Your Friday moment of zen.
Port of Tillamook Bay rolling stock, coastal Oregon (at Burns). This is the source shot of yesterday’s tilt-shift image. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 6:47 am Fri May 21 2010 | Comments(0) |
WWI gothic — From x-planes.
New Theory Explains Superrotation on Venus — As a Japanese weather satellite heads to Venus, a new theory tackles one of the outstanding mysteries of the planet.
Should We BAC Down? — I find the conclusion of this piece sort of odd, as it seems to assume that drinking and driving is a public good the value of which should be balanced against reduced traffic deaths in the case of stricter laws.
Before He Hired an Escort, Rekers Tried to Spank the Gay Away — A look into homosexual deprogramming, Right wing style. Stories like this only deepen my conviction that the anti-gay movement is composed of bigots, barbarians and vicious fools.
Sanchez on Epistemic Bias and the Right — Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute has a podcast up on the Cato website talking about a phrase he recently coined — “epistemic bias” — to describe how the right-wing echo chamber has produced a large portion of the citizenry essentially immune to evidence that is contrary to their beliefs.
When and (to an extent) why did the parties switch places? — Some long-ago political history. The footnote is very funny and apropos to current politics, however.
The Proud Ignorance of Rand Paul — Ta-Nehisis Cotes on Rachel Maddow’s Rand Paul interview. I love this bit: This isn’t like not knowing the days of Kwanzaa, this is like not knowing what caused the Civil War. It’s just embarrassing–except Paul is too ignorant to be embarrassed. I’m sure Paul’s defenders will dismiss this interview as a lefty hit-job. But Maddow gave him every opportunity to correct the record, or defend it, and Paul answered with a series of feints and dodges. Not once did he stand up and throw a real punch. You’re left wondering how he came to his position and what, precisely, is really at work here.
The Poor, Suffering “Centrists” — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison labors under the delusion that this country has been governed by centrists for the past ten years. Some of us actually remember the Bush administration, however, and their complete dominance of all three branches of government from 2000-2006. Sadly, no one in the Tea Party and few on the Right recall this long ago era of conservatism run amok with its trivial budget deficits and tiny, easy foreign wars, even telling us lately that 9-11 happened on Clinton’s watch.
?otD: Diesel or steam? Show your work.
Posted: 6:45 am Fri May 21 2010 | Comments(1) |
Reading the Science in my Fiction blog lately has gotten me thinking about worldbuilding again. That’s a topic never far from my mind, and is perhaps the first aspect of fiction craft I became formally aware of, as a reader during my teen years. (I blame a combination of Robert Heinlein ret-conned future history and the release of First Edition AD&D for this.)
I might try to make this a regular series of posts on the blog, because I have a lot to say, but I don’t yet have an overarching thematic structure in which to embed my thoughts. Ie, random musing.
For today, point the first: Monocultures.
Science in my Fiction recently had a post on single-biome planets. I don’t completely agree with them, I can imagine several situations where a single human-viable biome is present on an otherwise inhospitable planet (think Larry Niven’s A Gift From Earth for one example), but the general point is very well taken. But I think the point applies just as much to monocultures as monobiomes.
It’s a trope in SF (and to a much lesser degree in fantasy) that an oppressed or defeated or otherwise marginalized culture flees to a place of new opportunity. Consider the US grade-school version of the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts as an example of this. In SF we see entire planetary civilizations dedicated to a single purpose. A good version of this in fiction is Gordon R. Dickson’s Childe cycle, with the worlds of the Exotics, the Friendlies (sic) and the Dorsai. Yet, much like the Pilgrims, historical and sociological evidence strongly suggests that monocultures do not long survive their charismatic (or traumatic) foundings. Schisms occur. Persecutions lead to diaspora, which leads to competing centers of civilization far from the original core.
In order for a monoculture to make sense in an SF novel, it would have to be fairly young, fairly small, and very tightly controlled. Which could certainly be true in the early years of a new colony. Or in a very resource-constricted environment where one entity has control of both information and critical resources. Think North Korea, for example. Or in a dying colony. But in general, with any substantial population and a decent surplus of resources, people will find things to argue about. That’s what we do.
