Obsidian Wings

Hugo Awards post-game analysis

by Doctor Science

The 2014 Hugo Awards were announced August 17, and the results weren't terribly surprising. The "Sad Puppies Slate", put together by Larry Correia and other self-described conservatives, lost by a landslide.[1]

Now Correia says both that he isn't surprised by the results, but also that they prove he was right:

My stated goals this entire time was to get some political untouchables onto their sainted slate, so that they would demonstrate that there was serious political bias in the awards. ... I predicted that the SJWs[2] would mobilize to stop the untouchable barbarians, so I got some barbarians through the gates, and the SJWs mobilized like I said they would… And I'm supposed to be sad about that for some reason, why?

In other words, he put together a slate to "make the liberals mad", liberals got mad, the slate lost, this proves that the awards have a liberal bias.

What kind of weird is that John Scalzi, one of the Sad Puppies' leading opponents, thought something else was going on:

Correia was foolish to put his own personal capital as a successful and best selling novelist into championing Vox Day and his novelette, because Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being, and his novelette was, to put it charitably, not good (less charitably: It was like Gene Wolfe strained through a thick and rancid cheesecloth of stupid). Doing that changed the argument from something perfectly legitimate, if debatable — that conservative writers are often ignored for or discounted on award ballots because their personal politics generally conflict with those of the award voters — into a different argument entirely, i.e., fuck you, we got an undeserving bigoted shithole on the Hugo ballot, how you like them apples.

As for me, I see something else that neither Correia nor even Scalzi seems to have noticed:

None of the Sad Puppies' horses is fit to race. The only ones I can call reasonably competent works of fiction are Correia's novel and Dan Wells' "The Butcher of Khardov". They also read way too much like re-tellings of unfamiliar video games, and lack the most important quality Hugo voters are looking for, world-building. They are, at best, B level works, not the kind of thing I think *anyone* would want associated with "Hugo Award Winning".

A useful way of looking at the tolerance question

by Doctor Science

Over at digby's, Batocchio wrote a good, long analysis of the tolerance issue we've also been discussing. The most useful part, for me, is this chart:

The real problems with tolerance are the categories Batocchio accurately labels "Smug Hipster Assholes" and "Friendly but Misguided Authoritarians". The FMAs are much nicer people than the SHAs, more pleasant to be around, and can be wonderfully helpful and caring when you have a direct, personal problem. In contrast, even when they're on your side the SHAs can be so annoying you just want to punch them in the face.

Dismantling a system of intolerance means that you will, at some point, hurt the feelings of some nice FMAs -- and what's worse, some SHAs will rejoice when you do.

But I don't think there's any way around that. There really is such a thing as a system of intolerance or injustice. If that sounds too much like a deliberate conspiracy, think of it as a set of habits. We need habits to be able to get anything done, to save our brainpower and emotional energy for when they're actually needed. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste -- use yours sparingly".

So changing society means changing habits, and changing a system of intolerance means changing habits that were hurting some people, and getting into the habit of doing things that hurt them less.

But this means that a bunch of FMAs are going to learn that they've been thoughtlessly hurting people -- and because they're nice, kind people, this will make them feel bad. Because they're authoritarians, learning that they've been wrong will make them feel *especially* bad -- because part of being authoritarian is that you have trouble with the idea that you (and the people you look up to) have made mistakes.

Maybe the way to persuade the FMAs to not cling to their habitual intolerance is to make it personal, to appeal to their natural niceness. Not, "you have to put up with gay marriage because society is changing, and because it's right", but "you've been hurting these people without meaning to, and now you have a chance to be nice to them instead." "Do it because it's kind" is more likely to appeal to kind people than "do it because it's right".

Out of the nest

by Doctor Science

I got back yesterday from dropping Sprog the Younger off at BALAC (the Boston Area Liberal Arts College where she's a freshman). It took a lot less time than I expected, because they used a move-in procedure I only heard about last year, when an e-friend encountered it moving her sprog into the University of Toronto. I'm guessing it's become common for colleges in urban areas or where parking is at a premium.

What happens is that you drive up with your offspring and a car full of stuff, and they sort you by dorm into a holding area parking lot. Every so often they send a group up to the dorm and direct you to a parking space. You open all the doors & the trunk and stand back as a swarm of college athletes descends on the car, emptying it in a single go and taking everything up to the room without you doing anything. Meanwhile, someone has whisked your kid off to pick up her key and other paperwork.

