Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.
William Somerset Maugham
Month: March 2024
24MAR2024 – Photo of the Day
Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 23MAR2024 – Smartest Guys in the Room
Like the other readers of this blog I have been watching our culture slowly disintegrate over my lifetime. I am certain that the oligarchs have ran many simulations (remember the Club of Rome?) and are certain that they have the winning hand. That being said I think they have made a very basic logic error which is human beings have agency. Anyone who has a science or engineering background usually views every process as being a mix deterministic or random, it’s drilled into us. However I don’t believe that applies to human beings who have agency. A steel beam doesn’t evaluate the torsion being applied to it and decide how to react but a person does evaluate the forces being applied to him and reasons about how he should react. I think that’s why we constantly hear about how those stupid so-and-sos didn’t do the “rational” thing. Actually they did, it’s your model that’s stupid.
Time will tell but I don’t think the “smartest guys in the room” really know very much.
Guest Contributor – Xavier – 23MAR2024 – Genre vs Literature
This post raises two important and related questions. One is the question of genre fiction versus fiction/literature or entertainment versus literature. The other, how technology impacts this balance.
On the first point I think the best guide for the use of imagination in narrative fiction or really any literature is could it be real. That is, literature always fabricates events, but only events that could be real, at least to the viewer. This may seem overly restrictive, but even if we look at even the most fantastic events in literature, they are literature precisely because they are convincing. The narrative is not just believable, but super believable, as the clumsy moniker of surrealism suggests. The reader has to have a reason to suspend disbelief and that reason has to be both compelling and convincing.
This is why Macbeth can include incanting witches and Hamlet a ghost. Same for Dickens, Joyce, etc. We don’t mind Old Hamlet showing up every night to drive the action. His presence is utterly real to mind of any son that lost a father to murder. That reality may be the reality of a dream or some subconscious memory acting on a son’s emotions, but it plays as real almost universally.
The second question relating to our kids watching stories inside game applications like Minecraft and its relation to literature and media has a very direct precedent in movies. As soon as movies got past the novelty stage when they were sequestered in menageries they looked to literature to augment the spectacle. I can be argued that screenplays almost never satisfactorily translate literature, not even drama where the analogy seems direct.
I believe literature doesn’t translate well because movies, like radio, video and now video games, are essentially entertainment media mixed with mass communication. It is not novel to say that the commercial dimension of these media plays a much greater role than they do in traditional art forms, which were mostly centered around patrons.
Some radio dramas, such as those produced by there Mercury Players, seem to approach the experience of attending a play. So maybe these mass media/entertainment forms can become like literature if they survive long enough to establish the required conventions to seem real. But movies and radio were quickly supplanted by TV and now video games. So perhaps the balance for literature requires a limit of commerce and reliance on technology, as these certainly are not timeless.
Most traditional “critics” would say that the need to seem “real” is undermined, rather than supported, by technical or futuristic artifacts. They don’t make good literature impossible, but they raise the bar to get an audience to suspend disbelief and to tell the underlying story that the reader wants. This is why genre fiction is such good fodder for farce. If the story doesn’t need these obstacles, it’s probably better off without them. But if the fun in writing with them can overcome their drag, the story could soar even with rockets. They’re just a heavy narrative load to bear.
What Should Science Fiction Be About?
There is an endless debate about whether science fiction should be literature or genre fiction. By that I mean should the story be about the humanity of the characters or about the rocket ships and ray guns. Now this is an artificial dichotomy. Even in the pulpiest of space operas, the humanity of the protagonists, even the humanity of the non-humans is always a factor. But when the story basically becomes “Pride and Prejudice” with only a stray rocket ship thrown in as a fig leaf then we’ve stepped over the line to lit-sf.
A hundred years ago the pulp market said science fiction was about the rocket ships. And that school of thought dominated during the first half of the twentieth century. Sometime in the 1960s literary science fiction began. I’m sure its roots go further back and it as yet was only the beginnings of what it would become, but the earlier dominance of space opera and pulp type stories began to give ground to more sophisticated writing styles and psychological and sociological considerations in the stories. Women authors and progressives began to address social justice issues.
