dreamer_easy: (Default)
"At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor of chattel slaves5 , whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons. First, chattels are commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s person that is the excess. Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very presence on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror."

-- Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-­‐40.

This is similar to stuff in my Pyramids of Mars book, the terrifying possibility that the exotic people you have cruelly treated will turn and treat you cruelly -- the mummy, Fu Manchu -- but what a hair-raising way of expressing it. I'm only partway through but this essay is hair-raising in general.

Getting a bit of reading done at the moment because I've blocked Reddit. XD

dreamer_easy: (Default)
Fact-checking resources:

Reality Check from BBC News

bellingcat.com


New Nuclear Power Plants Are Unlikely to Stop the Climate Crisis (Scientific American, February 2022). "These plants take too long to build and bring online, and we don’t have that much time."

The 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, April 2021)

Scientists Say GMO Foods Are Safe, Public Skepticism Remains (National Geographic, May 2016). Is safety a red herring? "But the academy also found that GE or (genetically-modified organisms or GMO) crops didn’t increase those crops' potential yields, and they did lead to widespread and expensive problems with herbicide-resistant weeds." (emphasis mine). What's the point, then? (Potentially, nutrient content.)

Make extreme wealth extinct: it’s the only way to avoid climate breakdown
(Guardian, November 2021) | Global rich must cut their carbon footprint 97% to stave off climate change, UN says (CBS, December 2020) "The richest 1% would need to reduce their current emissions by at least a factor of 30, while per capita emissions of the poorest 50% could increase by around three times their current levels on average."

Permaculture and the Myth of Overpopulation (Fr John Peck, January 2016). I know nothing of permaculture, but the points in this essay chimed with me. The reminder that this mess is not inevitable and that perhaps humans can and should survive was welcome.


Humans are hardwired to dismiss (coronavirus) facts that don't fit their worldview (LiveScience, July 2020). "Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one's tribe required assimilation into the group's ideological belief system — regardless of whether it was grounded in science or superstition."

Mask-Shaming Won’t Work. Try These 5 Things Instead (Yes!, July 2020). Advice useful for any polarised debate.

Heightened susceptibility to misinformation linked to reduced mask wearing and social distancing (PsyPost, October 2020). "Reflective and analytical thinking" is our best hope.

How social media influencer tactics help conspiracy theories gain traction online (ABC, December 2020) Influences and conspiracy theorists are businesses out to make money, and do it through similar marketing strategies.

The new coronavirus and racist tropes (CJR, January 2020).

Cory Doctorow: Fake News Is an Oracle (July 2019). The problem of conspiracy theories in a world of conspiracies.

How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail (Scientific American, January 2017).

Are Americans as stupid as we seem on Twitter? (Forward, May 2020). On slogans.

How does your body respond to feelings of moral outrage? Depends on your politics (Neuroscience News, January 2020).

The Lazy Poor or the Entitled Rich? (Psychology Today, March 2020) "A psychological perspective on wealth, merit, and compassion."

Closed-minded cognition: Right-wing authoritarianism is negatively related to belief updating following prediction error (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review volume 27, 2020). Right-wing authoritarian views make it harder to change your mind given new evidence.

Supporters of religious violence are more likely to claim they’re familiar with religious concepts that don’t exist (PsyPost, August 2020)

The Root of All Cruelty? (The New Yorker, November 2017). What if, rather than dehumanising our victims, we see them precisely as human beings who are justified targets of our violence?

Furry Panic Is the Latest Dumb GOP Attack on Public Schools (Daily Beast, February 2022). Rumours about special treatment for furries etc in US schools are proxies for attacks on the more usual groups, and on schools themselves.


Science fiction, with a taste of the Twilight Zone: When You Die on the Radio by Adam R. Shannon.


And finally (image not mine):




dreamer_easy: (Default)
Watched Cast Away (2000). I enjoyed its cleverness very much -- I even picked the director, although I couldn't think of Robert Zemeckis's name for quids -- until the interminable series of endings. Anyway, what struck me was that Chuck is obliged to recreate civilisation piece by piece to fulfil his basic needs: blades, fire, art, religion. What made me think of this is an article which I can't find, which compares Shamhat's seduction of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is intended to civilise him, with a mother bringing up a child -- got it! It's Rivkah Harris's chapter "Images of Women in the Gilgamesh Epic". What does Chuck drink first? Milk, of course.

