This has not been exactly a happy week for world news. Seriously, one of the least awful things to happen this week was the stock market taking a dive as the pointless trade war rattled the economy further.
So this week’s Friday Five wasn’t exactly fun to assemble. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to the queer community, five stories about science fact and fiction, five stories about haters and their guns, five stories about the deplorables, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
My copy of The Dragon and the George, which I never realized was a fist edition until I was researching for this blog post.I’ve mentioned before that I joined the Science Fiction Book Club when I was in middle school. Now, the problem was that I didn’t have a steady source of income, and I did my first order without consulting any adults in my life1, and so I had not realized that the cheap price on the advertisement did not include shipping, so this mysterious box arrived in the mail with postage due and my parents were not pleased. Anyway, for the next several years I had to remember to send the post cards back in saying “Do not send this month’s selection!” except on those occasions that I had some money or that my parents agreed I could have the particular book and they would pay for it. Anyway, from about October 1975 until July 1976 I got to order one book every month because my parents were going through a messy divorce and my paternal grandfather declared he would pay for the books4. And one of the books I got during that interval was The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson.
The premise of the book is a weird hybrid of sci fi and fantasy—both portal fantasy and epic fantasy by the time the book is through. Our protagonist, Jim Eckart, holds a PhD in Medieval History and is hoping to become a full-time instructor at the university. His fiancé, Angie, is working on her own doctorate degree in English literature5, and is also working as an assistant to a professor who, in Jim’s opinion, is always tricking Angie into working more than she ought to. One day, when she isn’t ready to be picked up by Jim, he rushes to the professor’s lab, arriving just in time to see Angie in a contraption that looks as if it is from a bad sci fi movie—and then she vanishes before Jim can say a word.
The professor’s machine is supposed to boost latent psychic abilities, and he was trying to get Angie to astral project into another dimension. He never expected her to physically teleport there. The professor has to explain that he can’t simply pull Angie back—it is her own psychic talent that did the trick, after all. But he is certain that if she could be hypnotized in the other realm to return home, she would pull it off. So he convinces Jim to get into the machine, and at a lower power setting, has high hopes6 that Jim will project into the body of a native of this other dimension near Angie and be able to convince her to return herself home.
That’s the set up.
Jim agrees, and he wakes up not inside the body of any person close to Angie. Instead, he wakes up inside the body of a dragon named Gorbash, and trouble ensues from there.
The body Jim is in isn’t anywhere close to Angie’s location. He spends a few chapters trying to sort out the world he is in, which seems to be very similar to 14th Century England… except that are multiple species of dragons, and there are wizards, and some wolfs can talk. Also, humans in this world are all called Georges (at least by dragons and the talking wolves) because of the legend of St. George and the Dragon. Hence the title.
Jim eventually figures out that Angie has been captured by two dragons. He meets with them, and attempts to hypnotize Angie so that she will return to earth, but she refused to leave without Jim. While they are trying to think of an alternative way for both to get back, one of the dragons whisks Angie away, and she is imprisoned by an evil knight and the dragon who was in an alliance with the forces of Darkness.
Jim meets a wizard named Carolinus who sets him the task to collect a series of companions (which includes a knight, a woman archer of extraordinary talent, a talking wolf who was a friend of the dragon Jim’s consciousness is trapped in, a very elderly and no longer robust dragon who is a relative of the body Jim is trapped in, and a small dragon from a subspecies that is ridiculed by normal dragons) before he can make an assault7 on the keep where Angie is being held prisoner.
The whole point of this book was to invert the idea of who we should be rooting for when knights battle dragons, so it should be no surprise that the part I found most interesting was the complex society of dragons that was partially explored in this book. Two of my three favorite characters in the book are dragons (the elderly dragon and the smaller one). I read this book about a year before my social group discovered original Dungeons & Dragons8, which was only shortly before the first printing the Advanced D&D’s Player’s Handbook, which we all bought, and tried to produce better adventures with as slowly, every so slowly, the Monster Manual and other books needed to make AD&D a real game were published.
And mention all of that because when I was designing campaigns, I tried to play the dragons more like the characters in this book. Which was easier to do before the official Monster Manual came out and was filled with, frankly, a poorly-designed set of monsters.
