Criticism on Authonomy's post about sense in fantasy and historical fiction

I often click links and wonder, "Do people actually consider, do they really, truly think about the things they write?" Often, I feel the answer is, emphatically, “no”. In particular, the article here has a bunch of stuff that - upon inspection - isn't very true. Sure, it gets repeated all the time by writers and people in the publishing industry, but like many things often repeated but rarely discussed there isn't too much truth to the author's claims. Apropos of this is this blog post on verisimilitude for fantasy and historical fiction. It is terrible.

For instance, the blog post says, "[T]he author of a fantasy novel filled with invented creatures and magic must ensure that these elements exist within coherent systems and are subject to perceivable rules."

Really? First, I'm going to mention a kind of writing that gets scant respect from the literary types but has created many of the most enduring characters and stories of the last hundred years: comic books. If you have a fast paced story with colorful characters, it appears that consistency, much less verisimilitude, is irrelevant. Superheroes are constantly developing new abilities to get out of situations in a non-stop barrage of deus ex machina. The only reason not to acknowledge this is pure snobbery, because superheroes are enduring and popular, many of their figures and stories having become bedrock culture of the 20th century (and certainly the 21st).

(One of my favorite cases in point is Batman's cowl. Sometimes it's cloth, except when he gets shot in the head when it is revealed to be a helmet. I would say, “Choose, dudes”, but the truth is that I – or, really, anyone else – doesn't much care.)

But, really, it doesn't stop there – it's in most fantasy. Lord of the Rings? Remember Gandalf coming back from the dead after fighting the Balrog? Yeah. There was nothing inherent in the logical structure of the narrative to suggest, much less state, that would happen. It had happened to no other character and was not thought to be something that could happen by any of the protagonists, yet it occurred: Gandalf came back from the dead.

One of my favorite examples about how consistency in fantasy is a bugbear is Dracula. How, exactly, did Dracula get his ship into England, again? He killed all the crew, sure, okay, he's a vampire, I get that, but what mystical authority allowed the ship to find its destination uncrewed? And why should Mina have a psychic connection to her attacker, allowing Van Helsing and the others to track Dracula? There is nothing inherent in previously existing vampire fiction known to Victorian audiences to make this credible or coherent. It was clearly something added solely for the purpose of allowing the humans to confront the undead, pure deus ex machina.

I could go into more details - almost all fantasy and sci-fi books do this to some extent - but the key point is that while our ability to notice out-of-place things is real, equally real is our ability to see patterns that we want to exist. A big part of the trick isn't to create a setting where everything is plausible within a rigidly constructed framework - you could go quite mad attempting that, though some writers can make it work - but that the writing does whatever it takes, by whatever means it takes, to get the audience to see a pattern even if it makes no sense to do so by giving them reasons to see things your way. We forgive Tolkien because we want Gandalf to return; we forgive Stoker because we want Dracula to lose. Consistency or verisimilitude does not really enter into it.

Additionally, due to the power of the Internet, and the rise of fanfic, the extent to which the audience is not only willing but actively engaged in finding patterns where none were created by authorial intent is evident. Just as we see patterns in the clouds, the complex narrative of a novel allows people to see a great many things that any given author never intended (and it is even easier with series, written or otherwise) - thus the large number of people who sexually obsess about Draco Malfoy or Snape, which J. K. Rowling finds strange and incomprehensible, or pretty much any slash or ship related to almost any media. Verisimilitude need not apply. Consistency be damned. We see what we want to see and I feel that a big part of a fiction writer's job is to seduce the audience into accepting their narrative. (This isn't news, it's simply suspension of disbelief and there are many tricks to making it work – verisimilitude is merely one and not even the best one, I think.)

The author then goes on to say, "Historical fiction also depends upon strict coherency." Nonsense. I mean, complete and utter nonsense, and a lot of that is because it's impossible to get "strict coherency".

History, because of its incomplete nature and our inability to understand the internal lives of the people who lived it, is a moving target. As a historian, at any given time, there are competing narratives of just about any historical subject.

To pick literally the first one that came to mind, the authorial intent of Machiavelli's The Prince. Is it a handbook of political ruthlessness or a cunning satire? To this day, the question is unresolved. Some find it absurd that Machiavelli, who spent the rest of his life as a staunch republican, suddenly became obsequious to tyranny, finding it more likely that The Prince was meant as an insult to the de Medici and Borgia (and, indeed, the central premise seems to be that Cesare Borgia got lucky, so I think this is a very strong argument).  Others, of course, think that Machiavelli's imprisonment broke him and, in order to secure a job, any job, he wrote a toadying manuscript (also a strong argument). Which is it? Who knows? Both positions have some merit and we can't ask the writer.

