But it isn’t even a question!

Over in that imperialist undemocratic monarchy across the Atlantic (we can be smug because we got rid of the “monarchy” part), people are wondering how the country got to the point that democracy can be suspended by a buffoon, and further, how said buffoon can actually be appointed prime minister — a question that we non-monarchists have been asking ourselves as well. At least part of the answer has to be that our respective upper classes are trained to be pompous buffoons, either at Eton or in our equivalent prep schools for the rich elite. At least in Great Britain bits of the training have been exposed.

Laurie Penny explores the implications of an amazing question from the entrance examination for Eton. This is a question that 13 year old boys are expected to address.

The year is 2040. There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters have been killed by the Army. You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.

I am impressed by how the question is not even a question. It assumes the answer and demands that you justify it. There is absolutely no latitude to question the actions or condemn the policies that led the army to be deployed against civilians — nope, every action we have performed was right and just, no matter what it was, and your job is to keep doing the same thing and tell the populace that their murders are “necessary and moral“. I have to marvel at the implicit arrogance of this thought exercise. So this is how you get Boris Johnson. Great Britain apparently didn’t learn a thing since Peterloo.

We don’t have one Eton, but instead a network of elite prep schools, mostly in the Northeast, some in the South — Phillips Exeter Academy might be the closest thing to Eton that we’ve got. Now I’m wondering what kind of biased drivel you have to recite to get into those, although we’re also different in how one gets into the civil service, anyway. My impression is that most of the training our ‘elite’ kids get is to coach them in glorious capitalism and how to trample on the middle class and the poors in your stampede to excessive wealth.

Sometimes it isn’t the answers that matter, but the questions asked that shape your mind.

Conservatives don’t understand this democracy thing

The Republicans of Alabama have just urged their state reps to kick Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, out of congress.

The state GOP supported a resolution calling for the congresswoman’s ouster at its summer meeting in Auburn this past weekend, according to Al.com. The committee reportedly approved the resolution on a voice vote after it was introduced by state Rep. Tommy Hanes.

The resolution calls on Alabama’s congressional delegation to “proceed with the expulsion process in accordance to Article 1, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution.”

That’s just weird. I thought Southern conservatives were all about states rights and opposing federalism, but here they are, trying to interfere in another state’s politics. OK then. Can Minnesota urge the immediate expulsion of Moscow Mitch from the Senate? I wouldn’t mind that at all.

I could also mention this bizarre move by Boris Johnson to suspend parliament in order to prevent anyone from stopping by democratic means his grand plan to sunder Britain from the EU.

As long as you rely on billionaires for funding, you are participating in a criminal enterprise

The take-home message of this article is that scientists who took money from Jeffrey Epstein should give it back, and I kinda sorta agree…but first I have to mention this annoyance.

Giving away the money would begin to clean up the gross, topologically complex web of influence trading that Epstein helped weave. Before and after his year in prison, in 2008, Epstein lavished money and attention on scientists—biologist Stephen Jay Gould, biochemist George Church, evolutionary scientist Martin Nowak, linguist Steven Pinker, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, physicist Stephen Hawking, and AI researcher Marvin Minsky, among many others.

Why is Stephen Jay Gould in there? He was dead in 2008! He died 6 years before that, as a matter of fact. There is no sign that he accepted buckets of cash from Epstein, unlike Nowak, who received $6.5 million (which Harvard refuses to return). Gould was both a SJW before the term was invented, and so deathly sick with cancer that the idea he might have participated in Epstein’s sleaze is ludicrous.

But back to the topic at hand — returning or reinvesting the money in socially aware programs is a band-aid. Yes, if you were a scientist who turned a blind eye to the creepy guy who was giving you all that money, you should be punished appropriately, and taking away your ill-gotten gains seems like an entirely reasonable and fair response. If somebody just hands you a million dollars, would you just pocket it without asking where it came from or what was expected in return? If an authority comes along later and takes away that free pile of money you accepted, no questions asked, you’ve got no grounds to complain…especially not when they tell you what you should have inquired about in the first place, that it was given to you by a criminal.

It’s only a start, though. The system is broken. When we’re dependent on the generosity of billionaires to get any science done, that skews the outcome — your funding is no longer coupled to any measure of merit, but on your skill at schmoozing and pandering to fat cats, and on your association with over-hyped organizations like Harvard. Taking money away from scientists does not fix the system. What we need to do is take that power away from the billionaires, and nothing in this solution is going to discomfit the unearned prestige and influence of the criminally wealthy.

Look around your university. See all those fancy buildings named after well-off alumni? That’s the problem, that we rely on the whims of assholes who inherited or stumbled into or stole great wealth, and they use science as Epstein did, as a cosmetic to cover up their crimes and make themselves look better than they are.

Some news of progress!

OK, happy news to start the day.

