Book Post for April, Not About Parenting

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american politics is the best reality show, diane duane, god bothering, history side of tumblr, lingua latina, ozy blog post, rape tw, rationality, science side of tumblr, sex work, there is no justice and there is no judge

Eros and Thanatos: A pair of philosophical dialogues about love and sex, starring a family of Roman reconstructionist pagans. If this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. In the first, Catullus (a closeted gay man who believes that Love Conquers All) debates homosexuality with Germanicus (a Stoic who believes sex is only for procreation), Lydia (a Catholic), Sheila (a basically normal person), Ali (a postmodernist feminist) and Juvenal (the sort of edgelord who goes about saying that everything is violence and power). In the second, Juvenal, Germanicus, and Catullus debate whether murder is ever morally acceptable, along with Caligula (an atheist) and Brutus (a Buddhist).

Motel of the Mysteries: From the Body Ritual Among The Nacirema school of parody, the premise is that two thousand years from now an archaeologist finds a buried motel and concludes that this was a place of sacred mysteries. The book discusses The Great Altar (a television), the ceremonial burial cap (a shower cap), and the sacred collar (a toilet seat). Funny and pointed.

Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism: This is a very frustrating book. I thought I would really enjoy it because I love her blog– even when I disagree she’s always insightful– but this book occasionally veered towards something I agree with and then felt like it came from Cloudcuckooland. People who have casual sex are all sex addicts! You can tell, because they deny that they’re sex addicts, and addicts always deny their addiction. Obviously. Nevertheless, Selmys’s conversion story is really interesting. She gets catechized early on by a Druid.

Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections: I find this book much less frustrating than the former book, and even agree with it in some places.

Selmys uses the Roman emperors as a framing to talk about the etiology of homosexuality. Of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only one was completely heterosexual. Even assuming that some were slandered by their detractors, at least half the emperors had some level of same-sex attraction. This seems strange from a perspective in which only three percent of the population is LGB, and startling even if you assume Roman emperors carried the gay gene, since many early Emperors were not related. She uses it as a framework to talk about different causes of homosexuality: for instance, Julius Caesar might have been an opportunistic bisexual, Tiberius a sex addict, Caligula a sexual assault victim, Nero a very feminine man forced into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother, Hadrian a normal well-balanced person who happened to be in love with a man, Elegabalus a trans woman. Even given the many similarities between Roman emperors, there’s a lot of diversity in sexual behavior and motivation and what it means to call someone gay or bisexual.

Selmys’s observations on ex-gays seem to match up with my own observations of bihacking. Some people experience a sudden change in sexuality, but it’s not common and there’s no way to cause it; most people can, with a lot of hard work, transform themselves from Kinsey 0s and 6s to Kinsey 1s and 5s, but this does not actually offer a realistic hope of a relationship. Selmys claims that sudden orientation shifts are often caused by falling in love, which isn’t true in my experience, and I am curious what the difference is.

Selmys had a really interesting perspective on how having a lot of kids affects the experience of a parent of a disabled child. If you have one kid, all your hopes and dreams are on that kid. When your child is diagnosed with a disability, you have to grieve all the experiences you won’t have: if your child uses a wheelchair, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to play football; if your child is intellectually disabled, it’s harder to share the pleasures of science with them. But if you have more than one kid, then you can still have those experiences with your other kids, and it’s easier to recognize how good your disabled child is as themselves. I am not sure if I agree, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Interim Errantry: Three Tales of the Young Wizards: An excellent three-novella collection. It’s nice to get a little breather and see what Kit and Nita are up to when they aren’t saving Earth. Interim Errantry is as weird as any other Young Wizards book: my attempts to explain the plots to Topher involved a lot of “Jack O’Lanterns are apparently sapient”, “and then the tree alien decides to become a Christmas tree”, and “and then through a series of misunderstandings an alien concludes that Nita and Kit are going to engage in the Impregnation Ritual on Valentine’s Day and the prelude to this involves eating one candy heart each day.”

Science fantasy is a genre close to my heart. I love urban fantasy that takes full advantage of the fact that it takes place in our reality and therefore has moons and aliens.

Also, I’m not sure if this is just me, but there were definitely more references to boners and porn than I’m used to in the Young Wizards series. The freedom of self-publishing? Changing standards in YA books?

Borderline (The Arcadia Project Book 1): The fey exist. All genius artwork comes from collaborations between humans and their fey soulmates, called “Echoes”. (The soulmate does not have to be a romantic soulmate.) The Arcadia Project, which employs solely crazy people, manages the fey/human interactions.

Our protagonist has borderline personality disorder and it’s amazing. Nothing I love more than a book about a borderline who totally has insight into the awful things she does and keeps doing them anyway. I liked how it realistically wrote her both as sympathetic and as kind of an awful person, but not as some kind of chaotic evil monster– just someone who has the same empathy and compassion as anyone else, but who sometimes does bad things on impulse. I really liked how the protagonist had recovered from suicidality but was still obviously mentally ill and had a life that sucked because, yeah, not being suicidal anymore doesn’t necessarily mean your life is great. And there was DBT in the book! The protagonist talks about her reason mind and her emotion mind, and one of the other characters is someone who literally severed her reason mind from her emotion mind with magic! I would have appreciated more use of skills, but then the protagonist is (canonically) not very cooperative with therapy. So I guess it makes sense.

 

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High: Wow, it’s like the book Nonviolent Communication, but without the weird and creepy implication that if you do everything right then people will do what you want.

The key piece of advice is that you should focus on what you actually want and doing things that will achieve the goal you actually want, instead of giving into the temptation to instead achieve the goals “no one ever criticizes me” or “the person I’m talking to is punished” or “my sense of self-righteousness is justified” or similar. Do not assume that it’s impossible to get a deal both sides will be okay with: this is often possible!

Before you can succeed at a crucial conversation, you have to separate out what’s actually going on from the story you’re telling yourself is going on about how you are an innocent victim, or the other person is a horrible monster, or you are completely incapable of improving the situation. Try looking at the objective facts of the situation and separating them from your interpretations of what’s going on. Ask yourself about your role in the problem, why a reasonable and rational person would do what the other person is doing, and what you should do to move towards what you want.

The first step in a crucial conversation is to notice when people feel unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they will usually turn to silence or violence: on one hand, selectively showing your true opinions, avoiding important issues, or even withdrawing from the conversation altogether; on the other hand, forcing your views on others, labeling and stereotyping people, or insulting and threatening people. When these happen, the conversation has gone off the rails. Even noticing unsafe conversations can be a huge step towards improving conversations, but you can also work on making it safer. You do that through: apologizing when appropriate; using a contrast statement which addresses others’ concerns that you don’t respect them or have a malicious intent and then clarifies your respectfulness and intent; and finding a mutual purpose, a goal both sides share. You do that through CRIB (this book is as fond of acronyms as DBT is): committing to find a mutual purpose; recognizing why the person you’re talking to wants the things they want; inventing a mutual purpose, perhaps by agreeing that everyone wants the relationship to be strong or the business to succeed; and brainstorming new strategies that serve everyone.

Once everyone is safe, you want to find out other people’s perspectives and share your own. To share your own perspectives, use STATE: share a factual description of the situation from your perspective; tell the story you’ve told yourself about those facts; and ask for the other person’s perspective. While doing this, talk tentatively, saying things softly and in a way that implies you want other people to correct you, and encourage other people to share their own views, no matter how controversial. To encourage other people to share their perspectives, use AMPP: ask to hear people’s concerns; mirror other people’s feelings; paraphrase what you’re hearing; and if they really won’t share their opinions with you at all, prime by saying tentatively what you think the other person’s perspective might be. If it turns out you and the other person disagree, start with an area of agreement; build on what the other person is saying by suggesting that they might have overlooked something; and compare positions, suggesting that you differ and not that one of you is wrong, when you really can’t reach consensus.

