My pandemic journal has reached Part 10 here at the end of June 2020 (see the previous entry here). I have more memes, of course, including a few random ones that aren't immediately related to current events. Enjoy!
Wed. 10 June 2020
That City Council meeting last night was really inspiring. Hopefully some change will come of it.
Tonight I had Wednesday night D&D followed by a conversation with an old friend on writing science fiction, fascism, running a small business, and the police (not necessarily related or in that order).
I’m facing the ultimate nerdy dilemma. I really want to keep reading the Dark Tower series, but I also need to read enough to vote for the Hugos by July 15. I doubt I’m going to be able to read or watch enough to vote in all the categories (it’s a lot), but I’m hoping I can at least read most of the novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories along with maybe the related work and fan writer. That’s still a lot to do by July 15.
Anyway, I finally downloaded some of the packet and bought some of the novels and novellas in paper to support the authors and also because I don’t want to read everything on a screen.
But of course the Tower calls…
Fri. 12 June 2020
I feel kind of like I’ve been busy lately, but it’s more like I’ve been doing lots of little things: union stuff (organizing stuff, contacting legislators, etc.), academic reviewing tasks, reading, a bit with the police oversight coalition, a bit of TV, etc. And a really nice walk this afternoon.
Today is the 4th anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, and the Trump administration commemorated this anniversary and Pride month by reversing legal protections for people based on gender identity or sexual orientation in federal healthcare law. Between this and planning a campaign rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, it’s becoming harder to deny that this is all deliberate. It’s at the very least callously indifferent.
I’ve finally started my Hugo reading with just a little over a month until ballots are due. I’m starting with P. Djèlí Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (a fun alternative history Cairo with djinns and more). I ordered this and a few other things as paper copies, but I’ll probably try to read a lot of it from the digital Hugo packet. I may not vote on as many categories as I have in past years. We’ll see.
I started voting for the Hugos several years ago partly to counteract the Sad Puppies (yeah, that was a whole thing …) and to be the change I wanted to see and whatnot. Now that most of their yapping is done or taken elsewhere, I continue to do it as a way to take part in SF fandom. It’s also a good excuse for me to read new stuff once in a while and read more short fiction. My reading habits are pretty random, but they do tend toward stuff that’s older (especially in philosophy where I read lots of stuff that’s thousands of years old!). And I never read as much short fiction as I should. So it’s fun to keep up with what’s going on in the genre and to read some short fiction, all while taking part in making SF history. So, that’s cool.
Wed. 17 June 2020
I guess it’s been a few days.
I’ve been starting my Hugo reading with the novellas. I like the length of novellas: long enough to be interesting, but not long enough to be tiring. So far my favorite is Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught, if Fortunate. It’s a quietly beautiful work that prompts some serious thought.
Protests continue around the world. I haven’t been to any in person lately, but I support them wholeheartedly. I’ve been continuing to donate, contact public officials, sign petitions, and spread the world online.
Another thing I’ve been doing: a friend is organizing people to make lunches for our local homeless population and I’ve been supplying some fruit and supplies for that venture. It’s one thing I don’t talk about on social media. Doing the work is enough.
Sure, social media can be egotistical and “look at me, I’m so good!” But on the other hand, leading by example to encourage others to work for making their communities better is also a good thing. Another line is between having silence taken to be complicity versus virtuous silence of “it’s not about me.” These are fine lines that I try to navigate. How well, I’m not sure.
One weird thing: is the term “virtue signaling” just a normal thing for everybody now? I thought it was a term of abuse from the right and the “anti-PC” part of the left. But how do you know when other people are virtue signaling? How do you know when you are? And what does it mean? Who is in a position to tell what is genuine expression of a virtue and what is empty, meaningless signaling of a pseudo-virtue? Is accusing someone of virtue signaling itself a kind of virtue signaling? Would the widespread use (and abuse) of this term have the function of shutting down any real discussion of moral and political issues, even if most people didn’t mean for this to happen?
I’m not sure, but now I’m leaning toward being annoyed by the whole term and thinking that it along with “political correctness” should just be thrown into the fiery chasm from whence they came.
Speaking of social media, the comments on a lot of local news outlets are a horrific shit show sometimes. One of the local TV stations posted something about the protest last night. There were a lot of supportive comments, but also a lot of meanspirited, ignorant comments. Like, a lot of people had obviously not read the article, hadn’t bothered to look online to find out what the protests are about, and had never considered that someone might have a job and then go to a protest on their time off. It’s weird.