But to get back to The Dragon and the George, eventually the evil knight and dragon and their many monster companions are defeated, though at great cost, and Angie is rescued. Angie and Jim decide that they don’t want to go back to earth for various reasons, and Carolinus separates Jim for Gorbash, giving him a human body identical to his one from earth. Which set things up for the characters to return for a sequel, that that wouldn’t be published for 14 years. Dickson eventually completed a total of 9 books in the series before his death in 2001.
I only read three of the sequels. I didn’t find them as compelling as the original. Sometime in the mid-nineties, after being disappointed in one of said sequels, I decided to re-read the first book, and was quite happy to find it still enjoyable. Do I wish the damsel in distress had been a more fleshed out and active character in the story? Yes. But the story held up a lot better than some of my other old favorites from my teen years and before.
And besides, the dragons, at least, got to be something more than cliches.
Footnotes
1. As I recall the offer that I found inside a copy of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, which was itself the result of one of my grandmothers buying me a subscription for my birthday and renewing it each year after2, had said that you would receive 6 books for just one nickel3!
2. The other grandmother, by the way, upon hearing me explain to a friend that I’d actually wanted a subscription to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction purchased me a couple years of subscription to that ‘zine, as well my next birthday.
3. The order card had a place for you to tape a nickel to the card before placing it in an envelope. I complete missed the small print about the shipping.
4. I did not intentionally manipulate anyone’s sense of guilt. The month that all we found out about my dad having had a long-running affair with another woman and having fathered two children with her and so on and so forth was, well, it was hectic. And I didn’t mail the card in on time that month, and the book showed up a few weeks later, and things just happened5.
4. Not that I didn’t recognize it was a gift horse into whose mouth I was not looking, but…
5. I can’t decide whether I should be irritated at the cliché of the woman who is the romantic interest of the male protagonist being into English Literature. On the other hand, I suppose that we ought to be grateful that Jim isn’t a science major, right?
6. I distinctly remember being a bit put out at this point the first time I read it, because it seemed to me that the professor had no evidence to back up any of this theories.
7. I said it would move into Epic Fantasy territory!
8. The precursor the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons9 published first in 1974 and came as a set of small books and very cheaply-made dice in a white box.
9. Which began being published as hardbound rulebooks in 1977.
(click to embiggen)I recently linked to an article about a former evangelical superstar who now describes himself as an ex-Christian. Now, since I have been describing myself as both an ex-evangelical and an ex-Christian for many years, you would expect that I would be totally in this guy’s corner. And when I linked to the previous post I did say that I am happy that he is renouncing his previous views and specifically that he asked his publisher to not issue more print runs of his advice books… but if you know me, you probably understood that I wasn’t giving him a full-throated endorsement with those statements.
And let’s be perfectly clear: I am not yet willing to embrace him into the ally fold. Because so far his “apologies” and his repudiations of his former stances have fallen far short of the minimal acceptable act of contrition.
In order to explain that, I have to give you some background. Mr Harris was raised by two of the founders of the evangelical home-schooling movement. I know that there are non-evangelical families that participate in home-schooling, but the largest of the home-school movements are run by very conservative so-called Christians. All of the statistics indicate that the majority of students in those programs, at least, do not receive minimal science education while their history curriculum fall far short of any reasonable expectation of accuracy. And the sex education would be laughable if it wasn’t causing so much harm.
But let’s get back to Mr. Harris. Harris came to prominence in evangelical circles for writing a book called. I Kissed Dating Goodbye which was about how modern dating culture was merely thinly disguised promiscuity. He promulgated all the usual arguments fundamental to purity culture, which is pushed by many churches as a biblical reaction to immorality, when it is actually a codification of practices that victimize natural feelings women experience, while excusing immoral impulses of heterosexual men.
Harris supported an alternative to dating called “courtship,” where a young man—feeling that god has pointed out his intended bride to him—approaches her and her father, and if the father approves, they begin courting. This is different than dating mostly in that everyone agrees there will be no kissing ever, and that they will also spend their time together in chaperoned (usually church-sponsored) activities until such time that that families deem it is time for the two to marry.
You will note that it is the young woman’s father who approves in that description, not the young woman herself. If you bring that up to the folks who push this particular brand of purity culture, they will insist that of course the father consults with his daughter before giving his approval. But counsellors who have worked with young people who feel they are being railroaded by their family’s beliefs on this, as well as the accounts of adults who have fled those churches, report that the majority of the time the young woman’s wishes are not taken into account.