Someone could probably get a thesis -- probably has got a thesis -- out of this tale of a lone, heroic white man creating the civilised world anew. (He looks like a caveman, then a "native".) This brings me to another thing: the reality show Alone (2015-), of which I have watched a few episodes on demand from SBS. Ten white men are plonked down in the chilly Canadian wilderness to do or die. At some point I thought to myself, "This is how people used to live." But of course, that's nonsense! People live in groups, sharing and passing on skills and equipment. (Would Chuck have survived without the packages?) This is not to say that hermits never happen, but this man-on-his-own narrative doesn't reflect any human social arrangement. Another thesis there, perhaps on the horribly destructive idea of "independence".
dreamer_easy: (*feminism)
These ideas are so interesting, so compelling. I have no way to tell whether this is the end of depression or the start of hypomania. I only know I can't trust my brain, and that when I am hypomanic, I am prone to nonsense regarding sensitive subjects. Luckily no-one will see this!

Anyway:

This morning I had the mixed pleasure of reading Eevee's demolition of J.K. Rowling's online essay against trans people. Rowling offers no data to back up her statements (since, lbh, she couldn't) and in fact avoids saying things outright if she can. She also makes telling omissions. But what's relevant for my next paragraph is this phrase from Rowling: "I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class".

I keep coming across this idea and again -- that human beings must sort people into clear categories -- no, that human beings must sort themselves into categories, clearly. Tonight it was in Cory Doctorow's Locus column from last year about Jeanette Ng's speech on winning the John W. Campbell award for best new writer, when he used the phrase "women and racialized people".

I was on the treadmill and my eyes popped out a little. How many times have I used the phrase "people of colour" -- as opposed to normal people, who are colourless -- or the phrase "non-white" -- as opposed to normal people, who are white? And here's an expression that gets across the fact that "race" is an invention, a series of artificial categories unreflected in the genetic facts, assigned to people for a reason.

And there it is in the same breath with the category "women". Doesn't that have interesting implications!

What if "women" is another artificial category, ill-supported by actual biology? A category into which a group of people must be placed so that we will know who makes the sandwiches? Because if we get confused about that question -- who is assigned to menial and/or unpaid tasks, who is paid little or less or not at all -- the jig is up. Slaves make the sandwiches. Immigrants make the sandwiches. Get into the kitchen, woman, and make me a sandwich.*

But what if you're not sure who is a woman? You might have to make your own damn sandwich.

Of course, J.K. Rowling will always be able to pay someone to make her a sanga, which has to leave you wondering why she is terrified of trans people, who offer so close to no threat at all to cis women as makes no bones -- even Jo has too much shame to outright say "men will put on dresses and sneak into the ladies loo and assault us", as she'd be laughed off Twitter. But by her own words, this is about the thick black border around the category "woman".

The other categories which are relevant here are Us, The Good People, and Them, The Bad People. This is something I tried to address, with frustrating clumsiness**, at the start of my essay on Talons of Weng-Chiang. I'm fortunate in that I've never particularly liked the story***, so I don't suffer the cognitive dissonance of the majority of fans, who love it, but can see that, however hard they deny it, it's racist as fuck. The thinking goes this way: if you like a racist thing, you are a racist, one of the Bad People. But you are one of Us, The Good People! Therefore, if you do like something, it isn't racist. Cue the list of excuses, the blather about book-burning, etc etc.

Tumblr user what-even-is-thiss addresses a variation of this, in which Rowling is disconnected from Harry Potter -- presumably leaving a clean text, free of transphobia, unable to contaminate the reader. Apparently this is a frequent tactic.

Drop the Good vs Bad categories, and you're left with flawed creators, flawed texts, and flawed fans, capable of screw-ups, hatred, learning, improvement. And no fear of contamination; you can like even a bigoted thing or person, and comfortably acknowledge that bigotry, alongside the text's virtues and its personal meaning. For online culture, built out of headlines, kneejerks, and outrage porn, it would be no less confusing than doing away with categories like "Asian" or "man".

(If there's anything to these ideas, these connections, then I certainly won't be the first or only one to have made them. I have so much reading to do.)

ETA: Of course, Rowling divides trans people into two categories as well: a small number of real trans people who "just want to live their lives" on the one hand, and "trans activists" (malevolent) and trans teens (confused) on the other. The moment you stop being humble, grateful, and silent, and stand up for yourself, you lose membership in the category of "real" trans people; your permission to be trans is in danger of being taken away. The only "real" trans person is the one who can be safely ignored. Any feminist should recognise this tactic.

* Somewhere I read that these were the three categories that made up the Other for the Ancient Greeks -- slaves, barbarians, and women.

** Here's an extract from an article which looks deeply at this problem. "By making displays of bigoted behavior as the ultimate embodiment of evil we have a built-in justification for moving selfishly within the system because we’ve displaced our shame of our own cultural complicity with the destruction our way of life causes onto a convenient scapegoat. This, it turns out, opens the door for people to use bigoted language we have deemed “too far” as a show of power and dominance."

