Categories
science fiction this shit is fucked up worldcon wtf

Well, I sure don’t like this (I’m talking about the Hugo stats)

First, go read Jason’s roundup of info, because he is more measured, cogent, and informative than I could hope to be: Genre Grapevine on the Hugo Awards “not eligible” problem (ETA: Cora really digs into the irregularities at her blog.)

(And you really should consider supporting Jason, because he does solid work all around.)

I don’t necessarily have anything new to add, but I have been reminded that, particularly in such a relatively small group, it can be very worth it to speak up even if the response boils down to a rousing hear, hear! It is all too easy for silence to be read as either assent, consent, or disinterest, and I also know I have my own association with WSFS nonsense as a dedicated meeting attendee.

My thoughts, then, are thus:

  1. This is really fucked up and really upsetting. People being marked as “ineligible” for no cogent reason I’ve yet encountered, despite a plethora of nominations and obvious eligibility. While some of the “ineligibles” are pretty easy to read as politically motivated–and that is already not okay in the slightest–others (I specifically mean here my friend Paul Weimer) make absolutely no goddamn sense in that framing. Not that it would be okay either way. Absolute fucking bullshit, top to bottom.
  2. It’s a massive stain on the Hugo Awards themselves, I would argue far worse than the Sad Puppy nonsense because at least there were no questions there about the admin tampering with the Hugos. So I reiterate: what the actual fuck.
    1. Cheryl Morgan makes an interesting point about this, by the way. The thought that releasing stats with problems as a deliberate act to draw attention is certainly a possibility. Though I find myself wondering why, if this was intended as a deliberate act of whistleblowing, one of the American members of the Hugo Admin hasn’t out and said something.
  3. I am pissed, I’m horrified and… I’m honestly also not surprised that there were some kind of bullshit shenanigans. I chose not to participate in Chengdu WorldCon as a panelist or anything else because of the policies and acts of the Chinese government; while I certainly know the people are not their government, I had massive concerns about either top-down political interference or protective self-censorship. I am deeply saddened and disappointed to have that choice vindicated.

You can consider the above 3 points to be squared, as my housemate Corina shares these opinions. (And doesn’t have a blog of her own, because she is wiser than me.)

I’ll admit, after my initial what the actual fuck, this is fucked reaction, my second thought was, oh boy, the Glasgow business meeting is going to be spicy as hell. Which: good. Deservedly so, if it pans out the way I imagine.

With that in mind, I want to draw attention to another post by Cheryl: Decoupling the Hugos. Please give it a thorough read, and take a look at the draft resolution.

I had a similar thought on hearing the news. Making the Hugo Admin independent of WorldCon could prevent uneven application or different interpretations of rules, say, and provide more continuity. Election administration is only as good as the honesty of the people in charge, but as we in America got educated on thoroughly in 2020, if you have officials and administrators who are answerable primarily to the rules themselves and deeply invested in the process regardless of their potential personal feelings about the results, it can shield you from a lot of interference.

I also, for reasons of my current planned participation in the Glasgow 2024 WSFS Business Meeting, don’t feel I can personally push this proposal forward–and I may very well not be able to debate on it. But I can sure say I think it’s a good idea, and Kevin has crafted some solid starting language, and I hope I get a chance to vote on something like this in August whether I’m sitting on a chair out in serpentine territory or at the table.

We already showed once that, for all its required two-year timeline, WSFS can react to deeply troubling occurrences within the Hugos. I have high hopes that we can do so again.

Categories
conspiracy theory science skepticism thinking out loud this shit is fucked up

Pop culture matters, and education, and history, and…

On the way to Dallas for ConDFW, I started reading (listening to, actually) The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is a great read if you want a reminder of how we actually shouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised about all the gross shit that went down surrounding our invasion of Iraq (we’ve been training for it since the 60s, really) or that the free market should never be considered a magical unicorn that farts healing rainbows.

But there’s one particular detail in the book that’s sticking with me. One of the first chapters includes quite a bit of information about the CIA’s MKUltra program, including a conversation that Klein had with one of the program’s victims. You’ll note that I’ve just linked to Wikipedia for this, because that’s a decent enough overview. And if you try to just google MKUltra and go past Wikipedia and Rationalwiki, you will find yourself in deep in the bad parts of crazytown with no idea how you got there.

