Elf Sternberg

Donella Meadow's "Thinking in Systems" naively parrots a White Supremacist talking point

Mon, 20 May 2024 15:17:45 GMT

The Tragedy of Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems.

This week, I’ve been reading Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems, because I wanted to wrap my head around the ideas that involve systems thinking and understand it better. And until about halfway through the book, it was holding to some pretty basic examples, and it was doing a fine job of convincing me that it had valuable ideas.

There was one thing that gave me pause, but it wasn’t about her thinking. She writes about New England forestry, and how ever since the Civil War the industry there has experience a predictable 40-year cycle of boom and bust, because the entire industry is trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma: either they over-log and destroy the forests’ ability to produce lumber at a steady state, or they’re out-bid by their competitors who over-log, go under, and get bought by those some competitors. In hard times, some of them go under anyway, get bought, and create larger holdings, until those holdings are shattered by bankruptcy in the next cycle.

In this story, I want to understand the system that creates this problem: the political forces that prevent the lumber industry from collectively reaching an optimal “steady state” of forestry.

The book states that there are four common meta-states for any exploitation of a natural resource:

an unharvested condition, in which humans aren’t exploiting it, and it produces at maximum

the optimal harvest, in which we harvest from it at a state that leaves it capable of sustaining itself. It produces less than its natural state, but as much as it can and produce a constant harvest for humans.

an over harvest, in which we harvest too much, its ability to reproduce new resources is damaged, the harvesters experience their own cut-back as a result, and then the resource recovers and new harvesters move in. This is the oscillating state.

an excessive harvest, in which so much of the resource is cut out that it cannot recover, not in a meaningful amount of time as humans understand it. This is the collapsed state.

About halfway through the book, though, Meadows does start to get into the political questions that influence such systems, and this is where I wanted to throw the book against the wall.

Because Garett Hardin

Because she quotes Garett Hardin approvingly and enthusiastically, and she embraces his ideas.

Garrett Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons. Most people have heard of it, but I’m going to tell you something you may not know: “The tragedy of the commons” did not, historically, exist. When Hardin wrote his essay, he invented the idea out of whole cloth, and his examples were entirely hypothetical.

Hardin invented the idea, and his examples, because he hated Black people.

Hardin was a straight up, unrepentant, loud and proud white supremacist. Meadows paraphrases one of his most offensive examples. She writes: “If every family can have any number of children it wants, but society as a whole has to support the cost of education, health care, and environmental protection for all children, the number of children born can exceed the capacity of society to support them all. (This is the example that caused Hardin to write his article.)”

It’s that parenthetical that caused my Book, Meet Wall moment.

Hardin wrote those ideas at a time when conversations about “How Black People Were Gonna Outbreed White People” was a part of daily conservative discourse. It was a meme that existed everywhere in the 1960s in rural and conservative America. It was on the radio, it was in church newsletters, it was every goddamned place. Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons to convince white people not to succumb to an empathetic view of Black people, but instead that we, the master race, should be prepared for ecological disaster and must be prepared to “throw the lesser races overboard” if civilization was to survive. In the meantime, welfare and school lunches and all that were just setting the stage for making that collapse happen sooner.

Meadows is quoting that idea, and does so approvingly.

Commons were real. Tragedies about them aren’t.

“But the tragedy of the commons, that’s real, isn’t it?”

No. It’s not. When you say that, you’re “thinking like a state,” as historian James Scott puts it.

Go back to before the invention of capitalism and the regulatory state. The word “commons” is the antithesis of what you and I call a “resource.” A commons was a shared communal source of subsistence that everyone within walking distance of it recognized as their responsibility to nurture. Grazing land, water, timber, fishing, game, all the natural resources that could be over-harvested were managed by local collective consensus to ensure that they weren’t. The means for deciding how that resources was shared, harvested, and accounted were local, idiosyncratic, tied up in the local history and local ecology, often unwritten, and based on there being little inequality among the families involved in the commons’ sustainability.

Commons weren’t “tragic”; commons (the resource and the communal awareness of it) were literally the means by which a town-and-farm community tied to a valley, to a region of arable land, to a river, or to a seafront, managed to keep themselves alive for generation after generation.

That’s what a commons is.

