Free Speech for the Dumb

This article has been making the rounds on Facebook lately, and I haven't been able to properly respond to it there. It's not that I lack the time or inclination for shortish political rants. Mostly it's just that it's two-thousand-goddamned-fifteen and Facebook still can't show animated gifs.

So, on that note:

It's important to me that we all treat this subject with all the seriousness it deserves.

The argument can be summarized thus:

1. Free speech is under assault all over the world, from the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris to the disappearing journalists in Russia to the murders of Bangladeshi bloggers.
2. These incidents are very similar to the culture war fetish-scandals that the American right has been flogging since Reconstruction, in that pundits often use the same metaphors to describe them.
3. In some ways, the fetish-scandals are even more dangerous than actual, literal terrorism, and we are bold and masculine for standing against it.

I don't think this exactly needs an essay in response: not from me, anyway. Garry Trudeau covered much of the same ground from a much more knowledgeable viewpoint than my own. I don't think it's consistently funny enough to fisk, either, but it does deserve a highlight reel of sorts:

The value of intellectual freedom is far from self-evident.

If this is true, then it's so ubiquitously proclaimed that it certainly appears self-evident to most of us. Given that the most oppressive regimes are often the most vocal about the value of intellectual freedom, perhaps we should consider that the problem isn't ignorance of its value. The people who'll be killed if they say the wrong thing understand that intellectual freedom is a fine, fine thing. They are aware of its value on a deeply personal level.

It’s hardly natural to defend the rights of one person over the feelings of a group; to put up with all the trouble that comes with free minds and free expression; to stand beside the very people who repel you.

It could also be argued that it's hardly natural to dig metal out of the ground and built suspension bridges with it. Perhaps we should be surprised that bridges exist at all, but we should not be surprised that bridges continue to exist tomorrow when we were entirely away that they exist today.

We learn culture by seeing it performed by those around us, not by inferring them from thought experiments and first principles.

After the massacre at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, in January, even defenders of free speech couldn’t help wondering why the cartoonists hadn’t just avoided Islam and the Prophet, given the sensitivities involved. Why be provocative? 

I can only speak for me, but my concern with Charlie Hebdo wasn't that they shouldn't have drawn those cartoons because it might have been dangerous to do so. My concern was that they shouldn't have been drawn at all. Racist cartoons don't develop a raison d'etre by virtue of being dangerous to draw. I would vociferously oppose the suggestion that hacking people to death with machetes should be legally or morally ok, But if the ISIS leadership were to be hacked to death with machetes in an extrajudicial execution, I will not be posting on #IamISIS to express my commitment to the right to due process.

And when freethinkers are a tiny minority in a terribly poor and overwhelmingly religious country on the other side of the world, with no First Amendment or republican tradition of laïcité, it’s easy to feel that they’re admirable eccentrics who speak for nothing and no one beyond themselves—which may explain why they’ve received so much less attention than their brethren in Paris.

Honestly? I hadn't heard of Rahman and Roy until I read it in this editorial. Thanks for telling their story, I guess, but do you kinda think there might be some other reasons why terrorist attacks in Paris might get more ink than terrorist attacks in Bangladesh? Something pervasive, and central to any meaningful discussion of free speech and terror?

Do you think structural racism might be a bigger issue here than how we feel about bloggers?

Even in this country,

the loathsomeness of an incident

in which University of Oklahoma students were caught on video singing a racist song

made it seem churlish to argue that their expulsion from a public institution might be unconstitutional.

I don't really know how I feel about the specifics of this, actually. I strongly believe in protecting the rights of racists. But I don't believe in exclusively protecting the rights of racists, which is what the right is actually proposing when they rally around these horseshit memes. Free speech issues on college campuses, especially public universities, are both important and complicated. It's a collision of culture, politics, and law, and I don't for a minute want to suggest that it doesn't matter. I don't know the best way for society to punish racists or care for their victims. I don't know what's too much. I don't know what's not enough. It's just fucking awful.

But, y'know, no one every wrote songs that cheerfully joked about murdering people like me. Nobody sang joyfully about a kind of ritualized murder of people who looked like me. A kind of ritualized murder that likely continues as recently as last month.

Threats of violence are themselves a form of violence.

Public safety is part of free speech.

Creating a “hostile environment” is what the Bangladeshi bloggers stood accused of.

Hate-speech regulations put actual feelings, often honorable ones, ahead of abstract rights—which seems like common sense. It takes an active effort to resist the impulse to silence the jerks who have wounded you.

Abstract rights are not respected equally.

Y'all have an exceedingly wide definition of "silence." The status quo puts the feelings of racists--rarely honorable ones, I assume?--over the abstract rights of others. There is not a secret constitution for white people guaranteeing them not only free speech, but legal protection against the entirely predictable consequences of their actions.

But, in some ways, an even greater danger than violence or jail is the internal mute button known as self-censorship.

No.

It isn't.

Once it’s activated, governments and armed groups don’t have to bother with threats.

I don't think you understand how threats work.

Here self-censorship is on the rise out of people’s fear of being pilloried on social media.

Or, y'know. Maybe they're exercising some editorial discretion because they don't want to obscure their message, discredit their ideas, or needlessly hurt anybody.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin has been masterful at creating an atmosphere in which there are no clear rules, so that intellectuals and artists stifle themselves in order not to run afoul of vague laws and even vaguer social pressure.

Which--Putin has put a lot of work into explain this to everybody--might then followed up with very specific social pressure in the form of physical violence.

Threats of violence are themselves a form of violence.

Public safety is part of free speech.

Trudeau's piece writes about the peculiar nature of satire with what I can only assume is some insight--I certainly don't know very much about it, at a historical or literary level--but I am curious every time I read this neat, symmetrical model of punching up, not down. As cultural practice, humor is an adaptation and a technology. Like a lot of our adaptations and technologies, it might well have survived precisely because it helps us hurt and kill people.

Threats against free speech, by professionals or amateurs, are a serious issue. Likewise, our ongoing conversation concerning what is or isn't acceptable within a social discourse, currently playing out on campus and on Twitter, is also an important issue. They both deserve attention and discussion.

But they are not the same issue, and it's insulting to claim that they are. They are not two different points on a continuum. They are two radically different things, and equating the two harms our understanding of both of them.

New Moon

It's been a month, and I should probably update this thing.

My mind has been everywhere except games this for the last couple of months. When it did manage to wander there, it usually took a nap while I did the contemplative, one-thing-at-a-time thing, which lends itself quite poorly to writing. It's been a poor month for narration. A good one for long car trips and bonfires and sleeping on strange new couches, but crap for this word-after-a-word thing I try to do here.

There's been other writing, here and there. Back in June, I wrote a piece about the Santa Barbara shooting, out of a vague, anxious sense that I should do something to help. People waited in line to give blood after 9/11; I guess everyone finds their own way to feel useful. Personally, I dealt with 9/11 by taking a weird, serious detour in what was supposed to be a lighthearted short story about the apocalypse. Sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes writing can't get in the way enough.

A new follower on the Twitter had a question about DBT, having seen it referenced in the most recent post, and it reminded me that I really need to set up a best-of page or something, so people don't wander in to be greeted by dense, sporadically emotive Community recaps. In the meantime, in an effort to keep myself honest, some things in the pipe:

• More Community, obvi. I've apparently had the notes for Social Psychology sitting ready for cooking for an entire month now.
• Something substantive about my experiences with DBT. Currently trying to figure out if it might be two articles fighting for independence.
• Semiotics and UI in turn-based strategy games, because gaming is Serious Business.
• I dunno, something about guns, probably.
• More posts explaining how and why I haven't been writing.

Undisciplined Platinum members will have access to the various works in progress that make up my textual life, of course, but the rest of you will have to wait in line like everyone else. In the meantime, July is over, and you, like me, survived another month. Sit with that thought for a moment, taste the air in your nose and throat, note the tension and creeping pain in your fingers and wrists, and selah.

You're alive. Do something fun.

Prudence, IN

Are there advice columns that aren't terrible? You never seem to hear about them. Perhaps it's because good advice is, in practice, usually pretty obvious, and the tough questions involve choosing between several terrible courses of action.

It's neither here nor there, of course, when a professional advice columnist fucks up one of the really easy ones. Case in point, Dear Prudence's Emily Yoffe's recent piece for Slate, with the impressively on-the-nose title "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk." The article in question splits its time between asserting the title's imperative and apologizing for existing. If you're interested in reading a thoughtful rebuttal, I recommend Erin Gloria Ryan's How To Write About Rape Prevention Without Sounding Like An Asshole.