Anyway, I broke down and wanted to add my support. Here’s what I said:
"I'm here to support people trying to make our community better for everyone and to marvel at other people who are apparently incapable of basic human empathy, using Google, or even reading the article upon which they are allegedly commenting."
Weirdly, I’ve had no haters directly respond and about 20 people liked it. One theory I have is that the sentence structure is a little too complicated for some of the trolls to understand. I may have written it this way intentionally.
But I’m not doing it just to feel smug. I really do hope maybe someone stopped and thought, “Hey, maybe I should try to find out what this is about before I harangue strangers on the internet.”
I can dream, can’t I?
Thurs. 18 June 2020
For a country allegedly founded on personal responsibility, few of our leaders at any level seem to want to take responsibility for making policies that would actually help respond to the pandemic.
Maybe this is why the pandemic has hit the US so hard? Likewise, how much has the legal-ification of the very idea of responsibility affected this? We increasingly think of responsibility in terms of legal liability, so the less you take responsibility the less likely you will be sued. But is this the right way to think about responsibility in a broader sense, especially for leaders during a pandemic?
A funny McSweeney’s article: “Just Because They’ve Turned Against Humanity Doesn’t Mean We Should Defund the Terminator Program.”
I wrote the first of a series of blog posts on my Dark Tower re-read, starting with the first two books. I’m not sure if this will count as my second or third re-read (technically it’s the third time reading the first two books, which makes it my second and one-fourth re-read).
I was going to read this series to celebrate, but I still have not received word on my official tenure, but I may be getting it next week. I thought it would come from the system President, but the Board of Trustees is meeting next week and it’s on their agenda. Maybe this changed. Who knows? I’m not really worried about it at this point (the difficult hoops have been successfully jumped through), but it will be a relief to get official word.
Besides the Dark Tower re-read, I have a lot to read for the Hugos by July 15.
But some good news today: I finished a review of a very long manuscript for a publisher. That was a relief to cross off my to do list. Just a couple more things to do this summer.
Fri. 19 June 2020
Making Juneteenth a national holiday and removing Confederate monuments are literally the least we could do toward becoming a decent country.
I’m writing a blog post to explain this statement, like a Sanskrit commentary on a sūtra.
Sun. 21 June 2020
Today Beth told me that the cats left me presents for Father’s Day in the litter box. I also called my dad.
I heard that some police are calling in sick to protest the way people are talking about police these days. This seems to suffer a similar problem as the decision to respond to protests against excessive police force with additional excessive police force. That is, if their point is to show people that we need police, they may show that we don’t really need them.
Imagine it like this.
People: Police, stop using excessive force.
Police: No, here’s more excessive force against you.
People: Police, we don’t really need you.
Police: Yes, you do. We’ll call in sick, so we won’t be around.
People: Um, are you sure we disagree?
In other news, I finished reading the novellas for the Hugos. I collected my reviews in a blog post.
Mon. 22 June 2020
It’s Octavia Butler’s birthday. She would have been 73. There’s a great new podcast out today to celebrate: it’s on Butler’s Earthseed series by Adrienne Marie Brown and Toshi Reagon. I listened to it while I took a late night, post rain walk around the neighborhood this evening. The podcast and the walk were fantastic.
Interesting fact I’m sure I’ve noticed before: Octavia Butler was only about six months younger than my dad and two years older than my mom.
Reflecting on Butler’s statement, “all that you change changes you,” reminds me that philosophy is supposed to change you. That many philosophers seem dead-set against this makes it no less true. The same goes for art as well. As Ursula Le Guin once said, a great novel is one than changes you in ways you don’t completely understand right away. (Which reminds me that I want to teach a science fiction and philosophy class on Butler and Le Guin someday).
I’m still doing Hugo reading (I started Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, which I’m loving: it’s like Dune, but with an occasional joke). And I have my Dark Tower re-read. But I have been itching to re-read the Parable books. The aforementioned podcast gives me a good excuse to do so. There are also Butler and Le Guin books I haven’t read, which ought to change. I also want to dive back into the Dune books at some point. I guess what I’m saying is that I have a lot to read and re-read.
Tues. 23 June 2020
I have an actual work thing for departmental service today: my department is undergoing a five-year review, and I’m meeting (via Zoom) with the program reviewer.
A random thought: One reason I’ve never been much of a video gamer: At some point almost all video games get to a point where the difficulty of continuing to play the game exceeds the fun I have playing it. Also, I have terrible hand-eye coordination.
