"We were neurophobic and perfect
The day that we lost our souls"
Marilyn Manson - Mechanical Animals
______________________________________________________
"They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing
truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite objective
they were just marching and showing themselves in the more prosperous
parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of unskilled cheap
labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers had superseded for
evermore. They were being ‘scrapped’—as horses had been
‘scrapped.’
Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his own
precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but despair at
the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this gathering
surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless—and incapable—and
pitiful.
What were they asking for?
They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen——
It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling
enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal to
those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful, for
something—for INTELLIGENCE. This mute mass, weary footed, rank
following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must
have foreseen these dislocations—that anyhow they ought to have
foreseen—and arranged.
That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly to
assert.
‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened
room,’ he says. ‘These men were praying to their fellow
creatures as once they prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise
about anything is that it is inanimate. They had transferred their
animation to mankind. They still believed there was intelligence
somewhere, even if it was careless or malignant.... It had only to be
aroused to be conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw,
too, that as yet THERE WAS NO SUCH INTELLIGENCE. The world waits for
intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for good
and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of impulse and
wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and creative in our
souls, into a common purpose. It’s something still to come....’"
[...]
"It
is wonderful how our fathers bore themselves toward science. They hated
it. They feared it. They permitted a few scientific men to exist and
work -- a pitiful handful... 'Don't find anything out about us,' they
said to them; 'don't inflict vision upon us, spare our little ways of
life from the fearful shaft of understanding. But do tricks for us,
little limited tricks. Give us cheap lighting. And cure us of certain
disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our
colds and relieve us after repletion...'"
HG Wells - The World Set Free, 1914
_______________________________________________________
"Me go too far!
Me am play gods!"
Dresden Codak, Caveman Science Fiction
_______________________________________________________
Here's an old riddle: you're given a choice of being executed by being thrown in a room with either:
A) a blazing inferno
B) inescapable quicksand
C) tigers that haven't eaten in a year
There are different versions, naturally. Sometimes the tigers are lions, sometimes the quicksand's poison gas. Have you solved it yet? The kitties have long starved to death, so they're the safe choice. I flunked that riddle when I first heard it. To me, the hazard which carried intentionality ranked automatically most hazardous. I never even considered its details.
Speaking of poison gas, have you heard of this crazy old thing called World War 2? It was pretty popular back in the day. Nuclear bombs and the Nazis' gas chambers remain the war's icons of destruction, but vastly more civilians were killed by plain old bullets and shrapnel, or by starvation, or by homelessness, or by being worked to death or by any number of other low-tech solutions to the problem of breathing. In fact part of the stated (albeit highly questionable) rationale for nukes was that they would result in fewer casualties than a protracted conflict, and for gas chambers it was to spare soldiers all the mental anguish from all those millions of civilians they'd been shooting the old-fashioned way. Yet somehow our minds fixate on the complicated, technological evil as the necessarily greater one. The same was true of World War 1, where the infamous gas attacks which so captivated both the media of the time and our historical perspective fell two orders of magnitude lower than the total deaths caused by fighting, which in turn were an order of magnitude lower than deaths caused by the breakdown in social services, plummeting health conditions and pandemic disease. Even back to the French Revolution and its subsequent years, the guillotine, that towering emblem of Terror, racked up under twenty thousand deaths during a period when ten times as many were being butchered in the Vendée alone, and maybe a million in the country as a whole, by methods a great deal more painful than instant decapitation.
Nor is our skewed perspective of such dangers limited to warfare. As I've pointed out before, the media loved to build up Theodore Kaczynski as their poster-child for terrorism and have ingrained his name in our memories even decades later, even as he was eclipsed by the world trade center bombers whose names no-one remembers. Yet in his seventeen year "unabomber" career, he inflicted only three fatalities and a score of injuries, easily outmatched by any of hundreds of terrorist Muslims in each single attack, not to mention all the other superstitious cretins of the world smiting various infidels. Kaczynski retains his notoriety partly for evading capture so long, but largely because he stands out, because instead of being a brainwashed simpleton like most murderers he was a mathematics professor. Instead of chanting and praying he formulated his own convoluted misinterpretation of the world and demanded it be published. He thought. Whatever his crimes in a practical sense, in the public unconsciousness he was convicted of the worst crime of all: thought.
All of us, if we're to die a violent death, would likely be shot by a soldier with no more understanding of the world than a rabid dog, or by a hobo with 70 IQ beating our brains out with a brick - yet we fear the complex means of death, nuclear bombs and noxious miasmas and guillotines. To escape the knowledge that we'll likely be pummeled to death in a fit of rage or greed by our own moronic neighbours, we fabricate imaginary techno-wizards leveraging the mysteries of the universe against us. Or has anyone not watched a movie from the past hundred years?
On a completely unrelated topic, I was listening to some TV show or another on nutrition. Mostly good, sensible, simple, redundant warnings of our immoderate intake of sugar and fat...until the presenter got to the topic of additives and spouted one of the stupidest lines imaginable: "don't eat anything with ingredients you don't understand." Like what? Prolyl endopeptidase? Or guanidinoacetate, oh, that's great stuff, delicious on toast. Or maybe you're afraid of dying of simple histone poisoning? I hear the Nazis invented it. Hey, here's a question: if you chop a leg off a wild boar and toss it onto your grill, how many of the chemicals sizzling so enticingly do you think you can actually identify? You yourself are a pile of ingredients you don't understand!
Here's the thing. We fear thought. Our later stages of evolution selected us for it. A human tribe as a whole is a highly efficient unit of resource-gathering and shelter, especially once supplied with a Neolithic arsenal and domesticated snacks. Survival and reproductive success, for our ancestors, primarily meant competing not against leopards or antelope, but against each other. Reading others' intent has been so crucial to our propagation that when posed the question of intent, our brains fail safe and just assume it. We read faces in anything from knots in tree trunks to car headlights; we hear voices on the wind. From even deeper in our evolutionary past we also inherit a fear of the unknown - which is why so many dogs will be spending this fireworks-rich night hiding under their masters' beds. Combine the two and you have the greatest evil the human mind can imagine: thought it can't understand.
So even though the food additive currently causing us most harm is simple sugar, we fear the chemicals produced by chemists much, much more. The warlocks must be up to something! We fear the convoluted machinations of engineers designing RubeGoldbergian devices for killing us, when the greatest threat to our safety comes from our uneducated neighbours who decided to have seven children and now could use a bit of long pig to feed them all. The more thought goes into something the more we fear it, shun it, assemble angry mobs to combat it, and the reactionary Luddism thus engendered continually hampers scientific endeavors. The outcry against cloning for instance has not even the barest seed of reason to it. Identical twins are perfectly natural, but when it's done with intent and intelligence instead of leaving it up to the stumbling of chance, out come the pitchforks and torches. Genetic engineering holds the greatest promise to improve quality of life since fire and the wheel, yet the wailing against "frankencrops" drowns out all sensible arguments. I am sick to death of hearing phrases like "we don't know what the long-term effects will be" from cretins who don't know what the long-term effects will be without it either, who in fact don't know much of anything about anything. Do you know what the long-term effects of hereditary disease are? Disease! What about endemic diseases? What about mass starvation? Does that have any long-term effects? What about the potential for longevity and immortality? Am I supposed to meekly accept my death sentence because you imbecilic filth fear transgressing some imagined supernatural plan to our natural lifespans?
Anti-intellectualism is intrinsic to human instinct, but society is increasingly outpacing instinct. Ultimately, the discernment necessary to view the world clearly is not primarily a matter of education or availability of information, but of the capacity for independent reasoning. We can't dodge it. Even placing trust in some institution and the information it provides means somehow evaluating its trustworthiness. By accepting the conclusions of some university researcher's study on horizontal gene transfer, I, as an individual, am accepting the validity of that university's accreditation, the reliability of whatever machinery was used in the study, the size of the giants on whose shoulders the researcher stood. The same is true of the primitives placing their trust in superstition. By taking the word of some astrologer or voodoo priest or economist, one implies some sort of evaluation of that person's qualifications -- to which I would retort: based on what evidence?