*** Come to think of it, I'm also lucky that I don't give a damn about Harry Potter.

On Sumuru

Apr. 8th, 2020 10:07 am
dreamer_easy: (Default)
Stumbled across a tantalising hint that, even in 1945, the BBC recognised the Fu Manchu franchise for what it was. Apparently, they asked Sax Rohmer to develop a radio series for them -- but one which wouldn't insult the Chinese. (Unlike migrants, your allies in war are not dispensible.) The result was "Shadow of Sumuru", with its ambiguously Japanese protagonist. So near and yet so far. I'd like to get a solid source for this.

(Jon and I tried to watch The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967), but even Riff Trax couldn't make it tolerable. Although MST3K, which is funnier and far less mean-spirited, might have been able to manage it.)

dreamer_easy: (*writing 8)
Had another spin on the Talons of Weng-Chiang wheel over at Gallifrey Base. Just the usual slightly panicked denial of the story's rampant racism, with nothing particularly new or interesting -- except for one posting which Jon mentioned to me (since I have the poster blocked). Alas, thanks to its persistent alt-right troll and his tedious transphobia, the thread was locked before I could address it.

Also alas, the posting wasn't as interesting as it had at first sounded: "It might be argued that The Room with No Doors is a work of astonishing orientalism that would make Edward Said cringe, if Edward Said were in the business of reading television tie-in novels. An act of cultural appropriation that reduces the richness of Japanese culture to a background setting for the actions of a bunch of white people. Maybe only people who know about these cultures should be allowed to write about them."

It's a pretty standard tu quoque / derailing / spotlight shifting, and I seriously doubt its author knows more about either Said or "the richness of Japanese culture" than he has gleaned from Wikipedia or anime, or that he has read Room. Nonetheless, I think it's interesting question to ask: what are the characteristics of Orientalism? Does Room display some or all of those characteristics? Is Japanese culture merely a "background setting" to the action, or does it figure in the story's plot or themes? The same questions could be asked about The Left-Handed Hummingbird, and perhaps Set Piece and Walking to Babylon as well. Doctor Who's format carries the danger of misusing the real places, times, and cultures with which it engages.

Exploring this properly would mean re-reading Room, and in complete honesty, I don't have the time or energy to do that now. OTOH, I should probably grab Orientalism off the shelf where it's been gathering dust for years and give the thing a proper read. Maybe I'll do that and make notes here.

Because: I'd love to write something set in Korean history. (I'll bet I've said this before. Still hasn't happened. Off on black holes at the mo.) When I was writing Room, a substantial part of the research, IIRC, was watching Kurosawa movies (there's at least one cheeky reference in the book). I've watched loads of sageuks, Korean historical dramas, but I'm not satisfied with that as a source -- I'm going to have to do a lot more reading first. Also -- this plugs into the "a bunch of white people" thing -- I don't want to try to write from the point of view of a Korean character. To avoid that means dropping a Western character into Joseon (probably) and conveying Korean culture to the reader through their eyes -- through my eyes.

That means, of course, engaging with that culture, not merely using it for decoration -- which is essentially what Talons does with Chinese culture; just as Sax Rohmer's Fu-Manchu stories were proudly Chinese culture-free, I'm not sure there's a single thing in Talons which actually comes from Chinese culture. (Maybe some costume stuff from stock?)

dreamer_easy: (refugees)
Neither Australian Or PNG Gov’t Informed Family Of Man Who Died On Manus Island (Pedestrian, 23 May 2018). Good gods, they can't even bureaucrat properly.

Doctors beg Australian Border Force to move terminally ill refugee off Nauru (GA, 23 May 2018). I thought perhaps the problem was that the dying man has family in Afghanistan and could apply to bring them to Australia, but apparently they won't even send him to Taiwan, which doesn't accept refugees. (The former head of the ABF has admitted that it has a history of blocking medically necessary transfers.)

White South African farmers won't get special treatment, despite Peter Dutton's earlier claims (ABC, 22 May 2018). I wonder if this was ever a serious proposal, or just dog-whistling.



dreamer_easy: (refugees)
Combined Refugee Action Group reports that there was a fire in the Hillside detention centre on Manus. No-one was hurt, but the men have been left without beds or food.

Asylum seekers 'face destitution' as income support and housing cut off (GA, 17 May 2018). "The federal government is taking away income support and housing from up to 100 refugees and asylum seekers from Manus Island and Nauru who are currently in Australia for medical treatment. The group... includes families, elderly people and pregnant women..." Vinnies characterises this cut as part of a general move by the government to divest itself of its legal responsibility to care for refugees, outsourcing that responsibility to charities and community groups. "Most of those targeted this week were families with young children, who were given six weeks to find new accommodation and a source of income."

Australia's cut to healthcare on Manus Island 'inexplicable', Amnesty says (GA, 18 May 2018). "Group criticises counselling services cut when Manus refugees have one of highest mental illness rates in world." Refugees with physical medical problems needing urgent attention have been left waiting for months or years. IMHO all this is entirely explicable: our government hopes the sick men will either die on Manus, or return to their home countries and die there, out of sight.