Yoffe's article is attempting to suss out a tension that seems to be inherent in the prevention model: you can only issue direct advice to people already interested in preventing rape, since they're the ones reading the damn articles, but you can't really do so without engaging in victim-blaming or undergirding complicity narratives. There's also the not-insignificant problem that most rape prevention tips aren't worth the fear they're printed on: beyond proximity, about the only reliable common denominator is that rapists like raping people and don't like going to prison. They tend to target people to whom they have easy social access, and people who aren't likely to call the police, or who the police aren't likely to believe.

So, basically, we're talking about women, children, ethnic minorities, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, sex workers, and God's own favorites, the poor.

Don't be in any of those groups, and you should be fine.

Even if this the risk-avoidance tactics of the prevention model were reliably successful, a more fundamental question remains: who gives a fuck? Living in fear does not solve the problem. In many ways, living in fear is the problem itself. Take it from #DepressedBane, relentless hatred and defiance will wear you the hell out. Teaching our more vulnerable citizens to be strong in the face of fear is all well and good, but seriously, fuck strength. Mere safety should not require strength. My allegiance, now and always, lies with the weak. There are a hell of a lot more of us, you see, and the strong don't like those odds.

Which brings us to the retaliation model. We tend to think of law and law enforcement as preserving safety, and, when well-designed and implemented, they can do that. Nonetheless, safety is incidental; the immediate function of law enforcement is not to make anyone's lives safer and happier, but to make criminals' lives more frightening and dangerous. Clearly, there are an awful lot of people out there whose lives are not currently dangerous enough, and rather than making victims responsible for deterring the behavior of their attackers, I wonder if it might not be more productive to focus the national conversation on ensuring that every rapist is arrested, charged, and convicted: to focus on breaking the secrecy in which predators necessarily operate, punishing police that scuttle investigations, and making prosecutors do their jobs.

If nothing else, focusing on the retaliation model it might help us cut through some of the bullshit about what a woman might "expect" to happen should she find herself drinking until she's drunk--you know, the way many college students do when they aren't too afraid--by moving to an entirely different expectation: that when someone is raped, drunk or sober, we expect the state to respond with all its fury, on her behalf and our own.

How to Crowdsource Assault

Social media platforms live and die in a fiercely attritive Darwinian environment. Platforms gravitate toward their "natural" use, and those that fail to do so quickly disappear. MySpace, in its day, thrived on teen girls who wanted attention and the adult men who wanted to give it to them. Facebook is prized for its ability to passive-aggressively micromanage your interactions with exes, as well as get in fights about political slogans. Also, Candy Crush Saga. (Again, sorry about that, Joey.)

Twitter, surprisingly enough, has shown an impressive aptitude for social activism. 140 characters is short enough that people will actually read most posts all the way through, and the hashtag functionality allows for the building of memes that are more complex than your average bumper sticker, but a hell of a lot more spreadable than a Rachel Maddow monologue. Women Action Media! recently used the #FBrape hashtag to publicly embarrass Facebook (and its advertisers) into revisiting their definitions of "abuse," which is more than anyone else had managed to do. More recently, and more hilariously, right-wing attempts to "expose" Planned Parenthood--by revealing that Planned Parenthood provides health care, including contraception and medical and surgical abortions, to women who want those things and might not otherwise be able to get them or afford them--were hijacked by liberal jackasses like myself. This is how I discovered Jenn "not @jennfrank" Frank, the way all new contacts should be made: drunk, and making puerile jokes. (Frank was not drunk. I'm assuming.) When the dust settled, I had a few more followers, and a few more followees.

The outcome of this episode is that my feed isn't as uniformly gave dev oriented as it had been before, and more of the really real world has been seeping in. Ana Mardoll wrote this helpful editorial over at Shakesville, describing the recent dust-up over Twitter's then-proposed "report abuse" functionality.

The logic of threat is a pretty deep topic, but one should probably start by acknowledging that the threat of violence is inherently coercive, and therefore functions as a form of violence. The harm done to you by an act of violence visited upon a stranger is the dread that grows involuntarily your mind when you hear about it; the same part of your brain that thinks you're having sex when you watch it on TV does that empathic magic for the bad stuff, too. The severity of a threat exerts its dark gravity on a mind regardless of plausibility. Of course, the more plausible a threat, the more seriously it must be taken--even a minor threat demands one's attention if it's particularly likely to be realized.

Of course, there are some places where over-the-top threats are considered entirely normal: sports, general infantry, and, apparently, fighting games. Any place culturally coded as particularly masculine is going to its own flavor of friendly hostility, often with its own specialized vocabulary. It's part of the bonding process, and nobody--the men issuing the threats, or the men receiving them--takes them too seriously. They don't have to. And no matter how many metaphors for rape are employed during a heated round of Halo trash talk, (adult) men generally aren't at a meaningful risk for sexual violence. ("Meaningful" is vague here, but I suspect anyone who isn't trolling gets the denotation.)

Threats directed towards women, in or out of these spaces, are more plausible. Consequently, they provoke a lot more anxiety. Ninety-nine out of a hundred death threats might not be serious, but when you receive two-hundred of them, it's hard to like those odds.

That's the point, of course. The more focused campaigns of abuse on the 'net are launched with the intent of annoying or frightening someone into shutting up, and by definition, we only hear about the campaigns that fail. Because of the acceptance of ritualized hostility in masculine spaces--in this case, the goddamn internet--people can feel perfectly fine saying things they'd be mortified to let loose in person. The anonymity and depersonalization of the medium doesn't just insulate them from criticism, it diffuses responsibility. It's not their fault the target pulled their entire site off the web, because who the fuck takes that kind of thing seriously? It's the internet. And besides, who's to say which particular broadside made the difference? So many to choose from. Every griefer contributes, and when successful, every griefer gets what they want, but none of them are obliged to feel that their particular contribution was meaningful.

When you phone in a fake bomb threat, you're profiting from the terror provoked by people who phone in legitimate bomb threats. When you play psychopath for kicks, you're complicit with the ones who aren't playing.

Because, of course, this phenomenon isn't about masculine spaces or bonding rituals at all. It isn't even about the internet. It's about how anonymity functions in groups of varying sizes, and how the mind buries responsibility where the conscience won't find it. Psychopaths and the people hoping to profit from their actions didn't wait around for the internet to do their thing, and they don't particularly need it now. Case in point, this Pandagon post about a coalition of anti-abortion groups trying to close George Tiller's old clinic on the basis that anti-abortion groups are comprised of violent lunatics who threaten the physical and mental well-being of everyone around them:

What’s happening here is that the anti-choicers spend all their time hanging out with each other and reinforcing the opinion that the clinic doesn’t deserve to exist and that any tactic used to take it down is acceptable, and with that kind of group dynamic, they completely forget how idiotic they sound to come out and say, “This clinic has to go because the temptation to picket it and threaten its workers for violence is more than we can bear.” It’s worth mulling this over, because this attitude—that the harassers are entitled to run someone off the internet for, say, making a series of videos about video games—tends to get blamed on the tech a lot, because forums and and other online gathering spaces create an echo chamber where the idea that you get to force someone out of business (rather than say, simply stop visiting their site/following their Twitter feed if you find them so provocative) stops sounding like the overly entitled idiocy that it is, and starts to seem nearly sensible. But as this example shows, that kind of thinking can kind of sprout up anywhere, and it’s usually less about the “echo chamber” than an outgrowth of their arguments being unable to persuade, forcing them to embrace immoral tactics to win, because they can’t do it fairly. 

I think it's more than a matter of not realizing that people are going to realize that this amounts to an open threat of ongoing violence. I think they sincerely think that their organizations--the ones that they're alleging to be inextricably bound up with acts of domestic terrorism--are fundamentally unconnected to those acts. They couldn't function without the terrorists, of course. It's impossible to deny that the constant threat of violent death doesn't make operating a facility that performs abortions more expensive, dangerous, and generally more difficult. Since 1973, terrorism has served their interests a lot better than lobbying. I think they honestly think that the violence arrives ex nihilio, called into being by the existence of the thing they abhor. After all, Randal Terry's sure as hell not going to spend the rest of his life in prison to kill a handful of his enemies. The fact that the extremists have defined the mainstream discourse to the point that actual threats are indistinguishable from your standard press release has nothing to do with it.

