Talks with the wind

I refer to that old saw from a movie about Vietnam:

Kill them all and let God sort them out.

Maybe it isn't Vietnam, I may be confusing that quote with the smell of napalm in the morning. In any case, this idiom I used to to throw around among my chums back in grade school is an utterly cringeworthy statement and a case in point for why child recruiting into armies works as well as it does.

It's on my mind again while I watch the IDF decide this is the way to deal with Hamas. My own country is supplying weapons to make this ethnic cleansing go faster. While soldiers haven't yet been caught on video working through buildings and shooting anything that moves, they're sure dropping enough bombs and missiles to do much the same thing. They're bringing bulldozers into 'cleared' areas to 'secure' their captured areas.

There isn't a military solution to the Hamas problem short of genocide, which is where the IDF is going right now. The only true solution is political, but the authoritarian inflammation response to the Hamas attacks has kicked up to cytokine storm levels and we get to watch the bloody human carnage as a result, and see the despoliation of one of the most well known symbols of Judaism.

A taxonomy of one-handed swords. Once you get to two-handers, you've got a long and narrow axe.

Short and stabby
The go-to sword for ages in temperate and cold environments, because soldiers wore armor (cold climates mean they wouldn't over-heat) and stabbing works better than slashing for getting past armor.

Short and slashy
Weapon of choice for nobs with horses, because they can hit you with it while at a full gallop and still keep the sword.

Also the go-to weapon for anyone who is on an unstable surface, like the deck of a ship, where precision stabbing isn't going to work.

If you're in a warm to hot climate this weapon is your go-to because the heat means most people aren't wearing armor. This, by the way, is why you get such amazing swords from places like Africa, the Indian sub-continent, and south-east Asia.

Long and stabby
The go-to sword of choice for nobs looking to kill other knobs in the streets, because guns are total bummers with no art to their use.

Long and slashy
The weapon of choice for people from traditional horse cultures, but are now nobs that needs something that looks like it could be used from a horse but probably shouldn't.

---

Most of the yes, but... from this is probably answered with:


They really are. That extra hand changes so much of the mechanics of sword usage

But I'm not joking. Climate is why you get such beautiful and seemingly strange swords from hot climates, where in cold old Europe we had a thousand years stabby infantry swords and slashy cavalry sabers.

Growing up white in a white neighborhood meant I was trained from age 0 that police are there for you if you're in trouble. You could give them a friendly wave, and they would wave back. They came by my K-8 schools and talked about that, even though my grade 3-8 school was significantly minority.

Then Rodney King happened. In March of 1991 a guy with a VHS camcorder (the over-the-shoulder kind) who was walking his neighborhood happened across a police stop. The procession of events is extremely familiar in 2020 (King 'reached for a gun', and before too long was on the receiving end of a taster and a boot-party by four cops), but it was literally the first time white America saw that on ABC/CBS/NBC national news. There weren't riots and mass protests in 1991, because it was caught on video, how could anything but a conviction be possible? And yet, in April of 1992, the country saw for the first time what conditional immunity allows police officers to do, and all four were acquitted. That's what sparked protests and an uprising.

That was the first big chink in my police are OK indoctrination. Because I was going to a very black high-school in 1991-1992, I heard talk of how beatings like that were actually pretty common, so long as you were black. I watched how people like the Urban League talked my classmates out of uprising themselves. It was the first time I was really aware that police are only friendly if you look right, and are in the right place.

Then the 1994 crime bill happened; but I was going to an extremely white college (8% black. They recruited at my high-school to improve that percentage, and ended up with white ole me), so didn't really notice what it did to everyone that didn't look like me.

Then 9/11 happened. The legislative aftermath of 9/11 included such gems as the Patriot Act, as well as legislation enabling the military to sell surplus hardware to law-enforcement agencies and creating the Department of Homeland Security to pass out funds to law-enforcement agencies to buy surplus military hardware. I noticed this, and noticed that police agencies were getting anti-insurgency hardware. I even saw some of it, since I was working for a City government until late 2003 and had a chance to be in the police vehicle garage a few times. I didn't know what they intended to use APCs and vehicles with cannons on them for, but the departments sure wanted them.

Then Ferguson happened in 2014 and the uprising that came along with it. It was the first time in 23 years that police acting badly made national news in that way. The sleepy white progressive movement, which to be honest includes me, finally noticed there was a problem here and started signing on.

Somewhere between 2015 and 2018 after seeing the deaths by police, and hearing stories about how our just throw people in jail stance is at odds with just about every other westernized society, I started working on prison abolition. Our prisons were created by the loophole in the 13th amendment that allowed slavery for convicted felons. It functionally nationalized slavery; no more private ownership, but the State could lease slaves out to private parties. The school to prison pipeline was a real thing, and police departments are the slave-takers. Modern state-sanctioned slavery is a time-limited thing, no more being born into it, but the system is set up so that doesn't really matter all that much. It's a bit better than the Jim Crow era, but not a whole lot (thanks, 1994 crime bill and the war on drugs).

