Scifi Saturday: Cary starts a hunt, part one

The musty-smelling room was long, dark, and featureless. To Cary, it seemed more like a truncated bit of corridor than an actual room. He thought he could see a large shape at the other end. Cary wiped his palms against his pants and stepped forward.

“I’m looking for The Houndmaster? The guide brought me here.”

“For what purpose?”

The voice was clear and cool, a bit higher than Cary’s own.

“I’m an apprentice in the Turtle Bay Fishers’ Guild. We need to find a pollution source. My mentor told me to figure it out.” Cary paused. “I think I need your help to solve it.”

A ceiling light flicked on, causing Cary’s eyes to water.

“And so this is your trial.”

Cary nodded, rubbing his eyes. “Find a problem and solve it.”

“Do you know, I once heard of an apprentice who created their own problem, the better to earn their full membership.”

Eyes clear, Cary took in the person at the other end of the room. The Fae seemed small, sitting on the floor with faer legs hidden by loose, brown cloth. Behind faer was curled an enormous dog that seemed to be carved out of stone or or some dull metal, with patterns engraved in on its surface. The Houndmaster reclined against the dog’s side, with its head resting on faer shoulder. The eyes seemed to be flat black stones, set in the dog’s ornately carved face.

“What happened to that apprentice?”

“They asked one of us to solve their problem, and fae did. They no longer live in this city.”

Cary blinked.

“Well, uh, I didn’t create this problem, and even if I did, it still needs solving.”

“Good answer. Tell me what you have found.”

“Pathogens on the incoming tide. I believe it’s a sewage leak of some sort, and I did some digging. There aren’t any treatment facilities upstream, so it’s probably someone or something that’s operating without oversight.”

“And it would not do for our city’s clear waters to be sullied. Good. This is work that needs doing, and there will be no debt or payment.”

The Houndmaster stood, and Cary took a step back, bumping into a wall where the room’s door had been. As the Fae rose from faer sitting position, faer legs were revealed to be mechanical, shaped like the hind legs of a dog, and made of the same material as the hound. Cary’s eyes rose, and he saw that the hound’s head had risen with the human Fae, separating from its massive body to remain on faer shoulder. Fae stalked toward Cary, faer footsteps inaudible, and stood in front of Cary, half a meter taller than him.

Faer face was smooth and round, with a small nose, and full, black lips. Metallic tattoos glistened with gold and silver patterns on faer temples and forehead, looking a little like a crown.

“Outsiders call me Houndmaster.” Fae stooped slightly, extending a short arm, banded with the same metallic tattoos. Cary closed his mouth, and lifted his hand to touch fingers with The Houndmaster.

“Now, we shall see what we can do.”

The Houndmaster turned to the side and knelt. As faer legs slowly folded, Cary glanced at faer back, seeing that a sort of sort of metallic hump seemed to emerge from the back of faer tunic, forming a platform that extended back from faer left shoulder, supporting the hound’s head. Kneeling, fae reached up, lifted the head, and gently placed it on the floor, facing the Houndmaster. Placing one hand on it’s head, fae leaned in and spoke softly.

“There is work to be done, and it requires your abilities.”

Fae’s head tilted to the side, as if listening. Cary could see the corner of faer mouth tug upwards in a small smile.

“Because we are not the only ones present, and we wouldn’t want our guest to feel neglected… No, Eldest. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

The Houndmaster glanced up at Cary and shrugged.

“The pack is shy at times, and faen’ve recently welcomed a new member. If you earn their respect, faen may choose to speak with you.”

“How might I go about that?”

“That is not for me to say.”

Fae turned back to the head. “Will you aid us?”

For a long moment, there was no sound, and no motion, then the head’s black eyes lit up with a soft, golden glow, and The Houndmaster stood, returning the head to its place on faer shoulder. Fae turned and looked down at Cary.

“The pack has agreed. We will find the source of this pollution.”

“We appreciate that. Will you need my help?”

“You may accompany us, insofar as you are able.”

Cary blinked. “Do you move that fast?”

“Quite the contrary, but we will not stop until the source has been found, and if – as you suspect – it is under water, then we will follow our quarry into the depths. Do you dive? Have you a submersible?”

Cary shook his head. “Just a canoe.”

“Then you may follow in your canoe.”

“I’ll do that. If you need to keep anything on board while you work you’re welcome to.”

“No, there are no things we would need to keep on your boat. We will meet you at the southwest boundary of Turtle Bay in an hour.”

The Houndmaster turned and stalked to the back of the long room. Fae pressed faer palms against the wall. Glowing signs appeared on the wall around faer hands, and then both wall and signs faded showing the dim waters of Central Park. The Houndmaster stepped forward as the water poured in, not changing pace as fae entered the torrent. Cary stood frozen, and braced himself as fae disappeared into the rushing water, but the wall re-appeared, and the flood was cut off. The water spread out on the floor, and was only millimeters deep as it gently flowed around his shoes. The water sank into the floor, leaving it dry, and Cary stepped back through the newly re-opened doorway, and into the passage beyond.

As it had on his way into Manhattan’s Otherworld, a bright speck of light was projected into the air in front of him, and he followed it through the dim, dripping corridor, until it vanished by the lift. He entered, and was carried back to the surface. He stepped out into the warm air and bustling noise of Central Park’s floating market, and made his way through the evening crowd to his docked canoe. Cary stepped lightly into the vessel, sat, and pushed off. He had an hour to meet the Houndmaster, so he decided to save the outboard’s battery and move under his own power. His paddle bit into the water and he slid forward.

Yesterday

A warm breeze blew droplets of rain into Cary’s eyes as his canoe coasted close to the ivy-covered hulk of an ancient tower. His earpiece chimed softly as he passed his mentor’s lot beacon, and he dug in his paddle, turning the vessel into a gap in the ivy. Jo’s canoe was tied a metal railing, and his mentor was lounging in a hammock over the dark waters inside the building, her wrinkled face and silver hair lit up by the tablet she was looking at. He stilled his canoe near her hammock.

“Hey, Jo.”

She glanced down at him.

“Your face says you found somethin’.”

“I think there’s a sewage leak.”

“Really now?”

“Fecal bacteria in all four quadrants.”

“Well, sounds like you’ve found a problem.”

Cary nodded.

“Can’t have the fish getting contaminated. Where do we go from here?”

Jo raised a bushy eyebrow at him, and turned back to her tablet. Cary suppressed an urge to groan. Jo had taken him as guild apprentice when he was 10, and the past seven years had taught him to dread the moments when she simply didn’t answer a question. It invariably meant that she felt he should already know the answer, and so it was on him to figure it out, or to ask a better question. He set his paddle on the bottom of the canoe, and rolled his shoulders, thinking.

Jo was a senior member of the guild, and in addition to turning Cary into a competent fisher, had also shared her belief that any task that arose should be tackled immediately, lest it cut into their free time. The guild’s strict fishing quotas meant that each fisher started their shift knowing the maximum they could take. Jo had sent Cary to other fishers, to see how they worked, and it made him realize how many different approaches there were. He could see the value in the meditative approach that some of his guildmates took, but he preferred Jo’s goal of spending as little time actually working as possible. The key was always to take the time to do it right, so no followup would be needed.

The apprenticeship was his job, and so he had to take the time to do it right, and now his mentor had told him that he’d missed something. He glanced up at her. Whatever he’d missed, it wasn’t big, or she wouldn’t be smirking at her tablet. Even so, he was annoyed that he’d missed something. After seven years of apprenticeship, he was on the verge of becoming the guild’s newest full member. He’d even heard Jo telling Leon that he’d learned everything he needed, so that just meant-

“Oh.”

Jo glanced at him, her smirk widening into a grin. Cary’s stomach fluttered as he stared up at her.

“Really?”

“Yup. This is your first chance.”

The last stage of his apprenticeship – find a problem in Turtle Bay or the Fishers’ Guild, and solve it. He looked at the water beside his boat, watching the phosphorescent glow that tailed a small school of fish. Jo wasn’t going to help him on this. Some mentors would help on a final task, but he knew Jo would be disappointed if he just gave a general request for help.

I can do this.

New York City was a complex web of collectives, all with their own purposes and ways of doing things. The Fisher’s Guild oversaw Turtle Bay, which meant maintaining the fishery for future generations, monitoring the water quality, and checking the “ruined” towers for signs of instability. When the city had been reclaimed, it was decided that Turtle Bay would remain a wild zone. At the time, it was a mix of whimsy and limited resources. A local legend held that there was a huge, ancient turtle that lived in the bay, and they had to make sure it had an ecosystem that would support her so she wouldn’t go looking for food in more populated areas. Nobody had ever seen the turtle, but the idea stuck. That had meant refitting the buildings for their new purpose as stable structures for vegetation, bird life, and as Cary had learned when Jo sent him up to inspect the building they were in currently, a thriving population of enormous spiders. He shook his head, putting those memories aside, and thought about his problem.