We're long past due to admit that in order to continue to improve the world we must improve its inhabitants. We must select for those capable of rational thought, those who not only fear tigers on a mindless instinctual ape level but can evaluate when the tigers do or do not pose a threat. There can be no better world while the vast majority of the population is actively, reflexively fighting against the intelligence which might bring about improvement.
________________________________________________________
P.S.:
I'd put money on "the fearful shaft of understanding" being Wells' pet name for his penis.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Sunday, December 29, 2019
All-Out Tactics
I'm finding it difficult to get into Fallout Tactics.
It always seemed a misconceived project for Bethesda to have funded back in 2001, an uninspired quest pack, not even an expansion, to Fallout 2. As the name suggests, it's a squad tactical TBS. Admittedly, that was one of Fallout's strengths... for an RPG. It was counted a strength as long as the focus lay elsewhere. Unfortunately "Tactics" truncated Fallout's excellent use of the roleplaying rags to riches escalation, by starting you out as an armed and armored soldier. It seems heavy on the backstory but absent its integration into gameplay. Most jarringly, trivializing Fallout's overland map only emphasizes how much the series banked on its exploration aspect - which the later 3D releases proved all the more true by their popularity.
Don't get me wrong, from the first couple of missions Tactics seems a decent enough squad TBS... except for the part where the X-Com games had already been kicking everyone's ass in that department for over half a decade. "Decent enough" was not good enough to compete within the same limitations. I'm seeing quite a few improvements to Fallout's inventory and combat mechanics, most importantly stances and cover, but at the same time the lack of a grid results in a lot of frustrating imprecision as to what constitutes said cover, or passable/impassable terrain, etc. While I'm not mourning my $3 bereavement, I do believe I'll be uninstalling it now. After all, I've also been playing this:
Look, hexes! Beautiful, rational hexes!
The more recent Fallout-inspired RPGs like Dead State or Wasteland 2, despite their flaws, would put Fallout Tactics to shame. But, more importantly, after a fifteen year slump, computer games have once again been growing in complexity and scale, to the point where tactical squad management can form only one facet of a larger product. That second screenshot's a run of the mill combat encounter from Age of Wonders: Planetfall. It tries to mix planetary conquest TBS a la Alpha Centauri with the AoW series' long-standing emphasis on squad tactics for individual combat encounters - with mixed results, but impressive nonetheless. Naval battles, assaulting reinforced bases, charging down exposed bridges, maneuvering through dense forests, I suspect that in just my current campaign I've accumulated more diverse six-unit encounters than the sum of Fallout Tactics' missions, and they're contextualized within a larger narrative partly of my own making: the spread of my kingdom across a predominantly arctic, mountainous planet of my choosing.
The old genres resulted partly from technological limitations and partly from companies deliberately shortchanging their customers. Having clear, simple product definitions facilitates the shovelware they love to shovel down players' throats. So where do we stand now that technology has advanced enough to be scalable and the braindead mass-market is enthralled by Fruit Ninja, leaving real computer games on the industry's fringes? While some genres' different modes of interaction are difficult to reconcile, in most cases they should be converging into multifaceted gestalts. Good storytelling should not prevent a role-playing game from having strategic and tactical depth, or base-building or kingdom management and "first-person shooter" merely describes an interface which could well be applied to a game with complex crafting and economics. All games ideally tend toward The Matrix - infinite scope, infinite complexity, infinite persistence, seamless immersion. "Genres" are only approximations of that ideal from different angles, and the angles are widening.
It always seemed a misconceived project for Bethesda to have funded back in 2001, an uninspired quest pack, not even an expansion, to Fallout 2. As the name suggests, it's a squad tactical TBS. Admittedly, that was one of Fallout's strengths... for an RPG. It was counted a strength as long as the focus lay elsewhere. Unfortunately "Tactics" truncated Fallout's excellent use of the roleplaying rags to riches escalation, by starting you out as an armed and armored soldier. It seems heavy on the backstory but absent its integration into gameplay. Most jarringly, trivializing Fallout's overland map only emphasizes how much the series banked on its exploration aspect - which the later 3D releases proved all the more true by their popularity.
Don't get me wrong, from the first couple of missions Tactics seems a decent enough squad TBS... except for the part where the X-Com games had already been kicking everyone's ass in that department for over half a decade. "Decent enough" was not good enough to compete within the same limitations. I'm seeing quite a few improvements to Fallout's inventory and combat mechanics, most importantly stances and cover, but at the same time the lack of a grid results in a lot of frustrating imprecision as to what constitutes said cover, or passable/impassable terrain, etc. While I'm not mourning my $3 bereavement, I do believe I'll be uninstalling it now. After all, I've also been playing this:
The more recent Fallout-inspired RPGs like Dead State or Wasteland 2, despite their flaws, would put Fallout Tactics to shame. But, more importantly, after a fifteen year slump, computer games have once again been growing in complexity and scale, to the point where tactical squad management can form only one facet of a larger product. That second screenshot's a run of the mill combat encounter from Age of Wonders: Planetfall. It tries to mix planetary conquest TBS a la Alpha Centauri with the AoW series' long-standing emphasis on squad tactics for individual combat encounters - with mixed results, but impressive nonetheless. Naval battles, assaulting reinforced bases, charging down exposed bridges, maneuvering through dense forests, I suspect that in just my current campaign I've accumulated more diverse six-unit encounters than the sum of Fallout Tactics' missions, and they're contextualized within a larger narrative partly of my own making: the spread of my kingdom across a predominantly arctic, mountainous planet of my choosing.
The old genres resulted partly from technological limitations and partly from companies deliberately shortchanging their customers. Having clear, simple product definitions facilitates the shovelware they love to shovel down players' throats. So where do we stand now that technology has advanced enough to be scalable and the braindead mass-market is enthralled by Fruit Ninja, leaving real computer games on the industry's fringes? While some genres' different modes of interaction are difficult to reconcile, in most cases they should be converging into multifaceted gestalts. Good storytelling should not prevent a role-playing game from having strategic and tactical depth, or base-building or kingdom management and "first-person shooter" merely describes an interface which could well be applied to a game with complex crafting and economics. All games ideally tend toward The Matrix - infinite scope, infinite complexity, infinite persistence, seamless immersion. "Genres" are only approximations of that ideal from different angles, and the angles are widening.
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
I heard she's pretty but she don't have all her wits
"Kept like a pet in an old hen coop
The mother didn't beat her and she gave her food"
Rasputina - The Snow-Hen of Austerlitz
___________________________________________
"The Lees were right after all, I thought. Lia's medicine did make her sick!"
Anne Fadiman's thunderous self-righteous quintessential intellectually dishonest declamatory climax to The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
___________________________________________
Reality is not a matter of tastes or preferences or hopes or beliefs.
When I was in my mid-teens in the '90s I caught an extended flight to visit my extended family and promptly picked up an extensive gut infection. With the benefit of hindsight, several recurring incidents, online lists and a mediocre "university" education, I can now guess the symptoms might be those of salmonellosis, but that's neither here nor there. (Well... to be honest, it was sort of... everywhere... but never mind.) It did leave me with one fond memory: my grandmother (an otherwise harsh, off-putting woman even at the best of times) sitting by my bedside pumping me full of weak mint tea to counteract dehydration, telling me it's a pity I was losing my vacation and "pulling on" my wrist to help the overwhelming nausea, heavily massaging the area low on my forearm above the wrist.
I can't remember what education grandma Mary had gotten back in the interbellum, in the Great Depression years. Fourth grade? Eighth, if she was lucky. She'd also have the local priest stop by, now and anon, and sprinkle the various rooms of the house with holy water. Not that it did much to banish the specter of Salmonella, mind you. The wrist massage thing I'm amused to find listed as the P6 acupuncture point, seems mainly used to address nausea-related ailments, and is the only example of acupressure sufficiently reiterated to make it past at least Wikipedia's rather lax citation standards. Damned if I know where my grandmother picked it up. Probably not Wikipedia. For my own part it helped my nausea, but I'll also freely admit to a whopping placebo effect in just having Granny take care of me. Though I can't remember with whom it originated, I'm reminded of a comment about "alternative medicine" - there's no such thing. If something works, it's medicine. If it hasn't been demonstrated to work, it's not.