Granted, the internet folk who pledged their honor to defeat Sarkeesian or Jane Austen or whatever aren't nearly as organized as the anti-abortion lobby, and so far they don't have the body count. Still, I wonder if the former might be a more advanced version of the latter. I wonder if we might be seeing another demonstration of emergence, the curious tendency of large groups to spontaneously organize. I wonder if the properties of this medium and this cultural moment have developed a way to delegate not only terror, but guilt.

Empty my God (un)to Thee

The only thing that surprised me about the verdict is that juries work on Saturdays.-@michaelianblack

This weekend started off well enough, with my own personal terror alert system elevated to orange, and a surprise visit from a fellow Tori room kid. When nothing happened on Friday, I assumed we'd hear on Monday, which was fine. So, when a sociology instructor whom I never quite managed to befriend in undergrad posted "fucking florida" to her feed, I didn't immediately identify to what she had referred. There are, after all, a lot of things about Florida that ought to be fucked.

The bestial nature of that metaphor aside, Florida's a strange place, and I doubt I'd have chosen to have been born and raised there had I been consulted beforehand. That said, you could do worse for a tutorial map. For those of you unfamiliar with America's wang, it can be kind of counterintuitive: the further north you go, the further south you are. South Florida is an odd amalgam of New York expatriates, Cuban-American families, tourists, relocated witnesses, snakes, and hideous half-human muttations produced in the labs beneath Disney World. North Florida is, for lack of a technical term, Georgia's muffin top, the southeastern border of Confederacy country. The two are bisected by the I-4 corridor, our perpetually sunny Valley of the Ashes, and where elections are won and lost. Along this winding stretch of demographic confusion lies the city of Sanford.

Like any American city, Sanford is a place where quiet, mild-mannered wonks and loud, racist loons live in such close proximity to one another that you'll occasionally be surprised at who is which. It is, perhaps, easier to see there than in less liminal locales. So when I heard about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I wasn't entirely surprised by the shooting, and I was even less surprised to hear that the police had essentially taken a pass on investigating it as a crime. Ta-Nehisi Coates explains it all for you:

For some reason there's this notion out there that Trayvon was killed on Monday, Al Sharpton showed up on Tuesday, and there were marches on Wednesday. There's an entire contingent of critics who are much more comfortable attacking Sharpton, or wondering why "black on black" crime doesn't attract any protests. 

As I have written, the contention is, itself, false. But more importantly the protests aren't merely about Trayvon Martin's killing, they are about the failure of a police department to rigorously investigate a crime. [...] At its root, Trayvon Martin's killing is a law and order case, and you would think conservatives would latch on to that. Instead, with few exceptions, we are being told that the true calamity here is the presence of Al Sharpton. 

I didn't have any predictions of which I was confident, largely because I hadn't bothered to follow the trial. I knew a conviction was hardly a fait accompli, but it struck me as immediately and obviously important that there be a trial. As it went on, I'd pick up little bits from arguments in FB threads and blog posts about the broader political issues at work. Consequently, I don't have a whole lot to say about the trial itself. The state's burden of proof necessitated that they essentially prove a negative, since the victim was conveniently dead, and the more distant witnesses ignored or persuaded in the hours after the shooting. And while Zimmerman is rather obviously a paranoid lunatic with a history of impulsive violence--and his explanation of events is so wildly improbable that it ought to have been accompanied by a laugh track--unless he was actively engaged in a crime before he pulled the trigger, Florida says there's no crime.

What I find most disconcerting about this scenario is that, applied fairly, both Zimmerman and Martin would have been within their legal rights to kill the other. Assault requires that the fear apprehended by the victim be well-founded; deadly force in self-defense only requires that the fear be legitimately felt. (Furthermore, immediately prior to the gunshot, neither party would have had the responsibility or the ability to retreat; running away from a man with a gun is a great way to get shot in the back, especially if he's a complete stranger who was threatening you, in the dark, for no apparent reason.) Knowing that being legitimately afraid entitles you to kill the object of your fear, one party can be plausibly afraid for their life simply because they believe the other party might be afraid for their life. In political theory, this is known as the Hobbesian trap, and it's the problem the Leviathan is designed to solve. The state takes sides. If it doesn't--if the state hedges its bets and says "whoever dies first is the criminal"--then it has abdicated its primary function. Wyrre, the late Old English word from which modern English's "war" derives, means "to bring into confusion." The state is, first and foremost, an epistemological construct.

Of course, the "war of all against all" scenario isn't actually going to happen, because laws like Florida's self-defense+ aren't intended to be applied fairly. This is what "empowering citizens" to do the job of law enforcement means. This is what it's for: creating a definition of self-defense so wide that it's impossible to convict anyone unless you have an a priori reason for wanting to imprison or kill them. It's jury nullification in reverse. The police's power to enforce laws encompasses not only the ability to deploy violence against citizens, but to choose not to deploy violence against some citizens. Legitimization of vigilantism makes the police more powerful, not less.

George Zimmerman stood trial for the death of Trayvon Martin, and that's a good thing. We almost didn't get that.

George Zimmerman is, for the moment, not going to face any legitimate penalty for having shot and killed Trayvon Martin. That sucks.

It sucks differently for different people, obviously, but for the people whose sons he hasn't shot, the most important is this: there's no legal disincentive for Zimmerman, or any of his adoring fans, to keep doing this sort of thing. Martin isn't the first, nor the hundredth, person to be killed in an extremely sketchy "defensive" shooting; Zimmerman's justification is far from the most ridiculous. And while there's some irony in noting that Zimmerman is now essentially an anthropomorphized security dilemma, I sincerely hope this is the last we hear of him, either as an aggressor or as a victim, because vigilantism is inherently a threat to all of us. Because the people for whom Zimmerman is a hero will avenge him a hundredfold. And because the outcome of this case doesn't actually mean that people are now legally allowed to hunt and kill each other in Florida. It only means that people are legally allowed to hunt and kill people whose deaths the police don't feel to be worthy of an investigation.

The police are a weapon. The legislature decides at whom it's pointed.

Now get out there and make them do their fucking job.

Portafoglio

So, I used to be kind of a writer. I used to have evidence of this fact, but time and hard drive crashes have taken their toll. So, I'm a-trying to organize some of my better more respectable stuff. Will probably hit up the sister-in-law for a proper thing, but for now I'm just trying to get everything in one place, i.e. "this post" and/or "the internet."

Coming of Age at Bullworth Academy.

Virtual Virtual War.

Notably missing: "Free Will Isn't Free: Context and Meaning in The Suffering," lost in the great hard drive crash of ought-eight, and seemingly scrubbed from my Gmail by Catholics, masons, and anarchists. What a pisser.

It might be helpful to be able to demonstrate an ability to write competently about things that aren't videogames, but the records are thinner on that. Assuming the automatic ineligibility of solipsistic journal entries and comments on Pandagon and LGM, my forays into political writing consist of some decade-old dead tree archives of HC@FAU's Feminist Student Union, and some short rants about abortion and gun control on here. With some reorganization, and deletion of extant profanity, these could be workable, maybe? I've also long wanted to kick the Twilight posts into a cohesive whole, but I'd miss the interstitials. Ditto the Mortal Kombat Problem. Ditto the torture thing from way back. Or the Rand thing. Hell, I should probably take a look at some of my yawning treatises on my desktop.I'm not sure any of this will help sell my skills to employers, but I do feel considerably less lazy after typing it up.

ETA: Respectable edit of the Newtown piece here.

It's 4/20 Somewhere

A few months back, I went to MIT's GameLab symposium, ran into old friends and new acquaintances. The content was interesting, of course, but aside from finding myself suddenly in the same room with Peter Molyneux--and becoming very self-conscious of all the smack I've talked about him all these years--I mostly remember the breaks, and the reception, and the repeated catch-ups and introductions. I was exhausted, having been up late reminiscing with an old Tori room friend until the wee small hours of the morning, and found that I lacked the enthusiasm to be embarrassed about how things were going. So when people asked how I was, I didn't find a way to change the subject, or inflate pipe dreams into viable projects. I simply answered, in as friendly and earnest a manner as I could manage, "I'm terrible. How're you?"

The feeling is strangely liberating. Doris Rusch, of Akrasia and Elude fame, advised me to write a novel. It's a tall order, but I suppose she does have credibility on the topic. Tell you what, Doris. You make a game about writer's block, I'll throw 60,000 words into something from the Goofy Vampire Shit file. Who knows, if housewives can masturbate to it, I could finally be writing for a living.

