The patriarchy has deep roots, it’s going to hurt to dig them out

Jeanette Ng won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and this is how her speech began:

John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists. Yes, I am aware there are exceptions.

Welp, that set a few people’s hair on fire, but she’s right. Corey Doctorow agrees.

I think she was right — and seemly — to make her remarks. There’s plenty of evidence that Campbell’s views were odious and deplorable. For example, Heinlein apologists like to claim (probably correctly) that his terrible, racist, authoritarian, eugenics-inflected yellow peril novel Sixth Column was effectively a commission from Campbell (Heinlein based the novel on one of Campbell’s stories). This seems to have been par for the course for JWC, who liked to micro-manage his writers: Campbell also leaned hard on Tom Godwin to kill the girl in “Cold Equations” in order to turn his story into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.

So when Ng held Campbell “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists,” she was factually correct.

It reflects my experience as a reader of science fiction, too. I got hooked on this stuff as a boy in the 1960s, and initially read all the old classic authors — Asimov, Clarke, etc. — and was fascinated with all the robots and spaceships and hyper-advanced gadgetry that they wrote about, but failed to notice that they weren’t very good at writing about people. Then I stumbled onto New Wave writers, and Ursula Le Guin, and Joanna Russ, and all these other amazing writers who had escaped the orbit of the John W. Campbell school, and discovered that the JWC stable tended to be not-very-good writers, period, because that wasn’t what he cared about, which is a strange characteristic for an editor.

Also, when I finally discovered Heinlein in my mid-teens, I freakin’ hated his books. They were long-winded exercises in self-indulgent misogyny. I don’t think he needed JWC’s coaching to be an asshole, he was one naturally.

Here’s another take on Campbell.

Ng’s assessment of Campbell is undoubtedly informed by Campbell’s personal politics and beliefs and those who have written about him. Campbell argued that African-Americans were “barbarians” deserving of police brutality during the 1965 Watts Riots, as “the “brutal” actions of police consist of punishing criminal behavior.” His unpublished story All featured such racist elements that author Robert Heinlein, who built upon Campbell’s original story for his own work titled Sixth Column, had to “reslant” the story before publishing it. In the aftermath of the Kent State massacre, when speaking of the demonstrators murdered by the Ohio National Guard, Campbell stated that “I’m not interested in victims. I’m interested in heroes.” While difficult to presume where Campbell’s beliefs would place him in modern politics, it is apparent that Campbell would disagree with many of the beliefs held by modern America.

I’ve read enough Campbell to guess he’d be cheering for Trump — the pseudoscientific racist genetics, the anti-immigration stuff, the contempt for anyone who rocks the boat, he’d definitely be a Trumpkin.

Doctorow continues.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We’re trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We’re trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people [Harlan Ellison, fantastic writer, not such a nice person] whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

It’s not a coincidence that one of the first organized manifestation of white nationalism as a cultural phenomenon was within fandom, and while fandom came together to firmly repudiate its white nationalist wing, these assholes weren’t (all) entryists who showed up to stir trouble in someone else’s community. The call (to hijack the Hugo award) was coming from inside the house: these guys had been around forever, and we’d let them get away with it, in the name of “tolerance” even as these guys were chasing women, queer people, and racialized people out of the field.

Those same Nazis went on to join Gamergate, then take up on /r/The_Donald, and they were part of the vanguard of the movement that put a boorish, white supremacist grifter into the White House.

He’s talking about the Rabid Puppies, but I don’t think SF fandom was specifically responsible. We saw exactly the same phenomenon in skepticism/atheism with Elevatorgate and the slymepit. It’s everywhere. It’s like we entered the 21st century and scumbaggery blossomed everywhere. Arthur Clarke could predict geosynchronous satellites, sure, but he completely failed to anticipate the effect of selectively amplifying the voices of arrogant white male dudes, as SF, and science, and atheism, and everything had been doing for decades. What we’re seeing now is the effect of a patriarchal culture being shaken up, and the reactionaries fighting back.

This stuff matters. It’s deeper than any fandom, and it reflects a world-wide pattern of necessary change as the old order resists its slow, painful demise. Ng brings it right back to reality.

So I need say, I was born in Hong Kong. Right now, in the most cyberpunk in the city in the world, protesters struggle with the masked, anonymous stormtroopers of an autocratic Empire. They have literally just held her largest illegal gathering in their history. As we speak they are calling for a horological revolution in our time. They have held laser pointers to the skies and tried to to impossibly set alight the stars. I cannot help be proud of them, to cry for them, and to lament their pain.

Yes. The fascists and capitalists and corporate goons and colonizers have been running the world for a few centuries now, and it’s time to overthrow the old order. There will be great pain in the churn.

