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liberals really out here saying our soldiers defend our freedom in response to the transgender ban. Like lmao boi the military is trash, if your trans and actually want to serve the US military you're trash, and anyone who puts aside the fact that Syrian children are getting bombed because "Trans people deserve to kill Middle Eastern families too!!" is trash. Fuck out my face.
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This is a great piece on how EU in particular and strategy games in general put players in the minds of imperialists. There's a joke about the much-vaunted German board game tradition that I love: "It started with laying out maps of Europe and pushing army figures around." (And what makes it even better? It's true! Pretty much the entirety of modern war gaming originates from German "kriegspiel", literally "wargame", which was used to train Prussian commanders. There's a fascinating history of it given in Jon Peterson's Playing at the World.) There's something about looking at a map that inspires the imperialist impulse, the reduction of the world into territory, zones that can be color-coded and labeled: German, French. Roman, Gallic. Stark, Lannister. In a strategy game, people are abstractions; the map is the territory, the real thing, and everything else is a representation. It's easy to understand, I think, playing EU, how those who spend their days looking at nothing but charts and maps, who are surrounded by numbers, optimize those numbers at the expense of reality. To a bureaucrat, the numbers are reality; the people are something they hear about second-hand at best. And a bureaucrat's performance, to the extent that it is judged at all, is judged on those numbers, not on more difficult to measure things like happiness or well-being. How much did you increase the economic output? How much territory did you conquer? These are the things we celebrate political leaders for, while dismissing those who have no such accomplishments to claim. Life is more than numbers, more than market transactions among self-interested rational utility maximizers. But measurement requires abstraction; comparison requires reduction. For bureaucrats it's just a game, an optimization problem: manipulate the variables to achieve the highest output. But there's something more, too: why do we make and play so many war games? Why are there not more city management games, like SimCity, which applies the same philosophy of abstraction and technocracy to a superficially peaceful context? The answer, I think, is not merely the valuation of violence over other forms of conflict resolution, as we might first assume. Instead, I would say, war games are, in fact, more honest. Not honest about the consequences, but honest about the means. That is to say, when the abstractions of the bureaucrats' games cause real-world harm, normal people would ignore them, given the choice; life is more important than abstractions. To prevent this, the abstractions of bureaucrats are enforced with violence. Violence requires no context, no understanding, no nuance: as Graeber says, violence is the one communicative act which requires no understanding of the target of communication by the communicator. To make a game of bureaucracy and technocracy--which is fundamentally what EU and other strategy games are--is to make a game about an artificial order that depends on violence to exist. It is appropriate, then, for such games to be literally about that: moving armies in order to change fictional borders. A game like SimCity, on the other hand, is fundamentally dishonest, eliding the massive violence required to enforce the city's technocratic government. (Even in the latest SimCity, for example, homelessness does not exist; likewise, poverty and unemployment exist only in economic equations of demand, not in impacts on the citizens of the city.) The violence is subsumed into unquestioning obedience. If the morality of EU, where genocide and colonization are just good tactics, is horrifying--and it is--what do we say about the morality of SimCity, a game purportedly about liberal good government where totalitarianism without resistance is an unstated foundational assumption?
Those with money usually think they deserve it. But most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top.
Once, I met with a man who runs an idea festival. He was a great admirer of businessmen who became Buddhist monks. "I don't like protest," the man told me. "It's too much about ego. Ego is the problem with America."
I thought of the workers busting their backs lifting boxes at warehouses, while an electronic tracker yelled at them to work faster. Are their egos too big?
So much of the difference between the experiences of rich and poor comes down to kindness. Kindness is scarce. Kindness must be bought.
If you have money, you can pay to live in a bubble of politesse. Excellent wine choice, sir. Here's your gift bag, madam. Often, you don't have to pay for it. The mere promise that you might will keep you sipping prosecco and deserving of servile attentions. Soon, you think this treatment is earned.
Meanwhile, we treat the poor with casual cruelty. Single moms on welfare have their homes searched by police to make sure they're not hiding a man in the closet. But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat. The poor get stop-and-frisk, drug tests, and constant distrust.
It's impolite to interrupt a supervillain when he's monologuing.
It's really astounding how a man can go on national television and talk about how abhorrent the things he is directly responsible for are as if he has no involvement whatsoever in those things happening.
Or, I suppose, the really astounding thing is that people take him seriously and blame those who criticize him for somehow preventing him from not doing the abhorrent things he directly chooses to do.