Because Turtle Bay was so closely monitored by the guild, it was a near certainty that the leak was outside their territory. In theory, Cary could simply alert the City Council of the problem, and they’d deal with it at some point, but he knew that Jo would find that to be unacceptable. She’d probably decide she hadn’t trained him properly, and set him to studying the city’s history or something. No, he needed to at least figure out how to track down the source of the contamination. He needed help from outside the guild.

“Oh.”

Jo looked up.

“You have a plan?”

“I think so.”

“Run it by me.”

“Wherever the sewage leak is, it’s probably under water, or someone would have smelled it, right?”

“Seems reasonable.”

“So I need someone that can trace bacterial contamination in the water back to its source.”

“You have someone in mind?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what’s your plan?”

“The guild has a good working relationship with the Fae, right?”

“As does anyone with half a brain.”

“So I’m going to Otherworld to incur a debt.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I know faen’ve got people who can do this, and frankly it’s about time I made my own connections, don’t you think?”

Jo cackled.

“Good boy. Yes, that should do. You know how to get there?”

“Everyone who grew up here knows. I’ve never interacted with one, but faen do make sure that every child in this city knows where to go if there’s trouble.”

And every parent in the city knew that if the didn’t treat their children well, they might decide that living in Otherworld was preferable. It wasn’t perfect – it wasn’t even a system – but it did mean that Cary knew where to go.

“Ok. I’m off to Central Park then.”

Jo shook her head.

“Go tomorrow afternoon, late-ish. The current will be in the same direction and that’ll help the- whoever you manage to get trace the contamination.”

“Oh, good point.”

“Of course it is. Are you catching any fish tonight?”

Cary shook his head.

“I think I’d better make sure I’m well-rested, and I’ve got some things to attend to at home.”

“Give my regards to your parents if you see them, and update me when you have something.”

“Will do.”

He grabbed his paddle and moved to leave the building.

“By the way,” called Jo, “Stop by the boathouse and note your findings. Say you’re dealing with it so that nobody else will waste time on it.”

“Will do.”

Cary grinned as his canoe slid out from under the building. This would be his first solo entry in the guild’s logbook.

Today

The gray sky was beginning to dim as Cary reached the southern boundary of Turtle Bay. Looking around, he saw the tall, Otherworldly form of the Houndmaster waiting for him on a small jetty. The hound’s eyes were still glowing, and several small drones were chasing each other around in the air nearby. As he approached, the aerial drones darted out to swoop around him, and then returned to the Houndmaster, settling to rest on faer head and shoulders. Now that faen weren’t moving, Cary counted six.

As he pulled his canoe alongside the jetty, the Houndmaster crouched slowly and gestured to the drones using him as a perch.

“These ones took a turn around the area, and the only traces of sewage faen could find were right by the water’s surface. I think it is safe to say that the source is below, so I will take the other half of the pack down, and see what we can find.”

“Sounds good to me.”

The drones took off again, and the Houndmaster stood, and stepped off the jetty with a splash that rocked Cary’s canoe. Holding his paddle to shade the water’s surface, he watched the Fae sink down, submersible drones darting out of the hound’s mouth. Fae hit the canal floor with a large puff of silt, and looked up at the drones. Bubbles emerged from faer “hunch”. The drones sniffed around a bit, and then faen moved southeast, followed by the Houndmaster. Fae moved along the bottom slowly, each footfall kicking up a puff of silt. The aerial drones kept pace with the rest of the pack, and Cary dug in his paddle and followed. Where the buildings created dark patches against the reflected sky, Cary could see fish following the Houndmaster, darting in around faer feet to eat things kicked up by the Fae’s passage. Bubbles rose from faer back at regular intervals.

As he glided forward, he also watched the aerial drones. In general, one or two would hover directly over over the Houndmaster, while the others would dart ahead and perch on railings, windowsills, or docks, until the Houndmaster was level with faen, at which point faen would switch out with the ones keeping pace. Occasionally, one would loop around Cary as if to make sure that he was still following. The Houndmaster’s pace was steady, so Cary stuck to paddling. The outboard was easier, but he preferred conserving its battery. A thought occurred.

As a drone looped back to check on him, he waved to faer.

“If you all want to save your energy, you can ride on my canoe, and I can keep following the bubbles.”

The drone came to a halt in the air, darted down to hover in front of his face, faer propellers giving a pleasantly cool breeze. Fae then darted over to the others, and faen all flew to the canoe and settled on the gunwales, extending little metal limbs to hold on.

“Good”, said Cary. “No sense in wasting energy when I’m already tagging along, eh? Let me know if you need anything.”

He wasn’t sure faen had the means to do so, but faen had understood his offer, and faen seemed able to communicate with the Houndmaster. He dug his paddle into the water and pushed them forward, following the trail of bubbles towards a pair of apartment buildings by the southwest edge of Turtle Bay. The Fae drones rocked a little with the motion of the boat, but faen held faenselves in place. Satisfied his passengers were safe, he looked up at the buildings. From the line of bubbles, it seemed they would be going between them, under the lattice of bridges that connected various floors. Dripping ivy hung down from the lowest bridge like a ragged, green curtain, and Cary could hear the sound of children at play as he approached. Peering up as he paddled, he could just make out shapes darting around in the support structures under the bridge. He felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. His family’s home was in a similar building, and the bottom bridge was one of their favorite playgrounds. By the time he’d taken on his apprenticeship and moved into his own flat a few rows down, he’d become an expert at swinging himself along the bars that made up the bridge’s support, and for the rare moments when he missed his handholds…

Splash

A small, dark shape tumbled into the canal, pulling a laugh from Cary. He looked up at the other kids, and moved his canoe to the leftmost edge of the canal.

“Passing under!”

A high voice called, “boat!” and the movement among the ivy paused.

“Hey mister!”

The one who’d fallen had surfaced and swum toward him, curly black hair cropped close against their head. A brown hand came up to wipe water out of their eyes.

“Those your drones?”

Cary grinned and shook his head.

“Fae, so be nice to faen.”

“Fae? Really? Are you Fae?” The kid grabbed onto the side of his canoe, looking up at him. “You don’t look Fae.”

“I’m not. I’m just a fisherman.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at Turtle Bay. “But we needed help. I’m Cary.”

“Greg.” Greg peered at the nearest drone. “Nice to meet you. I’ve never met a Fae before.”

The drone lifted off with a buzz, and landed on Greg’s head for a second, before returning to its place on the gunwale. Cary glanced toward the Houndmaster. The bubbles were stationary. Squinting, he could just make out the distorted form of the Houndmaster standing on the Canal floor facing them.

“Cary, right? Don’t faen talk?”

“The Houndmaster said faen will if faen feel like it, but I don’t think faen talk to outsiders much.”

“The Houndmaster?”

Cary pointed to the water. “Fae’s down there, waiting for us.”

Greg’s free hand plunged into a pocket in his shorts, and he pulled out a pair of goggles. He jammed them on his face, took a big breath, and dove. Peering over the side of the canoe, Cary watched him turning his head around, and then waving frantically at the Houndmaster. Fae waved back, and Greg surfaced with a shout.

“There’s a Fae in the water!”

“You’re just trying to get us to lose, too,” came the answer from above. “Let that person go through so we can keep playing!”

“No really! Fae’s working with the Turtle Bay Guild and fae’s right under the bridge, standing on the bottom! Fae waved at me!”

“It’s true,” called Cary. Everyone knew about the Fae, but faen kept to faenselves. Jo had once said faen enjoyed being mysterious.

“I’ll check.”

Another kid plunged into the water, and looked around, before waving at the Houndmaster, who waved again. The kid surfaced, and yelled to the others.

“It’s true!”

A second later, several kids dropped into the water at once, and the Houndmaster found faerself surrounded by children diving down to get a look. Fae waved at them, waited a moment, then turned and continued walking. The kids surfaced and surrounded Cary’s canoe.

“That’s so neat!”

“What’re you doing with faer?”

“Are there others around?”

“Did you see the big head on faer shoulder?”

“Yeah, with the glowing eyes”

“Faer legs are so cool! I want legs like that!”

Cary laughed, and answered the question directed at him.

“I found a little pollution in Turtle Bay and we’re trying to find the source.”

“Is it safe to be in the water?”

Cary nodded.

“Yes, and we’re going to keep it that way. Someone’s not taking care like they should, so we’re going to make sure it’s dealt with.” He glanced at his Fae passengers. “And yes, these ones are also Fae – faen’re part of the Houndmaster’s team.

“Oh! Sorry we didn’t say hi!”

This was followed by a chorus of greetings and waves. The drones lifted off, gently touched down on the bobbing heads, and then returned to the boat. It seemed that was how faen greeted children.

“Sorry kids, but I’ve gotta get moving. The Houndmaster’s getting ahead, and I don’t want to slow faer down.”

“Back up to the bridge and we’ll start over. Last one there has to be the ref!”

They all splashed toward the nearest building and began clambering upward, still chattering.

“Faen touched all of us! Do we have magic now?”

“Don’t be silly Milo. You don’t get powers unless you become a Fae.”

“Auntie Kat said faen don’t have powers, faen just use tech different.”

Cary paddled after the Houndmaster, grinning as he listened.

“Did you see fae just walking around on the canal floor? If that’s not magic, it’s close enough for me.”