Several inventions combined in the 18th century to destroy the commons: gunpowder gave princes a far greater reach over which to impose their will; cartography and the new sciences of measurement and statistics gave those same princes the ability to “understand” their realm as a physical entity; and finally the invention of the limited liability corporation, the ability to impose one’s will at a distance using only money, created a relationship between princes and their banks that required a steady, reliable, comprehensible and uniform way of accounting for it all. The commons, with their local, quirky, “nobody owns that, how will you tax that?” nature, had to go. It all had to be standardized so the state’s accountants could account for it.

The commons were enclosed: parceled off and privatized. Formally recognized as belonging to the local lordling, not the people who depended on it. Rents could be extracted, and resources could be mined, and if the resource was exhausted, oh well, that’s not the lordling’s concern; he just needs money, he doesn’t have to be too concerned with how the peasants get it.

The Benefit of the Doubt

Hardin took a word and turned it into an attack on minorities because he thought they were “lesser races” who didn’t deserve the “largesse” of white people (it wasn’t largesse at all; black slaves built a lot of the 19th century USA and didn’t get paid for it, and white people continue to reap benefits from what those black hands built).

Meadows quotes not just Hardin’s erroneous idea, but Hardin’s vicious racist reasoning behind the idea, couched in a generic language that belies the conversation Hardin was participating in, and makes it central to one of the points she’s making.

She goes further, too, quoting Hardin’s three “alternatives” to tragedy: Educate, Privatize, and Regulate. She writes:

Some “primitive” cultures have managed common resources effectively for generations through education and exhortation. Garrett Hardin does not believe that option is dependable, however. Common resources protected only by tradition or an “honor system” may attract those who do not respect the tradition or who have no honor. Privatization works more reliably than exhortation…

As Ivan Illich has pointed out (note: PDF), those “primitives” didn’t manage through education and exhortation; they managed through regulation, on a local scale. Meadows is giving in to modern thinking here, trapped in her own experiences about how natural resources are created and distributed. Local communities had a fixed and limited range; even with good roads, an ox-drawn wagon can’t travel more than 80 miles before the animal has eaten more food than the wagon can profitably haul, and that’s been part of the human condition since the invention of the ox-drawn wagon. Privatization is a modern and radical change in the way people use and think about natural resources, and during the European transition of the 19th century hundreds of thousands of peasants were transformed from “stewards of the land” into wage laborers, cast into poverty, and often left to starve.

I really, really want to believe this is a case of naivete. Meadows died in 2001, so we can’t ask her, but her general politics in the book is a fairly anodyne liberal sort, with comfortable nods toward alternative families and abortion rights and so forth. And I really want to believe that her editors, who were all academics of the economic, macro-sociological sort, were unfamiliar with the context or meaning behind Hardin’s work.

An egregious and offensive error this big damages any arguments the book might be making. And that’s unfortunate, because the basics about systems thinking, its purpose, modeling, and uses, are really valuable and generic. I just wish I hadn’t hit this speedbump, or that she’d written it quite so enthusiastically.

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The Life-Changing Magic of Actually Reading What You've Bookmarked

Sat, 29 May 2021 19:02:57 GMT

I recently bought a new e-reader, the Kobo Aura 2 waterproof edition with the e-paper sheet and not a full-on LCD screen, with the intention of experimenting with its open-source nature, but I've also discovered something else: I've started to clear out my backlog of unread non-technical articles.

I have a list of bookmarks, hundreds long, of articles that I someday intend to read. Calibre is an e-book management program that runs nicely on Linux, although it's only usable with DRM-free books. Calibre has a number of plug-ins to help you manage your collections, some of those plug-ins will automatically collect news from a variety of sites, build them into EPUB documents, and notify you that they're ready to be transferred to your device of choice.

But if you want to read just one article on the web off-line, there are a few options: Pocket, Instapaper, Wallabag. But all of these seem to be, still, read it while you've got either a browser or a phone in hand. And as someone with a terrible distractability issue, having the browser or device available is a problem.

The Kobo has no web browser¹, and the response time for flipping pages is about the same as actually flipping a physical page. Moving articles onto the Kobo was a chore that involved a lot of hand-steps.