Sixty years later the pendulum has probably swung as far in the direction of literary science fiction as it can go. Almost every science fiction publisher employs editors who probably wouldn’t allow a story published that ignored the social justice pieties that define the acceptable mindset of this editorial class. And these approved stories have not been wildly successful. In fact trad publishing is in pretty bad shape. But with the advent of self-publishing the possibility exists for other types of stories to begin circulating again.
But the question still needs to be asked what are the relative sizes of the markets for “literary sf versus stories about rocket ships. My guess is that if the right kind of rocket ship stories were available, they would garner at least half the market. I think it’s the case that many of the boys that currently spend most of their time playing video games would be the market for this kind of science fiction. Currently from what I’ve heard they read a kind of fan fiction that involves stories taking place in the “universe” of the games they like playing. I assume they aren’t attracted to the literary sf but I could see them being attracted to more adventurous types of stories and these would fit more in line with the kind of pulp/space opera stories that used to make up science fiction.
Of course, it can be done backwards where writers of pulp sf could go to work producing this fan fiction to an already existing game universe. But to me this seems restrictive. Having to limit your creative directions according to a video game seems sophomoric.
But in reality, there are markets for all different kinds of stories. The odd thing is that the traditional publishers and even Amazon act as gatekeepers to limit the types of stories that receive publicity and support. In effect their limiting their own profits for ideological reasons. So, this is the takeaway for authors. In order to get seen you have to tailor your work to fit the gatekeepers’ requirements or you have to market your work to an audience that doesn’t know you’re there.
Well marketing is a serious business and based on what I’ve read cracking the Amazon algorithm is not for the faint of heart. But still, I think trying to find an audience for your book is preferable to writing a book you don’t like in order to get an editor to approve it.
So, a marketing I will go.
23MAR2024 – Photo of the Day
23MAR2024 – Quote of the Day
Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it…
William Somerset Maugham
Guest Contributor – War Pig – 22MAR2024 – Monkey Joe
Maybe the geniuses chose Joe deliberately. Plans within plans. Joe is a distraction while the deep state makes itself irremovable. Joe is the screeching monkey distraction while the real work goes on surreptitiously. Rush Limbaugh was the distraction for GW Bush. He was the MAGA type of super-patriot distraction that allowed Bush’s people to work quietly building power. Bush was decried by the left as a yokel, all the while he beat them twice in a row and got the great majority of his legislative aims passed.
Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 22MAR2024 – Rule Over Ashes
Sun Tzu refered to the evil men who would burn their homeland to rule over the ashes.
I think the wheels are going to come off the US/Petrodollar deal that Nixon carved out over 50 years ago. Pull on your tinfoil beret, I personally believe the gold in Ft Knox bought that deal with the House of Saud, and they are now getting ready to after 50 years of meddling in our foreign policy mostly to their benefits, to dump us on the rubbish heap. Explain coherently why before the OPEC deal was signed that the tours to Ft Knox depository were shut down, and nobody has done an exact counting and inventory since ’72, at least one publicly available. I smell shenanigans, and am worried about the BRICS+ currency because it is gold backed, and has a large portion of both the worlds population and real estate to back it. By being gold backed it has an advantage over the Euro, or the Dollar, both of which are now straight up fiat “We Say So” bucks, only good because we say so.
I do not believe the oligarchy realize how few they are, and how many disillusioned and increasingly angry, bitter people are looking at them wondering why the WEF, and all the other asshats who fly in private jets to eat catered meals served to them by their underlings while they lecture us about our carbon footprint, and recommend we learn to downsize and enjoy “Micro Livestock” so they can shepherd us towards their brighter happier future.
The unelected enviro-nazis do not have any authority over me that I do not grant them, but somehow their wants are translated into the laws governing the US, and Europe while the “Poor unfortunate Asians” like India and China get a pass on all the environmental BS.
