Obsidian Wings

The Contracting Universe

by Doctor Science

So, how do you pick people to do your home renovations?

Right now we've got:

a) a general contractor, picked by the "has done projects for one of our best friends" method.

b) an electrician and generator-installer, picked by the "recced by another close friend" method.

c) a well-digger and water-system-installer, picked by the "recced by realtor, then returned calls in a competent manner" method.

Now I'm trying to find a kitchen designer. I picked three who are nearby, have kitchen-designer accreditation, have pictures on their websites of things I like. Only one of them has successfully returned my calls & emails and met with me. Should I keep trying to track down a second opinion, or should we just go with her?

I admit, part of my trouble with these decisions is that I want to be able to use my father's method for hiring workers: the handshake. Dad doesn't even believe in getting estimates, he says "the worker is worthy of his hire" and does everything on the basis of trust.

My mom says it drove her nuts at first, but it really works for him. He grew up in a working-class household, union when they could get it (but they often couldn't), and he really can relate to guys in construction. He works alongside them, they call him "the Professor" and take him to the bar for a beer after work.

But then, both my parents have a Sociability Superpower: they can start conversations and make connections with *anyone*, they're fundamentally interested in people of all kinds. While still being introverts in many ways -- like I said, it's a Superpower. I can try to imitate it, but I don't really *have* it -- and I somehow doubt the construction guys will invite me along to the bar after work.

Construction Workers by Steinlen, whom I knew mostly for his pictures of cats. [image source].

can we talk about this...?

by russell

The "this" in the headline is "guns".

The back home in Indiana thread petered out into (somehow, once again) a discussion of guns.  The topic is obviously of interest to a lot of people, and equally obviously seems to be one of the hardest things to talk about.

I thought I would try a front-page on the topic, to see if we could actually have a useful conversation.  I don't know if we can, or not.  It's an experiment.

I want to start by remembering a comment from JanieM, one of my favorite long-time, now-gone ObWi regulars:

How can I make it safe for you to hear what I need to say?

Words to live by.  In the interest of (possibly, with luck) making it possible to even broach the topic, I'll say where I, personally, am coming from in the great gun debate.

I have no interest in taking people's guns away.  I think it's fine if people own and use firearms.  I think they are obliged to do so safely and responsibly.  I think most, by far, gun owners do so.

I understand why guns freak people out.  They're dangerous.  I'm not sure much more than that needs be said.

I also understand why folks who like guns are frustrated by the debate about guns.  Lots of people have strong negative feelings about guns, but don't know much about them.  Lots of people have really negative opinions about gun owners, again without knowing much about them.

I think both sides typically enter any discussion about guns with blinders on.  I think both sides hold some things to be true that aren't really so.  It seemed like some folks wanted to discuss this stuff, so I thought I'd put a front-page post up.

To kick if off, I thought I'd offer 6 Things Gun Lovers And Haters Can Agree On, from Cracked magazine.  I don't know what it says about our public life, but if I want to find a thoughtful, insightful, fair-minded and plainly-stated discussion of any current day issue, the most consistent and reliable source I know is Cracked magazine.  

It's a hot topic, so for this thread and this thread only I will lay down some ground rules.

If folks seem like they are thread-jacking or going wildly off topic, I will try to return the discussion to the topic at hand.  If that fails, I will shut it down.

If things get abusive or overly heated, I will shut it down.

If it gets to the point where everyone is just saying the same things over and over and over and nobody is listening, I will shut it down.

The kitty has given you a discussion, if you can keep it.  Carry on.

Breaking the Mold on Primaries

by wj

A couple of years ago, California modified it's primary election process -- via an initiative, necessarily. Josh Richman has a column in the local paper today on the impact of that new system. Money quote:

California's top-two primary system and independently drawn legislative districts took effect in 2012.

