Tag: History

Why Do Some SciFi Writers Think An “All Male” Species Is Clever?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Science Fiction, Uncategorized5 Comments

I’ve now heard of several SciFi stories which feature an “all male” race. The first was Seth McFarlane’s Star Trek show The Orville. The second is the new Supergirl movie. How on earth does anything think this even means anything, let alone is clever?

For a species to be entirely one sex, they must either reproduce asexually or else they must be hermaphrodites. There simply are no other options. “Sexes” are simply a description for how members of a species produce new members of their species. In the case of Moclans in The Orville, the species is clearly hermaphroditic since any two Moclans can reproduce with each other and either can fertilize the other and the other lay eggs. Looking at a species and deciding that if some are bigger than others they are the “males” is simply nonsensical anthropomorphizing. It is true that in most mammal species the males are larger than the females, but when you go outside of mammals nearly any set of relative sizes can be found. In many species, males are larger. In many species, females are larger. In many species, males and females are the same size. And when I’m talking about species where females are larger, I’m not talking about obscure or docile species. This is true in great white sharks, in pythons, in birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons—it’s quite common for females to be larger than males in the animal kingdom here on earth.

In Moclans, the “female” Moclans are actually just smaller, weaker, more fragile Moclans. They can’t do anything that the “male” Moclans can do. From what I’ve read, it’s implied that they lack half of the genitalia which the “male” Moclans possess, so it’s not clear that they’re actually fertile but unlike “male” Moclans they certainly can’t reproduce on their own, so a colony of “female” Moclans would naturally die out without replacement, while “male” Moclans can sustain themselves indefinitely with no “females”. If there was a genetic condition in humans which made them smaller, weaker, more fragile, and significantly reduced their fertility, we would naturally consider it a birth defect, and aside from a few wackos (there are always wackos) a medical intervention at birth which would allow the child to develop naturally with full function would be completely uncontroversial.

What these shows play on in order to trick people into thinking that they’re not completely stupid is largely their casting. They cast male humans to play “male” Moclans and female humans to play “female” Moclans, and so our innate knowledge that in humans male and female are complementary kicks in and does the work the writer won’t do himself because he can’t. If you changed the casting to be all-male and had the “females” played by pre-pubescent male actors, but changed not a single word of the script, no one would think this deep in the least.

I suspect that this is why, if this ever showed up in a novel (and it probably has because everything has shown up in a novel at least once), it made no splash. Without smuggling in human male and female via actors, the fact that you’re just talking about hermaphrodites who treat a birth defect with a life-improving medical intervention would be too obvious.

I also suspect that this use of human actors to smuggle in human male/female complementarity is why defining “female” Moclans by being small and weak and fragile isn’t generally taken as being insulting to human women, even though it should be. Yes, human females are, statistically, smaller, weaker, and more fragile than human males. (Technically, it’s overlapping normal distributions, but it is certainly true that the averages are not right next to each other.) But this is not the point of female biology. If someone looks at a smaller, weaker, more fragile version of something and thinks “female!” they’ve completely missed the point of human femaleness. Human females have abilities which human males lack—that’s the point. The point is not the tradeoffs that biology generally makes for the sake of those extra abilities.

I assume that the “all male” species in Supergirl was even stupider.

Ideas Matter, But So Does Context

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

While it is true and important that ideas have consequences, I think a lot of people misunderstand the history of the 20th century because they forget that context has consequences, too. For example: Karl Marx’s ideas had profound consequences. But original Marxism—if you actually read Marx, anyway—is profoundly stupid and can only be appealing in certain contexts. Modern Marxism is, if you examine it, merely related to original Marxism, because it has adapted.

Modern Marxism/socialism (in the USA) is primarily an answer to a mass of people who were tricked into selling themselves into indentured servitude for a lottery ticket to the upper classes with a fraudulent representation of the odds of winning. This indentured servitude comes in the form of high-interest student loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and it’s important to note that in 2010 the US federal government became the issuer of all student loans, so these loans are no longer a matter between private parties.

A fuller picture of the context that makes Marxism/socialism appealing in the USA also has to do with the general history of it involving an upper class of bureaucrats who get to tell everyone what to do, and how much this appeals to the kind of people who desperately want to tell everyone else what to do.

This context of widespread indentured servitude is why it’s probably for the best to allow students to return their degrees in exchange for cancelling their debt. Given that the issuer of the debt is the same as the government which makes it uncancelable in bankruptcy and also the government which has, through its impact on compulsory lower education created a system of indoctrination of the importance of going to college, the moral hazard really runs just as much towards keeping the loans as it does toward allowing people to cancel them. People should, in general, pay their honest debts. Student loans are not really honest debts. (And I say this as a person who never took out even $1 in college loans, so I have no personal stake in this.) I think it would make a certain amount of sense to liquidate the endowments of prestigious universities to partially pay for this cancellation and for the federal government to eat the rest of the debt as restitution for having perpetrated or at least cooperated in fraud.