But if you were writing a story about Machiavelli, you'd likely choose one of two contradictory narratives, or create a third narrative. At any rate, you're going to run into a lot of people who think you're absolutely wrong no matter the depths of your research.

All of history is like this - it is a fluid narrative that changes as we change. From the idea that the "Dark Ages" was a time of technological regression (go ahead and google "Carolingian Renaissance" to start to find out what modern historians actually think of that idea), or the causes of the American Revolution, our perception of history is almost always controversial in some regard. There is no such thing as “strict coherency”. What makes perfect sense to you is likely to enrage someone else.

(And a living issue: primary education textbooks are being rejected because the historical narrative does not match what various school boards demand to be true. History is a minefield of conflicting beliefs and opinion, ranging from the very naive to the well-researched and intensely sophisticated but equally contradictory and exclusive.)

So, creating coherency must first ask, "Who's coherency?" Lacking an objective standard, how does that even make any damn sense? (Answer: it doesn't, but you've got to know something about historiography to realize how history is constantly, almost necessarily mired in controversy.)

(I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that writers fail to do research. I'm not saying that a work should not have some internal consistency. I'm just saying that "strict coherency" is nonsense regarding historical research for a historical novel – that the standard is irrational.)

And . . . then I stopped reading the article, I admit, even though I was mostly through it. Why bother going on? What bothers me is the extent to which these oft-repeated maxims are unconsidered in, I think, the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. The idea that they even MIGHT be wrong is totally undiscussed (as opposed to, say, the way fans pick apart the media they love, or historians continue to search for truth in the mists of the past). Still, writers love repeating them to each other. I think we should stop and reconsider them, really think about them, and maybe even think about why we are encouraged to think this way.

My present thoughts about Ferguson and the drudgery of causation

The worst part about seeing fnords is that almost no one else does, so I find myself in conversations or making observations that not many people understand.  I find this frustrating so I shut up more often than I should.  What's the point of saying something when no one listens?

Anyway, here's the bit about Ferguson.  I'm not sure to what extent it is fair to take a specific incident and turn it into a referendum about broad social policy. While I understand the legitimate issues at stake in Ferguson, I find this specific incident far less touching and significant than the general trend that I don't think many people understand.  Here it is:

We have all been tricked by the "war on crime".  It has never been about crime.  Every other industrialized nation in the world has crime rates similar to the US without our crazy obsession with crime and punishment (and they all have a small fraction of our murders, due to the fairly strict gun control laws in every other country worth living in).  This very strongly suggests that crime rates in the US have been dropping due to outside factors (such as the fact we're a generally richer nation than we've ever been, leaving fewer people in utterly desperate straits).  No, no, the war on crime has never been about crime but about race.

As the social movements of the Sixties changed the attitude of Americans, it became unacceptable to perpetrate violence on minority communities merely because they were minorities.  Cops couldn't just go in to beat and kill minorities to satisfy the racist bloodlust.  Yet, all of these police departments and justice systems were top-heavy with brutally vicious racist assholes.  The cops and judges that came into power in the 60s were raised in the undeconstructed racism of the 50s and earlier.

It is likewise important to realize that this continuity extends forward - the cops and judges in power now arise directly from those people in the 70s.  It is very important to remember that there is direct continuity of personnel between then and now - that the people in charge of law and punishment are the chosen heirs to the people who played the trick I'm going to reveal.

The people in power of the justice systems in the US weren't cured of their racism simply because some hippies made it harder to bash in black people's heads.  So they invented the war on crime, which distributed the bulk of law enforcement assets in crime ridden areas.  Well, those crime ridden areas were poor and non-white neighborhoods, they were defined as crime ridden by those undeconstructed racist cops.  A bunch of laws and procedures were invented to rationalize this (and I'll talk about a couple of the specifics below) but the important thing to remember is that when you police a given neighborhood (even taking away stuff like racism, which was definitely a big player, but this is true even if you take that way), the neighborhood that is more policed will seem to have more crime.

This is easy to figure, right?  You take two identical neighborhoods and you put twice as many cops into one as the other, the one with more cops will tend to find more crime - because that's one of the key duties of the police!

In turn, this rationalizes even more police coverage of those neighborhoods in a vicious circle.  All the did was create the conditions through which the same behavior was permitted, merely changing the rational for that behavior to something that appeared less racist.  It also allowed police to characterize non-white communities as being inherently criminal, even though it was a condition they created in the first place.