A random thought I had yesterday: I had chicken and waffles for lunch and a Mint Julep for happy hour at home, and I have no idea why anyone would need to look further than this (and maybe barbecue) for Southern pride.
I checked the mail, and we didn’t have anything. I thought, “Nobody loves us, but nobody wants money, either.” This is another great saying I inherited from my mom.
Tonight I finished watching HBO’s Watchmen, which was fantastic. Two of my failings as a nerd are that I don’t really like comic books and I think superheroes are kind of silly. But if other superhero stuff was even half as good as this, I’d have to rethink my failings.
I admit it took me a few episodes to get into it. A lot of my issue was just overcoming my aversion to superheroes. But by episode three or so, I was on board. Aside from just being well written throughout, the show deals with the history of racist violence in America without preaching or kid-gloves, it has a superhero origin story that actually makes sense (Hooded Justice), the alternate history/parallel dimension America is fascinatingly realized and oddly believable, Dr. Manhattan is a mind-bending character, the actors are great (especially Regina King, Hong Chau, Yahya Abdul-Maheen II, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Jeremy Irons), and so much more.
Wed. 24 June 2020
A comment I just put on a friend’s Facebook post on dealing with anti-mask people on Twitter:
I think social media has a way of amplifying the voices of people who are especially ignorant and mean so they appear to be a larger part of the population than they are. Or at least I have to hope this is true to avoid total despair about the human race.
Thurs. 25 June 2020
The other day I saw a tweet that from the playwright Claire Willett that I’ve been thinking about (see below). She discussed “how humor shapes culture” and compared 90’s Beavis and Butthead humor to Cards Against Humanity and South Park humor. She cites South Park in particular as representing “this trend that peak humor is to mock the very idea of caring about anything.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I like some South Park, so my point isn’t about whether South Park is a good show or not or whether Cards Against Humanity is fun. Willett also makes the point that she’s not talking about a particular show, but larger trends in humor. She compares this trend to a to more recent trend in absurdist humor.
While I think the idea of mocking caring about anything does cut across political boundaries to some extent, in the Trump era it seems to have been particularly embraced by many on the right. Like the idea of caring about others enough to wear a mask during a pandemic is to be ridiculed. Those who care about racial injustice need to “get a job” or “stop wasting everybody’s time” (paraphrases of typical comments on local news stories about the ongoing protests).
I also think this sort of dismissal is at the root of almost everybody who worries a lot about things like “political correctness” or “cancel culture.” And here a good chunk of libertarians and leftists are involved as well. The fundamental conceit of most Anti-PC discourse is that nobody could actually, genuinely care about these things, at least not in the ways they claim to, and therefore it must all be for show or “just virtue signaling” or a power play or whatever.
In the past I’ve doubted whether anything like “political correctness” exists at all (although I have been assured by many Very Smart White Dudes of the Internet that it most definitely does exist). And since “cancel culture” is a deeply related phenomenon, I’m not sure about that, either. I think the phrase “virtue signaling” is undergoing a significant shift in meaning so that it might become a more general term, but its history seems to include this core as well.
I’m not saying that sometimes people don’t say things for less-than-sincere reasons or that some people don’t get obnoxiously sanctimonious or that some people don’t get shut out of some personal or professional contacts as consequences of things they do to other people. But whether any of these diverse phenomena can be grouped under convenient terms like “virtue signaling” or “political correctness” or “cancel culture” that should thereby activate a whole apparatus of Culture War organizing metaphors that dictate boringly predictable moves … I’m extremely skeptical about that.
There’s also the epistemological problem that successfully applying these terms would seem to rely on the applier understanding the applyee’s mind better than the applyee does! I mean, how do you know whether someone is sincere or whether they might have a different framework for understanding things than you do? Telepathy?
What underlies a lot of this is something I suspect (and I do mean suspect: I can’t know other people’s minds, either! I’m sure those Very Smart White Dudes of the Internet will correct me). Anyway, my suspicion is that underlying all this is an inability to imagine that someone might genuinely care about social justice. A paradigm example of the phenomenon I’m talking about is the fact that “Social Justice Warrior” is supposed to be a pejorative, like fighting for social justice is a bad thing! WTF?
It goes something like this for the Anti-PC crowd: 1. Some person seems to care about something I find trivial or silly. 2. Obviously they can’t actually care about that because I don’t care about it. 3. Rather than finding out why another person might care about that, I’m going to apply pejorative labels to that person and continue entrenching myself in the same old Culture Wars we’ve been fighting for decades. I mean, what’s the alternative? Research? Empathy? Conversation? Who has time for any of that bullshit?