We have reduced our environmental impact and are decreasing our utilization of coal, oil and natural gas, while they build a new coal fired plant every 2 weeks. The Clinton administration locked up one of our supplies of low sulfur coal in Utah to help out campaign donors from Indonesia who coincidentally also export low sulfur coal, kinda cozy.
I know I am rambling, but that happens, I don’t think the US people will go gently into that long dark night without a struggle, and would prefer it to be sooner rather than kicking it down the road for my grandchildren to deal with.
Ten-Dimensional Chess
Being old now, I don’t know if I’ll live to see the outcome of the great experiment that our oligarchy is currently embarking upon. What this experiment is I’m not completely sure of. I can see the actions being taken and make some assumptions about what is planned, but much is still speculation. Let’s review.
The industrial basis for our modern economy has been almost completely moved to Asia. High skill manufacture is located in Japan, South Korea and China and the low skill assembly is farmed out to Thailand, Vietnam and other backwaters.
The use of fossil fuels is being curtailed in the United States, Canada and Europe. This will have the effect of impoverishing the majority of the former middle class and their descendants. And the knock-on effect of this is the discouraging of these young people from marrying and having children.
At the same time the United States, Canada and Europe are being flooded with migrants from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, various parts of Asia and the Middle East. These migrants have the effect of further depressing the economic opportunities of the younger American and European citizens while at the same time plunging the whole of these areas in a chaotic environment that further discourages stability and political action by the supposed sovereign citizens.
So, what is this experiment? Apparently, the oligarchs find representative democracy, at least one that doesn’t accord with their dictates as inconvenient. So, what they are doing is reshuffling the deck. If those pesky Europeans and European descendants have gotten demanding (things like a living wage and a middle-class existence for their children) why then let’s just find some people whose expectations only include a tin shack and a dollop of beans. After all, if the Chinese can get the Uyghurs to assemble smart phones while they’re being genocided in the camps then surely, we can expect Guatemalans to pick fruit and work in an Amazon warehouse for practically nothing.
Ultimately, these supermen see the whole world and all the people in it as their tools. They decide what the world will look like and even who gets to live in it.
But for this to continue to work, the Global American Empire has to be able to control basically the whole world. Asia has to continue to make our tech equipment and America has to run things without producing anything except Artificial Intelligence and high-end war equipment.
But is this a stable system? That’s the part that will take time to discover. Already there appear to be some parts of the machine that are coming loose. The extension of the European sector into Russia and its satellites has turned into a land war that has the earmarks of a catastrophe for the West. If Russia overwhelms Ukraine, then the much-vaunted NATO alliance will have failed at its primary task of keeping Russia in check.
On the other side of Asia China is preparing to call America’s bluff over Taiwan. That is a much more serious threat. Such a move would cause a panic in South Korea and Japan and alter the way things are looked at throughout East Asia.
And even in a nothing place like Niger in Africa, the dominant role of the West is in retreat. Warlords are kicking over the West’s puppets and telling the United States and France to take their troops out.
Now which way all this will go is completely unknown. Maybe our oligarchs are playing ten-dimensional chess and they’ve already looked fifty moves ahead and know to a certainty how all of this global pinball game settles out. Maybe the much-vaunted AI has run the simulation ten trillion times and every time the result shows the masters of the universe winning the game and the peons being crushed down to dust.
That’s what I’d love to know the answer to. Do they know something we don’t or are they guessing? My hunch is they’re winging it. The face of the oligarchs is Joe Biden. That’s not the face you get from a directorate of super geniuses. That’s the face you end up with from a bureaucracy of hacks, crooks and hucksters and a shoddy one at that.
So maybe this regime will last long enough to outlive me. But I’m holding out hope that the awful people running things aren’t as smart as they or even we think they are. They’re just more ruthless than we are. In which case they won’t have things all their way. The global empire will end up as all empires do; in the dustbin of history. I just hope to see it and get the last laugh.