Are we at war with Marvin Minsky?
I know I've been AFIA for a long while, but has Minsky been gunning for fandom lately? I barely know who he is in mundane matters - some computer guy, right? - and I have no idea if he's jumped on the "Denounce Skiffy As Nekulturny" bandwagon - so many have, but I don't recall hearing anything outrageous about him. Did I miss the declaration of war? The call-to-arms? I guess I'll have to check the Ansible archives.
Seriously, though - this Spearhead rot that I heard about via the Outer Alliance newsletter is the kind of drivel I was brought up in, the faux-kulturny academic conservativism of Thomas Aquinas College and Steubenville and all that angsty Muscular Catholicism that is totally, absolutely, inarguably Not Gay AT ALL! HOWDAREYOUPOINTOUTTHATSOCRATESREALLYREALLYLIKED STRAPPINGYOUNGMEN? SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP! SPARTAAAA! -er...nevermind.
It's really toxic, self-othering, nasty stuff and of course it Hurts [Straight Men] Too with its narrow, spiky, Little Ease mentality.
And even more of course, ignoring it won't make it go away, as anyone with an ounce of logic ought to realize, since it bubbled up without us being aware of it - clearly attention has nothing to do with its production, and the sympathetic magic of pretending it doesn't exist isn't going to extinguish it. And I've written reams on it in the past, this is just the same-old-same-old that insecure brittle dudes were moaning about on Usenet in the Nineties just like they were in living rooms in the Seventies and Eighties (Girl Cooties! Pussification of the American Male! Amazons!) but it still needs to be walloped because they're still doing it. It isn't "going away by itself" - only strong and constant fumigation has reduced its prevalence at all from the 1970s.
--I was initially thinking this needed to be a separate post from the one I was going to do expanding/expounding on my Biercean aphorisms of yesterday, but it really doesn't: the Spearhead (snerk!) ranters actually provide a perfect example of the intersectionality of so-called "social" and "fiscal" conservativism, on a more grass-roots level than Mr. I-made-my-millions-by-privatizing-govt-services Ruddy's combined war on the social safety net and on the sex-lives of the proles. (Did you catch that, about his other big lobbying activity? Or look up what exactly Maximus does? It wasn't unpacked in the article, but it was all there, buried way down at the end of the story.)
This is because I keep running across the belief - which I used to subscribe to, once upon a time, myself - that there is a chasm between the "fiscal" conservative set and the "social" conservative set, where, basically, the fiscal conservatives claim (or are claimed to be) to be all about the budget-balancing and the stoppage of "waste" defined usually as anything that helps people who are not me, while simultaneously venerating Ronald Reagan and the largest taxpayer-supported industrial complex in the entire world while demanding low/no taxes for themselves, but not to care about sexual activities, choice of religion, length of hair, recreational substance use/abuse, or contemporary fashions in dress; while "social" conservatives only care about policing private sexual behavior, public obeisance to a theologically-amorphous "mainstream Christianity", restricting and severely punishing the use of (some) substances for recreation, and conformity to ill-defined but restrictive norms for clothing and hair, particularly for women.
But the overlap is much, much wider than most people realize. Yes, there are oodles of oblivious RTC conservatives who don't actually know about or care about anything politically outside their Senior Anti-Sex League activities. I was raised among them...or so I thought. But then, upon reflection, I realized that the fact that my parents didn't overtly care much about anything but abortion/sex-ed/War On Christmas stuff in the 1970s didn't mean anything about the greater movement, and also that I didn't pay any attention as a kid to the politics and economics stuff even when my folks and their friends were talking about it because it was boring to me, so my impression that "we didn't support X" were even less valid than they might have been - and warred with my distinct memories of skipping over all the stuff in our zines about how unions were the wreck of American strength when it wasn't how Social Security was going to wreck the American economy and leave us prey to the Godless Commies - but it would still creep in when you had articles about how contraception/abortion was going to leave us with a greying population of geezers who would be too old to work and scarf up all the money in the US via SocSec that wasn't being replenished because selfish Western women weren't having enough babies to become the Workers Of The Future and so we'd either end up overrun by The Enemies Of Freedom or have to put Granny on the Icefloe because we couldn't afford to pay out any more...just like they were doing in Japan! And Holland! TEOTWAWKI coming!
