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tanadrin · 4 years

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How /did/ things change after 2001? I was born in that year and everyone says it was different before, but I've never really gotten a sense of how.

It is difficult for me to emphasize just how different the world you see on the evening news is now, from what it was like before 2001, at least as I remember it. There’s a scene in Farscape, where after years of trying to get home, the astronaut protagonist John Crichton finally makes it back to Earth with his alien friends in tow, and when he’s reunited with his father, he’s shocked to discover his dad has gone from this optimistic, forward-looking, hopeful dreamer to a nervous, jingoistic conservative. His attitude is basically, “yes, there’s dangerous aliens out there who may or may not be trying to kill us--but the galaxy is a place full of wonders you’ve never dreamed of.” His father, in the meantime, has retreated from his hopes for a science-fiction future, and views his new alien friends with suspicion.

It’s not a subtle metaphor, but it’s true. The 90s--at least in the US, at least as I remember them--were a relentlessly optimistic period. Even if things were not yet at their ideal state, there was very much a sense they were heading there; politics was mostly down to what exact flavor of the neoliberal consensus you preferred, Clinton or Bush, and the international triumph of liberal democracy was either a fait accompli (cf. the erstwhile USSR), or just around the corner (cf. hopes for China’s liberalization in the wake of market reforms). Yes, in retrospect, this was kind of a dumb world view. If you actually lived in Russia in the 90s--to say nothing of the Balkans--it was a rough decade, and a lot of the relentless optimism of the period in the United States was down to the privileged position we viewed the world from.

The blunting of that optimism--the reminder that we were still embedded in history, and the final triumph of everything good and just was not foreordained--would not in itself have been a catastrophe. Terrorism was not a strange concept in the 90s, and even Al-Qaeda-style terrorism had its predecessors in attacks on American ships and embassies. 9/11 itself was confusing and chaotic and sad, but 9/11 wasn’t the catastrophe. The catastrophe came after, in how we responded.

I think something broke in America between 1945 and 1991. Something shifted, in a nasty way we didn't realize while we were occupied with communism and stagflation and the civil rights movement. I don't mean to say that America before 1945 was the Good Guys. But the American state and the American political class viewed the world with... humility? Like, sure, the can-do Yankee spirit before 1945 had its own special kind of arrogance (and greed, and hideous bigotry), but it still thought of the world in terms of obligations we owed other countries. By the time the Cold War ended, and the US was the sole remaining superpower, that wasn't how we viewed the world. It was still sort of how we told each other, and our children, what the world was like. We certainly talked a big game about democracy and human rights. But as soon as that principled stance was tested, we folded like a cheap suit. What we should have done after 9/11 was what we had done after every terrorist incident in or against the United States before then: treated it like the major crime it was, sent a civilian agency like the FBI in to investigate, and pursue the perpetrators diplomatically. What we did instead was treat it like the opening salvo of a war--in fact, invented a war to embed it within, to give ourselves narrative justification for that stance--and crank every element of paranoid jingoism instantly up to 11. It has never abated since.

Some of this is the little things. The TSA and the Department of Homeland Security--a name I thought was creepy Orwellian shit right from the get-go. The terror alert levels. (God! remember those?) The fact that airport security--despite being just as ineffective today as it was on September 12--is still routinely humiliating and invasive and just a total waste of everybody’s time. Some of it is the big things. The way security, and the need for security, trumps all other demands including the state’s obligation to protect civil rights. And the fact that this just isn’t even up for debate anymore. 9/11, as Chomsky presciently observed, was a boon for authoritarians everywhere. Suddenly, “counterterrorism” was the magic word that let you get away with anything, like “anti-communism” twenty years prior. At the most extreme end, this led to things like anti-atheism laws being promulgated in Saudi Arabia in the name of “counterterrorism,” but you don’t have to go that absurd to find ways in which the security state has fostered authoritarianism. In every aspect of our lives, this new, fearful outlook on the world justified a gradual ratcheting down of freedom, the gradual empowerment of petty tyrants everywhere, and the weak protests, fading into silence, of people who still believed in liberty as an important organizing principle for modern society. It wasn’t even that you’d get called a terrorist-sympathizer or anything that blatant. It just ceased to be regarded as important. It wasn’t that you were wrong, or misguided, or evil. You were just a non-serious person, someone whose opinion was clearly irrelevant, whose head was permanently in the clouds, if you thought that stuff still mattered. And that never went away.