Then I discovered Niklas Gollenstede's EPub Creator. This has been utterly life-changing. It's a browser plug-in that works fantastically with Firefox. If I find an article I want to read later (or have to, because it came across my feed while I'm at work), I just click the EPub Creator button and it automatically bundles the article and feeds it into Calibre, which sees the origin and automatically puts it onto the Kobo's "Articles To Read" shelf. The next time I plug in the Kobo, which has to happen regularly just to charge it, it syncs that shelf and the articles are there, ready to read.

And there's nothing else on the Kobo to distract me (except for, well, other books and articles, of course). So I've been plowing through them, highlighting the details I want to review (which, by the way, syncs back to the desktop so I can review them there and add them to my notebook manager). It's been nothing short of life-changing to actually make progress on my tsundoku pile, and to turn unassimilated information into working knowledge.

¹ The Kobo actually does have a built-in browser, supposedly built on top of WebKit, the same engine in Chrome, but it's slow, terrible, and just does not do Javascript; it's mostly to help you get past the "sign up for X" pages on various libraries and bookstores.

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I oughta be a Sad Puppy

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 04:12:50 GMT

I ought to be a Sad Puppy.

No, I'm not a supporter of snot-nosed Vox Day's ridiculous and stupid campaign to overwrite the will of Hugo voters. I'm not going to say that he and his ilk deserve anything over than public opprobrium in the face of their self-serving and malign campaign to deprive the science fiction community of its next level up.

When it comes to what I like to read, well... I generally like what Baen has to offer. Sad, but true. I bounce off women writers more often than I do men, I like bad space opera and ridiculous tales of derring-do, and I cheer when the hero gets laid. One of my favorite writers is David Friggin Weber, which is about as silly as its sounds.

I'm a little more sensitive now that I was in my 20s. Admittedly, in my 20s I was living through the early Cyberpunk era and its post-New Wave backlash, which both embraced and attacked the mores and ethics of New Wave feminist SF 1970s. I wince if the story is too obviously written by a an old white guy who thinks a homogeneous, conservative version of Southern California in space!, where the men are men and the women are pliant, is paradise. But the truth is I'm an old white guy who likes reading stories written by other old white guys.

Which is why I really can't stand the Sad Puppy / Rabid Puppy thing at all. Look, boys, we're old. Like, really old. Kids these days are going to forge their own worlds, with their own stories, and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it. You can poison some awards processes and wreck a fine time you could have otherwise enjoyed. The kids will have this world long after we're gone, and the only thing we can do is try to hand off a world of faith, hope and caritas... or, in the case of the SP/RP crowd, a burning cinder, a hellscape fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.

Nobody is stopping anyone from writing. No one is preventing you from buying John C. Wright's books. (I wouldn't encourage anyone to give Wright money, though; his hackneyed, ridiculous style would disqualify him long before we start discussing his manifest personal cruelty.)

Go ahead, write the swash and the buckle. Just remember that you're outnumbered. Your niche rose to prominence because of the privileges we white, English-speaking guys had in the early 20th century. But in the age of the Internet, you are outnumbered, you are a minority, and you are an embarrassment if you continue to write with the kind of deft wit and narrative grace that brought Ken Robeson or Victor Appleton fame.

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Langhorne!

Thu, 26 May 2016 16:09:25 GMT

I've been reading David Weber's Safehold series. I can't recommend it unless you're an absolute Weber fan; it's pretty much the worst Weber fanservice I can imagine all rolled into a single, many-millions-of-words-long story. It's not really a work of modern fiction; it's more like an fable or apologue, a "moral story" in which the good guys are emphatically good, the bad guys are emphatically bad, and everyone in between is meant to highlight a point on the scale between grace and damnation.

The premise is ridiculous: the human race has been Wiped Out by an alien species that hates innovative competitors. In a classic "they hate us for our freedoms" parable, the first book has Captain Langhorne order the last human colony ships to race as far away from the battlefield as they can, find a habitable world, and create a new set of colonists brainwashed to believe in a singular, monotheistic religion with a very Catholic-like heirarchal setting, but designed with sins and punishments that theorically will prevent humans from ever innovating again, to avoid coming to the attention of the aliens. Everything is taught in terms of "preserving men's souls into heaven." Not only were the colonists brainwashed to believe in Langhorne's religion, but for the first century colonists interacted with Archangels who flew and had clearly divine powers and they all wrote down their testimonies. There is no competing religion, no alternative viewpoint, at all in this world.