2020 brought George Floyd and the Minnesota uprising which seems to have pushed America as a whole over a tipping point. The cruelty of the Minneapolis Police Department was on national display, with local activists keen to point out just how much of a jack-booted white supremacist thug the Police Union chief is. Floyd was the third high-profile police-death in the Twin Cities in six years, with Philando Castile and Tamir Clark preceding him in death. That was enough.

The observation I made in 2002, that police departments were being equipped to fight counter-insurgency operations, was made very clear this year.

• Surplus military body-armor and weapons just in case an armed uprising happens.
• Surplus military vehicles to shock and awe rebels into fleeing.
• Surplus military helicopters to do likewise.
• Surplus military veterans/contractors, of the kind that liked busting heads in Afghanistan, working with their buddies rather than integrating back into civil society.
• Community Policing, making friends, is a Hearts and Minds operation to improve perception of policing.
• Riot-line training was on evidence in every city with a large protest, proving that all police are trained in herding/pushing crowds of lesser-armed angry people.

Now that some of the emissions from the Minneapolis Police Union chief have come out in public we now see how the reality bubble of policing is shaped.

• Police have a uniquely hard job (debatable) and deserve special protections from society as a result.
• Anyone can turn into a perpetrator, and perps are true evil geniuses when it comes to using every-day items in criminal ways (which is how bike-tire shims magically turn into lock-picks, and a candle turns into an IED).
• Community Policing is just something you do to get politicians off your back (which is why it hurt so much to hear Biden talk about improving Community Policing rather than anything that would actually work)
• Police are domestic warriors, the thin blue line between civil society and the lawless elements that would overtake it (siege mentality, great for cementing loyalty against outside challenges like politicians getting uppity).
• Officer safety is our top concern. (When the smile and a friendly chat doesn't work to get someone to stop what they're doing, you're allowed to use any force up to and including shooting them to get them to stop.)

American policing descends directly from Slave Patrols, and it shows; there to keep the lesser classes in line and fine society happy and feeling safe. But since 2002 it has also been equipped like a counter-insurgency operation, which keeps its mailed fist of freedom packed away and ready for use at a moment's notice. Because until 2020 (I hope) all it took was a few days/weeks of less-than-lethal riot-line work to wear out the malcontents and train a new generation that you just don't fight the police.

Except in 2020. We have a chance, here. It will take years of work, which means our results are far from assured. But enough of America has realized that police are a counter-insurgency force that also does some other things on the side that we might, if we push, turn our police forces back into something that helps the community. It won't be policing, it will be something else. I've seen a lot of talk about Iraqi de-baathification, and there are a lot of parallels there between that process and what we will have to do.

• Qualified immunity needs to end. This gives police forces impunity to do whatever they want to whoever they want, so long as they can hang a fig-leaf of I felt threatened on it.
• Police unions need to be cast out of the major labor organizations. This is a hard sell, since Labor in-fighting is a capitalists dream and many labor people realize that.
• Along with ending qualified immunity needs to come revisions to officer discipline procedures. Decades of police-union wrangling, and the unique pressures police unions can bring on balky politicians, have built in massive protections of officers against facing any kind of consequences.
• Citizen safety needs to be the top concern, not officer safety. You won't get this with the current police power-structure in place.

These are going to be hard, and this is the core of what defund the police is calling for. You will not reform our existing departments into a shape that isn't counter-insurgency, but abolish and recreate has a chance of doing it.

Charles Stross asks the question, how will residential architecture change in the next 100 years? Complete with context around how it changed in the last 300 or so.

Being a USian, my answer to that is focused on the US.

( A long essay on futurist housing )

With Elseworlds starting this week, the A part of the season is now done. Some impressions.

( Read more... )

I saw this on cable the other day, didn't see it in theaters because of all the reviews it got. I'm glad I saw it, because wow does that make me think.

As I recall, there were two major critiques of this movie:

• Doesn't even come remotely close to a Bechdel-test pass, and treatment of women over all is shit.
• My, that's a future full of white people.

Now that I've watched it, I'm pretty sure both of those are intentional. Let me explain.

The first Bladerunner was released in a time when a lot of fiction was following a certain theme:

The future is not OK.

This was back when we were all certain we'd die in nuclear fire and the human race would have to scratch itself up to civilization through a cancerous wasteland of environmental toxicity, a new ice-age, and mutants. We got stories about surviving that. Stories about things that happened so far after that people mostly don't think about it. Stories about the kind of small social group societies that a fall from civilization would create.