“Faen wouldn’t take you, Ana. Everyone knows your parents treat you so well they probably get “parent of the month” medals from the Fae.”

“That’s not a thing, Walter.”

“I bet faen’ve got a list of good parents though. Faen’d have to.”

“Why?”

“If faen know who all the bad parents are, then it stands to reason faen know the good ones too.”

“Oooh.”

“You’re both being silly. Faen don’t know all the bad parents. Faen don’t have to. Faen just make sure that kids know where to go.”

“You see those drones? I bet faen have got them like that all over, to keep an eye on us.”

“Uh, help?

Cary brought his canoe to a quick stop and looked back. The child’s voice had a note of panic in it.

“Guys I’m stuck! I can’t- Ah!”

Greg, the kid who’d first fallen in the water, had lost his grip and was hanging upside down by his right ankle. It seemed to be caught in the vines a couple stories up. His right hand was bleeding.

“My ankle’s caught! I can’t- It hurts!”

“Oh shit! Greg hang on!”

“I think he’s hurt?”

“Mister can you help?”

Cary had already pulled his canoe around, and was paddling toward the wall as fast as he could. The drones lifted off and hovered near the crying child, but Cary was pretty sure faen couldn’t do anything to help. As he reached the building wall, he took a second to inspect it. The vines were old and sturdy, firmly gripping the building’s outer surface, which had been designed for that purpose. Their age, however, made them dangerous. Woody branches jutted out, making for easy climbing, but a painful fall if you were too close. One of the younger kids from his family’s building had had a fall like that and ended up losing an eye. Ray hadn’t been willing to play under the bridges after that.

Greg whimpered, and Cary grabbed a vine and hauled himself out of the canoe and on to the wall.

“I’m coming Greg, just hang on for a second. You’re gonna be all right!”

Part Two

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

A couple thoughts on Thanksgiving, and a video on the holiday’s history from Some More News

There’s a lot to be said about Thanksgiving, what it represents, and what it has been used to obscure. I don’t think I personally have a lot to add on the subject, so for this year, here’s an entertaining breakdown of the holiday’s bleak history, as well as the ways in which colonial abuse and erasure of Indigenous Americans continues today.

As I’ve said before, dealing with climate change and injustice will both require global solidarity, and a central part of that is uplifting and empowering those currently at the bottom of our society’s hierarchy, both within the United States, and around the world. This is not just because it is the just and moral thing to do, and not just because solidarity is a good strategy for building peace and prosperity, but also because despite everything, the Indigenous communities of the Americas and of the world are at the front lines of defending vital ecosystems from destruction, and opposing the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels.

The least we can do is support their fight.

If you want to commit to the superorganism, sharing your mind is not enough.

When the concept of superorganisms come up in science fiction, we tend to focus on the mental aspect of it. The collective consciousness of a hivemind seems to fascinate us, as something alien and uncomfortable. Stories that explore telepathy often dwell on the flood of thoughts and feelings from other people, and the sense of distrust and invasion upon realizing our thoughts and feelings can be seen or heard by others. I now have the opportunity, through the hivemind of the internet, to implant a new concept within your brain.

Come, and open your mind to the concept of a “social stomach”. Let me share with you these findings from – and I’m not joking about this- The Laboratory of Social Fluids, in the Biology Department of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

“Individual ants have two stomachs — one for digesting their own food and another one that comes first, a ‘social stomach’ for storing fluids that they share with other ants in their colony. These fluid exchanges allow ants to share food and other important proteins that the ants themselves produce,” says senior author Adria LeBoeuf, Assistant Professor and leader of the Laboratory of Social Fluids at the Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

“To help us understand why ants share these fluids, we explored whether the proteins they exchange are linked to an individual’s role in the colony or the colony’s life-cycle,” adds lead author Sanja Hakala, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Fribourg.

The team analysed all of the ant-produced proteins found in the social stomachs of individual ants. They then compared how the proteins varied depending on whether the ant was a forager or a nurse caring for the colony’s young. They also investigated if the proteins varied depending on whether the ants were part of a new colony or a more established one.

I find this honestly fascinating. It immediately makes me think of discoveries about the ties between gut health and mental health, and such delightful treatments as fecal transplants to foster a better gut microbiome. Everyone talks about the dangers of artificial intelligence and The Singularity, but nobody seems to be paying much attention to the fact that we seem to be in the early stages of developing the option of a social intestine.

In a lot of ways, we’re already pretty comfortable with swapping our innards around. Organ transplants have been a fairly common thing for a long time now, and we’re getting better at processes like that. We also have some success with artificial organs like hearts or the “artificial kidneys” used in dialysis, but that’s still very focused on our individuality, and what’s contained within our person.

Perhaps, in my quest for a more harmonious society, I need to pay more attention to the field of social fluids. Humanity has achieved a great deal through division of labor, and maybe we should take a key from our more advanced compatriots, and look into things like the division of metabolic labor, too!

LeBoeuf concludes: “It is hard to measure how metabolic work is shared between cells. Here, the ants pass things around in a way that we can easily access what they are sharing. Having a better understanding of how ants share metabolic labour may help us learn more about the ways that other creatures, like humans, distribute metabolic tasks between different tissues or different cells in their bodies.

The singularity may be coming, but do we really think it’ll stop with a collective cyber-mind?

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Bigotry, Transphobia, and the BBC: They always tell on themselves

It is not a new insight to say that bigots always tell on themselves. The reasons they give for their bigotry never hold up to scrutiny, either in how they align with measurable reality, or in how they align with the actions of those bigots. For one glaring example, white supremacy in the United States has always leaned heavily on the idea of “protecting white women” from the violence and sexuality of non-white (usually black) men. At the same time, the people who lean so heavily on this narrative regularly deride the concept of rape culture, and are openly hostile toward efforts to hold white rapists accountable for their crimes. Regardless of what they might say, their actions indicate that they care more about non-white men being seen as a threat to white women than they are about the safety or wellbeing of those women. Because that justifies the policies and cultural norms that they want.

A similar pattern emerges when we look at anti-immigrant rhetoric, as is well illustrated in this Lonerbox video about the recent moral panic about “Muslim grooming gangs”:

For those who didn’t watch the video, the prevalence of the problem was grossly, deliberately inflated, and the term “grooming gang” was defined in such a way that it excluded the vast majority of sexual assault committed against children. Once again, the stated concern for the white victims of non-white assailants is not visible in their actions. What’s important to people like Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad is that the group in question be seen as a threat, because that justifies bigoted laws and violence.

When the struggle for gay rights began to attract more attention, gay men were all accused of being pedophiles, and the narrative was that they had to be oppressed to protect the children. Even leaving aside the children being murdered around the world by the U.S. government, this lie was being told at the same time as the Roman Catholic Church was shuffling rapists around to protect and enable them, and other homophobic religious organizations had similar problems.

The goal wasn’t to protect children, it was to maintain bigotry and oppression. The children were just useful rhetorical tools.

It’s a story that repeats over and over again – bigotry against a group is justified with lies about the evils of that group, while the supposed victims are ignored.

And so we come to the BBC’s latest efforts at upholding the UK’s reputation as “TERF Island”.

The overall moral panic about trans people has never been about the supposed harm they do, because that harm doesn’t really exist. The same people who wail and wring their hands over the “danger” of trans women having access to toilets routinely ignore the much greater threats posed by cis men, and in the case of this article, by cis women. In their eagerness to paint trans women as rapists, the BBC chose to use an admitted rapist as a source, who then went on to call for trans people to be murdered.

Because bigots always tell on themselves. They find something “icky” and work backwards from that. They think they should have rights over another group and they work backward from that. The state of oppression, repression, and demographic hierarchy is the goal. It’s the “lifestyle” they want to protect. It’s where they feel safe from people and perspectives that scare them.

That’s not to say they don’t believe their own bullshit. I think most of them do believe it, but debunking a lie doesn’t tend to change anything, because the lie wasn’t the reason for their hatred – it was a justification to prevent you from calling them what they are, and to obstruct efforts at building a more just society.

Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Nonbinary people are valid.

And bigots lie to hide their bigotry.

Machine learning and complex information: How much of humanity has been affected by climate change?

A few years ago, I was working as a curriculum writer at a non-profit science education research company called TERC. The company has been around for a long time, but its central purpose, as I understand it, is to study how people teach and learn science of all sorts, with the goal of improving the process for both teachers and students. This means that while my job was to write lesson plans, readings, and so on, it was always as part of a larger research project. The difficulty with this sort of research is that if you’re trying to actually assess how well students understand the subject before and then after an attempt to teach it to them, you can’t just rely on an easily generated dataset like a multiple choice test. The best way to gauge a person’s understanding of a subject is to have them explain it, in their own words, to someone whose understanding is already good enough to assess the answer.

So how can you conduct data analysis on data that’s not in a simple numerical form?

You find a way to convert it.

For example, let’s take a basic question: What does the term “ecological mismatch” mean? Define it, and give an example.