On a completely unrelated topic, I was assigned The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down as a reading in an anthropology class many a year ago. (I'm older than my profile picture looks.) In fairness, I should hedge a bit and admit it's not an altogether bad text, providing some satisfying historical background on the Hmong and a plethora of colorful anecdotes about their integration in California, the sort which always make anthropology such a page-turner. Unfortunately, while its prima facie observations are perfectly valid, its ideological context and conclusions are nothing but the lowest breed of anti-intellectual postmodernism. This book did much to convince me that not only the humanities but the soft sciences as well have fallen to cheap, facile dogmatic vandalism.
Leaving aside the author's protestations of multifaceted, nearly impenetrable complexity, the basic story is gruesome yet uncomplicated. An epileptic child is born to uneducated parents, who despite having access to Californian-grade modern medicine, refuse to treat her and choose to allow her condition to worsen for years on end. According to Fadiman's own account, after years of severe and frequent seizures which might very well have proven preventable if her parents hadn't deliberately wanted to preserve her "holy" epilepsy, obfuscated and confounded her doctors at every turn and thrown away her medications, the poor girl's wracked and battered body finally succumbs to an opportunistic infection. In which final infection, the potentially immunosuppressant side effect of one of her medications MIGHT have played a role... thus prompting Fadiman's infuriatingly misleading statement at the start here.
Much of the text is given over to schmaltzy praise of the parents' feeding, grooming and hugging of their daughter, as well as pandering to the Hmong's particular brand of primitive superstitions in forced ingenuous glorification of the religious flim-flam by which her family tried to treat Lia's symptoms in lieu of actual medicine. I will concede that as mammals it does sound as though they had all the right instincts, to protect and groom and feed and pander to their offspring's demands. But epilepsy cannot be combated by mammalian instinct, nor by the scraps of habitual best practices which might be occasionally imparted by superstitious ritual. It provokes a conflict of intellect far beyond the arsenal of vulgar irrationality. And, if the parents' rural, third-world upbringing in the mid-20th century might excuse much of their confusion and ignorance, I feel no inclination to extend the same courtesy to a Harvard-overeducated moron like Anne Fadiman.
The entire book was written from a forced perspective holding primitivism in the same esteem as modern science. There's an inherent dishonesty to this attitude, as no-one who does so ever, conversely, demands of "alternative" philosophies the same evidentiary standards by which science has painstakingly won its seat as our species' benefactor. Any demands to "teach the controversy" are instead veiled demands for scientists to demean themselves by endless gratuitous concessions to irrationality. Throughout her text, Fadiman postures as an egalitarian but at every step it is only the Californian medical establishment whose flaws get criticized. If the Hmong refused to abide by the medication schedule, it's because the doctors didn't explain it clearly enough, despite the interpreters, printed lists and ideograms. If the child was physically wounding (to the point of drawing blood from) other children on the playground, it's the system's fault for putting her in foster care so she'd get her medication... not the fault of having been spoiled at home. We're invited to marvel at the cleverness of Hmong cheating on driving tests by embroidering answers into their sleeves, and so on and on, page by page, chapter by chapter. Here's just one of the more egregious passages:
"[The doctors] always spoke of Lia in the past tense. In fact, Neil and Peggy themselves frequently referred to "Lia's demise" or "what may have killed Lia" or "the reason Lia died." Dr. Hutchison did the same thing. He had asked me, "Was Lia with the foster parents when she died?" And although I reminded him that Lia was alive, five minutes later he said "Noncompliance had nothing to do with her death." It wasn't just absentmindedness. It was an admission of defeat. Lia was dead to her physicians (in a way, for example, that she was never dead to her social workers) because medicine had once made extravagant claims on her behalf and had had to renounce them."
Now before I expand on the context, remember this is a Yale professor with a Harvard education speaking. This woman occupies the pinnacle of what passes for Liberal Arts scholarship. Despite not being an anthropologist herself and the book being written in the '90s, it is still taught in anthropology classes today.
Lia Lee was born in 1982 and died in 1986. Her final grand mal seizure suffered during a Pseudomonas infection destroyed her higher brain functions and thus the self housed in those synapses. Now, as should happen, our existence as individuals is not intrinsic to our bodies' physical functioning. As long as the brain stem, the cerebellum and a few other primitive structures remain intact cells will continue to divide, the corpse will continue to breathe, pump blood, digest and excrete, despite the person who once inhabited it having long ceased to exist. This is the state Fadiman chose to misrepresent as "was alive" and to spin by some pop-psychological sleight-of-hand as a condemnation of science, as putative guilt on the doctors' part.
But wait, there's more!
In a morbid twist worthy of the Addams Family, Lia Lee's still reflexively breathing corpse persisted until thirty years of age. It was apparently cared for by her relatives until 2012. They propped the zombie up in their house, they continued to shove food into it, change its diapers and wash it and interact with it, for twenty-six years - indeed, a success and standard of physical care which would put any hospital nursing staff to shame. Presumably they were still waiting for the demon which absconded with her soul to make restitution.
If there's a better allegory for religion than wiping a corpse's ass all your life, I haven't found it. Merry Christmas, by the way.
What if the low, grinding headache which accompanied my gut infection had set off a seizure and killed me in my teens? Would my grandmother have wasted her money to bring in the priest week after week to mumble some pig-Latin and sprinkle my corpse with angel piss? I wouldn't put it past her; that woman was stubborn. But she was also practical. A warm blanket, wrist rubs and tea. Our traditions can't be all wrong on every point and we should be willing to extract the grains of truth from the mountains of superstitious gibberish heaped upon us by our forebears. But extract we must. Popping an aspirin is orders of magnitude more effective than chewing willow bark. I'm willing to consider the P6 acupressure point might possibly induce some therapeutic effect beyond Granny's home-made placebo... but it might also be the only such valid point to be made on acupuncture/pressure's behalf.
We can't carry out that crucial process of extraction, that winnowing of folkloric baggage, while impeded by charlatans in the soft-headed sciences who, for political or ideological reasons, fabricate false equivalence between reason and unreasoned impulses and conflate reality with superstition under the purloined moral umbrella of multiculturalism or open-mindedness. Those who cripple our intellect's ability to improve the world stand on the same side as those who willfully steal, murder and demolish, even if they feign the equanimity of an impartial sociological observer.
Reality is not optional.
The mother didn't beat her and she gave her food"
Rasputina - The Snow-Hen of Austerlitz
___________________________________________
"The Lees were right after all, I thought. Lia's medicine did make her sick!"
Anne Fadiman's thunderous self-righteous quintessential intellectually dishonest declamatory climax to The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
___________________________________________
Reality is not a matter of tastes or preferences or hopes or beliefs.
When I was in my mid-teens in the '90s I caught an extended flight to visit my extended family and promptly picked up an extensive gut infection. With the benefit of hindsight, several recurring incidents, online lists and a mediocre "university" education, I can now guess the symptoms might be those of salmonellosis, but that's neither here nor there. (Well... to be honest, it was sort of... everywhere... but never mind.) It did leave me with one fond memory: my grandmother (an otherwise harsh, off-putting woman even at the best of times) sitting by my bedside pumping me full of weak mint tea to counteract dehydration, telling me it's a pity I was losing my vacation and "pulling on" my wrist to help the overwhelming nausea, heavily massaging the area low on my forearm above the wrist.
I can't remember what education grandma Mary had gotten back in the interbellum, in the Great Depression years. Fourth grade? Eighth, if she was lucky. She'd also have the local priest stop by, now and anon, and sprinkle the various rooms of the house with holy water. Not that it did much to banish the specter of Salmonella, mind you. The wrist massage thing I'm amused to find listed as the P6 acupuncture point, seems mainly used to address nausea-related ailments, and is the only example of acupressure sufficiently reiterated to make it past at least Wikipedia's rather lax citation standards. Damned if I know where my grandmother picked it up. Probably not Wikipedia. For my own part it helped my nausea, but I'll also freely admit to a whopping placebo effect in just having Granny take care of me. Though I can't remember with whom it originated, I'm reminded of a comment about "alternative medicine" - there's no such thing. If something works, it's medicine. If it hasn't been demonstrated to work, it's not.