There are a couple reasons this is still niggling at me and sticking with me. First off, MKUltra was a deeply fucked up, horrifying thing. The government of the United States, through the CIA, basically paid scientists to clinically research torture. And Klein does an excellent job connecting the dots of that basic research to a whole load of incredibly awful, inhumane practices that have happened ever since, up to and including the “enhanced interrogation” (translation: torture) of detainees in recent years. And then there’s this asshole, Donald Ewen Cameron, who was the person who perpetrated torture on the woman to whom Klein spoke, including extended sensory deprivation, medically-induced near constant sleep, and electroshock therapy, rendering her incapable of remembering pretty much the first 20 years of her life and putting her in constant pain until this day due to persistent microfracturing in her spine from all of the convulsing she did while being shocked and going through induced insulin seizures.

And then you consider that this man was involved in examining Rudolph Hess during the Nuremberg trials (including testifying that he wasn’t insane) and then somehow went on to torture his patients in an attempt to remove their personalities entirely so he could create better ones for them. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around this particular dichotomy.

These details are all fascinating in a horrifying way.

But then there’s the fact that I actually had heard of MKUltra before. Fairly frequently. It actually gets pop culture shout-outs regularly. The first mention I can recall is in the X-Files, but it regularly gets mentioned with two purposes:

  1. To denote that the person mentioning MKUltra is a serious paranoid conspiracy crackpot who might be on to something nonetheless
  2. To trot out the fact that the US government apparently paid researchers to get people high on LSD.

Point number one is kind of hard to avoid when a cursory search yields mostly results that involve pop stars and how their behavior is obviously a sign they’ve had the MKUltra treatment done to them. And that then makes you feel weird about even trying to have a serious conversation about this, because I started talking about creepy CIA shit and spontaneously generated my own aluminum foil hat, stop looking at me like that.

And point number two honestly has the effect of reducing the entire thing to a punchline. Up until I learned more about this particular subparagraph of horror in the 10 volume set of Shitty Things America Did in the Last Century, this treatment of MKUltra had me filing it in the same part of my brain as the Stargate Project and research that I parroted dismissive talk about back years ago when I was a Republican (eg: “They spent a hundred thousand dollars and researching how fruit flies have sex! What a waste!”) and didn’t get that basic research is not only a thing, it’s an important thing. The CIA got people high on LSD, what a waste of money, amirite? Except we’re not talking about giving a bunch of college kids a few tabs of acid just to see what happens; we’re talking about doses of LSD and PCP and weird cocktails of uppers and downers administered with the specific purpose of trying to completely destroy someone’s personality and sense of self.

Which isn’t funny in the slightest.

So this bothers me. It bothers me that I just sort of consumed this bit of pop culture presentation without thinking more critically about it. And it also bothers me that something brutal and fucking horrible that the United States government perpetrated on innocent people—in this case innocent people with psychiatric problems who then had those problems made exponentially worse and in many case ceased to be able to function independently afterwards—is basically a dismissive punchline. And I don’t think it’s even something that’s being done willfully; apparently when the ugly facts of MKUltra came to light, the thing the media latched on to most was the line about LSD. So I’d imagine that it’s something writers remembered hearing about without looking into it more deeply, and used it as a throw-away reference, and then the next generation of writers picked it up and it’s just become a meme.

Kind of like that fucking ‘humans only use 10% of their brain’ bullshit that I wish we could just kill with fire but it’s got a life of its own now too just because it’s been repeated so many times.

This circles back to a weird and uncomfortable place for me, because I’ve gone on record before saying that I don’t think it’s the responsibility of movies/tv/etc to get science right. I’d rather have a good story even if that means bending the rules—though I do also think that it’s goddamn lazy writing when people just can’t be arsed to even check. Particularly when hewing closer to the facts would actually make for a more interesting conceptual framework than the lazy bullshit you pulled out of your ass, which happens often. And I still do hold to my position that if we’re looking to the movies to be educational vehicles, we’re fucked anyway because we’ve failed our schools and therefore the kids in them so badly.

