Confessions of a Demon
by rsbakker
The most controversial decision I made embarking on the Second Apocalypse was the decision to create a deliberately sexist world. All this time I had been looking at fantasy fiction as ‘scripture otherwise,’ as an example of the way religious tropes, once extracted from their native communities, instantly became magical tropes when fictionally relocated. Middle-earth is what Biblical Israel, Vedic India, or Homeric Greece look like when packaged for consumption as another consumer good. Since I saw nostalgia as the greatest social and aesthetic sin of the genre, I wanted my alternate ancient world to be as morally troubling as our own ancient past most assuredly is. Since I saw wish-fulfillment as the second greatest social and aesthetic sin I devised characters too damaged or too alien to not make the reader itch in some way. I wanted grit in every seam of my world. I wanted people coming out feeling their skin.
I think fantasy narratives, the narratives conquering more and more of the mainstream imagination, are the most direct and florid symptom of a very special kind of society, one that is ‘akratic,’ functionally nihilistic insofar as scientifically rationalized and empowered, yet occulted by carnival cultures of disposable meaning. I think our society is what a society that can only instrumentally rationalize norms looks like, one continually reorganizing itself around market imperatives. Upon this nihilistic architecture we slather endless homilies to our brutally chauvinistic past, and most especially, to our self-overcoming selves.
This was the dynamic I wanted to explore in photographic negative.
For those with no ear for such things, I just come off as a sexist pig. Since traditional chauvinisms are invariably naturalized, or taken as the way things are, I wanted a female protagonist who accepted the fact of her oppression. Moreover, I wanted both her ‘revelation’ and her ‘emancipation’ to be thoroughly tainted, to be mediated, not only by a man, but by a cipher for modernity.
I wanted to show how nihilism can actually explain ‘moral progress.’
Now, of course, I just sound like an insufferably arrogant sexist pig trying to rationalize his pigginess. That’s okay. I’ve read enough research on moral judgment making to realize that such declarations generally do not admit rational consideration. Those making them are actually best thought of as machines running through certain inevitable programs. Even showing them the research makes no difference—as I’ve discovered first hand. If they smell pig, then pig is on the menu…
No matter what the cook says.
Let me explain. We like to think that moral progress, the gradual expansion of the ‘franchise’ to include more and more participants belongs to a larger, rational process. We like to think, in other words, that ‘social justice’ services some kind of ‘moral truth.’ This is certainly what I like to think, and how I do think in many practical situations. But there’s an entirely different way to think of moral progress, one that explains its otherwise mysterious relationship to scientific and technical ‘progress.’ The most glaring fact of human social life is human social ignorance, how we make/accompany social decisions given only scanty evidence. My own tango with moral condemnation provides an excellent case in point. Not a single soul declaring me morally defective had the slightest clue who I was, let alone my history of relationships with women. On the basis of a series of hunches—some kind of ‘narrative odor,’ perhaps—they knew with Old Testament certainty that I was somehow morally defective in this way or that.
They were thinking heuristically, through the lens of a system that very clearly seems to be social results oriented, and not fact oriented. Whether or not I was morally defective in fact had no bearing on the issue. If it had some bearing, then the evidence would have been assessed. I would have been asked questions, and my queries would have been answered. If I had any case whatsoever, my detractors would have qualified their claims accordingly. ‘Bakker is a sexist pig!’ would have been amended to, ‘Bakker’s books lead certain readers to assume he’s a sexist pig, but they could be mistaken.’
To my horror and fascination—things had quickly become too surreal to feel otherwise—the whole kerfuffle unfolded exactly as Jonathan Haidt’s research suggested it would. Mathematical proof of my innocence would have simply revealed that mathematics had a ‘tone problem.’ (A handful of more sophisticated critics had decided my real problem was the lack of contrition, that I failed to exhibit the ‘proper tone,’ one expressing sensitivity to the plight of those wishing me dead). It became very clear very quickly that facts and interpretative charity had no place in this debate.
Although Haidt attempts to soft-sell his findings, what they really demonstrate is the immorality of moral reasoning. But what could this mean, the ‘immorality of moral reasoning’? Is it simply a matter of inconsistency, the fact that I was being accused of chauvinism, of unjustified denigration, in the most chauvinistic manner I could imagine? Does it all come down to something as banal a human hypocrisy?
Or does it mean something more troubling?
The fact is this is precisely what we should expect moral reasoning to look like were nihilism true. The original basis of the charge against me lies in my books. Since depiction is so often confused with endorsement, it should come as no surprise that certain readers would think that, far from critiquing patriarchal social systems, I’m celebrating and promoting the denigration of women. This is a simple and quite understandable mistake to make in an information vacuum. The most straightforward conclusion to draw is that I am a moral problem. This triggers the application of our moral problem solving systems. Now, if there were a fact of the matter regarding moral defects, you would expect the heuristics involved would be geared to fact–finding, to determining, in my case, whether I am indeed morally defective. But as it turns out, precisely the opposite is the case. As Haidt’s research shows in rather dramatic fashion, individuals from across cultures can do little more than rationalize their conclusions. Their bias is very nearly complete. What should be raised as a worry is voiced as an accusation. Hatred becomes the driving affect. Intimidation—‘shame tactics’—becomes the only communicative tool people seem to recognize.
Not one of these people knew me, and yet I was an obvious moral monster. I would do vanity Googles and find complete strangers mourning for my wife, my daughter—on the basis of a review of the first six pages of my first novel. Now that’s heuristic.
This suggests that the function of moral reasoning is only incidentally epistemic, that it’s geared to managing perceptions, enforcing attitudes—and that this is the case no matter what the message. The moral reasoning of Islamic State radicals is the moral reasoning of Christian Fundamentalists is the moral reasoning of Feminists is the moral reasoning of Environmental Activists. Demons focus the attention, provide the organizing principle for some kind of recuperative or retributive action. The coarse grain of the ‘demon detection system’ is actually advantageous the degree to which false positives eliminate the chances of false negatives. Real demons are serious business, liable to destroy the entire community. It’s far better to burn a dozen innocents than let one demon run amok.
Haidt is keen to stress this point: irrational or not, in situ moral reasoning makes things happen. It is a crude, yet enormously effective social device, capable of resolving potentially existential problems given mere scraps of information. And as irony would have it, The Second Apocalypse was nothing if not a long meditation on the mad power of this device, how it’s capable of organizing whole societies around the need to exorcise perceived demons, how it can move individuals to sacrifice not only themselves, but innumerable innocents as well—the details be damned.
The fact the novels have managed to spark living examples of this device in action is something that I will always regard as my single greatest artistic triumph. My job, after all, is to problematize moral sensitivities, not pander to them. If certain issues, certain words, make people cringe and run for cover behind silence or reverent/patronizing tones, my job is to run the hazards and to ask why, to follow the reasons no matter what latrine they guide me to.
But it strands me, as well, leaves me wrecked on the shore of a world I do not recognize, one where the compass of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ spins and spins and spins. What does Esmenet’s emancipation mean given the instrumental nature of its origins—given the fact of Kellhus? She’s my cipher—a painfully obvious one, you would think—for the crazy contradictions we’re witnessing today, with women making ever more social and economic inroads even as their sexual brutalization becomes the dominant form of mass entertainment. Kellhus strikes the shackles from her wrists… for what? So that she might be more fully enslaved?
How could this count as moral progress? How could emancipation, the ‘triumph of moral reason,’ so easily collapse into systematic exploitation?
If morality were a delusion, if ‘values’ were primarily a way to tackle complicated problems in the absence of any detailed information, you would expect morality to be ruthless the way it is ruthless, simply because it lacks the discriminatory powers to be anything but ‘fast and frugal.’ What’s more you would expect that the cultural accumulation of information would have a profound, systematic impact on the way moral reasoning functions. Moral cognition evolved as a means of managing extraordinary complexities in informatically impoverished environments. In such environments, the simple fact of information availability serves as a reliable proxy for trustworthiness, for determining who belongs to the cooperative franchise. So it makes sense that the accelerating cultural accumulation of information would be accompanied by an expansion of the franchise, that information availability would generate an ‘intuition gradient’ favouring the extension of ingroup privileges and responsibilities to those who would have been unequivocal outgroup competitors in paleolithic times. As the technologically mediated transformation of social relationships renders traditional norms more and more maladaptive, this gradient steers the development of new, more inclusive norms.
It’s possible, in other words, to see the gruelling, uncertain march of moral progress as a mechanical artifact of our social cognitive limitations rather than as a ‘triumph of moral reason.’ On this picture, the contradiction of ‘moral progress’ becomes clear: Even as increasing information access feeds the ‘emancipation gradient,’ technologically mediated social change reveals the arbitrary nature of traditional constraints on sexual conduct, thus allowing more basic imperatives to roam where they will. These tend toward depictions of rape for the same reason they tend toward depictions of youth and beauty. Culture builds and culture tears down but it always breaks ground on an evolutionary landscape. Rape, like murder and violence more generally, is almost certainly part of the male evolutionary inheritance.
Men are scary… part Sranc.
Turn on the news. Reactionary, atavistic throwbacks. Biases pitted against biases. The death of innocents summed on strategic balance sheets. Sometimes it seems that nothing argues the chimerical nature of morality more forcefully than morality itself. I know I had that sense more than a few times watching the hatred for me and my books metastasize across the web, the profound sense of being caught in something as relentless as it was automatic, with more and more people leaping to fantastic conclusions regarding my character and my life, acting out, without the least self-consciousness, the same preposterous moral certainty my books had been warning them against all along.
It was almost too good to be true. And heartbreaking, like anything that strands you in the desert of the real.
Bakker, why do you do this to yourself?
You realize that everyone will now say that you’re comparing feminists to ISIS (regardless of whether that was your intent or not)?
In a way, the misinterpretations are precisely the point. If this get’s picked up on the web in ‘outrage mode,’ take a seat and the program unfold. If not, no worries.
The real question I’m interested in is the question of the ‘shore,’ of what it means to take this attitude to moral condemnation.
Reblogged this on My Blog and commented:
Well worth the read for the 0 followers I have.
Teehee.
Well it lost me followers, so you might find yourself a -2, MH! Thank you though, MH. This stuff always has to climb uphill.
The feminists who think your books are the epitome of misogyny don’t want a discussion.
They never had, and they never will.
You’re entirely right. Zealots are in the conversion business, not the understanding one.
Not necessarily.
To them, you aren’t just some dude who writes imaginary stuff about imaginary creatures doing things to other imaginary creatures.
You’re a guy who build a supercritical fission device in his backyard, and is now going around the neighborhood and showing off the “glowy party-ball” you’ve built.
Scott, it must be so emotionally and mentally draining to be maliciously attacked like you’ve been. I don’t know if I could handle it.
It’s kinda like how Sam Harris is being attacked right now, for his criticism of Islam and liberalism.
For the most part, the criticism that both of you receive operates in the same fashion. Dishonest and unethical attacks.
I find it all very depressing.
Sam,
Difference is, Sam Harris isn’t aware he’s writing fiction. People who make inaccurate, empirically unfounded claims about large groups of humans should be attacked.
01,
You’re describing a situation with practical dimensions to it – ie, you’re describing building a bomb and bombs have a lot of practical issues someone could raise.
Check whether they are raising any practical issues.
Unless there is profound misunderstanding on my part with regards to how feminist critics use English words, it seems apparent that when someone claims that a given work “promotes sexism” and “harms women”, one is raising a practical concern and not merely a high-brow abstract objection.
01,
Unless there is profound misunderstanding on my part with regards to how feminist critics use English words, it seems apparent that when someone claims that a given work “promotes sexism” and “harms women”, one is raising a practical concern and not merely a high-brow abstract objection.
Curious, given your own ‘ghost’ comments in regards to violence.
What’s not ghostly about these phrases (“promotes sexism” and “harms women”)? Ie, where they come down to emperic metrics?
@ Callan
You mean, what reasons do I have to believe that the authors of such comments aren’t using those words in some “ghostly” sense that does not imply any degree of objectivity or coherent legal impact ?
Wellll no, I’d asked where they come down to an emperic measure – there are no other reasons possible, so as much I’ve no interest in any other reasons you might come up with. I have no interest in what reasons you might have to believe that the authors of such comments aren’t using the phrases in a ghostly sense. There are no other reasons other than emperic measure. Answer on the terms I made, as there are no other terms. There are no special exemptions.
Unless were indulging ghosts. Unless you are. Which I can go with, but you seem to have a problem with this even as you’re trying to rephrase the question as one where they have reasons OTHER than an emperic measure. AND without ghosts being indulged as well.
The ghosts have got you, man.
TL;DR: No, that’s not what I mean. Just give the emperic measures of the phrases, please. As that’s all there is to give. Any other reasons are hogwash. Sans ghosts, anyway.
Wait a second.
You’re asking me what empirical measures do “I” propose for investigating “harms” and “promotion of X attitude” claimed by third parties ?
I am mildly confused.
If you’re trying to pitch some defence for them, 01, then yes. You’ve said ‘they see it as a bomb’ – but if you don’t know their metrics to be able to say those metrics here, then you don’t know how they see it.
What are you going to say? “But I feel their plight, man! Take that as evidence!”
And I would, actually – if were both acknowledging that doing so is to indulge ghosts.
If you were arguing they see a piece of string as too long, why would it be confusing for me to ask you how many centimeters that is, since it is you who are arguing for them? Do you expect to be able to argue that it’s too long for them, but never mention the exact length that offends? So much so it’s confusing if I ask the exact length?
If you can’t mention the exact length, how did you expect to argue to begin with?
Unless we indulge ghosts.
But it wont seem like there’s an issue, since the use of metrics are not natural to our tribal selves. Millions of years without numbers. We operate socially via pleading and begging. Not facts.
@ Callan
Do I look like someone who cares to pitch a defense for second-wavers and their closest ideological associates ?
I guess that’s where our misunderstanding stemmed from – the request for exact measures that were used to ascertain the “fact” and “extent” of “misogyny promotion” is my usual line of inquiry, so I kind of assumed that you’re trying to preempt me as some kind of rhetorical technique.
Actually, you can discern a lot from the way the claim is structured, in terms of language.
If one claims that a work is misogynistic, that is a statement of opinion (that opinion might or might be more or less factual itself, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate a claim to some larger claim about the work’s impact on the livelihoods of real living beings)
If one, however, claims that a work “promotes misogyny” (or “harms women” or “causes violence” or what have you) , that is a clear (and, more often than not, quite unjustified) implication of a larger social impact, and thus a claim regarding an empirical matter
But, given my pathologically argumentative nature 🙂 I could not, of course, refrain from inquiring further whenever such claims are encountered, so my observations aren’t based merely on language being used.
Usually, my interlocutors did not backpedal and claim that statements in question are merely a critical opinion of theirs.
More often than not, arguments as to empirical effects of given work, or literature in general, were raised. Some arguments were rather trite, like unjustified parallels with CBT and “Birth of a Nation”-era “surveys”, some where somewhat more interesting – like arguments based on “spillover” research, which, despite ranging from “very fragile and vulnerable to undesired priming” to “outright Craig Anderson-style shenanigans”, at least provided an interesting and coherent empirical frame for the discussion.
So far, none my interlocutors have succeeded in providing unquestionable evidence of causal relationship between the media they hate and social effects they claim it causes (admittedly, that’s not an easy task – the problem is about as bad as the “conceptual replication”* problem, but hey, they made a hard claim, so a hard task of backing it is more than well-deserved)
But most do try, instead of merely falling back on the trust “it’s just a critical opinion, man” backpedal
Just to be clear:
I am not “arguing for them”
I am merely relaying an admittedly non-scientific observation of third-party opinion based upon numerous instances of asking said third-parties about their string, how long it is, and whether they have any measurements of that string, or for that matter, any evidence of string existing 🙂
Hey, I’ve answered Callan with a different gravatar pic (but same account) and the stuff is showing up no more.
Scott, could you check the spambin ?
I am not “arguing for them”
I am merely relaying an admittedly non-scientific observation of third-party opinion based upon numerous instances of asking said third-parties about their string, how long it is, and whether they have any measurements of that string, or for that matter, any evidence of string existing
Unless you’re being paid to relay the information, no, you are arguing for them, 01. Specifically, for their ghost issues.
If someone feels that the text in the book will make the slender man appear when read (and the author hasn’t heard this from them already), there’s no point relaying that – unless you are indulging the ghost of it. This is what Scott, I think, was trying to say with his whole rationalisation thing before (though that ends up a shut down, IMO) – that when it’s a ghost you relate to, you will relay it, but when it’s a ghost you have no use for – well THEN you’ll call it a ghost. As if you never indulge ghosts.