So, yeah, some of us were oblivious tools of the Plutocracy, thinking we were just godly servants of the divinely-ordained Patriarchy. But plenty of us were willing tools, and avid supporters of the Plutocracy, too. It's like the overlap between the Venn sets of "fiscal/social conservative" and "racist" - sure, there are some cons who aren't overtly or consciously racist, but if all that's going on is that you haven't yet heard them defend The Bell Curve or squick about "miscegenation" or make a "Jew joke" when someone picks up change off the floor, then this is simply benefit-of-doubt. And yes, there are plenty of racist white liberals and centrists who believe in white superiority even if they would never say so explicitly and think that having multicolored group photos on the Girl Scout Cookie Boxes is "political correctness gone mad" just as there are sexist ones, but The National Review's support of segregation back in the day wasn't an abberation, and they still have columnists like our old buddy Derbyshire who write for VDARE and the "separate" strands of Conservativism versus Racism/ Sexism/ Militarism/ Christianism turn out almost inevitably to be just one strand, like a moebius strip.
You just have to hang around long enough until "but I don't think they should have special rights" or "but really, women don't vote for the common good," or "but don't you think it's unfair to promote unqualified minorities over qualified white men?" or "but really it is necessary to have a unified culture to have peace & prosperity" or "but don't you agree that religion is necessary for ordinary people to behave morally?" pops out and you are forced to accept that this person you didn't realize thought of you/your friends/your neighbors as subhuman did all along, but was simply not talking about it - yet.
And so too it is with theocracy and meocracy - the "fiscal" conservatives aren't really separable from the "social" conservatives, no matter how comforting a thought it is to believe that there is this group of "rational" actors who are just out to fuck the poor for the purpose of lining their own pockets at the expense of everyone else without having all kinds of superstitious convictions about the mystical linkage between the ruler's sex life and the health of the crops, or the need for sufficient public sacrifices to be made to the national deity for the good of the Imperium and so forth.
Well, personally I don't find that a terribly comforting thought. But many people do, for some odd reason, wanting to believe that the rich just are better than the rest of us (or our rich folks, at least), primate power worship or what, and thus are rational and objective and canny even if they may be predatory assholes, but not that they're filled with abject superstition and fear of the Other. Maybe it offends our national amour propre to think it otherwise - "Our Plutocratic Overlords may be Ebol, but at least THEY'RE not Stoopit" - perhaps we need to feel that we are ruled by the competent-if-evil, in order to feel better about ourselves? That it would be too much to bear, to accept that not only are our Owner Class grasping tyrants who, in true Lawful Evil fashion, simply rewrite the laws of the nation designed to protect against such as they, to justify themselves when they get tired of buying their way out of the consequences of breaking them, but they are also just as nutty and parochial as any poor, uneducated peasant without the excuses of lack of education or access? We can point and laugh at the stereotypical third-world dictator with his superstitions - but how can we go on doing that when we hear about, say, secret Crisco annointing ceremonies in our own halls of power?
But that's all speculating, based on my long observation of American Exceptionalism in action in the classroom and workplace. What isn't speculation is that a) a lot of people, even on the left, don't want to believe that our aristos are just as likely to be given over to bigotry and superstition as anyone else, b) in spite of this, an awful lot of them are, because c) there is no intrinsic contradiction between being a grasping exploiter of consumer and laborer alike and a sex-obsessed Puritanical hypocrite, a la Richard Scaife and Thomas Monaghan and a zillion other right-wing Hegemony flacks and funders.