As others see us: There's No Escape From Australia's Refugee Gulag (Foreign Policy, 30 April 2018).

Following up on the lies about "African gangs": The truth about crime and ethnicity (The Age, 28 April 2018).


dreamer_easy: (refugees)
Due to illness, I missed the refugee march today. Here is Manus detainee Mohammad Imran's letter to be read on Palm Sunday.(Here's an interview with Imran, about the Rohingy a, from earlier this year.)

Another suicidal child, this time a ten-year-old boy, has been removed from Nauru despite our government's best legal efforts to keep him there.

Peter Dutton is pressing ahead with humanitarian visas for white South African farmers, commenting: "I'm completely blind as to somebody's skin colour, it makes no difference to me" and borrowing a leaf from President Trump's playbook by declaring media criticism "fake news".

Papua New Guinea has demanded to know when Australia will remove the refugees who remain on Manus Island. So far, 84 of about 600 men have escaped to the United States thanks to the refugee swap deal.

'It’s freedom': Rohingya refugee reaches Florida after horror of Australian detention (GA, 23 February 2018)

Swapped from Manus to Missouri (SBS, 20 February 2018)

'Negative status' asylum seekers on Manus Island left hanging in legal limbo, unable to leave or stay (ABC, 7 March 2018)
Paging Mr. Kafka.

Australia to train Myanmar military despite ethnic cleansing accusations
(GA, 6 March 2018). "Defence department spend continues despite claims treatment of Rohingya bears 'hallmarks of a genocide'".

Scathing UN migration report mars Australia's first week on human rights council
(GA, 2 March 2018)
Australia's refugee policies are part of a worldwide problem, as the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer makes clear: "The primary cause for the massive abuse suffered by migrants in all regions of the world, including torture, rape, enslavement, trafficking and murder, is neither migration itself, nor organised crime, or the corruption of individual officials, but the growing tendency of states to base their official migration policies and practices on deterrence, criminalisation and discrimination, rather than protection, human rights and non-discrimination. States have initiated an escalating cycle of repression and deterrence designed to discourage new arrivals, and involving measures such as the criminalisation and detention of irregular migrants, the separation of family members, inadequate reception conditions and medical care, and the denial or excessive prolongation of status determination or habeas corpus proceedings, including expedited returns in the absence of such proceedings." (See also Why we all need to read ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (Medium.com, 13 February 2017)).

Refugee visas a 'lower priority' not 'slowed down', ASIO boss says
(ABC, 28 February 2018)
Paging Mr. Kafka again.


dreamer_easy: (refugees)
This mess needs a posting of its own. The Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, stated that he was looking for ways to fast-track visas for white South African farmers. "...they do need help from a civilised country like ours", he remarked, lauding them as ideal potential migrants. This initiative has been challenged on two fronts: one, that the situation of white farmers in South Africa is not what the Minister says it is; two, oh what a giveaway, as Monty Python might say: Mr Dutton's concern for white people sharply contrasts with his treatment of brown refugees. His statement has its roots in the Rupert Murdoch-owned news media; their claims are echoed by white supremacist groups online.

The Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, did not support (or oppose) Mr Dutton's call, and the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, said there were no plans for special visas. South Africa denies the claim that white farmers are disproportionate victims of violence.

Ironically, if that's the right word, former PM Malcolm Fraser once said of Australia's offshore detention system that white South African farmers who arrived by boat would never be treated the same way. There are long-standing parallels to the history of racism in Australia and South Africa, which this article explores.

Meanwhile, in "civilised" Australia, migrants from an African background have been the victims of what has been called "media terrorism", fuelled by our politicians' lies.

dreamer_easy: (refugees)
Small numbers of refugees continue to escape Manus Island and Nauru for the United States. Despite this excellent news, thousands are still being left behind, in increasing desperation. Also in good news: last year, Australia accepted a record number of humanitarian arrivals.

Last Friday, a group of refugees on Manus Island were attacked, allegedly by members of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force.

We keep refouling people - deporting them to danger. This Tamil asylum seeker, who may be tortured in Sri Lanka, is just the latest example. Meanwhile on Manus, asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected are being told that they cannot be deported because of the danger to them in their home countries, but that they cannot settle on either Papua New Guinea nor in Australia. Plus the US is not taking people from its list of Muslim-majority countries. Where are these refugees supposed to go? The moon?

I've wanted to comment for some time on the latest group of our fellow Australians the rest of us are supposed to fear and hate: Sudanese immigrants. As it turns out, the supposed rash of crimes by "African gangs" was - I can't do better than Overland's headline: Total and utter racist bullshit. "Right from the beginning, the whole ‘African gangs’ beat-up relied on errors, distortions and flat-out lies."

dreamer_easy: (*books 3)
I guess everyone has feet of clay, or a blind spot - pick your metaphor. In the case of Hannah Arendt, it seems to have been Africa. I read her chapter on "Race and Bureaucracy" and her account of the colonisation of Africa with mounting unease, realising that she was not just describing the attitudes of colonists like the Boers, but her own. (I got so cranky that I pulled the very readable African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone off my infinite "to read" shelf.)

