Speaking as someone who re-reads Dune for the Bene Gesserits and skims the arias to its serial boy-genius messiahs and who thinks the hero of Holy Fire is not Maya but the Widow (possibly the character in sf with whom I personally identify the most) and who has long theorized that Cranford is really located in a Culture LSV (and that's just SF from the boys, Octavia Butler's Anyanwu remains for me SF's greatest protagonist), Athena Andreadis' Where Are the Wise Crones in Science Fiction?is a pleasure and a provocation even more keen than her usual offerings for me. There's even an illustrative storylet appended at the end. A taste for context, but read the whole thing and then read it again:
Literature, whether mainstream or genre, has apportioned a good deal of its content to formidable crones, matriarchs and dowagers, both benign and malign. There is one genre, however, which if read exclusively conveys the impression that men live for ever (and get ever more potent and interesting as they do so) but a disease fells women the moment they go past the “peak attractiveness” so beloved of evopsychos... Two items have prompted me to revisit this literally hoary topic. One is the constant much-heat-little-light argument about representation and diversity in SF, from which discussions about age are conspicuously absent and primitive in the rare instances they occur. The other is the recent “PC censorship panels” petition to the SFWA – a crude intimidation attempt disguised by its originator as a fight for freedom of speech, with responses to it mostly (though not exclusively) split across age lines. The young(er) hopefuls on the Side of Good opined en masse that all “isms” will disappear from SF “when the old dinosaurs die”. If only. You have much to learn, grasshoppahs... The real determinant is not age, but entrenched power hierarchies and the sense of entitlement they foster. Age, particularly in the US context, rarely translates to power – especially for women, who are still considered disposable beyond decoration, un/underpaid labor and reproduction. Age may bring hardening of the arteries and softening of the upper and lower heads, but closed minds correlate far more tightly with automatically vested authority and membership in dominant groups. Clinging to power, rather than an attribute of age, is in fact a refusal to really grow up: even kids eventually learn to share their toys.
6 comments:
> The young(er) hopefuls on the Side of Good opined en masse
> that all “isms” will disappear from SF “when the old dinosaurs die”.
> If only. You have much to learn, grasshoppahs...
>
> [W]omen. . . are still considered disposable beyond decoration,
> un/underpaid labor and reproduction. Age may bring hardening
> of the arteries and softening of the upper and lower heads,
> but closed minds correlate far more tightly with automatically
> vested authority and membership in dominant groups. Clinging
> to power, rather than an attribute of age, is in fact a
> refusal to really grow up: even kids eventually learn to
> share their toys.
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/debate-with-michael-anissimov.html
----------------
The connection froze just as we were getting into the most heated
area of disagreement, gender roles. Too bad.
====
;->
I'm pretty sure Anissimov has a brain tumor.
Yes, I love Siân Phillips as Helen Mohiam in the 1984
Dino De Laurentiis _Dune_ movie (and as Livia in
_I Claudius_, and for that matter as Lady Ann in the
George Smiley series).
The Bene Gesserit? Weeell. . .
The notion that people are assumed to be "animals"
unless they pass the gom jabbar test gives me the creeps.
(Ayn Rand, of course, promulgated the same idea -- that
people have to "earn" the right to be considered human,
by an act of will informed by [Objectivist-style] "reason".)
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/02/the_psychology_of_hate_how_we_deny_human_beings_their_humanity/
----------------
In the early 1990s, California State Police commonly referred to
crimes involving young black men as NHI—No Humans Involved. . .
====
----------------
“But the pain--” he said.
“Pain,” she sniffed. “A human can override any nerve
in the body.”
Paul felt his left hand aching, uncurled the clenched fingers,
looked at four bloody marks where fingernails had
bitten his palm. He dropped the hand to his side, looked
at the old woman. “You did that to my mother once?”
“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked.
The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind
into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen.
He nodded.
“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
====
> “We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312924127/
----------------
"G. Gordon Liddy's autobiography is as spookily fascinating
now as it was in 1980, especially the memorably unvarnished
depiction of his early years. Listening with admiration to
Adolf Hitler on the radio, seeking to free himself from
"disabling emotionalism" by slaughtering chickens, young
Gordon must have made quite an impression on the neighbors."
"Liddy's autobiography reads like the ludicrous bragging of a 12-year-old
boy who wants approval from the big boys and will scream ever louder
until he gets their attention. Is he a hero? Is he a sociopath? Neither;
he's sometimes weak, frequently pathetic and, ultimately, not nearly
as interesting as he desperately wants us to believe."
"He begins by admitting that he was a frail child and takes us through
his growing up and his obsession with controlling his own fear. At
times this becomes a very strange story. For example, not many
of us would feel the need to catch, kill, and eat a rat to prove
to ourselves that we were no longer afraid of rats."
"_Will_ is a page turning memoir of a sickly child who, transfixed and
mesmerized by Hitler and the cult of the Alpha-Male, transformed himself
into a self made (and self described) Nietzschean (and Machiavellian!) Superman.
After all, this is the man who made his entire office staff watch Leni Reifenstahl's
Valentine to the Nazi Party _Triumph of the Will_ as inspiration."
Writing teachers struggle painfully with passing on the technique of 'Voice'
to their subjects. Present in this excellent read is a perfect example of 'Voice'.