So I find monocultures, especially allegedly long-term monocultures, dubious at best. I tend to lose story trust very quickly when presented with such, unless a valid (and interesting) rationale is presented as well. Besides which, they don’t usually work well in fiction except as allegory (Dickson’s intent, surely, in the Childe Cycle), and allegory is difficult to pull off well.
Point the second: Societal impacts of magic.
I was in a workshop years ago where a very good writer (who is now a Bigger Name than me) presented a charming short story which was, essentially, Jane Austen with magic, during which, as a complete toss-off line, someone mentioned that the South Tower of the manor had previously been turned to butter by a passing magical storm.
Everybody else in the workshop thought it was a terrific story. I got totally hung up on the butter question. Where did twenty or thirty tons of butter go afterward? What happened to the local dairy economy when the lord of the manor went to dispose of enough butter to feed half of England for months? What was the value of the labor spent to build and then rebuild the South Tower in a world where all that effort could be randomly erased at any moment? If transmutation were so random and simple, what was the value of any material good? If the gold in the vaults could suddenly become gravy, who would keep gold in vaults? Etc.
The workshop patted me on the head, told me to take a pill and lie down, and carried on. But that conversation bothers me to this day. It’s a trope in some kinds of fantasy that we see the world-as-it-is (or was) with this one magical element introduced. As a reader, I understand the appeal of that. As a writer, it makes me nuts.
Naomi Novik’s excellent and entertaining Temeraire series is a startlingly clear example of this. The books take place in the Napoleonic world, with dragons. Dragons have been around since prehistory, according to internal evidence in the text. Which leads me to think that if the Phonecians had dragons, they’d have had deepwater navigation thanks to over-the-horizon reconnaissance, and the Romans would never have risen as they did. Or if the Romans had dragons, would they have been more successful in repelling the barbarian invasions during their decline? Etc. I find it almost inconceivable that the world of Napoleonic Europe could have evolved with such an overpowering historical inflection. Had the dragons appeared just a few dozen years before the narrative present of the story, it would have all made sense. Which isn’t the point of the Temeraire, of course, but it bothered my world-building self intensely.
I can make the same criticisms of my own Mainspring series. That there should be a Victorian England as we knew it in an Earth where the equator is impassable and therefore the British East India Company is much a reduced or nonexistent beast, for example, is ludicrous. I make some efforts to explain this away in the world-building, which I hope are successful, and (like Novik) I did this for a reason, but it still doesn’t make sense. Given that the Mainspring universe is about a light-year wide, and contains one solar system driven by clockwork, it doesn’t have to make a lot of sense. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
My larger point is that when you introduce magic, any kind of magic, it’s impossible to imagine that society will simply stay the same. Randall Garrett did a good job of this in his Lord Darcy books, showing a society familiar enough to have that frisson of interest to the reader, but also quite distorted from our own in both the narrative present and the internal history by the presence of the magic. There’s a huge temptation when working at the high concept level to say, “It’s just like Little House on the Prairie, with werewolves!”, and that obviously works commercially — Jane Austen with Zombies, anyone? — but if you’re attempting or even pretending to SFnal rigor or internally consistent fantasy, work out the plausibilities first.
Posted: 5:55 am Thu May 20 2010 | Comments(9) |
Lots of social stuff yesterday. By the time
More dreams of sexual and food frustration. As my therapist says, completely unsurprising. The spirit has never lost its willingness, but the flesh grows ever weaker. Thank Ghu for patience, creativity, love and understanding.
This morning I finally managed some lower GI activity for the first time since Monday. You can imagine the resulting pleasantness. At least I’m not going in to infusion weekend stopped up, as I did last time. That only multiplies issues.
Otherwise, exhaustion continues as an Xtreme sport here at Nuevo Rancho Lake. Yesterday it was accompanied by some jolly headaches. Peripheral neuropathy also seems to be a nearly full time thing now. Still, I bear up and march on. I figure on seeing the first glimmerings of normal around the end of June.
Posted: 5:16 am Thu May 20 2010 | Comments(1) |
Your Thursday moment of zen.