And I think a big part of what changed between 1945 and 1991 was that the US started to believe its own jingoism. When did this start? Vietnam? Earlier? Korea? I don’t know. It’s hard to pinpoint, given that my understanding of the cultural zeitgeist of the decades before I was born mostly came from my dad’s old Doonesbury collections. I don’t know how to describe what we became--what we, hideously, revealed ourselves to be--except as a kind of machismo. A kind of ruthless, General Ripper-esque us-versus-them psychosis that gripped us where the Soviets were concerned, and never let up. And we still believe it. It still infects every atom of our political discourse. We don’t question the necessity of drone strikes, only who to drone strike and how much. We don’t really question the massive powers we’ve afforded the executive branch to wage war and conduct espionage--including kidnappings and torture--and we’ve kind of forgotten that we still have a prison camp in Cuba full of people who have never been convincted of any crime. In a way, we lost faith in law entirely: by God, we couldn’t try terrorists in American courts! (Why not? What’s wrong with American courts? Don’t we have faith in our own laws, at least?) No, justice wasn’t a matter for the law to decide anymore. Justice was a matter for the military only: justice came in the form of strength of arms. Ergo, shooting Bin Laden in the head and calling that justice; ergo, Jack Bauer; ergo, blowing up Yemeni weddings. Keep America Safe. I can’t begin to tell you how alienating and horrifying so much of the last 20 years has been, if the most consequential news stories of your childhood were the OJ Simpson murders and a discussion of the President’s cum stain.

In my opinion, the seminal text of the post-9/11 world was released in the year 2000. In the original Deus Ex video game, the year is 2150, and the world is a dark, depressing place. You, the game’s hero, work (initally) for a UN counterterrorism agency while a plague ravages the world. You hunt terrorists whose existence has provided the justification for an authoritarian crackdown on dissidents everywhere. You visit a Hong Kong firmly under the control of the CCP, you fight genetically engineered mutants created by huge businesses run amok, FEMA (no DHS then) controls the federal government, and, it turns out later in the game, the bombing of the Statue of Liberty that precipitated the creation of your organization was a false-flag attack used to justify its existence in the first place. Drones patrol the streets of NYC, and the whole thing is steeped in late-90s militia movement-style conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and the New World Order, that look weirdly out of place now that these things are more clearly aligned in the popular consciousness with right wing extremism, when back then they were just seen as kooky weirdos in Montana--but every year since then, we’ve been inching closer and closer to that world, and you know what? It wigs me out a little.

In 2000, Deus Ex was an absurdity, a fever dream of cyberpunk and early-internet conspiracism. It’s a shame that tonally speaking it’s been dead on for the two decades after. But honestly, I think the biggest thing that’s changed about the world since 2001 is our cultural capacity for optimism. I don’t mean in a sentimental way--although if you compare other texts heavily influenced by the post-2001 political milieu, you definitely see a sharp contrast with the optimism of cultural artifacts from earlier eras; science fiction was hit especially hard in this area (cf. RDM’s version of Battlestar Galactica). But I also mean this in a political/ideological sense. We cease to imagine that the world can be made better. We cease to imagine the possibilities that are afforded to us if we are willing to strive for our ideal society, even if we, personally, may never reach it. We make deals with the devil, we let the CIA violate the constitution and federal law six ways from Sunday, we don’t question the prevailing political-economic consensus even if it’s setting the planet on fire and pitching us headlong toward social disaster, because we forgot what it was to feel like those sunlit uplands we’ve been hoping for were just around the corner.

