Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Literary writers: Calls for submissions

Spotted on Twitter over the last six weeks.

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Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Have you seen inside the book 'To Climates Unknown'?

The alternate history novel To Climates Unknown by Arturo Serrano was released on November 25, the 400th anniversary of the mythical First Thanksgiving in what is today the United States. It asks: What if the Mayflower never made it? I've got a hardcover at home, and I want to show you how cool it is. Never mind a summary — let me show you some scenes.

Book cover of TO CLIMATES UNKNOWN by Arturo Serrano

Part 1

      “...palace, I was the best köçek.” He took two spoons from a side table and started clanking them in his hands. “I learned to charm the eyes of a man like no harem ever can,” he added, gradually twirling his shoulders and tracing endless circles with his hips. “I sweetened the weary days of palace officials and ministers.” The rhythmic sound of the spoons became hypnotic, and he moved around the dining table with a gracefulness that should have been impossible for his massive frame.
      “You’ve made your point, Signor Fulla,” said Brigitte, but he continued dancing, oblivious to their astonished stares.
To Climates Unknown, Part 1: '...palace, I was the best köçek.. He took two spoons from a side table and started clanking them in his hands. 'I learned to charm the eyes of a man like no harem ever can,' he added, gradually twirling his shoulders and tracing endless circles with his hips. 'I sweetened the weary days of palace officials and ministers.' The rhythmic sound of the spoons became hypnotic, and he moved around the dining table with a gracefulness that should have been impossible for his massive frame. 'You’ve made your point, Signor Fulla,' said Brigitte, but he continued dancing, oblivious to their astonished stares.

Part 2

      “...nature of time, the properties of divine foreknowledge, the number of types of the gift of grace, the limits of unaided human choice, the truth value of counterfactual claims, every shred of Scriptural evidence, and the other side’s counterarguments. It was fascinating, but exhausting.”
      “Were any new doctrines formulated?” asked René, with evident excitement.
      “That is not what philosophy is for! Now pay attention, Monsieur du Perron, to what I’m trying to explain to you.”
To Climates Unknown, Part 2: '...nature of time, the properties of divine foreknowledge, the number of types of the gift of grace, the limits of unaided human choice, the truth value of counterfactual claims, every shred of Scriptural evidence, and the other side’s counterarguments. It was fascinating, but exhausting.' 'Were any new doctrines formulated?' asked René, with evident excitement. 'That is not what philosophy is for! Now pay attention, Monsieur du Perron, to what I’m trying to explain to you.'

Part 3

      “A mirror?” asked Christian.
      “He’s thinking of Archimedes,” said Sophie. “He used reflected sunlight to burn enemy ships.”
      The king turned toward her, greatly surprised. “And why aren’t we doing that?”
To Climates Unknown, Part 3: 'A mirror?' asked Christian. 'He’s thinking of Archimedes,' said Sophie. 'He used reflected sunlight to burn enemy ships.' The king turned toward her, greatly surprised. 'And why aren’t we doing that?'

Part 4

      ...that formed the Forbidden City. The way he stared at her across the desk was unmistakable: he had more serious matters to think of, and she should be prepared to offer an acceptable excuse to merit his attention.
      “Agent Ma Liang, I have just wasted hours of work reviewing your assignment history. The picture that this office has of you is that of an efficient, resourceful, and loyal member. Did we miss a side of you that you were hiding until now?”
To Climates Unknown, Part 4: that formed the Forbidden City. The way he stared at her across the desk was unmistakable: he had more serious matters to think of, and she should be prepared to offer an acceptable excuse to merit his attention. 'Agent Ma Liang, I have just wasted hours of work reviewing your assignment history. The picture that this office has of you is that of an efficient, resourceful, and loyal member. Did we miss a side of you that you were hiding until now?'