_Will_ may be one of the best popular insights into the inner workings
of the psychopath (uh-oh, I let my judgement of Liddy's character seep out )
available."
"G. Gordon Liddy is, to my mind, one of the few living embodiments
of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This may seem strange to
leftist college profs, to whom the great iconoclast of the nineteenth
century is a hero for his debunking and (to use a modern word)
deconstruction of so many traditional modes of thought, and who
wish to carry on his work in the name of democracy and justice.
But Nietzsche was in truth a right-wing aristocrat, and his destruction
of the old "myths" was certainly not done to pave the way for the
banality of a Starbucks coffee hour. G. Gordon Liddy knows this;
and whether or not he has actually read any of Nietzsche is, for this
astute and articulate defender of the old order of things, quite
beside the point. Liddy's book is an account of a man who
believes that he has cracked open the secret of life, and decides
to live accordingly, on his own terms and by his own lights."
====
http://home.earthlink.net/~elundegaard/nf-lbjascent.htm
----------------
"There's a wonderful scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence holds his hand over a candle's flame for far too long
to be comfortable (G. Gordon Liddy reportedly did the same
feat at a party during the Watergate era). In the film, someone
asks, 'What's the trick?' Lawrence, played by Peter O'Toole,
calmly replies, 'The trick is not to mind.'"
"In two movies, Lawrence of Arabia and All the President's Men,
a single incident--a man holding his hand over a flickering candle--
is described. In the former, because the man is Lawrence himself
(the hero), the incident is positive: a sign of his determination and
courage. In the latter movie, because the man is G. Gordon Liddy
(the villain), it's negative: a sign of his craziness. The incident is the
same. We are just made to feel differently about it depending on
the character involved. Fine for Hollywood, but in biography?"
====
Well, maybe it all comes down to hypertrophied
masculinity.
;->
> I'm pretty sure Anissimov has a brain tumor.
You know, one of the motivations for Michael Anissimov's jolt to the
far right seems to be this (from Scott Alexander's erstwhile
LiveJournal blog, as "squid314"):
http://archive.is/nCohi
------------------
If you're so smart, why are you dead?
Dec. 25th, 2012 01:10 am
I've been talking to some reactionaries sort of in the
Moldbuggian tradition recently and asking what seems to
me the obvious question: "why think past societies were better
when all the statistics indicate our society is?"
I've gotten some good answers that I'm still thinking over,
of which many seem to be along the lines of "We're doing better,
but not nearly as much better as you would expect from
our greater technology and economy, which suggests what
better science giveth, worse politics taketh away." . . .
====
And from the comment thread:
------------------
From: (Anonymous)
2012-12-25 03:16 pm (UTC)
Honestly, the Moldbuggian/NuReactionary/etc. cluster around
Less Wrong/SIAI (at least in the case of Michael Anissimov),
is one reason why I am very reluctant to ever give them a cent
of my money.
I simply don't know what to make of any of it. I'm an economic
historian, by training anyway. This
(http://stevereads.com/img/per_capita_income_great_divergence_from_farewell_to_alms.png)
is the world I live in. And when someone looks at that and says
"Yep, monarchy is the answer" or "boy the Catholic church had a
great thing going!", I don't just disagree but I'm left so utterly
bewildered as to what they thing the problem is that it's difficult
to even respond.
-Chris
====
It's sabotage, I tell you, sabotage! We'd have the Singularity
already, if it weren't for the damn libruls!
I'm reminded of a passage I read recently in Ken MacLeod's
_The Star Fraction_:
------------------
Chapter 13, "The Horsemen of the Apocrypha"
. . .
'You know,' Janis said thoughtfully, 'people used to talk about the
Breakthrough, the Singularity, when all the technological trends
would take off and the whole world would change: AI, nanotech,
cell repair, uploading our minds into better bodies and living forever,
yay! And it always almost happens, but never quite: we get closer
and closer but never get there. Maybe we never get there
**because we're being stopped**.'
'Stopped by Stasis . . . and by Space Defense enforcing arms control . . .
yeah, that's how it works: software cop, hardware cop!'
'Yes, let's kill them,' Janis said fiercely. 'They're a waste
of space.'
====
I have always argued that futurisms conduce to reactionary corporate-military politics [1] in their acquiescent gizmo-fetishizing consumer fandoms and [2] in their daydreams of elite technocratic circumventions of democracy via design and [3] in their reduction to technical amplification of a progress for which political struggles among stakeholders in history in the direction of equity-in-diversity are always required in fact and [4] in their naturalization of the status quo through fantasies of status quo amplification peddled as "disruption" and "accelerating change" and so on. For years and years before Anissimov's "jolt to the right" I have accused him of advocating a reactionary politics of plutocratic corporatism, fetishistic militarism, and anti-democratic eugenic and technocratic elitism. He whined and denied this as name calling but never responded to the substance. Now he lets his fascist freak flag fly, I can't say that I am at all surprised. He seems to me to have been somewhat left behind when the music stopped and many of the cultists he hobnobbed with grabbed chairs in better-funded more mainstream-sounding institutional perches with corporate and university affiliations. He's opting for being a bigger freaky fish in a smaller freaky pond because it suits his vanity and because he may be angling for one more round of the guru-wannabe grift so many he supported since he got brainwashed by the Robot Cult in high school have managed for themselves while he watched.
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