If one claims that a work is misogynistic, that is a statement of opinion (that opinion might or might be more or less factual itself, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate a claim to some larger claim about the work’s impact on the livelihoods of real living beings)
If one, however, claims that a work “promotes misogyny” (or “harms women” or “causes violence” or what have you) , that is a clear (and, more often than not, quite unjustified) implication of a larger social impact, and thus a claim regarding an empirical matter
The way it seems to you that they are different is the root of the problem. That the former somehow has the protection of ‘opinion’ when the latter doesn’t – or put it the other way around, why the latter somehow has to go to emperical while the former doesn’t, and the inconsistancy within that, is the problematism I’m pointing out in your ‘they see it as a bomb’ reply. No special exemptions, as I already said. Neither gets the protection of ‘opinion’. Unless you’re indulging ghosts.
Stop treating opinion as special somehow and exempt from emperical examination (ie, to just relay them is to skip any emperical examination), and I quit the charge that you’re indulging ghosts.
The emperical is where opinion goes to die. There are no special exempted opinions that avoid this fate. Unless…indulging…
I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that arguing “arguing for” them implies some kind of support
As you might know, I hardly am partial to the opinion that a work of fiction could, in any meaningful way, “promote” misogyny (or whatever negative social outcome one chooses to worry about)
So, stating the observation that a given person appears (based on said person’s use of language, and in some cases, the way said person answers questions) to believe that a work of fiction can summon a child kidnapping monster would be tantamount to endorsing this weird belief in supernatural monster and its respective book of summoning?
So, how do we discuss weird attitudes we aren’t ourselves partial to, then ?
It might so be that I understood Scott’s argument differently.
I understood it as a claim that the one (or at least, the most important) mechanism underlying the negative reaction some of his detractors is, essentially, a target discrimination failure.
And while I don’t claim that the “target overgeneralization problem” does not exist, I decided that it might be worthwhile to point out that, judging from the way some of his detractors use language and answer questions, it would appear that they have a slightly more sophisticated reason to target him, one based on a fairly counterfactual belief they appear to have.
Also, I would argue that merely stating that there exists a peculiar (and counterfactual) belief is not synonymous with indulging it.
I happen to have no problem acknowledging the existence of, and contemplating upon, demonstrably erroneous and/or outright fantastic beliefs without actually indulging them.
Do you ?
The difference to me, is the difference between saying “this soup is salty” (awwww, man, that’s too bad. Try another restaurant then, will ya?) and “the amount of salt in this soup is sufficient to constitute a health risk” (a medically plausible claim, but one that requires a certain degree of clarification and empirical verification)
I could perhaps concede that the claim of “your work is misogynistic” also requires a justification, though I would argue a slightly different one than the justification needed for “your work promotes misogyny”
An interesting case to ponder would be the infamous Gor series (as long as “pondering” does not require “re-reading”. It’s bloody tedious), since it is quite conceivable to support the case that the work is “misogynistic” (in the sense that the majority of prominent characters and the intradiegetic social environment in general appear to partake in attitudes commonly considered “misogynistic”), while the claim that it “promotes misogyny” would still be pretty much unsupportable (despite Norman being on record voicing views in opposition to gender equality).
I could concede that opinions aren’t foolproof to examination (though it seems to me that the inherent and admitted subjectivity of opinion and lack of claims generalizable to “reality” would limit the effectiveness of this approach), but I can’t concede that merely relaying a (conterfactual) belief constitutes indulging said belief.
Otherwise I won’t be able to discuss all the crazy fantastic shit people believe (and nitpick their sacred cows to shreds :)), and that would take all the fun out of discourse!
I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that arguing “arguing for” them implies some kind of support
I can’t parse this – are you refering you arguing “arguing for”?
So, stating the observation that a given person appears (based on said person’s use of language, and in some cases, the way said person answers questions) to believe that a work of fiction can summon a child kidnapping monster would be tantamount to endorsing this weird belief in supernatural monster and its respective book of summoning?
So, how do we discuss weird attitudes we aren’t ourselves partial to, then ?
By…indulging…freakin’…ghosts!
To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife.
Indulge it or cut it. Choose.
I am not against indulging it. I am against pretentions of emperical attitude when it’s chanting a magical chant.
I happen to have no problem acknowledging the existence of, and contemplating upon, demonstrably erroneous and/or outright fantastic beliefs without actually indulging them.
Yes, you can’t help but describe the ‘existance’ of ‘belief’. Because it’s on the periodic table! Beliefonium, I think it’s called. Not to be confused with Baloneyium!
Fuck’s sake. It’s when superstition starts grabbing emperical fragments (and ignoring whatever else that’d get in the way of the desired outcome) that it becomes the most freakin’ entrenched.
The difference to me, is the difference between saying “this soup is salty” (awwww, man, that’s too bad. Try another restaurant then, will ya?) and “the amount of salt in this soup is sufficient to constitute a health risk” (a medically plausible claim, but one that requires a certain degree of clarification and empirical verification)
So what in this big cuddly universe has said these are to be treated differently somehow?
Some sort of magical protection for the former that’s so indescribable the request to describe it wont make any sense, no doubt.
Otherwise I won’t be able to discuss all the crazy fantastic shit people believe (and nitpick their sacred cows to shreds :)), and that would take all the fun out of discourse!
It’s funny that you’re the sadist, yet I’m the one getting off on what isn’t fun here (presumably I’m getting off by the pursuit of some goal or other by the means of flirting with nihilism).
Hot wax* isn’t supposed to be fun either, is it?
Not directly. Neither is the emperical.
Yeah, you don’t get to have fun directly. Like a human.
* I’m waiting for the ‘hot wax is so toy‘. Yes it is. I don’t know the bodily realm. I reserve my self mutilation for thinking.
Interesting.
It appears that many people (definitely not limited to me alone) are quite capable of discussing and investigating known-counterfactual statements without “indulging” them (at least for definitions of “indulge” found in Webster), in a compartmentalized manner.
Might have something to do with me not being a member of a nomadic tribe. Or with the fact that I happen to inhabit a place where one can’t exert extensive influence on objects by mere language (at least, not above the influence of sound waves one might produce by using language 🙂 )
Say, would I, per your opinion, be “indulging” a ghost when discussing something that is admitted-fiction (like say, oh, Middle Earth) or is it reserved for discussion of counterfactuals that are not perceived as such by some known third party (like, say, UFO abduction clams/beliefs) ?
So, per your opinion, the statement “John Doe really believes that chanting Hastur three times will summon forth a supernatural monster” would be tantamount to somehow “indulging” the belief in, well, Hastur and his attendant Byakhees ?
Ah, a mightier intellect might have chosen to describe “beliefs” as neuron arrangements and firing patters (it might also have chosen to describe “operating systems”, “files” and “interfaces” as particular arrangements of electronic components and their attendant activity patterns), though the empirical benefit of such endeavor seems to be dubious.
For one, storage space and computational effort that is needed to implement a precise neurobiological description of “belief” in “actual fraking Byakhees” could likely be spent elsewhere.
Well, we do have technological hurdles when investigating internal states (such as “experiencing a salty taste”).
However, that’s not the point.
More salient to the point I am trying to convey is that the former (soup is salty!) claim conveys very little about the soup and is far more concerned with the speaker (the state of the speaker’s brain if you will – maybe speaker has a tumor that causes an alteration in the way information about organoleptic properties of food is processed, for instance)
The latter explicitly makes a claim about soup’s state as well as its effect on third parties (specifically, that the content of NaCl exceeds some previously established standard of safety)
Same with misogyny.
Claiming that a book is “misogynistic” is, at most, telling us that a proud brain-bearer 🙂 has, upon being exposed to the text, underwent some (currently, not entirely understood) brain processes that are subjectively exposed as “perception of misogynistic attitude”.
Claiming that a book “promotes” “misogyny” is claiming that this book will contribute to (as a risk factor) or even induce (as a causative agent) a certain, specific alteration in third party brain bearers that in turn will lead to certain, specific social outcomes.
The former is thus no so much completely inaccessible to investigation due to some “cuddly law” of universe, but its investigation would proceed differently due to lack of a wider-scale claim.
Are you implying there is some goal other than having fun through application of philosophy?
P.S.:
I don’t know if hot wax and/or philosophy are “supposed” to be fun, but as far as I am concerned they both are, and seem to have some other things in common 🙂
RE: ghosts
Hey mate, I think the point Callan is trying to get across (just not very clearly, tbh) is that belief itself is the unscientific, unfalsifiable ghostey-ghoo thing.
Not just some “UFO belief” or some second-wave cultural-feminist belief, any belief period.
Like, “I say there’s a belief that…” BAM GHOST, UNSCIENCE.
It’s quite controversial, I say
Say, would I, per your opinion, be “indulging” a ghost when discussing something that is admitted-fiction (like say, oh, Middle Earth) or is it reserved for discussion of counterfactuals that are not perceived as such by some known third party (like, say, UFO abduction clams/beliefs) ?
It’s the pitch betrays the indulgence.
Saying ‘That land you’re about to walk on is held taboo by so and so tribe’ is not the same as ‘walking on that land is like rolling a primed bomb around!’
The failure to identify the tribe it’s specific to. The emphasis instead of using clinical terms to isolate and quarantine. Not even scare quotes for the bomb part – actually scare quotes for how you pitch Bakker’s view of the ‘glowy party ball’.
You may as well have been talking about the need to get the ring to mount doom and using scare quotes in saying others might see it as ‘just words’.
So, per your opinion, the statement “John Doe really believes that chanting Hastur three times will summon forth a supernatural monster” would be tantamount to somehow “indulging” the belief in, well, Hastur and his attendant Byakhees ?
What about this phrasing says the person giving the statement has no commitment to that belief?
The former is thus no so much completely inaccessible to investigation due to some “cuddly law” of universe, but its investigation would proceed differently due to lack of a wider-scale claim.
No, that’d be not admitting ones ignorance in such an investigation. Much like not admitting one is an alchoholic but thinking one can make progress with alchoholism regardless.
You’re avoiding admitting your ignorance/your lack of emperic measures on the matter. Which is indulging a ghost in doing so. Take an ignorant side – I’m okay with that – I do that, for various sides. Pick up your bottle and yell.
Just don’t tell me you’re not a fellow alchoholic when you do it. The denial is too funny.
I don’t know if hot wax and/or philosophy are “supposed” to be fun, but as far as I am concerned they both are, and seem to have some other things in common 🙂
Enjoying philsophy directly = practicing religion.
Getting off from not having gotten off from a philosophy = practicising philosophy.
It’s much like getting off from pain (ie, pain being not getting off). It’s the contradiction that’s the key element – and if you get off on philosophy directly, then there is no contradiction. Just worship.
Would saying “That land you’re about to walk on is held taboo by so and so tribe, to the point that members of this tribe consider trespassing upon it equivalent to rolling a primed bomb around” be clinical enough?
Well, enumerating this tribe is a daunting task, due to variance of feminist subgroups, but upon contemplation, I think it wouldn’t be erroneous to claim that the belief in question is particularly common among groups that self-identify as, or are sympathetic to, second-wave feminists (think Meghan “there must be wider social implications” Murphy), radical feminists (not all of them though, mostly those who maintain strong connections to “second-wavers”) and cultural feminists. These groups share a certain common ground with regards to media influences and ability to reshape society through narratives, specifically, the belief in possibility of “toxic narratives” and “cultural pollution” is pretty universal among the abovementioned people.
Wait a moment…
… are you implying that I happen to have a positive commitment to the belief in the existence of “toxic narratives”, “cultural pollution”, or some more general ability of works of fiction to exert specific effects on crime rates and other such social outcomes ?
The phrasing is neutral third person.
It would be pretty tedious if we were obliged to precede every description of a counterfactual position held by a third party by some kind of “I don’t really believe in magical bats that turn into uppity Transylvanian nobility, but those guys over there do…” disclaimer.
Which matter ?
The matter Third mentioned above, one concerning whether third parties (pun intended) indeed hold some particular beliefs?
Do you seriously suggest that we should preface any claim regarding a third party belief with an “According to X, X believes that…” disclaimer ?
Should we extend that to any claim of a private emotional or cognitive state (“according to X, X finds this thread to be interesting…”) ?
Or should we treat any claim regarding existence of a self-professed belief in a subject to be “ghostly” because technology for belief measurement (more commonly known as “lie detection”) is not currently available (if we’re being serious, then pseudoscience like polygraph test won’t cut it) ?
Well, I am partial to the cult of the yet unborn Machine God, but you know that already 🙂
So, you enjoy not enjoying the philosophical discussion at hand ?
Hey, you’re like some “high concept” BDSM folks, I’ll give you that 😉
Would saying “That land you’re about to walk on is held taboo by so and so tribe, to the point that members of this tribe consider trespassing upon it equivalent to rolling a primed bomb around” be clinical enough?
Unless they had used the words ‘primed bomb’ and said it was the equivalent (in which case you’d note that), no. That would be adding to their claims. It’s not what an anthropologist would do. It’s what a member of a tribe would do.
Wait a moment…
… are you implying that I happen to have a positive commitment to the belief in the existence of “toxic narratives”, “cultural pollution”, or some more general ability of works of fiction to exert specific effects on crime rates and other such social outcomes ?
Yes. I’ve been saying you’re indulging ghosts for some time now.
What do you think it is when you make a statement like the primed bomb, which the tribes in question have not said those words? It’s not reporting what they’ve said, is it? What is it then? It’s inventing new material for them!
I’m a-schoolin’ you in proper anthropology here, son */foghornleghorn voice*
It would be pretty tedious if we were obliged to precede every description of a counterfactual position held by a third party by some kind of “I don’t really believe in magical bats that turn into uppity Transylvanian nobility, but those guys over there do…” disclaimer.
So? You think you can be emperical but skip all the boring parts of empericism? It’s only emperical when it’s interesting?
Do you seriously suggest that we should preface any claim regarding a third party belief with an “According to X, X believes that…” disclaimer ?
Should we extend that to any claim of a private emotional or cognitive state (“according to X, X finds this thread to be interesting…”) ?
Or should we treat any claim regarding existence of a self-professed belief in a subject to be “ghostly” because technology for belief measurement (more commonly known as “lie detection”) is not currently available (if we’re being serious, then pseudoscience like polygraph test won’t cut it) ?
If you’re pretending an entirely emperical approach, yes and yes.
This is the thing – when it’s a belief you like, you think you’re saying it like it is. When you don’t and want to win an argument, you say the other person is arguing a ghost (certain notions of harm being ghostly, as you state it)
Further, I don’t think you even recognise how you are picking and choosing when you use the empericists hammer and when you lay it down so as to preserve your own prefered ghosts.
I’d estimate most of the population would take offence at this point, rather than consider methods by which this claim could be proven true or false (or atleast just say you’re bored rather than the whole ‘I’m offended – so I don’t have to think about that’ routine. Bored is okay. Science is boring). So, break the mould on that?
Ah, so you are concerned with merely my use of language?
Well, this was not an anthropological discussion, I am not an anthropologist (and neither is Scott, to the best of my knowledge), so I didn’t think that indulging in a bit of imprecise and “flowery” prose to get a point across would be problematic.
I realize that if one is to take a serious anthropological stance such imprecision might be grating (kinda like Random person: “Yao people of Africa avoided photos like the Plague because they believed a photo can be used to do magical harm” Very Serious Anthropologist: “the fuck you know about Yao’s attitudes towards the plague, dude!”) 😉
Much like when netsphere network engineer might cringe at nat being explained with smurf-based metaphors.
I freely admit that my use of language was imprecise.
Okay, now you’re being imprecise.
Of course, with my mind being merely human and imperfect, it is entirely plausible that I do harbor weird unsubstantiated beliefs (Though enumerating all of them would probably be outside my abilities).
However…
….However, I asked about whether you’re implying that I happen to have a positive commitment to the belief in the existence of “toxic narratives”, “cultural pollution”, or some more general ability of works of fiction to exert specific effects on crime rates and other such social outcomes?
Which is a rather specific kind of “weird belief”, one I would find surprising to be suspected of harboring
I guess it’s to late for me to become a proper…anth-ro-po-lo-gist… but thanks for helping out anyways, doc (bugs bunny voice 🙂 )
More like, I think that comment section of this here fine blogging establishment is not a peer reviewed journal of sophisticated philosophications 🙂 and as such, permits shortcuts to be taken in order to increase subjectively perceived “fun” and “narrative flow” for both myself and third party readers who might once stumble upon our textual exchanges
Uhm, no.
Actually, the closest thing I did was merely telling James that “ghostly” kinds of violence that aren’t objective or legally meaningful might not deserve the title of “violence”
Specifically, I said the following (great power of copy and paste shall be my witness!):
This wasn’t meant to imply that James is necessarily arguing “ghostly stuff”, but to suggest that we should consider using a separate term for “weird ghostly stuff”
Which isn’t synonymous with claiming he is necessarily arguing a ghost, which would be a much stronger claim (also, a claim I refrained from making 🙂 )
Why, I do most certainly realize that there is a degree of preferential treatment towards “weird ghostly claims” I find sympathetic.
And even though I, being in allegiance to yet unborn Machine God, do not take particular pride in this weakness, I am not strongly concerned, since many of my interlocutors have been shown to carry empiricist hammers of their own.
And I do enjoy a session of sparring with them ol’ hammers (metaphorically speaking, of course 🙂 )
Ah, so you are concerned with merely my use of language?