Elfstones of Shanara happens after such a holocost.
The Mote in God's Eye happens after such an event, but the social scars are still evident.
Shadowrun the tabletop gaming system replaced a nuclear holocaust with a magical one.
An entire genre of "return to the old west" style neo-westerns that replaced Indians with mutants.

Bladerunner is no different here. Most of where it differs is in the kind of grim meathook future we get. And the one in the original one was kinda cyperpunky, The tropes are all there, and some of them started with this movie:

• Constant rain.
• No sunlight, and what there is, is heavily filtered.
• Canyons of streets.
• Neon colors everywhere.
• Any joy in the world is small-scale, in the moment.
• Streetmarkets. Lots of streetmarkets.

But that's just the visual aesthetic, which definitely was repeated elsewhere in the 80's and 90's. I want to mention this because it directly affects what Bladrunner 2049 is: an homage to a previous work in a previous time.

So, a grim meathook The future is not OK style film, written and produced today, and yet descends directly from the previous stuff. Right from that we can tell that this will not be a bright future by any means, nor one to be held up as a 'what we could be if we try'.

What did they do? They managed to envision a future that was the white-gaze dystopia we've all be fighting. It's got all kinds of goodies:

• A return to overt slavery in the form of Replicants.
• Using slaves to remind the lower classes that they're better than someone and to be happy about it, thus keeping them in their place.
• Fantabulously wealthy people in a world of paupers.
• The message that the only way to save this destroyed world is to do more of what we've already done. More slavery! It's the only way to thrive!
• The male gaze is the hard-coded default in everything. The female form is objectified from beginning to end, in every advertisement, replicant, and everything in between.

Hell, there is one (1) woman in the thing that isn't a replicant, and she's a bought-in slaveholder. There are two (2) obviously black people who talk in it, and the rest of the non-white cast are all light-skinned (also, the muted color-palate means its easy to miss an actor's race; can't rely on skin color alone). This is a white-supremacist future we're looking at, consistently so.

White supremacists futures are also misogynistic as fuck, and this one is no different. No wonder the treatment of women is shit, it's baked into the world-building.

There is something that the old stories did that this one also does, and that's realize that showing a completely shit future is bad storytelling so they leave the reader/watcher with a sense that things might possibly get better soon. In the original Bladerunner that was the overthrow of the Tyrell Corp that made all the replicants. In the early Cyberpunk stories it was getting a truth out where others can see it, and hoping. It's often a thin, scant thread. But that thread is there. It's in this one too.

As an homage it owns the source material and the deeply problematic future it built. It does not pretend that this is a nice world. It doesn't even try to recast the future to be more 'realistic' because that wasn't the point. The very point is that this is a white-supremacist future and all that entails, giving us a story that leaves us with the hope that the slaves might finally have the tools to liberate themselves. Maybe. If things go just right.

For that kind of story it's fucking brilliant.

However

That's not how it was marketed. Since the white-male gaze is the default in SF works, the marketing was all return to the world and suchlike, making everyone think they were a Deckard. Because this wasn't marketed as a return to the 80's style of grim-meathook futures, audiences were not set to expect those genre-conventions, so it earned quite a lot of righteous criticism.

To contrast, there is another film that did much the same thing as Bladerunner 2049, but got the marketing right. I'm talking about the 2012 Dredd movie that starred Olivia Thirlby and Karl Urban. This movie was an homage to the Judge Dredd comics that got their start in 1977, and was set in a post-nuclear megacity dystopia. It was a modern telling of an old style of story, in a deeply problematic setting. It was fucking amazing, and it was sold as just that. I think it did $20M total box-office, which earned out its production costs and some profit. If you have any love for the original material I endorse the hell out of this movie. If you haven't and are at all squeamish about splatter, stay the fuck away.

Anything doing an homage to a problematic period like the 80's We're all going to die style of story-telling is going to have limited critical and intersectional appeal. You can definitely play in the after-the-fall setting using the modern story telling, and Handmaid's Tale,The CW's 100, and Greg Rukka's Lazarus comic are doing just that. But doing it in 80's style? There will be problems. And like re-reading those old classics, you have to remember the time.

Twitter stream.
Caption stream.

This was a panel on the representation of disability in fiction. It's not great, but panels like these help those of us writing disability to do better about it. In my case, all three of my novel/series-length works involve some aspect of disability. This was accidental, but it seems to be a theme of mine.

• First Novel: PTSD and recovery from major mental trauma.
  • Being a first novel and one I didn't do a lot of research on, if/when I get back to it there is a lot that needs fixing. The entire first third of it will need rewriting and plotting.
• Shelved Romance: one of the two MCs is missing part of a leg
  
  • Sounds like I did a decent job. Still need a sensitivity reader.
• Ace Series: earned disability through combat injuries.
  
  • One of the MCs might be considered to have a disability in our world (she's 4'3"), but doesn't get labeled that way in hers.
    
