Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, March 13, 2024
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51 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Yesterday, Kathy asked:
It has sexaphone. They’re like saxophones, but you make music by screwing them. There’s also a noble savage plot, and Shakespeare in banned and soma and some weird mix of Marxism and Henry Ford worship, and the whole thing feels like he had the ideas for 8 novels and the plot for a short story.
If he were to have just focused on one of the ideas, and really explored that, it might have been better. I’m talking, of course, about the sexaphones — there was magic there.
I’m not going to say that it’s the worst book I’ve read, but it ranks up there.
@Gustopher: No wonder I never read it.
@Gustopher:
Like so many ‘great classics’ it’s mostly crap, but has one or two interesting ideas. Soma was prophetic. And the worship of morally questionable billionaires. The noble savage thing baffled and bored me when I was twelve and reading it. Trying to remember who wrote the more embarrassing sex scenes, Huxley or Heinlein.
Note to aspiring authors: Avoid sex scenes, they almost never work.
Note to sci-fi writers: Cool ideas! Know what else is cool? Character and plot. Oh, and dialog.
Nikki Haley got 13% of the Georgia primary vote, despite no longer being in the race. Interesting.
I’ve been wondering when would be a good time to get this off my chest, but on the subject of RFK Jr., I’ve been fairly convinced for some time that he may have been partially responsible for the 23andme leak last year. The possibility seems obvious to me, and I’m surprised that in all the coverage of the leak, I haven’t seen anyone even speculating on a connection.
For those who haven’t been following, late last year the genetic information of several million users on 23andme was breached by hackers, and was being posted to public forums. Most of the affected users were Ashkenazi Jews, and a smaller number were of Chinese descent. As I am an Ashkenazi Jew with an account on 23andme, this was of concern to me, and I received an email that information I shared with DNA relatives may have been accessed, though my account hadn’t been hacked.
What does RFK Jr. have to do with any of this? Not long before the leak, he suggested (in comments he apparently thought were off the record) that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are genetically more immune to Covid than Blacks and Caucasians, and that this may have been deliberate–seemingly implying that Covid was a biological weapon designed by the Chinese government in cahoots with Da Jooz.
In the range of current racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, Covid conspiracy theories are the only ones I’m aware of that specifically single out Jews and Chinese, and only Jews and Chinese. Where else do you find that exact Venn Diagram, outside of restaurant attendance? In any case, RFK Jr.’s version of this theory, where he obsessed on the genetic makeup of Ashkenazim and Chinese, came little over two months before the bizarre, ethnically targeted cybercrime against those two groups on 23andme. It’s hard to believe this was a coincidence.
I’m not saying he personally ordered the leak. I doubt he or anyone in his circle has that level of computer knowledge. And I think that most likely he didn’t invent the conspiracy theory himself, but picked it up from somewhere. If so, the leak could have happened even if he’d never opened his trap. Still, I definitely think this theory which he gave voice to was the motive behind the leak, whether it was causally related to his publicly endorsing the theory or not.
The hackers aren’t likely to find the info they expect. Research on genetic susceptibility to Covid is pretty sketchy at this point. There have been a few studies on a possible link with blood type, but nothing to my knowledge on differences among ethnic groups. Now, it is possible (I haven’t checked) that Jewish Americans and Chinese Americans have shown relatively low rates of Covid deaths compared with African Americans (that’s almost certainly the case) or even white Americans generally, but if so, that’s most likely due to socioeconomic factors, not genetics. You probably find similar disparities with flu and other deadly viruses long before Covid.
Also, to anyone who thinks the number of people in China who have died from Covid is anywhere near as low as the Chinese government has claimed, I’ve got a Great Wall to sell you. It’s funny how the conspiracy nuts always seem to overlook the obvious evidence of when governments lie, preferring to believe in sci-fi scenarios that aren’t remotely possible with today’s technology that are being kept mysteriously secret by the powers-that-be.
Legal action could end use of toxic sewage sludge on US crops as fertilizer
The punchline?
Sometimes I just have to laugh at our stupidity.
