I finally realized today what it is that bothers me about feminism: It's the mainstream feminist response to crazy radical feminism.

I'm talking about lesbian separatists, radfems, anyone who says things like "all pornography is degrading to women" or "heterosexuality is inherently patriarchal".

They respond like a religion, like Islam really: "That's just a minority of extremists."
They should respond like a cohesive political movement: "That's not feminism."

If feminism is really about equality, then this shouldn't even be a difficult thing to say; indeed, it should feel precisely natural. Someone who hates all men because they are men is not interested in equality, and therefore should be considered just as anti-feminist as any misogynist. When feminists don't respond this way, I find myself wondering: "Well what does feminism mean then?" By allowing in people like this, you dilute the definition of feminism and what it stands for, until... it doesn't seem to stand for much at all.

If someone advocated for a fascist dictatorship but identified as a social democrat, we wouldn't say "That's a minority of extremists." We say, "They are not social democrats. I don't know why they call themselves that. They're mistaken, or lying. This is not social democracy."

In fact even political movements aren't as good about this as they should be. Indeed, this is one thing I actually don't like about a lot of socialist organizations for example; they try to have such a big tent that anyone who is at all leftist is included, rather than only people who actually believe in what would properly be called social democracy or democratic socialism. (And if you're advocating for non-democratic socialism, then I do not support you so please go somewhere else.)

When this is done right, it's a very good thing. For example, one of the things that Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly denounced any black extremists who advocated separatism or violence against whites. He didn't say "These are extreme civil rights activists." He said: "These are NOT civil rights activists. They are something else and we don't support them."

Shrinking feminism's tent in this way would not weaken feminism. It would strengthen it---it could potentially strengthen it dramatically. Radfems and their ilk should be excluded from being allowed to call themselves feminist in the same way that fascists are excluded from calling themselves socialists (the Nazis tried!). When someone tries to co-opt your terminology in this way, you denounce them. You make it very clear that they are not what you represent.

And if that doesn't work, how about you try a new terminology for yourself? I like "egalitarian" and "gender freedom". How could anyone be a radical extremist egalitarian?

JDN 2456193 EDT 12:24.

 

We can all name some womanizers, from Kennedy to Feynman, Casanova to Ben Franklin; they cavort with huge numbers of women, using them for sex and nothing else. And we get non-stop complaints about how they are despicable and disrespectful to women, and this makes some sense to me... I certainly feel like it is disrespectful to women to treat them this way. Even if I knew how to behave that way, I'm not even sure that emotionally it's something I would even want...

But then, there is this nagging thought: If women hate womanizers them so much, why do they sleep with them?

Womanizers are not rapists. (Well, there might be some cases who are; but there's no evidence that Feynman ever raped anyone, for example.) They aren't forcing women to have sex with them. Women choose to have sex with womanizers, and do so in extremely large numbers. There are men who use deceptive or manipulative tactics to get women to sleep with them, and this is definitely something many womanizers do; but still, it's ultimately your decision whether to sleep with a guy who is being manipulative. This is especially true if you know he has a reputation for being manipulative, and thus can see it coming.

So my question is: Why sleep with him? If you know he's a womanizer, and you don't like womanizers... go find someone else to have sex with. Seriously, there are a huge number of men out there who are looking for women, and they range widely from those who want casual sex to those seeking a future wife and a wide range in between.

Is it just that womanizers play the numbers game? They hit on dozens or hundreds of women, and the small percentage who say yes turn out to be a large number of total successes? Or is there something more? Is it really that despite what so many women say about despising womanizers, there is actually at least a subset of women who, well, like them?

One reason why this might be so seems rather obvious: Presumably a man who has sex with large numbers of women has a lot of sexual experience, and as a result can be expected to be good in bed. I think actually this is overrated, because the very best sex so far as I can tell is when someone truly knows your body and mind at a very deep level, and that's simply not possible in a casual encounter, whatever your level of overall sexual experience. But experience does count for something, and this could well be what goes through women's minds.

Is it that womanizers are charming and attractive, and this overwhelms rational decisions? I find it hard to believe that women are that easily mind-controlled. Even when I'm really smitten by someone I still have the power to say no. In fact, if I don't like them as a person, that tends to turn me off pretty quick.

Honestly, I have trouble seeing any conclusion other than this one: At least a large fraction of women—maybe not all, maybe not even a majority, but at least a large minority—like womanizers. They may complain about them, maybe wish that they fulfilled deeper emotional needs and whatnot—but when it comes down to choosing whether to sleep with them, they say yes. In economic terms, their revealed preference is that however much they complain, they like womanizers just fine.

This is especially true if you look at it from a womanizer's perspective, since sex is all he wants. For someone like me, there's a big problem here: I want to respect women and be kind to them and have fulfilling emotional connections with them, but I also want to have sex with them. And if I have to choose one or the other, that's a really difficult and painful decision. But for a womanizer, if the choice is between having a fulfilling relationship with no sex and having sex with no relationship, he doesn't see a dilemma at all: Option 2 is exactly what he wants. So basically when you sleep with a womanizer you are giving him the maximum possible incentive to continue being a womanizer; he's getting exactly what he wants.

And hey, if that's what you want, fine. If you like casual sex with men who also have casual sex with lots of other women, that's your business. Conversely, I'm sure a lot of women do want nice, sensitive, faithful men and actually do seek them out and have relationships with them (I'm hoping to find one... so far no luck).
But it gets kind of annoying when women say they want one thing (sensitive guys) and then actually go do something else (womanizers). I'm not sure how many do this—but it's definitely not zero.

JDN 2456192 EDT 09:58.

I was in an argument with some people last night who believe guns are overregulated. I believe guns are underregulated, especially as long as the gun show loophole remains open. But in fact we don't even disagree all that strongly about which weapons should be legal for which citizens. What really made me furious was how they argued. They made several really awful arguments that I've heard far too many times.