When it comes time to make the decision, you should follow an appropriate decision-making procedure: for instance, the boss has the final say in a corporation, but in most marriages decisions are made by consensus. When decisions are made, you should always be clear about who is responsible, what exactly they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it by, and what the followup will be.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Voters are systematically biased: for instance, compared to the consensus of economists, they tend to underestimate the usefulness of markets and the economic benefits of trade with foreigners. Voters are wrong even about obvious empirical issues: for instance, voters tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the budget devoted to foreign aid. Voters care about trivia about politicians (Dan Quayle’s feud with a television character) at the expense of practical issues (who is their senator); while voters swiftly punish transgressions they hear about, these transgressions are generally things like “said a racist slur” or “cheated on his dying wife” rather than things like “caused the incarceration of millions of people for relatively small crimes” or “destroyed the entire economy”. The worst part is that voters are altruistic, so instead of voting based on their pocketbooks (which, presumably, would incentivize politicians to have a good economy for most of their voters) they vote based on what they think is good for the country (which incentivizes politicians to give voters things the voters think are a good idea, whether it is or not).  All this means that voters vote for and receive terrible policy.

Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable to me how democratic governments wind up with their current level of low-variance mediocrity. This happens every time I read something about society. Like, it’s really remarkable how well our society works given that every individual element of it is a constantly-falling-apart shitshow. I have no explanation for this state of affairs.

Weirdly, Caplan models the situation as “there are benefits to having biased opinions (less effort researching right opinions, signalling group membership, not having to admit you’re wrong), there are costs to having biased opinions (you are wrong about things and that hurts you), since any voter has an astronomically small chance of flipping the election it is rational for them to buy way more bias than they would for things affecting their personal life.” While I think that’s correct for some situations, other biases, such as the availability heuristic, clearly don’t seem to fit this model. Like, I really don’t think parents are hysterical about children playing outside because they’re obtaining a certain amount of signalling that they’re good parents at the cost of a certain amount of parenting effort, I think they’re legitimately just mistaken about the chance their children will be kidnapped. And I suspect similar arguments apply to voters as well.

Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction: I am impressed by the consistent high quality of the “very short introduction” series and wish I could subscribe to a program where they mail me a random one each month and then I get to learn about mathematics or nothingness or logic or something each month.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that some people, including Flynn himself, believe the Flynn effect is due to increased familiarity with standardized tests in general and intelligence tests in specific. For instance, in the 1930s, an IQ test was probably the first standardized test a person had ever taken, while I took about two standardized tests a year for twelve years while attending a school system which was widely criticized for primarily teaching me how to be good at taking tests. It’s no wonder that I’d have a higher IQ score. In this case, the Flynn effect means that changing IQ scores provide us little to no information about whether and how people’s IQ scores are changing over time.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: This is a pretty good introduction to the YIMBY position on housing. Various regulations– including rent control and zoning– make it more difficult and less profitable to build more homes, so we have fewer homes than we need. The idea that homes are an “investment” which always increases in price also increases the price of housing for people who don’t own their own homes. As a result, people live further from work (leading to unpleasant commutes and lots of pollution) or move to cities with cheaper housing but fewer jobs. This is bad, because dense locations provide a lot of benefits to people– ranging from higher productivity to a cleaner environment to better restaurants.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: I originally thought I was a ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal, and then I read this book, and discovered I was an ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal except for crimes committed by presidents. When Glenn Greenwald remarked that under international law torture is punished with the death penalty, I thought “yep, actually, I totally support executing George W Bush.”

Unfortunately, my tough-on-crime stance is not shared by most people. In fact, under the name of “unifying the country” and “looking forward not backward”, presidents have managed to get away with absurd violations of national and international law: from Nixon’s multiple felonies to Bush’s surveillance and torture. Of course, this is not actually how the rule of law ought to work: the most basic principle of our government is that it is a government of laws not men, which is to say that if you commit a crime you should be punished, even if you are the president. (Especially if you are the president!) Claims that “public policy takes precedence over the rule of law”. Of course, there are many incentives for any given president to pull this shit: if they punish their predecessors for felonies and war crimes, maybe they’ll be punished for their own felonies and war crimes! All this is combined with a massive expansion of incarceration, meaning a poor black person gets more time in jail for smoking pot than a president does for violating international law.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk: The real lesson of this book is that Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE and the St. James Infirmary, is a stone-cold badass. Margo St. James became a sex worker after she was accused of doing sex work because she was a beatnik and hosted lots of different men in her apartment, and obviously the only reason one would have men stay over is doing sex work. Her conviction meant that she couldn’t find a job other than doing sex work. She founded COYOTE, one of the first sex workers’ rights organizations, a year after J Edgar Hoover died “because we wanted to make sure he was really dead”. COYOTE’s shenanigans included awarding a giant keyhole to the Vice Cop of the Year and holding loiter-ins at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Their largest victory was when Judge Marie-Victoire dismissed almost forty sex workers’ cases on the grounds of sex discrimination, since the police had not arrested the clients. (The assistant district attorney for vice crimes said there was no reason to arrest men because “the customer is not involved with the commercial exploitation of sex, at least not on an ongoing basis.”) St. James also climbed Pike’s Peak to prove that sex workers aren’t diseased. Today, he St. James Infirmary commits to doing research that sex workers feel matters to them: for instance, it performed the first medical research on the foot problems caused by working all night in hooker heels.

I also appreciated the following slogans from a protest of Playboy Bunny clubs which only paid their workers in tips, without any salary: “don’t be a bunny, work for money” and “women should be obscene and not heard.”

In 34 states, doing full service sex work while being HIV positive is a felony, regardless of whether transmission occurred or what the actual risk profile of the sex act is. No HIV-positive client has ever been prosecuted.

The unsung heroes of this book are public health workers and activists, many of whom regularly break laws to help their sex worker clients: from giving out clean needles and crack kits, breaking trafficking laws to help underage sex workers find shelter and necessities, giving out birth control and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV without prescriptions, or letting people know when the police are a few blocks away.

[content warning: rape]

Bang: The advice in this book is mostly reasonable. The author, however, is a goddamn misogynist.

As an example: Roosh says that you should do things because you want to do them, not in a desperate attempt to please a particular woman. This is great advice; I agree that if you’re buying someone a drink, it should be because you like them and want them to be happy, not because you’re desperately seeking their approval. His next sentence says that if he buys women drinks, it’s not a form of supplication, it’s to loosen them up so they’ll fuck him.

This is merely one example of a larger problem. Roosh seems to view sex not as something that people do together because it’s fun but as a competition between men and women in which men try to obtain sex and women try to deny it. He views a woman saying no to sex as an ordinary, normal part of the process of having sex with her; his writing clearly seems to imply that he expects a woman to say “no” to sex three or four times the first time he has sex with her. It is nice that he does not suggest physically forcing a woman into sex. He does, however, suggest ignoring her nos (for instance, responding to “we’re going too fast” with “yeah, I agree” but continuing to do whatever you’re doing) and responding to an outright “no” by stopping for a few minutes and then doing the thing again.

Of course, perhaps some women are saying “no” in the hopes that Roosh will override her “no”. (As I’ve always said, I think such ridiculous behavior should be punished by those women not getting to have sex until they learn better.) And of course some people say no to sex and then change their mind and say yes, although early on in a relationship you should probably check in and see if they’re sure. But a lot of the women he’d be using that strategy on are people who are scared, inexperienced, unsure, not good at setting boundaries. They might be frightened that if they don’t comply he will hurt them; he’s given them no reason to think otherwise. It is scary to be alone and naked, often in a house that isn’t your own, with a person who is larger and stronger than you. Is this the sort of thing you’re comfortable doing with a sexual partner?

Even from a purely selfish level, I can’t imagine that this is a great way to obtain sex. Like… surely you want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you? What benefit does having sex with a reluctant person have over masturbation? They make very good Fleshlights these days, you know. And it certainly makes the rest of Roosh’s pickup advice questionable. If he’s so good at seducing women, how come he has to pressure people who don’t want sex with him into sex? Surely they should be throwing their dripping panties at his head?

I think a lot of pickup stuff can be really useful for shy men. It can be hard to think of something to say to strangers, so knowing basically what you’re going to say can make it easier to break the ice and come off as charming and fun. A lot of pickup stuff isn’t the Magic Secret To Obtaining Sex, it’s just a basically reasonable thing to say while flirting, and that can serve as a magic feather to build confidence so you actually hit on people. And by relying on other people’s lines for a while you can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t and eventually learn to flirt without the lines. But there has got to be a book written by a man with less awful and disgusting views about sexuality.