For those who are unfamiliar, “ecological mismatch”, at least in the context of climate change, refers to a situation in which the seasonal patterns of different species that normally line up, cease to do so. For example, there are numerous bird species that breed in North America during the spring and summer, but fly south to South or Central America to avoid the cold winters. Why do they put in all the effort to make such a long trip? Why not just stay in the south? Because the explosion of insect and plant life in the northern spring provides an abundance of food far beyond the day to day in their more tropical “winter homes”.

The problem is that as the climate has warmed, spring has begun to come earlier to North America, and for those birds wintering around the equator, their evolved migratory instinct relies on Earth’s orbit around the sun, which is almost entirely unaffected by global warming. That means that their migration signal has stayed the same, but spring is coming earlier, so they arrive later in the season. The food supply that made this a successful behavior isn’t always there by the time they arrive. The timing is mismatched. This means the insects they’d normally eat have a population boom, as do the birds that don’t migrate as far. That in turn can affect plant populations, other insect populations, and so on.

So. We ask a class full of people to answer this question, and what we get is a mix of responses. Some are blank or completely wrong. Some get the definition mostly right, but the example wrong. Some get the example right and the definition wrong. Some get both right. Our goal, as researchers, is to convert this qualitative data into quantitative data, so that we can run it through equations, make graphs, and so on. One could simply go with “right” or “wrong”, but that’s going to give us an inaccurate picture. The students who are partly right do have some understanding of the subject. We could split it into three options – right, partially right, and wrong. That’s also not quite right, because it doesn’t tell us what they’re partly right about; so we split it into four – right, partly right (about the definition), partly right(about the example), and wrong. Now, with options 1, 2, 3, and 4, and a clear definition of each, we can go through everyone’s answer to the question, give it a number, and actually analyze the overall pattern of understanding.

And now we’re ready to teach the lesson.

Then, you give the same test after the lesson, break it down the same way, and compare the two to see how the overall level of understanding changed. Ideally, each student will be assigned a number so you can compare them to themselves, as well as looking at the group as a whole (the data should be anonymized as much as possible, both to protect people’s privacy in published data, and to prevent conscious or subconscious bias). There was also a long process of systematizing the instructions for evaluating these quizzes so that multiple qualified people would fairly reliably get the same results going through the same process. Remember: with research part of the goal is to ensure that strangers can reproduce what you did from your publication.

We generally didn’t do a quiz like this for a single lesson. The ideal was a full unit of about a week (longer if possible) to test what did or didn’t work, and the “after” quiz would be on the last day of the unit. Each quiz would have a mix of short- and long-answer questions, and once the framework for “coding” the tests was established, someone on the team would have to go through and code every test from every student, with checks on tough calls (you’d be amazed at how many ways there are to be almost right or partly wrong about a question like this), enter the numbers into a spreadsheet, and then we could start actually analyzing the data.

This is to answer a few relatively straightforward questions about how well students understand the subject matter we presented to them.

Now let’s get to the actual point of this article, and look at a different question – How much of the human population has been directly affected by climate change?

As before, we need to break the question down, so we know what answers we’re actually looking for. Obviously we need to define what it means to be affected by climate change. Going broadly, let’s say “forced to change behavior in some way (movement, spending, place of residence, etc.) by weather that would not have caused that change absent warming caused by humans”. That means we need to determine which weather phenomena count as “normal”, and which ones can be attributed to the rise in temperature. In many cases, that’s a matter not just of determining whether climate change influenced a given event, but how much of that event was due to higher global temperatures. Would the storm surge have breached the levees if sea levels were an inch lower? Would the storm have been as powerful if the planet was a degree cooler? Trying to figure this stuff out is very difficult and time-consuming, for those with the task of actually quantifying it.

And again, that’s just for one event, like a hurricane. We’re trying to see what patterns there are on a global scale, which means our best bet is to look at the answers that have already been given – the numerous publications on individual weather events, and how they affected people, and while all of these studies do have quantitative data, they’re often studying different things, using different methods, which means the numbers they get can also mean different things. Ideally, again, you would have a team of people who already know the subject matter very well, to analyze each publication and make sure the overall data analysis actually says what we think it does. If you’re being thorough, that means having a team examining over 100,000 studies of many different weather events, and generating a dataset that will give us results we can trust.

It’s a monumental amount of work – possibly more work than could reasonably be done by a group of experts.

So some folks trained computers to do it for them.

Increasing evidence suggests that climate change impacts are already observed around the world. Global environmental assessments face challenges to appraise the growing literature. Here we use the language model BERT to identify and classify studies on observed climate impacts, producing a comprehensive machine-learning-assisted evidence map. We estimate that 102,160 (64,958–164,274) publications document a broad range of observed impacts. By combining our spatially resolved database with grid-cell-level human-attributable changes in temperature and precipitation, we infer that attributable anthropogenic impacts may be occurring across 80% of the world’s land area, where 85% of the population reside. Our results reveal a substantial ‘attribution gap’ as robust levels of evidence for potentially attributable impacts are twice as prevalent in high-income than in low-income countries. While gaps remain on confidently attributabing climate impacts at the regional and sectoral level, this database illustrates the potential current impact of anthropogenic climate change across the globe.

The debut of the remarkable new word “attributabing” not withstanding, this approach to meta-analysis could end up being hugely useful in helping people in general keep up with the massive collective effort known as “science”. There are millions of scientific papers published every year, from people all over the planet. Our collective knowledge is such that it’s impossible for any person to read the current research on all but the tiniest fraction of it, and yet we need to have at least some general grasp of these issues if we want to have any control over our future as a species. Our capacity to understand what’s happening around us and respond accordingly is one of our greatest strengths as a species, but climate change is happening at a scale that’s a bit outside what we can easily wrap our minds around. That’s probably part of why we’ve gone so long without treating global warming as the crisis it is.

From a Washington Post article on the study:

In the United States, climate disasters have already caused at least 388 deaths and more than $100 billion in damage this year, according to analyses from The Washington Post and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Yet despite a pledge to halve emissions by the end of the decade, congressional Democrats are struggling to pass a pair of bills that would provide hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy, electric vehicles and programs that would help communities adapt to a changing climate.

The contrast between the scope of climate disasters and the scale of global ambition is top of mind for hundreds of protesters who have descended on Washington this week to demand an end to fossil fuel use.

“How can you say that we are in this climate emergency and be going around and saying we’re at this red point … and at the same time be giving away land for additional oil and gas infrastructure?” said Joye Braun, a community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who rallied in Washington this week.

The activists, many of them from Indigenous communities that have been harmed by global warming, risked arrest as they remained on the sidewalk outside the White House after police ordered them to clear the area.

The new research in Nature adds to a growing body of evidence that climate change is already disrupting human life on a global scale. Scientists are increasingly able to attribute events like heat waves and hurricanes to human actions. In August, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change devoted an entire chapter to the extreme weather consequences of a warming world.

The study’s conclusion that 85 percent of humanity is experiencing climate impacts may sound high. But it’s “probably an underestimation,” said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.

The study looked at average temperature and precipitation changes, rather than the most extreme impacts, for which Otto says there is even more evidence of climate change’s role.

“It is likely that nearly everyone in the world now experiences changes in extreme weather as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

The human toll of these events has become impossible to ignore. This summer, hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest died after unprecedented heat baked the usually temperate region. More than 1 million people in Madagascar are at risk of starvation as a historic drought morphs into a climate-induced famine. Catastrophic flooding caused New Yorkers to drown in their own homes, while flash flooding has inundated refugee camps in South Sudan.

In a letter released Monday, some 450 organizations representing 45 million health-care workers called attention to the way rising temperatures have increased the risk of many health issues, including breathing problems, mental illness and insect-borne diseases. One of the papers analyzed for the Nature study, for example, found that deaths from heart disease had risen in areas experiencing hotter conditions.

“The climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” the health organizations’ letter said.

As Braun points out in the quote above, the feeble “climate response” plans of most governments become a sick joke when put next to continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction, and the unwillingness of groups like the Democratic Party to do more than just say they care about the issue. It’s hard to tell if it’s malice or delusion, but in either case, it’s a problem, and it feels like they’re hoping people will just continue to underestimate the scale of what’s happening. Things like this new research could help us make a more compelling case for the change we need, by making it harder to wave the problem away. That said, the resources going into understanding what’s happening around the world aren’t much better distributed than wealth has been in this era of colonialism and neoliberalism:

Yet in many of the places that stand to suffer most from climate change, Callaghan and his colleagues found a deficit of research on what temperature and precipitation shifts could mean for people’s daily lives. The researchers identified fewer than 10,000 studies looking at climate change’s effect on Africa, and about half as many focused on South America. By contrast, roughly 30,000 published papers examined climate impacts in North America.

In poorer countries, the researchers say, roughly a quarter of people live in areas where there have been few impact studies, despite strong evidence that they are experiencing changes in temperature and precipitation patterns. In wealthier countries, that figure stands at only 3 percent.

“But it indicates that we’re not studying enough,” Callaghan said, “not that there isn’t anything happening.”

Otto attributes this discrepancy, known as an “attribution gap,” to a lack of capacity and funding for research in poor countries, as well as researchers’ tendency to reflect the priorities of wealthy nations.