If you'll bear with me, you'll find that you've been bearing with me for the last two paragraphs, because I haven't bothered to introduce the topic of this post, which is the Newtown shooting. I begin with the symposium to bring some context to my initial reaction: shock and disbelief. Specifically, shock and disbelief that people were rending their garments over a rampage shooting in America. The fault here is clearly mine; my capacities for shock and grief have been stretched a bit thin recently. To put it succinctly, I feel badly.

The thing is, even had I not been operating from a place of sullen amorality, I think I still would have been surprised at the extent of the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending. Because, honestly, if I reacted to every rampage shooting with the pity and anger and incomprehension of Columbine, I'd have either moved out of the U.S. or stopped reading the news years ago.

I promised to post exactly two things about this, because, as noted here, I gave at the office, and don't have a whole lot to say on the subject that's either original or interesting. The first was this, because it's the logical starting point for what interests me about the current cultural moment. There are a lot of issues in play right now in American politics, but gun control really isn't one of them. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it hasn't been in play for the decade or two; we'll have to see how the current kerfuffle plays out. If I'm not mistaken, the most significant changes wrought by the Columbine shooting, aside from the ongoing militarization of our schools, was a change in Wal-Mart's inventory. Since then, the most notable gun-related policy shift has been the expiration of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly (and oddly) referred to as the Assault Weapons Ban. This is not the brutal, gunless dystopia we were promised, and like his failure to crash the stock market and cripple American capital, reflects badly on Obama's willingness or ability to destroy America as he promised.

This has not stopped gun control opponents from making impassioned, heartfelt, deontological arguments, but I admit that I'm not entirely certain who they're hoping to reach, because gun rights are under no real threat. Congress can barely pass popular legislation, let alone "culture war" shit. Not only are "guns"--the entire broad category of ballistic weaponry, apparently, from the flamelock onward--not going to be banned, but no congressman is going to even introduce legislation to that effect. The most that's going to happen, barring a massive sea-change in Congress' perception of the electorate, is a ban on certain high-capacity magazines, and possibly the return of the PS&RFUPA. (That law is a lot of fun to type.)

I am, as a rule, deeply suspicious of principle, so when I see people making wide, generalized deontological arguments about present-day politics, I start asking whether the application of said principle can be defended on any grounds other than the authority of the principle itself. There are plenty of reasons one might prefer to live in a society that has few restrictions on private ownership of weapons. Hunting and home-defense remain perennial rhetorical favorites. Less commonly asserted is the value of corpse-free recreational shooting itself, which is to say, pleasure. A lot of people think guns are fun. Pleasure is a legitimate social good to be considered and weighed alongside others. This is an issue that can be dealt with through standard, boring democratic means.

What I find more concerning is the obfuscatory argument-by-invocation, the assertion that the second amendment takes democratic processes off the table. We can live in a society of freely available weaponry if we want to, but the second amendment does not obligate us to. At least, nobody claimed that it did until the 1960s. Regardless, it would be disingenuous to say that this ties our hands. The 18th amendment made alcohol illegal, but we didn't throw up our hands and say that the Constitution prevented us from drinking. We repealed that motherfucker. Ok, first, we continued drinking alcohol in huge quantities, helped subsidize aggressive organized crime syndicates that would then proceed to infiltrate our law enforcement operations, and started wearing really wonderfully fashionable clothing. But then we repealed that motherfucker. We, collectively, can do what we want. Some of those things might require more than a simple majority vote, but nothing is forever off the table. That is ok. That is how republics do things. The Bill of Rights is not the Decalogue. God will not wither our souls if we make bad policy choices. We will simply have to live with bad policy choices until we decide to change them. The argument from authority is not sufficient. If the Founders are worth listening to, we can discern that fact that the policy merits of their ideas, not the fact of their capitalized mythic identity.

This is not to say that we should take constitutional restrictions lightly, nor do I mean to suggest that more restrictive gun control policies would have uniformly positive, predictable outcomes. Conversely, that is not to say that trendy nihilism is the appropriate response. Yes, it is true that we cannot prevent all violence, all evil, everywhere. It is true, it is obvious, and employed effectively, it can add a meaningful rhetorical flourish. It seems to have every quality but that of being useful. We also can't prevent death, not indefinitely. But I still take the trouble to eat every day, and I take care when I make left turns. That utopia is unavailable is not, in itself, an argument that the status quo is the best for which we may hope. Chalking it up to original sin is not a policy prescription. Despair, like hope, is not a strategy.

Related, arguing that it's in poor taste to discuss policy, that it's "too soon" and sensitivity to the victims demands that we stammer awkwardly and change the subject, is a classic small-c conservative move, the first and most beloved argument to obstruct the democratic process. Yes, the media coverage is sure to be traumatic to many. This can be mitigated somewhat by consideration on the part of individual journalists, but in wake of a tragedy of this magnitude, I sincerely doubt that our contribution to the survivors' misery is more than negligible, in terms of total abject horror. If you're interested, you can test it out yourself. Find a parent who lost a child to accident, suicide, or murder, and tell them how lucky they are that they didn't have to see references to their pain in the media. I'm sure they'll agree that they have much to be thankful for.

As nice as it would be to bend the entire culture to sympathy for the victims, there are many, many children who haven't been shot yet, and they matter too. It would be nice if we could collectively and unobtrusively sit shiva with the victims' families, but we do have stuff to do. The supplication for sensitive silence is a specific application of the more general use of "politics" as a dirty word, denoting arguments over outcomes that are meaningless to all but the players directly involved. Politics, says the meme, is for politicians, a species of humanoid insect in flesh masks. It's despicable the way people keep trying to polticize the ongoing threat of random violence, as if the means by which we make collaborative decisions about how best to ensure our well-being could possibly have anything to do with preventing violent crime.

Thankfully, we are having that discussion. Sadly, in the main, it's not going terribly well. The gut reactions seem to mostly involve "banning" things that are already illegal, a matter not helped by the bizarre insistence that a problem that is partially technological be dealt with at any level of technical specificity. Semi-automatic and automatic are not synonymous; fully automatic weapons are already illegal, and have been for some time; the term "assault weapon" is a vague term describing semi-automatics that look like assault rifles. We've been playing first-person shooters for twenty fucking years now. It's not unreasonable to expect people to know a bit about guns.

On the other side of the aisle, Prohibition and the drug war are not the only times the government has attempted to ban things. As far as similarities go between alcohol, marijuana, and semi-automatic rifles chambered for .556 rounds, the fact that people have wanted to ban them is pretty much it. The risk factors, means of production, and moral economy differ entirely. Similarly, the argument that "criminals can always get guns" is somewhat specious, in that the availability of illegal guns is a function of the availability of legal guns. I rather doubt that criminals have set up underground factories into which they import raw materials and produce illicit weapons. It seems like that sort of operation would be much easier to find than, say, a grow house. (It is worth noting that, yes, 3D printing might make this reality in a few years. The meme might be more true by then.) The trade in illegal guns does raise some concerns about the efficacy of state laws in a country with 48 easily-transgressable internal borders. It also suggests that, if such a policy were enacted carelessly, we do run the risk of disarming the criminals last.

Ah, but here we hit another vocabulary roadblock. It's not insightful to point out that only criminals use guns to commit murder; it's tautological. Unless we legalize murder, it is not possible for non-criminals to commit murder. But people do commit murder, without first conducting a syllogism to see if it's ok. It seems that our definition of "criminal" errs heavily on the identity of the "career criminal," an odious symbolic individual who, for all his faults, isn't usually interested in getting himself killed for no particular reason. Criminals--those ruthless, rational, career criminals we're concerned about--tend to want to live. If they didn't, the money wouldn't matter very much, and they could just find inexpensive ways to kill themselves, like being insufficiently deferent to police.