Yes, it must be aliens and not some uber rich person with too much money and too much time to play around with his weird fantasies or a group of bored merry pranksters. No, neither of those, it’s ALIENS!!!
@Gustopher:
While 1984 is rembered as better writing, I think Brave New World is more important, as it was a much more prescient prediction of the form our dystopia would actually take.
To quote Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” essay:
Suggestion I saw that I think m8ght be a good answer yesterday’s question of what Biden should do if Israel crosses the “redline”:
Formally recognize a Palestinian state.
@Stormy Dragon:
Where? With what borders? With what government? Hamas? The PA? Who’s paying the bills? And when the whole world laughs and decides Biden really is senile?
The business headline of the day- Family Dollar and Dollar Tree will close 1,000 stores
Speaking from where I’m living, we’re over-saturated with these stores. 5 or them at least, counting Dollar General, in the 5-mile vicinity of our home.
The headline of the day- Aaron Rodgers and Jesse Ventura Top R.F.K. Jr.’s List for Running Mate
@Bill Jempty: As near as I can tell, in rural areas these are a real boon, serving as the de facto department store of the area. People with more choices belittle them, but they serve a real purpose. And even in more developed area, I imagine they serve as a nonjudgmental version of Target or Wallmart, and one you can get to without a car.
@MarkedMan: Heard on the radio:
“Ah loves the Dollar Store! Why, you don’t have to git dressed up or anythin’ lahk ya do at Walmart!”
@Bill Jempty: Like Aaron Rodger’s is gonna give up his multimillion dollar pay check for sitting on his butt after getting hurt in the 2nd (3rd maybe?) game of the season to make RFK Jr. look like an even bigger idiot than he already does?
For some reason or other, I suspect Jesse Ventura’s one dance in the spotlight was more than enough for him. Playing 2nd fiddle to a for sure loser just isn’t the draw it used to be.
@MarkedMan:
There’s a family dollar in the same shopping center as the barber I go to. I have a small beard* which I get trimmed every three weeks. On the same day as I do that, I visit FD to get a large size bag of cat food. The price is good there.
There’s a DG real close to our church/my wife’s workplace. I used to sometimes get the spiral notebooks** I use for my strat-0-matic baseball replays.
*- A goatee style beard. I’ve had one long before beards became fashionable again.
**- I have a spiral notebook purchased during this chain’s going out of business days. That was in 1993! What can I get for it on Ebay…..
Heh. I collapsed a lung back in… ’86? ’87? something like that, was in the hospital for 6 days and felt like absolute hammered sht for 2 weeks after. Didn’t shave the whole time. Decided I kinda liked not shaving. Took to cutting my beard real short with a trimmer when it bothered me enough, but leaving a goatee. I’m still doing that lo these 37 years hence.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I first grew my beard in the late 90’s. There’s a picture of me on at Strat-O-Matic related website from 2001 and I had the beard then.
@Gustopher:
Try Island–it’s Huxley’s last novel and way more coherent and interesting than Brave New World.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Or Muir, who seemed to have a pretty good idea as to the alloy and technique used to make the monolith for a stone mason, and who insisted on going for a walk on the moors despite the lousy weather.
As a sci-fi devotee world building is still of most importance to me. That other stuff is important just not as important. My current pet peeve is authors stretching out series as long as they can with more and more improbably characters and plot twists. I sort of want to see how the series ends but I get tired of what is to me transparent attempts to prolong the series. I now stop reading most series well before they end. ( We went from single books to trilogies to now near endless series. I guess this was inevitable.)
Steve
@Stormy Dragon:
That’s a rather insightful analysis.
Huxley wrote a follow on book, called Brave New World Revisited. It’s non-fiction, about trends he deemed to point to developments in his novel. I read a long time ago and don’t quite recall much of it.
@Gustopher:
@Michael Reynolds:
I think of dystopian fiction as big idea works, not so much as literary ones. So the merits or lack thereof of dystopian fiction, or for that matter utopian fiction, or lack thereof, are far from foremost in my mind.
I do agree about sex scenes, and I’ll go one further: also not in movies or TV.