Part 5

      Azlor’s voice shook as he asked, “For how long have they been hiding this machine?” He tried to retrace mentally the milestones in the ascent of the Canutic Empire, knowing that everyone in the room was doing the same exercise, afraid to venture a number of years, feeling the seed of anger sprout from fertile speculations.
      “Are you suggesting,” asked Gerbaut, “that this is why our ships vanish?”
To Climates Unknown, Part 5: Azlor’s voice shook as he asked, 'For how long have they been hiding this machine?' He tried to retrace mentally the milestones in the ascent of the Canutic Empire, knowing that everyone in the room was doing the same exercise, afraid to venture a number of years, feeling the seed of anger sprout from fertile speculations. 'Are you suggesting,' asked Gerbaut, 'that this is why our ships vanish?'

Part 6

      “Neema, are you awake? Please open the door.”
      She had never had an interest in poetry. What she had started writing had no name yet, but it felt necessary to her. Everything was poured through her quill: the wars of Vedic gods, the laws of motion, the rivers of Brazil, the moons of Saturn, declensions in Ottoman, the alloys of tin, Canutic dynasties, the burning of Tenochtitlán, the strange animals of Encoberta, the months of the Hebrew calendar, every single lake in Novadania...
      “Neema, today we’re teaching the refraction of light. I need some silver paper. Can you open the door?”
To Climates Unknown, Part 6: 'Neema, are you awake? Please open the door.' She had never had an interest in poetry. What she had started writing had no name yet, but it felt necessary to her. Everything was poured through her quill: the wars of Vedic gods, the laws of motion, the rivers of Brazil, the moons of Saturn, declensions in Ottoman, the alloys of tin, Canutic dynasties, the burning of Tenochtitlán, the strange animals of Encoberta, the months of the Hebrew calendar, every single lake in Novadania... 'Neema, today we’re teaching the refraction of light. I need some silver paper. Can you open the door?'

Part 7

      “What happens to someone who is hit by this bomb?” asked Gediminas, and Gilberto’s face stiffened.
      Yakub wanted to ask what unspoken disagreement existed between Gilberto and his secretary, but didn’t think it was the right moment. “Those at the center of the explosion simply disappear. Their bodies turn to nothing. It may not even hurt; I don’t know.”
To Climates Unknown, Part 7: 'What happens to someone who is hit by this bomb?' asked Gediminas, and Gilberto’s face stiffened. Yakub wanted to ask what unspoken disagreement existed between Gilberto and his secretary, but didn’t think it was the right moment. 'Those at the center of the explosion simply disappear. Their bodies turn to nothing. It may not even hurt; I don’t know.'

This is the book

Bookshop will ship it within the US. The ebook is on Kobo. Yes, also Amazon. Exquisite book.

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Tuesday, November 30, 2021

What do we value when we value ignorance and hypocrisy?

Ben Smith's article in the New York Times (November 28, 2021) observes that it's easier to handle "an information crisis...than a political one." Some "well-meaning communications experts" have tended to believe, Smith writes, that "if only responsible journalists and technologists could explain how misguided Mr. Trump’s statements were, surely the citizenry would come around." Unfortunately, they "never quite understood that the people who liked him knew what was going on, laughed about it and voted for him despite, or perhaps even because of, the times he went 'too far.'" And that is still how they feel. It's not a lack of information. Some people deliberately choose falsehood. That is their politics.

On that note... Spotted on Twitter, an argument:

"Hemry, Local Bartender" says: People who take health precautions during pandemic — vaccines, masks — tend to assume that people who deliberately avoid these precautions are missing some information. But maybe they just understand any sort of public health measure as totalitarian. For them, there are no shades of lockdown. Their values might be "completely withdrawn from the social compact." When others incorrectly assume that they have certain values, it further "violently alienates them." And there may be nothing you can do to change their minds. You can't give them values like empathy and solidarity. As long as they lack relevant values, you can't give them information (usefully organized facts for particular purposes). They will do nothing with the information.

Several days ago, I had a brief online exchange with a blogger (not Hemry; someone else). This blogger made a strange, incoherent argument. I've squinted at it trying to put it into some logical order. Roughly, this was his position. This is as coherent as I can possibly make it.

He says: (1) Our ethical choices are “authentic” only if we have total individual freedom. When we instead constrain ourselves to manage collective risk, we’re focusing on an abstraction. It’s a hyperobject whose justification we don’t fully understand. Since we don’t understand it, we’re not making a truly ethical choice. We’re only ethical when we make choices whose extended ramifications we fully understand.