On a completely unrelated topic, I was assigned The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down as a reading in an anthropology class many a year ago. (I'm older than my profile picture looks.) In fairness, I should hedge a bit and admit it's not an altogether bad text, providing some satisfying historical background on the Hmong and a plethora of colorful anecdotes about their integration in California, the sort which always make anthropology such a page-turner. Unfortunately, while its prima facie observations are perfectly valid, its ideological context and conclusions are nothing but the lowest breed of anti-intellectual postmodernism. This book did much to convince me that not only the humanities but the soft sciences as well have fallen to cheap, facile dogmatic vandalism.
Leaving aside the author's protestations of multifaceted, nearly impenetrable complexity, the basic story is gruesome yet uncomplicated. An epileptic child is born to uneducated parents, who despite having access to Californian-grade modern medicine, refuse to treat her and choose to allow her condition to worsen for years on end. According to Fadiman's own account, after years of severe and frequent seizures which might very well have proven preventable if her parents hadn't deliberately wanted to preserve her "holy" epilepsy, obfuscated and confounded her doctors at every turn and thrown away her medications, the poor girl's wracked and battered body finally succumbs to an opportunistic infection. In which final infection, the potentially immunosuppressant side effect of one of her medications MIGHT have played a role... thus prompting Fadiman's infuriatingly misleading statement at the start here.
Much of the text is given over to schmaltzy praise of the parents' feeding, grooming and hugging of their daughter, as well as pandering to the Hmong's particular brand of primitive superstitions in forced ingenuous glorification of the religious flim-flam by which her family tried to treat Lia's symptoms in lieu of actual medicine. I will concede that as mammals it does sound as though they had all the right instincts, to protect and groom and feed and pander to their offspring's demands. But epilepsy cannot be combated by mammalian instinct, nor by the scraps of habitual best practices which might be occasionally imparted by superstitious ritual. It provokes a conflict of intellect far beyond the arsenal of vulgar irrationality. And, if the parents' rural, third-world upbringing in the mid-20th century might excuse much of their confusion and ignorance, I feel no inclination to extend the same courtesy to a Harvard-overeducated moron like Anne Fadiman.
The entire book was written from a forced perspective holding primitivism in the same esteem as modern science. There's an inherent dishonesty to this attitude, as no-one who does so ever, conversely, demands of "alternative" philosophies the same evidentiary standards by which science has painstakingly won its seat as our species' benefactor. Any demands to "teach the controversy" are instead veiled demands for scientists to demean themselves by endless gratuitous concessions to irrationality. Throughout her text, Fadiman postures as an egalitarian but at every step it is only the Californian medical establishment whose flaws get criticized. If the Hmong refused to abide by the medication schedule, it's because the doctors didn't explain it clearly enough, despite the interpreters, printed lists and ideograms. If the child was physically wounding (to the point of drawing blood from) other children on the playground, it's the system's fault for putting her in foster care so she'd get her medication... not the fault of having been spoiled at home. We're invited to marvel at the cleverness of Hmong cheating on driving tests by embroidering answers into their sleeves, and so on and on, page by page, chapter by chapter. Here's just one of the more egregious passages:
"[The doctors] always spoke of Lia in the past tense. In fact, Neil and Peggy themselves frequently referred to "Lia's demise" or "what may have killed Lia" or "the reason Lia died." Dr. Hutchison did the same thing. He had asked me, "Was Lia with the foster parents when she died?" And although I reminded him that Lia was alive, five minutes later he said "Noncompliance had nothing to do with her death." It wasn't just absentmindedness. It was an admission of defeat. Lia was dead to her physicians (in a way, for example, that she was never dead to her social workers) because medicine had once made extravagant claims on her behalf and had had to renounce them."
Now before I expand on the context, remember this is a Yale professor with a Harvard education speaking. This woman occupies the pinnacle of what passes for Liberal Arts scholarship. Despite not being an anthropologist herself and the book being written in the '90s, it is still taught in anthropology classes today.
Lia Lee was born in 1982 and died in 1986. Her final grand mal seizure suffered during a Pseudomonas infection destroyed her higher brain functions and thus the self housed in those synapses. Now, as should happen, our existence as individuals is not intrinsic to our bodies' physical functioning. As long as the brain stem, the cerebellum and a few other primitive structures remain intact cells will continue to divide, the corpse will continue to breathe, pump blood, digest and excrete, despite the person who once inhabited it having long ceased to exist. This is the state Fadiman chose to misrepresent as "was alive" and to spin by some pop-psychological sleight-of-hand as a condemnation of science, as putative guilt on the doctors' part.
But wait, there's more!
In a morbid twist worthy of the Addams Family, Lia Lee's still reflexively breathing corpse persisted until thirty years of age. It was apparently cared for by her relatives until 2012. They propped the zombie up in their house, they continued to shove food into it, change its diapers and wash it and interact with it, for twenty-six years - indeed, a success and standard of physical care which would put any hospital nursing staff to shame. Presumably they were still waiting for the demon which absconded with her soul to make restitution.
If there's a better allegory for religion than wiping a corpse's ass all your life, I haven't found it. Merry Christmas, by the way.
What if the low, grinding headache which accompanied my gut infection had set off a seizure and killed me in my teens? Would my grandmother have wasted her money to bring in the priest week after week to mumble some pig-Latin and sprinkle my corpse with angel piss? I wouldn't put it past her; that woman was stubborn. But she was also practical. A warm blanket, wrist rubs and tea. Our traditions can't be all wrong on every point and we should be willing to extract the grains of truth from the mountains of superstitious gibberish heaped upon us by our forebears. But extract we must. Popping an aspirin is orders of magnitude more effective than chewing willow bark. I'm willing to consider the P6 acupressure point might possibly induce some therapeutic effect beyond Granny's home-made placebo... but it might also be the only such valid point to be made on acupuncture/pressure's behalf.
We can't carry out that crucial process of extraction, that winnowing of folkloric baggage, while impeded by charlatans in the soft-headed sciences who, for political or ideological reasons, fabricate false equivalence between reason and unreasoned impulses and conflate reality with superstition under the purloined moral umbrella of multiculturalism or open-mindedness. Those who cripple our intellect's ability to improve the world stand on the same side as those who willfully steal, murder and demolish, even if they feign the equanimity of an impartial sociological observer.
Reality is not optional.
Sunday, December 22, 2019
It Hain't Paktical
spoilert: main plot element of Larry Niven's Protector / Ringworld Series
_________________________________________
I've been re-reading Protector, and there's just something so quintessentially... Scie Fie, about Larry Niven's books. Sure, his independent minded frontier "belter" social structure's more or less lifted from Heinlein and some of his alien species come across like half-baked placeholders for a better idea, but he was never afraid to think BIG, man! Solar system sized hula hoop big. Transgalactic migration big. But there's something aggravating about the Pak's main plot point as extraterrestrial ancestors of humans. It was equally annoying in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels, where Terrans are merely the remnants of a colony established by the four million year old Hainish civilization, and wherever else this notion of humans as an introduced species crops up.
As a narrative cause, it's golden. It is at once pathetic and grandiose, establishing a noble heritage but demoting Earth from the center of the human universe to an abandoned outpost. It lends itself both to poignant tales of paradises lost or to hints of reconquest and lends our filthy ape species the mannered stoicism of an impoverished aristocracy. As a psychological motivation it's why, in the real world, Europeans have been looking back fondly to Rome ever since they remembered they had one, and why in the semi-real world conspiracy nuts and New Age quacks like to claim Atlantean or Anunnaki ancestry. Noble ancestry makes us feel special.
But as a narrative effect, it faceplants into justifiable disbelief. When consuming SF, we agree to choke down a phlebotinum now and then. Proposition: force fields exist. That's all right. We don't know what those are so they don't interfere with the other workings of the universe. But what about the proposition: on some planets, gravity works sideways? Gravity already exists. Its sedate predilections could be observed to vary if they ever did... and they've been the same every time anyone's counted down to lift-off. Humans being alien to Earth, that would be the biological equivalent of spontaneous sideways gravity.