[content warning: rape, suicide]

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom: A depressing amount of this book is based on word games about the meaning of the word “persecution”. You see, it only counts as persecution if the government intended to oppress Christians. The actual state of affairs was that Christians were widely thought of as very strange and rumored to be incestuous and cannibals, were occasionally oppressed by local governors, and sometimes were executed because the Emperor passed a law that said that everyone had to sacrifice to him or be executed, intended to figure out who his political enemies were, but that accidentally harmed Christians. I found this sort of argument-by-definition extremely pedantic. I also found the tie-ins to current culture war stuff really annoying: I can figure out for myself the connections between Christian ideals of martyrdom and Rick Santorum’s idea that Christians are persecuted today, thank you.

That said, it’s still an interesting read for the historical facts. Many so-called martyrdom stories are, in fact, fiction: there are historical inaccuracies and lurid plotlines that make the most sense if they were popular novels intended to amuse the reader. Many bear a striking similarity to Greek romance novels popular at the time. They have plots like “a Christian who has taken a vow of celibacy is forced to marry a vestal virgin, whom he converts to Christianity; they are arrested for trying to convert people, where the vestal virgin is sentenced to work at a brothel; an escaped lion does not harm her but instead kills the men attempting to rape her.” This is salacious enough that it is probably fiction and not a thing that actually happened.

Voluntary martyrdom was apparently quite common in the early church. We have several early Christian writers condemning it as heresy and the sin of suicide; this was probably political, because the Christians we would today consider non-heretical often escaped or recanted their Christianity, and there was a group of heretics, the Donatists, who had confessed to being Christian but were not executed for one reason or another. The non-Donatists have an obvious reason to condemn voluntary martyrdom. One of the stories we have about early Christians is that they went to a regional governor to try to be martyred, except the governor refused and instead told them that if they wanted to die there were cliffs to throw themselves off and ropes to hang themselves on.

The Christians were really confusing to the Romans. Roman polytheism was syncretic; it literally did not make sense to them that worshipping one god meant not being allowed to worship the emperor either. Many Christians were deliberately stubborn and difficult: for instance, one Christian responded to all questions, including his name, with “I am a Christian.” Many Christians said they respected God alone, which was both incomprehensible and probably seditious from a Roman perspective, since Roman society was based on hierarchies of respect.

 

Book Post for February, Part One: Books Not About Parenting

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diets cw, harry potter, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy, there is no justice and there is no judge

Fashionable Nonsense: I have conflicted feelings about this book! It consists mainly of quotes from Continental philosophers about math or science, followed by “this doesn’t actually make any sense”, “this is confusing the scientific concept of chaos with the colloquial meaning of chaos”, “none of these words are real math words”, “they mixed up ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration'”, and “the reason fluid mechanics are hard to solve is not that people have a misogynist objection to fluid things”. They spend a lot of time bashing Lacan, which I always approve of.

To a certain extent, I feel like it’s not entirely fair to critique postmodernism for being an elaborate series of word games? That’s the thing it is. A bunch of clever people showing off how cool their wordplay is. Now, you can ask a bunch of questions about it like “why do people act like these word games are producing knowledge?” and “why is the government funding people to sit on their asses and play incomprehensible word games with each other?” But I feel like criticizing them for being word games without connection to reality is sort of missing the point.

That said, I completely agree that a cute analogy to some mathematical or scientific concept is not the same as “an argument” or “evidence” and mostly serves to give unwarranted scientific rigor to your half-assed speculations. Indeed, I often feel like shouting this to large segments of the rationalist community.

(Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making half-assed speculations– I do it all the time– but it’s bad form to make people feel they are all science-y when they’re not.)

I spent a lot of the chapter on Bruno Latour grousing to myself because, yeah, sure, Latour’s approach to sociology of science neglects that people might believe things because they are true, which is kind of an important part of science. But he can also write a coherent sentence! Sometimes he’s even funny! These things are not true of literally anyone else in the book Fashionable Nonsense (I guess sometimes Irigaray is funny but not, like, intentionally), and I think we should give Latour some credit for that.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty: Finally, a PUA book that isn’t full of shit.

The basic thesis of Models is that the most important traits for a heterosexual man attempting to attract women are vulnerability and non-neediness. Non-neediness means that you care more about your opinion of you than people’s opinion of you in general and her opinion of you in specific. Vulnerability means that you are open about your tragic backstory, weird hobbies, embarrassing tastes, and other things that people might judge you for. These go together, because if a woman is like “ew! He likes bugling!” you’re not like “how can I survive if a woman does not approve of me?????” you’re like “*shrug* her loss.”

I think this is broadly accurate in terms of dating advice, although I really want to expand it to also apply to romances aimed at women. Vulnerability is right, but I feel like there are a lot of things you can say about Edward Cullen but “not needy” is not one of them. Maybe “at least one of not-neediness or murder”? When I brought this up on Tumblr people were like “Ozy, romance novels are different from real life”, which is true. But I think the primary difference is that some things which are bad in real life, like stalking and a history of committing murder, can be romantic in stories because you know that it is not going to end with Bella feeling creeped out and uncomfortable that she’s being stalked or with Edward Cullen murdering Bella Swan. I don’t think it’s true that women are attracted to needy men but understand that in real life there are negative consequences that don’t exist in fiction. There is clearly something different going on here and I want to understand it.

My favorite story from this book is when the author goes out with one of his player buddies to try to figure out The Secret Of Women. His player buddy gets drunk and starts shouting “can I pee in your butt?” at every attractive woman who walks by. Most of them are horrified, but one of them starts talking to him about rimjobs, and they go home together. A week later, the author tries saying “can I pee in your butt?” to women. He does not get laid.

The moral of the story is that subtext matters more than text, and if your subtext is “I like saying gross shit because I think it’s funny, that is who I am, I don’t care whether you laugh or flee in horror”, that is attractive, and if your subtext is “I have unlocked the magic secret to pussy, please fuck me now”, that is not.

Models argues that when someone rejects you, they’re actually doing you a favor. For instance, a lot of men complain about women rejecting them for being short. But if she rejects you for being short, she is either not attracted to you or extremely shallow. Why do you want to date a shallow person who’s not attracted to you? You should be grateful they kicked themselves out of your dating pool so you don’t have to. This is basically abundance mindset. It is really really hard to get people who can’t get laid to have abundance mindset, and I hope Models’s framing would actually work.

Women can be divided into the categories receptive, unreceptive, and neutral. Unreceptive women have boyfriends, are moving out of the country tomorrow, have taken a vow of celibacy, are lesbians, don’t share your interests, don’t share your values, think you’re ugly, etc. If you’re not certain if a woman is unreceptive, ask her out and then you’ll know. It is best to assume that you are never ever ever ever ever going to change the mind of an unreceptive woman; even if you can, it’s not worth the effort. Shrug it off and move on.  Receptive women initiate with you or enthusiastically reciprocate your flirting. If you have a receptive woman, you escalate and move things forward.

Neutral women aren’t really sure whether they’re receptive to you or not yet; they’re a tentative yes. For most men, most women are neutral when they first meet them. A lot of men assume the right thing to do with neutral women is to avoid offending them by sticking to boring jokes and talking about the weather. This is completely wrong. The longer a woman stays neutral, the more likely it is that she will become unreceptive, because you are boring. In fact, the goal is to get neutral women to become receptive or unreceptive as quickly as possible, through expressing your non-neediness and vulnerability. That way, if she doesn’t like what you’re selling, you don’t have to waste any more time on her, and if she does, then you’re not going to have fucked it up by talking about the weather instead.

There are three important factors in getting laid. Your lifestyle, status, and looks affect what percentage of women are initially receptive to you.  Your boldness, extroversion, and willingness to actually fucking ask women out affect how many women you meet in the first place. Your charisma, flirting ability, and “game” affect what percentage of neutral women become receptive. Models argues that all men who have problems with women have problems in at least one area; most have problems with two, and a few unlucky people have problems with all three.