 

Arguments I hate:

 

1. “I have a right to hunt and target shoot.”

 

No, I'm sorry, you don't. Certainly not an inalienable right. Your pleasure does not override the security of your fellow citizens. In fact, I don't see why you should be allowed to hunt and target shoot at all.

Hunting: Random citizens in a highly disorganized fashion meander through the woods killing whichever animals they choose, usually with alcohol involved, for amusement. This is often justified by 'population control,' but it systematically selects out the largest, strongest, healthiest males, which is one of the worst things you could do to a population. If we really want to control deer populations, ideally we'd just use sterilization, as we do for cats and dogs. Failing that, we should hire professionals to humanely euthanize the most unhealthy individuals—and probably females, because that gives much more precise control over reproduction in a polygynous species like deer.

Target shooting: Obviously, it's not enough to use paintball guns, or airsoft guns, or laser tag, or video games. (All these are quite fun, I enjoy them, I encourage you to play them if you enjoy it.) No, you must have actual functioning death machines. You aren't willing to play with toys, you must play with weapons. And why? Because you are too macho for fake guns? Because you get off on the idea that you are holding a death instrument in your hands? Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck you.

What really pissed me off was that my opponents wouldn't even concede this basic point: Firearms are portable death machines. Their purpose—their express purpose, their designed function—is to kill human beings. This shouldn't even be controversial. And you can defend the use of guns even given this premise (I will in a moment). But somehow, gun lovers can't bear to admit that guns are for killing people.

 

2. “Cars kill more people than guns.”

These gun lovers actually said “cars kill millions of people,” which is just false. “Look it up,” he said. Well, I have: The average number of auto fatalities in the US per year is about 32,000.

But it's actually true that this is more than gun homicides: Each year there are about 12,500 gun homicides in the US, about 17,000 suicides, and 31,000 total gun fatalities.

In other words, guns kill almost exactly as many people as automobiles do. Far from it being a radical difference, it's barely statistically significant. But I guess you could exclude suicides and merely look at homicides and accidents, in which case the number for cars—32,000—does significantly exceed the number for guns—14,000.

But the proper response to this is: So what? Simply looking at the raw number of people killed tells you absolutely nothing. The important question is this: What benefit are we getting from this cost?

The benefit from cars is quite literally the strongest economy in the history of the world. There are other ways to achieve the level of trade integration and transportation that cars (and trucks) grant us, and some of these might actually be better (trains and public transit), but they all carry a certain amount of fatality risk, and it's worth it. If all the cars in America suddenly stopped running, more Americans would die without them—from, quite literally, famine—than currently die from them.

Are guns equally worth it? If they actually work at deterring crime, then maybe they are! But that's what you actually need to argue. You need to show some benefit from widespread gun ownership that outweighs all the fatalities.

Also important are usage rates: More people die from acetominophen than from cyanide. This is because almost everyone uses acetominophen, and you only use cyanide if you want someone to die. Huh... that sounds a lot like the relationship between cars and guns, doesn't it?

 

3. “We need to defend against government tyranny.”

 

Actually, a couple of the gun lovers agreed with me on this one: This just isn't going to work. You'd need at minimum Stinger missiles to defend against the US government, and even then... Iraq had those. Maybe back when Jefferson was writing, it was reasonable to think that private militias could seriously resist the government (even then, I'm unconvinced); but today, that's simply not possible.

The only way to make it possible would be even more terrifying, which would be to grant private citizens access to helicopter gunships, aircraft carriers, surface-to-air missiles... and that, pretty obviously, would be horrific.

 

3. “Guns are the great equalizer.”

 

No, they aren't. Guns require training. Different guns vary tremendously in their capabilities, from a six-shot revolver to a belt-fed SAW. (Or all the way up to the GAU-8 Avenger on the A-10, which is a kinetic weapon so terrifying it's almost indescribable. Fires 30mm incendiary rounds at 4200 RPM with a muzzle velocity of 1000 m/s.)

The idea is supposedly that even an old woman can defend herself against a strong young man, if she has a handgun. And I guess there are a few cases of things like this happening. But there are vastly more cases of young men using handguns—or worse, assault rifles—to kill far more people than they could possibly have killed using knives or their bare hands. This, furthermore, makes perfect sense: Quick reflexes and physical strength actually do make you better at using a firearm, and there's really nothing that can be done to make that not true.

But hey, suppose it were true. Suppose we made everyone in America able to kill any person at a moment's notice. Suppose we made that completely equal, so being bigger or stronger (or faster, or smarter) made absolutely no differencein how effective you would be at killing someone. I want you to ask yourself: How would that be a good thing? We would be living in a Hobbesian nightmare where anyone could kill anyone at any moment. And this is indeed how people in our inner cities sometimes live—our inner cities, where handgun ownership is most prevalent.

If we equalized violence by making it harder to kill people (issuing everyone body armor?), that would be a good thing. But that's not what guns do. Guns make it easier to kill—a lot easier—and that's what they are expressly designed to do.

 

Arguments I don't mind:

 

1. “The Second Amendment guarantees gun rights.”

 

This isn't a very good moral argument, but it's a highly compelling legal one. Without a Constitutional Amendment, there are very harsh limits on how much guns could be restricted in the US without the regulations being obviously illegal.

The question remains whether we should try to push through such an amendment, but legally the argument is squarely on the side of those who don't want to restrict guns.

 

2. “Responsible gun owners deter crime.”

 

The evidence on this is actually pretty mixed. Some studies say guns are a deterrent. Some say they have no effect. Others say they make crime worse. The social science on this issue is extremely complex and unclear.

As such, simply making the blanket statement that guns are a deterrent is not a good argument. However, I put this on the list of arguments I don't mind because if guns are a deterrent, and you can show that they are, this would actually be a really good reason to increase access to guns. If this actually does work, then it's worth doing.