Okay, sure, sure, it's easy to declare this gimmick obsolete now, as molecular clock measurements have provided us with the most minute gradations in genealogy. Your hemoglobin, cytochromes and every other flavor of goop in your goopy ape body differ slightly from those of other apes, slightly more from those of other mammals, and not nearly as much as we'd like to think from those of parasitic worms or amoebae. We might forgive older authors like Niven or Le Guin on this point, as both the Known Space and Hainish series began in the late '60s when molecular biology was still in diapers. But even then, the fossil record was fairly extensive and at least where macroscopic life is concerned, the gradations in anatomic divergence had laid out humans' relation to the rest of the animal kingdom to a more than satisfying approximation. We fit within the primates, within the mammals, within the tetrapods and vertebrates and deuterostomes and bilaterians and eukaryotes. We are intrinsically, mundanely Terran creatures. In fact, while it's nearly impossible to predict an alien species' appearance, we can safely say we know what an alien species would not look like; it would not look like us.
And here we have to address the issue of convergence. The human body, it has been said, is utilitarian. Most things that get around on land will have a use for legs. Cephalization has its advantages. Eyes confer an immense survival advantage anywhere there's light. So on and so forth, when adaptation adapts to the same conditions, it often finds very similar solutions. Wings, flattened surfaces for catching air, are so useful they've evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom. But note: despite adapting to the same basic utility, they evolved differently every time. If we saw a hummingbird with dragonfly wings, we would notice. An extraterrestrial might very well have a head, but it would not be an ape skull with ape molars. It might have hands, but they would certainly not contain metacarpals homologous to the forelegs of horses. The idea of an extraterrestrial "blending in" with four billion years' worth of independent Terran evolution is, paradoxically, not weird enough to be accepted. It grates, not because we don't know how it would work, but because we know how it doesn't work.
Note, this does not exclude every other means of alien influence on Earth, whether it's assuming our planet was initially seeded from outer space via directed panspermia, or a certain animal genus had its intelligence uplifted by a mysterious black monolith. However, we should really lay to rest the notion of humans alone being biologically descended from anything other than local animal stock in all its filth and monotony.
We are not intrinsically special.
_________________________________________
I've been re-reading Protector, and there's just something so quintessentially... Scie Fie, about Larry Niven's books. Sure, his independent minded frontier "belter" social structure's more or less lifted from Heinlein and some of his alien species come across like half-baked placeholders for a better idea, but he was never afraid to think BIG, man! Solar system sized hula hoop big. Transgalactic migration big. But there's something aggravating about the Pak's main plot point as extraterrestrial ancestors of humans. It was equally annoying in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels, where Terrans are merely the remnants of a colony established by the four million year old Hainish civilization, and wherever else this notion of humans as an introduced species crops up.
As a narrative cause, it's golden. It is at once pathetic and grandiose, establishing a noble heritage but demoting Earth from the center of the human universe to an abandoned outpost. It lends itself both to poignant tales of paradises lost or to hints of reconquest and lends our filthy ape species the mannered stoicism of an impoverished aristocracy. As a psychological motivation it's why, in the real world, Europeans have been looking back fondly to Rome ever since they remembered they had one, and why in the semi-real world conspiracy nuts and New Age quacks like to claim Atlantean or Anunnaki ancestry. Noble ancestry makes us feel special.
But as a narrative effect, it faceplants into justifiable disbelief. When consuming SF, we agree to choke down a phlebotinum now and then. Proposition: force fields exist. That's all right. We don't know what those are so they don't interfere with the other workings of the universe. But what about the proposition: on some planets, gravity works sideways? Gravity already exists. Its sedate predilections could be observed to vary if they ever did... and they've been the same every time anyone's counted down to lift-off. Humans being alien to Earth, that would be the biological equivalent of spontaneous sideways gravity.
Okay, sure, sure, it's easy to declare this gimmick obsolete now, as molecular clock measurements have provided us with the most minute gradations in genealogy. Your hemoglobin, cytochromes and every other flavor of goop in your goopy ape body differ slightly from those of other apes, slightly more from those of other mammals, and not nearly as much as we'd like to think from those of parasitic worms or amoebae. We might forgive older authors like Niven or Le Guin on this point, as both the Known Space and Hainish series began in the late '60s when molecular biology was still in diapers. But even then, the fossil record was fairly extensive and at least where macroscopic life is concerned, the gradations in anatomic divergence had laid out humans' relation to the rest of the animal kingdom to a more than satisfying approximation. We fit within the primates, within the mammals, within the tetrapods and vertebrates and deuterostomes and bilaterians and eukaryotes. We are intrinsically, mundanely Terran creatures. In fact, while it's nearly impossible to predict an alien species' appearance, we can safely say we know what an alien species would not look like; it would not look like us.
And here we have to address the issue of convergence. The human body, it has been said, is utilitarian. Most things that get around on land will have a use for legs. Cephalization has its advantages. Eyes confer an immense survival advantage anywhere there's light. So on and so forth, when adaptation adapts to the same conditions, it often finds very similar solutions. Wings, flattened surfaces for catching air, are so useful they've evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom. But note: despite adapting to the same basic utility, they evolved differently every time. If we saw a hummingbird with dragonfly wings, we would notice. An extraterrestrial might very well have a head, but it would not be an ape skull with ape molars. It might have hands, but they would certainly not contain metacarpals homologous to the forelegs of horses. The idea of an extraterrestrial "blending in" with four billion years' worth of independent Terran evolution is, paradoxically, not weird enough to be accepted. It grates, not because we don't know how it would work, but because we know how it doesn't work.
Note, this does not exclude every other means of alien influence on Earth, whether it's assuming our planet was initially seeded from outer space via directed panspermia, or a certain animal genus had its intelligence uplifted by a mysterious black monolith. However, we should really lay to rest the notion of humans alone being biologically descended from anything other than local animal stock in all its filth and monotony.
We are not intrinsically special.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
The World Set Free
"Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground
Silly monkeys give them thumbs
They make a club and beat their brother down"
Tool - Right in Two
__________________________________________
"Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water."
H.G. Wells - The World Set Free
__________________________________________
The World Set Free is a war story. It's social commentary. It's a political pamphlet. It's science fiction, which is to say it's slightly scientific fiction featuring some largely fictional science. It's "a series of three fantasias of possibility" in Wells' own words or as we might call it these days, a future history. It's disjointed yet incisive and obsessive yet detached. It's apocalyptic and utopian, eerily accurate in some of its predictions but still touchingly naive on other points. Though not quite concise enough to amount to the same aphoristic avalanche, it lays the thunderous proclamations on thick enough to remind one of reading Nietzsche.
It's a book about a fictitious oncoming global war published in 1914, just months before the first of those that we're about to have a third of. Three decades before the first nuclear mushroom clouds, Wells wrote of aircraft dropping "atomic bombs" onto city centers. He also hoped the unprecedented destruction thus caused might prompt the leaders of the world into unifying our fractious species under one government. Good luck on that last part.
It's not an entertaining book. I doubt it was meant to be. Together with Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free builds up an understanding of human society out of the idiosyncrasies of the author's time, one oddity at a time. The latter book, as future histories are wont to do, even denies its readers a stable protagonist, flitting among the experiences of generation after generation. Certainly, a few themes repeat themselves, like Wells' obsession with airplanes:
"From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?"
It is, however, a very interesting book, more so with the benefit of hindsight. He correctly predicted the acceleration of nuclear fission could be used in both power generation and as an explosive, but he underestimated the extent to which it could be accelerated, so his nuclear bombs work more like slow-burning flames rendering an area uninhabitable for decades on end. Amusingly enough, he wound up predicting the result despite mistaking the mechanism. Neither did he foresee the effect of mechanization and automation on warfare; his atomic bombs are armed by biting off the ignition cap and chucked out of a passing aeroplane by hand. Nevertheless, many of his points remain valid: Britain's dangerous dependence on its empire, Germany's even more dangerous Prussic acerbity, an alliance of the central European powers, an opening move against Western Europe by sweeping through the Low Countries, even bombing the Dutch dikes, which though it's never been performed has remained a contingency plan of every military who's ever looked at the place - including a last ditch* "scorched Earth" tactic for the Dutch themselves. And in the midst of all this he even manages, as a casual aside, to hint at the Maslowian hierarchy of needs!