Our hero, Nimue, wakes up a few centuries later to discover she's been embodies as an almost indestructible robot by rebels who want the human race to be freed of Langhorne's restrictions and take the fight back to the aliens. By now, the world is circa 16th century Earth, with sailing ships and all the rest, and it lets Weber do his Napoleonic Wars thing all over again.

It is very silly; we're expected to buy that Nimue's influence has the world going from the Battle of Cape Celidonia (1616) at the end of the first book to Appotmattox (1865) at the end of the 8th book in less than ten years.

But one thing really bothers me: to map our history to his setting, we have secular rulers who are secular rulers first. While it's unthinkable that anyone would defy The Church, and the absolute Truth of the Church is unshakable to 99% of the world, the kings and princes act as if they're just church believers like anyone else, and their duty to their kingdoms starts and stops with keeping the people alive and healthy. The church is separate from the state. There's even a republic in this world, with elections!

Which is ridiculous. Langhorne and his cronies, the "Archangels" who set up this world, knew better. In a society like this, the monarch's reign is acknowledged by the church, and would be believed "Blessed by God," and given the duty above all else of the corporate "preservation" of the nation, accountable not to The Church, but to God himself.

There would be no republic, because a republic requires republicans, leaders accountable to the people and their petty wants, rather than to God. Schism would be far harder. The excuse that our England-analogue is "on the other side of the planets, months away by sea" and therefore harder to oversee isn't credible; the Langhorne's Church not only failed in its duty in this generation, it failed in all its generations, from the first when the Archangels were around, to the present.

That's just one of many problems with the series, but it's the most subtle and yet, the most glaring.

Still, the series does swash and buckle nicely, if you're into that sort of thing.

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Nobility in the age of the Psychopath

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 05:38:39 GMT

I realized the other day that there's a line of thought in David Weber's Honor Harrington series that is never coherently explicated, but it's clearly there.

We, now, live in the Age of the Psychopath. Almost all the restraints that prevented psychopaths from clawing their way into positions of authority are gone; books and magazines on the subject remind us that one out of twenty people is a psychopath-- usually above average in intelligence, unrestrained by common communal or instinctual fear or guilt about mistreating others, and in our hyperindividualized culture, plunked down straight into a mass population of ready victims. Most psychopaths aren't like those in the movies; they're not murderers, for example, because they're mostly above average in intelligence and know that's a crime they're unlikely to get away with.

One of the premises of the Manticoran system is that of entailment, the idea that there is an inherited nobility, with inherited responsibilities and rights, that cannot be transferred out of a family. And one of the follow-on premises is that the nobility, with their own house in Parliament, is a firewall against psychopaths.

If a significant amount of power in the government rests with the House of Lords, and the House of Lords is made up of men and women who inherit their positions from their progenitors, then it follows that, unlike the House of Commons, the House of Lords is made up of a population that, by now, has the same number of psychopaths as the general population.

That's not to say that psychopaths won't rise to the role of Whip, or some other leadership role within the House of Lords, but the house itself is made up mostly of neurotypicals. And their main job is to be a brake as the House of Commons barrels along, determined to make the concentration of wealth and power by means indistinguishable from sadism.

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Reading Elsanna

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 15:54:13 GMT

So, falling under the heading of no surprise whatsoever, I've been reading a metric ton of Frozen fanfic, more specifically Elsanna. While I do love fanfic, Sturgeon's Law applies, plus I have my own pecadillos, starting with the simple fact that, given who and what the characters are, I'm not going to read anything IU ("In-Universe").

A lot of the short stories (those of 2000 words or less) are simply pointless; the writers don't know how to pack in the details the way a short story demands. That said, I readily deleted "Cacophony," "Empty Halls," "Something Crazy," and "Closeted" as unreadable. "The Takeover," like "Sorority Sisters," is simply too fast and ridiculous to be believable; the characters fall into trust (much less love) simply because they have to for the sake of the plot, and never question their reaction to one another, so I never finished them.

That said, there are some worth mentioning, not because they're good romances, but because they're among the most compelling illustrations of mental illness I've seen yet. You Are and Elsa is Suffering both show the progression I've noted before; a few chapters of crud, followed by the author hitting his or her stride, followed by a tragically compelling mess of a story. Those two are like having a crazy lover you can't stop seeing; for all the drama and emotional toil, the high points are just amazing.