Or, I should say, it might be worth doing, because there's another effect you have to consider: Suicide. You might think that suicide is something someone either does or doesn't do, and it doesn't matter what tools they have; you'd be wrong. Suicides are much more frequent in places that have a lot of high bridges to fall off of, and they are much more frequent in places with more access to guns. Suicide is an impulse decision in most cases; it is not usually something that you spend a lot of time thinking about and planning. As such, if you are surrounded by things that can easily kill you, you are much more likely to actually make that step and kill yourself. Even if gun ownership does deter crime, it must deter crime sufficiently well to compensate for the increase in suicides—and it seems pretty clear that it wouldn't, the effect sizes just don't line up. You'd kill about 3 people by suicide for every 1 you saved from homicide. It's possible we could solve this problem in other ways—better early intervention in depression, for example—but then, we could also stop crime in lots of other ways too, besides giving people more portable death machines.

JDN 2456188 EDT 19:26.

 

So weird, in fact, that I can barely make sense of it. The same person will:

* Buy auto insurance (pay high price to protect against high risk of small harm)

* Not buy health insurance (refuse to pay high price to protect against high risk of large harm)

* Buy lottery tickets (pay small price to grant negligible chance of large gain)

* Not buy low-risk stock (refuse to pay moderate price to grant large chance of moderate gain)

* Not buy high-risk stock (refuse to pay moderate price to grant moderate chance of large gain)

* Not wear a seat belt (refuse to pay negligible price to protect against high risk of enormous harm)

* Submit to draconian anti-terrorist procedures (pay high price to protect against small risk of enormous harm)

* Go to college (pay enormous price to grant large chance of large gain)

* Binge on alcohol (receive negligible benefit to bear high risk of enormous harm)

* Not wear a condom (refuse to pay small price to protect against moderate risk of moderate harm)

* Not ask someone out (refuse to pay negligible price to grant moderate chance of large gain and moderate risk of small loss)

 

Basically, it's impossible to fit all these behaviors into a coherent model of risk-averse, risk-seeking, or really any kind of logical utility function at all. Prospect theory does a little better than classical utility theory, accepting the fact that we treat gains and losses differently and aren't good at judging probabilities. But even then, why would someone refuse to wear a seat belt but be willing to undergo a strip-search to fight terrorism? How is preventing a 1% chance of violent death not worth the tiny discomfort of a seat belt, but preventing a 0.01% chance of violent death is worth being publicly stripped and humiliated?

I've chosen these examples because they are all things that don't involve free-rider problems; I've specifically excluded weird behaviors surrounding recycling and political activism, which can be better explained in those terms. Why wouldn't you pay a few hundred dollars a year to prevent the world from flooding and being overrun by hurricanes? Well, it wouldn't work unless everyone did it. (Though, taxation and regulation removes most of that free-rider problem, and yet the same people who are fine with absurd anti-terrorist procedures refuse to bear even a slight increase in energy costs to slow the tide of global warming.)

One obvious answer probably occurs to you: People are dumb. And this is definitely true, but it's not a complete answer. The question really is: Why are they dumb? In what ways are they dumb—what specific cognitive errors are they making? And what can be done about it?

It's often hilarious the interventions that can work: We can make people wear seat belts by charging a $50 fine. From a rational perspective, that makes no sense at all. If a 1% chance of violent death didn't motivate you, a 10% chance of losing $50 certainly shouldn't either. But for a lot of people, it does. Likewise, Obamacare will fine you if you don't have health insurance. This shouldn't be necessary; again, people are being motivated by small sums of money and not motivated by grievous bodily risks. And yet... it works.

What I'm trying to understand is some of the cases where small chances of big events are motivating (e.g. buying lottery, accepting anti-terrorist procedures) and some of the cases where they aren't (high-risk stocks, seat belts, health insurance). What's the difference? One of my friends suggested a possible explanation: Narrative. The lottery and the terrorist attack both would make good stories, while the others don't nearly as much. Yet, I don't think this is a complete explanation; there's not a direct correspondence between what makes a good story and what motivates people.

So what's going on here? Why are people so weird about risk?

(And how can I turn this into a proposal for a PhD thesis?)

 

JDN 2456187 EDT 14:17.

 

It's a common refrain those of us who criticize Islam will often hear: “Islam contributed to civilization; look at the 10^th to 12^th centuries, when the Muslim world was ahead of the West in mathematics and scholarship.”

The historical claim, so far as that goes, is pretty accurate: Overall, it's accurate to say that during the Medieval Period, Muslim societies like Egypt and Morocco were generally more advanced in their level of scholarship compared to Western, Christian societies like England and France.

 

But the proper response to this fact is: So what? What does that say about Islam?

Virtually nothing, as it turns out. Indeed, if we reversed the argument and pointed out that Christian societies today are far more advanced in science and technology than Muslim societies, we would be (and often are) accused of some terrible sin called “Islamophobia”. (This is apparently a borrowing from “homophobia”, which was already a problematic term. It makes sense for the closet case in denial who hates gays because he is gay and hates himself; it doesn't make a lot of sense for plenty of other anti-gay bigots. But anyway, people who oppose Islam are not closet Muslims.)

Instead, what it says is that secularism works. For Muslim society in the 10^th to 12^th centuries was considerably more secular than Muslim society is today. (Even the Arab Spring did little to change this, especially given the success of the Muslim Brotherhood.) And Christian society today is almost completely secular (especially in Europe), while in the Medieval Period it was almost completely non-secular, that is, theocratic. In short, Muslim societies advanced mathematics in the 12^th century by being less Muslim.