You aren’t?
so I didn’t think that indulging in a bit of imprecise and “flowery” prose to get a point across would be problematic.
James probably felt the same way before you told him it was ghostly violence he was refering to.
Okay, now you’re being imprecise.
Only when I start using your word ‘ghostly’
….However, I asked about whether you’re implying that I happen to have a positive commitment to the belief in the existence of “toxic narratives”, “cultural pollution”, or some more general ability of works of fiction to exert specific effects on crime rates and other such social outcomes?
Dunno. You just raised the placard of the text being a bomb.
I mean, maybe I’m silly – when I see a rally and someone in it is holding a placard, I tend to think they are saying that, rather than them just holding the placard to refer to what the rally is talking about and gosh gee wiz, not what they are saying and why would I assume that?! I’m supposed to take it they are just walking with the rally and providing others information on what the rally participants are saying, not them – even though the placard holder is walking along with them and who’s placard looks the same as the other placards.
If you’d written some fiction where some character said it, I’d pay you the ‘depiction doesn’t necessarily mean endorsement’ card.
More like, I think that comment section of this here fine blogging establishment is not a peer reviewed journal of sophisticated philosophications 🙂 and as such, permits shortcuts to be taken in order to increase subjectively perceived “fun” and “narrative flow” for both myself and third party readers who might once stumble upon our textual exchanges
Put it into placard format, in other words?
This wasn’t meant to imply that James is necessarily arguing “ghostly stuff”, but to suggest that we should consider using a separate term for “weird ghostly stuff”
Oh goodness.
You weren’t arguing he’s saying ghostly stuff, just saying to use a different name for…his ‘weird ghostly stuff’, as you put it.
I guess technically that’s not arguing it’s weird ghostly stuff. It’s TELLING him it’s weird ghostly stuff.
I’m having reason to believe your words have little to do with your actions.
You’ve considered the patient with the stem between the brain halves severed, who when one eye is shown a sign ‘go get the coke’, but the other eye isn’t, he’ll go to get it and then when asked why, he’ll say ‘Because I was thirsty’.
Even with an intact connection between brain hemispheres (I assume you haven’t had that hideous epilepsy ‘surgery’ that involves it*), have you wondered if that applied to you? I’ve wondered about it applying to me, somehow.
since many of my interlocutors have been shown to carry empiricist hammers of their own.
‘The goggles, they do nothing’
To me, the hammers appear to do nothing. Not here, not elsewhere.
* I had a psychologist when I was a teen, for various reasons – this will probably sound like it reflects on me more, but when I looked at her, over time I’d get the impression her face was sliding in half, down the center.
I now wonder if she’d had that dreadful brain surgery where they cut the connection between the two sides. And that’s why she’d become a psychologist, as many psychologists do, to diagnose herself. And I was detecting that. How she’d been killed and replaced with two half fragments of her former self.
I have never had this impression with anyone else, ever. And as I understand it, the operation is not performed anymore.
I thought it’d be fun to simply segue into a ghost story.
(bugs bunny voice 🙂 )
You’re not bugs. I want to say a pinhead version of Elmer Fudd, but while honest I don’t think it’d be taken as simply giving an honest appraisal. ‘Pinhead’ is the horror movie character your icon is, right?
Good thing I didn’t tell him such a thing, right?
And good thing there is the kind courtesy of copy and paste to illustrate exactly what I have said (yet again), which was:
“And if we’re talking some abstract kind of “violence” that isn’t even legally meaningful or objective, then I really don’t know why we should call that ghostly thing “violence”.”
(it is worthwhile to notice the pesky “if”)
To borrow your metaphor, my intent was merely informing that there does exist a rally with certain placards, and that I have talked to people participating in said rally and have reasons to believe that they are not being “ironic” or “metaphoric” about their claims.
If my imprecise use of language has confused you as to whether I share the beliefs of the “rallying people” (which I, of course, do not), then, for that, I am truly sorry
Again, it is worthwhile to notice the pesky “if”.
There was no assertion on my part, merely an attempt at clarifying what exactly does James mean when invoking word “violence” in this context (after all, there are people who “believe” TV commercials to be a form of violence. NB! I am not one of those people 😉 but Douglas Rushkoff is, according to his book “Life Inc” 🙂 )
This thing here sounds curious.
Care to link (not necessarily hyperlink) the source with regards to the patient cases you mention ?
Well, one could interpret the Elmer Fudd comparison less than charitably, but I won’t (though personally, my favorite Looney Tunes villain is Marvin the Martian), and I do find the idea of Elmer Fudd as a cenobite to be rather amusing, so thanks for that mental image.
And yeah, the character on my gravatar is Pinnhead, of Clive Barker’s fame.
(it is worthwhile to notice the pesky “if”)
Sure – and when I say ‘If were talking about punching people in the face, that’s a bad thing to do’ I’m only talking about IF were talking about that – I have no commitment to saying punching in the face is bad otherwise! That’s how language works! Notice that pesky ‘probably’ in ‘James probably felt’? See, totally the same thing! I had no commitment to anything, so I’m perfectly in the clear! It’s not like I’m betraying myself in the bigger picture and entering hypocrasy simply to win a small picture discussion! No, I’d never miss the pound to catch the penny!
Were back playing for match sticks, no real emotional money on the table. Doesn’t it feel a touch drab? I can see why Scott goes and agitates simply to get some meat into play and not just intellectual match sticks. At the very least, it’s boring not to.
To borrow your metaphor, my intent was merely informing that there does exist a rally with certain placards, and that I have talked to people participating in said rally and have reasons to believe that they are not being “ironic” or “metaphoric” about their claims.
The claims they haven’t actually made. Whole new placards made up by you, that they never carried.
Maybe this is what Scott refers when he goes on an Acratic rant.
This thing here sounds curious.
Care to link (not necessarily hyperlink) the source with regards to the patient cases you mention ?
Can’t find the first account I found, but here’s a wiki entry on split brains.
(though personally, my favorite Looney Tunes villain is Marvin the Martian)
I’d forgotten Marvin. A pinhead version of him may have been more apt.
I think Scott is Will e Coyote, but with hair cropped pentinent short and clothes that smell of borrowed things – he is good, and it is this that he cannot stand (I’m ripping off a judging eye moment of Mimara).
Okay, at this point I’m not sure what your angle is with regards to James.
I think we can agree that when one is discussing punching-in-the-face and the nature of discussion makes one question whether the interlocutor is actually still talking about the same thing (“physical contact with opponent’s facial structures made via body part or a tool and resulting in varying degrees of tissue damage”), it might be wise to attempt to establish whether the definitions are in sync and propose to introduce terminology to clearly differentiate non-typical definitions of face-punching (some weird-ass “postcolonial theory” concept of face punching, or whatever)
I vaguely suspect that James did in fact mean “proper”, forensically detectable and legally prosecutable kind of violence, but sadly, he has chosen not to clarify his position.
Your insistence on making this “emotional” is perplexing.
This is an internet discussion about philosophy and social sciences.
It is by necessity very emotionally disconnected, and it seems to me that it is better this way, since quality of arguments tends to decrease when emotional involvement rises.
Oh, so your problem is that I do not have a datadump with verifiable quotes?
okay, that is a very solid point, and I agree
Between me not being a professional ( both as in “doing this as employment” and as in “having formal qualifications” 🙂 ) internet debater (and thus not having a meticulously assembled, categorized and indexed archive of discussions) and certain interlocutors (like mooncrack) meticulously purging a lot of correspondence, I am currently strained to present hyperlinks to particular posts in question.
I should have screencapped those placards, lol (To be honest, thanks to browser history, I have some “snaps”, but the ones I have at hand are assertions of toxic narrative in a rather different context, so I’m pretty sure you’ll not be willing to accept them as illustrations for claims regarding toxic narratives in scifi/fantasy)
I guess under this conditions I should indeed tone down my claims and present them as more hypothetical
But I make a note here – next time some doof (or doofette 😉 ) makes a claim that amounts to existence of “toxic narratives” and actual harm resulting from fiction, I will most certainly meticulously preserve it so that it can easily be provided for future reference.
Good thing Scott’s new book is coming, eh ? 😉
Well, ever chasing that damn bird (which Coyote apparently doesn’t, strictly speaking, need) is a neat metaphor for trying to tackle the issues of meaning and “aboutness” 🙂
Okay, I have decided to rejuvenate this discussion in most provocative way possible.
I have went into the vast, damp, stale depths of a
xenomorph hivepopular second-wave feminist blog with explicit goal of trying to fish for evidence of “text as bomb” beliefs and explicitly counterfactual / anti-empirical claims on second-waver part.I will post
private pics of naked xenomorph queenevidence as it becomes available.Right o! Just remember it’s about repeating THEIR claim. When someone says something like ‘Incest is bad!’ and you repeat it as ‘They believe that the genetics of incest lead to really poor following generations, suffering and early death’, you’re putting words in their mouth. They just think it’s bad. My point has been to avoid putting words in mouths – especially if you think yourself even minded.
I think I will just collect quotes, especially since so far the harvest looks good (Sadly I can’t go “Bakker is dangerous” route, because frankly, I doubt the
hivemind nodesfine gentlepersons remember his works all that well, but they seem to be getting feisty when interrogated regarding dangers of “media in general”)When someone says something like ‘Incest is bad!’ and you repeat it as ‘They believe that the genetics of incest lead to really poor following generations, suffering and early death’, you’re putting words in their mouth.
At first, I got just a few superficial comments about media toxicity in general (and a silly citation of the infamous Fiji study which actually kinda sucks due to tiny sample size and poor confounder controls, as well as BMI shenanigans), so I wanted to argue that when someone says incest be bad because kiddies come out all wrong” that can still be used as evidence of belief in genetics-related woes of incest (even if the subject doesn’t know what DNA is)
No need for that kind of argument anymore, tee hee hee 🙂
After some back and forth,
xenomorphs were baited into open spaceone of the locals finally made an explicit claim regarding existence of “toxic books” (heee heee) and the book so terribly accused was none other than Gor series itself (Gor is an itch second-wavers can’t help scratching, which is downright weird given how dated and unremarkable the text itself is). Several other locals immediately rushed in to compliment the claimant on her analysis of Gor, reaffirm their complete agreement, and extend the argument about how Gor (and media in general) is making the sky fall.There are numerous other, Colbert-worthy cherries upon that cake, including the traditional false-consciousness bullshit, shy “I’m not advocating book burning, but we need to do something high-temperaturely about them books” cries of wannabe censors, piles of fallacies, outright anti-scientific screeds (science is patriarchal! Feel truth with your “humaaaaaaniiityyyyy”!) and of course the trademark passive aggression.
After the holidays I’ll archive the thread in several snapshot services so that future generations can still enjoy it if something “bad” were to happen to the original (eventually, the
xenomorphs will smell melocals will be alerted to this humble expedition of mine). After that, I will make a large comment here (with links! and quotes! and a bonus companion book! 😀 )P.S.:
Actually, the interaction was rather interesting in that the
xenomorph hordesecond-wavers remained pretty wary of me throughout, and did their best to tone down their claims to a “politically correct” level of bigotry and general anti-scientific weirdness (their best is, apparently, not good enough)Hilarious! Moral indignation makes reasoning impossible, to be sure. Like I think I’ve mentioned before, you really get the sense you’re dealing with machines, the moves become so predictably irrational. Imagine if you were a dude, 03! You’re not even allowed to agree…
But this stuff is even more important than it’s interesting. I hope you’re keeping copious notes. Invent names for their moves. Write the right kind of book about your experiences, and you could make a difference. Has anyone done a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Blogosphere?
I think all the names for their moves are well documented in every paper about logical fallacies since approximately forever.
And I frankly think that they were acting rather rationally, if you try imagining a “rational” course of discussion from “within” their mindset (which isn’t to say they weren’t “acting like machines”, but hey – all humans are just biological machines, some just happen to be a little easier to hack than others 😉 )
P.S.:
In hitchhiker’s guide to the blogosphere, secondwaver ““women’sconversations” will definitely be Traal. Due to being a home to something that is “so mind-boggling stupid it believes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you” 😀
That sounds like quite an expedition, 03! Sounds like it’d be a good main post to make, if Scott would consider you as a guest poster. Hopefully he will (sounds like cross roads stuff, for sure)! Looking forward to seeing the post! 🙂
Nah, “second-wave anti-sex feminist believe in a particular specific brand of silly shit” doesn’t warrant a whole damn post. Comment at most.
Currently, my wingman (yep, arranged for a wingman when going there, because someone has to watch your back when descending into
the bowels of a xenomorph hivesuch establishments) notified me that he responded to some of the comments therein, so I’m just waiting for them to get through moderation.If they get stuck, alas, if they get through – that will be some nice closure for that particular
slimy corridorcomment thread.I’ve already made archive snapshots in case they catch a whiff of what’s going on and try something drastic.
Okay, the promised post.
It is well-known that sex-negative feminists (I tend to use the term interchangeably with “second-wave feminist”, which is formally inaccurate, but not any more inaccurate than the term “second-wave feminist” itself is) have rather weird and counterfactual relationship with “media” in general and pornography specifically, which can be trivially traced throughout the literature (for examples of claims regarding harms of pornography that are unsurprisingly not substantiated by in-vivo empirical evidence from actual human populations, see “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape” by Robin, or pretty much anything by McKinnon) and thus the claim that they do have a kind of “books as poison” belief going on could in theory be substantiated on second-waver literature alone.
However, the protracted and pedantic nature of the argument between Callan and 01 has inspired me to go fishing for more specific secondwaver claims regarding harms of non-secondwaver literature in general and fiction specifically, with focus on claims by “internet second-wave feminists” as it is their negative opinion of our kind host that has inspired this discussion.
I have obtained help of a wingman (who needed some internet-debate management practice for work-related things. Yes, some people get paid for “managing” internet “debates”) and proceeded to initiate discussion in one of the feministcurrent threads dealing with infamous Ghomeshi event.
The reason I have chosen this blog is because it was apparently quite saturated with claims regarding link between media and abuse (with such factless assertion gems as “The power relations that lead from a culture of pornography to Jian Ghomeshi are direct and clear except to liberals and the willfully blind. This is why he could claim to be a feminist while behaving as he did“ being the norm)
BTW, given the prevalence of a certain type of “arguments” in this particular venue, both the original blog and my humble summary of a specific discussion therein are best consumed with this well-illustrated companion book
Initially, the vector of discussion was my own sexual preferences (masochist, very much into BDSM, yep), nature of consent and alleged social harm of BDSM in general (which, yes, is pretty provocative given how common is anti-BDSM bigotry in second-wave/sex-neg feminist circles).
The results at first were mixed. My interlocutors remained somewhat suspicious and did their best to steer the discussion away from the fact that they explicitly downplay lived experience of masochistic women like me (and downplaying a woman’s lived experience is not something most types of feminist discourse look kindly at) and towards more abstract notions of “cultural contamination” and “false consciousness” (which is a very insidious form of ad-hominem argumentation)
Some residents proceeded to make far-reaching (and as usual, empirically unsubstantiated) claims regarding the harm of BDSM and nature of social interaction.
Some notable examples include (listing examples from both my dialogues and ones of my wingman, in no particular order):
Decrying empirical approach as simple-minded and making vague, ominous insinuations about what is “behind” BDSM culture (as if we had tools to actually dissect cultural phenomena and see what is “behind” them)
Blatant ad-hominems
Marxist “critiques” of BDSM (one has to wonder how Marxist anything is still a thing)
Assertions regarding existence of BDSM-induced “feedback loops” that “can not be contained in bedrooms”
Just sequences of short statements without any particular ties to reality or evidence or other such things
Flat equivocations (with claims of “psychic internalization” on top)
Dictionary arguments (not very successful ones)
And of course accusations of gaslighting (based on, shall we say, rather unconventional and hopefully unintentional misreading of my comment) and attempts to play a game of supernatural hot potato (whoever ends up with “supernatural” being ascribed to their worldview loses the game!)
However, the one that perhaps I found most noteworthy was a sudden and surprisingly straightforward dismissal of the importance of masochistic women’s desires and experiences (also, somewhat more bluntly stated by another member here).
Meanwhile, my wingman has directly confronted the audience with questions regarding empirical validity of their beliefs regarding BDSM (managing even to raise toxo awareness while at it ) and media in general.
Initially, responses were amusing, but not particularly enlightening, and included claims that scientific method is a product of male authoritarianism and should be disregarded as biased and weird ad-hominem insinuations regarding his “damaged humanity” (whatever that may mean), but he was very insistent about demanding evidence of “social harm from BDSM ideas” as well as about soliciting everyone’s opinion on existence and nature of “cultural polution” and “media toxins, which after some time started producing more interesting results.