In the same way that my Catholic faith was eventually done in because the ethical principles I was taught were at odds with the manifest monstrosity of the organization that taught them to me and the metaphysics it espoused, my patriotism and my faith in America was done in because when I was a schoolkid, I really did believe that democracy and human rights and equality under the law were important. Some people probably had their illusions--if they ever had any--about the US government stripped away long ago, but I was a white kid from a reasonably prosperous part of town, so it took until the 2000s and my growing political awareness to realize just how flimsy these principles were when they were put to any kind of test. It made me angry; it still makes me angry. I was raised to believe there are some principles that are important enough that you don’t compromise them ever, no matter how scared or worried you are. Just as I was old enough to understand what was going on on the evening news, the United States betrayed everything I had been taught the United States stood for. And as a nation, we never turned back; we never apologized; we never repented. America, as an abstract entity, never was what I thought it was as a kid. But I think it could still become that, if it tried. Alas, very few people seem to believe such a thing is possible anymore. Most days, I’m not sure I do, either.

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thessalian · 4 years

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Thess vs Altered Carbon

So I’ve had people throwing the suggestion of Altered Carbon at me in great big handfuls lately - firstly by @hyperewok1, whose opinion I often respect in these matters - so I’ve been giving it a shot. Two episodes in, I have Thoughts, which shall be put under a cut because this does fall under the Spoiler Rule.

First thing was that I had to think a minute before I decided how I felt about where race came in here. Yeah, they threw the Japanese guy into a white body and I don’t know how I feel about the fact that the hero had to be white ... but they used it in an interesting way, I thought. I mean, first of all, the guy freaked right the hell out when he realised he’d been thrown into some white dude’s body. Then there was the whole bit where “the System is fucking you over and no one who matters cares about your feelings”, which allowed a point of sympathy with the protagonist from anyone who’s ever been fucked over by the system (read: anyone with not that much money, so basically almost everyone). Stll, doesn’t change the fact that we had a protagonist of colour who’s now living in the body of a white man, and where his original race doesn’t matter because he is an Envoy - a chameleon who will fit into any situation he needs to, which means that any cultural cues are by necessity smoothed to nonexistence unless they need to come out. I’m not really sure how I feel about that. Then again, I think that’s the nature of the cyberpunk genre in general and this particular example of it in particular - you’re not supposed to feel easy about that. I mean, maybe some people do; I think what maybe really bothers me is that because he was originally mixed-race (Japanese and Hungarian, according to the Wiki), and his Hungarian surname is used more than his Japanese given name, they are making it a whole lot easier to forget that he wasn’t originally white.

(But then again, they put him in the body of a black man in the second season, and that black man being Anthony Mackie, and that’s interesting. I’ll have to see where that goes.)

There are also some particularly interesting protest points on the whole ‘skinning’ thing. It’s always interesting to imagine the discussions in the writers’ room about “Who would protest this and on what grounds?” when it comes to any aspect of science fiction, technological or otherwise. The morality of it when seen through the eyes of a variety of different people, not all of whom are even necessarily main characters (though having a secondary lead at least having a link to those views is always a good thing). So quite apart from the whole issue where people who would very much like to take advantage of this technology either can’t or are incredibly limited in how they do so, there’s also religion. Thing is ... I really hope we see more about this than the Catholic view on why it’s bad. Then again, I imagine it’s complicated in any religion where reincarnation is seen as a thing. I mean, take the Hindu faith, for instance - samsara is all about the lessons you learn in your previous life and that’s supposed to affect where you end up in the next life. Being able to pick and choose ... that can’t be part of the plan for a devout Hindu, can it? And the Buddhists, while sharing the terminology, take a really different view on whether or not a soul actually exists, which would really influence a Buddhist’s thinking on whether this reskinning thing is so outside their belief system they might have had to come up with a whole new term to go, “Um, no?” I mean, sure, the concept of reincarnation exists for the Buddhists, but they’re supposed to be reaching a state of Zen, of non-self, so how is that possible if they can just keep ... reincarnating as the exact same person with their sense of self fully intact every single time? Judaism has some interesting things to say about the idea of reincarnation. The concept of reincarnation features in a lot of First Nation and Native American belief systems, particularly among the Inuit. More faiths than the Christian think it anathema (Islam, anyone?). But yet we focus on Catholicism as some kind of shorthand and I’m really hoping it sees some broadening, particularly since ... again, protagonist who, while born on another planet, is part Japanese (so potentially Buddhist teachings in there somewhere) and part Hungarian (where, at least in our modern world, the census has a slight majority of the population being Roman Catholic at 37.1% with 1.8% of the population being Greek Catholic instead).