Port of Tillamook Bay rolling stock, coastal Oregon (at Burns). This photo has been tilt-shifted. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:10 am Thu May 20 2010 | Comments(0) |
Get Fuzzy on dog breeding — Hahah.
New drug reverses even ‘untreatable’ cancers — Cancer patients may be offered new hope in the form of a harmless virus which can reverse even apparently untreatable forms of the disease when injected into tumors.
Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth — Fascinating article, especially when read with a political eye. (Thanks to
The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield — The sordid history of antivax denialism in comic strip panels. Children die daily now to support the antivax delusion.
D.C. Douglas PSA For Tea Party And FreedomWorks Critics — Wow, quite a video. “Tweaking the nipple of hypocrites in powers can be dangerous.” (Thanks to
Bogus Religious Freedom Claims — An argument about whether government officials in Canada can decline to perform same sex marriages. This is analogous to the deeply flawed “conscience laws” here in the US allowing healthcare providers to decline services that conflict with their religious beliefs. Don’t want to dispense birth control pills? Don’t become a pharmacists. All these laws do is privilege religious bigots and allow persons in positions of authority to impose their private beliefs on the general public.
?otD: Have you ever been eight miles high?
Posted: 5:06 am Thu May 20 2010 | Comments(1) |
As I’ve observed many times before, we are all hypocrites. I don’t think it’s psychologically possible to be completely consistent. The tension between mythos and logos in the human psyche pretty much puts paid to that. It’s certainly possible to be morally and intellectually rigorous, and intensely self-correcting, but most of us (definitely including me) are too busy leading our lives to keep that up on a full time basis, either. Insofar as I can tell, one of the whole points of pursuing religion, or some other form of ethical and philosophical system, is to provide a framework in which such consistency can be pursued without having to continually reason from first principles.
And for the most part, I don’t care, so long as you (and I) are not harming anyone. Have fun believing six impossible things before breakfast. I do it all the time. Revel in your self-contradictory nature. I do that all the time, too.
But when you move into the realm of politics, specifically legislation, and you bring your religion or your ethical framework with you and begin governing from that stance, you’d better damned well be consistent. My ethical framework tells me that other people’s private sexual, reproductive and social behavior is none of my damn business, except insofar as they might choose to include or inform me for their own reasons. If I were in politics or government, I’d stay the hell away from putting government in the bedroom. That’s one of the core reasons I’m a liberal-progressive: I firmly believe government doesn’t belong interfering in private life absent a compelling public interest (mandatory education, for example) or preventing harm (domestic violence, for example).
Contrast this with core conservative principles that attempt to control private sexual behavior, personal medical and reproductive choices, and ethical behavior. Legislating morality is a non-starter in any free society, but conservatives love nothing more than the idea of inserting government into the private lives of people they disapprove of. It’s in black-and-white in virtually every Republican party platform out there.
So when we see a story like the resignation of Indiana GOP Rep. Mark Souder in a sex scandal, I call it out. Like I (and so many others) called out Republican Senator Larry Craig, who promised to make the lives of gays a living hell while cruising for men in public restrooms. Or Republican Senator David “Diaper Baby” Vitter for his use of prostitutes while running and serving as a family values champion.
These are not the quiet, private hypocrisies of you, me and everyone else in America. These are the public hypocrisies of the people legislating sexual behavior and private lives of everyone else in America, and they’re doing it on a “punishment for thee but not for me” basis.
That’s why I don’t care when Democrats, or entertainers, or sports figures, are caught out in such scandals. Unlike conservative politicians, those people are not trying to use the force of law to constrain my freedoms and the freedoms of those I love.
It’s not the hypocrisy of doing one thing and saying another that incenses me. That’s just human nature. It’s the hypocrisy of doing one thing while criminalizing and persecuting others for doing the same damned thing that incenses me.
To my mind, that’s reflective of the ultimate flaw in conservatism. My worldview as a liberal-progressive encompasses most of the conservative worldview. Against abortion? Don’t have one. Creeped out by homosexuality? Don’t hang out in gay bars. Almost everything conservatives want, I’m happy for them to have. Even (grudgingly) guns, if people keep them safely. But conservatism, by its very nature, is incapable of granting me the same courtesy. Their worldview, as defined in their party platforms and public rhetoric, explicitly seeks to limit and criminalize mine.