Many of Wells' observations and predictions tracked his contemporary writers' assumption of both the moral and practical need for socialism. The continuing centralization of wealth, the de facto disenfranchising effect of technological advancement on the working class. He also predicted the accumulation of economic surplus as military arsenals combined with a superfluity of unskilled labor would result in mass warfare. (In fact, he and many other thinkers of his time had been predicting the world war since the turn of the century.) While this was and is, by and large, correct, he also incorrectly placed the locus of control in each nation's leadership, and presented the abolishment (or willing abdication) of the old aristocracy as the solution to such conflict and the path to a global government:
"You know he is right as well as I do. Those things are over. We--we kings and rulers and representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more atomic bombs. The old game's up."
Well Herb, we got rid of the kings, and most of the old-school rulers, and castrated our representatives until they can't even admonish the rich against cannibalizing the poor, and I gotta tell ya, the old game? It is not up. Vermin with human faces are still breeding out of control, the vast majority of the population is still utterly superfluous, unfit for anything other than our dwindling manual labor requirements, and xenophobia and bloodlust have proven intrinsic to human nature. Wherever two or more are gathered unto the name of some symbol of in-group solidarity, some kin recognition surrogate, they will plot to exterminate all who are not in their midst.
But The World Set Free is noteworthy most of all as Wells' richest quote mine. Addressing the human spirit from the sensual and brutish to the cerebral and transcendent, sweeping through history from cavemen to proletarians to infantrymen to kings who would be men, every chapter provides memorable imagery, poignant jabs at social mores, biting stabs at our animal nature. I had to stop myself from marking every single passage just so I could get myself to finish the book. It could be quoted on education, gender relations, socio-economics; its intoxication with science and intellectual progress could almost make one think such an enlightened technocracy waits just around the corner... were it not for the intervening century which has failed to produce such leadership. One might even call the story's final chapter describing a postwar Utopian society transcending its baser nature transhumanist, except that Wells' mouthpiece Karenin explicitly disavows the notion. So he even foresaw that misanthropic nerds like me would try to co-opt him on that point, damn his overgrown frontal lobe. The more I read Wells, the more I see him as one of the greatest minds in history.
_________________________________________________
*pun very much intended
Silly monkeys give them thumbs
They make a club and beat their brother down"
Tool - Right in Two
__________________________________________
"Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near him, and he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a day that was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction under a dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned, furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.
The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view was bounded on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water."
H.G. Wells - The World Set Free
__________________________________________
The World Set Free is a war story. It's social commentary. It's a political pamphlet. It's science fiction, which is to say it's slightly scientific fiction featuring some largely fictional science. It's "a series of three fantasias of possibility" in Wells' own words or as we might call it these days, a future history. It's disjointed yet incisive and obsessive yet detached. It's apocalyptic and utopian, eerily accurate in some of its predictions but still touchingly naive on other points. Though not quite concise enough to amount to the same aphoristic avalanche, it lays the thunderous proclamations on thick enough to remind one of reading Nietzsche.
It's a book about a fictitious oncoming global war published in 1914, just months before the first of those that we're about to have a third of. Three decades before the first nuclear mushroom clouds, Wells wrote of aircraft dropping "atomic bombs" onto city centers. He also hoped the unprecedented destruction thus caused might prompt the leaders of the world into unifying our fractious species under one government. Good luck on that last part.
It's not an entertaining book. I doubt it was meant to be. Together with Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free builds up an understanding of human society out of the idiosyncrasies of the author's time, one oddity at a time. The latter book, as future histories are wont to do, even denies its readers a stable protagonist, flitting among the experiences of generation after generation. Certainly, a few themes repeat themselves, like Wells' obsession with airplanes:
"From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop to death?"
It is, however, a very interesting book, more so with the benefit of hindsight. He correctly predicted the acceleration of nuclear fission could be used in both power generation and as an explosive, but he underestimated the extent to which it could be accelerated, so his nuclear bombs work more like slow-burning flames rendering an area uninhabitable for decades on end. Amusingly enough, he wound up predicting the result despite mistaking the mechanism. Neither did he foresee the effect of mechanization and automation on warfare; his atomic bombs are armed by biting off the ignition cap and chucked out of a passing aeroplane by hand. Nevertheless, many of his points remain valid: Britain's dangerous dependence on its empire, Germany's even more dangerous Prussic acerbity, an alliance of the central European powers, an opening move against Western Europe by sweeping through the Low Countries, even bombing the Dutch dikes, which though it's never been performed has remained a contingency plan of every military who's ever looked at the place - including a last ditch* "scorched Earth" tactic for the Dutch themselves. And in the midst of all this he even manages, as a casual aside, to hint at the Maslowian hierarchy of needs!
Many of Wells' observations and predictions tracked his contemporary writers' assumption of both the moral and practical need for socialism. The continuing centralization of wealth, the de facto disenfranchising effect of technological advancement on the working class. He also predicted the accumulation of economic surplus as military arsenals combined with a superfluity of unskilled labor would result in mass warfare. (In fact, he and many other thinkers of his time had been predicting the world war since the turn of the century.) While this was and is, by and large, correct, he also incorrectly placed the locus of control in each nation's leadership, and presented the abolishment (or willing abdication) of the old aristocracy as the solution to such conflict and the path to a global government:
"You know he is right as well as I do. Those things are over. We--we kings and rulers and representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war, and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more atomic bombs. The old game's up."
Well Herb, we got rid of the kings, and most of the old-school rulers, and castrated our representatives until they can't even admonish the rich against cannibalizing the poor, and I gotta tell ya, the old game? It is not up. Vermin with human faces are still breeding out of control, the vast majority of the population is still utterly superfluous, unfit for anything other than our dwindling manual labor requirements, and xenophobia and bloodlust have proven intrinsic to human nature. Wherever two or more are gathered unto the name of some symbol of in-group solidarity, some kin recognition surrogate, they will plot to exterminate all who are not in their midst.
But The World Set Free is noteworthy most of all as Wells' richest quote mine. Addressing the human spirit from the sensual and brutish to the cerebral and transcendent, sweeping through history from cavemen to proletarians to infantrymen to kings who would be men, every chapter provides memorable imagery, poignant jabs at social mores, biting stabs at our animal nature. I had to stop myself from marking every single passage just so I could get myself to finish the book. It could be quoted on education, gender relations, socio-economics; its intoxication with science and intellectual progress could almost make one think such an enlightened technocracy waits just around the corner... were it not for the intervening century which has failed to produce such leadership. One might even call the story's final chapter describing a postwar Utopian society transcending its baser nature transhumanist, except that Wells' mouthpiece Karenin explicitly disavows the notion. So he even foresaw that misanthropic nerds like me would try to co-opt him on that point, damn his overgrown frontal lobe. The more I read Wells, the more I see him as one of the greatest minds in history.
_________________________________________________
*pun very much intended
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Monday, December 9, 2019
ST: TNG - Galaxy's Terror Loss
In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
_____________________________________
Seriesdate: 4.10
The Loss
Help, we're under attack by a Windows screensaver!
A shoal of 2-Dimensional fish are migrating toward an interstellar maelstrom, and dragging the Enterprise along with them... to its DOOOOOOOM !
Masters of suspense that TNG's crew were, they cautiously deferred showing us the rubber shark until 15 minutes into the show, and even then sparingly. Deanna instead takes up most of our time with her constant complaints about everyone noticing the fact that she's constantly complaining about the suspiciously coincidental loss of her Betazoid telepathy. On one hand, I appreciate the further corroboration of my oft-reiterated conviction that telepathy is a dead end for Science Fiction.
Deanna: "Right now, I feel as two-dimensional as our friends out there."
Either writers deliberately snuck self-commentary into the script or they accidentally scribbled their way into a vein of irony ore. Deanna Troi was a flat character from the start, partly because she was the show's designated damsel in distress and partly because she was defined by her telepathy, a superpower so super as to efface all other considerations. Though being a central character the progression stood out less from episode to episode as it did for her mother's seasonal appearances, it bears mentioning Deanna's own character growth entailed much the same process of downplaying the mind-reading or coming up with plot devices to nullify it for an episode's duration. No other main character required the same lathing away of their principal attributes. Data didn't need to negate his android circuitry as the seasons wore on. Picard didn't need to lose his captain's pips. Geordi didn't need to forget everything he ever knew about engineering. Guinan didn't need to become less of a font of ancient wisdom. The only characters whose later appearances followed the same pattern in downplaying their core elements were the likes of Wesley Crusher or Q, space wizards completely out of place even among Star Trek's very soft scientific precepts.