"What made them different from other human beings," Arendt writes (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 192), "was not at all the colour of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality - compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder."*

I'll give you another example: "Lazy and unproductive, they [the Boers] agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years... The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature." (p 194) And again: "They [the Boers] behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries - feeling at home wherever the horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settlement." (p 196)

Similarly, the peoples of Australia and the Americas had no "human reality": "Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans." (p 186) By contrast, "there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensibly reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because everyone ought to have known what he was doing." (p 206)

Even alongside Arendt's severe criticism of the Boers, it all sounds disturbingly like justification. It also brings into question the whole definition of civilisation - of "humanity" itself. No accomplishment is enough to qualify you: not writing (the Meroitic script of Nubia, the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Berber scipt Tifinagh) nor monumental architecture (Nubia's pyramids, the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, Axum's obelisks); not settled communities, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy; and certainly not other kinds of technology or expertise, nor a rich culture which includes law, history, religion, sophisticated art, and the kind of spoken storytelling on which Homer's work is based**. I think, for Arendt, possibly only a long literary tradition would allow any civilisation into the "humanity" club - which knocks out the overwhelming majority of human cultures, in all times and places.

It's not that the facts weren't available to Arendt; the Meroitic script, from ancient Nubia, had been deciphered, the Bantu origins of Great Zimbabwe were known. It's just that her immense expertise was focussed on Europe, and she shared the received wisdom of her time, which, as Parker and Rathbone put it, was that "Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of. Not only were its societies regarded as primitive and unchanging, they were believed, due in large part to the widespread absence of literacy, to possess no collective historical consciousness." (p 3)

Where the chapter is most effective, I think, is where it talks about the people who colonised not as representatives of "civilisation", but because they themselves were outsiders:

"The superfluous men... who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers.... The difference was not their morality or immorality, but rather than the decision to join this crowd... was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (p 189)

There's a parallel here with both those Trump voters who have been effectively excluded from American society through poverty and social breakdown, with - as Susan McWilliams wrote in The Nation - the Hell's Angels (I've just read Hunter S. Thompson's book, of which more soon); and also with Dale Beran's analysis of 4chan, when Arendt writes: "They were irresistably attracted by a world where everything was a joke", "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter".

McWilliams writes that the Trump supporters' racism is partly a fuck-you to the political elites. Maybe, but as Arendt writes: "South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." If necessary, of course, you can always declare some of the people next door to be foreigners.


* I had a nasty moment reading this and remembering another nasty moment: watching some dreadful "white jungle goddess" movie or other, in which a pith helmeted dolt panics and randomly shoots dead one of the locals, and begs the White Goddess to get him out of being punished. And, until I caught myself, I sympathised. Partly, of course, it was just because this was a speaking character vs an extra seen on screen for a few seconds. Partly, of course... it wasn't. [ETA: this was indeed "Jungle Goddess" (1943), which was MSTed. "Meanwhile, in an equally racist Tarzan movie across the way..."]

** Here I'm putting aside the complicated question of the African-ness of Ancient Egypt; I don't even need it to make my point. (Actually, I've seen a few Black people on Tumblr worry that Egypt gets too much attention, to the detriment of the other great civilisations of Africa.)

*** I remember reading - this must have been when I was writing Hummer, so forever ago - a chapter about some women of native heritage, perhaps in rural Mexico, ooh-ing and ah-ing over how much darker than them a Black woman on TV was. You might think they'd be natural allies, said the chapter, subject to the same colourism. But the women were able to console themselves that at least they weren't that black. :(

dreamer_easy: (Default)
"What’s missing, though, is the fighting spirit. What’s missing is an understanding of history as a never-ending contest, whose virtues must be won and whose horrors must be confronted every single day."
— Maximillian Alvarez, 2016: A Liberal Odyssey -- A challenging essay about the danger of progressives fetishising an inevitably liberal, progressive future in the same way that Trump et al fetishise the imaginary Great America of the past.

In lighter Trump news, the First Lady was at some Olympic event or other when a Kpop idol (SHINee's Choi Minho) took away the spotlight.

How to call your representatives when you have social anxiety


Skin-whitening uptake sparks concern among Australian dermatologists (ABC, 26 April 2017) IIUC, there's a historical preference for lighter skin in Asian cultures, but there's also a desire to look more "Western" - along with the risk of dodgy whitening products harming peoples' health.

The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black
(The Stranger, 17 April 2017) This is about a lot more than one woman's outrageous behaviour.