Indeed, it's pretty bizarre to even call the scholars and philosophers who advanced knowledge during that period “Muslim” in the first place, as they were quite freethinking and not at all devout. They were nominally “Muslim” because that was expected of them, just as Newton was “Christian” because everyone around him was. I guess some of these thinkers may have believed in their religion to some degree, but it was almost always to a lesser degree than the society around them, which is really the measure of an individual's belief system. Someone who is 60% Muslim in a society of 90% Muslims isn't representing Muslims, they are representing non-Muslims. They are being, again, less Muslim.

And indeed we are today, less Christian than Europe was during the 12^th century. Fewer people believe in the literal truth of the Bible (though still far, far too many). Hardly anyone is burnt at the stake for heresy or witchcraft. Apostates are almost never stoned to death. One could argue that we are more like what Jesus argued for in Matthew (more compassionate, more peaceful), and there's some truth to that; but at the same time even in Matthew Jesus has some pretty crazy ideas about certain things. He just seems so great by comparison to the likes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which are nonstop horror-fests of murder, rape, and genocide. It's kind of like reading Lolita and then switching to Ulysses and thinking, “Hey, he masturbates in public, but at least he's not a pedophile.” or playing Grand Theft Auto and then switching over to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and saying, “Well now, isn't this wholesome. We're killing terrorists instead of bystanders and prostitutes.” It's certainly true (Leopold Bloom is a much better person than Humbert Humbert, and the moral values in Call of Duty are considerably better than those of Grand Theft Auto); but it's also not really saying all that much. At the end of the day you're still jacking off in public and shooting people in the face.

Don't think Jesus is like that? Well, he tells us to hate our families, for one thing, Luke 14:25-26. He also tells us that if we've ever done anything bad with our hands, we should cut off our hands (and the same goes for our eyes), Matthew 18:8-9. His concept of charity would collapse the world economy instantly, Matthew 5:40. He encourages blind faith, John 20:29. He regularly threatens people with torture and murder (especially via the concept of Hell). He really hates fig trees, for no apparent reason (honestly this passage just makes him seem like a complete lunatic), Matthew 21:18-12. Worst of all, he says that he agrees with all the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (even though he obviously doesn't), Matthew 5:17.

So while we're more like Jesus in certain ways, we're not in other ways, and that's a really good thing. Jesus was anti-money and anti-technology. His sort of pacifism, Matthew 5:38-39, was so naive that any country run that way would be immediately invaded and conquered. (Nixon, who I remind you was a Quaker, said the same thing: “Any nation that decides the only way to achieve peace is through peaceful means is a nation that will soon be a piece of another nation.”) The fact that we have a functioning economy, digital infrastructure, and a standing army is fundamentally anti-Jesus, and that's great.

Secularism is what made the modern world. Not atheism necessarily—though disproportionately many great scientists, inventors, humanitarians, and entrepreneurs have been atheists—but secularism, the system by which religion and government are kept separate, so that no one is allowed to impose a religious ideology on anyone else by force. It is only in an environment where you cannot be burned at the stake for heresy that anyone dares to imagine new and original ideas. (Actually to be fair, there are a rare few brave enough to think original thoughts even then! They are, predictably, usually burned at the stake. Giordano Bruno was, and Galileo Galilei would have been had he not recanted.)

It was secularism that made mathematics flourish under 11th-century Islam, and a failure of secularism that made it flounder in 20th-century Islam. It is secularism that makes science advance by leaps and bounds in 21^st century Europe, and theocracy that made it stagnate in 14th-century Europe. Christianity and Islam have nothing to do with it, except insofar as they are powerful religions that tend to impose themselves upon government if you let them. In that sense, they are and have always been the enemy of scientific progress.

Fourth and final Worldcon post.

JDN 2456174 CDT 18:14.

 

I am on the Amtrak train now, leaving Chicago to return to Ann Arbor. I had the good fortune of finding a seatmate this time; she studies chemistry at Michigan. (I will probably never see her again after today, alas. But as she does go to Michigan there is some small chance we shall meet another day.) The conference itself went quite well. Though it did not always go to plan (especially when on Friday I woke up feeling extremely depressed for reasons that are still not entirely clear), overall I have a renewed devotion to my writing and several new author contacts, including one who specifically sought me out (again for reasons that are still not entirely clear).

It came up a few times on the various panels that the scientific community as it presently functions is often biased. Chief among these biases in terms of pervasiveness is publication bias, the almost universal tendency to publish papers with positive (i.e. statistically significant) results and not publish those with negative (statistically nonsignificant) results. The result is a bizarre sense that every hypothesis is true—men are smarter and dumber than women, fluoxetene works better and worse than sertraline, and so on. Meta-analysis can deal with some of these problems, but not all. In particular, the media typically publishes articles about new papers well before they are replicated and meta-analyzed, resulting in a deeply confused sense of science among most laypeople.

Yet, there is a very simple solution: Results-blind publication. Experiments should be submitted to journals before they are conducted, with complete analysis of their methodology but no results. (If there is a pilot study involved, perhaps those results could be included. But not the final results of the study.) If the methodology is approved as ethical, logical, scientifically valid and cost-effective, then the experiment will be given permission to continue, and it will be published regardless of its results. As long as the experiment is actually conducted, whatever results it gets will be guaranteed publication.

If universally adopted, this would solve the problem of publication bias literally overnight. Any study worth publishing if it is true is also worth publishing if it is false—and if you don't understand that, you don't deserve to be a scientist. Any question worth asking is a question worth knowing the actual answer to. And yes, we should expect a lot of null results to get published. These might be marginally more boring to read, but that's just too bad; truth doesn't care what you find boring. In fact, many null results could be quite interesting: What if a study really finds no difference between men and women on, say, IQ tests? What if there is really no difference between college grads and high school grads in terms of overall happiness? These would surely be significant findings well worth publishing and reading. (There's a stickier issue of what to do with, say, a 0.15 p-value, which is not statistically significant but also does not support the null hypothesis. A Bayesian approach to statistical testing would resolve this problem, but most scientists and statisticians right now are so thoroughly committed to frequentist methods that this is likely to be a much more difficult change.)