If you want the best Elsanna story (and you probably don't), Anna Summers, Personal Assistant is probably your best bet. In what has to be the most giggle-inducing scene ever written, Anna discusses safer sex and the author absolutely nails her voice. Hilarity ensues.

Fanfic is a supergenre, and the AU settings necessitated by my restrictive choices enforce all sorts of genre categories that drift far from the original material. (I have yet to see an SFnal Elsanna story. I may have to change that myself.) But if you like to read, fanfic is a way to keep those characters moving forward when no one else will give you more of what you want.

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We can only hope to be half as good as Lois

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 03:12:43 GMT

Warning: What follows contains spoilers about Lois McMaster Bujold's Memory.

In a scene where Miles encounters another courier who was wounded in action, he makes the following observation:

It had apparently been Gregor's day to hand out various Imperial recognitions, for a new decoration gleamed on Vorberg's chest, the one for being wounded in the Emperor's Service. Miles had half a jar full of similar ones at home in a drawer; at some point Illyan had stopped issuing them to him anymore, perhaps fearing that Miles's threat to don them all at once sometime was not facetious.

And then, just a few chapters later, when he needs to invoke the full authority of the blood he has shed for the Imperium, Miles does indeed don all of them at once, to an effect "just short of looney."

She does this again and again and again. Each time I re-read Bujold, I see more of the same: symbolism, allegory, and foreshadowing so subtle that it borders on fairy dust.

We can hope to be half as good as she is.

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Two weird thoughts about Monty Python and the Honorverse

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:11:31 GMT

Thought #1

The other day, I was casually playing Zuma (that stupidly addictive game from PopCap) when it suddenly hit me: the scene in Monty Python's Meaning of Life where the American tourists at a restaurant, given a selection of "topic cards" about which to converse while their meal is prepared, attempt their hands at philosophy, eventually handing the cards back with the comment, "Waiter, this conversation isn't very good."

While I get the surface of the joke, the underlying commentary that, sometimes, it is the customer that fails the meal at the restaurant. The restauranters have to deal with, not "poor" customers, but customers who just don't get it. I can appreciate now what Cleese was writing there.

Thought #2

While listening to Linkin Park in the car, I suddenly realized that the cargo vessels in David Weber's Honorverse were very poorly designed. The idea that the ships are "giant skins of metal stretched around a hyperdrive core" is ridiculous: why aren't they designed more like the Nostromo?

The hyperdrive core could dock with a containerization platform that can be loaded and integrated independently of the hyperdrive. The cartels could load and prepare the cargo completely independent of the n-space impeller and h-space "sails." A cargo vessel could drop a cargo into orbit with automated minimal station-keeping, or turn it over to a small, local station-keeping engine, and immediately turn around and pick up an outbound cargo (or empty containers, which could even be folded into a low-profile configuration, given that Weber's ships have pseudo-inertia in hyperspace propotionate to their hull diameter) and head back out without all that faffing about planets. The cartels already have massive infrastructure for moving cargo surface–to–orbit; a few small local ships to reduce hyperspace turnaround to nil would result in huge operational savings.

The first merchant cartel to introduce containerized cargo transport on the Terra—Manticore—New Potsdam run is going to destroy the competition.

Admittedly, this would have made Honor Among Enemies (the one where she commands a cargo vessel) a much more difficult novel to write.

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Why I can't stand the Seattle Times

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:39:22 GMT

I was reading the local newspaper, the Seattle Times, and came across an article that addressed a problem in my household: whooping cough. According to the family physician, it was "very likely" that at least one, and possibly up to three, of the people in our house caught the disease. We're all old enough that it doesn't represent a life-threatening condition, but it's annoying to go weeks without a let-up in the coughing. So I read the article hoping for enlightenment.

Except author Carol Ostrom writes to me as if I were a child. Starting with the title, "Feds probe whooping cough epidemic; are vaccines pooping out?," Ostrom goes through a series of bizarre language choices to get her point across. Starting with "pooping out," which is going to make everyone's inner five year old snigger, and move on to telling the audience that whooping cough is "pertussis in science speak," and that it is "acknowledged to be a bad bug." It reads like she's trying to reach not just that target 5th grade reading level, but all the way down to the 2nd grade playground.

Worse, a mechanical analysis of the article shows a 12th grade reading level to the whole. As you go further into the article, Ostrom's vocabulary becomes more dense and complex, and the last third of the article is written in language that doesn't insult my intelligence.