But okay, this is me going entirely off on the cultural issues presented because ... without them, let’s be fair - this is pretty generic so far. Two episodes in, and ... you know, it’s Not-Quite-Grizzled White Dude With A Past But No Future Unless He Does This One Last Job. Its core premise isn’t exactly saving it from generic popcorn. Not that there’s anything wrong with popcorn, by the way. Just ... okay, analogy about me and popcorn. I moved to this godsforsaken country and my first aching disappointment was the popcorn at the cinema. You had your choice of sweet or salty - which is literally, “Do you want your plain popcorn with sugar or salt?” The idea of artificial butter topping? Didn’t exist. Still doesn’t. Probably they want to avoid some of the mess and the smell, I dunno, but the fact is that dry popcorn lacks something intrinsic to me. It’s ... dry. It’s squeaky. It’s okay if that’s what you’re after - it fills the void, it’s something to chew on - but for me? I won’t settle for that. I want toffee popcorn, or I want it with butter, real if I can get it, but the flavoured grease at the cinema will do in a pinch.

In this case, the butter is the world - the structure of it, the people in it, how they interact. So the world-building, characters, and dialogue. I haven’t got a handle on our Envoy yet, and I’m really not sure how I feel about Ortega, but on the whole, the world itself is elevating it to popcorn I really enjoy eating. The fact that I prod the world it’s presenting to me seeking out more of it just proves that.

So yeah, so far, I like it. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but like I said, I have a feeling this is supposed to be making me uneasy on a number of levels. Just not entirely sure I care who blew Rich Guy’s brains across a wall.

#Thess watches stuff

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magdaleneswift-blog · 7 years

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RE: Gender roles in the new economy

I had many thoughts on the New York Time Magazine 9/3/12 article on changing gender roles in the new economy. Here are my two cents from a Roman Catholic female civil engineer from SD who had Edith Bunker from All in the Family as a hero growing up. Agree or disagree, I think the pastor in the article could get at least a half dozen sermons from this letter.

These role reversals are not as new to the economy as you seem to think. The beginnings of feminism started in the "wild west" of the gold rush days when women were the legal property of their husbands. The 'ADD' husbands would pack up families to strike it rich in the west and it was often up to the women to make things work. (RE Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman) It seems that more than one male pioneer was surprised that manna did not fall from heaven. Men would travel miles to buy a loaf of bread "baked by a woman" at $5 a loaf. It was the western states that first gave women the right to vote for these reasons. (The fact that the Wyoming bill granting women the right to vote was 'lost' between the legislature and the Governor's office is another story altogether.)

On the husband who told his wife to either drop out of college or he would not marry her. I'm glad that it worked out for them, but I would advise any young woman told the same thing today that she would be much better off dropping the boyfriend. Partners who try to emotionally blackmail their significant others in that manner are often abusive.

My ex-husband had a Masters degree in education, yet never did get around to getting a teaching position. I was always the sole source of income for both my children from before they were born. He was the one who stayed home with the children full time. As long as he was providing for his children in that manner, I did not mind 'differing' to him. It was when he stopped to 'open a hobby' store that produced negative income, caused our children to be neglected, and left me with two full time jobs, that I reduced my work load in half and my stress level by 3/4 by moving out and becoming a single parent. Unable to care for himself, he was dead within three years.

(I found Father's sermon on God drop kicking you out of your complacency and periodically providing 'excitement' in your life non-applicable. My two year old daughter spent the service trying to scale the holy water fount, while I was worried about my ex going postal or giving me a custody battle and my new job. I told Father I had more than enough excitement in my life, thank you very much.)

I asked my current husband who he thought was head of our household. He said that he didn't think that applied to our family. He thinks we defer to each other based on who has the better skills in the area under question. That was also often the case when he was aboard ship in the navy. A single person in charge structure is really not as common as thought either in human or animal societies. It seems more a 'male ego' fairy tale than reality. Herd societies are more often democratic. The herd heads to water when the majority of the herd gets thirsty, often leaving the head stallion wondering where everyone went. I remember driving cattle from one pasture to another while growing up on a farm. The bulls would stand in the gate, blocking the cows from going from their territory to another bulls. We had to bring the dog to help drive. The cows were not about to defer to the bulls when that 'wolf' thing' was barking at them and pushed the bulls aside. Once past the gate, the cows led the way back to the home pasture. Primate groups normally have a titular alpha male, as long as he puts the welfare of the group above his own. A bully is only tolerated for a short time before the rest of the group gangs up on him and beats sense into him. Another alpha male is then chosen.