I said I'd give a couple of examples.  They racists who set up this system consistently overplay their hand, but they aren't called on it because the more attenuated an argument becomes the less likely people are to pay attention to it in the first place.  It's easy to understand that cops beating and killing black people because they're black is wrong.  It's harder to understand that a bunch of racist people created a system to justify continued racist abuses under layers of statistically skullduggery.  Most people don't bother to penetrate the more complex argument and/or assume the people proposing the more complex argument "have a point" so they give violent racist assholes a pass.

Still, examples.  Both of them come from the major campaign of the war on crime, the war on drugs.

The first is that black people account for about 12% of the US population and about 13% of drug users and drug peddlers (the difference is due to wealth, by the way - poor people use more drugs and black people get paid about 3/5ths what white people do in another part of the complex and persistent pattern of racism in the US).  However, over half of the people arrested on drug related offenses are black.  This is what happens when you send your cops into black neighborhoods to look for drug dealers while ignoring the ones in white neighborhoods.  It is the natural consequence and it is racist, hidden under statistical skullduggery.  And it creates vicious stereotypes of black drug dealers and black drug users when the truth is that drug sales and use is almost perfectly evenly distributed by race.

(The sentences between black and white people for similar crimes is also greatly different.  In all, black people spend about eight times longer in prison than white people for drug related offenses.  Hella racist.)

The second clear and obvious example is crack cocaine.  Until very recently, 1 gram of crack cocaine (which tends to be sold in poor, black neighborhoods) was treated as 100 grams of powder cocaine (which tends to be sold in rich, white neighborhoods).  Now 1 gram of crack is as bad as 18 grams as cocaine.

The rationale behind this is that crack is some sort of superdrug.  It isn't.  The bioavailability of crack cocaine is about 15% more than snorted cocaine.  That's it.  It produces a short but intense high, but as with all narcotics how high you get is primarily a product of how much you take.  If you've got enough money, you can put as much coke up your nose to give you the same intensity of high as crack - and it'll last longer.  Likewise, if you don't have a lot of crack, you might smoke less, producing a less intense high.  Since the metabolites of crack are identical with powdered cocaine, there is no particular difference in the character of the high - it's the same high.  You just get it a little faster with smoking, per unit, though the high is shorter in duration.

Which is part of the reason why black people spend eight times as much time in prison vis-a-vis white people - when 1 gram of your drug is worth 100 times its weight in sentencing, you're going to be staying in the big house for a loooooooong time.

This isn't subtle, people!  But the essential trick is that the when blatant, overt racism became less permissible in the 1960s it wasn't like the cops stopped being racist.  They found a way to keep doing the same stuff, but buried under somewhat complex arguments.

Which is why it is vital to remember that the justice system of today is run by the hand picked successors to the guys who have always been running the show.  It is being run with the same eye towards permitting the overt racism of the 50s and earlier but with the new lingo.  They've had generations to tighten it up, to create the vacuous procedural bullshit that we've seen all over America, to solidify their "reasons" and cover up their racism with charts and shit.   But it's shit.  They're just racist thugs.

So, I very strongly feel for the people who have been trapped by the war on drugs.  But when I hear people talking about this specific indictment, well, Betty Bowers summed it up pretty well when she said, "Whether Ferguson and racism or 9-11 and terrorism, Americans always fixate on the theater of results rather than the drudgery of causation."  But the drudgery of causation is the important part!  Without discussion of that causation, no amount of riots over specific police actions is going to mean very much.

Short critique of modern atheism

I was recently asked to write a critique of atheism, so here it is.  This post applies to atheism in the Anglophone world.  I don't think I have enough understanding of global atheism to say anything meaningful about it.

There are two major problems with atheism in the English-speaking world that I can see - the first is that it is a club run for and by middle-class white people, mostly men, who are wedded to a very trivial view of scientific reductionism and the second is that there isn't much of a difference in attitude and action between atheists and religious people.

That atheism is a club for middle class white boys is almost transparently obvious.  Almost all the big shot atheist writers - Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens - are well-to-do white men.  When I was in Miami, almost all of the people who belonged to the atheist group I briefly attended were white men - and that's really saying something in Miami - and I saw a grand total of zero non-white people in the seven events I attended in Freethought Dayton.  In Freethought Dayton, seven of the eight board members were white men with one white woman.  It is my understanding this is pretty generally true.