First, one of the respondents attempted to use a study on violence trends in war-traumatized Palestinean youths as evidence of BDSM being “contagious” which is a beautiful fallacious argument straddling the line between equivocation and a dour non-sequitur. (as was quickly pointed out )
Then, the (in)famous Fiji study was thrown into the fray (and yes, that is a rather weak thing to throw there )
Finally, after a LOT of back-and forth, one of the locals came forth and outright asserted the 1) existence of media toxins 2) “insidious media toxins that are worse than porn” (the moth-riddled Gor series was used as a representative example of such dire threats) , and 3) a surprisingly keen observation that the only other group which treats these “media toxin issues” seriously are vicious social conservatives (interestingly, social conservatives are also not particularly fond of scientific method, as we all know)
The comment was met with significant support of other members who proceeded to further expand the argument in the following way:
1) one member stated explicit support and proceeded to suggest censoring forms of expression that don’t have explicit goal of political dissent (It should be noted that the author of original comment took great pains to distance herself from the issue of “burning books” and “censorship” per se, preferring way more vague and euphemistic formulations that “are totally not book burning, really not burning of books, no” 🙂 )
2) another member of the community, upon expressing agreement , proceeded to state sympathy a fairly extreme claim by none other than the infamous Sam Harris (which is rather surprising both in context of feminist discourse and in terms of so-called sanity, especially given that this particular claim by Harris is, shall we say, rather devoid of empirical grounding). The Sam Harris argument was later used as an argument stating the alleged “impossibility” of feminism “going to far” (which was a remarkably jarring, borderline extremist statement in an otherwise relatively mild-mannered discussion)
I initially wanted to post this report as soon as claims of “books as poison” showed up, but decided to wait till wingman gets a chance to respond to wild alarmist precautionism of the “toxic book” comment (unsurprisingly, response to his response was not very happy )
Now that everything is said and done, I humbly submit this highly informal collection of quotes and commentary as direct demonstration that yes, a significant portion (if not most) of “sex-negative/second-wave” feminists do believe in “cultural pollution” and media toxins, which is pretty much exactly a belief in books (movies, etc.) that literally compromise, poison and/or otherwise distort the mind of their reader/viewer, and such claims are not treated as mere hyperboles or metaphors.
Also, apparently people professing such beliefs (carrying such placards, as Callan would put it) are supportive of censorship and, as seen above, are sometimes quite vocal about it.
P.S.:
Original comment thread at feministcurrent (linked through a dereferer to reduce probability of us getting the equivalent of Voxcoming, lol)
Archive.today backup (it is a nice comment thread and would be a shame if something bad happened to it)
Freze backup of Archive.today backup (feministcurrent has severe performance issues which prevent backing up comment threads with freze directly) just in case something very bad happens
And last but not least the Archive.org backup of Freze backup (because Archive.org no longer backups new archive.today, and because the backup of original thread at Archive.org might suffer if something bad and crazy were to happen to feministcurrent’s robots.txt)
And don’t forget about the companion book (if you missed it at first read, see waaaay above 🙂 )
03,
which is pretty much exactly a belief in books (movies, etc.) that literally compromise, poison and/or otherwise distort the mind of their reader/viewer,
Literally poison? Somewhat like Omega Red, except instead of death spores, BDSM practitioners exude BDSM spores that turn others into BDSM practitioners? I mean, he’s got the tentacles already!
Overall I think what you have is a lot more nuanced anthropological investigation that more avoids adding ghosts to the subjects investigated. But what’s the tie in to what I’ve said? Even if they are into Omega Red – he doesn’t have bomb powers, does he? So how does this tie in to the topics I’ve engaged, 03?
Well, I have provided specific quotes, both regarding BDSM and regarding media in general. IMHO, the one about “feedback loops” that can not be “contained” in a bedroom takes the cake as far as WTF factor goes, it definitely out-WTFs the claim that (quote) “texts/images/other media forms that are always or at least almost affect the thought process of their consumer in some negative way” really exist, and that specifically the old, shabby Gor is something that can (again quote) “likely to have a long lasting antisocial, antihumanitarian effect on the reader” .
I mean yeah, the last two are pretty out there, but a runaway feedback loop of BDSM is something so… corny… that the mind boggles when you realize that the person in question isn’t kidding at all (of course, with intertubes, a subtle troll is never out of the question, but further investigation into that user’s comment history does not give reasons to suspect insincerity)
I don’t know how that compares to Red Omega tho – not very fluent with Marvell stuff, but yeah, it seems that they really do think me and my partners are a bit like that, and that Gor is more or less pontypool-lite.
If I understood the exchange you had with 01 correctly, you expressed skepticism regarding whether second-wavers who sincerely believe in toxic/poisonous texts (aka cultural pollution, aka “texts/images/other media forms that are always or at least almost affect the thought process of their consumer in some negative way” ) in a literal sense (as actual dangerous things in the so-called “real world”, and not metaphors or somesuch) .
Well, here you go – people who really believe that a particular genre text is directly harming its readers, and that “I and mine” are some kind of weird environment hazard. With those very “placards”, hanging out right over there.
If you’re willing to pedantically challenge a particular metaphor/turn of phrase 01 used (and whether a better way to describe beliefs quoted in my post above), well, I ain’t going to get into that kind of argument.
It’s been awhile now, but I recall 01 telling someone else they were bringing in ‘ghosts’ to the discussion. Then he went with the bomb claim in another post.
The way you stop ghosts is with pedantics – ie, emperics. That’s all empericism is – being really, really pedantic. Ghosts hate pendants.
That’s why we all hate pedantism.
I feel your investigation is like revealing a particular configuration of a chess board – I am not at all inclined to say it’s just like another configuration, because it’s all chess/all ‘poison’, etc. Further it seems to reveal the many different attitudes the subjects have, without them acknowledging the differences – the ‘BDSM escapes the bedroom’ person seems to only be a sample size of one. It would be ironic to say ‘well, his attitude escapes his posts to all other posters there’ because that’d be taking up his transmissive (if I might name it such) claim, just with a new transmission agent. However, he/she wasn’t outed for their claim, so either there was acceptance or denial or lazy policing by other participants. It makes me think that you could claim some pretty outragious things, perhaps, if you simply don’t frame them as a question an instead frame it as if you are one of them.
In a way I feel you prove my point by the diversity (of madness?) you found, as opposed to ‘they think it’s a bomb’.
I mean in common language we might call people mad. But in specialised investigations, there are many, many distinctions of mental conditions (with homosexuality famously being a mental condition, once). Is that pedantism to be dismissed? Perhaps it’s because many people have loved ones with a mental disorder that they wish to aid somehow. And on the forum in question, you have no ties of love to the participants – so it seems pointless to distinguish them individually?
Well, here you go – people who really believe that a particular genre text is directly harming its readers, and that “I and mine” are some kind of weird environment hazard. With those very “placards”, hanging out right over there.
I feel maybe what you are trying to argue is that these people are on the, let’s say, assault. And maybe you feel I was arguing against that being the case?
No, I acknowledge the assault and closed mindedness (though let me say in the vanilla sex community there are a percentage of fucked up practitioners – and so too roughly the same percentage of BDSM practitioners will be fucked up. I don’t think all BDSM practioners are somehow saints any more than I think all vanilla sex practioners are saints).
But A: I think accurate intelligence gathering is pivotal to conflict management and B: I was aping 01’s anthropological bent with the banishing of ghosts – and anthropologists just care about the details. They don’t care about changing anything about the cultural situation, they just care about the details of documenting it. I think that’s what we are when we start trying to banish ghosts – people who don’t give a fuck.
So when you go to banish someone elses ghosts, why, if I adopt the same platform, would I care about how these small minded people are trying to wipe out your culture, except to document it in detail?
Heh, nice one on pedantism 🙂
Anyway, my understanding was that you have challenged the “they really believe a book can be like a bomb/poison/etc.” claim based on absence of actual quotes and references (which is a fine objection).
I initially intended to just quote (published) sexneg/radfem/secondwave literature’s statements on pornography as evidence of such beliefs, but then decided that since we have live sexneg/secondwave feminist communities literally at our fingertips, I could go and try to get some opinions with regards to toxicity of non-pornographic literature (which would be closer to the subject matter of this discussion)
Which I did.
Even got lucky to get a sample opinion on a genre-lit piece specifically.
Well, without NSA cooperation we can’t make a statistically sound quantitative study.
And I’m not quite willing to solicit NSA assistance on this one 😉
However, both the BDSM claim and the “Gor toxicity” claim have met considerable support from other commentators (the “uncontained feedback loop” person just made the most outrageously phrased statement, numerous others simply used equivocations or even plain assertions without supporting argument, see quotes above) so unless some very determined sockpuppetry is going on, we are not dealing with a sample of one.
Actually, moderation there is super-severe and pretty much anyone (even the “resident commentators”) goes through a pre-approval process.
Some of my comments definitely failed to be “kind enough” to pass that great filter, BTW 🙂
I’d say you are right in the sense that “bomb metaphor” does not apply strictly and directly (metaphors and analogies rarely work that way anyway!), and there is divergence as to whether “doubleplusungood” literature like Gor is more like a bomb or like an open canister of powderized enriched 226Ra, with some people possibly thinking that it’s more like Ebola or something 😉
However, we see a distinct, community-sanctioned belief system that basically ascribes directly hazardous properties (“likely to have a long lasting antisocial, antihumanitarian effect on the reader”) to works of literature (remarkably underwhelming ones at that 🙂 )
Also do note that of two community members who decided to chime in with explicit support, no one was trying to ameliorate, “tone down” the strength and alarmism of the Gor claim and, in fact, both have made even more far-reaching claims (with one explicitly supporting censorship and other explicitly claiming that all media is insidiously affecting and subverting its consumer)
I’d say these opinions are not “ghostly” (at least not in the sense the claim of something damaging “Ze Immortal soulz” is “ghostly”), and constitute a very distinct communal mentality (even though exact specific details of claims differ from claimant to claimant, preventing the “community” from agreeing on whether the works they hate are more like bombs or more like anthrax spores)
I can’t speak for First, but as for me it’s “not quite” on first count and “no” on the second one.
As to them being on the offensive, well, sexneg/secondwaver folks have always been pretty assertive and aggressive, and have been trying to push their own peculiar brand of sexual restriction for about as long as they have existed (they are perhaps most famous for their ill-fated campaigns to ban porn and to the ineffectual and sex-worker endangering abomination known as the “nordic model” of fighting prostitution)
However, in most jurisdictions, their power is lower than it used to be a few decades ago (and in jurisdictions where they get to massively affect policies, their initiatives turn into a weird clusterfuck, as research on nordic model effectiveness, for instance, clearly indicates). So, while this is an uphill battle, it’s a battle “me and mine” seem to be winning.
I don’t feel much concerned about sex-negative/second-waver feminists taking over (and I am not concerned about ones inhabiting feministcurrent specifically since I’m not even in Canada)
As to your part in this, I don’t think that I don’t think that you’re arguing again the case in question – in fact, my understanding is that the argument in question is about “sex-neg/secondwave feminist beliefs about media effects” and not about “sex-neg/secondwave feminist beliefs about BDSM”
If anything, the BDSM angle is entirely accidental and only got dragged into this because it was a comfy vector of opportunity for asking sex-neg/secondwave folks about their media beliefs (It would have been waaaay too suspicious to just barge in with “media toxicity” / “cultural pollution” questions)
Nah, like I said, BDSM angle is entirely coincidental, and the subject at hand (as far as I understand, heh) is their media beliefs in general (“doubleplusungood” books being seen as, at very least, some kinds of actual envirohazards, if not as outright bombs 😉 or somesuch)
So of course you should not care and we should do our best to stay as objective as we can (that’s hard, heh heh heh)
I think that in combination with “their” published (in dead-tree format even!) outrageous and counter-factual claims regarding effects of pornography, we can consider the case of “second waver /sexnegative feminists holding some rather exotic opinions with regards to “dangers” and “effects” of media” to be rather plausible at the very least.
.
Oh, the “all PIV is rape and PIV is unnatural” stuff never ceases to amuse.
It’s almost as good as reading Woodhouse until you realize that it’s not being written as a humor piece and that there is a person out there who probably really believes those claims.
Personally, I like to bring up the CDC study (it has a teey bit of dodginess to its methodology, but you can’t attack its findings on female-on-male rape without attacking its findings on male-on-female rape) which found that female-on-male rape / sexual assault is about as common as its more mundane counterpart, and the fact that lesbian (as in “female-on-female”) rape in women-only LGBT environments is about as common as male-on-female rape in “typical” conditions (according to SFRCC, can track down exact quote if you’re curious).
Also the female-on-female wartime rape in Africa.
That never fails to send “PIV is rape” people flying right off the handle 😀
On a sidenote, I wonder what the “PIV is rape” sort of feminist would think of a femdom strapon party (yep, that’s actually a thing. A thingie-thing even).
However, I guess inviting a statistically representative sample of that kind of people would be very disruptive to the party 😉 …
I was wondering what they made of lesbian fingering, let alone something like fisting? I mean with fisting, to be honest, that’s a lot bigger!
I think I know a couple where the man has more of an attitude that is stereotypically attributed to women (nurturing? very simplified) while the woman has more of an attitude that is stereotypically attributed to men (assertive? very simplified).
I wonder if the ‘PIV is rape’ women just tend to identify more with what is traditionally considered a male attitude and hate being treated as if they hold an attitude they don’t – I certainly would hate it if that happened to me! But they just go off the rails about it.
Or maybe I’m being too charitable in trying to find some sane method in their madness? Maybe they’re just mad!
Oh, there’s a method to their madness, it has to do with an (almost entirely and purposely un-empirical) theoretical framework which presents all social interactions as a kind of struggle between oppressed and oppressor “classes” (and yes, this part bears more than just a passing resemblance to actual, heh, Marxism, which only gets stronger when you remember that second-wave feminists are quite fond of a certain type of unfalsifiable Marxist bullshit known as “false consciousness”).
And yes, fisting / fingering between women does present problems for that kind of worldview, though IMHO femdom-strapon kind of deal would be more insidiously problematic for them since in such a case, both the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” gender are represented, but the biomechanics of the intercourse are explicitly reversed.
Are men “raping” the strapons of their female lovers with their anuses during such a sexual activity? Ah, the philosophical implications…
Oh, that sort of femdom! Oh my! Yes, good question and now I’ll go all shy!
Though I’ll add the troubling thing about viewing things in oppressor/oppressed world view is that the only liberty the oppressed get in such a world view is when they become oppressors themselves – and is that any better? And how easy it is to forget or not be able to see alternatives once engulfed by that world view.
Oh, I today I ran into some ‘all intercourse is rape’ talk, first in the westeros bakker thread than I had to look up PIV ( http://witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/piv-is-always-rape-ok/ ). So in regards to their perspective, I’m kind of in the same basket as you – what I do (as relatively vanilla) is just sooo fucked up! And the women just couldn’t agree to any of that! Maybe they have false conciousnesses too!
What strikes me is how they basically support the ‘male as aggressor’ role. They never flip it around – that men are being raped and having false conciousnesses about agreeing to female engulfment. Only the man does anything in their perspective – it seems to enforce that women can’t do anything. Only men. You could have a guy strapped down so I can’t move his hips or anything, but it’d still be him doing something, apparently – woops, just walked into a bondage example!
It looks like the damn spam filter is eating my mega-post, both as a reply to your comment and as a separate comment.
A shame.
I’ll ask Scott for help…
To 03 and 01 (and I do not mean this question as rhetorical):
What relationship, if any, exists between the propaganda common in magazines such as Der Sturmer
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEVwkxxaxUyIIAZc1XNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0dTl2ZGVhBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkA1ZJUDU1OF8x?_adv_prop=image&fr=mcafee&va=der+st%C3%BCrmer
during the 1930s and the Holocaust?
Responded as separate thread, to contain overflow on this one.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/confessions-of-a-demon/#comment-39990
I don’t understand how a fictitious book depicting misogyny must translate to endorsement (as you said). It baffles me. What’s more, there are countless books depicting all sorts of nastiness. You could make the argument that Guy Gavriel Kay endorses and relishes in the brutalizing of homosexuals based on a certain early scene from Tigana…just as a single arbitrary example. Ah well. If it gets a conversation going in the media the foolish will spout foolishness, and the rational will counterpoint. At worst, they will ignore it.
In fact, GRRM already took similar heat for his supposedly sexist depiction of women in his work. And that never got a foothold because there’s no evidence. I imagine you would get similar treatment and this might not make it into any media venue that would (should) genuinely trouble you. Even if it did gain momentum, you get the PR bump. So, in conclusion, enjoy the view, but please don’t feed the trolls.
I find trolls and troll mentality fascinating, but I lost my lab coat and am averse to conducting experiments in the nude.
I think discussions on the political role various representations play is an important one, but it’s the interpretative fundamentalism, the sense that it is what it seems to be, no matter what, and the way this interpretative pathology feeds into the subsequent moral pathology that I find interesting, particularly because the latter pathology isn’t a pathology at all, but an instance of the way moral discourse is supposed to work!
There were parts in the novel that were hard to read, not gonna lie, but the idea has always stuck with me and encouraged me to re-evaluate my own writing perspective. So firstly, for that, thank you! Whenever appropriate, I recommend this series (and Neuropath) to my more philosophically-minded reader friends, but no one has admitted to taking the bait yet.