In human society, archeologists have determined that early societies gave equal status to both men and women until men figured out they had a part to play in the reproductive process. Then they decided they were better than the women. The leadership classes I have taken show that the big executive top down structure is not the best. The best is usually someone coming up from the ranks who rely on the expertise of the entire group. This is often a more 'feminine' group structure. (I found out that my employers were often paying large fees for information that most people could get for free by going to church if they bother to pay attention.)

It is more comforting to have the paternalistic employer in a company town. Human history is full of the divine king who can magically take care of his people. It is often frightening to think of the ruler as just another human being and democracy is a great deal more work. You can find religious parallels with the Protestant Reformation and the declining percentage of people who believe in God. Many 'believers' miss the point that religion isn't a magic formula to wealth. I am sorry to say that my faith is more Jeffersonian in that I recognize that religion is often a 'magic feather' that allows those that can fly by themselves the illusion of a safety net. I also recognize that religious faith often does result in material wealth, as even the Communist Chinese acknowledged, not because that God rewards you for your belief, but that the basic tenant of at least Christianity and most of the other major religions stress that to look to the welfare of your neighbor above that of yourself is holy. This stability benefits all and allows for wealth to accumulate. Sin does not hurt me. All of the Ten Commandments are harm to your neighbor. If I have the time scales right, Buddhism was the first 'religion' (It has no deity and is therefore more a philosophy.) to result in a massive population jump. I don't think we can count the animal sacrifices leading to the discovery of soap and that subsequent population jump as religious. Note that both must be properly applied to work.

The true believers also need to recognize that faith is a gift from God and that agnostics and atheists aren't evil people thumbing their noses at God. I think most agnostics and atheists would be the first to agree that they would be happier if they could believe in God. (See last week's New York Times Magazine's Article on the Agnostics.) You will not be effective missionaries if you don't recognize that and scream at them for their 'wrong doing.' (I find religious debates with Jehovah Witness entertaining, they so seldom think through their beliefs. My husband entertains himself by harassing telemarketers. My daughter entertains herself harassing televangelists. "The Bible says …" "No, it doesn't." "You READ the Bible?!" Yes. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure she doesn't believe in God. )

I can relate to the English teacher in the article re-reading the Bible with new interpretations. I cannot understand the Protestant horror of the annotated Catholic Bible. A lot of the meaning in the politically driven (and most beautiful) King James translation is lost without the translators' notes. I am frightened by what I see as Biblical interpretations by the functionally illiterate. Some of the most bizarre are that the Bible says that men have two less ribs than women. No, it doesn't. The Bible is not Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories." The Bible says that God removed ONE rib from ONE man ONCE. For all men to be short two ribs is NOT how the world works or a lot a Jewish and Muslim men would be jumping for joy at not having to be circumcised. My father would have been pleased not to have to dehorn cattle every year either.

The movie, Master and Commander, the Far Side of the World is another example. To the sailor's, the book of Jonah is all about bad luck and God punishing Jonah and sinners. It is not. Jonah was singing for joy at being safely in the belly of the whale and given a second chance after disobeying a direct order and doing the opposite of what God wanted. It is also about God's forgiveness. It is mankind that is unforgiving in the story. The story is funny and my 16 year old daughter loves to have me read it to her and laugh her head off. The officer in question was a Jonah, not because of his bringing the crew bad luck, but in his sacrificing himself for what he thought was the good of the ship. The Captain's eulogy at his funeral was straight from the ending of Job.

The husband at the gate mentioned in the article, is NOT goofing off with his friends. The elders at the gate are the JUDGES and witnesses (notaries), see the book of Ruth. Note that is a group, not one magic individual dispensing wisdom and justice, though they are probably too old for hard physical work. I think the book of Judges has women as well as men as judges. With death in child birth, I think that women were not as statistically likely to live to be old enough to be judges.