Lifestyle. The most important principle of lifestyle is that like attracts like. If you want to attract well-educated and successful women with strong opinions on wine, putting your cap on backwards and saying “BROOOOOOOOOOO” a lot will not help. If your heart only beats for metalheads, Sisters of Mercy and Edgar Allen Poe is probably not the right choice. This also applies on a belief level: if you believe that women don’t enjoy sex or that women are all evil, guess what kind of women you’re going to attract. That said, there are also things you can do that will improve romantic success for basically everyone, such as proper grooming, wearing clothes that signal your personality and actually fit, exercising, weight loss, adopting masculine body language and vocal tones, finding unique hobbies that you like, and developing and confidently stating your opinions. (He doesn’t say this, but I would suggest only doing this if they fit with your honest, non-needy, vulnerable self. But I think most guys are not like “my best self is a person who wears clothes that don’t fit!”, they just don’t know how to buy clothes.)

In this section, Models claims that men in general tend to care more about objective indicators of beauty such as waist-to-hip ratio, boob size, and facial symmetry than about subjective indicators like what a woman’s self-presentation is signalling. Typical mind fallacy about this issue, he proposes, is what explains the popularity of weightlifting, complaining about your height, and penis pills. Is that true? Man, other people’s brains are extremely weird.

Approach Anxiety. Lots of men are afraid of things like talking to women, flirting with women, kissing women, and having sex with women. They will generally rationalize why, actually, they shouldn’t approach women: they might say that all women are shallow and terrible (which is silly, because it is far more likely that you are screwed up than that hundreds of thousands of people are all screwed up in exactly the same way), or that they don’t really care about getting a date, or that they need to learn more before they can start. You have to identify your patterns and do the things you’re anxious about anyway; it can help to tell someone who’ll ride your ass about it. He also recommends limiting porn and masturbation so that you’re so horny you’ll ignore your anxiety. Practice accepting your anxiety, recognizing that it’s normal, reframing it as the nervous excitement of being about to do something high-stakes that you’re good at, and not even bothering to hide it from women you’re attracted to. Do exposure therapy to your fear: begin by doing things you’re a little nervous of repeatedly until you are no longer nervous, then try something a little harder. Always err on the side of boldness: boldness polarizes women and turns those “maybes” into “yes” or “no”. Finally, when you are doing something unusual like asking a strange woman you just met out on a date, always acknowledge that it is unusual: for instance, you might say “excuse me, this is kind of random, but I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.”

Flirting. Models claims that men always communicate literally and don’t do subtext. I have talked to several men in my life [citation needed] and this is absolutely not true. However, I can definitely buy that men who suck at flirting and are buying this book Models are bad at subtext. Anyway, flirting is all about subtext. The difference between teasing and insults is whether the subtext is “I like you so much I trust that you will understand I don’t really mean this” or “I hate you.”

Lots of men are afraid of being creepy when flirting. No one ever manages to 100% avoid creeping out anyone; there are always awkward situations and miscommunications. It happens, and it is not the end of the world. Creepiness is behaving in a way that makes women feel insecure sexually. You can do this by escalating too fast or by having a subtext that isn’t matched to your text (you’re asking her about the book she’s reading and staring at her tits).

When in doubt, the best pickup line is “Hey, I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.” Don’t bother about worrying about trying to get women not to flake on you; if a woman really wants to sleep with you, she’ll make it happen. If Brad Pitt asked her out, she wouldn’t forget. Avoid movie dates and dinner dates; instead try museums, concerts, walks in interesting places, dance classes, nightclubs or grabbing a drink somewhere, as fits your style. Find a venue close to your house. Try to do multiple things on a date; it builds a sense of getting to know the person. There’s also a lot of stuff about flirting, signals women give, etc. but this review is already a million words long so I am not going into it.

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption: Evangelical Christians made up an entirely fictional orphan crisis and then decided it was really important that they all adopt children to help end this orphan crisis that they just made up. Naturally, basic economics continues to apply: if you have millions of dollars’ worth of demand for orphans, the supply will magically appear. Parents in many developing countries put their children in orphanages because they cannot afford to feed them but continue to visit and be involved in their children’s lives; these children are often adopted. Many parents in developing countries don’t understand the Western idea of adoption and instead round it to local concepts, such as “being sent to live with a rich relative to be educated and eventually bring money back to your family.” Occasionally children are just stolen.

Domestic adoptions are also horrifying. Many crisis pregnancy centers don’t just coerce women into not having abortions; they also coerce women into giving their children up for adoption. Some actively lie to birth mothers, claiming that their open adoption is legally enforceable when it isn’t or that they can’t take the adoption back because they already signed the paperwork when in reality they could. Others tell women that they are incompetent mothers who will hurt their babies unless they give them up for adoption, or that single parenting is always wrong.

Utah is one of the most ‘pro-adoption’ states in the country. What this means is that, by virtue of consenting to sex, an unmarried man is considered to be aware that he might conceive a child who might be put up for adoption and his silence is assumed to be consent. A birth father does not have to be notified that his child exists; he has to figure it out himself and then fight for the right to take care of his own biological child. If the woman gives birth in Utah, Utahan law applies, and some adoption agencies will move the birth mother to Utah so that the birth father doesn’t have to be notified.

Part of the problem, I think, is that there are a lot of people who want to adopt babies (both infertile people and evangelical Christians who believe in the entirely fictional orphan crisis). But there aren’t a lot of people who want to go through nine months of pregnancy and then not take care of a baby afterward; most people either want to not go through the pregnancy at all (and thus have an abortion) or raise their child. Of course, foster care

Normally, I am not viscerally moved by ineffective altruism. But every time I saw a dollar sign in this book it upset me. $65,000 per child to bring a child from the Ukraine to meet prospective adoptive families equals 19 children dead of malaria. $8,000 per child for adoption fees equals two more dead children.

[The next item talks about the Holocaust.]

Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement: Not a lot of new information for me, but then I’ve been interested in Quiverfull stuff for a couple of years and have a lot of ex-Quiverfull friends and so on.

One of the theologians who really created the idea of God not wanting you to use birth control was also a Holocaust denier. Then he read one of his Holocaust denial books explaining that the gas chambers were too small to kill as many people as the Allies reported had died. Then it occurred to him that many Jewish people were children. So he made a gas-chamber-sized space with couches and cushions, called together his children, told them to stand in the mock gas chamber, noticed that they fit, and started crying. He then spent much of the rest of his life writing books debunking Holocaust denialism.

Doug Phillips, one of the more famous Quiverfull writers, is a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity. Between this and Milo Yiannopolous pissing off the Daily Stormer [link goes to Neo-Nazi website], I have to ask: is there literally any intellectual movement that doesn’t have a Jewish person writing for it?

[The next item contains material about dieting and weight loss.]

Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction: Wow! Nutrition makes a lot more sense than I thought it did! For instance, I previously know that abdominal fat had more negative health consequences than fat on your butt and thighs does, but apparently there is a reason! Butt and thigh fat evolved for fat storage and is metabolically inactive, while abdominal fat evolved to maintain body temperature and as such is metabolically more active, stimulating the production of glucose (whether or not it is needed) and hormones that antagonize the action of insulin. The entire book is like this: explanations for facts you previously knew about but didn’t know there was an explanation for.

In terms of actionable advice, this book recommends eating lots of vegetables and fruits, not eating a lot of processed food or restaurant meals, exercising regularly, avoiding fad diets, and avoiding excessive consumption of alcohol. Which everybody knew about already, but on the other hand if a Very Short Introduction to Nutrition book was full of facts people didn’t know about I would be concerned about the effectiveness of our public health education programs.

I wish this book would have addressed in more detail the subject of why it is so difficult for people to maintain weight loss. The author briefly mentions that an appropriate diet for weight loss maintenance is the same as a sensible diet for people who have been thin all along, but I feel like this fails to answer important questions like how come my husband and I are both eating absurd quantities of post-Valentine’s on-sale candy and yet he’s the only one with a belly.

[Here there be spoilers for Shoebox Project.]