She gets back in about 5 minutes, and the car is already empty! It's incredibly fast and painless, and also doesn't involve campus being clogged with randomly-parked cars for a whole day.

There were various activities for parents to do in the course of the day but Sprog didn't really want me to hang around, so I left. Among other things, she wanted to spend some time with her roommates, who she'd been getting to know over Facebook for the past month or so. Neither of them had family hanging around -- one is from India, while the other came for one of the pre-orientation activities so her parents had already left to go back to the Midwest. It definitely gives a different flavor to Freshman Week when you can form some connections before you get there. Back in the 70s this was only true for the well-connected, alumni kids with siblings who were also at Princeton, or people from the private schools and handful of public schools that sent cohorts.

The nest isn't really empty, at the moment, because we've also got one of the Boomerang Generation. She's working hard to get out, but it's really difficult these days -- I couldn't believe how many of us ended up chatting in the drug store the other day about "my kid who's on Medicaid".

I don't really feel the cliche of "How'd the time go by so fast?" It seems to me as though it's been a really busy 18 years, full of all kinds of events. I can understand how a relative who doesn't see the kid very often would feel like "they grow up so fast! just the other day you were portable!", but to me it really does feel like a lifetime has gone by in her lifetime.

Although at least half the time when I dream, she's still portable.

Common Goldeneye ducklings jump fearlessly from the nest when it's time to go. By Swedish photographer Karin Thorell.

Sprog the Younger has always had this kind of personality -- she was the one who fell head-first from a shopping cart, was caught (by the bagger) only two inches from impact, and promptly demanded, " AGAIN!" A member of Future Bungee Jumpers of America, I called her.

A true hermit can never tell you why he is a true hermit

This piece about Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit, fascinating. 

Following his arrest, the court of public opinion was deeply divided. The man who wanted to live his life as invisibly as possible had become one of the most famous people in Maine. You could not walk into a bar in the Augusta area without stumbling into a debate about what should be done with Christopher Knight.

Some said that he must immediately be released from jail. Stealing cheese and bacon are not serious crimes. The man was apparently never violent. He didn't carry a weapon. He's an introvert, not a criminal. He clearly has no desire to be a part of our world. Let's open a Kickstarter, get him enough cash for a few years' worth of groceries, and allow him to go back to the woods. Some people were willing to let him live on their land, rent-free.

Others countered that it wasn't the physical items he robbed that made his crimes so disturbing—he stole hundreds of people's peace of mind. Their sense of security. How were they supposed to know Knight wasn't armed and dangerous? Even a single break-in can be punishable by a ten-year sentence. If Knight really wanted to live in the woods, he should've done so on public lands, hunting and fishing for food. He's nothing but a lazy man and a thief times a thousand. Lock him up in the state penitentiary.

...

"I don't know your world," he said. "Only my world, and memories of the world before I went into the woods. What life is today? What is proper? I have to figure out how to live." He wished he could return to his camp—"I miss the woods"—but he knew by the rules of his release that this was impossible. "Sitting here in jail, I don't like what I see in the society I'm about to enter. I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."

I think this pattern maps onto myself in interesting ways, and I wonder what others think about it.

Your talent spotting thread

by liberal japonicus

I try to avoid naming particular commenters in the post, but in this case, I'll happily make an exception. McT wrote

I'm ready to have that conversation with BobbyP. Why don't the bosses around here let him guest-post? 

Guest posts, sure, and I'd up the ante, it would be nice to have a few new frontpagers. Nominations, thoughts, ideas?

The best Ferguson overview I've seen

by Doctor Science

Why the Fires in Ferguson Won't End Soon by Jamelle Bouie, in Slate.

Talk to anyone in Ferguson and you'll hear a story about the police. "One of my friends had a son killed by the Ferguson Police Department, about 10 years ago," said Carl Walker, a Vietnam veteran and former parole officer who came to show his support for demonstrators in Ferguson. "They wouldn't release the name of the officer who killed him. Why wouldn't you release the name?"

"The cops said he shot at them—case closed," said Al Cole, referring to a cousin who was killed by Ferguson police in 2000. "Even as a teenager, 13 or 14 years old, I've been slammed on police cars … now I try to avoid riding through Ferguson."

"Some police say they saw me at a house, pulled me, said I fit a description, locked me up, and found out I was on parole," said Craig Beck, who was watching demonstrators under the shade of a burned-out QuikTrip convenience store. "They said I threw a plastic baggie, which they didn't have when they took me into custody." He continues: "I beat the case, but you know, this isn't new. This happens every day."