Fuck fuck fuck. ...like literally almost every fucking line of that speech is a blatant lie in the service of MASS MURDER. fucking christ. and they all just sit there, KNOWING that they're lies, and do NOTHING. fuck the political class. burn it all.
Like the tariff, “intellectual property” is a government restriction on who may sell a given type of good in a given market, enabling the beneficiary to charge whatever consumers can pay. But unlike the tariff, which was a form of protectionism that regulated the transfer of goods across national boundaries, “intellectual property” regulates the transfer of goods across corporate boundaries.
Unlike the industrial corporations of a hundred years ago, companies like Nike don’t actually make things. They use artificial property rights like “intellectual property” to control the conditions under which other people can make things, and to set up toll gates between the people who make things and the people who consume things. The really, really big money isn’t the ability to produce, but the ability to collect tribute for allowing production to take place.
Enforced, of course, by the threat or exercise of violence, ultimately by the US military.
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Let’s get one thing straight: women don’t develop eating disorders, self-harm and have other issues with our body image because we’re stupid. Beauty and body fascism aren’t just in our heads – they affect our lives every day, whatever our age, whatever we look like, and not just when we happen to open a glossy magazine.
[...]
Studies have shown that, across the pay grades, women who weigh less are paid more for the same work and have a better chance of promotion than those who are heavier. In politics, in business and in the arts, accomplished and powerful men are free to get fat and sloppy, but women can expect to be judged for their looks if they dare to have a high-profile job: we’re either too unattractive to be tolerated or too pretty to have anything worth saying. Beauty is about class, money, power and privilege – and it always has been.
This is something I wish mainstream feminism, and anti-prejudice movements in general, would push more. There's an understandable tendency, in the face of the constant justifications of "it's just a joke, take it easy" or "it's just words, get over it" and the like, to argue that words carry violence, that the act of speaking can be a violent act. This, however, is a tenuous argument that doesn't need to be made. Sexist and racist slurs are not dangerous and oppressive because of the power of the words themselves--or at least, not merely so--but because of the architecture of sexism and racism that structures society. A word like "slut" is not dangerous merely because it indicates a hatred for women, it is dangerous because that hatred is backed by the significant possibility of physical violence. If that architecture of power that enables violence toward women, minorities, and others did not exist--which is to say, if women and minorities held sufficient power to secure their physical safety and continuing livelihood--then such words would be simply the words of ugly, hateful people. But while that architecture exist, they are not merely words, but threats. And policing word choice without confronting the underlying architecture--which is to say, capital and state power, the monopoly on violence--will do little good.
It was already possible, by the early '90s and actually long before them, to trace the terms of the current partisan divide in America. Conservatives — think in Jonathan Haidt–ish terms here — value tradition, authority, and group identity; liberals value tolerance, fairness, and care. Or whatever; you can draw the distinctions however you'd like. The point is, The Next Generation depicts a strict military hierarchy acting with great moral clarity in the name of civilization, all anti-postmodern, "conservative" stuff — but the values they're so conservatively clear about are ideals like peace and open-mindedness and squishy concern for the perspectives of different cultures. "Liberal" ideals, in other words. You could say, roughly, that the Enterprise crew is conservative as a matter of method and liberal as a matter of goal. They sail through the universe with colonialist confidence sticking up for postcolonial ideals. I mean, Starfleet has a Prime Directive … but it's explicitly non-interventionist! This is so weird that it's almost hard to notice; your mind just sort of slides over it. But it's fascinating in numberless ways. Picard is both indisputably the most patriarchal Star Trek captain and indisputably the least likely to punch anyone in the face. No one is more individualist than the individuals of the Enterprise, but their individualism has led them to reject most forms of private property (because it actually holds them back, they're so boldly individualistic) and embrace ultra-centralized health care. The show is able to indulge a serious jones for the classical Western canon — Shakespeare, Mozart, et al. — without really running against the grain of multiculturalism at all, at least by late-'80s standards. Data will be listing some violinists whose style his programming can mimic, and some of them will be Heifetz and some of them will be aliens a guy just made up for the script. It's totally nuts, but it's also a fantasy of the American psyche that, if you can get into it, makes a lot of fine things suddenly seem possible, and makes some debilitating anxieties just sort of fall away.
The end of this piece is kind of stupid--the antipathy toward networked/collective consciousness is interesting but the analysis doesn't follow through, settling instead on an asinine comparison to the Borg--but the rest is quite good. There's also a great one-paragraph analysis of Harry Potter that comes out of the middle of nowhere.