The National Embarrassment humiliates us all again

No one can keep up. Here’s an attempt to list the lunacies expressed by Trump just today.

So far today, Trump has called himself:

  • The Chosen One
  • The King of Israel
  • The Second Coming of God

Just thought you might like to know that the person with his finger on the trigger of America’s nuclear arsenal appears to be losing the last of his marbles.

He also called American Jews disloyal if they voted for a Democrat, threatened to turn captured ISIS members loose on Europe, claimed that victims of shootings in El Paso and Dayton loved him, suggested that suicidal veterans could be treated with a stimulant, and suggested once again that he’d run for president again after his second term.

But he wasn’t done!

Later, President Bone Spurs says he thought about giving himself a Medal of Honor.

How much longer must we suffer with this babbling boob running the country into the ground? I know. For as long as Moscow Mitch controls the Senate.

What if Robert E. Lee had been hanged?

I’m currently reading the biography of Grant by Chernow, and I’ve just gotten to Appomattox. It was kind of distressing reading. Robert E. Lee shows up all stuffy and pompous, and Grant is all charitable and humane, and everyone from Lincoln on down to the press and the Washington establishment, and apparently, Chernow, (all white folks, by the way) are patting each other on the back about how the generous terms given to the traitors will lead to reconciliation and unity, while I’m reading this from the perspective of the 21st century. I can’t help but think, given the century and a half of abuses and oppression, that maybe, rather than a grand gesture of forgiveness, it was all a terrible mistake. Maybe Lee and his generals should have been arrested and imprisoned, maybe even hanged. Maybe the tabled suggestion to restructure the borders and governments of the Confederate states should have been implemented. Maybe the much-praised gentleness of Lincoln and Grant at the end of the war was an overly kind gift to a nation of racists and terrorists that allowed the “original sin” of the United States to fester anew.

I’m finding it disconcerting that the account of the war itself praised Grant’s strategy of total war, and Sherman’s and Sheridan’s ruthless actions to bring an end to the conflict as quickly as possible, yet we abruptly switch to nothing but confidence that the conciliatory approach was the best way to handle the victory. It smacks of hagiography. It has led to a situation where Southern cities maintain celebratory statues of traitors, and name streets and parks and schools after them, and a still divided country where racism is tolerated.

What if, instead of trials, the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities had instead been embraced and forgiven, and even praised for their administrative and military skill, all in the name of smoothing over the transition to peace? Because that’s what we did, and the historians and biographers are still reassuring us that what we did in America was the wisest choice.

I haven’t gotten to Chernow’s discussion of the Grant presidency or Reconstruction yet, so maybe there’ll be a more balanced discussion of the failings of America’s post-war policies to come. Right now it’s all very Whiggish, and I’m feeling less impressed with Chernow.

Imagine a Federal leadership that had Lee sign his surrender at Appomattox, and then slapped irons on his wrists, put him in a wagon with bars, and shipped the racist slave-holding traitor off to trial in Washington. We’d be a better country now, I think, with precedent set.

I think I need to read a black scholar’s perspective on the Civil War, because these pleasant reassurances that our country did the right thing aren’t so reassuring any more.

The system is broken

Eugene Robinson on Trump…or more accurately, the total failure of our political system.

The astonishing thing is that the president of the United States is, let’s face it, raving like a lunatic — and everyone just shrugs.

The nation is still reeling from two mass shootings. The financial markets are yo-yoing by hundreds of points. A bomb in Afghanistan, where we’re still at war, killed 63 revelers at a wedding. Tension between the United States and Iran continues to mount. North Korea keeps testing new missiles. India is playing with fire in Kashmir. Hong Kong has been convulsed for months by massive protests seeking to guarantee basic freedoms.

And Trump obsesses about buying Greenland.

The truth is that we don’t have an actual presidency right now. We have a tiresome reality show whose ratings have begun to slide — and whose fading star sees cancellation on the way.

That’s the thing: Trump is obviously incompetent and dangerous, a demented narcissist who is sailing the ship of state, and everyone, except his deluded base, knows it. Yet nothing is done. The Democratic leadership cowers in fear of disrupting the ‘process’, while the Republican leadership just wants to hold on to their power. We need more than an election of a better person, we need an overhaul of the whole rotten fabric of our political institutions.

Hates SJWs, decides to live in SJW Land

Daniel Povey, the Johns Hopkins professor who was fired for an assault with boltcutters against protesting students, was moving to Seattle to work at Facebook. His plans have changed.

Daniel Povey, the research professor whom John Hopkins University fired for trying to break through a student sit-in with bolt cutters, won’t be working at Facebook after all, according to The Baltimore Sun. Facebook previously confirmed that it had hired Povey and he was soon set to work there. But Povey now says that he isn’t prepared to work at Facebook because its “progressive ideas” parallel those of academe.