Everyone—or at least, every black person—can recall an incident. Everyone can attest to friends and relatives who have been harassed, assaulted, or worse by the police.

...

The underlying problems of white flight, discrimination, and disinvestment will remain, and—absent a dramatic and unexpected change—they'll persist into the next generation. We may never see another "Trayvon Martin" in Sanford, Florida, but I'm positive we'll see another "Michael Brown" in Ferguson, Missouri.

Or somewhere else. Soon enough, demonstrators will be chanting the name of another young black man killed by another agent of the state charged with containing blacks, not protecting them. We want it to be one way—a world where the police are here to serve us all—but it's the other way, a world where black bodies are the chief targets of American fear.

Read the whole article, talk about how it seems to you. Very important data, not referenced in the article: Nobody Knows How Many Americans The Police Kill Each Year. Nobody. That figure of "400 justifiable police homicides per year" you've seen kicking around? Certainly too low, quite possibly *much* too low.

A scene from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air episode Cased Up. That was 1991. The only thing that's changed is the clothes.

Detecting the writer

by Doctor Science

I used to be a voracious reader of mystery novels. I quit kind of abruptly about 15 years ago (or was it 20?) because I had become irrecoverably sick of mystery stories that failed my "One-Body Test". Here's the test:

Is there more than one murder? If so, you fail.

I mean, I still used to read them, but as far as I was concerned they were failures. I felt that way partly because I think murder should be taken more seriously than that, even in fiction. Also, it seemed to me that Agatha Christie failed the OBT so egregiously because she was making a political point: that capital punishment was justified because a murderer would also murder again. I read a lot of Christie in my teenage years, but the OBT only crystallized in maybe my early 30s (1990 or so), as full-on serial killers were becoming more common in the genre.

The other reason I developed the OBT was because of my love of Sherlock Holmes. If you look at e.g. Conan Doyle's first set of Sherlock Holmes stories, only 3 of the 12 involve any murder at all (Boscombe Valley, Five Orange Pips, Speckled Band). Most of the stories are just *puzzles*, mysteries of human behavior in general, not just murderous behavior in particular. I really *like* that, and I kept hoping I'd find mystery stories that were Sherlockian in that way -- and kept being disappointed.

But I kept reading mystery stories in spite of my disappointment. I think what sent me over the edge into I'm Just Not Going To Bother Anymore Land was when I was reading a new Tony Hillerman novel and discovered I was detecting the writer too easily.

"Detecting the Writer" is a phrase from Dorothy Sayers' introduction to Great Short Stories Of Detection, Mystery And Horror, and anthology she edited in 1928 and which is still golden, if you can find it. She wrote:

The mystery-monger's principal difficulty is that of varying his surprises. "You know my methods, Watson," says the detective, and it is only too painfully true. The beauty of Watson was, of course, that after thirty years he still did not know Holmes's methods; but the average readers is sharper-witted. After reading half a dozen stories by one author, he is sufficiently advanced in Dupin's psychological method ‡ to see with the author's eyes. He knows that, when Mr. Austin Freeman drowns somebody in a pond full of water-snails, there will be something odd and localised about those snails; he knows that, when one of Mr. Wills Croft's characters has a cast-iron alibi, that alibi will turn out to have holes in it; he knows that if Father Knox casts suspicion on a Papist, the Papist will turn out to be innocent; instead of detecting the murderer, he is engaged in detecting the writer.

---

‡ As outlined in "The Purloined Letter"

[bold mine]

Reading the Hillerman book, I reached a middle chapter, where our detective was meeting a particular white character for their first significant conversation. "He's the murderer", I thought -- based on nothing more than when he appeared in the book.

I was right.

I was reminded of this because I just broken my long no-mysteries drought to read Spider Woman's Daughter, Anne Hillerman's continuation of her father's series. The sentences don't flow as well as Hillerman Sr.'s did, but it's a pretty good pastiche. To my surprise, it passes the OBT! which is enough for me to plan on looking for the next one. I can also detect-the-writer with the same algorithm I used for her father -- which may just mean that it's a particularly *faithful* pastiche.

But I still yearn for mystery stories more like "A Scandal in Bohemia", "The Blue Carbuncle", or "The Red-headed League": ones which recognize that death isn't the only thing worth investigating.

The Red-headed League by Sally Avernier. Having a mystery without a murder also gives a lot more leeway for comedy, which is always good.