In South Sudan, for example, efforts to understand flooding have been stymied by conflict and the difficulty of collecting weather data in the world’s youngest country.

Liz Stephens, an associate professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, wrote in an email that the Global Flood Awareness System from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service is “notoriously bad” at forecasting flooding in the White Nile and Blue Nile river basins. Without good data, scientists can’t easily say what places are likely to be deluged or warn when a disaster is about to hit. Officials may be caught off guard by weather events. Vulnerable people are less able to get out of harm’s way.

South Sudanese officials say half a million people — about 4 percent of the country’s population — have been displaced by the floods.

But the “attribution gap” makes machine-learning-based analyses like Callaghan’s all the more valuable, Otto said. These programs can help identify climate impacts even in places where there are not enough scientists studying them.

“It seems a very useful way … to understand better what climate change is costing us today in a global way that is more bottom-up,” Otto said.

A September study in Nature found that 60 percent of Earth’s oil and fossil methane gas and 90 percent of coal must remain in the ground for the world to have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a threshold that scientists say would spare humanity the most disastrous climate impacts.

Increasingly, groups are calling on President Biden to restrict fossil fuel production outright.

On Wednesday, a coalition of more than 380 groups filed a legal petition demanding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Two days later, hundreds of scientists submitted an open letter asking Biden to do the same.

“The reality of our situation is now so dire that only a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel extraction and combustion can fend off the worst consequences of the climate crisis,” they wrote.

In response to Monday’s protests, however, American Petroleum Institute spokeswoman Megan Bloomgren said curbing the country’s energy options would harm the economy and national security. “American energy is produced under some of the highest environmental standards in the world,” she said.

In other words, they have no intention of changing course.

The difficulty in studying climate change in regions currently suffering from things like war or the effects of climate change, is one part of why it’s so important to stop the imperialist policies of the United States in particular, and wealthy countries in general – the pattern for the last century and beyond has been for powerful nations to subject the less powerful ones to debt, invasions, coups, assassinations, death squads, and more, all in the name of securing the “interests” of a tiny ruling class. This is what drives the obscenely high emissions of the U.S. war machine, and the overthrow of regimes – like that of the Brazilian Workers Party, or the Bolivian Movement for Socialism – that are committed to both eliminating poverty and finding a way for us to live that doesn’t destroy the ecosystems on which we rely.

We can’t adapt to what’s happening if we don’t know what’s happening, and if we’re still focused on narrowminded ideas like profit and nationalism, we won’t have the resources to study the problem, let alone prepare for what’s coming.

If we want to avoid an unprecedented tide of death, we’re going to need truly revolutionary change in our political and economic systems. The alternative could well be extinction.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and due to my immigration status in Ireland this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

So people are talking about conservative brains again…

This is a topic I find simultaneously fascinating and annoying. There is some evidence that conservatives and progressives- as defined in the U.S. – have differences in brain function that match differences in thought and behavior. Basically, conservatives seem to have a stronger threat response, and the related portions of the brain tend to be a bit bigger. According to the scientist in the video clip below, conservatives are also less likely to respond to strong emotional reactions with the kind of self-assessment that might help them spot misinformation designed to provoke those strong reactions. We don’t know if brain differences cause conservative thinking, or if the patterns of conservative thinking cause the brain differences.

I want to note that the language I’m using IS biased – I am quite certain that conservatives are wrong about the things on which we disagree, and I’m also reasonably certain that most of my readers are not conservative. I am writing from my own perspective on this, but one could just as easily switch this around and talk about “liberals” having a less developed amygdala or overdeveloped prefrontal cortex.

I think it’s good to know this stuff about ourselves as a species, and some of what Azarian says about how to deal with that is fine. I think he’s right about needing to put more effort into encouraging self-assessment and introspection as a way to build up the parts of the brain that might temper a threat response with what Terry Pratchett might call “second thoughts” – a meta-assessment of not just the thing that created the initial emotional reaction, but also of the reaction itself.

Where he loses me is when he starts talking about focusing on the things we agree about, rather than our differences, and using that as a starting point to have us all getting along, and uniting humanity under a materialistic understanding of reality. My objection is not because of the goal. I am firmly convinced that material analysis of our circumstances is vitally important, and the lack of that on the political/religious right is a serious problem.

But.

There’s an anecdote I saw a while back about a neuroscientist who was studying chicken brains, found that they don’t deal with smell the way we do, and concluded that chickens don’t have nostrils. This was rebutted by chicken farmers, who pointed out that a lifetime of working with chickens had left them quite certain that chickens do, in fact, have nostrils. The neuroscientist had focused entirely on the chickens’ brains, and hadn’t looked at the entire creature.

I couldn’t find where I initially read that account, and at this point I think it may well be false, or I’m mis-remembering it, but it gets at a reasonably common problem among those who have put in the effort to become experts in a particular specialization. It seems that becoming an expert – especially in a field known to be “difficult” – sometimes leads people to believe their expertise covers subjects in which they are not specialists.

In this case, I think that Azarian’s “plan” is hampered by an ignorance of sociology and politics.

To begin with, I think it’s strange that he talks as if getting everyone to agree on how the world works is a new idea. It’s also strange to me that he believes we can change how people think by applying a Bayesian system, as though the people whose minds he want to change are going to happily go through HIS process, unlike every previous attempt at something similar. He’s right about the problems caused by overstating certainty, but he seems to ignore the way right-wing propagandists have exploited the honest assessments of uncertainty that are the norm in scientific literature (evolution and climate science being possibly the most famous examples). He also seems to have no idea about the material factors in society that lead to misinformation campaigns designed specifically to confuse and obscure not just the truth, but also our processes for determining the truth. In a lot of ways, this feels like someone saying “We need to solve climate change by replacing fossil fuels with a mix of nuclear and renewable energy”, and then acting like the work is done.

It would be nice if everyone took a rational approach to analyzing every situation and claim, but that’s an end goal, not a plan for getting there. This makes Azarian just another voice in the chorus of people convinced that they could save the world if only everyone agreed with them.

But I think it’s actually a bit worse than that. Azarian says we should focus on our areas of agreement to avoid the emotional chain reactions that come with confrontation and disagreement. Again, this feels like a very surface-level analysis. Yes – we all get along better when we all suppress those parts of ourselves that cause conflict. And no – that has never been a viable path to changing people’s opinions or thought patterns. To begin with, if your primary approach to change relies on changing how hundreds of millions of people think, then the best-case scenario has your process of change taking several generations to really take effect. Humans don’t live in “the long term”. We can and should make plans for the long term, and work for the long term, but we’re stuck living in the present. Saying that the solution is to focus on areas of agreement also means that people who are being hurt by the way society works today should shut up about it for the sake of getting along.

This is as irrational an expectation as saying that people will always react calmly and thoughtfully when you tell them they’re wrong.

Take the example of Schrödinger’s Douchebag; that guy who will say something that sounds bigoted, and then decide whether they meant it based on the reaction of the group. If anyone pushes back, “it was just a joke!”, and if no one does, then everyone agrees it’s true. If you also push back on the idea that their bigotry is “just a joke”, then you’re the one causing conflict, because you can’t take a joke.

The fact is that there are people who like the world as it is, and they tend to be people who have a lot of power and material wealth. This is where you get twisted narratives like this one, demonstrated by Stephen King:

This is all wrong. The bill that Sinema and Manchin are obstructing is already a compromise – it’s already less than 70%, and the two “moderates” who are blocking everything are the ones refusing to accept anything less than 100% of what they want. For weeks now people have been blaming progressives for what’s going on. More recent tweets indicate that King may have gained a better understanding about what’s happening, but it’s not just an accident that he came to tweet that – it’s a deliberately false narrative of a kind that comes up every time U.S. progressives actually fight for something they want. Failing to concede to all right-wing demands is consistently framed as starting trouble and being unreasonable, and without real confrontation, what we get is movement to the right on economics and political power, over and over again.

This notion that we can just convert conservatives to rationality and material analysis by helping them reason through things is not a new one. What stands out in my mind is a sort of “Logic Bro” power fantasy found in the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The basic premise is “what if Petunia had become a college professor and married another college professor, and they both raised Harry as a scientific child prodigy?”, and basically uses the shallowness of J.K. Rowling’s worldbuilding to allow Harry to perform feats of science-inspired magic and cleverness that astound and baffle all the greatest wizards, while he also uses the titular “methods of rationality” to reason Draco Malfoy out of his bigotry. Full disclosure, I enjoyed this story when I first read it. I also find it mostly unreadable now, but there’s something catchy about the idea that if we could just get the people we disagree with to just sit down and walk through everything with us, they’d see that of course they couldn’t be right.

I’m fond of saying that our brains are basically meat computers vulnerable to some level of reprogramming by anyone with access to our senses, including ourselves. Changing minds via one-on-one exploration of ideas is absolutely possible, if both parties are approaching the project in good faith. Changing minds on a larger scale through media is also possible.

But that’s not the same as changing how society works, or how power is exercised. It also doesn’t account for those – like fascists – who are less interested in what is or is not true than they are in the assertion of power over others. Unfortunately, all the reasonableness and non-violence in the world won’t help much if someone wants everyone who believes what you do dead, and they have the power to make it happen.