Secondly, and more post-specific, my small and disparate debate group experiences this “mechanical artifact of our social cognitive limitations” in nearly every discussion, my world made micro. It can be frustrating and give-up inducing, so thanks for putting this all through a fresh lens.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t think the author was a degenerate, I thought the author was awesome and big-picturey.
Thanks jilliterate. The ‘polluted eye’ approach to narration is something that I seem to be addicted to, but the impulse is always going to be to assume the pollution belongs to the writer, not the narrator. So if you do go down that road (and I heartily encourage it!) just remember to wear your thicker skin.
If you can think of specific examples where your group runs into these instances, I would love to hear about them. I’m actually collecting ideas and bouncing them off some psych friends of mine, with an eye to devising some real honest to goodness experiments (!).
Come to think of it, I should put the call out more generally, begin collecting ‘human robot’ stories… Hmmm.
Somehow I didn’t see these comments earlier. Thanks for the tip on tough skin and the encouragement.
I’d be happy to collect and share instances of human robotics and also a bunch of arguers squabbling moral ideas to a halt. I’m not sure what kind of detail you’d be interested in, but I’ll see what I can come up with.
Good luck with your “experiments”!
Here, here! Seconding jilliterate. I know I, for one, have never looked at the world the same way since picking up TDTCB.
I’ve recommended Scott’s stuff to quite a few people and what I’ve discovered is that recommending is not enough, I have to get a copy of the book in their hands. If I buy a copy of one of the books and give it to them as a gift, then they feel obligated and will at least attempt a reading.
I actually do that, too. I’m even missing my copy of the first book. To my knowledge, though, no one has ever made it very far. Sometimes I doubt their commitment to sparkle motion.
People like their fantasy to be fair and simple. I was surprised reading user reviews to find that some people think of you as sexist, chauvinist or mysoginist.
And they hate Khellus too. They don’t see him as morally undefinable, as a stranger to their world (reminds me of Peter Watts’ Blindsight).
I guess people would like to see kinda “rags to riches” female characters on a totally justifiable and satisfactory path. Doesn’t really work that way.
If it means anything to you, I like your works precisely because it muddles black/white morality tropes of fantasy. It challenges the very things that makes us human. I don’t think any character ever made me think as much as Khellus did.
Funny how in plenty of fiction being human is the best possible thing in this universe or the next – non-humans and aliens should strive to be more like us and learn from us yadda yadda … we are kinda Mary Sue species in our own fiction.
Bottom line, your works are not for everyone. But those of us who like it can appreciate what you’re trying to do.
Keep up the good work!
PS. When is The Unholy Consult coming? 🙂
Thanks Marko. Jamming the ‘simplicity instinct’ was a big part of the goal. My hope is that the books perpetually continue to fall into the wrong hands.
When I have an ETA on the next book, you all will be the first to know.
” My hope is that the books perpetually continue to fall into the wrong hands.”
Looks like I’ve got some more people to recommend TSA too then. Going to have to order some more books to give away. Hopefully amazon won’t run out.
I always find experiments are more entertaining in the nude, though perhaps less publishable. Then again, never having the coat to begin with may expose some bias there.
I suppose when you choose an Argument (or are chosen by one as the case may be) that calls out literally everyone on all the world’s BS, making enemies is kind of a given.
Enemies make you shrewd, keep you focussed. It would be nice if they bought you a drink now and again.
Given the vehemence of online bile, I’m not sure I’d be willing to accept such a drink if they did! Some people are zealous enough they might even be willing to share a poisoned drink with you. I imagine it all gets exhausting at times. I get exhausted just following the various online debates and trying to parse all the viewpoints.
Actually, would you buy them a drink every so often, as well?
Mr. Bakker – i just wanted to say that i am glad i got to read your stories. they were worth much more than the money i paid for them. maybe u won’t be dead by the time the world wakes up to real worth of your work, but who knows, the universe is shit. i have been extraordinarily moved by your task and look forward to being moved again whatever and whenever you pick up the pen. 🙂
Call me Scott! I can already tell you my dying words…
“What… was… I… saying?”
Ok Scott! call me Madnesss! BTW, my institutionalized misogyny mate passed on this professor job listing to me–don’t know if this is up your alley…
https://www.mla.org/jil_listing?id=21915
A handful of more sophisticated critics had decided my real problem was the lack of contrition, that I failed to exhibit the ‘proper tone,’ one expressing sensitivity to the plight of those wishing me dead
I’d read those (where I’d seen them) as being given an opportunity to pledge allegence to the tribe once more, like a spy coming out of the cold.
In a way though it seems hinged on an academic indulgence of having everything mean something else. In practical terms it’s like showing green at a set of traffic lights, then saying it was a metaphor for red. Then being delighted/surprised/dismayed when they T-bone you. Is it all rationalising, or is some of it just not being academic enough?
One of the most interesting parts of the blog war back when was the perfectly asymmetric nature of the instinctive understanding of rationalization everyone had – me included. Reasons always feel so much more commodious on the inside, like a mansion, and yet from the outside (‘etically,’ an anthropologist would say) they look like a thief’s kit. I just think a lot of very intelligent people, not knowing how I nursed and toiled over this project for years while getting my degrees, assume I’m just making all this stuff up post hoc, after the fact, to cover my ass, when the fact is I made sure my ass was covered going in!
“I just think a lot of very intelligent people, not knowing how I nursed and toiled over this project for years while getting my degrees, assume I’m just making all this stuff up post hoc, after the fact…”
Or they do know, they just don’t agree and/or their intelligence determines a certain level of inherent argumentative reaction to the authoritative illusion genre seems to demand (and you like to subvert). I live in one of the highest concentrations of brainpower in the world and this is def. a common characteristic among high IQs (in the sciences, for this example) — the ‘wars of perspective.’ In regards to TSA, I often see this reaction at a certain other sight — people balking toward you / you’re work because, boiling it down, ** “you aren’t as smart as you think you are!!! // “How dare you make assumptions about ME…” etc. etc. **” –this, coupled with you stoking certain rashy areas of ideology (provoking radical feminists & idiot-savant libertarians not so long ago), and the blowout seems perfectly predictable, in hindsight.
Predictable, and amusing. Shame it effects the pocketbook, though. You should try kickstarter or something… I’d donate 5 or 10 bucks for an ebook-exclusive, and you probably have a couple thousand fans at least who would do the same.
So it goes. I’m scraping by, and the books keep get reprinted (in the UK and USA, at least). It matters that the books have now earned their notoriety.
When AE is out in the bold light of day, enough threads will have been connected, I think, for the series to climb a rung or two on the notoriety ladder. I really feel like I nailed the thing, created something wicked and beautiful on a scale not many writers achieve. But then this too, is a matter of hindsight.
Scott,
You thought about treating (with treating being basically ‘thinking about it a lot’) the green light as red for a long time before? How does the timely order definately matter in this regard?
In one culture, if you cross your heart before you whistle on a tuesday, it’s okay. In another, crossing your heart in advance does not make up for whistling on a tuesday.
I mean I get a culture where it matters that it was planned with a for thought – but isn’t that expecting a kind of an academically inclined culture? Kanye West explained his song ‘I am a god’ along the lines of black people not having any real recognised strong identies beyond rapper, gangster or pimp. So he launches himself straight up to god, then, to essentially scream the lack. Which I thought made a good point (once I’d read the interview!). But maybe even Kanye is expecting an academic culture in doing that, eh?
A lack of academic culture could be a sign of nihilism and what you’d expect to see if nihilism is the case. But is it the only one that would signify it?
It feels like it might be expecting certain training to be there – or even that certain training is just everything (etic-thingy, as you say, to the point of being all there is). When really it’s like saying something in a language someone just doesn’t know. Almost sounds like a science experiment – hand the book to someone, with scenes explained in detail in some ancient language in between the paragraphs of english text of the book. Surely the ancient language exists and is extablished well beforehand, therefore it will matter to the reading? Well, intelligence doesn’t automatically mean academic capacity, as much as intelligence doesn’t automatically mean knowing multiple languages (except in D&D char gen!).
So is it all rationalisation on their part, or is it that you expecting an academic practice from them? I mean I think the lack of academic practice on their part is ass – but I would, wouldn’t I? Once you’ve got a hammer, everyone else is shit at hammering nails. I guess I’m bitching about genre expectation at a very fundimental level.
I fear I think the rank hypocrisies of academic culture are a pretty clear sign that they’ve pushed the ‘original program’ (why does that make me shudder?) beyond it’s adaptive problem-ecology. I know that as ‘damaged goods,’ a poor kid from a broken home, I found university culture both narcotic and toxic. I had no idea it would be so MORAL. The mad extent of the hubris was only matched by its effortlessness: these unhealthy souls declaring the social retardation of the masses, the evil of the system, on the basis of postage stamp collections.
Now here I am, doing the same.
I don’t understand where that goes? I was going to add I think there needs to be establishing/bridging fictions (‘the emperors new clothes’ is an establishing fiction, for example). Along the lines of saying a text could be written with two intents, not just one – but in ‘show, don’t tell’ fiction. Preferably with dragons! Maybe the books are just too ahead of their time?
Otherwise I don’t understand where that goes?
I read your books late in the day and only afterward realized some controversy existed. The idea that your work would be singled out does not make sense to me.
I do think certain questions of similar nature can be asked. I once enjoyed Lolita, understand why some praise it, but an argument can be made that it is unacceptable and should have been discarded, say ignored, by polite society. That does not mean we should dismiss all stories of children having sex or even of adult-child relationships.
I also agree that we need more consistent and inundating images of different worlds than our own world, you know, perhaps ones that shape gender and social relationships differently. I am sure there is plenty of that out there, but it does not become mainstream (say TV) or reach a great deal of people. In that sense, images of different societies and a different arrangement of our selves do not flood what we hold as possible social and self repertoires, and that is a problem in the end. For the most part, we have lives created by what we found in our society, community, family, and there are better arrangements that we can strive for. Fantasy and science fiction, though, are about as good a tool for disrupting those thoughts as we see anywhere.
My only (non-complaining) complaint has to do with Neuropath. If we are going to build more rational and behaviorally superior agents I am pretty sure the first thing we do is take out sex drive, and probably even sexual pleasure.
The big moral I was aiming at was the way literary fiction only pretends to challenge literary thinkers, that violation means violations of sacrosanct orthodoxies. When Harry Potter is the only book being burned in your culture, then your literary culture is effectively dead as literature, and genre culture has become the engine of real cultural innovation.
Your criticism makes sense, but it does presuppose that such modifications would be made only once we had perfect knowledge of the brain, and I would argue that such is never the case when it comes to tinkering. Tinkering is actually a big part of securing that knowledge. You caught my institutional evil mid-tinker!
(Now that’s rationalization, no?)
“I wanted grit in every seam of my world”.
Coming to the online arena regarding this incredible series of books relatively recently, I learned about the backlash through this very website, and I was amazed! The very thing that made this series so gripping (the painful, painful realism that so effectively mirrored our own awful history) was being held aloft as an example of misogyny!
I have never commented here before, but I felt the need to add my voice to that of the readers above. There is a certain bent appeal to being on this side of the fence regarding what I truly believe to be the best modern fantasy writing in existence, and knowing that there are many who will never, and can never see that they are attacking someone who understands why these books make them squirm in a way so much more thorough than they ever will.
Thank you, August! I tend to look at the books as free floating code myself, which react with various individuals in various ways, some good, some bad, depending on the individual, generating more code. Whether it has an overall positive effect remains to be seen! The fact that they don’t vanish when consumed is what makes them interesting, I think, worthy of further consideration. But what else am I going to say! 😉
My dying words will be: What the fuck…was that?
The heuristic-based view of your critics versus the more rational Bakker defense is, at best, a low resolution versus high issue, but you, like so many others (e.g., me), want to use “I’m being more rational than you” as an ethical argument that you’re in fact “right,” i.e., on the inside of the tribalist inside=good/outside=bad distinction. Ethics cannot escape tribalism. There’s only one way to be ethical, and that’s as a tribal insider. Expand the franchise all you want, but there needs to be an outside, whether it’s the rest of the biosphere, the geosphere, the universe, other possible worlds…To say that irrationality (or half-assed heuristics) is bad is to say that the one who doesn’t succumb to irrationality, or “rises above” it, is good, i.e., is an insider, one of the good ones. It’s to make oneself the hero.
Bingo. There’s no way to critique the structure without recapitulating it – this is what makes ‘reasons’ so easy to dismiss. They’re just more machination. (We have to take care to avoid lapsing into normativism, here, however).
So one slogan we can use to understand this shore is: “Social-signalling machination always outruns epistemic machination.”
Would introducing speech act concepts here help, you think, Devin?
Ethics cannot escape tribalism.
Because ethics is there for the sake of tribalism…I hadn’t really thought of that before, that tribalism eclipses ethics, as the latter is there to serve the former?
So to try to drag the circle of ethics outside the circle of tribalism so it eclipses tribalism…would appear to be traitorous thinking?
It’s possible to be a traitor to a particular group but impossible to be a perfect traitor. There’s always something being defended.
Even in an internal monologue, there’s speech and there’s an audience. Language is outward-facing, always a presentation. As far as the topic has ethical implications, that monologue is a rationalization of an inside against an outside, a plea for approval from an audience.
Hello, Callan
Scott said it more elegantly than I did, but this is more or less what I was getting at during our dreadful Lucy exchange under ‘The Philosopher, the Drunk and the Lamppost.’ There are no universally valid ethical codes, only those by which particular groups of people agree to be bound. We assign them divine origin in order to discourage members of the tribe from thinking critically about them and realizing their arbitrariness. The steppe is boundless.
There’s a difference between thinking critically about codes Vs simply promoting their absence. Ie, Lucy simply shooting the cab driver because he can’t speak english.
[spoiler] Take the Inchoroi’s addition to the text written upon the tusk. Without a flag to think critically about it, it ends up a promotion
[/spoiler]
You might say, “But people should just think critically about everything, brah!”
If that’s the case then why do we need a text with the Inchoroi to begin with? Why show the need to think critically if we already aught to?
It’s hitting chicken and egg territory, both thinking we don’t need to tell people to think critically (ie, trying to treat the Lucy example as something to critically think about), yet writing flags to signal critical thinking to occur.
If you ever try to teach (preach) people to take up critical thinking on a matter “You have to think critically on this, man!”, then you can’t just have a laissez-faire attitude about another matter and just assume they will have critical thinking on that. It’s like trying to make a big deal about safety training in one area of a factory and how it’s very important to get it just right and follow every rule, but then just kind of handwaving for another area and not considering they could get their hand caught in the machine over in that other area.
Can you picture (if not agree with) the model of what I’m describing? To not put in flags is to not consider the scope of other peoples critical thinking – and with it, it ends up a promotion. Ignorance of other peoples ignorance is invisible – the Dunning Kruger experiment shows that. Where the people at the higher end of the critical thinking range might start attributing their own skill as being normal, ie, what everyone has. When not everyone does and so the less critical thinking people end up taking it as a promotion, ala the Inchoroi text.
Caveat: I have not seen the movie ‘Lucy’, this is just a concern I have in advance.
It’s possible to be a traitor to a particular group but impossible to be a perfect traitor. There’s always something being defended.
Pfff, that just seems to be you (charitably) extending the bounds of the tribalism to include such a traitor, as if they care about something like our tribe cares about things and so are part of our tribe (if peripherally) in doing so! When we know they are monsters! 😉
Heh, it’s fun on the rare occasions you can poke a hole in someones argument by pointing out their charity! “Your argument hinges on your niceness, man!”
Even denouncing heroism (which I agree with for reasons that appear later in this sentence) is an attempt to be right, i.e., a member of Team Rationality.
If I take the time to figure out “speech concepts” (sounds rational enough), maybe I can use them to become a better person, impress people, vanquish rivals, etc. So yes, it would probably help.
“(We have to take care to avoid lapsing into normativism, here, however).”
So as to remain right and just, good and true. 😉
related:
http://devinlenda.blogspot.jp/2014/10/the-strawmen-are-coming-and-they-look.html
First and foremost, I think you are ignoring the simple fact that a lot of your detractors believe in “harmful narratives”, that is, they assume that your depictions of misogyny somehow hurt actual women.
It is remarkable that these people maintain such peculiar belief despite stubborn lack of in-the-field correlation between availability of violent media and actual crime (even in rather synthetic laboratory conditions precious few studies show any hint of a causal link between media exposure and actual violence, and as far as evidence strength goes actual in-the-field effects beat the few tenuous and inconclusive studies hands-down).