Are there any downsides to results-blind publication? I can hardly think of any. It would force papers to accept more null results and therefore fewer positive results, but the whole point is to correct a pervasive bias toward positive results, so this is not a bug, it's a feature. It might be hard to persuade some journals to participate, and if there were many journals that refused the bias could still persist, but this is not a problem with the method, it's merely a reflection of human stubbornness getting in the way of scientific progress. It would have negligible costs to implement. It's a rare intervention that has a huge positive impact with so little downside; but every once in awhile one comes along (e.g. hand washing, vaccination), and we should leap at the opportunity when it appears.

Third of the Worldcon posts.

JDN 2456174 CDT 18:53.

 

There were several panels at Worldcon about issues of inclusivity, especially with regard to gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This was a great improvement over Gen Con, which had only a single LGBT panel (which was really a gay men panel with occasional mention of lesbians) and no panels on gender or broader issues of inclusivity.

On one of these, the topic came up of straight white cisgendered upper-middle-class men writing stories with gay characters, women characters, working-class characters, Hispanic characters, and so on. A couple of objections were raised to this; the first is reasonable but the second is fundamentally wrongheaded.

The first reason, the good one, is that this is often not done well. If you are a straight author whose gay characters are pure stereotypes, or cardboard cutouts that don't feel like real people, or just copies of your own experience with a different label put on it, that's generally not a good thing. And certainly examples of this do exist. Often 'diversity' is added in a slapdash way that ignores the reality and complexity of the phenomenon. But that's hardly unforgivable, and in fact it's a self-correcting thing. As more straight authors write gay characters, it will become more apparent whose gay characters are full, rich individuals and whose are simply stereotypes.

The second objection is that straight white male (etc.) authors have no right to write such characters, because they haven't lived the experiences of the people they are writing about. So this argument goes, we should leave the gay characters to gay authors, the women characters to women authors and the black characters to black authors.

I want you to stop and think about what would happen if we actually did that. Every story would be a bizarre segregated world, populated entirely by clones of the author. There would be no exploration of diversity in any stories, because there would be no diversity to discuss. If white authors are only allowed to write about white characters, and black authors are only allowed to write about black characters, then there will never be any books with black characters and white characters interacting! (Nor does being multiracial solve this problem, since multiracial authors will have to write about only multiracial characters, and presumably ones with the same precise mix they have.)

We have rightly complained about the lack of gay people, racial minorities, even women (which makes the least sense of all) in fiction, and science fiction is no exception. Star Trek was considered edgy for including so many women and racial minorities, and it only did so by relegating them largely to inferior roles. Uhura largely repeated the computer (spoofed brilliantly in Galaxy Quest), and had to wear a ridiculous skimpy uniform.

So here I am, a queer person, saying to all straight authors: Please write queer characters. I'd prefer you do it well, and I am available to consult if you'd like to hear about my own life as a case study in bisexual experience (and there are lots more people you should also consult; you'll find their experiences are not the same as mine). I'd prefer that you make your queer characters as rich, heroic, villainous, complex, interesting, and varied as your straight characters. But please, for the love of all that is good in the world, write queer characters.

If your experience of the world came entirely from the majority of mainstream fiction, you'd never know that we even exist. You'd think that men only love women, and women only love men, and that's how it is and has always been. Even in works of science fiction that purport to be radical and progressive about sexuality (like Heinlein) this is still often the case. Depending on what figures you use, queer people comprise between 5% and 30% of the human population (5% if you go by self-identification, 30% if you go by measured behavior). That's hundreds of millions or even billions of people. And yet to read most books, you'd think we didn't exist at all, or were some sort of bizarre aberration. (I remember cringing in the Dune series to see one of the Barons Harkonnen involved in gay sex just as part of his Harkonnen debauchery. There are to my knowledge no Atreides queer people in the entire series.) If you go by behavior, which, honestly, makes the most sense (I have had sex with men who still insisted they were straight; this has a name, denial), we are one of the largest minorities in the world—indeed if we were much larger we would not be a minority anymore—and we are present in every culture that has been studied, not to mention several hundred known animal species. To call same-sex sexual activity an aberration, you basically have to call 30% of mammals and birds an aberration. (This is about as weird as when people say that Biblical literalism is a radical fringe view—seeing as polls show it is professed by 40% of Americans.)

So yes, I want straight people writing queer characters. And some of them, no doubt, will get it wrong. That's okay. It's certainly better than the alternative, which is that we preserve the status quo in which any LGBT character makes your book an LGBT book, to be relegated (that is, ghettoed) to the LGBT shelf so that only LGBT readers need concern themselves with it. When they get it wrong, we will write more books (or book reviews, or blog posts, or tweets, or whatever), explaining—calmly I hope—what it is they got wrong and how it can be fixed in other works. In fact, I think that a lot of the things they are claimed to get “wrong” will actually be things that are true of a certain proportion of queer people. For instance, if they are all flaming flamboyant effeminates... well, I've definitely met some guys like that. Not all queer men are like that; I'm not like that; but some are, and as long as such characters are dealt with in a rich and responsible way, I don't have any problem with them being like this. It's not the author's responsibility to contradict every stereotype in every case for every character in every story. (If they always affirm stereotypes, that would be problematic. But even a slight deviation can have a significant impact; suppose our flamboyant femme is actually a star football quarterback. Now you've just made him quite an interesting character in one fell swoop!) I've definitely received criticism that some of my women characters are “unrealistic” or “don't feel like women”. In certain cases this was actually made specific: It was alleged that one of my lesbian characters was overly focused on physical attributes instead of romantic emotions, and I don't doubt that there's some sort of statistical trend that women are more interested in romance than men. But frankly, I'm pretty damn interested in romance, and I've known some really horny lesbians who seemed like they cared a lot about physical appearance. Is this typical? Perhaps not. But it exists. Showing that real diversity is important. Even weirder was the time that for one of my sex scenes I basically copied, almost moment-for-moment and thought-for-thought, one of my first sexual experiences with a man, making only one rather significant change—the protagonist (playing my role) was now a woman. I was told that the result was “too stereotypically feminine”. I was told that no real woman would ever have these flights of romantic fantasy that I myself actually had at the time. (Or are we saying that romantic fantasies are now a masculine thing? Wherefore said lesbians above?)