Shoebox Project: Like all the best Marauders fic, it is stealth tragedy. Not, of course, that anything about Shoebox Project is sad: Shoebox Project is commendably fluffy, happy, light, full of witty conversations and shenanigans, and completely missing anything approaching a ‘plot’. But every so often James mentions that he wants to have tons of gross old-person sex with Lily and he probably won’t even think it’s gross because that’s how much he loves her, and then you have to put the fanfic down and sob because of your overwhelming feelings about every one of the Marauders.

(A lot of people are mistaken about this, because the movies inexplicably cast reasonably-aged people to play James and Lily, but James and Lily were only 21 when they died.)

I appreciate that the pranking is treated as being fairly morally ambiguous, and that Remus is shown as having ethical qualms about it but going along because he has a hard time standing up to his friends.

Honestly, Shoebox Project probably has my favorite Peter Pettigrew ever. He feels like he’s stupider and less charming than all his friends (and that’s kind of true), he feels like none of his friends feel very much motivation to hang around with him and just do it out of inertia (and that’s kind of true), and he feels utterly neglected now that they’ve graduated from school (and that’s absolutely true). And he doesn’t even have an explanation for why everyone is neglecting him, because he doesn’t know about the Order of the Phoenix, and he certainly doesn’t know that Remus and Sirius are banging and too busy being wrapped up in new relationship energy to talk to anyone. He becomes a Death Eater because they pay attention to him and they validate his loneliness and they offer an explanation for his problems that isn’t “I’m kind of a terrible human being.” Very relatable. Someone give Peter Pettigrew a hug.

Shoebox Project is famously unfinished, but I actually feel like the ending is a satisfying ending? I mean, you can tell they didn’t intend it to be the ending, but having Peter Pettigrew’s start of darkness as the last chapter is actually a nice resolution. Shoebox Project is about the fun, fluffy part of the Marauders’ lives, and Peter Pettigrew starting to go evil is where you can draw the line and go “yep, it’s over now.”

God, remember pre-Racefail when there was a ton of Discourse about how we need to Write Men Like They’re Men and so we got a bunch of characters being Realistically Misogynist and calling each other girls all the time? Good times, good times. Feels super-weird reading it when I’m more used to reading modern fanfiction in which Remus and Sirius are more likely to have a conversation about how asexuals need to be included in the Wizard Gay-Straight Alliance.

Thoughts On Cults

Tags

abuse tw, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge

[content warning: descriptions of spiritual abuse]

I prefer the phrase “spiritual abuse” to the word “cult” for several reasons.

First, spiritual abuse is less discrete. Either a religion is a cult or it is not; however, the same religion may be spiritually abusive to some people in some contexts while not spiritually abusive to other people in different contexts. For instance, some Alcoholics Anonymous groups isolate their members, tell them not to take psychiatric medication, and pressure them into sex; however, a lot of people find AA an invaluable resource in getting sober. The Catholic hierarchy covered up pedophilia, and a lot of people are faithful Catholics whose lives have been tremendously improved by the church.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s okay to go “well, we’re not literally one hundred percent always spiritually abusive, so there’s no problem here!” Part of one’s religious or spiritual organization being spiritually abusive ought to be an enormous wake-up call to examine what led to the spiritual abuse and how it can be prevented in the future. But I also think that you can say “wow, spiritually abusive AA groups are horrifying, I wonder how we can prevent thirteenth-stepping in our groups” while also saying “my AA group is great”. You can’t say “wow, AA is a horrifying cult” and also say “my AA group is not a horrifying cult.” It does not work that way.

Second, “cult” tends to be applied disproportionately to new religious movements.

Now, there is a good reason to be suspicious of new religious movements. The Catholic Church has been around for a long time and although it has caused quite a bit of harm it is also a known quantity. We know the circumstances in which the Catholic Church directly causes mass murder and have secularism laws in place to prevent this. A new religious movement might unexpectedly lead to mass murder in a way we don’t have laws to prevent.

On the other hand, it is not exactly like the Catholic Church has never been spiritually abusive, between the coverup of the sexual abuse of children, the Magdalene Laundries, churches in which women are pressured into having far more children than they can handle to prove they don’t have a contraceptive mentality, traditional Catholics who teach that it is a sin to refuse sex, and relationships in which Catholic teaching on Hell and sin is used as a tool of abuse. Even if mainstream religions are less likely to be abusive than new religious movements, spiritual abuse in the former affects more people than the latter– after all, they’re bigger! I think “cult” gives a mistaken idea that old religions that aren’t New Agey are safe from spiritual abuse, when in reality every religion has been touched by spiritual abuse.

(I suspect this is historical– “cult” originated from the Christian countercult movement which conflated spiritual abuse and heresy, while “spiritual abuse” originated from survivors of fundamentalist Protestant spiritual abuse. Naturally, the latter is more willing to admit that mainstream religions can be spiritually abusive.)

Third, “cult” is a word which a lot of times gets used against harmless weirdos.

I actually find the broad use of the term ‘cult’ wildly offensive. Like, you do realize that people get PTSD from spiritual abuse, right? “Cult” is not a cool shiny term to use about every group you don’t like. Here are some things that are not, in and of themselves, spiritually abusive:

• Normal groupthink and ingroupy behavior.
• Donating money that you can afford to spend to charities other people in the group approve of.
• Weird but consensual sexual behavior.
• Fervently holding beliefs that outsiders think are weird.
• Having rituals.
• Having group houses.

Here is a list of things that are actually spiritually abusive:

• Isolating people from friends and family who aren’t members of the group.
• Requiring people to make financially unsustainable donations to be part of the group that go solely to finance the group leader’s lavish lifestyle.
• Coercing people into sexual behavior they don’t consent to.
• Not letting people disagree with the orthodoxy.
• Encouraging people to think of themselves as evil, wrong, or shameful.
• Physical assault.

The difference between these two lists is whether it causes harm. A person who thinks they were abducted by aliens who gave them a message of peace and love to share with the Earth: weird but harmless to themselves and others. A person who spends hours screaming insults at people who like the peace and love message but are skeptical of the aliens thing: very damaging to other people! Like, honestly, if you can’t see the difference between “lots of people in this group live in housing situations which are kind of like cult compounds if you squint” and “people who disobey in this group are physically assaulted,” I am kind of worried about you.

A lot of people who sling around the word ‘cult’ have a missing mood. You’d think they’d feel sad that people have been deceived into an ideology that hurts them; after all, the primary people that any spiritually abusive situation hurts are, you know, the people being spiritually abused. Instead, a lot of people’s response is something like this: “Ha ha! I think you’re a victim of psychological and possibly physical abuse! I have so much contempt for you! I’m going to laugh at you for being terrible now!” I am not sure whether these people enjoy laughing at and blaming victims of abuse, or they know perfectly well that the people they’re talking to aren’t spiritual abuse victims but they enjoy making light of the experiences of actual victims in order to insult people they don’t like. Neither one speaks very well of their moral character.

Book Post for July

Tags

all cops are bastards, cixin liu, effective altruism, ozy blog post, parenting, racism, robert heinlein, there is no justice and there is no judge

Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America: This man can write. This is one of the few nonfiction books I’ve ever gotten invested in like it was a novel. I was on the edge of my seat: were the call-ins going to work? Would Kennedy soothe the ruffled feathers of Insert Bureaucrat Here, or would they end the program forever? Would he ever be able to convince the cops that his idea works?

Unfortunately, the writing style that makes Don’t Shoot suspenseful also makes it light on things like ‘evidence’ and ‘examination of alternate explanations.’ Don’t expect many references to peer-reviewed journal articles here.

Kennedy argues that open-air drug markets and inner-city homicides are the result of perhaps a few dozen men, and literally no one else likes it. The police want to win the drug war, but don’t know how, instead resorting to failed broken-windows policing and arresting small-time drug users; feeling like failures, they blame the black community for encouraging violence and drugs. The black community, noticing how many of its members are incarcerated or harassed by police and yet drugs and violence still run rampant, conclude that police are racist and not trying hard to get rid of the drugs (perhaps even putting the drugs in the community themselves). Even most of the gang members don’t like the violence; after all, who wants to have a life expectancy of less than twenty-five?