And why not!  All the "serious" atheist thinkers from Diderot forward are well-to-do white men!  It is a culture that was created and has been fostered by the most privileged sector of humans that has ever existed!  While there are other brands of atheism - Marx springs to mind - it is the atheism of white prestige and privilege that is the foundation of modern atheism, I think.

They don't generally think this.  They give lip service to various liberal platitudes, but they are about as serious as the dudes who wrote The Bell Curve.  They are almost entirely wedded to a culture of material acquisition that is shocking in its breadth - but that's the well-to-do white person thing, right?  It's no different than any other group of rich white people from college frats to the World Bank, regardless of religious affiliation.

They also have a kind of profound love of scientific reductionism that rationalizes everything they say and do.  So, in Freethought Dayton, when they were initially writing their statement about inclusion, it was littered with phrases like, "Scientific research shows that racism isn't real" and "Current scientific understanding about gender issues . . ."  I'm pretty sure that kind of language would have made it into the final draft if I hadn't said that I would be against racism even if a bunch of scientists were for it, and ditto discrimination on gender issues.  I also pointed out that scientific racism is totally a thing.

The last meeting I was at in a Freethought Dayton group, likewise, included a long and grueling conversation where people were really digging into me saying "science says this" and "science says that", which seems to me to ignore two of the things about "science" - first is that science does not often speak with one voice.  So what a quantum physicist says about gravity is currently totally different than what an astrophysicist says about gravity.  And what an environmentalist says about the world has little to do with anything either of those other dudes say.  Science is a rambling, often chaotic enterprise and while there is sometimes a unified theory within a field to guide it, often there is not, and there is little to no unification of theories between fields.  No one can really speak for "science" and the field is so vast that I would seriously question anyone's qualifications for doing so.  Yet it is my experience that atheists are very quick to say what "science" says.

Second in this regard is that science speaks about matters of science alone.  Science tells us very little about ethics or beauty, though both are very important to us.  Many very important fields - government and law, for example - are not scientific.  Attempts to jam these fields into scientific reasoning exhibits a faith in science I find frankly religious in dimensions.  It is just as bizarre, to me, as when Bible-believing Christians say that the answers to all questions are found in a book compiled 1600 years ago.  I think that science is a highly productive epistemology, but it doesn't even try to answer all questions and to believe it does is where the religious canard that "science is like religion" becomes true.

(As I have said elsewhere, science isn't much like religion, but I'm not talking about science, here, but the crazy way many atheists believe in science.)

The second big problem with religion is that the attitudes and believes of atheists aren't different than religious people of their race and class, really.  There is this atheist saw: the difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the atheist believes in one fewer god than the Christian.  Yes.  Exactly.  It isn't much of a difference at all!

So the behavior of atheists is almost identical to that of rich white men.  Part of this - and you see it all the time with assholes like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris - is that they feel very free to attack in grotesque terms the same people that Christians in their society attack in the same ways.

So Richard Dawkins is this sexist pig.  Sam Harris can go on a TV show and say, seriously, that Muslims are extra special kinds of murderers and liberals need to really crack down on them.  This gets reflected on down, so at Freethought Dayton they were equally comfortable saying grotesque, racist crap about Muslims - they only study technology to murder Americans, they stopped thinking after 1500, stuff like that.  And going hand-in-hand with the first point, the only thing that mattered was their developments in science and technology.  I can find this kind of talk in after church social in America.

I contend that atheist culture is broadly like this.  They might have rejected the existence of supernatural entities like gods and devils, but their attitudes about many, many things are the exact same as religious people and driven by our culture of religion.  If the only thing you've abandoned is the belief in a supernatural god, that isn't such a big deal if you continue to perpetrate the patterns of thought and behavior created by religion.  I contend that atheists do precisely that.  They don't hate Muslims, all Muslims, for any reason - it is easy to tear apart the idea that Muslims are somehow more irrationally violent than people in the West, as I've done again and again on this very blog - but because people in the Christian West have hated Muslims for 1400 years.  As a result, they do precisely what Christians do - rather than trying to build bridges between the West and the Middle East, they attack them as backwards and needing a brutal lesson in violence for their own good.

Specifically on terms of race, atheists merely perpetrate the cultural misconceptions of our society, and from the same religious sources.  So, for instance, almost all atheists believe in a radical kind of free will - that we are absolutely free.  This isn't scientific.  Almost no one in psychiatry, psychology or neurology believes in a strong free will - many don't believe in free will at all.  Yet, I have met blessed few atheists that don't believe in an extreme form of free will - which has its origins in Christian dogma.  Christianity requires an extreme definition of free will in order to rationalize their beliefs about sin, heaven and hell.  I could go on about this, but I hope to have made my point - much of what atheists believe derives almost entirely from religion.