I've talked before, at length, how it all fits together - the way that the plutocrats use and have used for generations the obsession with fertility, comprising women's chastity & non-breeding males, the way this combo of misogyny and homophobia was tangled up (more covertly in latter decades) with xenophobia and white supremacism and militarism, but also with fears of the inability to control a peasantry getting uppity as it demanded better working conditions and was increasingly in positions to demand them - how this was initially diluted by bringing in still-more-disadvantaged strangers, but then this collided with the old WASP xenophobia, and was thwarted anyways by the original "Bread & Roses" strikers over and over again, until they were finally able to syncretize a perfect storm of Red Scare/White Supremacism/Uppity Women/Effeminate Sons rhetoric in the post-WWII era; posts tagged "hegemony", "conservativism," etc so I won't rehash it. But the apparent contradictions - and how better to show off the Venn Overlap than the furore over Environmentalism, which starting from the 1970s (or at least that is as far back asmy memory goes) combined fearmongering about how the Godless Liberal Hippie Ecologists were Humanity-Hating Feminist-Pagans who wanted to exterminate the species to protect birds and flowers and other girly/gay stuff, how Subjugating Creation was our Manly Christian Duty, Even Unto The Ends Of The Earth - and never you mind about how this message was entirely bought and paid for by the makers of DDT!
And as for the rare "fiscal" conservatives who really aren't bothered or upset by the idea of men lying with men or women with women or women with men who aren't their legal owners, who really don't give a damn if someone goes to church ever, or worships a hundred gods or none, or wears a miniskirt or blue spikes in their hair or tatoos or whatnot, or indulges in non-alcoholic forms of substantial recreation so long as it doesn't endanger anyone or impair their productivity - this "openmindedness" (when it exists) is worthless because they go on supporting the Senior Anti-Sex Leaguers against what they believe in, despite that neo-puritanism they supposedly disdain.
Who's the bigger tool, really?
Oh, and apropos of nothing (ahem) - Ruddy's from Massachusetts. Yeah, oh-so-liberal Massachusetts. And I don't think I've ever met him, but the odds of me not being a Bacon degree or two are awful slim.
Heh. I see that Minsky doesn't seem to have weighed in at all on fandom factionalism, or "hard" vs "soft" SF, or done anything but to criticize mundane fic as boring. Which many of us would agree with - although I'd argue with him for the honor of our Athenian tragedists, and point out that much of SF is, and always has been, Myths In Spaaaaace! - even the ones that aren't simply futurized ports of Anabasis.
Seriously, though - this Spearhead rot that I heard about via the Outer Alliance newsletter is the kind of drivel I was brought up in, the faux-kulturny academic conservativism of Thomas Aquinas College and Steubenville and all that angsty Muscular Catholicism that is totally, absolutely, inarguably Not Gay AT ALL! HOWDAREYOUPOINTOUTTHATSOCRATESREALLYREALLYLIKED STRAPPINGYOUNGMEN? SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP! SPARTAAAA! -er...nevermind.
It's really toxic, self-othering, nasty stuff and of course it Hurts [Straight Men] Too with its narrow, spiky, Little Ease mentality.
And even more of course, ignoring it won't make it go away, as anyone with an ounce of logic ought to realize, since it bubbled up without us being aware of it - clearly attention has nothing to do with its production, and the sympathetic magic of pretending it doesn't exist isn't going to extinguish it. And I've written reams on it in the past, this is just the same-old-same-old that insecure brittle dudes were moaning about on Usenet in the Nineties just like they were in living rooms in the Seventies and Eighties (Girl Cooties! Pussification of the American Male! Amazons!) but it still needs to be walloped because they're still doing it. It isn't "going away by itself" - only strong and constant fumigation has reduced its prevalence at all from the 1970s.
--I was initially thinking this needed to be a separate post from the one I was going to do expanding/expounding on my Biercean aphorisms of yesterday, but it really doesn't: the Spearhead (snerk!) ranters actually provide a perfect example of the intersectionality of so-called "social" and "fiscal" conservativism, on a more grass-roots level than Mr. I-made-my-millions-by-privatizing-govt-services Ruddy's combined war on the social safety net and on the sex-lives of the proles. (Did you catch that, about his other big lobbying activity? Or look up what exactly Maximus does? It wasn't unpacked in the article, but it was all there, buried way down at the end of the story.)