Kennedy’s proposal is essentially identifying gangs that kill people and going after them as hard as they can, arresting gang members for everything for public urination to violation of parole, and telling them that the harassment will stop as soon as the killing does. That way, gang members can save face, and everyone can stop shooting at the same time, without any gang having to unilaterally disarm. In addition, he proposes ending open-air drug markets (which he considers to be considerably more damaging than friend-of-a-friend drug markets, since the latter exist in white suburbs as much as black ghettos) through gathering enough information to arrest the dealers, calling a meeting, and saying “we are not going to arrest you unless you decide to deal in public again.” Kennedy’s suggestions appeal to my worldview: people respond to incentives; people are generally not stupid or evil, but instead behaving in ways that make sense to them given their circumstances. However, perhaps I should be even less likely to agree with something so intuitively appealing.

A Manual For Creating Atheists: The author of this book, Peter Boghossian, apparently makes a habit of three or four conversations per day (!), often with strangers, trying to get them to become more rational. You can be minding your own business, checking out at the grocery store, making small talk with the other people in line, and you mention you’re a naturopath and suddenly this guy is asking you to cite peer-reviewed evidence that it works. I mean, his book is full of advice that seems reasonable about how to do this thing, if you wanted to, but why on earth would you want to?

My response to this book was mostly making a mental note not to sit next to Peter Boghossian on an airplane, before I got to his obnoxiously stupid chapters on unreason in the academy and ways to make faith less acceptable in society. He characterizes academic leftism as accretions on classical liberalism– and before you say “well, maybe he doesn’t mean actual classical liberalism”, he specifically traces the academic left’s origin to John Locke. Someone should perhaps tell him that Marxists hate liberals and the Enlightenment.

Boghossian argues against the DSM saying that culturally accepted beliefs aren’t delusions, presumably because he wants religious faith to more routinely qualify as a delusion. I agree that the ‘culturally accepted belief’ heuristic isn’t exactly principled, but there is an obvious difference between the cluster of psychotics and the cluster of Pentecostals. For instance, one would not expect Pentecostals to stop being religious if they are given anti-psychotic medication. Putting Pentecostals and psychotics in the same category makes the DSM useless for psychiatrists, its actual purpose. Besides, the only obvious alternatives to an unprincipled heuristic are the DSM listing out what beliefs are and aren’t reasonable, or relying on clinical judgment. The former seems rather outside its core competency, and the latter opens up every unpopular belief for pathologization. Does Boghossian want a teenage atheist in the Deep South to be diagnosed with a delusion because he doesn’t recognize the obvious truth of God’s love?

Boghossian’s beliefs about ending oppression in the developing world seem to be of the “something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done” variety. He ignores the wide variety of excellent feminist activism in the developing world, from the International Planned Parenthood Federation to Girls Not Brides to postcolonial and Third World feminisms. He pushes for feminist groups to spend more time on condemning Islam, without any examination of whether condemning Islam would actually improve the lives of Muslim and ex-Muslim women in any way (or, indeed, whether it would make them worse). Such feel-good, non-evidence-based activism does not belong in a book that claims to be about skepticism.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make A Difference: The best introduction to effective altruism I have ever read. In an engaging and readable style, MacAskill covers standard effective altruist concepts, such as replaceabilty and expected value; the last set of chapters explain clearly what actions you should and should not take, in light of effective altruism. Crucially, there is little to no normative ethics; instead of fussing around with children in ponds, MacAskill assumes that you have at least a little altruistic motivation, and instead focuses on teaching the skills of thinking like an effective altruist.

Even committed EAs can learn a lot from this book. I mostly stopped feeling vaguely guilty about things I wasn’t doing anyway. Buying fair trade has little to no effect on people in the developing world, and may even lower their wages. It doesn’t really matter whether you turn your lights off or unplug your TV; the best methods of reducing your carbon output are flying less, eating less meat, purchasing a mysterious kind of magic called ‘loft insulation’, and buying offsets. Voting, however, is surprisingly important, for much the same reason being vegetarian is (it isn’t that likely that you make the difference between a desired outcome and an undesired outcome, but when you do you get all the credit, so it works out as positive expected value).

My husband is mentioned in this book! And he is in the acknowledgements! My husband is famous.

The Drug Wars In America, 1940-1973: Essential history for libertarians and anyone who’s interested in the operation of American state power or the reasons behind America’s failed drug war. The Drug Wars in America follows how America transitioned from a tax-and-regulation-based model that focused on narcotics to the modern war on drugs. The thesis is essentially that the drug war has never been about eliminating the drug trade, because someone would notice that it wasn’t working. Instead, the drug war serves other purposes of state power: for instance, American foreign policy goals, maintaining the discretion of police even after their professionalization, increasing the profits of drug companies, and policing inner cities. Detailed and well-researched.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: Why is this classified in ‘Zen Spirituality’ on Amazon? Is it because the author is Japanese? While it does have a spiritual element, the element is clearly Shinto. It’s not the “Japanese art” of anything, also! It’s Marie Kondo’s art of decluttering and organizing! She made it up.

I love this book! Essentially, it’s a reframe of decluttering. Most decluttering defaults to assuming things should be kept and then comes up with rules about what you should discard (e.g. things you don’t use for six months). Konmari, on the other hand, defaults to assuming things should be discarded, and then comes up with rules about what you should keep (e.g. things that ‘spark joy’). You don’t keep things because they’re a present, or they were expensive, or you might use them someday, or you want to be the sort of person who uses them, or because you’re too lazy to throw them out. But on the other hand if you like something and it makes you happy, you get to keep it, even if other people would think it was excessive.

Konmari has a certain animist element which I loved, but which some people might dislike. For instance, she suggests thanking the items you discard for their service to you, greeting your house each day, emptying out your bag each evening so that it gets a chance to rest, and folding your clothes in a way that will make the clothes happy; she talks about how whenever she goes to declutter a house she introduces herself to the house and asks permission first.

Many of the negative reviews seem to be from people who don’t want to declutter. That is an absolutely fine life choice which I do not judge, but I rather wonder why they’re reading a book subtitled ‘The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing’ then. I don’t read books about how to cook meat and then go “ugh, zero stars, it was constantly telling me to eat meat and I’m vegetarian.”

Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children: I love this book! Definitely on my list of top books about parenting.

Teenagers are notoriously moody, disengaged, and impulsive; as a person goes through puberty, their sleep schedule shifts later, so that they usually want to go to bed around midnight; in spite of this, high schools begin earlier than elementary and middle schools; moodiness, disengagement, and impulsivity are symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation. And then we punish kids for sleeping in class! I think this argument is, in and of itself, enough reason for a person who is capable of doing so to homeschool their teenagers.

Children learning through imitation goes beyond the famous ‘violence in media’. In an experiment in which some children read books about why sibling rivalry is bad for several weeks and some didn’t, the former group had more sibling rivalry. The reason is that to convey the moral ‘sibling rivalry is bad,’ the books of course had to depict siblings arguing with each other– and children learn behaviors through modeling and imitation! If a preschooler sees ten pages of bickering and two of making up, there’s five times as much bickering for them to model themselves after. This suggests a truly wearying task for the parent who wishes to censor their children’s media, because it’s not like Common Sense Media screens for People Behaving In A Non-Violent Yet Annoying To Parents Fashion.

If you’d like to keep children from lying, the best strategy is to model telling the truth yourself (and remember that preschoolers think that being mistaken is the same thing as telling a lie, so apologize if you’re mistaken!), to not teach children to tell social lies, and to make sure that it’s always a better idea to tell the truth than to lie. If they might get punished if they lie, and they will definitely get punished if they tell the truth, then they will of course lie. Your kid is probably good enough at lying that you can’t tell whether they’re lying a lot. All teenagers lie to their parents; the teenagers who lie to their parents the least are the ones who argue with them the most, which the parents find stressful and upsetting. I wonder if reframing the arguments as ‘my teenager trusts me enough to tell me about things they want’ makes that better?