I also think that atheists who are in groups and sitting next to atheists who say these things are no different than Christians or Muslims who sit next to their coreligionists and tolerate their racist, sexist bullshit in church.  I understand the need to belong to something is very strong, but you're doing exactly what Christopher Hitchens said that moderate Christians do when they don't stand up to their racist and sexist peers - they give tacit support and approval to the atheists who do think and say such things.

One of the net results of this is it makes it very hard for religious people, particularly if they're not rich or white, to take atheism seriously.  If I'm a poor black person and I'm listening to that racist fuckwit Sam Harris talk about how liberals need to attack Muslims more, and I'm looking down at the local mosque and how they spend a bunch of their time improving the self-image of black people, doing community service and creating a safe space for black culture to flourish, I'm not likely to be very impressed.  Wearing a headscarf doesn't seem so unreasonable in the face of all that empowerment.  Harris is going to sound a whole lot like another self-indulgent rich white racist telling non-white people how they should act and behave . . . which is precisely what he is!  So I guess that's okay!

And if I'm some poor white person, it's the same thing!  Rich white people don't give a damn about the social and culture aspects of religion - how when people like Sam Harris either contemptuously dismiss or flatly ignore the poor, it's often the churches that are there to pick up the slack.  A sermon seems a small price to pay for the kind of cultural interconnectedness that churches in poor communities bring!

This isn't me saying that religion is good, broadly speaking.  I think there are a lot of problems with religion.  That teaching children that they'll go to hell unless they behave a certain way is psychological abuse, that religion teaches an inability to correctly determine what is true and what is not that has multifaceted and serious consequences for everyone, everywhere (climate change deniers are at the top of this list).  I think religion normalizes racism and sexism, it creates an us-against-them attitude that is unhealthy for the body politic and a bunch of stuff besides.  Unfortunately, atheists have inherited a lot of that, often wedded to the arrogant superiority of rich white people looking down at everyone else.

None of this is structural in believing there are no gods.  There are plenty of skeptical traditions from antiquity to the modern day that have little or no overlap with modern Anglophone atheism.  I think one of the reasons I'm relatively sympathetic to critique of atheism, for instance, is that I got into it through Marx.  To me, criticism of religion is inextricably bound up with that of class - and the bigger problem is and always has been that a certain group of people have cheated, lied and killed in order to command other people.  To me, that's atheism.  Most Anglophone atheists are far more in tune with Ayn Rand and Adam Smith than Karl Marx, though.  Still, that's where I think this comes from, even though I no longer regard myself as a socialist.  Religion is a way that a certain segment of the ruling class keeps everyone else in line; modern Anglophone atheists are almost uniformly from that class, they just think that neo-liberal capitalist democracy and a scientific bureaucracy are better at it than religion.

I give the caveats that I am not condemning everyone who is an atheist or religious.  Many atheists are good people; so are many religious people.  But insofar as I'm talking about broad cultural trends, I think what I've said is true.

For my own part, while I do not believe in god, I am finding it increasingly hard to call myself an atheist because it identifies me with a social movement I find increasing abhorrent.  And not just some of the talking heads on TV, but that the whole movement - in my experience - does reflect those values.  I prefer secular humanist, these days, with an emphasis on the humanist.  In the end, I'd rather spend time with a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever that believes in reducing the misery in the world with an bunch of fucking sexist, racist assholes who happen to agree with me that gods don't exist.

What #MuslimApologizes makes me think about: Hyder Ali and Billy Congreve

With the hashtag #MuslimApologies, people are getting a lot of snippets of things Middle Easterns (mostly Muslims) invented.  But this is what this brings to mind, for me: William Congreve.  He is considered to be one of the founders of modern rocket science but here's the thing . . .

He stole it all from Muslim Indians in Mysore.  Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, used iron rockets to fight the English, and did so quite successfully for quite some time.  When they were finally conquered, Congreve stole the technology and rebranded it into the Congreve rocket.

But no one goes, "Oh, yeah, modern rocketry was founded by Hyder Ali."  They also ignore the incredible metallurgy used in those rockets, generally superior to the English metallurgy (which is why the English rockets were more complex - English metallurgy was broadly inferior to Mysorean metallurgy of the period; simplicity in weapons is generally a good thing).

This wasn't in some remote medieval period, either.  This was the 1780s and 90s.  This was the Industrial Revolution, which was very much also happening in India until the English stopped it.  They destroyed the schools and cast the whole country into ignorance and part of that was the conquest of Mysore and destroying Indian rocketry.