So basically you can't win, certainly not with everyone all the time. And yes, straight authors writing gay characters, people will probably criticize you no matter what you do. Ignore those people. If they can't give a really good reason that what you're doing is wrong, and they aren't writing their own stuff that is better, then shrug them off and keep doing what you're doing. Don't ignore legitimate criticisms (like “Why are all your gay male characters so femme? You do know that there are manly gay men right?”), but do ignore criticisms that are too vague to be useful and especially people who are critical of you no matter what choice you make.

And above all, keep writing queer characters. We need them, desperately. If you're not sure where to begin, try what Mass Effect 3 did and just make a couple of your motley crew gay. You don't have to make a big deal about it—in fact, it's often better if you don't. Bioware did this brilliantly; you literally don't know who is gay until you ask them about their family or try to hit on them—and it's basically canon that Shepard (of either sex) is bisexual. This is how you do it right. Moreover, the very casualness speaks volumes about the culture that Mass Effect takes place in; it's a world where the majority of intolerance has been conquered, where gender, race, sexual orientation and whatever else just aren't that big a deal anymore. (The reboot Battlestar Galactica operates on similar principles.) If that's the science fiction future you imagine (or hope for), then by all means, write it like that. Elder Scrolls actually does this too, but it feels out of place there; how is it that this medieval feudal culture is more progressive about gender and sexuality than our modern democratic republic?

If you're feeling adventurous, try creating entire cultures where, for instance, bisexuality, or transgender, is considered normative, and cisgender or heterosexuality is stigmatized. SF especially allows all sorts of opportunities for this sort of thing. All sorts of opportunities arise for aliens, fantasy creatures, and transhumans. (Transhuman transsexuals, oh my!) For my part, the Terlaroni are almost exclusively bisexual, but heterosexuality is not stigmatized, just virtually unheard of. If someone only has partners of one sex, it's generally assumed that this happened by chance, just whoever they happened to fall in love with. If this happens with someone especially promiscuous (making it statistically improbable that it's pure chance), people get confused, but not upset.

Or, if that's really the story you want to tell, tell us about a world where things are like they are now, or even worse than they are now (especially if you write medieval fantasy, the worse scenario makes a lot of sense). This is one that's tricky to do, especially from the point of view of characters who are steeped in a bigoted culture. But it can be done, if you are skilled enough to pull it off. I think one way it would work well is if you—meaning you, the author—had also written other works that were obviously progressive in their attitudes, making it clearer that the character's opinions are not your own. A straight guy who writes only one book, and in that one book the protagonist hates gay people, is going to be seen as a homophobe, and frankly he might well be one.

But if you are seen as a homophobe and really aren't one, write more books, from different perspectives, about different characters. If one of your hero protagonists is gay and breaks stereotypes, it's going to be pretty hard to pin the label of heteronormativity upon you—especially if you do it well and it resonates with queer readers.

 

Another post from the Worldcon commute.

JDN 2456169 EDT 13:48.

 

In the conflict about environmental sustainability, there are two major sides, and they are both right in some ways and wrong in others. One side is what I would call the “natural” camp, which is trying to make the world more like (what they perceive to be) its natural state, with such things as local food, handmade clothing, and self-sufficiency. A classic example of the natural camp is the Burning Man community. The other side, diametrically opposed, is what I would call the “modern” camp, which is trying to advance the world technologically and economically, and will use whatever means necessary to do that, coal, oil, steel, and so on. The Republican Party in the US is, among other things, part of the modern camp—“Drill, baby, drill!”

The natural camp is wrong, above all, about what they think the world is naturally like. They think that nature is harmonious and cooperative, when in fact it is mostly brutal and competitive. Life for most animals that have ever lived on Earth was nasty, brutish, and short. We do not want to go back to a world where the majority of infants die of disease, where childbirth is a leading cause of death among women, where life expectancy is 35. That is what nature is like. Moreover, natural ecology is not particularly stable; ancient humans made large animals extinct almost as fast as modern humans do today, and at any moment a volcanic eruption or asteroid impact could wipe out 99% of life without us having to lift a finger.

But the modern camp is also wrong, if they think that modernity can be achieved by any means necessary, without regard for what happens to our natural environment. We can't just keep on burning coal and oil, watching the Earth heat up degree by degree. On this road lies death and destruction as the ecology we depend on collapses around us.

Instead I propose a kind of compromise, which takes the best of both camps. Yes, we will change our environment, reshape it to our needs—but we must be careful doing so. Yes, we will be cautious about ecological changes—but we will make changes, because human lives are at stake. Sustainable modernity means neither handmade bicycles nor diesel SUVs, but instead solar-powered maglev trains. It means finding a balance between advancing human well-being today and preserving ecological stability tomorrow.

And yes, sometimes there are hard choices to be made. We need tantalum and germanium for our digital technology, but the mining of these rare metals causes environmental damage over wide areas. We hope to move to solar, wind, and fusion power eventually, but for now we may have to burn some coal just to keep our homes heated in winter and cooled in summer—especially as our summers get hotter ever year. Mosquitoes may be vital to wetland ecosystems, but they also spread malaria, and as such we must find ways to repel or kill them in malaria-heavy areas.
We will have to make sacrifices in both directions, sometimes giving up a little economic development for some ecological security, sometimes accepting a little environmental damage for some economic advancement. But always on our minds will be the balance, the cost-benefit analysis.