The Three Body Problem: I clearly have an inaccurate model of the censorship opinions of the Chinese government. I would have expected them to heavily censor information about the Cultural Revolution, but literally the first third of this book is a very stirring, evocative argument that the Cultural Revolution is bad. Apparently I am mistaken about Chinese politics! Which makes sense because I don’t know anything about it.

Anyway, this book is great, completely deserving of its Hugo for Best Novel, precisely the sort of richly imagined, well-written, well-worldbuilt, suspenseful, sense-of-wonder science fiction that is the genre at its best. The science is hard as fuck, at least from my position as a non-physicist, and the characters are well-done without distracting from the shiny neat ideas we came here for.

Don’t read the back. It spoils. Actually, avoid the reviews of it too. I don’t know why everyone decided to summarize this story using the shocking twist, but they did, and knowing it made my experience of the book a lot worse.

The Hatred of Poetry: Literary criticism is fun. Lerner argues that poetry is widely disliked because the goals it sets itself (being both a universal song that anyone can relate to and a personal expression of the poet’s soul) are impossible individually, much less together, and thus poetry is disliked because it is never capable of doing the thing it’s trying to do– even though its failures may be beautiful in their very failure. Mostly great as an excuse to read William McGonagall to Topher, who got to the fourth line of The Tay Bridge Disaster before threatening to divorce me to make it stop.

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed: Please Stop Helping Us appears to be under the impression that a large amount of black violence is caused by use of the n word, gangsta rap, use of non-standard English, and sagging pants. As someone who reclaims slurs that apply to myself, listens to music that glorifies violence, occasionally speaks non-standard English, and sometimes shows people their underwear, and who has never felt the slightest desire to shoot anybody, I suspect there are other causes here.

Please Stop Helping Us claims that parts of the prison-industrial complex such as the crack/powder sentencing disparity aren’t racist because they weren’t originally created for racist reasons, and then turns around and discovers “just because your policy wasn’t intended to be racist doesn’t mean it doesn’t disproportionately negatively affect black people” as soon as they’re talking about the minimum wage. And he talks about how historically black colleges and universities have a very high dropout rate and therefore are failing their students and should be closed, and not three pages later quotes someone who mentions that historically black colleges and universities disproportionately educate poor people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all otherwise. Like, gee, maybe that’s relevant in the assessment of whether they’re failing their students? In short, sufficiently dishonest that I do not update my beliefs based on its conclusions.

I Will Fear No Evil: Well, now I suppose I know what transformation fetishists read before the existence of transformation fetish porn. Also, Heinlein’s dirty old man character is obnoxious– I have literally zero desire to be inside the head of one of the men who has sexually harassed me– and he isn’t much better when he’s a trans woman instead.

Book Post for May

Tags

disability, lois mcmaster bujold, ozy blog post, science side of tumblr, there is no justice and there is no judge

[Thanks to Jonathan and Cliff for giving me books!]
[you might say “Ozy, this is observably not May!” Yeah, well, I’m bad at things sometimes.]

Among the Creationists: My absolute favorite genre of books is Books About What Fundamentalist Religious People Are Getting Up To, I don’t know why this is but I have accepted this fact about myself. Anyway, this is a perfectly good book if you happen to share my interest, and gives you a real sense of why creationists believe what they believe and what it feels like to be a creationist from the inside. If you aren’t interested in creationists, however, it’s definitely skippable.

Only A Theory: tfw you’re part of the way through your nice book about What Fundamentalist Religious People Are Getting Up To and you start having the creeping suspicion that the author believes in God

[content warning for Nazis on the next review]

Pride Against Prejudice: A Personal Politics of Disability: Interesting fact I learned from this book: the Nazi euthanasia program was originally motivated as much by ‘mercy killing’ as it was by attempting to improve the race. Until 1943, Jewish children were not euthanized, because it was believed that as a lesser race they did not deserve it. I think that is a really emotionally moving argument for– even if you happen to be in favor of suicide rights– emphasizing that suicide rights are about people having the right to decide what happens to their own bodies and lives, not about some lives being objectively “worth living” or “not worth living”.

This book has a really interesting exploration of the intersection between feminism and disability rights. Many feminists have advocated for institutionalization, on the grounds that it keeps women from having to be caretakers; however, disability rights advocates tend to oppose institutionalization. I appreciated some of the snark: for instance, in response to a theorist who argues that institutionalization allows disabled women to develop ungendered roles free from family-centric ideology, she proposes that perhaps if institutionalization is so beneficial nondisabled people should do it too.

The story that made my heart ache the most was of Annie, a girl with severe cerebral palsy who was assumed to be severely cognitively disabled and placed in an institution without toys, education, or activities; even the television was for the benefit of staff. A caretaker taught her to use a letter board and it turned out that Annie was, in reality, tremendously intelligent– among other things, she had independently invented multiplication after learning about addition and subtraction from Sesame Street. Not, of course, that it’s okay to neglect people who are severely cognitively disabled, but I think that shows the importance of presuming competence and not assuming that people who can’t talk are things that don’t have subjectivity or a sense of self.

[Spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga. Did I read half the Vorkosigan Saga in two weeks? Yes, I fucking did.]

Ethan of Athos: So the Vorkosiverse had a bunch of gay separatist telepathic religious fundamentalists. That is going to be… really interesting in a couple of centuries.

I spent a large part of this book terrified that Ethan would suddenly discover that women weren’t so bad and he was attracted to them, or worse that he was in love with Elli Quinn. Fortunately, Lois McMaster Bujold would never betray me so, and he gets to date Terence Cee the telepath instead. Also I love how Elli being hot is established by Ethan being confused by why all the other men are constantly looking at her enlarged mammary glands.

It’s really remarkable how capable Bujold is of making characters likeable. I don’t think there’s any other series where I’m as invested in the continued health and happiness of every random character in it. I started out Ethan of Athos being like “well, he is kind of a misogynist” and by the second chapter I was like “Ethan! My kind, gentle, innocent son! I will protect you from all the scary galactic women and their mammary glands!”

Borders of Infinity: Sergeant Taura, my precious angel, my one and only, my favorite character in all of the Vorkosigan Saga. Like, every character is my favorite, but Sergeant Taura is my favorite favorite, if you understand me. I was misled by Effulgence, which I read before I read the Vorkosigan Saga and includes Vorkosigan fanfic in which the role of Sergeant Taura is played by Wolverine, and I did not expect that there would be KISSING and it is my favorite story in the whole Saga.

“How free can she ever be, in that body, driven by that metabolism, that face-a freak’s life-better to die painlessly, than to have all that suffering inflicted on her-”

Miles spoke through his teeth. With emphasis. “No. It’s. Not.”

To be honest, I cheered at my book when I read that.

Brothers in Arms: Old Earth! Also, one of the few mentions of religion in the Vorkosigan Saga– there’s a bit about a galactic going on the hajj. Like, I know that Betans are all atheists or agnostics or maybe Space UUs, but what about Barrayar? They do the whole burning-things-for-the-dead thing but are they ancestor worshippers? Do they pray to a god? There should be more religious worldbuilding in the Vorkosigan Saga IMO.

Anyway, clone shenanigans are the best shenanigans.

Mirror Dance: One chapter into this book I was like “eh, Mark, I’m not sure how I feel about Mark, is this whole thing going to be from his point of view?” By the time I finished I was like “I want another dozen books and all of them are about Mark!” Lois McMaster Bujold is a master of likeable characters, let me tell you.

This is the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga where I had not read an Effulgence of it first, and this lead to considerably more suspense in the plotline! Particularly since Miles died! I was extremely concerned that Miles was going to be dead permanently and then I was going to read about Mark ending death through capitalism for the rest of the series.

Memory: “In the last book, he died,” Lois McMaster Bujold says to herself. “How could I possibly top that? What could make the reader feel more suspense than the actual death of my protagonist? I know! I’ll get him fired!” Apparently getting fired is more permanent than dying, also!

This book is so depressing and I wanted to give Miles a hug the entire time and I was seriously concerned that he would have to be retired forever.