Stuff like that happened all over Asia, as with Indian metallurgy and rocketry.  After the conquest of India, England wanted to export iron to India, but it was low quality compared to the iron India was producing.  So what did the English do?  Bought up the foundries and closed them.  Capitalism in action!  That was in the 1820s, well past the era most Westerners arrogantly assert that the Muslims had fallen altogether behind the West (and by "the West" we should also remember they mean a small handful of northwestern European nations and the United States).

Then we perpetrate this by placing a European as the person who "started" something.  Rockets don't become interesting to us until an Englishman does it.  Before that?  All that work done by Chinese, Korean and Indians is irrelevant.  The history of European metallurgy is central to the story of civilization, let's ignore Indian metallurgy's superiority by materially destroying it.

This becomes part of a great cycle where the West expropriates the culture of other places, Westernizes it, and then lays perpetual claim to it.  So, universities are inherently Western institutions - I have heard this time and again - despite the model of our universities coming from the Middle East.  Now, universities are fundamentally "Western" institutions despite their Middle Eastern origins.  Mathematics seems to arrive only with calculus - Newton and Leibnitz purified the Eastern albegra and now mathematics are a Western institution.

It's one of the things that made me quit Freethought Dayton!  They were talking about the lack of intellectual accomplishments of the Muslim world, and I was talking about how much of the basis of our modern world was first learned by Muslims - much of mathematics, physics, engineering, astronomy, universities, medicine, metallurgy and so forth and so on were based on the science of Middle Easterns.  Irrelevant because around 1500 (their words, not mine), "they" stopped using the stuff and it became ours.  Except, y'know, they didn't stop using it, I went on to say.  Even to this day, there are great Middle Eastern scientists and engineers.  Ah, they retorted, most of them are in Western schools.  But, I said, those schools are based on Middle Eastern schools . . .  Irrelevant!  Now they're in the West!  It seemed a circular argument to me.  Middle Easterns in Western schools weren't engaging in the cultural activity their ancestors invented, they weren't doing a Middle Eastern thing in a Western environment, the Middle Easterness of it had been altogether stripped away.  The same with math, physics, medicine, so forth and so on.  Despite the continuity from the past to the present and the presence of Middle Easterns at every step along the way.  It's a very good trick, if you can manage it.

We are told a great many lies about the supposed collapse of education in the Asia, in particular, and a great many lies about Western technological prowess.  We both ignore those instances when non-Western technology exceeded our own and don't pay attention to any given technological development until a Western does it well and create willful ignorance about the extent of Western complicity in destroying Asian education systems, economies, etc.  It's a pretty nasty piece of work, if you ask me.

We need a new word for people who work against the public trust within the boundaries of law; criticism of dismissing conspiracy theorists

To me, conspiracy theorizing is pretty weird because when you look at the definition of a conspiracy it's obvious we're surrounded by them once you strip out the risible language.  But it's hard to do because the risible language is built in.

A conspiracy is, according to thefreedictionary.com, 1. an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful or subversive act, 2. a group of conspirators, 3. Law an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action and 4. a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design.

That's . . . a pretty loaded definition because it leaves out of the realms of conspiracy anything that isn't illegal and even by the fourth definition, “as if by sinister design”. Conspiracy is, by a common dictionary, by definition at least sinister and usually illegal.

Going to thesaurus.com, I tried to find a word that was like conspiracy but accounted for things that were not illegal – like the word whose definition is “people working together inside the law but against the public welfare”. In a note to the entry “collusion”, they note that “cooperation is always positive, collaboration is positive except in wartime (working with the enemy) and collusion is always negative (working together in secret for a dishonest purpose)”. Conspiracy is a synonym with collude.  There didn't seem to be anything like I was looking for.

Yet, I find that unsatisfying, too, because there are all kinds of behaviors that are legal but nevertheless highly manipulative, such as advertising and propaganda (which is just advertising with a political message we don't like, really – how is the manipulations of North Korea propaganda but what comes out of our smear-happy, negative campaigning, lie-athon that we call an electoral process NOT propaganda?). There just seems to be no word, other than conspiracy, to describe when a group of people, often totally legally and with legal ends, nevertheless engage in unethical behavior to achieve their ends.

So what do we call a group of people who legally lie (and often their lies form the very basis of law) to achieve their ends that are destructive and terrible yet totally legal?