The entire process is built around assumptions that men naturally are imbued by god with insatiable lust, while women are tasked by that same god with ensuring that lust doesn’t become inflamed. The upshot of which is that boys and young men aren’t taught to respect boundaries or take responsibility for their own feelings and actions. And if any so-called sexual sin happens, it is always the fault of the girl or young woman, because it’s her job not to tempt the young man, right?
Harris made a lot of money from that book and subsequent writings, going on to become a pastor in a very anti-gay denomination. Which comes as a surprise to no one.
What has pushed him into the spotlight in recent years are first, his repudiations of his past teachings. It began a few years ago when he said he no longer supported many of the ideas in his first book. Oddly, it was quite some time later before he asked the publisher of his first book to stop selling the book. He and the publisher reached an agreement whereby they would not pursue any further reprints, but they would continue to promote and sell his book until the existing inventory was sold… and they would continue to pay him his royalties throughout this period.
Next, he worked with a documentarian to produce a film and then go an a so-called apology tour for the communities that were harmed by his sex-negative, misogynistic, anti-gay, anti-trans rhetoric. The problem is, the documentary and the tour was all about him (and selling his new apology merchandise) and not about the communities that have been harmed for many years by his anti-gay and anti-feminist teachings and his books.
Since then, he and his wife have announced that they are getting a divorce. Shortly after that he announced that he no longer considered himself a Christian and he specifically issued an apology to the LGBT community. That sounds great. But when he made this last announcement on Instagram, in as accompanied by a pretentious photo of himself gazing out at a lake. A photo was was taken by a professional he hired for the purpose. Which is totally what you would expect an ordinary person to do when issuing an apology about your years of being a leader of a bigoted movement, right? [/sarcasm]
And then, this weekend what did he do? Why he traveled from Ohio to Vancouver, British Columbia and marched in the Gay Pride Parade there. We know this because he posted a number of pictures of himself wearing a rainbow t-shirt to his Instagram account. We see him posing with people at the parade. We see him eating a rainbow donut. We see him standing on a sidewalk with the rainbow-clad crowd applauding the parade in the background, and so on.
All of which seems very… calculated. Joe Jervis over on his blog, Joe.My.God snarkily observed: “I guess we can give him props for at least doing this on his own before a Grindr account or something similar goes public.” I don’t suspect that Harris is going to come out as gay anytime soon—though he certainly wouldn’t be the first conservative pastor whose sermons focused a disproportionate time on sexual matters to be found out to be a closet case. I’m more concerned with how he has found ways to monetize his so-called transformation.
Take that documentary: a blogger named Elizabeth Esther who had written about her own escape from a purity-culture church, participated in Harris’s documentary. Later, when Harris started selling copies of the documentary while doing his apology tour, she saw how her interview with him was edited in a very distorting way. As she says, the whole thing came across as Harris proclaiming, “I had good intentions. I need you to know how good my intentions were!” That’s not an adequate apology to queer kids who were abused and/or kicked out on the street by their religious parents following advice from Harris’ books. It is not an adequate apology to women who were shamed about their own bodies from early childhood. It is not an adequate apology to kids of all genders who were pushed into relationships without adequate understandings of how real relationships work. And so on.
I could rant some more, but Patrick L. Green, who for many years was a pastor at a liberal church near Chicago that ran a youth outreach program which, among other things, tried to support kid who were being victimized in the purity-culture obsessed churches in their community. His post includes a lot of interesting (and sometimes disturbing) information: Joshua Harris’ Creation And What We Need to Consider.
Maybe Harris really is trying to find a way to make amends, but given that he first half-heartedly repudiated his most famous book (and had to be called out many times by ex-evangelicals before he actually asked the publisher to stop selling it), then made a documentary that he sold along with other merchandise on that so-called apology tour, then hiring a professional photographer for his instagram post announcing that he was leaving the church, and then those Pride Parade photos that look staged…
…well, let’s just say, I’m expecting a new book or something similar to go on sale soon. I’m not planning on buying it.
I frequently save memes, cartoons, and the like to use as an illustration for a blog post or Friday Five. I always gather a lot more than I can actually use, so every now and then I share some that I didn’t use.