It is also remarkable that, in a way, you have a similar belief, though perhaps much more refined and nuanced (more on that below)
In their view, you wield “the forbidden knowledge” (or rather, the forbidden narrative), and the fact that you “have a plan” is completely immaterial to them – forbidden narratives, in their view, are inherently damaging and thus not to be dabbled in, fullstop. They are very much inhabitants of their own little Lovecraft County (to borrow my own metaphor from long ago), and you just happen to be Herbert West, the mad scientist unleashing woeful dark forces to further a misguided “progressive plan” of his. It’s not some role you play, to a certain subtype of radical feminist (I’m not going to say “every” radical feminist, because there is a tremendous number of heterogenous ideologies that might consider themselves “radical” “feminists”), as well as to a certain kind of socioconservative, Herbert West is exactly who you are.
They aren’t just reaching for pitchforks because this is some silly evolved knee-jerk response born from heuristic overgeneralization.
They are reaching for pitchforks because they live in an (imaginary for me, but all too real for them) world where narratives can be inherently damaging, and you happen to be working on precisely such a narrative.
And, as the resident sadist of your fine blogging establishment, I do happen to… well, not take offense, perhaps, but… experience mild annoyance… towards your subtle suggestions that normalization of alternate sexualities is somehow unwelcome, unhealthy, or outright exploitative.
Not only do I wonder what factual basis do you happen to have when you claim that “…sexual brutalization becomes the dominant form of mass entertainment” (is Canada hosting some kind of BDSM Olympics that I happen to be unaware of? If so, why am I not invited?), but I also wonder what is exact justification for invoking the term “brutalization” in the first place.
It is a loaded term that insinuates nonconsent.
Are you suggesting that there are no women who would consent to (and be pleased by) activities you find “too brutal”?
Or are you, like certain radical feminists, suggesting that these women “don’t know what they are talking about” / “don’t know what they really should want” and are just brainwashed victims of some vague (and, dare I say, Lovecraftian 🙂 ) “transhistorical phenomenon” ?
There appears a rather vague undercurrent of distaste towards “liberal” sexual culture in your post, but you happen to construct your claims in a manner that makes it exceptionally hard to pinpoint what exactly your complaint is, besides the fact that you do seem to believe that certain consensual activities and expression forms are inherently “bad” despite the fact that all participants enter on their own volition.
You even seem to suggest that these attitudes are somehow not entirely unlike normalizing rape, despite the fact that, contrary to the alarmist claims of usual suspects, modern “western-ish” world is among the least “rapist friendly” civilizations in documented history (it is not unlikely that we have outlawed, and are prosecuting, more types of rape and sexual assault than ancient greeks believed to exist). As a matter of empirical fact, rape (and violent crime in general) appears to be on a rather steady decline despite growing availability of violent/sexual media and improving forensics.
You seem to harbor an unacknowledged bias there.
P.S.:
It is interesting to note that both you and your detractors (from both sides of the political spectrum) seem to share one more interesting trait – you are all directly (professionally or “strongly vocationally”) connected to the literary art form (being either writers or critics).
Perhaps belief in “fundamentally noxious narratives” is, for some reason, more common among people strongly involved with literature, huh ? 🙂
P.P.S.:
Also, I strongly doubt that rape is necessarily an “evolved routine” for human males (at least not in the sense “lekking” is an evolved routine for black grouse males), though I am willing to concede that some studies (like the rape-fertility one) do suggest a certain degree of biological predetermination in the manner rapists tend to select their victims (By the way, interestingly enough, studies actually investigating the patterns of victim selection suggest that “revealing attire” and “conventional physical attractiveness” have little-to-no effect on an “average” rapist’s targeting process, which is yet one more thing that goes against “folk wisdom” and “intuitive psychology”. Perhaps it wouldn’t be to audacious to say that almost everything “the commoner” believes about a rapist’s mind is either subtly wrong or outright blatantly false)
I’ll bite some of these bullets, especially those regarding folk-intuitions, academic artificiality, and over-generalizing feminism. But you do realize that you are plainly rationalizing an irrational predilection (is there any other kind?), here, 01. You fit Haidt’s ‘rider and elephant’ model just as well as any of us. You’re also buying into very simplistic notions of consent-to-harm and cultural radiation. I could go on, but the point is simply that there seems to be no other way to proceed than to cherry-pick and self-justify. ‘Self-loathing’ is a simple thing to can, terminologically, but you have to admit, the far less predictable thing for you to say would have been, ‘I am a sadist, and I need help.’ The only time we seem to do as much is when our drives cut against our own interests, as with addiction.
Is this the big lesson of ‘depressive realism’? That self-hatred is the only means of honest self-appraisal?
The point I’m driving at here is parallel to the point I drove toward in ‘Neuroscience as Socio-cognitive Pollution,’ which is the suggestion that effective social/moral problem-solving actually depends on keeping certain kinds of information sequestered. Morality is a hammer in a quantum computing lab. If this is the case, then how do we moved beyond it? What kind of new heuristic suite should we devise? Does ‘hyper-morality’ even make sense?
If you mean the predilection of your opponents towards attacking you with peculiarly wild and disproportionate aggression, then my argument was more along the lines that, within context of the worldview your opponents have, the predilection towards behaving in this manner might very well be rational and not a “heuristic misfire” (you’re very literally spreading information they consider inherently dangerous. Your plans and goals and rationale are of no concern, you are literally spreading a noxious agent)
If you mean my own humble predilections – well, I see no particular reason to even bother with rationalizing them.
I am merely a humble priest of the yet unborn machine god 🙂 not a perfect (imaginary) transhuman organism worthy of being the avatar of said (currently 😉 imaginary ) deity, so I see no particularly convincing reason why I should refrain from having some comparatively (compared to say, recreational diving) harmless fun with people who happen to have a complementary interest.
Is it “irrational” ?
In a certain way, yes, but so are bungee jumping, music, art and liking black trousers over green trousers of similar construction.
Well, you would have had a point if you could demonstrate that the drives in question operate practically against some third party interests (the qualifier “practically” is there to prevent stuff like “being offended by someone’s car color choice” from entering the discussion – I might find yellow cars to be an affront to aesthetics, but that hardly means that people who paint their car yellow somehow meaningfully compromise my interests)
Currently available empirical evidence suggests that third parties are not practically affected (well, no more than when they happen to suffer a yellow car to drive).
Do you suggest that one should experience some sort of self-loathing (or at least a profound introspective skepticism) when choosing clothing, or a recreational activity ? (Is airplane modelling more “in need of rationalization” than coin collecting? If so, why?)
I am not convinced this appraisal would be any more honest.
To truly reach a better appraisal, one would have to transcend the limits of mere human body and mere human mind – which is not currently possible, but we’re getting there 😉
Well, with all due respect, that is very much a Lovecraft County, where “evil knowledge” exists and is at large (it’s just that this particular Lovecraft County is more refined than that of your detractors, who have theirs inhabited with much more crude and banal things, like literal “demons from hell” and “malicious transhistorical phenomena”)
I happen to be of a completely opposite opinion (I am more of a Herbert West than you are – or perhaps I am actually more like Curwen 🙂 ).
That is, I happen to be of the opinion that if a given society experiences a “crisis” when faced with mere facts of empirical reality, then it should be washed away by the tide of knowledge, and be replaced by something better (praised be the unborn machine god, yada-yada and all that jazz)
A particular subtype of paternalistic abrahamic morality in question is like that.
Or rather, it’s like trying to operate a particle accelerator using a distorted record of a dead madman’s schizophrenic ramblings as a manual.
You don’t need to invent some radically novel heuristics to keep functioning even in the light of “neuropath-like” technology any more than you need a radically novel heuristic to handle the surprising discovery that the sky isn’t in fact inhabited by a vindictive, angry, sexually disturbed X-man and his army of polyvolatic supernatural creatures.
But hey, maybe I just happen to have very little attachment to status quo and its silly antics.
It might.
I just happen to think we aren’t facing any particularly terrible crisis of “morality” in general.
Yes, modern discoveries do go against the intuitions of some people.
So what ?
IP subnetting goes against the intuitions of, like, 60% of employees I happen to deal with (including ones with certifications and stuff!), and yet they handle it quite okay.
There is, like, a treasure trove of creepy “I need help getting into xxx’s house” jokes here
To illustrate my “morality” point more clearly:
A lot of my own decision making lies somewhat in the area of what can be called cognitive neglect (for instance, there is no clear “rational” reason for me to care about feelings and well-being of other people, yet somehow, I do. )
I do not see why a neuroscientific study clearly explaining the “introspectively concealed” processes in question would somehow cause me to alter my behavior.
I was doing that thingie-thing without even knowing what it exactly is, and upon learning what it is I would stop ?
A little thing I initially missed:
I’m not a fan of “cultural radiation”.
If anything, I find the phenomenon to be dubious and overrated.
What I wanted to state isn’t support for this concept, but rather the mere observation that a lot of your detractors likely subscribe to notions along those lines.
Some of their ideological peers outright honestly state that they believe in “poisonous narratives” and “cultural pollution” (concepts I find to be hypothetical at best, outright fantastic at worst) – though to the best of my knowledge your specific major detractors have not made such bold and honest statements.
P.(P.P.?)S.:
And yes, I do of course fit Haidt’s – why not ? I am merely human (so far… 🙂 ) and don’t claim to have ultimate objective perspective.
However, the sad fact of my mere human nature does not, however, invalidate the observation that claims of media-induced violence (sexual or otherwise) do not match observed empirical reality manifested in form of crime statistics and general social status-quo (the latter is remarkably non-violent compared even to the relatively benign 19th century, let alone the horror of ancestral savannah).
“Perhaps it wouldn’t be to audacious…” == “Perhaps it wouldn’t be too audacious”
GAH.
there is no reason a priori why you shouldn’t consider it, but whether it *can* help is a highly contentious issue. I admittedly suffer Akrasia, but knowing that Big Macs taste the way the do because evolutionary scientists passed memos around to corporations on our predilection to preferring high fat high protein high sugar salty food never stops me from buying a Big Mac. The mere notion of interests breaks down here. Whose interests. Which temporalizing sequence of which modalities interests. Which sub systems interests. My laryngoesophagesl reflux interests ain’t served by eating that fucking thing!
Big Mac was invented in 1967. I doubt advanced neurobiochemical and/or evolutionary insights played a major role in its development.
Also, Big Macs don’t affect GERD all that much (well, overconsumption of Big Macs may cause obesity which is related to GERD, but so does overconsumption of pretty much any conceivable food)
More generally, I do of course admit that there might be some “exploitable loopholes” that will be uncovered by neuroscience that would challenge the notion of one’s interests in interesting, very “meta”, manners, but here I have two retorts:
1) the whole history of human communication post-1945 is basically this process of “understanding the motives of your detractors so as to integrate their motives into your plans and achieve your goals despite their adamant opposition” (because “burning them to the ground” is no longer a practically tenable course of action)
2) vulnerabilities can be patched.
3) a mutual meta-understanding of each other’s “deep interests” can lead to interesting and beneficial results (do I believe that a political party, an NGO or a government can “hold my interests” ? No. Do I believe that certain organizations might be willing to exchange favors on my end, such as money and voting, for a support of social policies that I find appealing ? Yes.)
As to fragmenting into “subsystem interests”, as long as you can’t easily swap out your GI tract for a new one, it is impossible to reliably separate your interests from “its interests”.
As soon as we re-engineer the human body to be modular and easily extensible, GI tract (and other body parts, including the “sacred genitals” 😉 ) will become as trivial and disposable as the most recent goo-i-phone-pad.
I’ll probably have a disposed body-parts landfill to call all my own, if such a wondrous future is to come before my demise 😉
You are a sexist though–you’re all about “women are superior to men”.
I know it’s true but it hurts me anyway. Why do I have to be so weak, so far the loser?
Feels good to see yourself for what you are, I suppose.
21st century self-loathing man
Isn’t there a King Crimson song about that?
I am. I do think men are the ‘weaker sex’ across the majority of modern contexts. I continually catch myself assuming that women will be the more competent party in my social interactions, and I think this assumption is something modern media reflects in numerous ways. Imagine the hue and cry if the genders were swapped in Brave, for instance!
I don’t know if this is a good thing or bad.
In my very humble opinion, “weaker sex” makes about as much sense as “master race”, perhaps less so.
I have the same experience, Scott. I am baffled by my social incompetence, to tell you the truth. I am the model of the gen Y guy. I’m so fucked by the internet, so totally addicted, so nurtured by, and nailed to, the monitor. And from what I’ve noticed, women really are better at navigating the social world, especially today.
You should look up the “hikikimori” phenomenon. I think it would be of interest to you in your gender analyses. Men are only getting worse.
I am perplexed by this comment
Is there a joke I am missing ?
Whenever I’m writing a comment here it’s only half serious. I’m not sure what angle I’m going for, but there is an angle, however oblique it may be.
I can only thank you for your optimistic reflections of our world. Your writings make me laugh with glee. I can’t imagine the outlook of your detractors, but I can see their point of view if I go crosseyed.
Write on, man.
One of the things worth remembering about Middle Earth, Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel and Vedic India is that the writers who created those worlds believed in and endorsed the world views about which they wrote. The same thing might also be said of lesser imitations like The Belgariad and The Sword of Shannara. One might say it is a convention of heroic fantasy that the authors endorse the world views of their main (hero) characters. This is even true in very good fantasy such as The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Similarly, it is a convention of heroic fantasy that the evil of the world be externalized into a Morgoth, Sauron, Brona or Satan. When a writer subverts the conventions of a genre some readers will figure out that their genre-specific habits are being challenged and try to devise a new way of reading the book in question. Some people will resent the subversion as a kind of bait-and-switch and discard the book after fifty or so pages. Some will never catch on and read the book as if it is The Sword of Shannara. I think most of your feminist critics are readers of the third type. They read the books as if they were entertainment rather than art. Given the conventions of commercial heroic fantasy their inferences about your character were not completely unreasonable. Essentially they misunderstood your personal character based on a reasonable misunderstanding of your literary character. I’m sure you know that any time you disguise a work of art as a piece of entertainment you run some risk. As long as they can’t find your address it’s worth it.
But it is weird how…I dunno how to put it? Quarantined? How quarantined ‘entertainment’ is taken to be?
I mean take the movie ‘A night at the museum’. Pure entertainment? It contains a scene where a wax dummy that was brought to life and thinking it is a historical figure suddenly breaks down and accepts it’s a wax dummy and that’s all it is. None of the heroism of the figure it depicts. To me, amongst this pop corn there’s a sudden, huge philosophical punch to the gut!
And I think alot of audiences, happily enough, can take this with their pop corn.
But there’s a group who can’t – the escapism must be perfect. Perfectly quarintined from life. Granted rape is a hell of a subject – but it’s like wanting no breaches at all, not even minor ones. Not even a small punch to the gut.
Hopefully I’m just making up that group and it doesn’t actually exist.
Three things:
I think most readers, filmgoers etc. are quite flexible and can handle more complexity than mainstream entertainment wants to give them. To the extent there are quarantines they are more imposed by providers than demanded by audiences. I think this is especially true in media situations where the audience is the product rather than the customer, like broadcast television and much of the commercial content of YouTube.
I think followers of Three Pound Brain are more susceptible than most to being gut-punched by seeing other beings learn that their personhood is less than they believed it was, because this blog is at least in part about us learning that our personhood might be less than we believe it to be. People who have not had the Three Pound experience might simply feel pity looking down from the security of their image-of-God personhood on a lesser being.
The group for whom escapism must be perfect is, of course, consumers of pornography. I suppose that’s appropriate given that porn is the extreme case of the degradation of women in entertainment that Scott talked about.
Imagine you’re watching a porn video. She’s on her knees and he has her head in his hands. As he’s thrusting into her mouth he says “you like this, don’t you, bitch? You like getting this big cock down your throat.”
Instead of nodding vigorously and saying “gluug gluug gluug” she pushes him away and says “of course not, and I’m not in the mood to be called ‘bitch’ today. If you really think it’s at all reasonable to expect women to enjoy performing fellatio you should suck a cock sometime.”
Then she turns to the camera and continues “I know you clicked on ‘Big Titty Cum Slut Deep Throats a Huge Cock’ and we’ll get back to that in a moment, but right now I feel a lecture coming on. Don’t worry. It will be brief, only five points.”
“First, anything you want a woman to do outside normal vaginal intercourse you should try doing yourself just so you know what you’re asking. Get a dildo. Stick in in your mouth, then stick it in your ass. If you like it, maybe she’ll like it.”
“Second, if you are lucky enough to find a woman who likes cocksucking or likes you enough to suck your cock anyway, make sure it’s not covered in a half-inch of smegma.”
“Third, I do this job for the same reason most of us do the jobs we do. I need the money. It’s actually pretty good. I can make a thousand dollars a day doing porn, compared to two thousand dollars a month as an adjunct.”
“Fourth, yes I have a doctorate, in sociology. I’m not some stupid girl who came here on the Greyhound from Kansas thinking I was going to be a movie star.”
“But fifth, I took on seventy-thousand dollars in student loan debt to earn a PhD that’s worth less on the job market than a CDL, so stupid is as stupid does. On that depressing note, we return to our regularly scheduled blowjob.”
Wouldn’t you feel cheated? Wouldn’t you lose interest? Wouldn’t you lose your erection?