  • After Jeannette Ng called them out, the sponsors of the John W. Campbell Award didn’t dig in their heels — instead, they took a look at the archive of old Campbell editorials, said “Hey, those are pretty shitty and they don’t reflect our values at all,” and they just renamed it to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. No muss, no fuss, no drama, no screeching right-wingers howling that they can’t do that (well, there are some voices echoing out of the bottom of a trash can — Theodore Beale has declared that this decision means “Science Fiction is Dead” — but no one with real influence has protested).
  • Oh, look. Someone at YouTube noticed that their generosity towards Nazis might be hurting their bottom line. YouTube killed several big-name Nazi accounts, finally. Lost to us now are the racist words of James Allsup, VDARE, the American Identity movement, and The Right Stuff, channels that pumped out the most vile anti-Semitic and racist garbage. I’m most gratified to see VDARE get stomped, because that organization has been poisoning mainstream politics and media for decades. They’re whining about the death of political thought now.
  • Andy Ngo has been quietly let go from Quillette — they say it’s so he can pursue other projects, but we all know it’s really because of this article, where an undercover investigator discovered that he was actively collaborating with Patriot Prayer to bias his reporting.

    Ngo tags along with Patriot Prayer during demonstrations, hoping to catch footage of an altercation. Ben says Ngo doesn’t film Patriot Prayer protesters discussing strategies or motives. He only turns his camera on when members of antifa enter the scene.
    “There’s an understanding,” he says, “that Patriot Prayer protects him and he protects them.”

    Bye, Andy. We knew you weren’t a journalist all along, and you have to be pretty blatant when even Quillette finds you toxic.

When the universe is getting cleaned up one asshole at a time, you have to appreciate these little victories. Especially when they kill all of science fiction and all political thought, an impressive achievement.

Rich people using charities as a way to whitewash their crimes

The effort to salvage David Koch’s reputation is underway — usually by praising him for his donations to charity. Jeet Heer is having none of that.

Such encomiums are premised on the idea that Koch’s charitable giving was so commendable that questions about where his money came from or the general impact of the super-rich on society would be impertinent. This willful lack of curiosity was sharply critiqued as long ago as 1909 by then-President Theodore Roosevelt, who wasn’t impressed by John D. Rockefeller’s setting up a foundation to help disperse his mountain of money. “No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,” Roosevelt curtly but accurately noted. In the case of the Koch family, there’s plenty of misconduct to investigate.

Then he explains how the Koch money was earned by their father, a fanatical John Bircher, who built oil refineries for Nazi Germany, and how they were despicable in their treatment of their employees. How much would they have to give away in order to compensate for the evil they’ve done? More than they have.

Must we celebrate David Koch’s bountiful donations to public institutions, even if we dislike how the duo have pushed the Republican Party (and America as a whole) to the right? Not at all. The Koch brothers’ bad deeds outweigh their public service. Besides, plutocratic philanthropy is a wretched social model.

I would also add that even their good donations were tainted by an agenda. They funded a major exhibit on human evolution at the Smithsonian, but one of their goals was to play up how climate change affected human evolution. Why, we wouldn’t be here if not for climate change! Therefore, it’s all good for you.

At least that was one step beyond outright denial.

Charles Pierce is also piling on.

Fair warning. I am about to speak very ill of the dead. David Koch went to his eternal barbecue spit on Friday. Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that’s not even to mention the lasting damage they’ve done to the planet as a whole. Sorry, Morning Joe gang, I wouldn’t care if they opened branches of the National Museum of Puppies and Rainbows in every congressional district in the United States. The Koch brothers financed the wrecking ball that is still doing damage, and now one of them is dead, and, if I am not rejoicing, I am breathing deep sighs of relief and praying deep prayers of thanksgiving.

Well, I’m rejoicing, at least. Let the whole family rot.

Whose side are the police on, anyway?

I remember the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry — when we lived in Eugene, we often (but not as often as we’d like, it was a long drive) trekked up to Portland with the kids to enjoy it. It was a safe place, a hands-on museum with lots of children’s activities. I wonder how it’s changed in the past 30-some years.

It’s still supposed to be a safe place. In the recent demonstrations with fascists, the Portland police actually recommended that it was a good spot to visit that weekend, that it would be free of protests and Proud Boys. They lied. They actually led the Nazis right past the museum in order to clear them from downtown.

I was with my son, my daughter-in-law, and two little boys under five years old. We did not want my grandchildren anywhere near fascists. The Portland police bureau had published a map promising that OMSI, across the river from the planned site of the rally, would be safe. Alas, as police defused the main rally, some of the fascists found their way across the river and marched past the museum.

While the kids played in the beautiful Science Playground, the public-address system announced that the museum was in “lockup”; no one could enter or leave until further notice. We could not see the street; none of the staff knew what was going on; no one could tell us how long the lockup would last; no one knew whether the marchers might assemble in front of the museum, making escape impossible.

An actual lockdown, in contradiction to what the police had earlier recommended. Wow. They really don’t care, do they?

It’s not just Proud Boys, either. The Republican Party is merging with fascism.

Although no major political figure has embraced antifa activism, the Republican Party has begun to embrace the Proud Boys. Last fall, the Metropolitan Republican Club invited a Proud Boys leader to speak at a club event. (After the event, two Proud Boys beat four protesters so badly that a jury on Monday convicted two of them on charges of assault and riot.) The Republican activist Roger Stone has said he was initiated as a Proud Boy, and Proud Boys appeared at a federal courthouse when he turned himself in on charges brought by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Stone and the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson posed in the Fox greenroom with two Proud Boys accompanying Stone.

This summer, Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy are sponsoring a resolution that would designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist group.” No mention of the Proud Boys or any of the other neofascist groups who feel empowered by the ascent of Trump.

I guess we’ll need to go into lockdown any time a Republican passes by.

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.