To take a fairly extreme example, how does one talk about the lies and distortions used to start the Crusades. A letter from the Byzantine Emperor asking for mercenaries was turned into a lurid account of Turks murdering Christians and desecrating the tomb of Jesus. None of it was illegal. One could argue that the Catholic Church and various governments that supported the narrative of the Crusades were simply interpreting a complex political situation in terms that could be understood by their illiterate and uncultured knights and peasants.  Sure, it's specious reasoning, but you could make it and just barely not be laughably wrong.

Yet, somehow, the lies spread by Pope Urban II and the kings of Europe do not fit the definition of “conspiracy” because it wasn't illegal or subversive. What was it, then? Just religion?

But a lot of politics and business is like that. What they do is not technically illegal and, honest, there was no malice of intent. Even with the credit default swap stuff that tanked the economy in 2008. Not a conspiracy. Sure, there was a coordinated effort by every top bank in the world to sell as many credit default swaps as possible all to increase their own personal fortunes, but that's not a conspiracy! That's just business.

But it happens again and again. Every bubble in the history of the modern world has been engineered to benefit a few. Every war has it's winners, usually the guys who sell guns. Yet when a military contractor uses political influence to shape an aggressive foreign policy, it's not a conspiracy. Nothing either illegal nor subversive is going on. It's just politics.

There is a lacuna in our language then. If we use the word conspiracy to talk about political, religious and economic manipulation, we're called paranoid because the events we describe aren't illegal or subversive. There is no well-round word with which we can describe the legal forms of manipulation of our culture, business and politics that also describes the profundity with which the system is controlled by small cabals of like-minded individuals. Legally. Openly.

This really benefits the, oh, let's call them special interest groups that control our government. We can't really refer to their multifaceted, yet legal, manipulations of the public trust in language that does justice to the seriousness of their actions. And we can't talk about something unless we have words that substantially describe what it is we're talking about. In this lacuna of words, a lot of manipulation is not discussed. Worse, when people dare call it conspiracy – because the behavior resembles a conspiracy save for it's legality – the very idea that this kind of collusion occurs at all is attacked. People who bring up the concentration of power in a tiny group of people's hands are just crazy conspiracy theorists.

We need a word to describe the legal manipulations of the system against the public trust, one that conveys the seriousness of the issue but does not bring to mind the specter of conspiracy. Until we have such a word, the people out there who are acting together, within the system, but against the public trust will have an easy go at it because we can't even TALK about them.

The documentary Technocalpys not well thought out, I think

I got about six minutes into a documentary about transhumanism, Technocalpys, before stopping.

I'll probably be posting, soon, about how we have a bias towards technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic and how this limits our understanding of technology, but this was definitely on my mind when watching, y'know, the first six minutes of the Technocalpys.

What really lost me is that some talking head was saying that humans are beginning to cheat nature's limitations. Which . . . is very much baffling to me because humans have been reshaping themselves for thousands of years. Pretty much the first time a person decided that they didn't want the body that nature and their own unconsidered habits gave them – the first time a human set about exercise – the decision was made to transform us from the coincidence of our genetic inheritance and circumstance into something different. Likewise, the first time a human set out to consciously discover something, they started the process of education which created a vastly different kind of person.  To a paleolithic human, we are transhuman.

Sure, compared to the future, the ttechniques humans use to improve themselves will be considered crude. Much in the same way an abacus is crude compared to a laptop. But the continuum is there – the ancient Greeks invented progressive weight training, a conscious way to develop and improve physical strength. They decided to be more than nature made them, to be stronger, to be better, shaped by their own conscious desires. To me, that's the pivot upon which transhumanism moves and it started moving long ago.

The bias is, as I hinted above, primarily the bias we have for technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic. For instance, I believe that steroids and human growth hormones intermediary between simply progressive exercise and cybernetic or genetic manipulation for improved strength. If you take steroids intelligently, you become slightly superhuman. If you take them intelligently combined with progressive exercise techniques, you might as well be superhuman. Seriously, take a look at the abilities of professional athletes and the way their abilities tend to increase over time. Much of that improvement is due to various performance enhancing drugs.  Compared to the athletes of yesteryear, modern athletes are slightly superhuman.

But, y'know, that's cheap. It is also hard on a personal level. I suppose that we also tend to approve of technologies that make things easier for us. I'm sure the first robot bodies won't actually be better than the bodies of elite athletes – the primary difference will be that to be an elite athlete takes an awful lot of work whereas, in people's minds, having your consciousness transferred to a robot will be relatively quick and painless.

At any rate, when I realized that the documentary was going to be so tone deaf as to make no connection between historical and present efforts to reshape our bodies and minds past their natural states, I realized that it had nothing to teach me or, I think, too much interesting to say.  