@ Michael Murden
Nope.
It could actually be fun (I appreciate funny porn with dialog that goes beyond “yeiiiiiihhh giv it to meeeee”, perhaps even with an actual plot that isn’t completely retarded)
Though unlike the stereotypical low-plot stuff it would survive a limited number of re(re re re re) imaginings.
When you start doing “brainy” porn you run into the problem of coming up with new scenarios that kind of make a sort of narrative sense (I wonder, is there, like, a paid job which consists of “writing new original screenplays for [site omitted]”? and if so, what’s the pay?)
And in fairness, while their is not a lot of evidence for a causal relationship from sexual objectification in entertainment to rape in real life, the argument some feminists make for a relationship between sexual objectification in entertainment and lesser forms of oppression such as lack of female presence in corporate boardrooms and legislative chambers, attempts to deny women control over their reproductive organs, lack of good, affordable child care, lower pay in female dominated professions etc are at least worth considering. Experiments using fMRI in association with the Implicit Association Test (discussed elsewhere in this blog) suggest that correlations (although not necessarily causality) between consumption of entertainment that sexually objectifies women and attitudes toward women might be experimentally tractable.
Well, it should be experimentally tractable though personally, I am somewhat skeptical of fMRI being used to study fairly complex and abstract things such as “attitudes” (the dead salmon shtick and the “scary black guy” finding come immediately to mind), and the specific study in question is massively misrepresented (IIRC studies in question have found that men already rating high in sexism in other tests were found to associate women in attractive clothing with “object” concepts, which is of course a nice way of confirming that sexists are sexists and interpret images in a sexist manner, but in no way suggests that images in question are “brain poison” and actively “make” or “aggravate” sexists)
Anyway, I am all for more studies being done to demonstrate an empirically meaningful connection ( More science is good 🙂 )
However, I think that general “epidemiology” of social woes in question tends to disagree once again – increased presence of women in corporate environment, as well as institutional protections against “underhanded” employment practices tend to be found in jurisdictions where “sexualized” imagery is readily available.
Also of note is the often overlooked (non-secret) that HR people by nature of their trade see humans as finicky, fragile cogs they have to occasionally lube up or replace (you can think of it as professional personality disorder endemic to management and HR, especially HR), which is something that stems from the nature of modern workplace (or of any workplace, I would argue).
Investigating unfavorable female employment patterns without taking into account the inherently objectifying nature of the relationship between an employer (a legal entity) and employee (a person) seems a little bit misguided.
Read helliwels article it’s only a penis. I can forward it to you if you don’t feel buying it. 01s earlier point that we do indeed differentiate most strongly concerning the forms and nuances of rape and we do get outraged just demonstrates the presence of rape culture and its backlashes. There is no outrage concerning rape in places where it is uncommon. Humor and perplexity is what helliwell encountered. This comes down to what Wolfendale following foucault calls subjectivation. Rapists aren’t made by bootstrapping themselves into being. It’s not so much that sexualized images produce rapist but that there are common social conditions that give rise to both. helliwell traces this to how cultural signification is ampliative on physiological sexual dimorphism in how it accentuated and articulates sexual difference and moreover that even tho there must be some sameness within which to accentuate a difference that difference takes the forefront. Pay attention to advertisements and look at the ones where a penis is married to images of weapons. Again these signs are not necessarily causative but are themselves sustained by the entire body of social institutional and discursive practices.
I did read it long ago (I happen to cohabit with people of most fascinating interests)
It’s a good one, and it raises interesting points, but I don’t think it supports the specific media influence claims expressed previously in this discussion (the author even explicitly warns against interpreting her research as evidence for rape being “product of discourse”)
More generally, I would be wary of drawing any conclusions beyond need for further research from so-called rape-free communities (interestingly enough, low-rape / “rape free” societies tend to be small, isolated, and devoid of a history of large wars or famines. One has to wonder whether divergence here is purely cultural…)
While it’s hypothetically possible that sexual imagery and rape have a common underlying cause (much like it’s hypothetically possible that the human brain’s neural network allows for a distinct hostile and sexually aggressive Id “construct” and a separate lofty, delicate Superego “construct”),
I do not see much empirical evidence for such hypothesis (much in the same way that I don’t see much evidence for existence of a grouchy Id and turgid Superego, fighting for dominance within one’s “mind”)
However, unlike Freudian Id/Superego extravaganza, the hypothesis in question can be formulated in a falsifiable manner, I think.
Thus it’s merely a question of doing so and carrying out relevant research.
P.S.:
I must be inhabiting a really weird place where weapons and genitals rarely share same ad space, and genitals can only grace “mainstream media” “symbolically”, through bizarre proxies (usually botanical in origin).
I vaguely recall an ad that compared the output of an (implied, off-screen) HIV-positive penis to a bullet (which is even technically true – a HIV-positive man’s penis is a lethal weapon, albeit a very unfortunate one)
Wouldn’t you feel cheated? Wouldn’t you lose interest? Wouldn’t you lose your erection?
That’d be breaking genre pretty bad (‘Breaking (genre) bad’, next on HBO!).
The strangest thing is it appears you are comparing this type of viewer and their perfect porn expectation to the moral outrage had by some readers not getting their perfect strong female character expectation. And it’s probably pretty apt.
Besides, my own genre has drifted towards women directed and filmed stuff – any time I drift back I usually end up being disgusted and not sure how to change the world to stop that stuff.
The desert of the real? That is some ‘functional’ nihilism we got here. I love it.
But then love is all I’m left with, if we are lucky enough to still be unbroken, lost and wandering outcasts sure, but enduring. A little bit of love to make the lies stick and grease the wheels.
Is there any real argument for ‘authentically misogynistic rehashes of our past’ themselves being ‘authentically misogynistic’? I mean, we are guys here, and fantasy has a really bad history in this arena, being the refuge of those often snubbed by the pretty girls. I mean, the genre has a the name of a forty-something year old stripper . . . “Fantasy”. I’m talking silicone and lip-liner.
But then you were clearly not writing the books for that demographic, you never wanted to appeal (pander) to them. And seriously, I personally know three women who really like the series a lot, and at no point did you as a misogynist ever come up in our discussions.
I’ve always been surprised at how comfortable people are using the internet as their own personal therapy device, a place they are safe to go to and anonymously overcompensate for their darkest fears (as we do here!). I’m still not sure if that therapy is working or not though.
But I do feel better.
Show me on this finely crafted dolly where the aging stripper has touched you badly 🙂
Seriously, a weird choice of metaphor, there.
On a more serious note, unless someone demonstrates (empirically) verifiable real-world perils of a particular fictional depiction, there is no reason to “justify”, “rationalize” and “provide argument for” choosing this particular depiction.
It’s like asking Dali to provide a “real argument” for his line technique or subject matter preference.
Eh? The aging stripper named Fantasy was a perfect metaphor! It was meant to evoke the indifference to feminism that the genre as a whole has a reputation for, as what could signal the ‘sexual brutalization’ of women
and the ensuing indifference of men to their plight which we live with as our society (and by our silence tacitly endorse) than an aging female sex-slave?
Esmenet, anyone?
Or am I just being a sexist pig? I’ll never know, but I expect everyone to tell me just the same.
And by the way, “desert of the real”, are you deliberatly cribbing that term from Baudrillard, an open nihilist whom I had brought up a long time ago, or am I day dreaming?
Fantasy as a genre is “indifferent” to feminism ? Doesn’t look like that, given constant kerfuffles that happen when those topics intersect.
I would argue that it’s merely less accepting of certain media-oriented types of “radical feminism”, perhaps because the questionable nature of “narrative-driven social change project” that some “radfems” are so fond of is most apparent when this “project” starts seriously tackling profoundly escapist literature.
Also, I am going to direct you the same inquiry I already directed at our kind host:
what is this thing with brutalization ?
I mean, there does not appear to be any indication that sexually violent crimes are on the rise in so-called “west” in general and Canada specifically (especially if you evaluate the period of 5-10 years), despite the fact that compared to merely 50 years ago we have both expanded the scope of what we consider “rape” (Canada only criminalized intramarital rape in 1983!) and improved our forensics (which should have resulted in a “perceived boom” even if the actual rate of crimes in question was static).
We also are seeing improvements in reporting.
The “extensive brutalization” (as well as “sexual abuse epidemic” and other such catastrophes) does not appear to be a factual thing, as far as I can tell.
I happen to take offense at your characterization of an aging stripper as sex slave.
Unless you hail from a place where strippers are actually slaves, that is (In which case we should do something about it – perhaps an angry twitter campaign, #UndergroundTwiteroad)
How is a stripper renting out her good looks (and perhaps sexual favors) for money any less of a profession than someone renting out one’s mind?
“How is a stripper renting out her good looks (and perhaps sexual favors) for money any less of a profession than someone renting out one’s mind?”
So I don’t calibrate professions as being more or less ‘professional’ than other professions, but I’ll assume you meant to ask how the profession of a prostitute or stripper is or could be more degrading than that of say a creative writer or even an accountant.
And it is at this point that I’m going to have to stop. Because really, if you can’t see the difference between the two professions I can’t help you, and I’d like to point out that failing to distinguish between the violence inherent in the one from the remote chance of violence found in the other is itself symbolic of the sexual brutalization I believe my society and culture fosters.
I apologize for the mala fides fellow human.
01, I’m thinking rather than being a stripper being the issue itself, it’s the wage slavery that’s potentially there. I’d consider such an area one of high potential mental stress – much like a soldiers work can be high potential stress. But it’s not that in itself – if someones stuck doing high mental stress work so as to eat and stuff, that’s the bad thing, m’kay. But someone who becomes a stripper who isn’t forced into it for a wage can be seen as an extreme performance artist. It even ties back to the art/entertainment question pretty neatly – is the artist creating entertainment or art? Arguably when they are forced to do so for a wage, no, it’s not art any more. Or not doing it primarily for the art, anyway. And maybe that’s where fantasy ended up, even though Tolkien just loved showing off his body for the art of it (heh!)
Where’s 03? 🙂
@ James S.
“degrading” is a subjective characteristic (and not some objective measure like “radiation exposure” or “likelihood of getting killed in a carjacking attempt”.
There are accountants, taxi drivers, sewage system maintenance workers and even CEOs who consider their job to be degrading (but apparently prefer to continue working rather than seek a less well paid but less “emotionally questionable” job – which is something I can subjectively relate to). Some of those jobs are even considered degrading by large swaths of society (how many parents would like their kid to do field work at NY sewage ?)
Unless you claim that only tidy, universally loved professions should be socially endorsed (are there such professions?), we could probably agree upon here is that any expression of social judgement regarding “prestige” of a profession is preposterous glitch in human reasoning that has to be counteracted wherever and whenever encountered, and people who subjectively believe they are being degraded by the very nature of their profession should probably seek other career options.
You know, I really dislike when postcolonialists/radfems start overloading constructs such as “violence” and “violation” to include entirely non-legalistic, abstract meanings.
Because if we’re talking violence proper (like, a chance to suffer a physical altercation or at least verbal abuse) then I see no reason to believe it is more “inherent” to the job of a stripper – much like I don’t see a reason to think that risk of being murdered is inherent to a job of a taxi driver (and we know for a fact that taxi drivers are exceedingly likely to be murdered or severely injured during their work)
If we’re talking some kind of “sexual functions are sacred, and demonstrating sex-related behavior for money is inherently violent and harmful” shtick, then I just don’t happen to see any reason to believe why “sexual displays” or “sexual intercourse” should be considered “sacred” (and even if they were “sacred” by Decree of the Unborn Machine God, that would not automatically mean they should not be exchanged for money – unless that too, is established in Vis Decrees)
And if we’re talking some abstract kind of “violence” that isn’t even legally meaningful or objective, then I really don’t know why we should call that ghostly thing “violence”.
@Callan
The “wage slavery” argument kind of makes sense when you’re dealing with minimum-wage workers who literally have no option of a less lucrative, but more egosyntonic (not-degrading) work.
I don’t think that strippers are minwage in most of the so-called “west”.
Yes, their work is high-stress, and yes, it sucks if they get somehow stuck in it without less stressful options. But the solution is either to offer people an opportunity to live their lives at some “minimum acceptable comfort level” for a potentially indefinite time (which isn’t something I necessarily mind, though I do think that if no limits are placed on such behavior it could potentially crash any kind of infrastructure short of Bank’s Culture, so “perfect unemployment benefits” will have to wait until we finally invent the machine god(s) 😉 ), or offer people a larger diversity of employments (which isn’t even remotely plausible given that, even without outsourcing, we will see an ever-growing reduction in workforce demand due to LST).
Providing people with re-training opportunities would help a lot of people (especially since being stuck in high-stress job is by no means a predicament specific to sex workers and/or women), but it can only go so far.
As for art/entertainment distinction, I don’t think art stops being art because the artist was motivated by “non-artistic” causes such as “needing to pay the bill and not knowing any other way to earn money”.
The circumstances of creation of a given work are of course important, but it seems peculiar to decide whether a work is “art” based on author’s subjective experience when creating it.
I mean, by that kind of standards, some famous paintings (done in a state of poverty and mental turmoil, sold immediately after being finished) will be “un-art” (mere entertainment, and rather sad one at that), and that’s just weird.
Then again, as you probably recall I do not believe that distinction between art and entertainment to be strict or even particularly meaningful (yes, there are some entertainment products of very questionable artistic merit, but it would be hard, if not impossible, to construct an entertainment form with “zero” artistic merit)
P.S.:
Third is in a remote place that she has chosen not to disclose, doing things that are covered by NDAs that are thicker than an obese anaconda (and twice as dangerous)
I fear you’re simply illustrating my point, 01! The strength on your arguments demonstrates why the State got out of the business of legislating sexual predilections save those cases where harm was unambiguous. The passion of your arguments demonstrate the way rationalization of moral self-interest is automatic, and uncircumventable. But I hung around with musicians growing up, met and came to know a good number of strippers, almost all of them suffering from addictions, and most of them the victims of childhood sexual abuse. They make their ‘choices’ with painful consistency. A ‘right to cruelty’ given ‘consent’ depends on some kind of robust notion of consent that I’m not sure you’re own commitments permit…
I think ‘consent’ is problematic in the extreme. Suffering, however, is about as robust as can be.
What’s the way out? I dunno. Think of Japanese sex-doll culture, how in so many cases, the dolls are obviously children. If someone could show me empirical evidence that these dolls actually help those suffering pedophilic impulses manage their compulsions, that they actually spare living children, then okay… ? But I think the reason people react so violently to the depiction of ‘criminal’ desire isn’t a cultural artifact, but the expression of social problem solving ‘wisdom.’ Look at the power of the social imitation heuristic: I agree that the ‘monkey see monkey do’ intuition that drives the moralists is almost laughably simplistic. But I’m not so quick to write off the power of laughably simplistic heuristics to exercise powerful, positive long term effects. They delivered us this far.
Hey, I wonder if the in-notification reply form will result in properly sequenced comment…
This is a test 🙂
that just sounds like a whole lot of rationalization to me. I would never and do not currently condemn anyone for a job choice, given that they feel they are choosing anymore.
Perhaps its that I’ve never been to a strip joint, which I haven’t, but I did get to know two gay prostitutes and a stripper throughout my tenure as a drug addict, and they were all addicted to cocaine or methamphetamines and, this is not a joke, the stripper killed herself leaving behind two children.
And I cannot bring myself to believe that they wanted or choose the life they had, at least not in its entirety. They allowed what were essentially the daily trespasses of a culture that did not care about them beyond what their bodies could provision, and it killed one of them.
So now, talk of the subjectivity of degradation strikes me as providing rationale for a world in which you can find someone who enjoys choking on a strangers body, a stranger who for whatever reason cannot find or sustain any healthy enough relationship for themselves, and calling the enjoyment of that experience art or choice, when it is far more likely the result of being raped as a child and figuring out that no one cares or has ever cared.
You know the figures for sexual assault are like three out of four women experience it in their lifetime, right?
So I’m not about to try to shame anyone out of their job, but I think men talking about the ‘validity’ of that job out here in the hinterlands of the internet and providing rationale for the danger such a job presents is not a good use of time for anyone. I don’t think they should be ashamed for what they do, but I do think its on us that their jobs require them to expose themselves, literally and figuratively, to such dangers as rape, sexual harassment and assault (which these jobs literally commercialize), and prey off their poverty and addictions, to the point of purposely getting them addicted in the case of actual sex slaves sent into America from Estonia and the Ukraine.
So yeah, I think the situation is pretty messed up.
Happy holidays!
@rsbakker
Okay, gonna bite.
Leaving the degree of passion in my arguments aside, what would be the fundamental difference between rationalizing a self-interest and merely presenting an argument ?