Right, the police. The state's instruments of democratically authorized violence, a vitally important job that we've decided should be treated as a low-skilled, low-paying position. Conservatives and anarchists alike espouse the importance of being able to shoot it out with the police; curiously, the conservatives also eagerly argue that police should have no checks on their power whatsoever. The anarchists have the edge on this one, ideologically, but it's not a solution to the problem of a culture that too frequently allows bullies, vigilantes, and psychopaths to wield coercive power. I'll head off my mother-in-law's objection early, by noting that, yes, fewer than 100% of police officers are perjurers, rapists, murderers, etc. In fact, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm willing to bet that it's much, much less than 100%. The problem is that anything north of 0% is way the fuck too much. A state-authorized criminal is extraordinarily well protected, and their existence undermines public safety much more dramatically than comparably violent free agents. Furthermore, systemic problems in our legal system perpetuate rape culture, and poorly conceived, poorly implemented laws have created an underclass in which sex workers, immigrants, the homeless, etc. can expect no police protection whatsoever, putting them at an extraordinary risk for abuse both public and private. There seems to be no lobbying offensive aimed at making it easier for these folks to arm themselves, to defend themselves from violence at the hands of police, just as the shooting of Trayvon Martin did not lead to an NRA statement urging black teenagers to carry firearms to avoid street harassment. This absolute right to self-defense seems oddly haphazard in its application. But making it easier for people to shoot cops, or to shoot cops and get away with it, is not actually a solution in any reasonable sense. 

That the most egregious, unthinkable acts of violence cannot be entirely prevented is not a reason to give up on addressing the more prolific, ubiquitous acts of violence in American life. I think, should we actually do the work, we will likely find that the two are not entirely unrelated. I see no reason we couldn't have a sane, reasonably safe society and relatively unencumbered access to firearms for those that want them--there are fewer examples in the world than there used to be, perhaps, but, as Chesterton said, society is a human invention. "Could" is a very, very wide word. The question is what types and qualities of risk we're willing to tolerate, by binding or loosing. We can deal with this at the level of actual trade-offs, goods to be weighed against one another.

Finally--I swear--the emphasis on the more grandiose episodes conceal as much as they reveal, and aren't likely to lead to good policy. Rampage killers are, by definition, the most difficult to deter. They can be made less deadly, which would certainly be a worthwhile goal. But preventing rampage shootings is going to involve a hell of a lot more than vague generalities about mental health. It will involve dealing with the general patterns of violence in our culture, the role of privilege, and an awareness of the amount of psychopathy we're willing to let slide as long as you're a white guy from a decent neighborhood. It will involve economic justice, improved law enforcement, and a reduction of a hundred different risk factors. It will not happen overnight, and we'll need to make adjustments as we go. Fortunately, we have a technology for doing exactly that, and it works pretty well when we don't live down to our representatives' suspicions of us. It is the work of politics.

Lazy writer's block post that does not involve Black Claire

You know what videogames don't often deal with? Abortion.

Actually, videogames don't often deal with rape, labor rights, or tax law, but abortion's in my feed right now, because abortion's in the national feed right now. It has been for most of a century now, but we have to make room in our public discourse for wars and sporting events and Kardashians, so it drops out now and then.

Most notably, we're talking about a handful of big-name sound-bites on the issue, most notably Todd Akin's assertion that women's bodies will eject eggs fertilized during rape--I'm paraphrasing, because his actual words were so stupid it would hurt my fingers to type them--and Richard Mourdock's complementary assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape are part of God's plan.

These are stupid comments, and I'm not interested in spending much time arguing about their factual merits. They weren't meant for pro-choicers, liberals, feminists, or other sane and/or decent people. They were meant for a particular audience, to address a particular issue. Let's go around the back and see what's going on.

But first, some ground rules. Abortion is one of those issues where well-intentioned people can find themselves supporting barbarism, and it's helpful to keep an eye on our ideas about the basic functions of laws. To wit, for this post to make sense--for any political discussion to make sense, in my opinion--we have to remind ourselves that laws are not a psychic signifier of our culture's collective morals. There're lots of bad things we don't have laws against, because a law is not a stern talking-to. Breaking the law is about more than earning the collective disappointment of society. A law is an authorization of the state to use physical violence in particular situations, in order to prevent or retaliate against a particular course of action on the part of its citizens.

This is a useful metric for abortion. Forget how we feel imagining a stranger getting an abortion under circumstances X, Y, and Z. Think instead about how we feel about our employees, the police, a) extorting money from her under threat of kidnapping and imprisonment, b) kidnapping and imprisoning her under the threat of physical violence, or c) killing her should she resist b) with sufficient vigor.

So, in what circumstances should having an abortion result in a woman being extorted out of her property or beaten into submission before being forcibly placed in prison and forbidden to leave? If abortion is murder, as the placards say, all of them. Nobody ever seems to support this plan, though; even people who claim to oppose abortion rarely go on the record wanting to execute the women who get them. The doctors tend to bear the brunt of the imagined punishment, which is usually a fine of some sort: pretty light treatment for a hired assassin.

Regardless, if abortion is bad, it ought to be punished. Violence ought to be used against women who pay to have the procedure performed, medically or surgically. If abortion isn't bad, violence ought not to be used against women who have abortions. These two positions, though not equal, to my reckoning, are equally comprehensible. What's more problematic is what political scientists refer to as the Stupid Fucking Middle-Ground Horseshit.

The Stupid Fucking Middle-Ground Horseshit is where we get unambiguously awful ideas like the idea that abortion should be illegal (i.e. punishable by violence) except in cases or rape, incest, or endangerment. Because the law-as-psychic-projection idea comes into play here as well. We could treat abortions as homicides, I suppose, and acknowledge that certain kinds would be justifiable. But how would we actually know which ones those are? The law doesn't exist without a concordant punishment, and we can't punish people if we don't know who they are.

Given that rape is, y'know, a crime, it is rarely done in public. It is rarely particularly well-hidden, either, but we make a lot of excuses to help that process along. So let us now imagine that a woman is seeking an abortion, saying that she was raped. Does the state take her word for it? If so, the restriction is meaningless, and will have all the force and efficacy of the "Click here if you're 18" box. If not, what documentation would be required?

Would it be sufficient for the woman to report having been raped? Because we tend to work really hard not to believe women who say that.

Would it be necessary for criminal charges to be filed against an accused rapist? Because that's quite difficult to do. Prosecutors don't like cases they can't win, and cops don't like arrests that can't be prosecuted.

Would it be necessary for the accused rapist to be found guilty? Because a) that's almost fucking impossible, b) the goddamn kid will have been born by then.

There is simply no way to implement such a ridiculous restriction in a consistent manner. Criminalizing abortion would be immoral, but criminalizing abortion except under the aforementioned legal quagmire is both immoral and insane.

Which brings us back to Akin and Mourdock, whose comments, ridiculous as they may be, make some sense in this context. They were, in fact, arguing a point similar to the one I've put down here: that saying abortion is ok for rape survivors and murder for anyone else is really fucking stupid. It doesn't serve the interests of anybody, even the rapists and slavers of the right-wing id.

If there is anyone who ought to be allowed to get an abortion, under any circumstances, then there is no just reason to deny everyone that option under any every circumstance.

Naked Snake and the Philosopher's Stone

Like the rest of the series, MGS3 begins with a fucklot of cutscenes. My first mistake, it seems, was paying attention to the dialogue.

Not because the dialogue is bad, mind you--it isn't--but because the MGS series uses the dialogue both to describe the diegetic world and to poke holes in the plastic film of the fourth wall. The map is not the terrain, and the narrative is not the game. The diegetic gameworld has little concept of Continue, of course, and we all accept that any sentence that ends with "...or you'll die horribly" should be read to mean "...or you'll have to restart from the next checkpoint." Stealth games carry their own suspension of disbelief, that searches for an intruder will eventually be called off, as opposed to escalating into the kind of concentric search-and-destroy operation for which security forces are trained. The consequences of getting caught have to be severe enough to be interesting, but forgiving enough to be fun. But Major Zero really lays it on thick with the stealth stuff, exclaiming that you musn't engage the enemy at all, must leave no ammo casings, blood spatter, or any evidence at all that you were ever there. It's a lot to ask, even from a Metal Gear standpoint. Even with the (interesting, but not all that different) non-lethal options available in MGS2, nobody would look at an area Solid Snake had passed through and have any question that a heavy armed and highly trained special forces operative had been in to visit.

Still, I found myself wanting to do a full-on stealth thing, to actually avoid foes entirely, and the new camouflage functionality, combined with my old tricks from the previous games, seemed like it would fit the bill. (It didn't.) So I got seen, a lot. I tranq'd (tranqued?) a lot of people, and felt vaguely guilty for doing so. I broke necks and slit throats when I got annoyed. And I got seen. A lot. To the point that, fifty years later, there ought to be folk legends in Russia about the clumsy CIA agent who kept bumping into guards by accident.