This is because I keep running across the belief - which I used to subscribe to, once upon a time, myself - that there is a chasm between the "fiscal" conservative set and the "social" conservative set, where, basically, the fiscal conservatives claim (or are claimed to be) to be all about the budget-balancing and the stoppage of "waste" defined usually as anything that helps people who are not me, while simultaneously venerating Ronald Reagan and the largest taxpayer-supported industrial complex in the entire world while demanding low/no taxes for themselves, but not to care about sexual activities, choice of religion, length of hair, recreational substance use/abuse, or contemporary fashions in dress; while "social" conservatives only care about policing private sexual behavior, public obeisance to a theologically-amorphous "mainstream Christianity", restricting and severely punishing the use of (some) substances for recreation, and conformity to ill-defined but restrictive norms for clothing and hair, particularly for women.
But the overlap is much, much wider than most people realize. Yes, there are oodles of oblivious RTC conservatives who don't actually know about or care about anything politically outside their Senior Anti-Sex League activities. I was raised among them...or so I thought. But then, upon reflection, I realized that the fact that my parents didn't overtly care much about anything but abortion/sex-ed/War On Christmas stuff in the 1970s didn't mean anything about the greater movement, and also that I didn't pay any attention as a kid to the politics and economics stuff even when my folks and their friends were talking about it because it was boring to me, so my impression that "we didn't support X" were even less valid than they might have been - and warred with my distinct memories of skipping over all the stuff in our zines about how unions were the wreck of American strength when it wasn't how Social Security was going to wreck the American economy and leave us prey to the Godless Commies - but it would still creep in when you had articles about how contraception/abortion was going to leave us with a greying population of geezers who would be too old to work and scarf up all the money in the US via SocSec that wasn't being replenished because selfish Western women weren't having enough babies to become the Workers Of The Future and so we'd either end up overrun by The Enemies Of Freedom or have to put Granny on the Icefloe because we couldn't afford to pay out any more...just like they were doing in Japan! And Holland! TEOTWAWKI coming!
So, yeah, some of us were oblivious tools of the Plutocracy, thinking we were just godly servants of the divinely-ordained Patriarchy. But plenty of us were willing tools, and avid supporters of the Plutocracy, too. It's like the overlap between the Venn sets of "fiscal/social conservative" and "racist" - sure, there are some cons who aren't overtly or consciously racist, but if all that's going on is that you haven't yet heard them defend The Bell Curve or squick about "miscegenation" or make a "Jew joke" when someone picks up change off the floor, then this is simply benefit-of-doubt. And yes, there are plenty of racist white liberals and centrists who believe in white superiority even if they would never say so explicitly and think that having multicolored group photos on the Girl Scout Cookie Boxes is "political correctness gone mad" just as there are sexist ones, but The National Review's support of segregation back in the day wasn't an abberation, and they still have columnists like our old buddy Derbyshire who write for VDARE and the "separate" strands of Conservativism versus Racism/ Sexism/ Militarism/ Christianism turn out almost inevitably to be just one strand, like a moebius strip.
You just have to hang around long enough until "but I don't think they should have special rights" or "but really, women don't vote for the common good," or "but don't you think it's unfair to promote unqualified minorities over qualified white men?" or "but really it is necessary to have a unified culture to have peace & prosperity" or "but don't you agree that religion is necessary for ordinary people to behave morally?" pops out and you are forced to accept that this person you didn't realize thought of you/your friends/your neighbors as subhuman did all along, but was simply not talking about it - yet.
And so too it is with theocracy and meocracy - the "fiscal" conservatives aren't really separable from the "social" conservatives, no matter how comforting a thought it is to believe that there is this group of "rational" actors who are just out to fuck the poor for the purpose of lining their own pockets at the expense of everyone else without having all kinds of superstitious convictions about the mystical linkage between the ruler's sex life and the health of the crops, or the need for sufficient public sacrifices to be made to the national deity for the good of the Imperium and so forth.