If you want a surfeit of sex, though, I suggest The World Inside by Robert Silverberg. The setting is an overpopulated world where most people live inside 1,000 story buildings they almost never leave. People are encouraged to have extramarital sex often, and to have large families. It’s bizarre on many levels.
Our local edition of burn it all down: proposed town budget failed, proposed school budget failed, budget to hire a full time fire chief failed, design work for a new police station (badly needed) failed, road maintenance and repair work failed. And so on. Almost all of the increases in the town and school budget were to account for either mandates, increases in fixed costs (like insurance), and inflation. It’s going to be an ugly year, but I guess that’s what some people need to see.
I am proud to announce that one of my wife’s books (Wishtree) has been banned in. . . let me look it up. . . that’s right, in who gives a fuck Virginia. The reason? Trees. You see, trees are sometimes hermaphroditic. Seriously. Transgender trees.
The FBI are lying scumbags.
@Michael Reynolds: Mazal Tov!
I wonder what they think of Star Wars? I don’t know if you’ll find that in school libraries in the first place, but canonically at least, the Hutts are hermaphroditic. Jabba wasn’t always a dude.
@Jen:
I spent 40+ minutes in the election booth navigating the 12 page town ballot. Town officers probably the same as you, Select Board, Budget Committee, Planning and Zoning. School districts, yes districts, School Boards and Budget Committee for the High School district (regional), 4th(?) though Jr. High, regional school district and the town School District, K- 3. Plus the 40 odd warrant articles to wade through, budgetary, acquisition, work authorization and several process proposals. My wife, who worked at the elections came home wondering why there can’t be a better way.
Roughly 3000 people turned out in a town of ~15,000. Of course it could have been worse, we could still be getting together as interested voters in a school gym to pass those warrant article.
@Michael Reynolds:
And they use insects to have sex. Fito-bestiality!
BTW, would honey sales suffer if more people realized it’s processed plant sperm?
@Sleeping Dog: Our turnout was only slightly better than yours, ~1,200 voters in a town of about 5,000. We had around 30 warrant articles, many of which are only warrant articles because of the d@mn tax cap, so they are pieced out and placed on the ballot separately. And, I STILL have to go to the school gym for the deliberative session, because that’s where the Libertarians show up and make motions to zero out line items before they even go to the ballot.
I’m not going to lie, I’m exhausted dealing with this each year.
For some reason I thought last Sunday “next week the air fryer.” But I just got a big bag of buckwheat, and that puts me in the mood for kasha and meatball stew. So, te air fryer will have to wait.
I also want to put more effort with the ice cream (more on this later).
What I’m stuck for is a side. I thought pasta in red sauce, but that doesn’t strike me as a good combination (and there’s tomato pure in the stew anyway). So maybe fettuccine aglio e olio (oil and garlic), seeing as I’ve some olive oil left. Or pasta primavera (but then I’ll want to air fry the veggies first).
On ice cream, does anyone have any experience incorporating peanut butter in home made ice cream? I kind of think it would freeze hard. Does it? I think it would mix well with chocolate, mocha, banana, and strawberry among other flavors.
@Kathy: Peanut butter does freeze hard. I’ve had better luck swirling it through the ice cream after churning, but before freezing it–that way, you’re only scooping through ribbons of harder peanut butter, rather than clumps of it, if that makes any sense at all.
@Jen:
Long ago I realized their were few pyramids in our lives, almost everything is a garden. A pyramid is a huge undertaking you do once and it lasts forever, whereas any gardener can tell you making a beautiful garden takes constant effort and attention, and any time you get lazy it descends into chaos at speed, but the result is worth it all.
This is a good video on the Army press conference on the deployment to Gaza as well as a look at the assets now underway. Likely no news for a month as they transit the Atlantic and Med.
Not political, a shipping news site.
@Jen:
It makes perfect sense.
I’m not averse to deserts with some assembly required. So, one option is to mix PB with the ice cram after serving it. another is to incorporate peanut powder in the mix. It will also freeze, but the particle size is tiny.