You can imagine how gratified I felt, having tried to hard to be inconspicuous and play to Zero's specifications, when Volgin fired a nuke into the valley. Unlike the knife, the garrotte, and the needle, the Davy Crockett portable nuclear missile has never really been considered a "stealth" weapon.

Perhaps the story was playing a joke on the unrealities of the Tactical Espionage Action genre. Perhaps Zero was merely alerting the player, in a roundabout manner, of the types of things the NPCs would notice that they hadn't in previous games. Perhaps he was underscoring the diegetic point that it's 1964, FOX-HOUND doesn't exist yet, and the entire concept of Low-Intensity Conflict is still finding its legs. Intelligence and counterintelligence are older than dirt, of course, so at times it's difficult to remember that the shadow wars that made up American military operations through the latter half of the 20th century were breaking a lot of new ground. JFK might have been James Bond's biggest fan, but "James Bond" was hardly something that could be made into Standard Operating Procedure.

At any rate, at the commencement of Operation Snake Eater, I'd remind myself that this was still a Metal Gear game, and Zero could go fuck himself, because I'd be engaging the enemy violently and often. Which brings us to the second major point of confusion: the alarm system. More accurately, the lack thereof.

1 and 2 have a pretty simple, standardized, game-like approach to alarms. They go off, you break the line of sight and hide until it goes away. MGS2 added a few things like radio check-ins for dead/unconscious guards, but basically the pattern held. Worse came to worst, you could always just leave the area for a clean slate.

Most of MGS3 is outdoors, and there are very few alarms to pull. Reinforcements are handled by radio and person-to-person contact. So if somebody sees you, even if the Alert is blaring in the upper-right of your HUD, it goes away as soon as your observer does. There is no "general alarm" to worry about, just the guy who saw you, and anyone in range of his voice. The guy with the radio has a very long voice, but the principle holds, and logic compels you to disable him first. The logic of stealth in MGS3 is in this way more brutal than its predecessors: when you've been seen, hiding is useless. You survive by eliminating witnesses, and making sure you don't leave any living bodies, corpses, bloodstains or bullet-casings lying out where people might stumble onto them and get suspicious. (This last point leads to the more hilarious and/or horrifying moments of MGS3 when you're panicked and killing too quickly to hide the evidence, eventually leading to a badly injured Snake standing atop a pile of corpses like Frank Castle in Born.)

I was nearly finished with the game by the time I "got" this at any intuitive level, and consequently I missed a lot of weapons and items along the way. I'm replaying it now, and it's both thrilling and dull to move smoothly through a game that confounded me at every turn for so long. I stumble upon an AK-47, and wonder, why? Knowing for a fact that I can complete the game with a tranq pistol and my bare fists, why would I bother with this clumsy, unpredictable, score-killing death machine?

Which brings me to the third point that confused me for so long: not only are there redundant solutions to every conceivable problem in MGS3, but the solutions learned from the previous games are almost invariably impractical. The heavier weaponry is almost always more fun than it is practical, and I suppose that's a substantive achievement for the genre. Confusing as hell, but substantive.

In summary, 1) genre conventions override narrative conceits, 2) fight, not flight, and 3) prioritize the new shit. One could easily make the argument that these lessons, and my failure to learn them, comprise a neat allegory of my professional malaise. One would not be me, because me has one last to add: the most important red flag, when dealing with depression, is inability to enjoy things that usually bring pleasure. If I've learned one useful thing from the past five years, it'd probably be that it's harder to notice that flag when the things you do for fun are so closely linked with the things you do professionally. When you think of yourself primarily as someone who writes, games, and writes about games, it's not an occupational hazard when you find yourself unable to muster the interest to do any of those things for pleasure. It's a yawning chasm, a bright black void.

I've fucked up. A lot.

And thus, I Continue.

Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.

Last week, I finished Metal Gear Solid 3. It was bittersweet. We have a history, MGS3 and I. Fortunately, unlike the women I met in undergrad, MGS3 cannot be annoyed or offended by my writing it up here, and it can't file a restraining order should I attempt to play it again.

I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War, but not old enough to understand what it meant or why it mattered until years later. Which is to say that I am also too young to remember Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, or Snake's Revenge. I played Metal Gear once on the NES, and spent my time being confused why I was in a combat zone with a pack of cigarettes and no weapons. That was Metal Gear for me: unarmed, with addictive, carcinogenic drugs, and no clear idea what to do.

I got older, the wall came down, and Metal Gear Solid came out. I was seventeen, living in the phantom world between middle school and college, and I finished it in two sittings. Which is not to say I was particularly good at the game, just persistent. I learned the rules slowly, in the face of constant failure, but the Game is good, and the Game is kind, and I learned. Stay under the cameras. Break the neck if you're unarmed. Shoot from behind with a silenced pistol if you're not. The FAMAS for close- and medium-range firefights, the PSG-1 for long-range combat, the stinger for hard targets. Chaff grenades to make their attacks less accurate. Cigarettes and valium to make my own more accurate. MGS is a marvel of parsimony; a place for everything, and everything in its place.

I grew up a bit. "Watashi no senkoo wa seijigaku desu," is how the kids would describe it. MGS is a good thing to love if you're studying poli-sci, it turns out. The limits of deterrence theory, the ins and outs of modern weapons systems, the challenges posed by actor proliferation: all good stuff to have a handle on before you step into the classroom, especially if you haven't been there in a while. MGS stuck to me deeply in adolescence, and I suppose it sticks there still.

At 20, I acquired Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and played it manically, usually with an audience. The sheer craziness of the narrative was well-paired with the brutal sanity of the gameplay, and I died and died and died until I won. I didn't go for a lot of the secrets--I shot birds, sure, but I was never good at robbing guards, and I didn't think to look up the hostage's skirt--but I played it to death, and when I started working on my undergrad thesis, armed with a novice's knowledge of postmodern literature, I played it again. MGS2, and its progenitor, ended up being the centerpiece of my first significant academic work, my writing sample for grad school. Columbine taught me about CMS, but MGS2 got me there.

But that hadn't happened yet, so when I met Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I was living surreptitiously in my girlfriend's college housing. Like the Democratic party at the time, I was disorganized, weak-willed, and completely without direction. So when MGS3 didn't "grab" me right out of the gate, it might have been my own lack of focus that presented the problem, rather than that of the designers. We cannot blame the snow, after all, for being soiled by the earth. (We can also infer from Ms. Edison an alternate explanation.)

I'd return to MGS3 periodically over the years, sometimes with high hopes for figuring out what I was missing, sometimes out of dull determination to get it over with. I bought a DualShock 3 controller, in the hope that it would make the AP sensor more useful. I ignored entreaties to buy the enhanced re-release Subsistence. I'd pick it up, get confused, and put it back down. The rest of my life was working out much the same way. Looking back with the smallest amount of distance, I can see the sundry errors, near-misses and general-purpose fuck-ups of the last eight years mirrored in my relationship with, and my approach to, MGS3.

Next post will pick up the thread from there: how I learned to stop worrying and eat the snake, and how frustrating it is to have already used that joke on an entirely unrelated post title.

Batman follow-ups

SEK.

Think Progress.

Liberalism of Fear seems something to check out.

Means, Ends, and Win Conditions

Between The Power and the Glory and Twilight, my fiction diet this year has been something of a mixed bag, so it should probably surprise no one that my scatterbrained lit-major-in-denial ass has spent most of my reading time in the non-fic section of the storyrealm. Among the highlights of such recent ventures has been Codeville and Seabury's War: Ends and Means. It's a fairly famous text in conservative intellectual circles, although one does have to wonder if it would be so fondly remembered were it released under its original title.

It's been updated to accommodate the decades of real actual history that took place after it's publication, and I must confess ignorance to the any substantive ass-covering in the editing process. (c.f. Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History Except Not Really, New York: Doubleday (2001)) Reading it in terms of politics, it's a surreal text, taking place in an alternate universe in which conservatives used the same buzzwords they do today for diametrically opposed reasons. In terms of war, it's a much more straightforward read, and the raw data on technology, expenditures and logistics is useful even when the political slant is a bit obvious. The introduction offers an apologetics, of sorts, for the book's existence, in the process arguing a point much more difficult to deny than any of the principles that follow: when it comes to the function, history, risks, rewards, tactics and procedures of war, modern Americans don't know shit.