I know these are conscious editorial choices-- to make sure that everyone who bothers to read the Times can understand the point the author is making, but I find it tiring to wade through the childish introductory paragraphs to get to the real material and issues involved in the story.

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Pornography without morals is boring.

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:58:17 GMT

I've been re-reading some old "How to write sex and romance" books that I have on my shelves, and the first one, Writing Romances," edited by Rita Gallagher and Rita Clay Estrada, may have had some good things to say about the genre, but is so sadly outdated that it fails to convey the modern market. The rise of the anonymous erotica romance makes all of the advice about subtletly and "this isn't soft-corn porn" seem trite and pointless. But it was Helen Myer's advice that really made want to throw the book across the room.

In a section entitled "The Love Scene," Myers tells us: "These are monogamous couples with healthy, sexual relationships. Mores and morals matter to these people, which challenges critics who label these books as soft pornography."

Uh, no. To claim that "mores and morals" are a challenge to pornography is to miss the point of pornography, and worse, leave no breathing room at all for that vast tract of writing known as erotica. Does it not exist, or can we admit that it exists on a continuum than envelops both the universe of romance novels and vast tracts of the the porniverse as well? To say that pornography writers write in a universe without morals is to say that pornographers write in a universe without plot; the two are inextricably entwined. Characters want, others oppose them, these conflicts keep the reader returning to an author or a series long after the sex has become routinized.

I've read romance where the passion is flat and drab and meanders across the page, and I've read erotica where there's no plot and no morals. (The latter often involves a lot of misogyny, surprise that.) Few people want to read much of that. But don't tell me that good pornography doesn't invoke questions of morals and mores.

What Ms. Myers is telling us, really, is that only in the monogamous sexual paradigm do love, romance, and respect intertwine. (I maintain the old-fashioned idea that having a solid set of working morals and hewing to them is the only source of self-respect.) She seems to have missed forseeing the rise of the polyamory/romance/erotica series coming out of the usual publishing houses these days. Well, we can't all be prophets.

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Howard Roark, Edupunk

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 05:20:16 GMT

People have told me that The Fountainhead is a far better book than Atlas Shrugged, so I decided to give the former a go, having bounced off the latter fairly hard about two-thirds of the way in. I'm one chapter in.

The one thing that impresses me most is that Roark, the hero of the story, is clearly an edupunk. His goal is to become an architect, and to see his impressive personal visions cast into steel, concrete, wood and stone. In this sense, he is like any other visionary architect. But his goal is not to "get a degree in architecture." So even though he goes from high school into one of the most prestigious architectural schools, he takes only those classes that will teach him those skills he needs, backtracking only when he learns he may have missed something in an earlier class. He works on construction sites in the summer, mastering the physicial strengths and characteristics of his chosen building materials, so that when he returns to class in the fall he can design with that knowledge in mind.

The conflict in the first chapter, if it can be called that, is between Roark and the dean of the school, who is in the process of expelling Roark. Roark is insubordinate and will not take the classes deemed necessary by tradition. Roark is calm and eager to have the interview done with, because his goals and the schools have gone orthagonal, and he wants to move on.

I don't find it hard to believe that Roark would have trouble finding a job in architecture without a degree, especially not in the 1920s. That's probably the crux of the rset of the book. What I do find hard to believe is that the dean would go so far as to label Roark "dangerous" and "possibly criminal" for having the characteristic constellation of brilliance, self-assuredness, and self-containment in the face of the pressure of Tradition. The dean is way too much of a mouthpiece for a "the world is a hivemind, and only the heroes escape" subtext for the book to be a pleasure to read. While I can understand the mindset, the writer's axe grinds loudly when it could have whispered subtly.

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Reading Edwin Friedman's "A Failure of Nerve"

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:20:20 GMT

Edwin Friedman was a rabbi and family counselor who published a highly influential book, Generation To Generation, about family therapy. The book is little known in secular circles, but pastoral counselors and especially chaplains know his work well.