But the change in Troi's behavior comes across as much too abrupt. Despite her distressed damsel predilections, as ship's barometer of sanity she should have maintained a great deal more calm in the face of her own incapacitation.
_______________________________________________________
Seriesdate: 4.16
Galaxy's Child
The one with the baby space whale.
The Enterprise runs across a ship-sized space-adapted organism. It attacks. They phaser it to death by accident. Cue "what have we done" speech. But wait, there's more! (Inside the monster's belly that is.) One interstellar Caesarian later, the Enterprise finds itself suckling an infant whatchamacallit off its own power supply. All well and good until the baby starts draining them dry while calling in reinforcements, and it becomes imperative to shake it off by spouting some spectroscopy technobabble.
I love it, and I loved it when I was ten years old too. The special effects were damn good for their day, and the writing doesn't belabor its nonsensical storytelling conventions (like "asteroid belts" so closely packed as to look like gravel driveways) used to prop up the grand image of asteroid-chewing space whales. The "sour the milk" solution stuck with me as a classic SciFi plot gimmick. I'm also amused by some lines' delivery, like Picard's somewhat too decisive response to Worf:
Worf: "What action should we take, sir?"
Picard: "None, lieutenant. None at all."
- exactly 30 minutes into a 45-minute show with commercial breaks. No Jean-Luc, I think you're going to take exactly fourteen minutes plus end credits' worth of action. Or, later:
Data: "At their current speed, sir, the entities will intercept us in: ten minutes, thirty-one seconds."
- delivered seven minutes before the final credits. I wonder if they'll make it!
But what I didn't remember was the entire A-plot unfortunately being sidelined in favor of interpersonal hand-wringing on Geordi's part, as he finally gets to meet the woman of his dreams on whom he based his holodeck houri back in season 3... only for her to pre-emptively put him down at every turn. But that's a topic for another day. Today's all about the space encounters.
______________________________________________________
Seriesdate: 4.17
Night Terrors
Another memorable line:
"Eyes in the dark. One moon circles."
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a band of brave adventurers find a derelict ship, its crew mysteriously murdered, with a single shell-shocked survivor mumbling gibberish whose deciphering holds the only key to survival. Dun-dun-duuuuuuUUUNNN !
(Also everybody except Troi's turning homicidal from... lack of REM sleep. (Okay, sure, why not. Still beats "subatomic bacteria."))
Once again, as in The Loss, the Enterprise is caught in a gravitational pull with Deanna's personal predicament inexplicably central to the issue. Once again, as in Galaxy's Child, the ship's power supply is being sapped. This time around they need to blow up a paradimensional potluck by pouring acid into water. Or something. Oh, right, one moon circling = hydrogen! Interdimensional dream telegrams are preventing them from entering REM sleep and only the ship's telepath is receiving on the right dream "frequency" to communicate and coordinate both ships supplying reactive materials. Don't ask me what the telepathy angle adds here that any other "frequency" technobabble couldn't, but the dream sequences (with all that flying and flailing about) did allow the director to remind us that while her character may have been a bit flat, Marina Sirtis certainly wasn't.
Half the charm here stems from seeing the cast and make-up department conveying the crew's neurotransmitter deprivation, from Picard's lidded eyes and delayed reaction time to Troi's frazzled frizzled hair. That, and Guinan pacifying an angry mob by shooting off an absurdly oversized, gold-plated laser rifle she keeps under Ten Forward's counter for just such an occasion.
No, it makes absolutely no sense within the Enterprise's greater, very peaceful social context... but for once that just makes it all the more badass and hilarious at the same time.
______________________________________________________
Season four is where things got great. Leaving aside the character development and fleshing out the galaxy's political background, it's also where the show regained a sense of scale to its exploration angle, to those "new worlds and new civilizations" so we're no longer stuck dealing with one omnipotent space-god after another. Telepathic interjections aside, all three present dilemmas are ultimately resolved by material, naturalistic means: gravity manipulation, electromagnetic wavelength modulation, and good old-fashioned hydrogen just like grandma used to make. Apparently they finally secured some technical consulting because they even manage to shoehorn in some fancier real-world technobabble like "isozyme", "polymorphisms" and "Bayesian functions" in nearly appropriate contexts no less! - a far cry from Q snapping his fingers.
Also, true to its Utopian precepts, all three plots here lack an antagonist. They merely provide challenging phenomena. The space whales and 2D space fish are innocent by dint of lacking consciousness, and the alien telepaths in Night Terrors are themselves trapped and only unwittingly causing harm via their desperate dream broadcasts. In all three cases we're also supplied with a "hero of the week" episodic character to help the crew along: Troi's patient in The Loss, Geordi's imaginary love interest in Galaxy's Child, the shellshocked Betazoid in Night Terrors. This was Star Trek at its best: unraveling the mysteries of space anomalies, not merely personal drama or phaser light shows but object-driven plots delving the galaxy's great unknowns.
But while some of the repetition aided TNG's consistency and its particular thematic identity, it is a bit odd to see several episodes in a row clustered together, reusing nearly identical plot gimmicks. The family themes at the beginning of the fourth season, the Klingon plots toward its end, and here two episodes centering on Troi's telepathy, two with gravitational anomaly traps and two with energy-sapping to cripple the Enterprise's otherwise formidable problem-solving arsenal. Which is to say, its literal arsenal. Even at its best, the repetitive gimmickry of a TV serial asserted itself.
_____________________________________
Seriesdate: 4.10
The Loss
Help, we're under attack by a Windows screensaver!
 |
| Space invaders! Strafe for your lives! |
A shoal of 2-Dimensional fish are migrating toward an interstellar maelstrom, and dragging the Enterprise along with them... to its DOOOOOOOM !
Masters of suspense that TNG's crew were, they cautiously deferred showing us the rubber shark until 15 minutes into the show, and even then sparingly. Deanna instead takes up most of our time with her constant complaints about everyone noticing the fact that she's constantly complaining about the suspiciously coincidental loss of her Betazoid telepathy. On one hand, I appreciate the further corroboration of my oft-reiterated conviction that telepathy is a dead end for Science Fiction.
Deanna: "Right now, I feel as two-dimensional as our friends out there."
Either writers deliberately snuck self-commentary into the script or they accidentally scribbled their way into a vein of irony ore. Deanna Troi was a flat character from the start, partly because she was the show's designated damsel in distress and partly because she was defined by her telepathy, a superpower so super as to efface all other considerations. Though being a central character the progression stood out less from episode to episode as it did for her mother's seasonal appearances, it bears mentioning Deanna's own character growth entailed much the same process of downplaying the mind-reading or coming up with plot devices to nullify it for an episode's duration. No other main character required the same lathing away of their principal attributes. Data didn't need to negate his android circuitry as the seasons wore on. Picard didn't need to lose his captain's pips. Geordi didn't need to forget everything he ever knew about engineering. Guinan didn't need to become less of a font of ancient wisdom. The only characters whose later appearances followed the same pattern in downplaying their core elements were the likes of Wesley Crusher or Q, space wizards completely out of place even among Star Trek's very soft scientific precepts.
But the change in Troi's behavior comes across as much too abrupt. Despite her distressed damsel predilections, as ship's barometer of sanity she should have maintained a great deal more calm in the face of her own incapacitation.
_______________________________________________________
Seriesdate: 4.16
Galaxy's Child
The one with the baby space whale.
 |
| Shall I initiate the harpoons, captain? |
I love it, and I loved it when I was ten years old too. The special effects were damn good for their day, and the writing doesn't belabor its nonsensical storytelling conventions (like "asteroid belts" so closely packed as to look like gravel driveways) used to prop up the grand image of asteroid-chewing space whales. The "sour the milk" solution stuck with me as a classic SciFi plot gimmick. I'm also amused by some lines' delivery, like Picard's somewhat too decisive response to Worf:
Worf: "What action should we take, sir?"
Picard: "None, lieutenant. None at all."
- exactly 30 minutes into a 45-minute show with commercial breaks. No Jean-Luc, I think you're going to take exactly fourteen minutes plus end credits' worth of action. Or, later:
Data: "At their current speed, sir, the entities will intercept us in: ten minutes, thirty-one seconds."