I've written before--not here, so you'll have to take my word for it--on how modern war-strategy games tend to present war in a certain way, which is also how it is often discussed in media coverage of politics. Specifically, war is presented as armed and/or mechanized conflict between two or more parties who fight each other until either some specific goal is achieved by one side, or until only one faction has living bodies left on the field. (We are, for the moment, excluding the problem of necromancy from the model.) The results are final, and beyond the initial outlay of resources, the battlefield is presented as something of a closed system: if it meaningfully affects the map, it's going to happen on the map. Terrain matters, but ultimately technology is king.

It's a fine enough model, and makes for some thrilling games, but it's a pretty strange way to look at war, because it's strangely devoid of...soldiers. Players often lack a clearly defined avatar: diegetically, they are sometimes represented by an officer figure of some sort, and sometimes feel more like the non-specific godlike presence of a sandbox game. The soldiers respond in the affirmative when given commands, and...that's about it. With rare exceptions, such as the pleasantly diverting Elven Legacy and Battles of Prince of Persia, armies are never "broken": unit discipline cannot be seriously undermined, because the soldiers in the field are functionally part of a hive mind, being fed information from the semi-omniscient command/control system at the speed of the player's mouse hand.

Confusion itself is the greatest impediment to an army's ability to function, due to the seemingly obvious fact that soldiers, for the most part, are sane people who don't want to die. Those who command them--and who rely on their loyalty and ferocity for their own ends--usually aren't thrilled about the idea either. Wars are rarely fought "to the last man" in practice.

Which brings us to the largest glaring omission in modern war-strategy games: the curious absence of prisoners and civilians. The rules about what to do with each are neither new nor vague, but in practice it seems difficult to keep to them. Games seem like an ideal medium to get people thinking about why. The rules of war dictate that, when fighting is to begin in a populated city, both armies give the refugees safe passage out prior to the onset of combat. Simple enough, but...what to do with these people? Whose responsibility are they? What realistic options do they have? What tactics encourage enemy soldiers to raise the white flag? What are the consequences of ignoring these tactics in favor of a more decisive body count?

Project Darkside: or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Black Mage

So, a few moons back, I'm playing Assassin's Creed, and thinking about good and evil, in games, like you do. Particularly in D&D, where the "payoff" for good or evil is so nebulous. More to the point, in a polytheistic universe with no dominance of celestial force in favor of good, what is evil? The best I could parse out was a general distinction between altruism (good) and selfishness (evil). This is a simple binary, by now intuitive to most people, backed up by common sense, personal experience, and not reading Ayn Rand.

This got me thinking about evolutionary psychology. (The group/self binary, not Ayn Rand.) I don't know what to make of evo psych as a science or social science; only the sexiest bits filter out into the mainstream press, and it's anyone's guess what the real research looks like at any given time. The stuff that's well-publicized, at least, tends to be a heady mixture of racism, sexism, and bullshit, and it's been argued that the field basically boils down to explaining modern behaviors (of which there exists little reliable evidence) by noting procedural similarities with ancient behaviors (of which there exists even less reliable evidence). Most of what you read about evo psych will fail to even accomplish the first of those two--if you want to explain why blonde hair is considered desirable by a significant majority of the species, for example, you first have to establish that it's actually true. (In case you were wondering, it turns out that it's because blonde women are more flammable than normal, non-blonde women, which makes them a valuable source of warmth in the cold Bronze Age winters.) David Livingstone Smith's Why We Lie was quite interesting and informative, and seemed to fall prey to precisely none of the huge methodological problems demonstrated in the shit you see in the Emm Ess Emm, so maybe the field's chock full of talented, sensible people who are drowned out by a couple of fame-whoring shitheads. Who knows.

That said, evo psych--not just people who claim to work in the field, but people discussing "natural" morality in general--tends to asume that selfishness is the default, and that works fine for reciprocal altruism. (In a shout-out to my demon-hunting brother, it is truly wonderful that our textbook example for altruistic behavior is derived from vampire bats.) But what about "pure" altruism, in which no obvious survival benefit presents itself? One current answer is that "pure" altruism is basically a glitch; early human societies may have presented few opportunities for altruism that didn't provide a likely survival benefit, so our genes don't account for the possibility. Ok, makes sense enough. Just because a behavior is widespread/universal doesn't mean it's necessarily adaptive, but could also be a spandrel or a malfunctioning of an adaptive behavior due to a change in context.

But really, do those circumstances exist even now? The theory above is meant to explain the Mother Theresas of the world--fuck off, secular contrarians, you know what I mean--but can we say conclusively that she did not benefit from her work? Because we sure as hell did. Missionary and humanitarian work within Christianity have historically yielded huge benefits for Christian cultures, establishing a cultural beachhead in what might otherwise have been hostile lands; while we're at it, poverty in general is a persistent security risk to pretty much everyone. But still, the benefit to the individual seems negligible, even if the benefit to the group--nation, in poli-sci terms, or just a general sense of "people around you"--is significant. Egoism generally assumes that altruism can only be "rational" when its benefit is fairly direct, fairly certain, and can reliably be calculated rationally. ("Rational" is a word I'll be using, and misusing, quite a bit. Bear with me, and try to tolerate some bendy definitions. Have a drink first, if that helps. I'll wait here.)

(Back? Ok.)

So we have the libido--which just means "drives" in early psychological usage, not specifically sex, although sex is certainly one of the strongest--which provides for selfishness, which encompasses reciprocal altruism. We also have this other, nebulous "moral feeling" that sometimes directs some of us to varying degrees of less-reciprocal altruism. (Or maybe we don't, but lots of philosophers think we do, and hey, sake of argument.) It's been suggested that this second urge is social, and not rational (assuming, of course, that they can be separated), but there are problems with this as well. Niebuhr uses the example of the individual whose moral feeling places him in conflict with, and therefore in danger from, his group to suggest that "conscience," his term for this nebulous "other" feeling, cannot be wholly rational or social.

So what if conscience isn't a glitch of the libido, but a key part of it? What if self-preservation, the drive to keep breathing, keep eating, and keep fucking, and make sure one's children survive to adulthood to do the same, has developed ways of presenting itself that are purely survival oriented, but not (consciously) rational, and therefore not calculable, in their expression to our consciousness? In a review of Christopher Strain's Pure Fire, a work concerning self-defense ideology in the civil rights movement, the author was criticized for including essentially suicidal actions under the rubric of self-defense. But there are, perhaps, different kinds of suicides, some quite life-affirming--there's some fine work on the social identity of suicide bombers that would seem to support this idea. Niebuhr's example, like Strain's, just means that the individual in question had determined, though not on a conscious or rational level, that staying in his current community "as is" constituted sufficient uncertainty and terror to be functionally equivalent to suicide, and a less pleasant one than a de facto suicide brought about by direct action.

So, essentially, what we have here is hard to pin down within the philosophical schools with which I'm familiar. In its early, pen-and-paper conception, I called it ethical nihilism, which is apparently a phrase both vague and in use, so here I use the more humble "Project Darkside," or simply D. It's egoistic, certainly, but not rational. It leads to a kind of enforced altruism (or "altruism," if you please), for reasons to be discussed, but doesn't require a god's-eye view like utilitarianism. It is ultimately consequentialist, but posits moral actions with no clear consequences in sight. More to the point, it encourages no particular actions, but seems to do a good job describing how people actually live; yet, by its insistent directionality it seems to be proscriptive as well as descriptive. It posits that morality is not a duty, per se, but but something that arises, emergently, from the chance interactions of horny people who don't want to die. Things like aggregate happiness, respect for free will, or adherence to rules derive their value from their contribution to the needs of the libido, and may be provisionally discarded when it's convenient to do so, i.e. when they cease to contribute. (And there it is, folks, the sentence that can be quoted out of context to undermine my credibility in anything I say or do in the future. Public office, here I...stay quietly away from!) Which is where it gets a bit creepy.

Because we can't accurately imagine the past or recreate lived experience from texts, D suggests that morality is entirely contextual. The treatment of women as property--or, if another of my pet theories is correct, the creation of the concept of "property" as analagous to women--might be so historically pervasive because, under different material/cultural conditions, it was actually beneficial overall. It's clearly not now, but when someone disagrees, all the ethical nihilist feminist may offer in reply is that the enslavement of women is detrimental to one's ability to keep breathing. (Conveniently, it allows said feminist to morally add, "...because if you keep doing it, we'll kill you.") So it's pretty damn relativistic about rights in general, and rights advance only by economic pressure and the threat of violence, but is that really so different from now?