Friedman's biggest contribution to family therapy is the diagnosis of the dysfunctional family as one full of peace-makers, who, by encouraging people to swallow their own wants and needs and instead learn how to "get along," bury rage and anguish and confrontation when those qualities are actually needed. What a family needs in these situations, he writes, is a leader, someone who can stand apart from the rest and say, "This is what we are as a family. This is where we're headed. This is how we'll get there. If you're not with this, tough." The leader, Friedman writes, leads by example, and by stamina-- by never giving in to the sabotage the most codependent members of the household engage in, as they try to suck the family back into the ennui of "just getting along."

What's fascinating to me is that Friedman sounds a lot like family therapy a'la Ayn Rand. "Selfhood" and "knowing where you stand" and "unflinching attention to reality" are big mantras with Friedman. It's very heady stuff.

And yet, his watchwords are about cohesion, altruism and community. He writes about the challenge of being what we would call now "the adult in the room," the mature person who refuses to participate in drama, but remains connected sufficient to both exemplify a principled and mature life and guide those he's trying to reach toward the goal.

How Rand and Friedman, both writing at about the same time, started from the premise the the average individual fails at differentiating himself, his principles, from the drama and emotional miasma of others-- fails at becoming a mature human being-- and arrive at two wholly different conclusions, one tragic, the other humane, is one of the great mysteries of the 20th century.

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"Gone to Pieces", by Connor Wright [ss, review]

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:00:27 GMT

Connor Wright's short story, "Gone to Pieces," appears in the ebook Don't Read In The Closet: An M/M Romance Collection. It's billed as "M/M sci-fi romance with some light BDSM elements," but that billing is so far off the mark that it seems almost mocking. What we get instead is a masturbatory sex scene between a man and a mannequin, laden with enough suggestions of sexual sadism that I'm sorta glad he has a mannequin on which to take out his frustrations rather than another human being.

There is no romance here. Neither character is emotionally invested in the other. The "robot," Tebri, is simply a beautiful boy mannequin with a tape recorder that says, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," and "Oh, please sir, fuck me," when triggered. Tebri is simply never depicted as being complicated enough as a robot to have genuine feelings, merely a fairly trivial decision tree over a script that could last a few hours. The protagonist, Brice, is merely a jackass managerial type who can afford a high-end sex mannequin.

(And can we please stop having every gay managerial character work as the "Gay and Lesbian Outreach Consultant to Human Resources for a Large Unnamed Corporation?" If I see another one of those, I shall scream. Can't they do something else. I'm sure there are gay janitors, programmers, truck drivers and CEOs. "GLBT Consultant" is the new "hairdresser.")

There is also no story here. There is no conflict, there is nothing to overcome. We don't even get enough of Brice's character to wonder what he could possibly be conflicted about. All he does is spank, fuck, and otherwise use his mannequin as a masturbatory relief toy, without any desire other than to relieve his sexual and personal frustrations in a blunt and somewhat passionless fashion.

There's also some bad POV management. At least twice, we get sensual details from the robot's point of view, without warning. And given that the robot's persona is shallower than the entire cast of Jersey Shore, that's an uncomfortably tight space to find yourself in.

I know I'm being harsh here, but I write this stuff. And I take pains to make something out of the story, to make the story about something other than a man merely getting his rocks off. Human/robot stories are, usually, about exploring what it means to be human by eliding or changing the definition in the Other, and then trying to puzzle out what that means: what it means to feel, to love, to be angry, to be loyal. This is the basis for romance, and for conflict: the human character has to come to grips with his or her understanding of the Other, of what it means to love, and be loved by a machine, or if a human-seeming robot even has the capacity to love. Nothing like that is present in Wright's story. There is no story, no plot, no conflict, no speculation. There isn't even a couple at the heart of the story, so there's no romance. We're reading about a guy jerking off. Big Fat Hairy Deal.

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Non-fiction EPUBs: Terrible quality

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:09:30 GMT

I don't write nonfiction, but if I did, I'd be offended at how bad the EPUB 2.0 editions of various ... For Dummies books are. I recently bought two, Genetics for Dummies and Bioinformatics for Dummies, and the translation from paper to digital is awful.

Subsection headers are frequently cut off. Images are rendered poorly, and (at least on the Nook) do not zoom. Worst of all, the index is corrupt. Although the table of contents seems to work fine, when you advance through the pages with the slider, all they ever say is "Introduction" and "There are 174 pages left in this section."

Nobody quality tested these books. Look, just because they're advanced topics unlikely to sell millions of copies does not mean you can afford to skimp on them.

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