If playing video games caused mass shootings, we’d see a lot more mass shootings outside the U.S.(Click to embiggen)As the stock market drops further while China stops buying our farm goods, and buys more from Russia and Brazil.Yep! (click to embiggen)Illegal diversion of campaign funds to cover it up… (click to embiggen)Yep!(Click to embiggen)
Since there is almost certainly going to be more outrageous political news by the end of the week that will be more urgent for the Friday Five, I also wanted to share some more stories and op-eds on the horrible crimes that happened this last weekend (which I wrote a about yesterday):
Front cover of today’s New York Post.Another week another mass shooting, or wait, no at least two more mass shootings. And oh, all the usual nonsense from people who are deeply invested in making sure we don’t do anything to cut down on the number of preventable deaths. I’ve written about this too many times already: Why thoughts and prayers are worse than inadequate, for instance. And then this analysis of the most popular arguments from those who claim there’s nothing we can go: They used to insist that drunk driving couldn’t be reduced, either. Not to mention this bit about leaping to conclusions without examining underlying assumptions: Oh, lord, the leaping!
I am slightly heartened that a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, has joined the ever growing chorus calling for a ban on certain categories of guns: The Post urges Trump to take action on assault weapons.
We’re used to all of the usual suspects trotting out their logically fallacious arguments (most of them commit a variation of the Nirvana Fallacy, also known as the Perfect-solution Fallacy: if whatever changes proposed can’t guarantee there will never be a gun death again, well, then we can’t do anything at all! Bull.
This weekend, thanks to Neil deGrasse Tyson being his usual smug self, we got one of the other fallacious arguments, and not for one of the typical rightwing types at all! Tyson had one of the most vapid and tone-deaf hot takes ever, in a tweet where he made the claim that in a typical 48 hours there are far more deaths in the U.S. due to medical errors, and due to the flu, and due to suicide, and due to car accidents, and due to homicide by handgun then these too mass shootings. Therefore, we should, you know, not get upset. Hit the link to see the tweet in question.
In one tweet he managed to pack several logical fallacies, which—if we weren’t talking about people being murdered—would be funny coming from a smug wanker who has made a career out of pretending to be the smartest guy in the room.
The first logical fallacy he is committing is the Appeal to Worse Problems (more formally known as the Fallacy of Relative Privation). All of these other things, he argues, cause more deaths, so we shouldn’t waste any time worrying about mass shootings until we eliminate all of those other causes of death. It’s a specialized kind of false dichotomy or dilemma: implying that we can only choose to worry work on a solution to one of the things in front of us.
Another problem is that several of the things in the list have no relationship whatsoever to the problem at hand. That the couple that could be argued to have a relationship, it’s a very weak one.
Medical errors, by definition, are not intentional acts. One has to be licensed as a medical professional and in most jurisdictions receive regular training and sometimes re-certification in order to practice medicine. Another way they differ from mass shootings is that we have systems in place designed to study such errors in order to find ways to make them less likely to happen. We have systems in place to apply those lessons. We have nothing like this for mass shootings.
Flu is not an intentional act by a human, it is caused by a virus. We have vaccines to reduce the incidence of flu. We have medications to reduce the severity of flu when it happens. We have entire teams of experts constantly studying flu and looking for ways to improve the vaccines and educate people in other ways to reduce their odds of catching flu. We have nothing like this for mass shootings.
Suicide is an act of self-destruction. We have suicide prevention hotlines. We have other forms of medical and psychiatric help available. We have groups of medical experts studying suicide (and proving again and again that there are ways to reduce the incidence of the act—that’s a topic for another day). But, those studies do relate slightly to the mass shootings discussion, as it has been shown that, for instance, banning guns in the residential parts of U.S. military bases (a program first undertaken at bases with a high incidents of service members committing murder-suicide of their families) doesn’t just cut down on the instance of gun deaths, but also reduces the rate of all categories domestic violence.
The vast majority of car crashes are not intentional acts. And again, we have experts in both the private and public sector who study car crashes and car design and relevant laws to find ways to reduce the rate of car fatalities. And we’ve significantly reduced them! Again, nothing like that exists for mass shootings. Also, you are required to have a driver’s license and regularly renew it to be drive. Cars are required to be registered and have their plates renewed periodically. Most jurisdictions require that you carry auto insurance for each car you own. Many jurisdictions require periodic inspection of the car to retain its registration. None of this applies to gun ownership.