Changing the context in this way will make Marxism unappealing in contemporary America in a way that better education never will in a fallen world where most men’s beliefs are at least as influenced by their passions as by their reason. (The best solution is both good education and fixing the context.)

This importance of context is also why conservatives need to put a great deal of effort into adapting the principles that were true in centuries past to modern conditions. We no longer have an agrarian society and we never will again for the simple reason that industrial society produces industrial warfare, and industrial warfare is so much more effective and pre-industrial warfare that if we ever became an agrarian society, it would only last a few years until an industrial society conquered us and turned us into an industrial vassal state with crushing taxation to fund their own standard of living.

Fundamentally, economic productivity enables people to make more and better weapons, and the warlike nature of fallen humanity means that we must make these. We must, therefore, figure out how to achieve maximal human dignity in a way that produces at least extremely high productivity. Merely yearning for contexts which will not come back in which this was a (mostly) solved problem is not a strategy.

Ideas matter, but so does context, and people somewhat naturally prefer bad answers to non-answers.

Joe McCarthy Had Nothing To Do With the House Unamerican Activities Committee

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, Uncategorized1 Comment

A while ago I came across an interesting video from RazörFist called Hollywood Was Always Red. (A warning: RazörFist uses very salty language.)

One of the things that really struck me from it was when RazörFist pointed out that Joe McCarthy did not run the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the first clue should have been in the name: the House Unamerican Activities Committee. How, he asks, would Senator Joe McCarthy run the House Unamerican Activities Committee?

If you look it up, what Joe McCarthy ran were called the “Army-McCarthy Hearings” which were held by the “Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee” (see here). They had nothing to do with Hollywood blacklists and, as the name would suggest, were investigating communist infiltration into the Army.

The House Unamerican Activities Committee, or more properly the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was formed in 1938—9 years before Joe McCarthy would become a senator—and was initially chaired by Martin Dies Jr, a Democrat from Texas. (Check out the Wikipedia page on it.)

When he pointed out that the first clue should have been the name and highlighted the “Senator” in Senator Joe McCarthy and the “House” in House Unamerican Activities Committee, I was stunned. It’s so obvious, just from that, and yet somehow I had never considered that and just went along with the fake history I was told about how the House Unamerican Activities Committee was part of McCarthyism and McCarthy led to blacklisting in Hollywood and the like.

I don’t get stunned watching YouTube videos often. In fact, I’m not sure I have other than with this one. But it’s so strange to have realized that something that was commonplace among everyone I knew wasn’t just wrong, but obviously wrong. Not just obviously wrong, but we had all the information to know that it was wrong and just never put it together. The “House Unamerican Activities Committee” was just a name, not a collection of meaningful words in a meaningful order. But it really should have been.

Jonathan Pageau on Kanye West’s New Song

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Kanye West (now going by “Ye,” I believe) recently came out with a song called “Nigga Heil Hitler” which has that as a refrain in it. Jonathan Pageau has a very interesting video where he talks about it in the context of the breakdown of the post-WW2 concensus:

It’s very worth watching, but the basic point is that all foundational narratives made by men contain a contradiction in them and the post-WW2 narrative of good-vs-evil necessarily exculpated Stalin, who was in reality just as bad as Hitler, in order to make the WW2 narrative good-vs-evil.

He doesn’t focus on this aspect of it in the video because he’s more concerned with other things, but this very much explains why it was that the socialism of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is ignored by most people. This is why people pretend that they weren’t real socialists or they maybe started out as real socialists but then abandoned it once they gained power, etc. etc. They needed to explain the Nazis as a unique evil different from the evil of anyone on the Allies’ side. And since there’s not actually very much that distinguishes the Nazis from the Communists—in the 1930s people would flip flop between them to the point where the Nazis had an insult “beefsteak Nazi” meaning someone brown on the outside but red on the inside—what people came up with was the Nazis being racist. Well, that and nationalist. Sort of.

Regarding the racism, it’s not like the communists weren’t racists—they were—but racism wasn’t central to their socialism while it was central to the socialism of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. So this one is at least a difference. And while you could find plenty of racism in 1930s/1940s America, it was, at least, a different kind of racism. And especially after the civil rights movement of the 1950s, this ceased to be such a problem.