Indeed, in the long run this is what will maximize economic growth. In that sense, we are not really giving up any economic development, only saving it awhile so it can have maximum return. Many economists complain about America's dismally small savings rate in bank accounts, but this is actually quite trivial. (It doesn't even necessarily affect investment, given the complexities of our monetary system.) What really matters is the “savings rate” of forests planted versus burned, water extracted versus replenished, materials recycled versus landfilled. We could have billions in our bank accounts, but if the air isn't breathable it won't do us any good. Conversely if the air is clean and the water is fresh and the food is plentiful, it won't matter all that much if our bank accounts are empty. Ecology is the real economy.

Sustainable modernity is neither a world of native tribes nor a world of soot and smokestacks, but a world of solar-powered arcologies and self-sufficient fusion-engine starships. It is a world where ecology and technology are not opposed but mutually supporting.

Fortunately, this idea is already beginning to take hold. “Green technology” is a notion that would have been anathema to the hippies of the 1970s, yet it is the official position of the Obama Administration. Even the burner community isn't quite as extreme about their naturism as they once were—they support the use of aluminum cans, for example.

The bigger problem today is from the other side, the modernists, who insist that we can continue to drill for oil and mine for coal on into the indefinite future, without any harmful consequences. We hear oxymorons like “safe offshore oil” and “clean coal”, even as oil spills fill the Gulf of Mexico and the EPA releases a report that air pollution will kill 30,000 Americans over the next 10 years.

These people believe that they are the engine of progress, that those of us who call for caution are simply holding back economic growth. They can point to the naturists as evidence of this—for the naturists really are holding back economic growth, or would be if they were taken seriously in policy. Our response, therefore, must be sustainable modernity—long-run economic growth that is consistent with environmental sustainability. We must be farsighted in our planning and prudent in our decisions—and in the long run, we will not be sacrificing anything, but instead gaining everything.

JDN 2456168 EDT 21:18.

 Nightmare Age is a collection of short stories from the 1960s (edited by Frederick Pohl in 1970). I found it at a yard sale for 50 cents, which is probably about what it would have cost nominally in 1970. The theme is “the end of the world,” though some of the stories are more apocalyptic than others. In some the crisis is averted, in others it's just a mild dystopia. And then, in some, everyone dies.

 It's an interesting experience, reading what our parents' generation thought about the coming end of the world.

The first story is by far the most realistic, and also by far the most boring. I don't think those two necessarily go hand-in-hand, but in this case the story has no real characters, and reads like it's a series of news reports. This becomes unbearably dry after only a few pages, and yet the story goes on. The plot? Environmental catastrophe.

 The second story may be where we get the idea of 'grey goo,' because it's about nanotechnology threatening to take over the world and turning it into, well, grey goo. The characters aren't that interesting, but at least they are characters.

 The third story is about overpopulation, but a very weird sort of overpopulation where the census takers go around deciding who is least fit to live and killing them to make room for everyone else. You'd think they'd just mandate contraception, or sterilize people if it's really that bad; but no, they shoot you in the face.

 The obverse occurs in the fourth story, in which a eugenic crisis has made humanity composed of utter morons, except for a tiny minority who are still intelligent enough to run things. This problem is solved by tricking millions of people into killing themselves; how this is heroic I am not sure.

 The next story is also pretty realistic: It's about nuclear war, which understandably was on a lot of people's minds in the 1960s. It's told from the perspective of a robot, which I rather enjoyed. Why did everyone just become shiny and fall down?

 At story six, it's not an apocalypse. It's hardly even a dystopia. They just have a very high rate of traffic casualties, and have special teams on every highway to heal the injured and clean up the dead as a result. I honestly don't understand why this story was even written, much less why it was included. It's basically Truth in Television, but it's not really that bad, now is it?

 Story seven is just silly: It's about an ongoing war between drivers and pedestrians. This is so stupid I see no need to discuss it further (or really ever again).

 Story eight is marginally better: It's about a war between poor youth and rich elders in suburbia. A real war, that is, with guns and Molotov cocktails and razor wire. Still, pretty ridiculous.

 Story nine breaks this awful trend with something more interesting and more reasonable. As transportation costs fell, people began to move out of cities, and the cities were left to decay. This is to some extent already happening, especially in Detroit.

 Story ten is also about nuclear war, which made it seem realistic—and then, alas, it's nuclear war between individual cities, “Denv” (Denver) and “Ellay” (LA). I don't even mind the name changes; they follow pretty good linguistic principles. But the idea that nuclear war—continuous nuclear war, with missile defense shields—could possibly occur between individual cities is profoundly bizarre. The characters are interesting in this one however, and there is a lot of good political intrigue.

 Story eleven is about post-scarcity, and it's sort of a dystopia except that it would be much better than the world has ever been. The culture is bizarre mind you: “Poor” means you have to buy and consume huge amounts of stuff, while the “rich” aren't required to consume nearly as much. But aside from that, everyone in the world has enough food to eat, water to drink, clothes to wear, shelter to live in, transportation to get around. It is in short, materially a paradise. And once that ridiculous notion of economics is removed (by a clever move involving hyper-Keynesian robots), the world becomes quite well and truly a paradise. I can only hope the world ends so well!

 The penultimate tale is about crumbling infrastructure, a shortage of skilled labor as unskilled laborers are laid off, an education system falling apart, all while the stock market rises, corporate profits soar, and there are ever more advertisements everywhere. In short, Truth in Television. It does make one very silly mistake: There are only 3 television channels, mostly ads, where of course what actually happened was we have 3000 television channels, also mostly ads.