Facebook? Progressive? The privacy-obliterating, money-grubbing-capitalist, information-selling organization was too progressive for him? Jeez. That says a lot about Povey’s commitment to freedom. As does his alternative.

He plans to work with an unnamed Chinese company or university in speech recognition and machine learning, the Sun reported. “There are several operations in the Seattle area who do this kind of thing, so I wouldn’t even have to move,” Povey said. “I will feel more relaxed among the Chinese because they don’t have American-style social justice warriors.”

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong…

Let’s see him storm those protests.

Also, the Pacific Northwest is full of angry progressives. Is he even aware of where he is going?

Anyone who claims a medium is “apolitical” is lying

Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, withdrew a foreword to a Marvel comic collection because he was asked to edit out a political reference. Don’t you know that Marvel Comics is “apolitical”? What a crock. Marvel Comics lies.

Everything is political. Abstaining from comment on the deepest political crisis of our time is a rabidly political act that takes an offensive stand on racism, corruption, and misogyny. They wanted to remove a disparaging reference to Donald Trump, because, apparently, Marvel Comics never ever took a stance against fascism.

Too political, I guess.

Meanwhile, the chair of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac Perlmutter, is a close confidant and supporter of Donald Trump.

Not at all political.

Fortunately, Spiegelman’s essay will be even more widely read now, since it’s been published in the Guardian, where you can read it for free.

Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

He has also expanded it a bit, since this closing story was irresistible.

I turned the essay in at the end of June, substantially the same as what appears here. A regretful Folio Society editor told me that Marvel Comics (evidently the co-publisher of the book) is trying to now stay “apolitical”, and is not allowing its publications to take a political stance. I was asked to alter or remove the sentence that refers to the Red Skull or the intro could not be published. I didn’t think of myself as especially political compared with some of my fellow travellers, but when asked to kill a relatively anodyne reference to an Orange Skull I realised that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with, and I withdrew my introduction.

A revealing story serendipitously showed up in my news feed this week. I learned that the billionaire chairman and former CEO of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, is a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s, an unofficial and influential adviser and a member of the president’s elite Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. And Perlmutter and his wife have each recently donated $360,000 (the maximum allowed) to the Orange Skull’s “Trump Victory Joint Fundraising Committee” for 2020. I’ve also had to learn, yet again, that everything is political… just like Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw.

Hail Hydra, Ike.

Portland seems to have weathered the neo-Nazi rally just fine

Much credit has to go to the Portland Antifa, who turned up in numbers to mock and dissipate any action by the racists. Eric Ward summarizes the day on Twitter, as does Robert Evans, with lots of photos. It sounds like the Proud Boys rally mostly fizzled, although there was a scattering of arrests and weapons confiscated. I think the best sign that they failed, though, was that they were reduced to arguing that they won because Go look at President Trump’s Twitter. He talked about Portland, said he’s watchin’ antifa. That’s all we wanted.. Your victory is getting Donald Trump to blab some nonsense on Twitter? That’s what he does every day while sitting on the toilet.

Here’s a great overview of events from Ward:

Today’s white nationalist rally in Portland, Oregon was a complete rout.

The largely non-Portland crowd was mostly abandoned by its leadership the night before. People arrived with no places to sleep and calls to cell phones went unreturned. This morning found hate group members without places to eat, water and access to restrooms. An increasing number of businesses (like the one pictured) were denying service.

The promised five hour hate rally lasted about 45 minutes; participants were forced to rally underneath a bridge and then had to beg police to escort them out (a very long walk) over year another bridge. Rally leaders then quickly took to their cars to allegedly attend a BBQ that just happened to not be in Portland.

Other remnants of the rally were forced to walk around downtown Portand for nearly two hours as they searched for their cars. I heard at least two Portlanders give them wrong directions. Tired, thirst and walked out; people started to drift away in droves, leaving a dejected looking Joey Gibson (leader of Patriot Prayer) with an increasingly smaller and smaller crowd around him. Not getting the physical confrontation he sought and contemplating his growing civil and criminal legal woes, Joey was very subdued today.

After analysis?

The social pressure and evolving diverse and incredibly fun tactics of PopMob; the seriousness of the Portland Police; and the number of city, civic and business leaders mobilized seems to have taken serious steam out of the white nationalist/alt right protest.

It’s clear from the speeches and comments today that White nationalist/alt right leaders are wary of the increasing civil suits led by the Oregon Justice Resource Center and criminal liabilities they are facing from disrupting communities.

Really proud of Portland today. Super impressed, from the leadership in the streets to city hall. Folks will be back to political positioning and eating each other alive tomorrow, but hope everyone gives each other a small nod of respect tonight

You are an amazing community Portand and you showed up this month and it mattered. Community and leadership made this happen and you showed up with a lot of both. Goodnight from the Rose City. #OurCityOurHome

Keep up the pressure. It’s great when the pinnacle of success for the Proud Boys is getting a pat on the head from Daddy Trump, and nothing more.