The nationalism of the Nazis is a curious issue because it is true it’s a major distinction between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis were national socialists while the communists were international socialists. But that meant, in practice, that Hitler only wanted to conquer most of Europe while Stalin wanted to conquer the world. That’s not really the kind of distinction that was desired, though, so people tended to pretend that Hitler wanted to conquer the world. Certainly that was what I was taught when I was a child.

This is a very interesting point and explains a lot of the modern world.

There Are Two Kinds of Extremists

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

J.D. Vance once made the observation that the real danger of social media isn’t living in an echo chamber, it’s only being exposed to the most extreme versions of the positions of people who disagree with us. I think that this is an important insight, and speaks to how it is important to seek out the reasonable version of extreme views that we see made fun of. That said, there are two kinds of extremists, and the more reasonable version is only important for one of them.

Let’s start with that kind: the extremist who is a monomaniac. This kind of extremist is extreme because he has abandoned most kinds of good in life and cares only about one kind of good. To make up an example so as to not be accidentally controversial, let us suppose that there is a man who loves the color blue. If he merely loves blue, but loves other things as well, he may well have many blue things in his house but he will not seek to paint the whole world blue, because he knows that trees and grass need to be green, and have their own value. If he was a monomaniac in his love for blue, he would not recognize the good of grass and trees and so would not care that they need to be green to achieve it (I’m speaking of photosynthesis, not of their aesthetics), and so he would seek to pain the grass and trees green, and would kill them. This kind of extremist, though highly concentrated online, is rare in real life. Most people love more than one kind of goodness, and so no matter how much free reign they are given to realize their ideal world, they will balance out competing goods and not wreck the world. These kinds of reasonable people are important to seek out. (I should also note that this highly simplified form of extremist is not what one typically meets online; I need to explain the other kind before I can clarify further.)

The other kind of extremist is a man who is dedicated to a philosophy of life and is not afraid of the opinions of his fellow man, but takes his philosophy to its logical conclusion. This is the Catholic saint, the Protestant Puritan, the Buddhist ascetic, and the Soviet dictator. People who are not extremists of this kind are not people who balance out goods, but merely people who lack the courage of their convictions. They do not live out their philosophy of life, not because they think it lacks something, but because they lack something. Most of the time, it’s social sanction that they lack. That’s why, for this kind of extremist, it is precisely the extremists you should pay the most attention to. If society were ever to adopt their beliefs, it would become more like them.

Now that I’ve explained the second kind of extremist, I can describe where you are actually most likely to meet the first kind of extremist: as someone posing as the second kind of extremist. The technical term for this is a heretic, though it’s an unpopular word with baggage, so let’s stick to “monomaniacal extremist.” For that same reason I will avoid religious examples, so let’s take a secular one: environmentalism. There are plenty of people who want to take care of the planet on which we live in a balanced way. They consider measures to ensure that we don’t poison our water supply, but also consider other goods like industrial production, nice housing, having pets, growing food, and a myriad of other goods that need to balance each other out. Then you have the monomaniac who only loves nature where it has not been affected by human beings, and so champions anything that removes human influence, at the fullness of expression being the human self-extinction project.

This example also shows the importance of distinguishing the two types of extremist. On the one hand, it is important to figure out that the monomaniacal environmentalist merely hates people, he doesn’t love the environment as one good among many, and so he does not represent the views or policies or much of anything of the people who merely consider clean air and water and an interesting variety of wildlife to be goods to balance out among other goods. On the other hand, the people who are members of the human self-extinction project are merely the monomaniacal environmentalists with the courage of their convictions. One should not ignore the human self-extinction people and seek out the more moderate “strangle the economy with regulation” environmentalists because those are only distinguished from the human self-extinction people by being unwilling to say what they really mean.

The Communist Manifesto is Unbelievably Bad

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read The Communist Manifesto (in English translation, of course) since from time to time I read primary sources and I literally have great difficulty actually believing how bad it is. It does not really contain either a political philosophy or an economic philosophy; it has a few scant elements of these, and is about as much a considered work of political philosophy as is Star Trek: The Next Generation.

For those not familiar, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a TV show set in the twenty fourth century where it is a post-scarcity world in which everyone has an unlimited amount of whatever they want without effort. In TNG (as it is commonly called for brevity) this is accomplished through free energy by unspecified means coupled with “replicators” that can make anything, instantly, with no cost. (I believe various unauthoritative technical manuals suggest there is some hidden feed-stock of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but there is never any kind of limit to what replicators can replicate, and there are episodes where feed stock is clearly not required.) I bring this up not as a tangent, but as oddly similar: it is fairly clear, from TCM (as I will call The Communist Manifest, for brevity) as well as several FAQs (which Marx called a “catechism”) that Marx believed that the industrial revolution was bringing about a post-scarcity world.