- delivered seven minutes before the final credits. I wonder if they'll make it!
But what I didn't remember was the entire A-plot unfortunately being sidelined in favor of interpersonal hand-wringing on Geordi's part, as he finally gets to meet the woman of his dreams on whom he based his holodeck houri back in season 3... only for her to pre-emptively put him down at every turn. But that's a topic for another day. Today's all about the space encounters.
______________________________________________________
Seriesdate: 4.17
Night Terrors
Another memorable line:
"Eyes in the dark. One moon circles."
 |
| Oh, we're eyeing the moon alright... |
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a band of brave adventurers find a derelict ship, its crew mysteriously murdered, with a single shell-shocked survivor mumbling gibberish whose deciphering holds the only key to survival. Dun-dun-duuuuuuUUUNNN !
(Also everybody except Troi's turning homicidal from... lack of REM sleep. (Okay, sure, why not. Still beats "subatomic bacteria."))
Once again, as in The Loss, the Enterprise is caught in a gravitational pull with Deanna's personal predicament inexplicably central to the issue. Once again, as in Galaxy's Child, the ship's power supply is being sapped. This time around they need to blow up a paradimensional potluck by pouring acid into water. Or something. Oh, right, one moon circling = hydrogen! Interdimensional dream telegrams are preventing them from entering REM sleep and only the ship's telepath is receiving on the right dream "frequency" to communicate and coordinate both ships supplying reactive materials. Don't ask me what the telepathy angle adds here that any other "frequency" technobabble couldn't, but the dream sequences (with all that flying and flailing about) did allow the director to remind us that while her character may have been a bit flat, Marina Sirtis certainly wasn't.
Half the charm here stems from seeing the cast and make-up department conveying the crew's neurotransmitter deprivation, from Picard's lidded eyes and delayed reaction time to Troi's frazzled frizzled hair. That, and Guinan pacifying an angry mob by shooting off an absurdly oversized, gold-plated laser rifle she keeps under Ten Forward's counter for just such an occasion.
No, it makes absolutely no sense within the Enterprise's greater, very peaceful social context... but for once that just makes it all the more badass and hilarious at the same time.
______________________________________________________
Season four is where things got great. Leaving aside the character development and fleshing out the galaxy's political background, it's also where the show regained a sense of scale to its exploration angle, to those "new worlds and new civilizations" so we're no longer stuck dealing with one omnipotent space-god after another. Telepathic interjections aside, all three present dilemmas are ultimately resolved by material, naturalistic means: gravity manipulation, electromagnetic wavelength modulation, and good old-fashioned hydrogen just like grandma used to make. Apparently they finally secured some technical consulting because they even manage to shoehorn in some fancier real-world technobabble like "isozyme", "polymorphisms" and "Bayesian functions" in nearly appropriate contexts no less! - a far cry from Q snapping his fingers.
Also, true to its Utopian precepts, all three plots here lack an antagonist. They merely provide challenging phenomena. The space whales and 2D space fish are innocent by dint of lacking consciousness, and the alien telepaths in Night Terrors are themselves trapped and only unwittingly causing harm via their desperate dream broadcasts. In all three cases we're also supplied with a "hero of the week" episodic character to help the crew along: Troi's patient in The Loss, Geordi's imaginary love interest in Galaxy's Child, the shellshocked Betazoid in Night Terrors. This was Star Trek at its best: unraveling the mysteries of space anomalies, not merely personal drama or phaser light shows but object-driven plots delving the galaxy's great unknowns.
But while some of the repetition aided TNG's consistency and its particular thematic identity, it is a bit odd to see several episodes in a row clustered together, reusing nearly identical plot gimmicks. The family themes at the beginning of the fourth season, the Klingon plots toward its end, and here two episodes centering on Troi's telepathy, two with gravitational anomaly traps and two with energy-sapping to cripple the Enterprise's otherwise formidable problem-solving arsenal. Which is to say, its literal arsenal. Even at its best, the repetitive gimmickry of a TV serial asserted itself.
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Folie à Dorks
"Should I choose a noble occupation
If I did I'd only show up late and
Sick, and they would stare at me with hatred
Plus my only natural talent's wasted
On my alcoholic friends"
Dresden Dolls - My Alcoholic Friends
I've been dropping in on the webcomic Weregeek now and then to see whether any creativity shines through its continued descent into lowest-common-denominator relationship plots. The current storyline about dating drama would point to no. However, the latest couple of pages caught my attention. The hero's asked by his shrink why he would be ashamed of having geeky hobbies when he enjoys them so much. We're treated to an image of his stereotypical sports-mad bad dad and the hero's sad face at the thought of being called a loser - then his wistfully happy face at remembering how all his LARPer friends commend his LARPing. Well, no shit they do. I don't doubt most people at Jonestown would have been perfectly willing to compliment the gastronomic virtues of cyanide as well. And, while LARPers' crossbows may be made of Nerf, there persists a mutually-reinforcing tyranny of consensus, an unsavory air of argumentum ad populum to seeking validation from fellow participants. You're not a plucky rebel or a martyr if you limit your sphere of interaction to those patting you on the back, if you narrow your world until the whole world sings your praises.
And hey, far be it from me to put down geeky pursuits. I spend as much time as I can immersed in video games and SciFi. Any hobby's virtues could be argued from a rational standpoint. Maybe it fills some atavistic need harmlessly instead of letting it sublimate, maybe it's more complex or proactive than merely sitting in front of the idiot box, maybe it's a way to challenge oneself intellectually or ethically, or immerse oneself in unfamiliar modes of thought thereby exercising mental flexibility, maybe simulated, rule-governed interactions are more honest than the alternative, maybe the escapism is necessary in this shithole of a world. Whatever. Unfortunately any subculture has the potential to preclude value judgments or the faculties of reason altogether and devolve into primitive tribalism. Goths, LARPers, furries, trekkies, bronies, juggalos, whatever the decade, whatever the fetish, once you've defined yourself as a brick in the opposite wall, then how appreciative are you really of the activity itself and how dependent on your fellow bricks, your social status props, the people clamping your endorphin drip?
Are you a social drinker?
If I did I'd only show up late and
Sick, and they would stare at me with hatred
Plus my only natural talent's wasted
On my alcoholic friends"
Dresden Dolls - My Alcoholic Friends
I've been dropping in on the webcomic Weregeek now and then to see whether any creativity shines through its continued descent into lowest-common-denominator relationship plots. The current storyline about dating drama would point to no. However, the latest couple of pages caught my attention. The hero's asked by his shrink why he would be ashamed of having geeky hobbies when he enjoys them so much. We're treated to an image of his stereotypical sports-mad bad dad and the hero's sad face at the thought of being called a loser - then his wistfully happy face at remembering how all his LARPer friends commend his LARPing. Well, no shit they do. I don't doubt most people at Jonestown would have been perfectly willing to compliment the gastronomic virtues of cyanide as well. And, while LARPers' crossbows may be made of Nerf, there persists a mutually-reinforcing tyranny of consensus, an unsavory air of argumentum ad populum to seeking validation from fellow participants. You're not a plucky rebel or a martyr if you limit your sphere of interaction to those patting you on the back, if you narrow your world until the whole world sings your praises.
And hey, far be it from me to put down geeky pursuits. I spend as much time as I can immersed in video games and SciFi. Any hobby's virtues could be argued from a rational standpoint. Maybe it fills some atavistic need harmlessly instead of letting it sublimate, maybe it's more complex or proactive than merely sitting in front of the idiot box, maybe it's a way to challenge oneself intellectually or ethically, or immerse oneself in unfamiliar modes of thought thereby exercising mental flexibility, maybe simulated, rule-governed interactions are more honest than the alternative, maybe the escapism is necessary in this shithole of a world. Whatever. Unfortunately any subculture has the potential to preclude value judgments or the faculties of reason altogether and devolve into primitive tribalism. Goths, LARPers, furries, trekkies, bronies, juggalos, whatever the decade, whatever the fetish, once you've defined yourself as a brick in the opposite wall, then how appreciative are you really of the activity itself and how dependent on your fellow bricks, your social status props, the people clamping your endorphin drip?
Are you a social drinker?
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