The new primary pits candidates of all parties against each other and sends the top two vote-getters to fight it out in the general election regardless of affiliation, opening the door to intraparty battles. That puts pressure on candidates to woo voters from beyond their own party's rolls, while a few more legislative districts have become competitive now that lawmakers can't gerrymander "safe" seats anymore. The result is increasingly moderation, compared to the far-left and far-right opinions that used to win elections. [emphasis added]

It's pretty obvious, from a strictly tribal point of view, why the various political parties would dislike a "top two" primary system.** Ditto politicians who are particularly far from the political center (however that is defined). But what is the down side from the perspective of the overall population? Why wouldn't most of us (especially those who register as "independents" and thus would otherwise not get a primary vote) like a system which forces would-be office holders to consider the whole population, not just those who happen to belong to their party, when crafting their positions?

** Not least that it makes running as an independent far more feasible that it used to be.

Dances with Muslims

by liberal japonicus

With the most recent turn of the Hugo thread, the idea of this post popped up. The title is not an attempt to slag off on Islam, but just to note that for many of us, our contacts with Islam and the 1.5 billion adherents may be, well, limited. It certainly is for me. 

So a thread to describe Muslims you have known/do know. I'll start with mine in the comments.

John C. Wright tries to cover up that he's a wannabe gay-basher

by Doctor Science

Warning: this post quotes deeply upsetting threats of anti-gay violence. Turn away if you need to protect yourself.

On 04.06.15 at 2:02 am UT (that's 9PM Eastern time on April 5), long-time commenter MPAVictoria posted a comment in the "Sucky Hugos" thread at Crooked Timber, quoting from John C. Wright, on his post about the "perversion" of Legend of Korra:

"Men abhor homosexuals on a visceral level. While girls sometimes are attracted to them, they tend to be 'bishounen' rather handsome if effete men.

So a man who is attractive is attractive for his spiritual qualities of leadership, manliness, courage, and strength, even if his face is as pretty as that of Humphrey Bogart, who turns out to be homosexual is neither attractive to a male nor to a female general audience.

In any case, I have never heard of a group of women descended on a lesbian couple and beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons, but that is the instinctive reaction of men towards fags."

I bolded that last paragraph so it will stand out to your eyes as it does to mine. It's one of the most horrible, hateful, and yes, evil things I have ever seen from a living person I might realistically encounter. I physically reared back from the screen when I read it, it's so shockingly vile.

I didn't include in my last post, which listed some examples of evil coming from Wright, because when I went to check the quote the paragraph ended at "tire-irons. The phrase ", but that is the instinctive reaction of men towards fags" wasn't there. This would have been at maybe 8PM Eastern time on April 6, so about 1AM UT on April 7 -- less than 24 hours after MPAVictoria made her comment.

This morning I asked Victoria if she'd added anything to what Wright had written, and she replied that she'd just copy-pasted (and regretted not taking a screencap). The Way Back Machine wasn't helpful -- they'd captured the page before Wright added the comment, which is time-stamped "Tuesday, December 30th 2014 at 4:22 pm" (on a post stamped December 29, 2014 @ 12:04 am).

However, it turns out that Google's cache for the page (when I looked this morning, and again checking just now) was taken at Jan 28, 2015 15:50:59 GMT, and shows:

In any case, I have never heard of a group of women descended on a lesbian couple and beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons, but that is the instinctive reaction of men towards fags.

I haven't been able to make a screencapture of the entire page due to baffling technical difficulties; let me know if you snag one. I have archived a full copy of the cached page in case this version gets overwritten.

So yes, let the record show that John C. Wright believes that the "instinctive reaction of men towards fags" is brutal, mob murder. I'm sure he'll tell us that *he* would never do such a thing, being above such instinctive reactions, and that he's shocked, shocked at the idea that he might ... or that he rather admires those manly men who give in to their instinctive horror and do what needs doin'. Instinctively.

But the record also shows that Wright isn't willing to stand by his words or defend them -- or even act as though they were ever there. He didn't explain, apologize (HA!), or discuss what he said -- he just made it go away, sometime between when Victoria made her comment, and when I went to check it.

This is who he is.

I'll re-iterate what I said in my previous post: Wright is one of the two people likely to have a real benefit from the Puppies campaign, the other being Theodore Beale aka Vox Day. VD is widely recognized in the sf community as humanoid toxic waste, but Wright hasn't been tarred with the brush of his desserts. He's so much *cleaner* and better-spoken, with his gentlemanly air and relatively coherent sentences ... but he's still evil. This is what it looks like.

The rest of Wright's comment is actually unintentionally hilarious, once you've stopped throwing up. He's replying to a comment from the self-styled "Joe Cool" beginning, "Lesbians, lesbians, lesbians. Why is it always lesbians?" -- asking what's in fact a good question, about why are lesbians so much more visible in fictional media than gay men are.

Wright opines it's because women are admired for beauty, even by other women, while men just aren't that beautiful, they're admired for "spiritual qualities" like courage, strength, and leadership. When you add an "instinctively repulsive" quality like homosexuality into the mix, there's no beauty left to admire:

... it is possible to hold up a lesbian couple which both men and women find attractive, or, at least, not repellent, whereas the reverse is not true. One cannot hold up a homosexual couple, not even Socrates and Alcibiades, which men will not find gross and unsightly.

Dearie dearie me.

First of all, never bring up ancient Greeks when you're trying to argue that men don't admire male physical beauty, you look silly.

If you do, don't hold up Socrates and Alcibiades as the ideal male/male couple, even the Greeks thought they weren't well matched. That just makes it look like you've got your fingers in your ears, going LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, because people are going to bring up Achilles and Patroklus -- and then a passing Classics major (Sprog the Elder, in this case) will mention Harmodius and Aristogeiton, a male/male couple who were heroes of Athenian democracy and had famous statues put up in their honor.

As I've been following the Hugo Puppies discussion around, I've noticed a number of Puppies saying, "What about the dinosaur story! You SJWs nominated that dinosaur story!

They're obviously talking about If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky, which was on the short-story ballot last year, coming in 3rd out of 4. It had 65 nominations, also in third place.

Here's what I said about it, when I reviewed all the nominated short stories prior to voting last year:

[It] starts out playful, and with a style that echoes the classic children's story The Runaway Bunny. But as it goes on it becomes darker, bitter, until it becomes really a meta-story: it's sf/f because it's a story about how we use sf/f to help us deal with disappointing or terrible things in what is called "Real Life".

What I didn't mention is that the culmination of the "terrible things" in that story is a queer-bashing. No wonder the Puppies hate it so much.

Hugo ballot go BOOM

by Doctor Science

Last year's attempt by the "Sad Puppies" to take over the Hugo Awards turns out to have been the warm-up act. This year, they succeeded (at least partway). Oy.

Let me sum up:

1. Last year Larry Correia put together the "Sad Puppies 2" slate, ostensibly to broaden the field of works nominated for the Hugo to counteract leftist "groupthink" by the usual nominators. A subset of the SP2 slate made it onto the final Hugo ballot.

2. I had a Supporting Membership for the Hugos last year, and read (or tried to read) everything nominated. My conclusion:

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".

Both of Brad Torgerson's stories are shockingly badly-edited with regard to basic grammar, punctuation, and sentence-structure. "The Chaplain's Legacy" might have become a decent story in another couple of drafts, under the whip of a stern yet understanding editor. Vox Day's story is also technically very poor, and then there's the fact that a lot of Hugo voters really, honestly dislike him.

3. This year there were two, largely overlapping "conservative" slates: Sad Puppies 3, put together by Brad Torgerson, and Rabid Puppies 2015, by Vox Day. The result: the Best Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, Editor (Long Form), and Editor (Short Form) categories contain *only* Puppies nominees, all others have been shut out. Only two non-Puppies are in the Best Novel category and in the two Dramatic Presentations, and there's only one each for Pro Artist, Fanzine, Fan Writer, and the Campbell Award.

4. BOOM. More links: FWOOOMP. I've been participating at Making Light, Crooked Timber, and Whatever.

5. My Opinions, Which Are Mine:

A. Elizabeth Bear, abi sutherland, many commenters at Making Light, and especially Cat (in a comment she cross-posted widely) have persuaded me that slates wreck the process of voting for awards. Slates are useful and often necessary when you're voting for people who need to work with each other (= politics), but they're destructive to the process of choosing excellence. Slates narrow the field radically, and let (or force) voters to make their choices other than from their own personal perspective, which is naturally idiosyncratic.