TCM was published when Marx was 30 years old, and I’ve been told it’s not why he was influential—that was Capital, or Das Kapital, as it is often known, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which is it’s full title. That book is around 1,000 pages long, and I don’t find it even slightly plausible that communists read the whole thing, so I’m still quite unsure of what to make of it. I’m willing to believe that Capital did flesh Marx’s ideas out somewhat, since they were basically only a few partial bones in TCM. Capital was published when Marx was 48, and presumably the intervening 18 years and the extra 970 pages lent themselves to a little more thought. I have trouble believing much, since the author of TCM was clearly not a thoughtful man.

It’s difficult to even critique TCM because there’s so little to it. It begins with the idea that the key to understanding history is class conflict, which is just wrong. That’s not the key. It mostly doesn’t even apply. It’s like saying that the key to understanding history is belts. I mean, yeah, you can identify belts at times and places in history, but if you think that they’re the key to understanding history you’re just a moron (assuming you’re older than fifteen; if you are fifteen you just need to think about this more). There is no single key to understanding history, because human history is as complex as human beings. And if there was a single key, interdependence would unlock quite a lot more of history than class conflict would.

Marx’s arguments are often beyond asinine, too. When he tries to address objections to abolishing the family, he starts by saying that families don’t really exist anyway so nothing will be lost. He defends all women being held in common, rather than marrying, by saying that the bourgeoisie has extramarital affairs so often that they effectively hold all women in common anyway. This is just rhetoric, not an argument, and it’s not even good rhetoric. Moreover, it’s rhetoric where actual ideas would be most natural, highlighting that there are no ideas.

To give another example of idiocy: among the general points that a communist system would have (there are only 10), Marx says that factories will be interspersed with agriculture such that there will no longer be a town/country distinction. This is only starting to become sort-of possible in certain types of manufacturing with modern high-end 3D printers in low-volume markets. In Marx’s time, when factories were enormous and required the labor of a huge number of people, this was pure insanity. Ignoring how factories would get in the way of farmers, this would require either factories so small as to be unproductive or absolutely enormous commutes to work at a time when horse was the dominant form of transportation. To say nothing of the great difficult of transporting raw materials to random locations and finished goods from them. (Factories were often on rivers because river transport is so much cheaper than overland transport; they were often near each other because one factory’s output might be used as an input by another, and not needing to transport these goods hundreds of miles was far more efficient.) If you even begin to try to work through what randomly locating factories throughout the countryside would entail in terms of transport and coordination, of the running of rail lines through farm fields and so on, it becomes immediately clear that Marx never gave a moment’s thought to what this goal would entail.

And that’s a theme of TCM. There is zero thought given to how to accomplish… anything. For example, he states that all property will be owned by the state, but he never so much as raises the question of how the state will say what will be done with its property, let alone provide even a hint of an outline of an answer to the question.

Incidentally, this is a point which a lot of people sympathetic to socialist rhetoric seem to miss: any form of socialism where the means of production are owned by The People is necessarily totalitarian, for the simple reason that if The People own the means of production, they clearly will have to say what gets done with their means of production. That computer in the apartment in which you live—that can be used to write things, so the people should get to say what their computer gets used to write. The oven in the common area of the apartment building in which you live produces cooked food, so The People should say what food their oven is used to cook.

Socialist-sympathizers will balk at this and say that all manner of things are excluded from ownership by The People, but all they’re doing is saying that what they actually want is only a little bit of socialism—often, in practice, only socialism of the things that they don’t want to own, but then most human beings are hypocrites.

Anyway, Marx says nothing in TCM about how The People (or The State) will say what happens with all of its property. He gives not a word to how this will, in his way of looking at things, only set up a new class conflict between the bureaucrats and the civilians, or between the politicians and the civilians, since clearly you can’t say what happens to everything by direct democracy. Especially since nations will fade away and there will only be one worldwide government.

A world government is, of course, a recipe for minimum accountability, but that requires some minimum of knowledge of how human beings work, which was clearly beyond Marx, or perhaps against his beliefs; but I would have expected him to at least give some vague hints about how the world government is supposed to work, even if it was beyond him to say how it wouldn’t work and what to do to correct against its failings.

History Is Safe Because It’s Over

On By Christopher LansdownIn Missing the Mark Podcast, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Some thoughts on historical fiction and our perspective on history. In particular, how knowing the outcome of history makes it hard to relate to the things historical people worried about, and how this colors our view of them and their actions. You can also watch this on YouTube: