Dear LGBTQIA+ friends...

Dear LGBTQIA+ friends and readers,

I haven't been saying much after the heartbreaking murder of 49 people at a gay bar in Orlando last weekend.  I don't know what to say.  I don't want to be another straight, white cis gender man trying to make this tragedy about himself.  It's about you, and we should all listen (see some resources below, and please feel free to suggest others).  As horrifying as this has been for me, I realize that I can't imagine what this has been like for you.

There are many disturbing, heart-wrenching things about this brutal murder of 49 human beings.  One of these is the thought that that could have been you, any one of you.  This was an attack on LGBTQIA+ people, most of whom were people of color, mostly Latinx.  Wherever the national conversation takes us on terrorism and guns, we can't forget who was attacked and what this means.

You deserve to live on this planet (or any other) as much as anyone.  You matter.  I've always admired the courage you have just to be who you are.  Especially in a world that demands that you be somebody you're not.  I hope that your courage will inspire everyone to create the world that you deserve.

In love and solidarity,
Ethan Mills

PS:  Here are a few of the online resources I've found to be worth reading.  Please feel free to add more in the comments.

• "The Long, Tragic History of Violence at LGBTQ Clubs and Bars in America"
• "Remembering the Victims of the Pulse Gay Nightclub Massacre in Orlando"
• "8 Ways Allies Can Show Up for the Queer Community After Orlando"
• "Dear White, Hetero Cis People, Please Don't Co-Opt This Tragedy"
• "What Queer Muslims are Saying About the Orlando Shooting"
• "George Takei: How the LGBT Community Can Lead America to a Sane Gun Policy"

The Otherness of Ourselves: This Alien Shore by C. S. Friedman

C. S. Friedman's This Alien Shore is one of the deepest science fictional meditations on diversity I've encountered.  Not only do the people look differently from one another, they think differently.  Physiological diversity is paired with cognitive diversity.  And as scary as all this can be at first, the message is that humanity is better off for our differences.

Influences

There's a lot of Dune here (there's even a Guild) with a dose of computer capers à la Neuromancer or Snow Crash.  Despite these obvious influences, Friedman's book doesn't feel derivative.  I'm a huge Dune fan, and I'm a little surprised that such a classic hasn't inspired more books like Friedman's.  Even though there is a Guild, they are something more like a combination of Herbert's Guild, Bene Gesserit, and Mentats all in one, but not exactly any of those things, either.

I'm not much of a computer person, and although I appreciate the genius of Gibson and Stephenson, I've never been a big cyberpunk fan.  Maybe it's because Friedman had to learn about computer programming to write this novel (as she says in the acknowledgments), but I found the computer passages of this book far more engaging and readable for a non-programmer than any cyberpunk story I've read before.

Two Conferences in Hawaii

I'm currently in Honolulu, Hawaii where I'm attending two academic conferences: The Eleventh East-West Philosophers' Conference (which just ended today) and the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Annual Conference (which begins on Thursday).

The University of Hawaii at Mānoa
(both conferences take place in the building on the lower left)

Lest you think I'm in Hawaii just for a vacation involving the beach and drinking Mai Tais (it's not just for those things!), here are my abstracts for my talks!

You can see this post on the Indian Philosophy Blog for more on some other papers at the East-West Philosophers' Conference.  And see this post for more on some of the other papers for the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy Conference.

SAPD – Suggested Acronyms for Puppy Discussion

As many science fiction and fantasy fans are already aware, the Sad and Rabid Puppies are at it again this year.  <sigh>  In a post last year I discussed the Puppies’ vision of the “acronym-laden hellscape” of SFF fandom – SMOFs and SJWs and CHORFs, oh my!  

Jayarāśi and His Place in Classical Indian Philosophy

"Cārvāka" (Credit: www.carvaka4india.com)

On May 4, I gave a webinar for the Takshashila Institution (a policy think tank in India).  This was my first online presentation!

The talk, "Jayarāśi and His Place in Classical Indian Philosophy," is about the classical Indian philosopher Jayarāśi, a skeptic and possible member of the irreligious Cārvāka school.  A lot of the talk is about placing Jayarāśi in his context in the rich diversity of the classical Indian philosophical tradition.  I aimed to make the talk accessible to people without a background in philosophy or Indian philosophy.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK TO THE AUDIO FILE.  

(Note: There was also a PowerPoint for the talk, which is not available at the above link).

Thank you to the Takshashila Institution, especially Nitin Pai, Devika Kher, and Pavan Srinath, for the invitation and for such great questions (which you can hear at the end of the audio file).

The first slide of the PowerPoint

Panoptic Personas: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

I've been a Philip K. Dick fan for a long time.  I even wrote a chapter for Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Do Androids Have Kindred Spirits?!  But somehow I had never read A Scanner Darkly.  This is odd because it's one of his more famous titles, although I did see (and enjoy) the Linklater movie several years ago.

Maybe it's because I've never been much of a drug person (I'm weird enough as it is) or maybe it's because I've never experienced paranoia about police surveillance, but this always sounded to me like the least interesting of Dick's A-list novels.

I was wrong.  I wish I had read this sooner.  A Scanner Darkly is, of course, a novel about drug culture and paranoia, but it's also a heart-breaking (and occasionally humorous) meditation on meaning, love, friendship, ethics, power, personal identity, and epistemology.

It combines the subtle humor and epistemological themes of Dick's earlier novels with the literary experimentation and emotional depth of his later novels.  It also generally lacks the bizarre religious themes of VALIS and The Exegesis, which is a brand of Dickian weirdness I've never warmed to, maybe because I worry it's a result more of his mental illness than his literary genius.

Academic Review of Reviews: Books by Beckwith, Carpenter, and Siderits/Katsura

One of the professional academic hats I wear is that of the Book Review Editor at the Indian Philosophy Blog.  I'm always in search of reviewers for that blog.  To encourage others to submit their own reviews I wrote some short book notes of my own on Christopher Beckwith's Greek Buddha (which I also discussed here), Amber Carpenter's Indian Buddhist Philosophy, and the translation of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by Mark Siderits and Shōryu Katsura. 

You can see the full post here: "Brief Book Notes on Beckwith, Carpenter, and Siderits/Katura, by Ethan Mills."