NSW government rejects findings of independent review into scripture in schools (SMH, 11 April 2017) They sat on the review for a year and a half, then declined to follow its recommendations - count the students actually taking scripture, let students who aren't taking it use the time to do classwork, and include the option to study ethics instead of religion.

Slavery claims as seasonal workers from Vanuatu paid nothing for months' work (SMH, 27 March 2017)

Section 18C: What racial vilification complaints have been upheld, dismissed by a judge? (ABC, 21 March 2017)

How to overcome bias (Mind Hacks, 17 February 2017) The "consider the opposite" strategy for overcoming confirmation bias.

Do-Gooder Derogation: Disparaging Morally Motivated Minorities to Defuse Anticipated Reproach (Social, Psychological, and Personality Science 3(2) 2011). "As predicted, participants rated vegetarians less positively after imagining their moral judgment of meat eaters. These studies empirically document the backlash reported by moral minorities and trace it back to resentment by the mainstream against feeling morally judged." This would explain the sheer quantity of stuff Snopes has had to debunk about NFL players in the US protesting police brutality. ISTG people will say absolutely anything to avoid having to take those protests seriously.




dreamer_easy: (*feminism)
I read Chapter Six, "Race-thinking Before Racism", which describes the development of racism as a philosophy or "science" at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Opinions about race predated this, of course, but now racism became an ideology.

Two ideologies have "essentially defeated" the rest, writes Arendt: "the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races." Both have been adopted by states, by intellectuals, and by the masses. Why do ideologies persuade? Not because of science or history. "Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine." For example, Arendt points to how the idea of progress guided late Nineteenth Century scientific thought, rather than being a product of scientific research. "The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain scientists who were no less hypnotized by ideologies than their fellow citizens."

In the early Nineteenth Century, this ideology was the attempt of "certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin." IIUC this was a flop, so there was a switch from language to what we'd call genetics, a "naturalistic appeal... which addressed itself to tribal instincts". All Germans were related by blood, and were of "pure, unmixed stock". At this stage, though, it's only the precursor of racism: there are supposedly separate "races", but they're still equal.

In France, by contrast, the idea was that the French aristocracy descended from the rightful conquerors and were a different "race" to their inferiors. Eventually one such aristocrat, Arthur de Gobineau, puts forward the view that the aristocracy is doomed, and so are Western civilisation and humanity itself; this is "due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood. This implies that in every mixture the lower race is always dominant." (The Victorian fiction I've read is nervous as hell about this.) What to do? eugenics, of course.

(What an unpleasant thing to realise that the Ernst Haeckel who did those bewitching biology illustrations was also a raving racist.)

In conclusion, Arendt remarks: "It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the 'scramble for Africa' and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world. Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism."



dreamer_easy: (Default)
Muslims and Islam: Key findings in the U.S. and around the world (Pew Research Center, 9 August 2017)

How liars create the illusion of truth (Mind Hacks, 11 November, 2016). "Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford."

I used to think Australia had no history of slavery. It becomes ever more obvious I was wrong. Queensland class action over unpaid wages for Indigenous people 'setting a national precedent' (ABC, 23 September 2016).  | Blackbirding: Australia's history of luring, tricking and kidnapping Pacific Islanders (ABC, 17 September 2017) | Australians 'just starting to wake up' to historical South Sea Islander slavery: Jeff McMullen (ABC, 18 September 2017) | ETA: Slavery claims as seasonal workers from Vanuatu paid nothing for months' work (SMH, 27 March 2017)

Right-Wing Extremists Are a Bigger Threat to America Than ISIS (Newsweek, 4 February 2016) | Globally, terrorism is on the rise - but little of it occurs in Western countries (ABC, 17 November 2015)

Study shows discrimination interacts with genetics and impacts health (Medical XPress, 21 December 2016). The most striking, and I think heartbreaking, thing about this study is the finding that discrimination against your friends and family was more damaging than discrimination against yourself. | Research finds daily discrimination sickens African-Americans (Medical XPress, 21 December 2016)

Hard-wired: The brain's circuitry for political belief (phys.org, 23 December 2016) "Political beliefs are like religious beliefs in the respect that both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong... To consider an alternative view, you would have to consider an alternative version of yourself."

The Human Zoo: Documentary sheds light on stolen Aboriginal people 'treated as animals' (ABC, 28 January 2017). The horror of Indigenous Australians kidnapped and displayed as exhibits leaves me speechless.
dreamer_easy: (*writing 7)
I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script (Village Voice, 9 September 2009)

White Men Playing With Sticks: Iron Fist, Martial Arts and Respect (The Learned Fangirl, 28 February 2017). Starts with a smashing anecdote about Miyamoto Musashi.