I could never choose a narrowing of opportunity, freedom and the future for myself or anyone else. Souder, Craig, Vitter and the entire conservative movement base their entire political lives on exactly that narrowing. And they betray themselves with the hypocrisy of sex.
Posted: 5:52 am Wed May 19 2010 | Comments(3) |
Such a social bug I am.
In one three-day period I am accomplishing more socializing than I’ve managed in the past three weeks. Weird.
Exhaustion continues bordering on the extreme. Well, not bordering. More full scale violation of sovereignty with incursion by armored columns and close air support. I slept in hat and gloves last night. The hat came off at some point, but the gloves worked well. (Thanks, Dad, and also for the Really Thick Socks.) GI, mirable dictu (or possibly mirable buttu) is being well behaved. Who knew Rice Chex and oatmeal were so good for the bowels?
There’s probably something I’ve excluded from my diet which is improving the GI, given how restricted my eating has become, but I’m too goofy lately to actually figure it out.
Chemo session ten of twelve forthcoming in two days. Joy of joys. Really, folks, I can’t recommend cancer as a hobby.
Posted: 5:33 am Wed May 19 2010 | Comments(1) |
Your Wednesday moment of zen.
Port of Tillamook Bay rolling stock, coastal Oregon. © 2006, 2010, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:24 am Wed May 19 2010 | Comments(1) |
A reader reacts to Mainspring — Mixed review, generally positive.
Book Habits: A Meme — Andrew Wheeler with a hilarious (and interesting) interview with ETA: meme snurched from book blogger Robb. Chemo brain strikes again!
Posthuman Blues — Awesome looking new-to-me blog. Going on my daily blogroll. ETA: I’m told the blog’s author passed away last year. Sigh. Chemo brain didn’t look at the post dates.
They S.H.O.O.T. atheists, don’t they? — In which (among other things) the Bad Astronomer complains about worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction. With some accuracy, I might add.
Can an Enemy Be a Child’s Friend? — Interesting. Having grown up in the era when the standard response to bullying was to blame the victim — “What did you do to antagonize him?” — and having been the class goat pretty much through seventh grade, thanks in part to the 1970′s gym teacher technique of picking on one pansy (me) to motivate the rest of the kids, I have a lot of sympathy for kids on the wrong end of the social stick. In some my ways, my entire life today is a revenge of the nerds.
Milky Way Over Ancient Ghost Panel — Another lovely APOD image.
Russia reportedly used nukes to seal runaway oil wells — Really?
Family Values GOP Rep To Resign Over Affair — Abstinence and family values FTW! And yes, the congressman and his girlfriend even made an abstinence video together. Principled consistency: your Republican hallmark.
Governor, I knew Susan B. Anthony. Susan B. Anthony was a subject of my scholarship, and Governor… — Ann Gordon and Lynn Sherr want you to know that no matter how often Sarah Palin says so, Susan B. Anthony was not an anti-abortion activist. Those who do not study history are doomed to be conservatives.
Angry Tea Partiers are not the Moral Equivalent of Compassionate Democrats — Juan Cole on Your Liberal Media’s continued false equivalency of political narratives. When is the last time you saw leftwing Democrats taunting disabled people, or weeping, or shouting that “their” country had been stolen by “those people”? What did the Democratic left want? Universal health care with a public option. That is angry? Isn’t it just common decency?
Tea party: Dark side of conservatism — When the tea partiers say they are true conservatives, there is no reason to doubt them. They stand in the conservative tradition of the radical right — a movement of the haves and the well-protected who, since the time of FDR, have feared that their freedom will be lost if the government extends a hand to the have-nots and the unprotected.
PA-12 and The Single Greatest Pushback in American History — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on the special election to fill the late John Murtha’s seat, and the abject failure of the Republican narrative about their forthcoming political gains.
?otD: Were you ever the class goat as a kid?
Posted: 5:21 am Wed May 19 2010 | Comments(1) |