I mean, it is entirely plausible that there are introspectively “cloaked” subroutines are massively distorting my perspective to create a fascimile of “rightness” as well as inserting subtle fallacies into the arguments of mine (I am a mere human and don’t yet have a self-test suite or a debugging solution available to assure that my brain and arguments produced are fully “to spec”), but it seems a little peculiar (and fallacious) to base this claim on nothing but my background (I could have made a polar opposite argument – but then one could just claim that I am a “self hating jew” and my introspectively unaccounted components are distorting my perception to fit a self-loathing perspective)
It seems that the best way to check if something is right or wrong is to bounce it against reality itself. It’s not easy (since statistics are hard and perception is unreliable) but apparently doable.
According to science (and I can quote a source on that when I re-gain connection to my home e-library) food service, construction work, and cultural/artistic performers are the professions with most severe drug abuse situation.
The study in question was based on SOC so strippers/exotic dancers were likely dovetailed into the media/entertainment major occupation group (which IIRC came in at third or fourth place in terms of prevalence of substance abuse)
And while I by no means want to trivialize the plight of sex workers, I would like to point out that we do not question the autonomy and consent capacity of food service workers based on the fact that they are remarkably likely to have a chemical abuse problem that compromises their judgement and career flexibility.
Again, it seems to me that the core of your attitude is that you don’t view sex (and related behaviors) as something that can be subject to transactions in the full sense of the word, that is, exchanged for money, favors, information.or something else (that is, handled the manner we handle every other human activity both “physical” and “intellectual”)
Suffering or pain ?
Because they are rather significantly different concepts as far as my humble hobby is concerned 🙂
Oh, and by the way, “suffering” does not seem very robust within employment/workplace contexts (since, no matter what lies my dear managerial peers spin, there’s a secret song at the heart of employment 😉 , and it’s sound is that of people exchanging a certain time of suffering they can tolerate – even if barely so – for a reward that is allegedly supposed to compensate or exceed the subjective value of the suffering endured)
Well, I am all for doing an empirical study like that (I wonder if any Japanese scientists ever had the bright idea of supplying those sex dolls to child molesters to see if re-offense rate drops. It shouldn’t be too hard unless Japan is already running out of convicted child molesters, which I doubt)
I think you and me fundamentally differ in our assessment of “odd legacies”.
You happen to follow the school of thought that whichever properties emerged (through biological selection or cultural accumulation) have emerged, ultimately, for a good reason (at least in the very limited sense of “good reason”, something along the lines of being beneficial for survival of the species or a society)
Thus you believe that “odd legacies” of either evolution or cultural attrition are best not trifled with.
I happen to think that un-engineered (evolved, either through natural selection or arisen in the course of “non-engineered” cultural development) systems simply don’t come with “benefit guarantees” on them.
There is no reason to believe that peacock tail is meta-beneficial to the species by inducing selection of massively superior males who have “protein and ATP to spare”.
For all we know, the preference for fanciest display might fail to induce such a process in this particular species, is actually detrimental to the species, but not detrimental enough to cause extinction and just happened to propagate through entire population through gene drift, runaway sex selection and lucky linkage.
Thus, my attitude to “odd legacies of evolution and culture” (and, frankly, legacy systems in general 🙂 ) is rather disdainful.
Or, more succinctly…
You ask “why?”
I ask “why not?” 🙂
@James S.
I am reasonably confident that nobody ever in history of anything has had any choice in the deepest philosophical sense, since free will is, in my opinion, pretty much a load of nonsense.
However, I am reasonably confident that to the extent one can be said to have chosen something, food-serv workers (who are, according to SCIENCE!, among the professions most severely addled by drug abuse) have not chosen to do a menial minwage work while having a drug addiction.
Yet we don’t believe them to be “food slaves”.
We also do not believe that humiliation and drug addictions are somehow “integral part” of “food cooking jobs” or “food culture”.
By same line of reasoning, the fact that a lot of people in sex work (strippers or otherwise) are in an unfortunate state of health and in a subjectively unpleasant job that were not their “choices” (to the extent choice is a thing), does not somehow make the unfortunate work conditions and/or drug addiction somehow “inherent” to the work in question.
Okay, honest question – do you believe that a company (a machine forged out of sheer legal abstractions with the goal of bringing more money to its proprietors) can “care” about a worker beyond what said worker’s body or mind can provision (and, at best, the optimal provisioning schedule and conditions – if the machine is well designed and the worker is fussy)?
Wait.
A.
Minute.
Are you suggesting that being into choking (on the receiving end) is inherently less healthy than climbing a dangerous mountain for no particular practical reason (and paying for that, both in equipment costs and various permits associated with gaining access to mountain in question) ?
Diving with freaking Great Whites for no particular practical reason?
Also, I don’t see how child abuse is supposed to functionally factor into this (I mean, even if there was a causal link – which isn’t a fact – between history of abuse and some masochistic predilection or other, should masochists be denied enjoyment on the basis that their predilection is due to abuse and not due to say, a bunch of uppity genes or weird space rays?)
And, statistic bickering over methodology and definitions of sexual assault aside, I am reasonably confident that it’s a huge improvement over good old times when we used to actually give people rape licenses when registering their marriage.
So I am definitely not seeing an “epidemic” of sexual “brutalization”.
I am seeing a slowly drying up lake.
I humbly disagree that erotic dancing, or even prostitution, commercialize rape or sexual assault, and definitely disagree that those things are somehow inherent to the profession by its very nature.
The prevalence of these transgressions is of course something to be fought (through legalization, regulation and enforcement).
As with any profession.
And regarding the issue of “preying off poverty”, we all are preying off somebody’s poverty or other, more abstract, need.
Sometimes more aggressively. sometimes less aggressively.
We can make the conditions of our least lucky citizens somewhat better (for example by provision of robust and unconditional social security guarantees, including medical) or somewhat worse (for example by going all crazy randroid on the citizenry)…
… but in the end, there’s a secret song at the heart of employment …;)
All jobs suck. That’s why they have to pay you to get you to do them.
@ Michael Murden
It’s not just that jobs suck, it’s just that organizations (ANY organizations) indiscriminately (though, usually, non-sexually) objectify everyone involved in them (including the top management!) because from an organization’s “perspective”, you are a structural component not that much unlike a HDD or a light bulb.
And organizations don’t care because they are systems that, despite having humans as a part of their design, aren’t human and don’t really have the necessary “bits” to really “care” about anything or “empathize” with anyone.
It isn’t even a capitalist quirk.
It’s a fundamental organizational quirk.
I’m gunna play ref for a moment!! How fucking concieted is that!?
Scott,
The passion of your arguments demonstrate the way rationalization of moral self-interest is automatic, and uncircumventable.
Ready for it? Yellow card! C’mon, this is on par with accusing someone of ‘mansplaining’. Ie, a great way to piously justify not listening to them anymore (and so never have that piousness questioned). If you’re on the field, figure out a way to listen to them or just declare you’re not gunna listen and leave the field! Ten meter penalty!
01,
C’mon, it’s pretty clear they are infering that these people have a bad history and that causes them to drift into certain professions as a method of self harm. Because with their morale damaged from their past AND the market doesn’t just provide the work anyone wants, they end up there. You’re failing to make neck tackles here! This is their neck – clothesline it, not ‘do people in general use drugs’! C’mon, punch some throats, here!
@Callan
What would constitute a clothesline in this branch of the debate, ref ? 🙂
I’ve already pointed out that there exist professions with substance abuse problems similar to (or possibly even exceeding that of) strippers, low pay (worse than strippers who aren’t typically minwage), and loss of social status, and yet people in said professions are not considered to be “slaves” and are not claimed to have a reduced capacity for “consent”.
I mean, I could push the whole “unconscious self harm” brouhaha, or inquire whether the whole affair with my perspective is a kind of neo-bulverism 😉 , but those don’t seem to be very constructive directions to pursue, and with Scott I am actually interested in a constructive and informative discussion…
What would constitute a clothesline in this branch of the debate, ref ?
By formulating your argument directly to the argument put to you, which you just did. So play on! *peeeeep!*
One last thing:
because I love this band and because this post is about misogyny and the desert of the real.
Haha… fireworks! I must admit I’m only half-way through your first book in the first trilogy and love it. When an author actually dumps the clichés and finally does something new and unnerving it always brings the little minds out of the woodworks. Thing about ideologues: and, to tell the truth – their everywhere these days, feminists included, they have no ability to leave their ideological filters at the door of one’s creative efforts. Ideologues love to beat the world over the head with their little sticks.
Think of it this way… the more you raised the ire of the moral bigots – feminist, Marxist, blah, blah, blah… the more you’ll be read. And, the good, thing is that when they trash you it will allow those renegades to wake up and read you. The renegades of the world will always find you and make you. 🙂
All good fun, fun that I hope you aim to join into with your own work, Craig. This is where the real action is… the real relevance! Genre isn’t a straightjacket, it’s a satellite dish aimed at the heart of genuinely living culture. We are the dead, otherwise.
I suspect that much of the effect of sex work on the people who do it is a function of the legal and cultural environment in which it is performed. I’ve known sex workers in Germany, where it’s legal and the United States, where it’s not. From my admittedly small sample size, the workers in Germany were safer, saner, healthier and better paid than those in the United States. Having legal rights makes a huge difference. Living in a less puritanical culture makes a huge difference. You’d be best off asking the workers themselves, but if I had to guess I’d say what they really need isn’t pity or therapy or counseling. What they really need is a labor union.
In b4 a randroid comes along and flips the fuck out.
The source I referenced above is, apparently, ” SAMHSA: Worker Substance Use and Workplace Policies and Programs”
It is available online:
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/work2k7/work.htm#Ch3
Apparently, salespeople also demonstrate an increased likelihood of drug abuse.
Who’d have thought.
testing the alt-gravatar, please stand by
This is rather embarrassing to admit, but I have plumbed the armpits of the internet and ended up in places where the scene of Neil Cassidy violating the brain of his first victim was showered with praise as unironic fetish jerkoff material of the highest quality. There was in its own way a shadowy parallel to the moral indignation you encountered. On the one hand perception equals endorsement, so reader revulsion at depictions of abject suffering means you must be a monster. On the flipside of that same hand, absent the recognition of moral censure, whatever text happened to prove gratifying must have been made for gratification and nothing else, making the reader’s skin crawl be damned. Any troubling philosophical implications you may have attempted to imbue within the text might as well no exist.
I don’t know where this is going except to say, as a man, I fully agree. Men are scary.
This is the problem of the ‘Archie Bunker Effect,’ something which I have no choice but to bite the bullet on. The ambiguities hang thick… mustard gas thick.
Either there’s a way thru all this, or we’re fucked, plain and simply. One thing’s for sure, pretending ain’t going to make it go away. That Chomsky clip gives a wonderful example I think, or where we find ourselves. Chomsky gives an ad hoc argument for the necessity of free will, then agrees that choices are unconscious. Does he mean ‘unconscious free will’? He doesn’t know what he means… as he pretty much admits. But the tu quoque horn he gives, where the free-willer responds by asking your interlocutor what he’s even arguing for can easily be unravelled on BBT (not so on any other eliminativist account that I know of…) simply because it has natural explanations of what these concepts are. Why bother arguing eliminativism? Because it’s likely true, and it promises to show us a way through all these ancient impasses. Neglect allows us to deploy our heuristic, socio-cognitive systems without needing to apologizing. What is reason? A form of communicative noise reduction. What is choice? A heuristic means of assigning efficacy in absence of any information pertaining to the actual systems involved that nevertheless allows us to serve certain sets of problems. So choice is an illusion? As conceived by the tradition? Almost certainly. As a way of managing neglect, not at all.
BBT actually has some very, very deep pockets, conceptual resource-wise. I’m convinced that if it was put forward by anyone other than a fantasy author, it would be making waves. My real problem, I’m convinced, is getting past my book cover…
RE: Frank
“This is rather embarrassing to admit, but I have plumbed the armpits of the internet and ended up in places where the scene of Neil Cassidy violating the brain of his first victim was showered with praise as unironic fetish jerkoff material of the highest quality. “
Show me those armpits, you must.
BRING FORTH THE NETWORK’S DARK ARMPITS
It was one of those 4chan knockoffs where posted messages don’t stick around for too long, so fortunately (unfortunately?) I not longer have a copy of that thread.
Well, that’s… disappointing (
Random query, forgive me if this is wildly off topic, but I don’t know where else to ask.
Where do sranc COME FROM? They are universally, at least that we’ve seen thus far, men. Their boner-motive is yoked to death, not creation. How do they reproduce? Where do they keep coming from?
It’s all in the encyclopedic glossary in TTT, kukla. The wiki might have it as well. The fansite has a wealth of further discussion/speculation.
Thank you very much for the courtesy of your reply, when you have every right to simply tease me for not googling before I asked.
The sranc are one of the most unsettling, uncanny elements of the setting, or really, of most any setting I’ve ever seen. Really, the inchoroi in general are such excellent supervillains – a cosmic, maniacal malignancy whose evil is both bibilically absolute and utterly comprehensible. In a world where objective good and evil is shown to be as arbitrary as anything, they defy deconstruction and take up the mantle of the archfiend with aplomb.
I’ve really enjoyed the Second Apocalypse sextet so far, and I’m eagerly anticipating the finale. Good luck, Bakker.
I guess the newest clusterf*ck has not reached here?
I spotted the two threads on GRRM forums, so I guess Scott might have seen it. Remember the Requires Hate blog?
This is her again:
http://beekian.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-things-that-we-do-on-mistakes-on-apologies/#more-1951
The two threads at GRRM:
http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/119265-benjanun-sriduangkaew-and-rotyh/
http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/120249-requires-only-that-you-continue-to-read-this-thread-benjanungate-ii/
I’m in the process of reading wtf is going on, so I don’t have much to offer beside pointing to it. Might be Scott is interested if he hasn’t seen it yet?
I’m up to my eyeballs, at the moment! Actually, I’m up to my eyeballs in eyeballs: I went to my eye doctor to check flashing lights in my periphery yesterday and found myself in surgery last night. I doubt I’ll even be able to hobble through half the backlog here as it is…
Thanks for the heads-up, tho.
Feel better dude!
Danke. Sore as a motherfucker at the moment, tho.
Seriously trying to channel the Meppa perspective I guess. Good luck.
On my blog I collected some links, if someone needs to look it up more quickly.
Just saying.
Sorry to hear that you had to have surgery. Bummer dude. I hope your recovery goes well.
Thanks, dharm. Not something I want to repeat. I now look at the world through an explosion of ink, black spots hanging in a granular spray, shot through with blurred curlicues–never to go away, according to the doctors.
You have my sincere sympathies, Scott. I guess that’s all I can say since I’m not qualified to comment on issues of eye surgery.
Abalieno, did you see the link Luke provided in the Meaning Fetishism post? I thought it was an interesting read.
If not, here it is: http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/
It’s between the links I collected.
You know, click on my name here 😉
And here we go again with comments eaten by spam filter.
I guess it didn’t like links.
(so, Scott, if you see it, unspam the comment)
Saw some of the nonsense surrounding the release, though I don’t frequent westeros to know the comments.
more or less, the lady is now a pariah since her name and profession were revealed. An incredibly mercurial fanbase that she had, it would seem. Still looking for a personal apology to Bakker, though I’m sure she’s a lot of emails to send.
WHAT DO YOU SEE!?
Scott, could you go and un-spammify one of my attempted Huge Posts ? (ideally the one that is at thread-depth of 0 🙂 )
Re:
Michael Murden
Quote:
***************
***************
Replying in a separate thread because the original one is overflowing
Long story short, I do not believe existing historical evidence is sufficient to claim a proper causal relationship.
Vicious, violent antisemitism in Europe (including but not limited to Germany) was quite widespread not just before “Der Sturmer” but also before the damn printing press itself (Rhineland massacres – 1096, while Gutenberg’s press came into being only around 1450).
One could maybe sustain an argument that there was some very moderate effect in terms of systematizing and unifying the antisemitic sentiment, giving it a kind of direction and organization that “natural” movements typically lack, but with the mess that is historical evidence, that’s gonna be some hard cheese even for such a mild claim.
And that’s not taking into account the hypothetical possibility that people of significantly more “media-naive” historical periods might have exhibited media reaction patters that are impossible or very hard to induce in a typical “late-twencen born” population (said hypothetical possibility might also explain the rapid senilization of support bases for certain political movements).
P.S.:
I don’t think you yourself are very serious about the possibility of actual “media toxicity” on behalf of “Der Sturmer”.
If you seriously thought that exposure to this material is capable of causing, in the words of one of my femcurrent interlocutors, “a long lasting antisocial, antihumanitarian effect on the reader”, you wouldn’t have hyperlinked it so carelessly 🙂
I don’t think a causal connection can be proven between the anti-semitic propaganda common in Germany in the 1930s and the holocaust. Given that anti-semitism within European Christendom has ebbed and flowed throughout European history it seems more likely that the propaganda of Der Sturmer and the holocaust were effects with a common cause or set of causes.
Regarding anti-female propaganda some people might argue that the Bible and the Koran have been more effective than any other works of heroic fantasy in contributing to female oppression.
[…] don’t constitute an endorsement on his part of those actions. In a blog post in 2014, he defended himself against what he viewed as […]