shadow.
Kermit the Frog's new girlfriend is younger, thinner – and blander

While one can go a bit overboard with using the "relationship" between a set of puppets as a stand in for serious issues in human relationships, in the end, Berlatsky is on to something. But he's also wasting his time.

Our current understandings of social justice don't tend to be about establishing an equitable society as a good end in and of itself. Rather they tend to be about addressing historical imbalances - attacking the social structures that elevated one group of people at the expense of another. There are different hierarchies that concern different people, but generally "the stereotypical affluent/wealthy, straight, white male" sits atop all of them, in a perceived central location in society, and everyone else radiates out from that point. And, generally speaking, conceptualizations of social justice view injustice as being solely a matter of the center pushing out against those farther out in the circle. While there may be a million personal reasons for this, it also fits neatly into the sort of Good-versus-Evil Manicheaen duality. Wealth, heterosexuals, whites and/or men are bad and poverty, non-heterosexuality, non-whites and women (and/or other people who do not identify as male) are good.

While it has been noted that this rather simple way of looking at the world has its problems, and some fairly serious ones, it's not going anywhere anytime soon, if at all. Whether locking others out of being seen as good is a strategy for maintaining access to scarce resources in what is perceived as a zero-sum game or simply a means of holding on to romantic ideals about the self or others, it's a beneficial adaptive strategy, which is why it has survived for so long.

Like it or not, society only advances through one enlightenment at a time. And a lot of the things that we find ourselves working to change are the result of both biological and social wiring, and thus, deeply ingrained. Thus, for the time being, articles like Mr. Berlatsky's are quixotic, at best. It strikes me as unlikely that Kermit the Frog will be on the receiving end of Miss Piggy's stereotyped karate chops as often as he was back in the day, if at all. Violence in general is more frowned upon in children's programming than it was when I was a child, and Piggy's hauling off and decking someone with a loud "Hiiii-ya!" is much more likely to be seen as a racist mockery of eastern martial arts, and thus Asians and Asian culture, that it was then. And so what we're left with is the online reaction to Kermit's new significant other, and if a columnist calls out Kermit as having faked the thumpings he received in decades past, who cares?

But if someone tilts at the windmills long enough, someone may actually see the giant hiding there. One can make the point that all of the great social justice movements of American, and even world, history started this way. So as much as I don't see the profit in taking up the lance myself, I salute those who do.