This passage is also about men wise enough to be judges being wise enough to pick good wives. In that regard, it is the wisdom of the wife conferring status on her husband. Not once is the physical beauty of the wife praised.

It is a big difference in stay at home mothers who stay home for the 'silk pillows' of one the first feminist detractors, so they can goof off, get their hair done and let their husbands do all the work and the farm wives who are equal business partners with their husbands, the PTA presidents, volunteers, artisans, church pastors, and community leaders, etc.

The incidence of domestic violence usually goes up during economic downturns as men try to 'prove they are men' by beating up their wives. The real men are those who put themselves at risk to protect their wives and children. I would ask the mother who wants her daughter to find a boyfriend and settle down in order to get protection, who it is that she thinks her daughter needs protection from? No doubt it would be irresponsible men. The New York Times recently did an article on the economic and emotional benefits of two parent versus one person households. A crucial factor was the number of "marriageable" men; i.e. those who would be responsible for their offspring. I would like to know how many of the young men her daughter knows who are happy to spend their twenties hanging with their friends in the parking lots she considers marriageable. If Mom is worried about the physical safety of her daughter she would be better off enrolling her daughter in a self defense and/or gun class than trusting to the maturity/mental stability of a random young man.

(The gun class may not even be necessary. I heard of one study that determined an enraged woman with no firearms training can put 6 shots in a six inch diameter area at 20 paces. The marines in the South Pacific during WWII trained both men and women to defend their islands from the Japanese. The men, male dominance mode, broke and ran. The women, protect my children mode' held, fought, and won. The alpha gorilla or chimpanzee does not even think of messing with the mothers or using the juveniles as shields in dominance battles. The females will drive them out of the group.)

Note to all you he men, taking care of a family is not limited to taking up arms or bringing home a paycheck. Sometimes taking care of a family is Hank from King of the Hill or Tommy Lee Jones in Man of the House going down the dreaded "Aisle 13" in the grocery store to take care of a teen age girl having her first period or shopping for a group of co-eds who can't leave their witness protection house. Or "Major Dad" learning how to do a mean French Braid or Archie Bunker buying a Star of David for his orphaned Jewish niece. The feminists could have a field day with two adult males being needed to replace one dead mother in Full House. It could also be Franc filling in for Steve Martin in "Father of the Bride Part 2" doing prenatal aerobics. It was the father though who stayed with both during the time of delivery. (Ladies, if you go by James Herriot of All Creatures fame, it is a smaller percentage of men who can handle this. You may be better off with a less squeamish substitute, traditionally more often female.)

One study of what women really want showed that; forget the washboard abs, handsome face, huge arms or other physical attributes, showed that women pick the men who are best with children. The study showed they are right the majority of the time.

How much of the angst the men in the article were going through related to the stress on their families and how much what the other men would think of them if they moved into feminine positions? Men often seem more concerned with their ranking among their male peers and their social status than their family status. The serial killer in most criminal shows is often the middle aged white male with the sense of wounded entitlement. The best parable I have seen is the book, "Who Moved My Cheese?" It was enjoyed by both my children and my mother recovering from a broken hip in the nursing home. I have seen more men who are Hems and Haws than women. They more often concentrate on what they are losing rather than looking for new opportunities. Maybe it is just that they more often have more to lose. I think I am less likely to look for a position paying less than I make now than my husband is who has always made less than I have in the time that I have known him. I think we should all consider how this relates to the new global economy.

It could be similar to the statement about the women in the town shutting the men out of the last paying positions. At the last Women in Business luncheon I went to, only one other woman at the table wasn't in a banking position. So much for women not being good in math. I can also see the women preferring not to have to deal with the male ego at work. My college agricultural engineering classes and the last ASABE magazine issue I last read dealt with the need to design around the male ego when working for the Peace Corp. A fully automated system will be confiscated by the men, leaving the women to starve. Manually steps must be left in place in order to provide a means of survival for widows and single mothers.

Even in the 50's though, my cousin the nurse, said that male nurses were preferred by the patients on the prostate ward.

Women moving to the cities is a nationwide trend as they look for more opportunity. It is the rural areas in which single men outnumber the single women.

#religion

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