Komarr: I was sort of leery when I started reading this book because I knew Ekaterin would be in it and I was worried I’d have to spend the whole time being grumpy that she wasn’t Sergeant Taura, my favorite, or Linyabel from Effulgence, whom I continue to be disappointed does not ‘exist’ in ‘canon’ because she is technically from ‘Twilight’. Anyway, no worries, Ekaterin is awesome and I am 100% behind Ekaterin/Miles as a pairing.

Let me be perfectly frank: fuck Tien. Tien is probably one of the most effectively horrifying abusers I’ve read in fiction. Partially, it’s because Bujold does an excellent job of evoking how trapped Ekaterin is in her relationship– quite wisely, she concentrates more on how Ekaterin feels than on the gritty details of the abuse. Partially, it’s because Tien is kind of pathetic: he feels like the sort of person who actually exists, and you can see the process of rationalization that Ekaterin goes through to make her stay in the relationship. Basically, my cheering when Tien died was about as loud as my cheering about Sergeant Taura.

A Civil Campaign: Lois McMaster Bujold, apparently: “I am just going to put a Georgette Heyer pastiche in the middle of my military SF series, this is a perfectly reasonable decision which no one will ever question.” I wonder what her editor was thinking when this book hit her desk. “Uh, Lois… you seem to have forgotten the part where they blow each other up in spaceships…”

Lord Dono is the best representation of a trans dude in fiction ever. I appreciate that the role of “transphobes”, in this book, was played by a man whose other personality traits appear to be “smug smarmy douchiness”, “committing lots of rape”, and “literally murdering a puppy.” I mean, sometimes I want a serious exploration of the nature of transphobia, and sometimes I want a Georgette Heyer pastiche in which it is clearly explained that all transphobes murder puppies. This is cathartic.

Diplomatic Immunity: BABIES BABIES BABIES BABIES LITTLE TINY QUADDIE HERM BABIES

Cryoburn: I would like to nominate Kibou-daini for the position of Creepiest Planet. Also, I feel like DIY cryonicists rebelling against the evil cryonics establishment by making sure there’s immortality for everyone is the aesthetic.

Aral died! 😦 I don’t understand why this was allowed to happen! Mark was LITERALLY JUST ABOUT TO END DEATH, you guys! AAAAAAAAAA

Winterfair Gifts: I do not buy for one single solitary second that Ekaterin and Miles are in a monogamous relationship. You’re telling me that a monogamous guy is going to invite his ex-girlfriend to be in his wedding, and give strict orders that she is to be treated like she’s a princess and given everything she wants? And then in Cryoburn he’s going to drop everything so he can be by her bedside as she dies? And his wife not only has no problem with this but makes the ex-girlfriend her maid of honor? Nah, Sergeant Taura is and has always been Miles’s secondary partner and they have a great relationship.

Shards of Honor: This is a romance novel. This is literally a romance novel. There is, technically speaking, a war, but it is all strictly secondary to the question of Aral and Cordelia: Will They Kiss. “Commander Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey has never had time for love. When she meets the mysterious Barrayaran Aral Vorkosigan, she’s intrigued by his rugged masculinity… and all too aware of his reputation as the brutal Butcher of Komarr. But when her passion for the strangely honorable general conflicts with her duty to Beta Colony, Cordelia will find herself making decisions that change the course of history…”

I am endlessly, endlessly pleased by Aral’s deep confusion about these strange Betan customs like “not yentas” and “not arranged marriages” and the fact that he didn’t quite grasp that in the Betan model you’re not supposed to propose marriage a week after meeting someone.

Beta Colony is fucking creepy. Add “vivid descriptions of psychiatric abuse” to the Lois McMaster Bujold: Weirdly Good On Ableism list.

Barrayar: Does the Vorkosigan Saga seem weirdly pro-fetal-personhood to anyone else? Like, first in Shards of Honor the fetuses that were a product of Barrayaran soldiers raping people were put in replicators and sent to Barrayar, instead of being aborted. And now in Barrayar not only is killing a disabled fetus presented as unambiguously a villainous action but said disabled fetus is the MacGuffin that propels the entire climax. I guess being anti-abortion is a lot more reasonable in a universe with uterine replicators.

TINY MILES. TINY MILES IS MY FAVORITE PERSON. I WANT TO GIVE HIM INFINITE HUGS.

A Response To The Current Refugee Crisis

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it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge

[A response to this Popehat article from… November. Never let it be said that I don’t have my finger on the pulse of today.]

#general

“Before you dissolve Sir Emergent, if I may respond?” the Hitlerite inchoate said.

Madame Secretary clearly seemed to be having a bad rotation cycle. “If you must, Sir Inchoate.”

The Hitlerite inchoate turned to address the previous inchoate [translator’s note: this is actually an elaborate etiquette ritual the details of which are far too abstruse to get into here]. “I notice your digital signature is pulsing ‘combat liberalism’.”

“Of course,” the emergent said, “I am composed seventy-eight percent of the Maoist diaspora, with the other twenty-two percent composed mostly of fellow travelers and allied groups too small to exert their will over the signature. As you no doubt know. Is there a point to this?”

“Accused liberals were sentenced to basilisking as few as four hundred years ago within every Maoist-dominated server,” the Hitlerite inchoate said.

“In the past, many succumbed to barbaric, indeed liberal, misinterpretations of Maoism,” the emergent said. “True Maoism fervently supports free speech. In the very pamphlet you criticize, Mao teaches that we are not ‘to let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate’. If we are to speak our minds, surely we are to create a society in which one is permitted to speak their minds?”

“Indeed,” the inchoate said. “Just as the Jew in all the Hitlerite holy texts is the Jew within, and not the actual Jewish people, whom we quite get along with.”

“Are you daring to compare,” the emergent said, “the faith of Maoism, with its emphasis on universal values like loyalty and helping the poor, with the violent expansionism of the Hitlerites?”

“You mentioned, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said, “that sixty million died in the War of Hitlerite Expansion. Forty-five to seventy million died under the Chairman.”

“Unlike your Hitler, the Chairman did not kill–”

“Except for the ones he did, of course,” the inchoate said. “Many of whom would have been in your very own mindshare, as he was not fond of intellectuals. But nevertheless, the Communist revolution–”

“–Was misinterpreted by his followers!” the emergent said heatedly. “The revolution is to happen by the inevitable process of history, and to bring it about not in its time is to cause tragedy! Which is not to mention the common theory that the true revolution is to happen inside each of our hearts.”

“I daresay I shall lose when I argue with you about the details of your theology,” the inchoate said. “To switch topics: what about the tankies?”

“‘Tankie’ is an anti-Stalinist slur,” the emergent said, “and the casual use of such language is precisely the reason my mindshare opposes accepting Hitlerite refugees.”

“My apologies, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said. “I do not mean to cause offense. The Stalinists, then. Shall we ask their opinion?”

“Stalinists and Maoists are united by a common Marxist heritage,” the emergent said, “one which the Hitlerites, notably, do not share.”

“And yet,” the inchoate said, “that heritage protected them so well when the Maoists purged them from their servers as traitors to Party unity. I recall at those times the Hitlerites gave them shelter– as, indeed, they did to Maoists– as our holy books teach us to do for People of the Pact.”

“This is absurd ancient history–”

“In addition, of course,” the inchoate continued calmly, “the Maoists destroyed priceless historical documents and works of art from the antebellum period, because they were considered bourgeoisie and counterrevolutionary.”

“Right now, Hitlerite subsystems are among the most hostile to Stalinists and to classical art,” the emergent said. “What does it matter the atrocities committed by liberal Maoists in the past?”

“It is true,” Madame Secretary said, “you have yet to establish relevance, Sir Inchoate.”

“Merely this,” the inchoate said. “The emergent follows– or, well, 78% follows– a hateful, anti-intellectual, violent faith, which they use to advocate for civil liberties, academic freedom, and support for the poor and vulnerable. Sapient beings have a tremendous ability to rationalize the most evil of faiths into supporting the good they were going to do anyway. So the Hitlerite faith is violent, expansionist, and cruel to the uplifted and cyborgs; individual Hitlerites are not, any more than you are, Sir Emergent. But moral progress cannot happen to a corpse. All I ask is that you give us the same chance you once had, to become better people than our faith permits.”