Okay, this is all speculation. I don’t really know. It’s a conjecture at best.
But if I’m right about this, it makes me sad. It seems to be a failure of intelligence and curiosity for one thing. And perhaps a moral failure in easily and selfishly discounting another person. But even deeper than any of that is a failure of imagination.
It’s a failure to imagine that another person might have experiences other than one’s own, and that these experiences might open up new truths and new ways of looking at the world. It’s a failure to imagine that the world could be wider and more interesting and more beautiful for all these different experiences and perspectives. It’s a failure to imagine that another person might care about things simply because you don’t care about anything.
I’m not saying all perspectives are true (I’m honestly not sure what that would mean even though many smart philosophers have claimed to believe such a thing). I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever think you might be right after you’ve carefully examined a situation. My point is that you shouldn’t always just automatically assume that your perspective is the true one at the expense of others.
Think about it: How boring that would be to think you have all the answers that there are, that your framework is the only possible framework for looking at anything! How would you ever learn anything? How would you ever open yourself up to growth and interaction with the world and your fellow humans? How could you ever learn to care about other people (to the extent that caring can be taught) if you don’t try to imagine their perspectives?
So in the end I think (and again, this is at best a conjecture!) that the Anti-PC brigade is perhaps most guilty of a failure of imagination. There are more things in heaven and earth, Anti-PC brigade, than are dreamt of in your Culture War.
(I may need to edit this entry to become its own separate post.)
Fri. 26 June 2020
I’ve done a lot of socially distanced things with people in the last few days. It’s weird. The weirdness is that I’m not used to being around people much, and it’s hard to recognize people with masks on.
Yesterday I helped my friend deliver some lunches, fruit, and water (I’ve been contributing to this the last few weeks, but I haven’t helped deliver until this week). We went to one of the poorest parts of town, and then in front of one of the larger soup kitchens (one that only serves dinner).
Like most cities in America, especially in the Southeast, Chattanooga has a lot of poor and homeless citizens. It’s not like I’m not aware of this, but maybe it’s because I haven’t been going out much for the last few months that it was a bit of a reminder. Everyone was great and thankful. At one stop we had some juice boxes to hand out. I grabbed the box, and I immediately felt like the most popular kid in school.
I’m glad to take part in this effort to offer just a little bit of food for hungry people. It would be better if we built a society where this type of thing wasn’t needed. I talked to my friend a little bit along our route about our police and criminal justice systems and how they are not designed to actually help people, least of all the poor, mostly Black people we were mainly interacting with yesterday. And considering that we are a wealthy society that allows a lot of people to live in poverty or on the streets and that refuses to reorganize itself to stop a deadly virus, it’s hard to think that American society cares about people at all. Not a new thought for me. But never a happy one.
Today I had a lot of union work. We released not one, but two statements today: a Racial Justice statement and an Open Letter about COVID-19. Then some of our members met up to support a student-led protest calling for disarming and divesting from campus police. Campus police regularly harass students of color, they totally botched an “active shooter” situation last fall that turned out to be one of their own officers out of uniform carrying a rifle down the street, and just a couple days ago, six officers pulled over a Black faculty member on campus.
The event was a bit haphazardly organized, but it’s a student event in the summer so you have to cut them some slack. 100% of people were wearing masks, and social distancing was easy in the main quad on campus. It was a great event that I think forged some connections between campus and the larger community (a couple organizers of our nightly protests spoke). It was also nice, if a bit odd, to see some people I haven’t seen in person for several months, even if it was a bit hard to recognize some people and we had to stand several feet apart.
Even just being around multiple people the last two days was kind of weird, like I forgot how to interact with people without a computer screen between us.
Anyway, I hope to relax a bit this weekend. Do some Hugo reading. Play some D&D. Maybe drink some whiskey. Write a blog post. We’ll see.
Sat. 27 June 2020
Am I the only person who finds most Google products to be extremely counter-intuitive? Deciphering symbols created by priests in a faraway valley of stone makes me feel like an Egyptologist, which is cool, but sometimes I just want to edit a shared document.