Steven Moffat offers his top tips for writing Doctor Who and storytelling in general (BBC, 14 January 2016 )

Writing The Perfect Scene (Advanced Fiction Writing, n.d.). I forget who said of Strunk and White's Elements of Style that you don't follow its rules, you just re-read them every now and then as a reminder. Advice like this essay is comparable - it's always helpful to think very concretely about the words going onto the page. I found stuff that applied to the scene I'm currently writing.

Describing characters of color in writing (N.K. Jemisin, 11 April 2009).

Novelist error messages. If you only have time to follow one of these links, this is the one.

dreamer_easy: (Default)
Spotted in the latest issue of Scientific American Mind: Some People Suffer from Face Blindness for Other Races.You won't be stunned to hear that the study in question was about the failure of white Australians to recognise Asian faces:

"They asked 268 Caucasians [sic] born and raised in Australia to memorize a series of six Asian faces and conducted the same experiment, involving Caucasian faces, with a group of 176 Asians born and raised in Asia who moved to Australia to attend university. In 72 trials, every participant was then shown sets of three faces and had to point to the one he or she had learned in the memorization task. The authors found that 26 Caucasian and 10 Asian participants—8 percent of the collective study population [9.7% of the white people and 5.7% of the Asian people] —did so badly on the test that they met the criteria for clinical-level impairment."
 
 
It's not hard to imagine why white people in Australia, where the population is overwhelmingly white, might be less skilled at telling Asian faces apart: we seldom have to bother. Not only are there few Asian faces around, so we don't get much practice, but the consequences of a screw-up are less likely to be serious - not true for an overseas student who fails to recognise their lecturer or tutor. (The other studies mentioned in the SA piece tend to back this up.)

Before Kpop, I'm sure I would have been one of that 9.7%. For a start, I'm not too crash hot at remembering white faces. I once shared a hotel room with someone who, as part of a costume, donned a wig; when she started talking to me in a hallway, it took me long, confused minutes to work out who she was! In TV shows, I persistently confuse white actors and forget their characters' names in TV shows. Thank heavens for Jon or "Game of Thrones" would be incomprehensible. This problem spills over into my writing - I don't know how to describe faces, so I use other descriptions for characters, like their hair or clothing.

Kpop forced me to learn how to tell Asian faces apart. Even now, when I see a photo or a video, my brain whirrs into action. How many boys? Five? That's probably SHINee, then. Next a scan for my favourite member, Taemin. Wait - or is that Onew? I tend to confuse them when they have similar hair. No, look at the width of the mouth, and the size of the eyes - that's Taemin, all right. And there - those cheeks could only belong to Onew.

I'd been doing this quite automatically for a long time when Jon and I happened to sit down and watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of Mighty Jack (a Japanese series edited into a movie by Sandy Frank, who also brought you Battle of the Planets). I was startled to realise that my tell-the-Asian-boys-apart neurons had kicked in: I was sitting there memorising which uniformed, short-haired young man was which.

The most interesting thing is, perhaps, the sheer variety of Asian eyes: Minho from SHINee's are large and "double-lidded"; actor Lee Joon-gi's eyes are long; Onew's eyes vanish when he smiles. Looking at fan edits of the band's faces, showing just their eyes, it's simple for me to tell them apart. But I didn't become consciously aware of this until I very recently read Describing Asian Eyes and followed some of the links there.

To sum up, although I think I'm not good at recognising faces in general, I've learned to recognise Asian faces (well, the faces of young Korean men, mostly) as a skill. That bodes well for my ability to remember peoples' faces in real life, and to describe my own characters better.

(One thing I'm not sure of is whether the six faces used in the study were only East Asian. In Australia, this is what we'd usually mean by "Asian" - Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and so forth.)
 
dreamer_easy: (snow kate)
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism (The Good Men Project, April 2015). If you're white, like me, this spells out some of the assumptions you've absorbed from the surrounding culture. It's US-based, but much of it applies to Australia. Come to think of it, a lot of it applies to feminism as well, with the important difference that racism is taboo and sexism isn't.

The bacterial flagellar motor: brilliant evolution or intelligent design? (ABC Science, July 2015). "A central tenet of this theory [intelligent design] is the notion of 'irreducible complexity'. This asserts that some biological machines — like the flagellar motor — must be the product of design, because if you were to remove one or two components from the motor it would not function properly, or at all. The logic being, this motor was designed as a whole construction — it didn't evolve through a series of steps, so the individual parts of the motor would serve no purpose on their own. So the creationist argument relies on us finding no evidence of individual parts of the motor having a role outside of bacterial flagella. Luckily, individual components of the bacterial flagellar motor have indeed been found elsewhere. And they work. So the motor is 'reducible', and certainly not 'irreducibly complex'." This is one of my favourite things about evolution - the kludgy use of whatever's in the toolbox at the time. It's why some antidepressants give you tummy trouble; the same receptors are present in the brain and gut, being used for different purposes. (Well, I say "favourite"...)