 And finally, the last tale is Heinlein and quite bizarre. It opens with a young woman who randomly strips naked in the street, and no, her motivation is never explained. Indeed, hardly any motivations are explained, as we are treated to Heinlein's bizarre theory of statistics on which “statistics” mean that things don't actually need to have reasons behind them and just happen because the statistics demand it. (Maybe he read a quantum physics textbook while high on marijuana or LSD? Seems probable.) The apocalypse is when all the statistical patterns line up and everything bad happens at once. It's definitely a full-scale apocalypse though. In fact, the final thing that happens pretty much renders the rest of the story completely irrelevant. (And frankly, could have been the plot by itself, if Heinlein were a better scientist.)

 In all, it made for interesting reading, learning about what did and didn't frighten people in the 1960s, which made me think about what should and shouldn't frighten us today. (Hint: Global warming? Definitely. Terrorism? Probably not. Solar event? Maybe.) But it wasn't exactly good reading, especially those bizarre and ridiculous stories in the middle. It was worth the 50 cents at current prices. Not much more.

 

JDN 2456167 EDT 19:15.

 You think you are being moral, don't you? Be honest. You think you are much more moral than I am, don't you? You think that you and others like you are the last bastion of morality in a world corrupted, corrupted by people like me, atheists, blasphemers, sodomites, fornicators, masturbaters, feminists, liberals, socialists like me (and on the above list, I am guilty as charged, though I sometimes hesitate at “feminist” because of what it implies about gender binary, and these words don't mean quite what you think). You think we are the immoral ones, and you are the last best hope for morality.

 You could not be more wrong. You are not moral, we are. We are not immoral, you are. We are trying to advance morality, while people like you are holding it back.

 You see, we don't disown our children. We don't beat people to death. We can elect a black man President and feel no need to demand his birth certificate—because we know that a large fraction of patriotic, native-born Americans are black, Asian, Hispanic, and so on. (You probably even think that Native Americans are not real Americans, which is pretty much the deepest irony imaginable. They were here first.) When someone gets raped, we don't blame them; we blame the person who raped them. (And we're conscious about our gender pronouns; I could have said “her,” except at least 9% of rape victims are male. So I used an indeterminate bound variable, “them”.) We don't take food away from children just so millionaires can pay a little less in taxes. We don't let bridges crumble just to reduce government spending. We don't bomb other countries and kill thousands of people, not without a damned good reason. We do all this because we care about people. That is what morality means.

 Morality isn't about following rules or obeying authority. It's not about what you do when there is a gun to your head (or infinitely worse, a Hell hanging over you). It's about what you do when you don't have a gun to your head, when nobody is watching, when you have the chance to hurt someone and get away with it—and you don't. Morality consists in the moment when you could have lied, could have cheated, could have stolen—and you didn't. It consists in the times when you could hurt someone, could take advantage, could harm someone else for your own gain—and you don't.

 Morality consists in making the world a better place to live. It is defined by being kind, being fair, being just, not because you're told to, not because someone is forcing you, not because you will be punished if you don't, but because it's the right thing to do. You do it because you'd rather live in a world where people are good to each other.

 Morality means making a little more hope and a little less despair, a little more joy and a little less sorrow, a little more peace and a little less war, a little more love and a little less hate.

 Which brings me to my next point.

 I'm going to focus especially on “sodomites”, or as we prefer to be called, “queer people” (some don't even like that, and prefer “LGBT” or no label at all). I focus on this because bigots like you, while you hate a lot of people (women, blacks, the poor, foreigners, etc.), you generally seem to hate us most of all. You hate us because we make love in a way you don't think we should, because men make love to other men and women make love to other women.

 You hate us for how we love. That is the very opposite of morality.

 And don't try to tell me it's the sex you hate and you have no problem with the love. That would be bad enough as it is, because sex is (or can be) a beautiful and vital part of the human experience.

 But it's also plainly a lie. On the contrary, you probably hire gay prostitutes or meet anonymous men for sex (if you yourselfdon't, I assure you that plenty of your bigot friends do). You think of that as a 'temptation' that everyone occasionally falls into. (Hint: People who are actually straight rarely have such 'temptations'.) But no, if I kiss a man passionately or walk down the street holding his hand, then you get mad. If I call him my “boyfriend” and tell him I love him, then you say I'm immoral. The thing that you hate is love. And that means you have morality exactly backwards.

 Do you really think that God hates fags? That the creator of the universe, who fashioned septillions of stars in billions of galaxies spread across billions of light-years—a light-year, remember, is a distance so vast that at the fastest possible speed it takes a year to traverse it—that God, who made gravity and quantum mechanics and shapes the evolution of stars, that God is terribly concerned about where I put my penis? That God, so mind-blowingly vast that a million years is as a moment, is deeply concerned about which books we read, which buildings we gather in on which days of the week, what clothes we wear or don't wear, and what body parts we insert into what orifices? Your God sounds far too small to be the sort of being who could make a universe as grand as ours. Indeed, in many ways what you describe as “God” is a being so very limited that most human beings have a deeper understanding of morality than it does. I am enlightened enough not to be concerned about what body parts you insert into what orifices (between consenting adults of course). How is the being who made time itself not enlightened enough to see that? How is the fashioner of galaxies such a petty busybody?

 There was a psychologist, you see, named Kohlberg. He was one of the first psychologists to seriously study morality, how it works, what people think about it. He found that there are three levels of morality, each more enlightened than the last: Preconventional, which is based on seeking reward and avoiding punishment; Conventional, which is based upon social relationships, and Postconventional, which is based upon universal principles of morality. Near as I can tell, bigot, you're stuck in preconventional. That's the lowest stage of morality. Sometimes, for instance when you talk about patriotism, you seem like you might reach conventional. But then you ask me questions like “Without Heaven and Hell, why would anyone be moral?” which is very much a preconventional attitude—only a preconventional person thinks that reward and punishment have anything to do with morality.

So here I am up in postconventional, and you're calling me immoral?

 No, bigot. You are the one who is immoral. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you understand the damage your hatred does and find a way to stop the hate, the better the world will be.