Mon. 29 June 2020
I had a pretty good weekend. I did most of the things I said I was going to do. I finished Arkady Martine’s A Memory of Empire, which was fantastic. I wrote a review, which I’ll post on my blog soon. It’s going to be hard to beat that for the Hugos, I think. I’ve started Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. About 70 pages in I can’t tell yet if I like it or not (the polarized reviews may have put me in that mindset), but it’s unique. If I can’t get into that, I may pick up Hugo the novelletes and short stories. I have until July 15 to vote. I don’t think I’ll finish all the novels, anyway.
I’ve also been reading MLK’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? I first read it about 20 years ago, and it seems in many ways even more relevant for today. It’s a much more nuanced and radical King than the typical image of him today. I wish I could send this book to every white person who uses MLK quotes out of context to tell Black people how to behave.
There’s a lot going on in the news, for instance with the US Supreme Court, most of it surprisingly good (affirming that LGBT people are included in provisions about sex discrimination, rejecting Louisiana’s abortion restrictions, etc.). Also, the President retweeted a video in which a person yelled, “White power,” so yeah, there’s that. I don’t understand why anyone would be surprised at this point, but well, that’s something.
Protests continue around the country and here in Chattanooga. Breonna Taylor’s killers have yet to be arrested after more than three months. Many police continue to do precisely the things people are protesting against as if they’re trying to make the protesters’ points for them. Among many other examples, this includes the Atlanta police killing Rayshard Brooks on June 12, the harassment of a former faculty member at my university by my university police department last week, the Aurora, CO police using pepper spray at last weekend’s violin vigil for Elijah McClain (who was killed last year), and the NYPD attacking protesters marking the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall uprising yesterday. Can an institution that responds to reasonable demands in this way be reformed?
I just ordered lunch delivery at home for the first time from a place I used to visit in person roughly once a week before the pandemic. Weird.
Tues. 30 June 2020
It’s the last day of June. La ti da.
I received an email that Lexington Books will be publishing a paperback version of my book! I’ve had several people tell me the hardcover is unaffordable (because it is: about $100!), and I’ve been saying a paperback may be available soon. (I may also occasionally send people pdfs, but let’s not say much about that).
My university conducted an investigation of the former faculty member stopped by police. And – Surprise! Surprise!—they found no evidence of racial profiling. It’s unclear what the standard of evidence is here, but the main bit of evidence seems to be the officers’ testimony that they could not identify the race and gender of the driver before they pulled her over.
But this led me to an epistemological issue. What would constitute evidence of racial profiling under their criteria? Is the whole police system set up to make establishing such claims nearly impossible? Is this more reason to doubt that surface-level reforms are not enough?
Here’s an email I just sent to the core group of my union.
Hi everyone,
I wanted to say that you've all been doing really great work for UCW. Last week was definitely one of the most active weeks for UCW at UTC in my memory. Since I joined UCW in 2016, we've gone from not meeting at all to issuing statements, attending a student demonstration as a group, bettering our social media presence, making connections with the local labor and social justice movements as well as the statewide union, and more.
Obviously we have a lot more work to do to make UTC a more just workplace for everyone, but I think it's important to pause once in a while to reflect on what we've accomplished as we think about how we're moving forward.
Good work, everyone!
Take care,
Ethan
PS: Please continue to share our Racial Justice Statement and our Open Letter widely! And be sure to check out the great work our social media team is doing on our Facebook page!
I finished MLK’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? I first read it about 20 years ago, and it’s always been my favorite of King’s books. I found it even more relevant today. Here’s the initial review I posted on Goodreads. I may write more later.
Reading this again for the first time in 20 years, I think that despite some ways in which King was a person of his times (e.g., his unfortunate sexism and lack of attention gender issues), a lot of this is even more relevant today. I'm thinking especially of King's call to radically rethink everything about American society and the world order, to make a world that is compassionate and person-centered rather than militaristic and profit-centered. That he does this with a realistic appraisal of failures and challenges that verges on cynicism while maintaining a core of hope is what I find most relatable in 2020 as we navigate a pandemic and continuing racial and economic disparities. I wish I could send this book to every white person who posts out-of-context MLK quotes on social media in service of the status quo or to tell Black people how to behave.
This is an absolute classic, so it's hard to know how to write a full review. Two ideas that might do it justice: Either a science fiction alternative history of an America and world that took King's advice from this book or making a bunch of memes of King's most radical quotes from this book to post in response to people who post MLK quotes in service of the 21st century version of the white backlash King describes in this book.
Maybe I'll do both eventually. Maybe this will be an assignment for students when I inevitably teach this book in one of my philosophy classes. In the meantime, here is my assignment to you, dear reader: please read this book.
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