Touristic futures and white elephants open thread

 by liberal japonicus 

Just got back from Osaka and the poorly taken photograph below is from the Ebisu bridge in Dotonbori in a neighborhood called Shinsaibashi. It's a very interesting place for a number of reasons, including the Hanshin Tigers 'curse of the colonel', but what interested me is that I hadn't been to Osaka in a while and when I have been back, I've usually not gone out in the evening, but a friend took me around and I was amazed at the activity and the energy. This was a Tuesday nite and there were still a lot of people walking, talking, spending money. I went back with another friend on Thursday nite and the place was packed.

Diving off the bridge is a bit of a tradition, and even though the police try to stop it, when a big celebration comes along, they can only limit the numbers. I believe that the most recent divers were during the 2014 World Cup.

But what interested me was how the area had been transformed. I used to spend a bit of time in Osaka in the early 90's and at that time, the water was truly gross and it was basically an industrial canal. Historically, the Shinsaibashi area had a number of theatres and the best actors were often brought to their gigs in a boat as fans cheered. (this link gives some history and some old photos) However, when I was there in the 90's, it was simply an industrial canal that had that sort of revolting brown-green water. In the past 5 or so years however, they've built boardwalks on both sides and now, tourist boats go up and down. 

The development has made the area a magnet for tourists, especially from Asia and when I was walking around, I heard Mandarin and Cantonese and Korean. In the hotel I was staying in, a big family of Thai were staying. 

I'm not sure why I'm so surprised to find Asians doing the touristy thing, and I can't seem to find any pictures of the area before the renovation. The place, with all the neon and all the people, has a Bladerunner look, but imagine everyone in colorful clothes.

The white elephant in the title refers to plans to turn the canal into a pool. Your thoughts on what brings in the punters or on anything else?

Is police accountability politically possible?

by Doctor Science

Shaun King of Los Angeles put up a change.org petition for new federal laws to protect citizens from police violence and misconduct. He says

I love good police officers. I have them in my immediate family. Like all civil servants they are underpaid and under-resourced for a difficult job.

However, a long and completely avoidable history of violence by police officers has killed too many innocent civilians, caused a destructive level of mistrust in the community, and is causing a rising tide of anger, frustration, and despair among millions of good people.

Proposed policy changes to address this:

1. The shooting and killing of an unarmed citizen who does not have an outstanding warrant for a violent crime should be a federal offense.

2. Choke holds and chest compressions by police (what the coroner lists as the official cause of death for Eric Garner) should be federally banned.

3. All police officers must wear forward-facing body cameras while on duty. They cost just $99 and are having a signficant, positive impact in several cities around the United States and the world.

4. Suspensions for violations of any of the above offenses should be UNPAID.

5. Convictions for the above offenses should have their own set of mandatory minimum penalties.

Note that there are about 800,000 police officers in the US. If cameras are $100 each, that's $80M. That cost is a fraction of the $350M per year Homeland Security gives local police departments, much of it going for military equipment that is *wildly* inappropriate for policing your fellow citizens.

When I look at this list of proposed policies, my first objection is to the wording of the first one. I think the police-mediated death *by any means* of a citizen who isn't imminently threatening someone's life, or who doesn't have a warrant against them, should be a federal offense. This includes things like deaths by taser or death when police feel threatened.

I even think direct but accidental deaths, or deaths when the police are mistaken, should be punished. Yes, maybe it was "just a mistake" -- but the police are too dangerous to be allowed to get away with unsanctioned mistakes. Basically, any mistaken or accidental death by police should count as negligent homicide. And it has to be a federal crime, because the Blue Code of Silence means that local police can't be trusted to investigate themselves.

Many people here are lawyers or experienced with the justice or protection system. Which of these policy suggestions do you think has a chance of getting into law? As King says, one of the huge problems (in e.g. Ferguson, MO as I write) is " a destructive level of mistrust in the community". Which of these suggestions has a chance of reducing that mistrust?

Your curious borders open thread

by liberal japonicus

Am in Hue, working with teachers to help prepare for the CEFR requirements that are coming down the pike for them. One of the participants came from Macau to Danang, because a regular service has opened up between the two, attempting to both give rich Macanese a place to spend their money and to bring rich Vietnamese to the casinos there. The participant noted that the flight was about 90% full of men with no luggage who were basically taking advantage of the Macau special status (as it is one of the 2 specially administered regions for the PRC). He talked to his seatmate on the flight who said that he travelled to Danang once a week. Curious, perhaps dr ngo has some insight.

Any other curious travel stories out there?