Now, the theological implications. It's obviously compatible with atheism, and a rationalist would say it requires atheism, but a fan of D would make a rather crap rationalist. If religion is viewed primarily in terms of its value as tribal affiliation, things get muddier. It's fairly compatible with transcendentalism, or unitarianism, or the American civil religion, of course; interesting, since those traditions all draw heavily from Europe, but are also as American as cherry pie. Or, well, you know.

In more old-school religion, D is oddly compatible with the doctrine of total depravity. In fact, it might be the doctrine of total depravity, with a weirdly sunny eschatology tacked on. Simply put, if the sum of all human kindness and decency is an unconsciously calculated selfishness, it's easy to see exactly what's wrong with the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We can't be moral because we can't even conceive of what real disinterested love would be. Or, for that matter, real faith in God. Faith is instead something we believe provisionally and socially, and through that loophole, you could drive a camel.

Now then. Back to the games.

Hey Kids, Do Ya Like Violence?

So, we've had a few shootings recently. Brings me back.

We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Columbine, an event I've spent far too much time writing and thinking about in a world that also contains rape, slavery and Battle for Wesnoth, and the subject of a new book by the guy who really got me into internet journalism. (Not that I consider what I'm doing now to be journalism, but...y'know, internet journalism is cool.) And I'm proud to say that Mortal Kombat was not mentioned at all in the recent shooting of three police officers by a crazy guy who thought Obama was going to take away his guns.

Granted, I'm not sure why he felt that shooting three police officers would be an effective way of preventing this. I'm fairly certain his guns are now in the possession of the Philadelphia police, which seems to be the opposite of what he wanted. And even if Obama had taken them, he could have held onto them for at least a few more weeks if he'd just stayed at home watching TV like the rest of us. But anyway, he shot them, and I hope he was satisfied with that result, because it's kind of too late to change course for him at this point.

And then, with much fanfare and at least a little organ music, entered the blogs.

Distilled, some rather avant-garde, largely wordless posts from the left digging up old video and text of The Clinton Chronicles, G. Gordon Liddy's famous exhortation to aim for the head or groin of armored ATF agents--which I can only assume he picked up from Metal Gear Solid 2--and the modern-day Martin Luther who took an armed stand against the medieval tyranny of the Unitarian Universalist Church. The right picks up the ball and insists that the left should be ashamed for trying to criminalize speech on the specious grounds that the aforementioned clips, or conservative sensibilities in general, cause this kind of violence. And some of the posters seem to agree about the causation, and some are more vague, and I thought it deserved a think.

I've written stuff I'm not proud of. Which is not to say that I think it's dangerous, or that I'm not a total attention whore about urging people to read it. I have, however, written a thing or two that I'm proud of, but I'd never actually want published. Case in point, a short story written in my late teens called Last Will and Testament, which is basically an emphatic defense of suicide that borders on celebration. It should go without saying that I don't exactly agree with the protagonist, in the sense that there are around ten ways to kill myself located in the room I'm typing in, and I've not opted to avail myself of any of them. But I like (my memory of) the story, I like its parsimony, its rhetorical force, and its general shamelessness. But I really, really wouldn't want it falling into the hands of a random teenager I don't personally know. So that, apparently, is my line. That's the idea I wouldn't want to express in public for fear of what someone might do with it. I don't know if it's morally necessary for me to have a line, and I can't really apply my line, by analogy, to anyone else's work. They can draw their own lines; it's really not my job.

I don't believe that causality is as simple as yes/no when we're dealing with something like human relations, a subject so ridiculously complex that it only makes sense to deal with it in terms of metaphor and analogy. But I do think that, were I the kind of person who had disliked Clinton's policies to the point that I had (if not actually believed or endorsed) tolerated the kinds of insane conspiracy-mongering highlighted in these posts, to the point that I didn't actively ridicule them, I'd want to take this moment to stop and consider what I had said, and what I had done, and what I had implicitly or explicitly defended or repudiated.

Because, even if there's no causality, these ideas matter. Ideas matter for their own sake, and ideas about politics--ideas about power, and justice, and how rights, duties and resources ought to be allocated in a world of finite resources, fluid wealth, and unfathomable social complexity--ought to be respected. The processes of politics, maybe not. I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with thinking that representative democracy is, at its heart, pretty stupid. And I'm certainly not suggesting that there's anything wrong with treating politicians with no more respect than any other human being of similar character. But human beings matter, once the sun's up and all the trendy nihilists have eaten their pancakes and gone to bed. And politics is about us, about who gets paid, and who gets shot, and who gets left alone. It might not be a noble endeavor, but we are fucking stuck with it, for no reason other than because we are human.

I am not a principled conservative, and my imaginary readers may form their own opinions as to whether I am, by default, unprincipled, unconservative, or both. But were I a principled conservative, I'd want to look at the shooters, and look at their opinions, and take a careful account of where they differed from my own. And then I'd want to look again, to see where they seemed similar to my own, and see if that made me look at my own ideas differently. I'd think about my own writing, and how to express those ideas more clearly and more forcefully: if not to be more civil, or more safe, but only to be more honest.

Imaginary conservative reader retorts, why don't those other asshat bloggers and assorted media whores have to do this?

Well, shit, I hope they do. I think crafting words into communicable ideas is pretty much the most awesome thing about being human, and it's part and parcel of consciousness, rationality, and the very idea of intentional action. Words fucking matter. I think political discourse, in the main, probably ought not to be conducted via stream-of-consciousness or automatic writing. But when the "Bush/Hitler" stuff gets brought up, I can only say...yeah, kinda stupid.

On the other hand, Bush's government did kidnap and American citizen, Jose Padilla, take him to a legal phantom zone, and torture him until he lost his mind. His staff did write memos that granted the office of the president theoretically unlimited power, even if we do not honestly believe he planned to suspend elections and start building concentration camps. He did either a) start a war on false pretenses, or b) start a war by accident, from a bad reading of widely criticized intelligence. He did, publicly and repeatedly, utter false statements about Iraq's WMD capabilities, even if we didn't notice because Clinton had publicly and repeatedly uttered the same false statements. WMD experts knew Clinton was wrong, and they knew Bush was wrong, and we spent four ridiculous years arguing with each other over the largely irrelevant point of whether or not these false statements constituted lying. He authorized torture. I said that before, but I think it's important, so I'm going to say it again:

Oh my fucking God the President of the United States authorized torture. Of anyone. Prisoners of war, foreign civilians, American citizens, your mom, anyone. He made it legal for the government to waterboard anyone they felt like.

These things are facts; they are well-documented, and to deny them or dismiss them is to opt out of social reality and voluntarily take up the identity of a schizophrenic. This makes them a bit different than, say, claiming that Obama's volunteer corps thing is a) mandatory and b) suppresses religious practice, since in this case, but a) and b) are ridiculous fucking lies. Bill Clinton did not murder Vince Foster and half of the state of Arkansas. In 1994, ATF agents were not about to kick in the door of every American who had legally purchased a handgun. These things did not happen. So I'm hesitant to argue that it's equivalent to things like Bush=Hitler, which identifies itself as hyperbole by the very fact that it is literally absurd. Hitler died in 1945. In Germany. You can look it up. The Red Army got custody of his body, and in all likelihood they did something truly hideous to it. George W. Bush cannot be, literally, the same person. Are we all clear on this? That making a literally absurd claim is not the same thing as making a literally possible but factually untrue one?

Lastly, there is one more point that tends to come up in these arguments that deserves mention: the Bush=Hitler people don't seem to have actually murdered anyone specifically because of what they feared Bush would do, despite whatever horrible paranoid fantasies the left might have been feeding them. This isn't bragging, and it isn't an attempt to criminalize speech. It's just a suggestion if we are going to talk about consequences and tragedy, we would probably do well to focus on tragedies that have actually happened as opposed to imaginary future tragedies that might reassure us of our own innocence.

I really did use the word "fuck" quite a bit in that post. Which, I suppose, leads to a nice mea culpa to end on: I do talk about politics in a largely improvisational, stream-of-consciousness sort of way. More accurately, I think about politics that way, and then carefully and intentionally form sentences deliberately constructed to look spontaneous. It's not just politics, I do it with everything. Unless I've tried to date you in the past, you really can't imagine how irritating it is.