Andy Ngo is a fraud and a right-wing provocateur

Nothing more. Ngo is an empty vessel who has found a way to gain the attention of right-wing chuds. He’s probably foaming at the mouth today at the opportunity to fire up violence in the streets of Portland, with the eager of his friends, the fascists.

Burley says, “One way to think of Andy Ngo is he is part of a far-right mediasphere that creates victimization narratives of conservatism and profit from it. It’s all about the embattled American man who is under siege at every turn, whether its trans children, immigrant criminals, anchor babies, or dangerous college campuses. ‘They are all out to destroy us and our values.’ It’s an entire infrastructure that’s moved from commentary like National Review to populist media hucksters drumming up a controversy. Ngo doesn’t seem to have many real journalistic credentials, and any he does is from creating controversy. He gets in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post from being a conservative celebrity. His actual reporting is very infrequent and sparse.”

Ngo adds a new element in facilitating violence, intentionally or not. Burley says, “He appears to target ideological opponents, which can make them fair game for harassment and violent confrontation.” The scale of the threats keep escalating. Now Portland is bracing for the August 17 rally.

Or maybe not. Right-wing organizers have been backing away from Portland, since some of them have been getting sued or arrested for their violent acts, and Ngo hasn’t publicly committed to attending the demonstrations today. If there’s a hint that the powder keg will blow, though, he’ll come running. That’s his chosen grift, after all.

The Proud Boys are claiming that they are rallying to “end domestic terrorism”…if that were true wouldn’t they just disappear themselves?

Let’s all hope that the Nazi show fizzles today. Another factor is that Portland Antifa has been doing an amazing job of making them afraid to show their faces — they’ll be mocked as cowards and clowns.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ, my ass

Myke Cole dissects the weird phenomenon of laconophilia, or Sparta worship. There’s something about it that has fascinated men for centuries — the whole fiercely macho, iron man myth keeps going and going, despite the fact that it is actually that, a myth.

The Spartans, popular wisdom tells us, were history’s greatest warriors; in fact, they lost battles frequently and decisively. We are told they dominated Greece; they barely managed to scrape a victory in the Peloponnesian Wars with wagonloads of Persian gold, and then squandered their hegemony in a single year. We hear they murdered weak or deformed children, though one of their most famous kings had a club foot. They preferred death to surrender, as the legend of the Battle of Thermopylae is supposed to show—even though 120 of them surrendered to the Athenians at Sphacteria in 425 B.C.E. They purportedly eschewed decadent wealth and luxury, even though rampant inequality contributed to oliganthropia, the manpower shortage that eventually collapsed Spartan military might. They are assumed to have scorned personal glory and lived only for service to the city-state, despite the fact that famous Spartans commissioned poetry, statues, and even festivals in their own honor and deliberately built cults of personality. They all went through the brutal agōgē regimen of warrior training, starting from age seven—but the kings who led their armies almost never endured this trial. They are remembered for keeping Greece free from foreign influence, but in fact they allied with, and took money from, the very Persians they fought at Thermopylae.

I’ve actually used a short clip from the opening of that comically over-the-top movie, 300, in introductory biology classes when discussing the flaws of eugenics. You know the one, the bit about how they culled the weak, shown with a mountain of infant skulls, and sending young boys off to fight unrealistically gigantic wolves with a stick. It’s a horrible way to run a society, and isn’t going to “improve the stock” in the way they imagine it. Spartan culture doesn’t seem to have survived very well, and has left to us only these destructive myths. Really destructive myths.

For much of this time, laconophilia was a relatively benign ahistorical myth, but Spartan admiration unmistakably turned malignant in the late-nineteenth century with the advent of scientific racism. German scholar Karl Müller included in his influential Geschichten hellenischen Stämme und Städte a history of the Dorian race responsible for founding classical Sparta. Müller’s work lionized the invaders’ Northern origins, which dovetailed into the early evolution of Nordicism, the pseudo-anthropological notion of a Nordic master race that would become a cornerstone of Nazi ideology. Müller was hardly alone, and European thinking about inherent inequality and Nordic superiority was already maturing in the fevered minds of thinkers like the French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, whose writings influenced the famous composer and German nationalist icon Richard Wagner. It is not surprising that Adolf Hitler saw in Sparta “the first völkisch state” and gushed about the ancient city-state’s legendary eugenics: “The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more human than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.”

The only “wretched insanity of our day” we have to worry about is the fascism Hitler endorsed, and the toxic masculinity celebrated in all of this Spartan nonsense. Pathological cultures, like Sparta, might capture the imagination, but they don’t last.