They also used a lot of Burning Man imagery and I've never met anyone who's gone to Burning Man who is capable of seriously talking about futurism.  Just sayin'.

MMA vs Football is like the circus vs. grad school

I was reading this article by a fella named Luke Thomas about MMA's status as spectacle more than a sport. I developed some comments.

The UFC, fairly publicly, looks to pro wrestling as its business model. People read a lot more into that than the UFC intends. Both have publicly viewed TV shows to capture public attention and then you have big pay-per-view events to capture dollars, both aggressively market their fighters. That's where the similarity ends, but when anyone learns that the UFC is modeled off of "pro wrestling" they start to think the kind of sports entertainment of the WWE.

In Japan, the connection is even closer. One of the early MMA promotions, Pancrase, was started by Japanese pro wrestlers who wondered who would actually win if they were to fight with wrestling-style rules. Several legendary MMA fighters -- Masakatsu Funaki, Ken Shamrock, Minoru Suzuki -- came from the Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Group before they were MMA fighters. Pro wrestling and MMA have a lot of overlap. That's just a fact.

There's a lot of history there, too. In very short, even legitimate sports fights trace themselves back to circus hucksters in fighting sideshows and those circus hucksters became the first fight promoters. With wrestling, since wrestling is sort of dull to watch, they had to spice it up and eventually it got to where it is today. With boxing, well, it is exciting and they never got rid of the legitimate competition . . . but they kept the circus sideshow promotion style.

Other professional sports developed from academic traditions arising in the 19th century. The one line history here is that in the 19th century, rich people were getting fat and weak so they introduced athletics into school curriculum. All the big non-combat professional sports in the US -- baseball, football, basketball, tennis and even ice hockey -- arise out of school curriculum. While schools do have one combat sport, wrestling, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling are not viable sports for a professional business model (a trait shared by many other academic athletics contests, of course).

So, what I see is that you have professional sports arising from two different places. One of those places is colleges and private schools in the late 19th century and the other is, quite literally, circuses. This leads me to believe that there is an elephant in the room and that elephant's name is "class". Most professional sports are conceptually "high class". Combat sports are the entertainment of low class peons.

Which is where this animosity about fighting sports comes from. People will say it's because of the brutality . . . which I think is a very interesting term. The sport is disliked because the intent of the sport is violent, whereas the injuries in football -- which is an injury prone sport, you hardly finish a pro or even college game without someone being taken off in a stretcher -- or, for heaven's sake, skiing are considered not as significant because they lack that idea of brutality.

I find myself thinking that the concept of brutality, itself, is invested with tremendous class significance. I could talk, historically, about brutality, but I won't. I'll just bring up that no one thinks it brutal for people to hire other people to do jobs that are physically hazardous, from mining to meat packing. The most dangerous job in America is lumberjack. Most jobs could be made much, much safer than they are, but that would cost money . . . I think that cold assessment of money that condemns a large number of people, every year, to agonizing injuries or death is incredibly brutal. Far more brutal than two guys who, basically, love their jobs going out and hitting each other. Sure, they might get injured, but that's true in many, many jobs. It's true in many, many past times and many, many sports.

So I find that condemning a sport as brutal not based on the injuries that people get performing the sport but, instead, on the idea that the sport is a fighting sport is a kind of witty argument used to cover up classism. The problem isn't that it's brutal, but that it's close class . . . it's vulgar. Which puts it in a piece of the way the rich and powerful have always viewed the poor and weak -- we speak wrong, our music is noise, our art is ugly, nothing we can do is right. Even though, to our ears, our speech is poetry, our music reveals our hearts and our art glorious. No, no, it's wrong because it doesn't conform to the standards set by rich people and learned in academic environments. Rock, country and rap will never be classical music, in the same way fighting sports aren't "pure sports" but a vulgar spectacle.

It's simply not about whether MMA is or is not a sport. It's that MMA isn't the kind of sport the "right people" do, it isn't a sport by rich people for rich people, it doesn't hail from a safe academic tradition, it doesn't abide by their rules of what is "proper". It abides by a different logic, the logic of people who see evidence all around that life is a struggle and sometimes fighting is necessary. Fighting sports come from people who don't have presumptions of safety and security.

(I might also so they're also pretty terrifying sports because they constantly remind the rich and powerful what will happen if "they" fight "us". That the working class finds it really easy to find an endless stream of tough guys, that the violence upon which their society depends is not done by themselves, but by proxies in the working class who are much, much better at it than they'll ever be.)