He also says: (2) There is a coronavirus, but people don’t die of it. They die, instead, of unspecified “political and economic” causes that are being blamed on the virus. Therefore, transmitting the virus is “solidarity.” (I guess his reasoning is that, if enough of us get the virus — as if over 260 million confirmed cases and over 5 million deaths worldwide is not yet enough evidence — we will eventually realize the true political and economic causes of other people's deaths? Seems to be a kind of scientific experiment to isolate variables?)

(1) and (2) are apparently contradictory, though. (1) says not to act on things you don't understand. (2) says let's run a biology experiment on each other and deliberately give each other disease to find out why 5 million people are said to have already died of that disease so that we can better understand it. That’s this guy's value system. That's "ethical engagement" (1) and "solidarity" (2) to him. In a sense, the contradiction — the hypocrisy — is what he values.

I think that is similar to what Hemry the Bartender points out.

Then, this: Not everyone on the right believes in total individual freedom all the time, of course. There are right-wing arguments for imposing restrictions on many people's bodies. Notably, they generally want to restrict a woman's right to choose abortion. Upon reading Michelle Goldberg's article in the New York Times yesterday, a related question posed itself to me this way: Is it that some people sincerely believe that totalitarian coercion ought to apply to some people and not others (e.g. women of childbearing age and not men), or are they deliberately, strategically hypocritical because hypocrisy proves to be a successful political strategy for them? In other words, do they sincerely hold any ideals, or do they just seek power?

"It's standard bully behavior for a bully to always cast themselves as the victim of their own behavior. It's standard behavior of an abuser to reverse the victim and offender, to claim the people they dehumanize are dehumanizing them by resisting them, to claim that what they are doing to others is being done to them. Doing so demonstrates the supremacist belief that only supremacists matter. Hypocrisy is a virtue to a supremacist.

We should know this very well by now, but all the same we seem persistently immune, culturally speaking, to this knowledge."

— A.R. Moxon, Apology Not Accepted, The Reframe, Nov 3, 2024

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Friday, November 19, 2021

Four podcasts that teach about a broad range of topics

The Very Short Introductions Podcast "Launched by Oxford University Press in 1995, Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects — from Public Health to Buddhist Ethics, Soft Matter to Classics, and Art History to Globalization." See if the topics interest you! Ologies "Alie Ward is a Daytime Emmy Award-winning science correspondent for CBS’s "The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation with Mo Rocca,” and host of “Did I Mention Invention?” on the CW. She hosts "Ologies," a comedic science show named one of Time Magazine’s top 50 podcasts." You're Wrong About Hosts: Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall. As described by Wikipedia, "the show explores misunderstood media events interrogating why and how the public got things wrong." This Day in Esoteric Political History
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Thursday, November 18, 2021

Several books of literary criticism, with focus on African-American fiction and metafiction

Here are several books that were recommended in a study of African-American metafiction.

"In From Behind the Veil, Robert Stepto shows that the history of African American literature has been a movement toward the invention of a self-authenticating voice. In Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative, Valerie Smith traces the development of voice from nineteenth-century autobiography, illustrating the resilience and adaptability of first-person narration. Gayl Jones [in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature] makes ‘freeing the voice’ the central trope of her study of the oral tradition in African American literature.” Madelyn Jablon. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. University of Iowa Press, 1997. p. 112.

More books that Jablon mentions: .

Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture Clarence Major, The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Here's Jablon's book:

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Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Against ecological catastrophe, all of humanity should be playing on the same side

Two recent podcast episodes that mention climate change, on the periphery, but in nuanced ways.

First, this episode of the Rachel Maddow show, "Steven Bannon indicted (again), giving new teeth to January 6th Committee" (13 November 2021). It is guest-hosted by Ali Velshi. At the end, climate activist Bill McKibben is interviewed about the failures at the COP26 climate conference. Velshi quotes an 11-page online article from McKibben's Substack blog: "It's gone from talking about phasing out coal to phasing out unabated coal, from talking about ending fossil-fuel subsidies to ending inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies. And on the deepest question, how much and how fast we're planning to cut emissions heating the planet, there's been no real advance." McKibben responds that the COP26 conference in Glasgow was hampered by U.S. politics. "Truly, this is not what people had hoped for. We're not catching up to the physics of global warming at this pace." (41:40–41:45) "For folks who don't think this is existential" — that is, not an emergency — "we're making progress" since any tiny incremental improvement, by definition, counts as progress over whatever we had before. "But better progress doesn't matter if the Earth is going to flood and burn." (43:00–43:17) McKibben responds: "Here's our problem: Most political questions that we talk about, we solve at some level by compromises. The problem with climate change is: it's not quite like that. The real debate that's going on isn't Republicans vs. Democrats, or industry vs. environmentalists, or Americans vs. Chinese. Those are all important subjects. But the real underlying debate is: Human beings versus physics. And the problem with that debate is: Physics is immature. It refuses to compromise. It doesn't know how to negotiate at all. It just does what it wants to do. And our job is to meet its challenge. The scientists have told us that if we wanted to meet those temperature targets we set in Paris which are a bare minimum for civilizational thriving then we have to cut emissions in half by 2030. That's possible. Scientists and engineers have done a great job in lowering the cost of solar power, wind power, and batteries to the point where this is the cheapest energy on the Planet Earth. But we still have to overcome both inertia and the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry which is on full display again in Glasgow. There are 500 fossil fuel lobbyists there; that's bigger than the delegation of any country gone to Glasgow."(43:18–44:42)

(Bannon, by the way, was described in Naomi Klein's 2023 book Doppelganger as "now a full-time propagandist for authoritarian and neofascist movements from Italy to Brazil.")

Second, this episode of the Ezra Klein show, "How Far-Right Extremism Invaded Mainstream Politics" (16 November 2021).

The historian Nicole Hemmer guest-hosts the episode. Her work "focuses on right-wing media and American politics. She is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University and the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics." Twitter: @PastPunditry. She is interviewing the historian Kathleen Belew, who co-edited A Field Guide to White Supremacy and wrote Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, "which tells the story of how groups — including the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and Aryan Nations — coalesced into a radical white-power movement after the Vietnam War. These groups were united by a core set of beliefs about the threats of demographic change and governmental overreach, perceived hostility toward white Americans and the necessity of extra-political, often violent, action to achieve their aims." Twitter: @kathleen_belew

How does a sense of victimization influence right-wing politics? Hemmer said that these are "increasingly extreme and increasingly apocalyptic politics. Right? Because if you constantly feel that you are being victimized, that something is being stolen from you, there is a level of emotion that comes along with that." (52:30–53:00) "Different kinds of 'end times' scenarios," including climate change, can influence that, Belew responded. (53:28-53:35) In reality, "we have a series of imminent threats to our way of life...We have intensely polarized conversations about what that is and what it means." Unfortunately, "we are not talking to each other about anything, right to left, anymore," and "we're consuming different narratives about the end of the world and different imaginaries about what the future might look like. We have not had the big conversation, collectively, about our history." (54:05–54:35)

"Is there a difference between the apocalypticism around demographic change and the apocalypticism around climate change?"
"I think one huge difference is where it directs our energy. A fear of climate change directs people to work together to solve common problems and creates an idea of global citizens who will have to face a crisis together or perish. At its most extreme, a fear of demographic change as we see in the white power movement causes people to encamp, to guard resources, to isolate, and to — at its most extreme — commit acts of violence against people they see as 'other.'" (55:45–56:25)

Both comments are making a similar point: Against ecological catastrophe, all of humanity should be playing on the same side.

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Tuesday, November 16, 2021

The value of strategic lying does not mean it is ethical to lie

In Gordon Bonnet's post "Shame, Lying, and Archie Bunker" (Skeptophilia blog, November 9, 2021), he resurfaced a 2013 opinion piece. Creationists, specifically David F. Coppedge for Creation Evolution Headlines, responded to a 2013 science paper, "Cooperation Creates Selection for Tactical Deception," by Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson. They titled the response "Evolutionists Confess to Lying." In that response, they argue (as Bonnet paraphrased it)

that because the paper supports an evolutionary edge for people who are deceptive, it is equivalent to the evolutionary biologists stating, 'Ha ha! We were lying all along!'
Image by PicsbyFran from Pixabay

The creationists' response is interesting — in an embarrassing way, as Bonnet points out.

Of course, there's a crucial distinction between descriptive and normative accounts of behavior: observing what people actually do, contrasted with judging what they ought to do. When scientists talk about "survival of the fittest," they are speaking descriptively. (This bears saying, unfortunately, endless millions of times.) Obviously, lying is sometimes a tactical advantage, especially when you are no longer trying to build up a reciprocally altruistic relationship but you are instead prepared to consider this your "final interaction," steal the bag, and go home. Lying, stealing, etc. can be lucrative in the short-term and in the long-term, but that doesn't mean you should do it, since what is lucrative — for yourself, for your offspring, for your social group — is not always ethical. That is, I'd say, definitional/axiomatic regarding the meaning of ethics. The word "ethics" exists to mean something different from "self-interest," and neither word is identical with "natural selection" (since sacrifices may contribute to the group's survival, so they can be simultaneously altruistic and self-interested).

Fundamentalist theists often point to a book and say: That's ethics, right there. You don't have a holy book? Then you have no ethics. The secular humanist may respond that ethics is a very complicated discourse that exists in the world as a function of human thought and behavior, but such a statement does not satisfy the fundamentalist and only generates the response: See, you are ignorant. You can't point to "ethics" as a concrete thing that fits in a shoebox. Therefore, you have no ethics at all.

Creationists routinely misrepresent descriptions of natural selection as recommendations for what humans ought to do. However, evolutionary pressures might be better understood as a constraint: sometimes they help determine what ethics is (insofar as they promote survival and group loyalty), but sometimes we have to fight against them to live ethically (caring about others). Our brains are wired to do something (e.g. fight or flight), while our conscious ethical choices seek a better outcome (e.g. nonviolent elimination of the threat, which takes time and thought). Whatever has helped humans survive throughout a long evolutionary past, dating back to when we were amoebas or whatever, isn't identical with what we consider ethical behavior right now.

Under certain assumptions of "intelligent design" whereby God determines human interests and human ethics and also guides evolution, self-interest might equate to ethics — since, under that worldview, God could choose whatever he liked and make it come to pass. This would eliminate the need for ethical discourse, as then we would only be obligated to say and do whatever increased our own bank accounts, because, according to God's rules in this alternate reality thought experiment, selfish behavior is good behavior by definition. Then we could say that, if God had wanted us to behave in some other way, he would have made survival feel less wonderful. But no one is claiming this. Not "intelligent design" creationists (I don't imagine?), and not atheists, either, rather few of whom are amoralists.

Refusing or being "unable to distinguish between truth and lies" is the definition of a bullshitter (per Harry Frankfurt), not a liar. If no human being could distinguish truth from lies, no one could choose to lie; no scientist could identify someone else's lying as a conscious strategy (since it's not conscious); and no scientist could analyze their unconscious choice either, since (as Bonnet pointed out in ALL CAPS in his blog post) if the scientist doesn't know which statements are false, they can't analyze the outcomes of making true and false statements.

How does a person even go from the obvious truism of sometimes people lie for strategic gain to the misinterpretation/oversimplification of these falsehoods are always told unconsciously, i.e. people never know when they're 'lying' to the outright non sequitur of if you believe that, then you also believe there is no way for any third party to evaluate what is true or false because there is no objective reality?

The fundamentalists' rhetorical question "How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?" is not asked seriously. Simply identifying an influence or a tendency doesn't mean it can't be overcome. The same question could be turned around at the Christians: "How can anyone overcome what Satan is telling them to do?" and they would similarly dispense of it: Apparently we humans just ARE able to make choices. Because pointing out a specific existing force should not immediately lead to a discussion of determinism/free will. If someone wants to talk about materialism/idealism implying determinism/free will, OK, but the mere pronunciation of the word "evolution" needn't always take us there. If someone feels that determinism/free will is the only philosophical or scientific debate that matters, that's fine for them regarding their own special interest, but their urge to steer the debate in that direction doesn't reflect anything inherent in the word "evolution."

The fundamentalists' rhetorical question "How can [the atheists] know what is true?" is yet another deflection. The same question could be turned around at Christians. Christians ask how atheists/scientists know what is true; similarly, a scientist might ask how a theologian knows what is true. But right now, in this context, this debate is a deflection because knowledge sources weren't the original topic.

Neither of these two epistemological questions — How can anyone overcome a tendency? How does anyone know what's true? — inherently privilege theism/creationism over atheism/science, so Christian fundamentalists aren't justified in "dismissing" all of science on the grounds that atheists/scientists are "deceivers" about the very nature of truth and self-knowledge. Christian fundamentalists can try asking those two epistemological questions about their own worldview and see what happens. But, of course, it is the nature of fundamentalism to be unable to interrogate itself and to dismiss opponents out of the starting gate.

Around 2016 various philosophers started describing Trump using Frankfurt’s technical sense of bullshit. But then it was pointed out Trump isn’t even a bullshitter: he doesn’t see propositions as truth-tracking at all. He sees words as things you just arrange in whatever way will ‘win’ an exchange.

[image or embed]

— Patrick Stokes (@patstokes.bsky.social) May 31, 2024 at 6:09 PM

If you like this stuff, go over to Gordon Bonnet's Skeptophilia blog and press the "Follow" button in the sidebar, please.

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Wyoming Republican Party: Politicians can't challenge the party line

In January 2021, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as chair of the House Republican Conference, voted along with the majority of House representatives (232–197) to impeach President Trump for "incitement of insurrection." On February 9, the state party in Wyoming passed a resolution to censure Cheney for this vote. (The U.S. Senate acquitted Trump several days later.)

Despite being censured by her party, Cheney went on to serve as Vice Chair of the House January 6th Committee which investigates the insurrection. In November 2021, the Wyoming Republican Party voted to cease recognizing Cheney as a party member, citing the language it had used in its February censure.

This outcome is hardly surprising, but what I want to note here is the odd language use by the Wyoming party. The party said that evidence for impeachment needs to be "quantifiable" (clearly, it does not, since not all evidence is expressible in numbers) as well as "undisputed" (which again, it does not, since if it were undisputed there would be no purpose of a House vote on whether to bring charges, nor of a Senate trial regarding the charges. Precisely because the truth might eternally remain disputed, the majority decision is used to determine the outcome.)

So how should we make sense of what the Wyoming Republican Party is saying? Looks like they really mean: All Republican politicians are expected to have a united front; they are not permitted to dispute the position that their party's leadership assumes for them.

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Monday, November 15, 2021

Castration in 'The Temple of My Familiar' by Alice Walker

Two stories in Alice Walker's 1989 novel The Temple of My Familiar discuss castration.

The first is an origin myth of womb envy that leads to misogyny.

"What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man's mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women." The men try "to show their worshipful intent" and bring the women "feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws" (since the women are mostly vegetarian and don't cultivate hunting skills). The men finally observe "that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves," and the men raise the boys. Finally they discover "that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had." The men chose to become priests, "that they could be the ones through whom life passed! They began to operate on themselves, cutting off and flinging away their maleness, and trying to fashion a hole through which life could come." The men died, and they learned to "cut off the balls," and "not the whole of the genitals," and to abandon the task of creating "the hole through which life passes." Instead: "What they remembered was that they must be like women, and if they castrated themselves at a certain age — the time of puberty, when they chose or were chosen for the priesthood — they could sound like woman and speka to the universe in woman's voice." This was the meaning of being a priest in those days. With these castrations, their pain seemed to last longer than women's pain in childbirth, and they complained and resented women, developing "hatred of woman."

Mr. Hal tells a story:

"Lulu was the name Lissie had had when she was part of a harem in the northern pan of Africa... how happy she was in the harem, because themaster was old and sickly and had hundreds of women it tired him just to see, not to mention to try to do anything to, and Lissie (Lulu) had had two lovers. One of them was another woman in the harem, named Fadpa, and the other was one of the eunuchs, named Habisu, whose job it was to keep the women from running away. They used to all sit around and plot about how to run away together, but Habisu was afraid to leave the safety of the harem, and he liked the sweets the women shared with him and the colorful clothing he got to wear. He was from a poor family, and he thought it wasn't such a bad thing to give up his nuts for such pleasant room and board. Now I don't know whether this was really the truth or whether Lissie was committing slander on poor Habisu." Eventually Lulu and Fadpa "became devoutly religious" and "could perform miracles." They prayed for their freedom for 80 years and were finally freed from the harem at ages 96 and 103." In a different part of the story, later, he says: "I could see in her [Lissie's] eyes the hundreds of times she had suffered in giving birth, and I swore it would never happen again, and my desire for her, for sex with her or with any woman, died, and I became a eunuch myself. I just knew I would never be able to deal with making love to a woman ever again."

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UN Secretary-General on COP26 conference: 'We did not achieve these goals'

As reported by Annabelle Timsit in The Washington Post yesterday:

“We must end fossil fuel subsidies, phase out coal, put a price on carbon, protect vulnerable communities from the impacts of climate change and make good on $100 billion climate finance commitment to support developing countries,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in a video after the agreement won approval from nearly 200 nations. “We did not achieve these goals at this conference...”
George Monbiot wrote that,:
just as the complex natural systems on which our lives depend can flip suddenly from one state to another, so can the systems that humans have created. Our social and economic structures share characteristics with the Earth systems on which we depend. They have self-reinforcing properties – that stabilise them within a particular range of stress, but destabilise them when external pressure becomes too great. Like natural systems, if they are driven past their tipping points, they can flip with astonishing speed. Our last, best hope is to use those dynamics to our advantage, triggering what scientists call “cascading regime shifts”.

A fascinating paper published in January in the journal Climate Policy showed how we could harness the power of “domino dynamics”: non-linear change, proliferating from one part of the system to another. It points out that “cause and effect need not be proportionate”, a small disturbance, in the right place, can trigger a massive response from a system and flip it into a new state.

Monbiot says: "We could use this property to detonate positive change." With actions today, "small interventions by government could trigger cascading change." While "we should never underestimate the power of incumbency, and the lobbying efforts that an antiquated industry will use to keep itself in business," change is possible.

But that change did not come from COP26.

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Friday, November 12, 2021

Found on Twitter: People crowdsource book recommendations

Seen on Twitter recently. People ask for book recommendations. Click into the thread and you'll see the replies.

Eugene Ivanov artwork
Čeština: Nebeská etapa, 2007. Art by Eugene Ivanov. Creative Commons license

Google doc: Wandering, Meditative, Plotless [or Peripatetic] Books

Google doc: Poetic, Beautiful, Slim novels

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Saturday, November 6, 2021

Pink News explains the problems with the BBC's coverage of trans topics

Yesterday, Pink News published this Twitter thread. It explains why people are upset about recent BBC coverage of trans topics.

Please also note that the BBC made this podcast series.

Update: Here's what's happening at the New York Times in 2023:

"The New York Times is racked with internal dissent over internal dissent — a development stemming from multiple open letters sent last week to newspaper management taking issue with the paper’s recent coverage of transgender youth.

* * *

The NewsGuild of New York, which represents Times journalists, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that Times employees have been called into 'investigatory meetings' related to their participation as signatories. An informed source says that disciplinary actions are underway.

The tough talk from management prompted a rebuke from Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild, which is in the midst of contentious collective bargaining negotiations with the Times. The coherence of the don’t-attack-your-colleagues rule is questionable, noted DeCarava, since the paper in 2020 published a critique by op-ed columnist Bret Stephens of the Times’s own 1619 Project."

— "The New York Times newsroom is splintering over a trans coverage debate." (unpaywalled) Opinion by Erik Wemple. Washington Post. 24 Feb 2023.

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