A couple of years ago, a high end grocery store sold peanut ice cream. I’ve no idea what was in it, but it tasted like cold, non-sticky, less creamy peanut butter. It was discontinued. Just as well, because it was outrageously expensive (like 4 times a regular store ice cream).
@steve:
I resemble that remark. 63 Animorphs, 11 Everworlds, I forget how many Remnants, 6 + 3 Gones.
We were being paid 100K advance (180K in today’s money) a book for Animorphs, it took three weeks to write one. So there’s that. But the point of a series is not just the resolution, it’s the milieu. Gone’s milieu is awful, a 30% death rate for young characters, for instance, and there are many, many readers who’ve read the whole 3000 pages six, eight, twelve times. You don’t visit a long-running series, you move in.
@Stormy Dragon:
Except Brave New World literally has Shakespeare banned, and it is a major plot point, as far as it has plot points. The noble savage from the Indian reservation had a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, as did the one head of production or leader of whatever (it’s been a while since I have read it)
BNW does anticipate our present dystopia where incoherent gibberish made up of random things thrown at the wall to see what sticks is viewed as a replacement for a well thought out argument, though, by virtue of being exactly that. And people falling for it.
I really would like a story about the sexaphone player though.
It’s such an amazingly stupid idea that I really want it expanded upon — how does it affect his own romantic life? Is he just too tired after performances to touch his wife? Does she feel like he loves his instrument more than her?
Perhaps as an episode of Black Mirror. That show frequently took a staggeringly stupid idea and then expanded upon it with the best production possible. I assure you that you will never find a better done version of the classic “prime minister blackmailed into fucking a pig on live tv” trope than that show managed.
@Kathy:
This might be a stupid idea, so, salt. Anyway, would you be able to mix some alcohol into the peanut butter so it wouldn’t freeze as much? I don’t know if you can get it down there, but there’s a peanut butter flavored whiskey that’s supposed to be good. Or a more neutral spirit?
Note, I started a grease fire earlier this week making a breakfast sandwich.
Not sure about Muir, but I learned long ago to never let the weather dictate my wanderings.
@Gustopher:
It must be a really long time since you read it. There are no wives. No husbands. No offspring. No families. Surnames are assigned upon decanting (or before?).
I won’t spoil your fun by saying what I think Sexaphones are.
@Beth:
I drink very little (I know, shame on me). Even so, I’ve pondered some kind of alcohol infused ice cream for later. I was thinking piña colada, maybe a margarita sorbet. That would need to be while on vacation. Alcohol tends to make me sleepy.
I’ve no idea how it would mix with peanut butter, both physically and as regards flavor. A possibility would be rompope. It’s like vanilla flavored eggnog, or so I’m told. It can mix well with Kahlua, too. So, coffee, vanilla, and peanut butter?
I’m intrigued.
@Kathy:
Oh, I get it re: alcohol. I’m pretty much at the same place. I like being intoxicated, but I hate the hangover. Also, the intoxication isn’t as good as other intoxications. I like, 1 or 2 drinks then a bunch of edibles. It’s a nice swimmy kinda feeling.
@Kathy: spoil the fun! Huxley spoiled all fun when writing it!
Are sexaphones Soylent Green?
There was a whole romance plot, so I assume there must be some kind of relationships, and sexaphone players must have groupies and girlfriends and boyfriends who are all disappointed in them.
I distinctly remember the main character was a Beta(?) who had to wear green, and then there was a scene where she was getting dressed to impress someone and trying to decide what to wear and was picking from a colorful closet. For every bit of world building there’s another scene that contradicts it.
Sometimes race was just practical adaptation — the decanted humans were browner near the equator to better handle the sunlight. Other times he was pulling out wacky antiquated racist terms like “octaroon” and makin* those characters the lower classes.
A character takes birth control, leading one to question why they aren’t all just sterilized if the plan is to decant humans in tanks.
Maybe it was meant to show the hypocrisy of their lives, and I missed that and just assumed the world building was as bad as the character building. By the time I finished it, I was thinking the noble savage guy had killed himself because it was the only way out of that terrible book.