    • Sort of. In the third book I change the cultural context and she definitely will be, for the first time in her life. It'll be challenging to write.
  • The other MC ended up with some neurological symptoms after an encounter with a mace.

For my own sake, I'm glad my two kind-of finished works hit close to the mark.

There were several tropes that the panelists rather hated

• Spending paragraphs and paragraphs on just how terribly hard it is to move around with a disability. The example used was "getting through a door with a small threshold bump." This is disability theater meant to educate the abled. Spending your point-of-view words on a disgruntled sigh and minimal words around working around it is far more in character and won't cause your disabled readers to skip whole bits.
• Magical cures. You get this more in magic or high-tech settings. That isn't disability, that's An Obstacle Overcome.
• The absence of things like ADHD, dyscalcula, and dysgraphia. People have these, and they can have major impacts to a story.
• Blindness as code for helpless.
• The lack of a disabled community. When disabled folk are seen in fiction, they're almost always singletons. It's isolating.
• The absence of assistive technology, rather than technical cures. 1980's Cyberpunk is kind of to blame for this, with its transhumanist suggestion that cyber-arms are better than organic ones and things like that.
  
  • You never see depictions of someone taking an evening to break apart and clean their ankle/knee.
  • Nor do you see people using assistive apps on their phone-equivalents.
  • A 'Google Glasses' type system that gives you guide-dog like guidance, only in words? Or an imp that does it? Would be cool.

This focus on the negative I'm doing is more of a me thing, since I find lacks to be more useful in helping me write things. There was a segment on wishes, where the concept of a hover-chair was raised. Not only is it better about going up/down stairs, it would also allow the user to be at eye-level with their conversation companions. Fewer cricks in necks!

And a session on book recommendations, which I wasn't great about transcribing. Refer to the caption stream for better notes, this section was near the end.

A question I had on a job-application a long while ago. Really. It was a joke question to be sure. But they made the mistake of adding "show your work" to it.

Which I did.

It came to three pages. I really should have said, "This came to 3 pages. If you want to see the whole thing, ask."

The short-version:

The Star Destroyer would usually prevail, largely through TIE-FIghter spamming overwhelming the targeting solutions available to the Enterprise, allowing the fighter screen to weaken the shields enough for the SD itself to finish it off. However, the Enterprise platform is a far more maintainable solution in a sustained campaign and wins the logistics fight.

( Showing my nerdy work )

Prince has never been explicitly my jam. Not quite my style, not quite my themes, not quite... it

And yet.

I am a child of the Twin Cities. Prince was the local musical super-star, and he stayed even after he made bank.. Importantly, his rise coincided with the time I started paying attention to mass-market music, so he has always been there as far as the background radiation of music in my life is concerned.

Bowie's music wasn't that, and this is probably why Prince's death has hit me so much harder.

My High School was the blackest school in the state. I don't know the demographics of my Jr. High, but it might have been majority-minority as well. I bring this up because:

Prince didn't transcend Blackness. He embraced, embodified & enhanced Blackness. Write that down.

— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) April 21, 2016

My HS was obsessed with rap and hip-hop. And yet, the theater-kids (mostly white) held Prince as their idol; Bowie's weirdness was so old it was acknowledged, but not held up nearly as high. Boy George had more impact on that market. than Bowie did. To someone with unchecked white privilege, this would look like Prince was 'transcending' his blackness to appeal to a non-street market. Instead, what he showed was the breadth of blackness, challenging the gangsta-narrative that was luring so many of my male classmates.

I have one memory of a couple of boys, who put on bandannas once they were off-campus, reacting with confusion to a discussion about Prince by some of those theater-kids. They didn't know what to make of Prince, a black man who most definitely was not street.

Prince was also queering gender before we started putting those words together. Androgyny was the term at the time, but these days queer would be a much better term for what it was he was doing in the 80's and early 90's. That resonated with me, even though I didn't notice it. Prince challenged narratives to what it meant to be masculine. His sudden loss took away one of the examples I had unknowingly been looking to for support.

So, yes. I'm taking a new look at his music right now. But he leaves a huge hole that no one person can fill.

How the Founding Fathers saw the second amendment.

An armed populace is able to protect itself from overreaching government and provides the sound foundation of citizen militias.

How things would actually work today if such a sanctioned usage of the 2nd amendment were to happen:

A general insurrection arises from the populace due to (event), and people reach for their 2nd amendment firearms. The police, local, state, and federal, treat this as what it is: a crime-wave, and respond with the full force of law-enforcement. With social media monitoring, telecomms interception, electronic interception, drone monitoring of movements, and a concerted effort to interrupt supply chains and disrupt ideological coordination.

Who needs guns, they've been deprecated already. The intent of the 2nd amendment has already been superseded. It's biggest effect is to turn random stabbings into random shootings, not provide a periodic overthrow of the government.