The Evil Has No Name (The Daemons): Phil Sandifer's review of the story, from five years ago, which I've just enjoyed re-reading and bookmarked because of the observation that Doctor Who is about putting things together which shouldn't go together. That's missing from the SF I'm trying to write at the moment, I think.

Is Nature Unnatural? (Quanta Magazine, April 2013). That is, is there some explanation for the constants in physics, or are they the result of a multiversal roll of the dice?

I'm only two decades late in discovering the Planescapes setting for D&D - somehow I stumbled across this page on the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Salt and it's captured my imagination. Takes me back even further to reading Heinlein's "Number of the Breast" in the eighties.

Rare, lonely 'lefty' snail seeks mate for love—and genetic study (phys.org, October 2016) Not only does the sinistral brown snail have a "left-handed anti-clockwise spiralling shell", but its genitals are on the "wrong" side.
dreamer_easy: (*books 3)
I'm reading Buchi Emecheta's novel "The Joys of Motherhood", set in Nigeria around WWII, and there's a bit where the white master addresses his 'house-boy' as 'baboon'. She writes:
"his laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity."
I've sometimes drawn a comparison between my experience of bullying and what I imagine it must be like to be the target of racism. There are crucial differences: the people who continually, unpredictably chipped away at my soul in high school were not trying to keep a whole class of people* miserable, afraid, and aware of how unwelcome they were; and once I escaped high school, I escaped them**. There's no such merciful exit for the young hijabi, the Indigenous athlete, the Sudanese refugee - all the Australians who have to cope with harassment from the media and in the street on top of systemic racism.

That constant drip-drip-drip is what makes people sometimes suddenly explode over seemingly small insults. I don't know what it's like to live with bigotry day in and day out, but I do know what the drip-drip-drip can do to you. When I read Buchi Emecheta's words, the familiar and infinite rage rose up in me. It's there now, in my chest and arms, almost nauseating. I think she may have been feeling something like the same feeling when she condemned the people who stoop to "that type of wickedness".



* Although there was gender policing involved; I would not have been the only young woman being called a "lemon" for being insufficiently feminine.

** With the exception of the Unpleasantness here in lj, many years ago now, which forced me to deal with the damage from high school - as well as requiring me to broaden my horizons, which led directly to the discovery of Emecheta, now one of my favourite authors.
dreamer_easy: (refugees)
The refugee swap deal with the US is dubious, but getting at least some people out of offshore detention can only be a good thing. However, it looks increasingly unlikely that the swap will go ahead.

What do we know about the Central American refugee deal between the US and Australia? (GA, 25 November 2016)

Senior US Republicans criticise 'secret' refugee deal with Australia (GA, 25 November 2016)

Nauru refugees sceptical of resettlement deal with US, Sky reporter says after visit (GA, 29 November 2016) "...some are so weary about there being a solution to their situation that they’re managing expectations."

US will reportedly take only up to 400 refugees under Australia deal (GA, 29 November 2016)

Trump administration could scuttle refugee resettlement deal with US, White House concedes (ABC, 3 December 2016)

Turnbull insists US deal to resettle refugees from Nauru and Manus will survive Trump's inauguration (SMH, 4 December 2016)

Immigration boss Michael Pezzullo flies to America to sell refugee deal to Donald Trump officials (The Age, 13 December 2016)


Racism against non-white and/or non-Anglophone immigrants is of course inextricably entwined with Australia's refugee policies. Here's some recent news and some historical context.

I've been told to 'go back to my country' my whole life. First in playgrounds, now by Peter Dutton (GA, 25 November 2016) | Lebanese-Australians speak out over Peter Dutton's comments: 'That's not us' (ABC, 26 November 2016) | Meet with us or be quiet: Lebanese community issues demand to Dutton (SMH, 25 November 2016) | Peter Dutton isn't wrong, but that doesn't make him right (SMH, 23 November 2016) (Informed and nuanced commentary from Jacinta Carroll, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Counter Terrorism Policy Centre.)

Muslim immigration: new research throws doubt on the poll that shocked the nation (SMH, 22 November 2016) | There isn't a 'silent majority' of racists in Australia (SMH, 22 November 2016)

Enemy aliens: How my family's lives were changed by Australia's wartime internment camps (ABC, 28 November 2016)

Calling Australia home: stories of Australia's boat people (SMH, 24 November 2016)

ETA:

If Australia had its current refugee policy in 1939, we wouldn't be alive today (GA, 19 September, 2016). '"Refo" was a straightforwardly racist, pejorative term. Now Australian governments use more sophisticated language like "unlawful boat arrivals"... Regardless of the terminology, the underlying racist logic is the same.'

A powerful opinion piece from the New York Times, Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?, reminds us of the parallels between then and now: 'The vitriol in public speech, the xenophobia, the accusing of Muslims of all of our problems — these are similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and '40s.'

And last but not least: Fact Check One Nation

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