But on the other hand now, this is a place where I got skunked by something that wasn’t quite true and didn’t take it upon myself to look any deeper. Which is mostly on me, but also feels like a failure of writing. It does show the power of pop culture to shape perception in very subtle ways, and makes me wonder what else I’m missing the gross (perhaps literally) detail on because it just doesn’t even seem that important when it comes up.

And it also does feel like an educational failure. Not that I think all children should have to specifically learn about MKULtra and Donald Ewen Cameron (gosh, want to make sure kids will never want to trust a psychologist again ever?), but this is one more little, tinkling horror in the giant black bag full of pustule-laden zombie demon clowns that is modern American history. I don’t know how it is currently, but we spent plenty of time learning how shitty the US government was to the Native Americans (very important) and then sort of… glossed over the rest with a sense of well yes, the civil rights movement happened and now black people can vote and isn’t that awesome, and there was the Cold War and things got a bit grim and the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn’t really a thing to be proud of but it’s all better now, right? Go America!

When in fact, the more I learn about recent history the more I’m horribly, horribly unsurprised about everything that’s gone down since 2001.

I don’t really have a good answer for any of this. I’m still thinking it through. I mostly just want to register how very disturbed I feel about… everything, right now. If nothing else, this is a harsh reminder about the importance of not only what you say, but how you say it. And at the least I’m going to try to take this as a lesson to be more mindful about knowledge I’ve picked up as a meme rather than via research, and just take the time to at least use the damn Google. For all that we have so much knowledge at our fingertips, it’s still frighteningly easy for something to get distorted so out of shape that it doesn’t even seem like it’s worth a second look.

Categories
filmmaking movie rants this shit is fucked up

Ridley Scott explains nothing, actually

Okay, someone hold my hat, I am about to come unglued here.

So yeah, by now you might have heard that Ridley Scott is making a movie called Exodus: Gods and Kings, which is based off the Bible story. Which takes place in Egypt.  Allow me to illustrate, briefly, where Eqypt is located:

Egypt: It's a place in Northern Africa.
Egypt: It’s a place in Northern Africa.

Okay? Now. Some people, including me, are kind of pissed off about some of the choices he’s made. Allow me to summarize why with a picture:

Notice anything, here?
Notice anything, here?

And here, have a bonus:

Even Christian Bale looks unimpressed.
Aw, they’re building a statue.

Just for reference, in reality land:

Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)
Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)

Now, if those don’t explain why a lot of us on the internet are breathing fire, just… tell you what. Go read this.

All right. We all caught up now?

So then Ridley Scott “explained” his casting decisions. Which he described as careful. (Hoo boy.) Like, to a certain extent I get, hey I like this actor and want to work with them and they are perfect for this role. Trust me, I now totally get that urge. And as many people have pointed out, if the casting seemed truly colorblind (Ken Watanabe as Nun! Benicio Del Toro as Rameses II! Viola Davis as Tuya!) I could go for it. I really could. But let’s look at the first ten actors listed on IMDB:

  • Aaron Paul – white (American)
  • Christian Bale – white (British)
  • Joel Edgerton – white (Australian)
  • Sigourney Weaver – white (American)
  • Ben Kingsley – non-white (British)
  • Indira Varma – non-white (British)
  • John Turturro – white (American)
  • Ben Mendelsohn – white (Australian)
  • Maria Valverde – white [spanish (literally from Spain)]
  • Emun Elliott – white (Scottish)

I would like to say, first, I feel gross and horrible after writing that list out, and awkward, and ugh. But I also feel it serves an important point, which is basically, out of the first ten people on the case list, there are two actors who could really be considered non-white (both Ben Kingsley and Indira Varma have an Indian parent) and Maria Valverde, who as an actual spanish person from Spain to my understanding should be considered white for the purposes of what we’re talking about. The point here is that the top listed actors are 80% white. If you go with the actors that are really being used to advertise the film, which would pretty much be the top five, you’re still at 80%.

In a movie. That takes place in Egypt.