Well, personally I don't find that a terribly comforting thought. But many people do, for some odd reason, wanting to believe that the rich just are better than the rest of us (or our rich folks, at least), primate power worship or what, and thus are rational and objective and canny even if they may be predatory assholes, but not that they're filled with abject superstition and fear of the Other. Maybe it offends our national amour propre to think it otherwise - "Our Plutocratic Overlords may be Ebol, but at least THEY'RE not Stoopit" - perhaps we need to feel that we are ruled by the competent-if-evil, in order to feel better about ourselves? That it would be too much to bear, to accept that not only are our Owner Class grasping tyrants who, in true Lawful Evil fashion, simply rewrite the laws of the nation designed to protect against such as they, to justify themselves when they get tired of buying their way out of the consequences of breaking them, but they are also just as nutty and parochial as any poor, uneducated peasant without the excuses of lack of education or access? We can point and laugh at the stereotypical third-world dictator with his superstitions - but how can we go on doing that when we hear about, say, secret Crisco annointing ceremonies in our own halls of power?
But that's all speculating, based on my long observation of American Exceptionalism in action in the classroom and workplace. What isn't speculation is that a) a lot of people, even on the left, don't want to believe that our aristos are just as likely to be given over to bigotry and superstition as anyone else, b) in spite of this, an awful lot of them are, because c) there is no intrinsic contradiction between being a grasping exploiter of consumer and laborer alike and a sex-obsessed Puritanical hypocrite, a la Richard Scaife and Thomas Monaghan and a zillion other right-wing Hegemony flacks and funders.
I've talked before, at length, how it all fits together - the way that the plutocrats use and have used for generations the obsession with fertility, comprising women's chastity & non-breeding males, the way this combo of misogyny and homophobia was tangled up (more covertly in latter decades) with xenophobia and white supremacism and militarism, but also with fears of the inability to control a peasantry getting uppity as it demanded better working conditions and was increasingly in positions to demand them - how this was initially diluted by bringing in still-more-disadvantaged strangers, but then this collided with the old WASP xenophobia, and was thwarted anyways by the original "Bread & Roses" strikers over and over again, until they were finally able to syncretize a perfect storm of Red Scare/White Supremacism/Uppity Women/Effeminate Sons rhetoric in the post-WWII era; posts tagged "hegemony", "conservativism," etc so I won't rehash it. But the apparent contradictions - and how better to show off the Venn Overlap than the furore over Environmentalism, which starting from the 1970s (or at least that is as far back asmy memory goes) combined fearmongering about how the Godless Liberal Hippie Ecologists were Humanity-Hating Feminist-Pagans who wanted to exterminate the species to protect birds and flowers and other girly/gay stuff, how Subjugating Creation was our Manly Christian Duty, Even Unto The Ends Of The Earth - and never you mind about how this message was entirely bought and paid for by the makers of DDT!
And as for the rare "fiscal" conservatives who really aren't bothered or upset by the idea of men lying with men or women with women or women with men who aren't their legal owners, who really don't give a damn if someone goes to church ever, or worships a hundred gods or none, or wears a miniskirt or blue spikes in their hair or tatoos or whatnot, or indulges in non-alcoholic forms of substantial recreation so long as it doesn't endanger anyone or impair their productivity - this "openmindedness" (when it exists) is worthless because they go on supporting the Senior Anti-Sex Leaguers against what they believe in, despite that neo-puritanism they supposedly disdain.
Who's the bigger tool, really?
Oh, and apropos of nothing (ahem) - Ruddy's from Massachusetts. Yeah, oh-so-liberal Massachusetts. And I don't think I've ever met him, but the odds of me not being a Bacon degree or two are awful slim.
Heh. I see that Minsky doesn't seem to have weighed in at all on fandom factionalism, or "hard" vs "soft" SF, or done anything but to criticize mundane fic as boring. Which many of us would agree with - although I'd argue with him for the honor of our Athenian tragedists, and point out that much of SF is, and always has been, Myths In Spaaaaace! - even the ones that aren't simply futurized ports of Anabasis.