There is no silver bullet here. There’s no “weird trick” or “scientific technique” that will unite humanity under a common purpose. Worse, Azarian’s idea of focusing on a “common enemy”, even one as abstract as climate change or poverty, strikes me as downright irresponsible.

First, agreeing on climate change as a common enemy is unlikely to happen so long as the capitalists funding misinformation and obstruction retain the power to do so. They have no reason to change their minds, because the way things are is working just great, as far as they’re concerned. In the words of Rex Tillerson, their philosophy is “we’ll adapt to that”, so let’s keep drilling.

Second, and more importantly, agreeing on common problems and common enemies is a very dangerous approach. For example – fascists and socialists in the early 20th century agreed that capitalism wasn’t working, and that the people in charge were doing things wrong, and focused on the wrong goals.

Common enemy, common problem.

The solution was the difference that mattered. Socialists wanted to find a way to democratize the economy, and fascists wanted to return to a nonexistent golden age, and murder the bad people who were making the bad things happen. For all the Nazis actively pursued privatization and further empowerment of capitalists, their version of agreeing that capitalism had a problem can be found in the works of Gottfried Feder, whose work “Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft“, or “Breaking Interest Bondage” advocated against the “collection” of capital (particularly through charging interest), as different from “creation” of capital which was done by fine, upstanding German workers and businessmen.

This was just a repurposed version of the same kind of antisemitism found in “A Merchant of Venice”, and meshed very well with the broader Nazi movement to blame all the world’s woes on a global Jewish Conspiracy. It was also Feder’s justification for seizing the property of Jewish Germans.

If your focus is on finding agreement, and especially if you ignore issues of social justice and injustice, then what you have in Weimar Germany is a left that hates capitalism, and a right that hates capitalism – they agree on a problem! And in observing that, you are no closer to achieving any form of universal understanding. Having a “common enemy” is useless if one group wants to radically change how society works to reduce our contribution to the problem, and another group wants to murder people who’re different until the problem goes away.

Let’s break it down further – we know that climate change is going to cause food shortages. It’s already hurting agriculture, and that’s only going to get worse as the temperature rises. My solution would be to invest heavily in weather-proof food production on a global scale, without regard for profit. Things like edible algae and bacterial cultures (usually sold in powder/flour form) aren’t necessarily the most delicious food, but they are something that can act as a backstop on famine. Further, having such facilities in every part of the world means that even if several areas are hit by  problems that shut down both conventional agriculture and food factories – wildfires, storms, war, etc. – it’s far more likely that the rest of the world will have the resources to both feed themselves and to provide food to those in need.

What’s the fascist solution? We’ve already seen some of it. When refugees came north from Guatemala fleeing both violence and drought, they wanted not just a wall that would stop the refugees, they wanted that wall electrified, and they talked about the refugees as an invasion that should be met with military force. The fascist solution is to kill people so there will be more food to go around for those who remain. This is both wholly unacceptable, and entirely useless for solving the problem.

Uniting against a common enemy is all well and good when that enemy is a group of people who are attacking. Despite the rabid anti-communism in the U.S. government (remember – the “Allied Powers” invaded Russia in 1918 in an attempt to prevent the Bolsheviks from holding power), the Americans joined with the U.S.S.R. to defeat the Nazis. The problem is, that unity only lasts as long as the enemy, and it only works if it’s an actual enemy who can be defeated through force of arms. Insofar as that applies to climate change, who’s the enemy?

I’ve been clear that I think the enemy is the capitalists who are working to maintain the system that keeps them in power. My solution is to take their power away as soon as possible, so that they can’t spread misinformation and buy politicians to prevent action on climate change that might hurt their profits. My preference is to do that nonviolently, but I’m not particularly optimistic; history has shown that capitalists generally prefer murder to losing their wealth. The fascist solution is to give all that power to an authoritarian, so he (and it always does seem to be a “he”) can “do what must be done”, which invariably means “do violence to the right people”.

To be clear, I do not think that Bobby Azarian is a fascist. I think that his work on brain differences is good, and useful. His thoughts on how provoking genuine self-analysis can “strengthen” the relevant parts of the brain are also good and useful. What’s lacking is a deeper understanding of how human thought manifests as behavior within a society. Even that, by itself, is not that big of a problem – specialization is a good thing overall – but in developing his “solution” to the problem of conservative thought, I think he has shown the failure of his own system – he thinks his analysis is good enough to be presented as a solution, when in reality he’s missing data at the “input” end, and he doesn’t even seem to know those data exist to be analyzed.

If you like my work, please share it around. I’d also ask that you sign up to support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Even as little as one dollar per month helps a great deal with there’s a crowd of folks doing it, and my immigration status is such that I can’t get conventional wage labor, so this is my only means of income, and it’s not enough to make ends meet right now. That said, you’re having your own trouble making ends meet, I do not want your money and I still welcome you as a reader. Thanks for reading, and take care of yourselves and each other.

Fatphobia in culture, and its effects: Some thoughts and a video you should watch

I was bullied for my weight growing up, though looking at pictures from back then I wasn’t particularly fat – just fatter than a lot of my classmates. The primary effect of that treatment was that I did my best to avoid exerting myself where other people could see me. I was lucky to find groups that DIDN’T do that shit for the most part, both in my youth circus and in the wilderness/naturalist program at my high school, but it never really went away. I don’t know that I would have worked out more had I been left alone about that issue – I certainly DID work out when I was in settings where I knew it wouldn’t come up – but overall when someone mocked me for my weight, doing something physical with my body was the last thing I wanted to do. Rowling’s descriptions of fat people doing things, as highlighted in the video below, are a good illustration of how I saw myself when other people forced me to think about my body.

I also don’t remember how I felt about the cruelty in JK Rowling’s writing. I enjoyed the books at the time, and I think the grotesque caricature named Dudley Dursley didn’t hit ME to hard because my reaction was “at least I’m not that bad”. A huge number of problems in our society seem to come down to the inability of some people to see their fellow humans as people, rather than scenery or props. Writing like Rowling’s encourages that perspective, and as many have now pointed out, it’s far from limited to the fat characters in her books.

Obviously there’s a lot more to societal treatment of fat people than just Rowling’s writing, and fortunately Ok2BeFat has a lot of content, not just about the societal aspects of fatness, but also the science. This is work that needs doing, and she does a good job with it, so support her on patreon if you can.

Christianity, Rapture Theology, and the American Empire

Hopefully this isn’t news to most of my readers, but the United States is the heart of a global pseudo-empire that uses its military, diplomatic, and economic power primarily to safeguard the economic interests of its ruling class. That said, the use of that power is not solely driven by material concerns of wealth and power. This also should not be a surprise to anyone, but Christianity – specifically a version of evangelical Protestantism, also plays a large role in U.S. foreign policy – particularly in the Middle East.

Any material analysis of the U.S. empire and its foreign and domestic policies will be incomplete without an understanding of the bizarre rapture theology that holds sway with most U.S. conservatives. This set of religious beliefs – not supported by biblical text – is key to understanding things like the antisemitism behind some U.S. support for the aggressive policies of the country Israel, and why there’s so much money from these branches of Christianity going to get Jewish people to move there. It’s a complicated subject that requires a mix of material historical analysis, scriptural analysis, and cultural analysis.

Because this belief is held by so many at the core of the U.S. empire, and because it’s held by so many in the halls of power (it’s why Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem), understanding this set of beliefs is important for those within the military reach of that empire, which would be everyone. This is a belief system that is actively working to bring about the end of the world.

This is a long video, but for good reason. I recommend listening to it while doing your dishes or gaming or something like that, if you don’t want to just sit through it, but this is important stuff to understand, and I’ve yet to see a better breakdown of it than this one from Renegade Cut:

 

Fiction: A boring night is looking up (full story)

The zeppelin’s white skin glowed in the city’s lights as it approached the docking tower. Rivulets of water made it shimmer, drawing Tua’s eyes. She yawned, and squinted to re-focus her gaze on the cargo hold. Her mission brief was sparse on details, but the central question was clear: a handful of freight vessels had been dropping something while on approach for docking, beginning shortly after sunset. A few dock workers had seen whatever it was, and reported it to the Shipping Council, but there were no reports of anything falling from the sky, of damage, or of unexplained waste in the canals.

Something was being delivered by people who were willing to go to fairly extreme lengths to keep their business off of any books. Half the time, when Tua was called in to run an investigation, what she found was depressingly harmless. People operating in secret because they enjoyed the challenge, or starting up a strange new business venture that drew attention from “concerned citizens”.

Those didn’t tend to involve the clandestine use of one of the city’s major shipping routes. Freight zeppelins ran constantly around the country. They didn’t move particularly fast, but there was a never-ending stream of them drifting slowly around the continent. It was effectively a massive, airborne conveyor belt, and because it depended on lighter-than-air craft, weight was carefully monitored.

The zeppelin docked with a loud thunk, and Tua closed her eyes to rest them while the vessel was unloaded above her. Waiting was the worst part of this job.