Scott was not asked about the racial component of his casting decision, but he did answer a question about how he formed the international cast — which has been criticized for only featuring colored performers in small roles, such as servants, thieves and assassins.

“Egypt was – as it is now – a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe,” Scott said. “We cast major actors from different ethnicities to reflect this diversity of culture, from Iranians to Spaniards to Arabs. There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.”

Yeah, all different ethnicities. You know. American, British, and Australian.

If you want to actually see most of the different ethnicities Scott’s talking about, when you go to the IMDB page, click “see full cast list.” Most of them are hidden in there. Which indicates much, much smaller parts. But we kind of already knew that from the pictures, right?

Oh and?

There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.

I did a little googling around because I was curious. And yeah, there’s controversy, most of it seeming to stem from much more openly racist times when people couldn’t handle the idea that someone who wasn’t snowy white made something white people think is awesome, like the pyramids. While at this point the science apparently boils down to:

There is no scientific reason to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged and evolved outside of northeast Africa.

While that’s no doubt an oversimplification considering yes, the area is a major crossroads, using that as an excuse to justify the vast majority of your principle actors looking like they didn’t mind the gap on the Tube and fell through a rip in space and time to land in ancient Egypt is pretty fucking disingenuous.

(Actually, that’s a bad joke on my part, since apparently London is ~60% white and thus would not be well-represented by Ridley Scott’s casting.)

I imagine when you’re a director of Ridley Scott’s caliber, you can end up getting a lot of your principle actors by just calling them up on the phone and telling them you have a script you want them to read. So it’s really on him to take a step back and ask himself why most of the people he thinks are the best man or woman for the job are white rather than doing elaborate mental gymnastics to justify it later.

Because I really, really am not down with the implication that somehow, the best actor for the job is almost always white. Because there are amazing actors out there who aren’t white, and I’d bet you anything even more amazing actors who are just waiting for a chance to shine, if people would just fucking give them that chance.

And it’s not hard to do, by the way. All you do is write a casting notice like this:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, non-white

Or if you don’t want to close the door all the way, fine:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, preferably non-white…

And trust me. You will get a response, from amazing actors, and I bet you anything one of them will be the right person for the job.

Categories
fandom rants this shit is fucked up you need to do better

Dear Interviewers: Please Refer to Wheaton’s Law, Re: Fanworks

Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.

So this happened. It’s just part of a long pattern of interviewers basically trying to embarrass both actors and fan writers/artists by bringing them forcibly together. (See also: people showing Tom Hiddleston pornographic fanart during interviews.) These people are dicks. Dicks of phenomenal magnitude. I’d say they should be ashamed of themselves, but the very fact that they’re doing this kind of bullshit pretty much shows that they have no shame.

This is the thing about being a fan writer or artist: your creative space is implicitly under the radar, made by the creators of the original work willingly turning a blind eye to give fans room to play. I wrote fanfiction for years and years (and still do, to be honest, very occasionally) and for the most part you do so on the understanding that the creators of the original work will never see what you’ve done. You’re writing for yourself, and for other fans. That’s what makes it fun and joyful. It keeps fan communities strong, which for the most part is a good thing, since yay loyal fan base. No one gets hurt (outside of shipping wars casualties), no harm, no foul, everyone is happy.

Now, it’s different if a creator (or actor) asks for fanworks to be sent to them (like the amazing Trollando Jones asking for fanfic!) or if, say, you come up with something beautiful and tasteful and want to send it as a tribute*. It’s also different if someone actually goes looking for work on the internet. It’s the internet. Enter at your own risk.

But this pattern of taking fanwork and shoving it in the face of people involved in the original movie (etc) is beyond gross. It’s mean-spiritedly shitting in someone’s sandbox for the sake of being a dick. And I shouldn’t even have to say that it’s gross to force something embarrassing on unsuspecting people in public, and megagross when it’s pornographic.

And it’s gross to search out fanworks just for the purposes of publicly mocking them. I feel like I hit my head and woke up back in high school, when the mean girls were stealing my notebook and staging dramatic readings of my horrible teen angst poetry. Fuck you for trying to make the act of creation feel unsafe. Fuck you for punishing people for loving something. No, really, fuck you guys.