B. The people linked in A are among the many arguing that the only way to save the Hugo Awards system is to put *any* work, however worthy, that was on a slate below "No Award". Being on a slate (of your own free will) must be an unconditional disqualification, or else we'll end up with competing slates -- which will be the very opposite of choosing works on the basis of quality. Generally speaking, I'm persuaded by this argument, and that's what I'll be doing. I'm really sorry, Guardians of the Galaxy.

C. What's kind of stunning to me is how resolutely the Puppies have ignored issues of *quality* in assembling and arguing for their slate. Last year's slate was unbelievably, insultingly weak -- and I say that as someone whose fiction reading is mostly fanfic. I know a *lot* about bad writing, but I also know the difference between "bad, but I like it" and "objectively well-crafted". Since Torgerson put together the SP3 slate, I feel safe dismissing it out of hand — he's demonstrated that he doesn't have the minimum level of competence at English-wrangling necessary to pick lists of "the best stories".

I often enjoy things that aren't even trying for excellence, but that's not what awards are *for*. Part of what bemuses me about the Puppies is that having high standards, believing in excellence, thinking that there are objective standards of value that don't have anything to do with popularity — these are all things I associate with traditional conservatism. And yet the Puppies seem to be doubling down on a pugnacious rejection of high literary standards — and, in their work, even such bourgeois affectations as grammar.

D. Another reason I won't vote for anything touched by the Puppies is that two of the most prominent people involved -- indeed, the two most likely to benefit from the slate -- are IMHO actually evil.

As a rule, I don't believe in calling a person "evil". Every human is capable of evil actions as well as good ones, you can't split people into neat "good" and "bad" piles.

However. Sometimes there are people who are pretty consistent about doing evil and seem to be proud of it, so it's fair to just cut to the chase and say they're evil people. If they do something nice, then you can be surprised.

Cut for some pretty disgusting, hateful language.

Cross-fertilization in the spring

by Doctor Science

It's actually spring! Except the forsythia aren't even really blooming yet and I'm not seeing many crocuses, much less daffodils. This is *very* odd and even disturbing for central NJ: I can usually count on daffodils from the garden for Passover.

If you've never been to a Seder, you may not be aware that the centerpiece of the table is a plate displaying symbolic foods. One of those foods is an egg. Traditionally, the egg is roasted "as a symbol of the sacrifice in the Temple".

When I look at the egg, though, I see something older and wider than any single religion. The Seder Egg to me looks like a different dress on the Easter egg or the colored eggs Iranians make for Nowruz.

Of all colored egg traditions, pysanky are the most beautiful. So when we started to host Seders I started to think about making a Passover Pysanka to go on the Seder Plate. To symbolize Spring, and sacrifice, as is Jewish-traditional -- and to also show how our specific traditions relate to more universal human feelings, and a history that is linked into the rest of the world.

Also, it would be pretty. Which is one of the universal human feelings.

About 20 years ago, I made a Passover Pysanka with a Star of David on one side, a picture of the burning bush on the other. I *know* I took pictures, but right now I can't find them.

We used that for about 15 years, then a mouse got into the cupboard and ate it. Well, broke it and nibbled on the edges -- but the result was the same.

This year I finally got around to making another one. I didn't do any practicing beforehand, I just drafted a design and went to a local pysanky workshop to make it:

I'm not completely satisfied with either the design or the execution. We're already discussing whether I should make a different one next year, maybe with the help of Sprog the Younger. She's very good at fine handwork and straight lines, while my skills are more for design and organic, curving lines. More practice before doing the special egg wouldn't hurt, either.

So, what are *your* spring holiday traditions? And how's spring doing where you are?

Agreement with Iran

by wj

In today's news, the talks with Iran have reached an agreement. Here is the State Department statement on the agreement.

At a quick glance, it appears that Iran has basically given the other side pretty much everything that they were asking. And sanctions are being lifted only after Iran has met its committments -- which should (but probably won't) address the concerns expressed by some members of the US Congress.

Now the domestic political circus can begin in earnest.