Normally, smuggling investigations required very little effort. Most items that would get a smuggler in trouble were things that could poison the water or interfere with some of the city’s vital functions. Smuggling might allow someone to avoid paying access or import fees, but those were low enough that avoiding them often cost more, even if you didn’t get caught. That went doubly for smuggling anything by air. Tua had helped a gun-running operation in her teens, but that had gone along the canals. It turned out the guns were for an ill-conceived plan by a group to gain control over the city’s common housing system through a mixture of bribery, intimidation, and murder.

Tua didn’t understand it, but there always seemed to be those who wanted power over other people, and those willing to help them for one reason or another. She shifted carefully on her perch, and adjusted her goggle magnification. The next zeppelin was just visible on its approach.

I was one of those willing to help, she reminded herself. Her current gig as an investigator had started as community service after she was caught along with everyone else involved in the attempted takeover. She hadn’t known what goods she was moving, but neither had she asked. It had gotten her better food and housing, and more than enough money to access some of the more interesting clubs around town. It had also been more fun than she had had before or since.

A bell rang above her as the zeppelin finished offloading its cargo, and glided away into the rainy dusk. The next one approached, and Tua watched, her goggles recording everything in case she blinked at the wrong moment.

She didn’t.

An object dropped from the hold, nearly invisible, and vanished between a couple buildings.

“Mark this section of the recording, and send it to Kenneth for analysis.”

Tua basked in the brief adrenaline spike for a moment as the zeppelin  docked, then clambered rapidly down the outside of the tower. Two stories down from her perch, she slipped through an access hatch and closed it carefully behind her. The suit that covered her head to toe would prevent her from showing up on any heat-sensitive equipment, but the more time she spent out on the side of a building, the better the chances someone would notice her.

If the people behind this operation knew they were being investigated, they’d disappear entirely.

There was a soft beep in her ear.

“Go ahead.”

“From what I can tell, you’re looking three rows north, one row west.” Kenneth’s voice was high, and a little nasal. “Based on your footage, there’s no way that hits the water without enough of a splash to draw attention, which means it’s being caught on the way down.”

“Any ideas how they’re doing it?” Tua’s mask prevented her voice from carrying more than a millimeter beyond her lips.

“Nothing you haven’t already thought of. There’s no permanent structure that would allow for it, so they’re putting out a net or something, without anyone noticing, catching the cargo, and pulling it in.

“And there’ve been no reports that might be related?”

“Not that I can find, no. The reports are all from dock workers, and altogether it seems like a considerable amount of something has been coming in at a pretty constant rate for some time now.”

“How much?”

Tua slipped quietly into a stairwell on the south side of the building, and headed down to another access hatch, guided by the display on her goggles.

“We won’t know till you get a better reading. Try to get a recording of the cargo being dropped, and we should be able to figure out how much each package weighs.”

“On my way.”

She heard someone the stairwell one floor below her as she reached her destination. She slipped through her door and closed it silently behind her. She followed her directions through a floor of offices to a utility corridor, and slipped out the access hatch at the end of it.

It let her out onto the roof of a causeway that ran through, and between buildings. Glancing up, she saw another zeppelin coming in to dock, its bulk peeking out around the sides of the building. Two thirds of the way across the causeway bridge, hopped over the side, hooking her grapple on a strut as she fell past it, and swinging up to cling to the underside of the bridge. A catwalk ran under the causeway, put there for inspection and maintenance of the machinery for the moving walkways that carried people around the city. She set off north at a jog, keeping her footfalls light. The hum of motors and gears above her would drown out most noises, but Tua liked to be careful when she was trying to avoid notice. Three rows north of the docking tower, she stopped in the middle of a canal and looked west.

“Kenneth.”

“Wait there for the next drop, then reposition.”

“It’s always ‘waiting.’”

“Really? I had no idea.” Tua could hear Kenneth’s eyes rolling. He worked out of his apartment, and complained bitterly any time he was forced to actually go out and do any investigating.

Tua complained any time she was forced to sit and wait, and most of her work involved waiting. When she told someone what she did for work, they thought it sounded thrilling and glamorous. When she told them it mostly involved waiting around, they generally assumed it was to hide thrilling secrets.

She heard the soft sound of something moving against metal and glanced to the side. A cat had found her, and decided to join her.

“Well” she murmured, “I suppose a catwalk is more your domain than mine.”

Kenneth’s breath puffed against his microphone as he chuckled into it.

“Found another cat, did you?”

“They find me, Ken.”

“Just don’t get distracted.”

“Do I ever?” The cat sniffed delicately at her gloved hand, and then rubbed its face against her fingertips.

“Yes. Often. That’s part of why you record everything in front of your face when we’re working.”

“Then it’s not likely to cause any problems, is it?” Her new companion flopped on its gray-striped side, its paws pressed against her thigh, and blinked up at her, tail tapping gently on the metal grate of the catwalk’s floor.

“That depends.” Kenneth’s tone was dry. “Do you expect the cat to be catching the cargo? If not, you may need to actually look in the correct direction for me to have anything to analyze.”

“Analyze my butt.” She turned her head to glare down the canal, scratching at the cat’s ear with a knuckle.

“Ugh. No thanks.”

Tua grinned. The few times she’d asked about Kenneth’s social life, he’d described himself as being in a blissful relationship with his work. Nearly everything about his life seemed boring to her, but the more she worked with him, the more she realized that he hadn’t been kidding. His life truly was blissful. He got along with everyone, had a few close friendships, and absolutely no interest in romance.

When she got to know him well enough to see the shape of his life, she had said his lifestyle would drive her to jump off buildings just for something to do. He responded that she did that anyway, so clearly her own lifestyle was also too boring, and at least he was content with what he had.

He wasn’t wrong.

Uncovering secrets was an intensely satisfying job – more so than just keeping them for other people – but she did find that her craving for adventure seemed to build exponentially every time she had to just sit and wait somewhere. If something fun didn’t happen soon, she’d have to enter herself into a ring fight just to alleviate the boredom.

The cat hooked a paw into the grate and pulled itself so its head rested on her thigh. She glanced down at it and tickled her fingers on its exposed belly. It immediately grabbed her hand with its mouth and front paws, and rabbit-kicked her wrist. The tough material of her suit protected against thorns and cat claws alike, but he was keeping his weapons sheathed, and his bite was playfully gentle.

She cooed at him, forgetting that the sound wouldn’t escape her suit.

“Tua…”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She turned her head and watched the long, glittering ribbon of the canal. The only disturbance on the water’s surface came from the dripping buildings, and the dripping sky. Movement caught her eye directly under her perch, but it was just the headlight of a small submersible drone, cruising along just above the bottom of the canal. As always, she wanted to know who was piloting it, and why, but that wasn’t the secret she was hunting tonight.

The cat let go of her hand, and sat up, staring at her. She gave it a shrug; she didn’t carry anything a cat could eat when she was working.

Her companion noticed the disturbance just as she did. A little less than one row west, something had appeared on the surface of the water.

“Kenneth, are you seeing this?”

“Yep.”

It was a black circle against the lights reflected in the water, maybe about four feet across. Tua whispered a command and her goggles began cycling through polarization and wavelength filters.

“It looks like there’s some sort of tube or something leading from the surface down to a gap near the base of that building.”

“Yeah. Can’t tell for sure, but-”

An object dropped into the middle of the object with a soft flap, and Tua’s goggles showed it sliding down the tube like a large fish moving down a snake’s body in a time-lapse video. Before it reached the bottom of the tube, it had already retracted below the surface, until the whole apparatus pulled back down to disappear where the canal met the building.

“What the hell was that?” Kenneth sounded almost disturbed.

“What we’re looking for, and it’s something new!”

“Tua…”

“I’m going to find a new perch. It looks like the vines on the side of the building will let me sit right over that spot without sticking out at all.”

“Be careful,” said Kenneth.

“That’s your job, Ken, not mine.”

“Tua!”

“Stop whining, Ken. Mark that spot for me so I can make sure I’m positioned right?”

“Fine.”

She stood carefully, and did a couple squats to warm up her legs again. The cat stood with her, but disappeared back the way it had come as she headed to the row of buildings. Her pulse drummed a little faster as she slipped from the catwalk into the building, and trotted down a narrow utility corridor. Her goggles had identified the building as a farm, which suited her fine. Farms always had a nice collection of walkways to allow people to do as much work as possible without risking contamination of the clean-room environment that kept the crops pest-free. After about 100 meters, she turned to a fire escape, and looked up, checking air traffic.

Her goggles outlined the long line of zeppelins for her, each about a kilometer apart. None of the sensors built into her suit were picking up surveillance beyond the standard stuff that wouldn’t care about her. She took a moment to pick a route, and began bouldering along the side of the building, moving from ledge to vine until she was over the bright orange spot Kenneth had put on her display to mark the drop point.

She hooked a couple straps to the vines around her so she could hold her position comfortably.

“In place. Time for more waiting.”

“Stop,” said Kenneth, “I can’t bear the excitement in your voice.”

“Hey now! We’re about to uncover a new secret! This is about as exciting as this job gets!”