And for good measure, fuck everyone who thinks what is basically cruelty for the sake of being cruel is funny.

(Don’t be ashamed of your fanfic.)

 

*-I shouldn’t even have to say this, BUT: sending pornographic work to someone who hasn’t asked for it is never, ever okay. Kind of like sending other people pictures of your genitalia is never okay. Same principle. Including someone in your sex life non-consensually is never okay.

Categories
rants this shit is fucked up

Sandy Hook "Truthers"

So yeah. This is apparently an actual thing. (ETA: Oh here. Have some more WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.)

I need a kitty right fucking now okay.

I mean, I know I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the unceasing plague of 9/11 Truthers and Birthers. Though Birthers (you know, the utter crackpots that are convinced President Obama is secretly foreign) seem relatively less disgusting compared to this.

It’s all the usual question begging bullshit, pattern hunting and being bizarrely startled that coincidences and similarities are things that happen despite the fact that they happen constantly every day of our lives. This just makes me extra angry because it’s a bunch of paranoid nuts dancing on the graves of children, mocking the grief of their families because they’ve convinced themselves that it’s all fake and therefore it is all right to be utterly inhumane to other people.

I need a kitten or I’m going to have an aneurysm, I swear to fucking god.

I think what just pisses me off the most about this is that the entire justification for this conspiracy theory is that the government is going to take all our guns away! The way that straw man has been getting shoved down our throats, we’re all going to be shitting chaff for the next three years.

It’s like the making shit up Olympics – creating a sadistically unfeeling conspiracy out of whole cloth to justify something that no one is even proposing. Oh yeah, and being mean to the grieving father of a murdered little girl because that’s totally okay when you don’t live on the same plane of reality as the rest of us. Hey assholes. If you took off your tinfoil hat for five seconds, maybe you could read our brainwaves and get that we don’t want your fucking guns.

Lookit that adorable kitty, helping with the laundry, and his adorable face. Breathe. Breathe.

Perhaps I speak only for myself, but you know what I do want? I want you to grow the fuck up. I want you to develop some empathy. I want you to leave your basement and get some professional help. I want you to have a grownup conversation with the rest of us instead of making like a seagull and shitting everywhere while shrieking at the top of your lungs.

I want you to realize that the world is a scary place, but the way you can truly make it less scary is to grasp reality with one hand, the rest of humanity with the other, and refuse to let go.

Kitten. Kitten kitten kitten.
Categories
earthquake geology news this shit is fucked up

Scientists convicted of manslaughter for failing to be psychic

Words cannot begin to express how upset, angry, and filled with contempt I am by this:
Italian scientists resign over L’Aquila quake verdicts

Two scientists resigned their posts with the government’s disaster preparedness agency Tuesday after a court in L’Aquila sentenced six scientists and a government official to six years in prison. The court ruled Monday that the scientists failed to accurately communicate the risk of the 2009 quake, which killed more than 300 people.

We wish we could predict earthquakes. We really, really do. So many lives could be saved. But there is as of yet no way to make those kind of predictions. A series of small earthquakes? Depending upon how you define it, those occur all the time. Hell, we can only sort of predict the imminent eruption of a volcano, and the mechanics of that, the pressures that dictate an eruption, are relatively simpler and there are far more “tells” – seismic activity, increased outgassing, etc.

Nature agrees: 

There will be time enough to ponder the wider implications of the verdict, but for now all efforts should be channelled into protest, both at the severity of the sentence and at scientists being criminalized for the way their opinions were communicated. Science has little political clout in Italy and the trial proceeded in an absence of informed public debate that would have been unthinkable in most European countries or in the United States

Hey Italy, while you’re jailing people for failing to predict disasters, how about extraditing the horrendous human beings who played fast and loose with the financial markets and caused the global economy to shit itself? That had far more potential for being predicted and arguably has caused even more human suffering. What about jailing people who have refused to listen to repeated warnings about global climate change?

Or I suppose this pattern could continue and the next time a doctor fails to predict a heart attack, or a traffic cop fails to predict an accident, they’ll end up in jail.

This is ridiculous. Contemptible.