Looking back, it’s possible that all the characters were deliberately stunted in the decanting process when they were irradiated to make them lower classes. Maybe their lack of depth was intended. Maybe I’m forgetting a scene where it was explained that the noble savage guy was repeatedly kicked in the head by a donkey and is just equally brain damaged.
A lot of other classic science fiction holds up with a lot of caveats about the misogyny and racism. For instance, Asimov apparently didn’t realize women existed most of the time, and when he did remember and included them you kind of wish he went back to leaving them out — but the Foundation and Robot stories are excellent and still relevant despite that.
I really think that everyone treating “Brave New World” like it’s good is some kind of mass delusion. That and making kids read “A Separate Peace” and “Ethan Frome”.
Apparently, I was traumatized by Brave New World, and haven’t worked through the trauma yet.
Soooo, anyone know what’s up with Joanne?
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/jk-rowling-holocaust-denialism-author?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=994764&post_id=142589534&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2j541o&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Cause, friends, I’m starting to get the sense that she’s actually a nazi. Like, she used to be kinda, sorta subtle about her anti-semitism, but now, it seems she’s like two steps from going full Kanye and being like, “but actually, the Nazi’s had some good ideas….”
@JKB: Pretty interesting. I remember when we deployed from Germany to Saudi Arabia in advance of Desert Storm, we drove our vehicles to the port of Bremerhaven and it took them about three weeks to get to the Saudi port of Dhahran. They went on ships very much like those in the video.
@Beth:
According to John Kelly, Trump had nice things to say about the Nazis as well.
Literary journal removes an article about the struggle to remain a decent human being, recognizing the humanity in all of us, in the midst of the Gaza war:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/arts/guernica-magazine-staff-quits-israel.html
And here’s the essay:
https://archive.is/S2je0
@Beth:
It’s hard to hate just one kind of different person, and easier to hate all different persons. Start hating a group for what they are, and you’ll hate all who aren’t like you.
@Beth: Many years ago, I read an interview by Rowling in which she said she partially modeled Voldemort on Hitler, in particular in the way Voldemort wanted to wipe out the Muggles despite being half-Muggle himself, similar to how Hitler wanted to get rid of the Jews despite his own Jewish ancestry.
In fact, most historians do not consider the theory that Hitler had Jewish ancestry to be credible.
Now, to be clear, I don’t believe that automatically makes her an anti-Semite. In my experience, it’s a pretty widely believed myth. But back when I read this interview (sometime in the aughts), it made me less than impressed by her historical knowledge, that she so uncritically accepted an urban legend as fact. And it made me a little uncomfortable as to what other types of misconceptions she might harbor.
By now, it doesn’t surprise me at all that she would be ignorant of the Nazis’ murder of trans people, and even swallowing revisionist histories aimed at erasing that reality.
@Beth:
I will say that the Nazis fashion was great. Does that count as “some good ideas”?
“Poorly dressed Nazis” is our particular dystopian nightmare. Also Hugo Boss’s dystopian nightmare.
Anyway, fragile white egos often slip into the right wing when they feel their worldview challenged. They want to go back to a world when they were acknowledged as right and everything wasn’t so “political.”
This is part of why I hate terms like homophobic and transphobic and arachnophobic as a replacement for bigot. We need a set of terms for people who are wrong, but haven’t crossed a line into Nazi shit. If someone fears gays, trans folks or spiders, and says or does something ignorant and a bit hurtful, they should be gently corrected and encouraged to not do that shit — they can reasonably be expected to grow, maybe even still have the initial feelings but choose not to act on them. When they make their entire personality about hating like JK Rowling or J. Jonah Jameson then they are probably lost forever and should be shunned. Our language needs to reflect that, because language shapes our thoughts and possibilities.
If she isn’t a Nazi yet, she will be. The best thing I can say about her is that she is walking that path slower than Elon Musk, who is speed running the alt-right pipeline.
@Kathy:
Does that make me a closet vegan?
Nah, didn’t think so.
@Gustopher:
This is one of my personal dystopian nightmares, FYI. On prime time television. On every channel.
YMMV .