“Maybe. From what we’ve seen so far, the next step is to call in a dive team. You and I might never even know what they find.”

“Hmph!” He was probably right. She hated not knowing.

“Stop whining. Look up so we can see the next one drop.”

She obeyed, pointing her face at the featureless, dripping sky

“At least the last spot had a cat.”

“Maybe this one will have a spider you can pet.”

“You’re so funny, Ken!”

“Nobody appreciate my genius.”

If any spiders were trying to befriend her, she couldn’t feel them through the suit. Every time she thought watching canals or buildings was boring, she could just remember watching the sky, and she’d feel better by comparison. The only changes in the sky were the transition from underlit yellow clouds at night, to overlit gray clouds during the day. Sometimes, a particularly dramatic sunset or sunrise would add a green or pink tint to things.

A zeppelin passed overhead without incident.

“How many more drops do we need to see?” The next zeppelin was a good five to ten minutes out.

“Probably one looking up, and one looking down,” said Kenneth. “Maybe two? Depends on how it’s dropped and on what we can gather from the landing spot.”

“Ugh. I’m gonna be stuck on this wall all night.”

“If it helps, it seems like about every third vessel on this route is smuggling cargo, so the next one should have some entertainment for you.”

“It had better…”

The next one looked different as soon as it came into view.

“Ken, are you see-”

“Yes, Tua. I’m seeing everything you’re seeing.”

There was a bulge on the underside of the zeppelin’s gondola. It was the same color, but looking carefully, even in this dim light, Tua could see that it was divided into three sections. The outer two were much larger than the central one, and Tua guessed they held a lifting gas. As it drew almost directly overhead, the outer sections suddenly deflated and retracted, and the whole thing dropped away, leaving the underside of the vessel completely unmarked. She kept her face turned upward as the object dropped past her, and flapped into its target, in case there was any activity on the zeppelin itself that she’d missed.

“They might not even…” Tua trailed off.

“Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s why nothing odd was showing up on the  weight readings. The two sacks on the sides kept it neutrally bouyant on the underside of the gondola, and it probably had a releasable suction cup to keep it attached enough to move along with it.”

“That’s a really clever system.” Tua was impressed. “They wouldn’t even need to have anyone on the inside or whatever. If they’re a little careful, they could be attaching these things at any point along the route and nobody would notice.”

“I’ve been marking the ones that are carrying the extra cargo, so we’ll be able to track when the last time someone had a recording of the undersides. We should at least be able to figure out where they’re coming from.”

The zeppelin out of sight, Tua turned her gaze downward. With the help of her goggles, she could even see the hole at the base of the building.

“You know, I could probably just dive down and have a look at that hole…”

“And then drown at the bottom of the canal? Doesn’t seem worth the sacrifice to me, but it’s your life, I suppose.”

“Sun, Moon, and Stars, how boring can you get?”

“Hey now…”

“Sorry, it’s just-” She took a deep breath. “Our differences aside, this suit doesn’t just keep me off I.R. scanners, it also feeds me breathable air. It’ll do that under water, too.”

“Even without tanks?”

“Iffy. I’d need to move slow to keep oxygen requirements low.”

“Sounds like you’d get bored halfway to the bottom,” said Kenneth.

“Very funny. It wouldn’t be boring, it would be a challenge, and then we might actually get some answers.”

“Better to get people who won’t suffocate if they get out of breath.”

“Maybe…”

Kenneth sighed. “Look, just watch for the next one so we can at least get some idea of what kind of weight these things are.”

“Watching…”

The gently rippling water below her was hypnotic. Time always passed more quickly when she was staring at the shimmer of lights and colors that made up the canal’s surface at night. After a little while, Kenneth spoke up again.

“Should be something on the next zeppelin, in about five minutes. I’m pretty sure they’re using hydrogen, and from the size of the gas bags, the cargo and container probably add up to around 70 to 75 kilograms.”

“Huh. That’s about what I weigh.” Tua couldn’t see any movement below her yet.

“You think they’re smuggling people?”

“With a drop like that? Not unless they don’t care if they’re intact on arrival.”

“I dunno…” Kenneth paused.

“What?”

“I had some numbers running after we got that first recording. It looks like the water pressure on the outside of the tube might provide enough of a gradual slowdown that it wouldn’t do any damage.”

“Clever system all around.”

“If I’m right, the weight of the cargo would pull it down even without the momentum of that drop.”

“Reeally…”

“The inside of the tube would probably need to be oiled or something, but- wait. Tua I don’t like the tone of your voice.”

“Don’t be silly. How far down do you think it goes?”

There was a moment of silence, and Tua saw movement below her. The tube was slowly rising up below her, pushed by several long, thin rods attached to the hoop that formed the “target”.

“Probably down to the old subway tunnels, maybe below.”

“So maybe a minute or two in the tube?”

“And then someone at the bottom to receive it and clear the way for the next one.”

“Underwater?” The tube had almost reached the surface.

“No,” said Kenneth. “From what I can tell, I’m willing to bet there’s an aerated structure down there. This whole system seems designed to protect whatever they’re smuggling from water.”

“Even though they’re dropping it into a canal?”

The tube reached the surface, and stopped just above it. Looking down, Tua could see it had a flat black cover. The edge of the circle twisted around, and the cover opened like an iris, revealing a sort of gullet, glistening with the oil Kenneth had predicted, and held closed by the water around it.

“Yeah,” Kenneth sounded excited. Tua’s heart was pounding now. “See that? The cargo just slides in, and has an easy trip down. It’s like they’re bypassing the city entirely.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“No idea.”

“Don’t you want to know?”

“Sure, but- Tua you’ve got that tone in your voice again.”

“What tone?” Tua carefully unhooked her anchors, and glanced up. The zeppelin was almost there.

“Like that time you got so bored you used your grapple to take a joyride on the underside of a delivery drone.”

“Oh yeah, that was fun!” She stared at the landing spot. It pulled back in about twenty seconds after the cargo hit, and the cover took about five seconds to open.

“How much did you have to pay to cover damage and wasted fuel?”

“That was a legit company. I don’t think these people have the resources to enforce any fines.”

“I bet they have the resources to make you sorry you interfered…”

“Maybe.” Tua pulled out her collapsible baton, and clenched it in her right fist.

“Tua don’t-”

“I’m gonna.”

“You’ll get covered in oil.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Gross,” said Kenneth. “You could die.”

“At least it wouldn’t be of boredom. I wanna know what’s at the other end of that tube.”

“But-”

“They might notice a dive team, but they won’t be expecting this.”

“Because it’s so reckless that nobody would-”

The smugglers’ cargo flashed past and flapped into the tube. Tua hopped after it.

Flap.

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Morbid Monday: The U.S. fascist movement is still going, and Democratic Party leadership isn’t doing anything to stop it

In my opinion, the best shot the Democratic Party had at reversing the country’s slide into fascism was to nominate and elect Bernie Sanders as president. I suppose you could argue that that means they never had a “best chance”, but here we are. The second best chance is for the Democratic leadership to do everything in their power to both improve the material conditions of the American people, and to crack down on those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.

The problem is, while I think this advice is good, I don’t think it’s enough. Even if they were to come down hard on everyone involved, if the general public doesn’t see their lives improving under Biden, they will ask – as some are already – why it was so important to remove Trump and the GOP. Throughout my life, when the Dems have had power, they have also had a tendency to act as though they lost the election anyway, and spend all their time trying to meet Republicans in the middle. If Pelosi, Biden, and Schumer believe in anything beyond their devotion to capitalism, it’s a nebulous conception of “The Process”. They don’t actually have material goals in mind that they want to fight for. It seems their goal is to be the “team” that always plays by the rules, even if the other team doesn’t even pretend to try. The GOP actually pushes the boundaries of what they can get away with to achieve their material goals, and guess what? It works. Everyone knew that Trump’s promised Muslim ban was unconstitutional, and they tried it anyway. When it got shot down, they adjusted the content and their legal argument and tried again, until the Supreme Court decided it could stand. There was no punishment for trying and failing, just as there is never punishment for those in power.

The Democratic leadership does not believe healthcare is a right. They do not believe housing is a right. They do not believe food or water are rights. They do not believe education is a right.

If they did, then they would be trying to ensure those rights existed in reality.  They would be pushing the boundaries of what’s known to be possible, because their goal would be to get those material results, not to “play the game” better or something.

They can’t even be bothered to look like they’re fighting for the rest of us, and it’s going to help the Republicans in the midterms, and in 2024. This is not a foregone conclusion. They could actually fight to deal with climate change and to make life better for people, but they don’t want to.

And so the threat of a fascist United States continues to loom, and those sworn to defend American democracy are either working on the side of fascism, or are in denial.

If you’re not involved in any form of community networking or organizing, that should change. Talk to friends and neighbors. Talk to family. If you need to start online, start online. Go through the suggestions and resources here, and if you can’t find anything to do, then think and talk about what’s preventing you. Comment about it if you like.

Our best shot at blocking a far-right movement is with left-wing policies that directly address the problems that are blamed on the groups the fascists try to blame for everything, and unapologetically work to build up the collective power of the working class. All we have is us.