The only one of his claimed worse problems to have more than a slight connection to mass shooting is homicide by handgun. And those findings about domestic violence on military bases give us at least some reason to suspect that the easy availability of guns contributes to the incidence of violent crimes in general. There seems to be something about the way that we perceive guns as opposed to knives and other weapons that has far-reaching effects. But, again, we don’t have large systemic ways of studying gun violence in this country.
The reason we don’t have systems in place to study gun violence is because Congress, under the influence of the gun lobby (usually in the guise of the NRA) has made it illegal to do so. And if there were no relationship between the availability of guns and the incidence of gun violence, why else would gun manufacturers be willing to spend millions each election cycle to prevent anyone from studying it?
Humans are social animals. Working together and the ability to divide labor is one of our species’ survival traits. We can work (as we already are), on other problems and the scourge of gun violence at the same time. Putting effort into universal background checks, and voluntary gun buy back programs, and studying other ways to reduce the incidents of these crimes. Red flag laws, which at least some Republican Senators have signaled they are willing to pass, would be a nice start.
Figuring out how to unpack toxic masculinity, racism, and how the mega-rich use our prejudices to blame economic uncertainty on marginalized groups instead of the hoarding and exploitation by corporations and billionaires, isn’t going to be easy. But if organizations like the National Institutes for Health could start studying gun violence systematically, we will find at least some ways to combat those contributing factors.
But it isn’t going to happen unless we ignore the excuses and demand action.
(click to embiggen)Time for another post about news that broke after I posted this week’s Friday Five, or didn’t come to my attention until afterward, or about a previously linked story which has new developments. And as usual I have some opinions that I wish to expound upon.
Let’s jump in: With Ratcliffe, another Trump nominee withdraws with a damaged reputation. So, Ratcliffe was an attorney in Texas that George W. Bush appointed to a position in the Department of Justice where he worked for five years (including a brief stint as an Interim U.S. Attorney). Also during that time, he was serving as Mayor of the small town of Heath, Texas. Which would indicate that he may not have been burning the midnight oil at the Department of Justice all the time.
But he eventually ran for Congress in a campaign that heavily relied upon certain racist dog-whistles, such as claiming to have arrested 300 illegal immigrants in a single day! Never mind that it was a blatant lie. He also frequently claimed to be a special prosecutor in a large and somewhat famous anti-terrorism case against the Holy Land Association, which was closed down as a fake charity funneling money into terrorist groups. This, it turns out, was also a lie—a whole pack of lies, since both his official web site and all his campaign materials included many untrue anecdotes and false statistics from his supposed involvement in that trial.
His supposed involvement in that trial was really his only qualification for being nominated as the Director of National Intelligence. And when rumors came out just before his nomination, lots of people (including a lot of conservative pundits) were pointing out that it was an awfully thin resume for an intelligence chief. That was before this week, when news came out is was all lies: Trump brutally mocked after his intel nominee crashes and burns in just 5 days: ‘It is called VETTING you idiot‘.
Speaking of ridiculous things the alleged president says, Fox Host Cuts Away From Trump To Explain That Trump Is Lying Yet Again About China Paying Tariffs (I’ve also embedded the video below). Trump keeps repeating the lie that the countries we levy tariffs against are paying those tariffs. They aren’t. The people who pay the tariffs are American citizens. The tariff is levied on imports, and that means the prices go up. All of us are paying higher prices for all sorts of things because of this trade war.
If this is news to you, it might prompt you to ask what the purpose of an import tariff is? The economic theory is that you impose tariffs on certain foreign goods in order to encourage people to buy locally produced things instead. But that only works if there are local sources of the goods in question. And since some of the earliest tariffs were raw materials that some of the few industries we still have in this country (raw materials that we can’t mine because we’ve already strip-mined all of ours), that simply causes U.S. companies to shut down those factories and move production elsewhere.
This is why economists keep pointing out that trade wars don’t work.
I sincerely think that Donald doesn’t understand. It’s like just before Acosta, the Secretary of Labor (who resigned over his past connection to sex trafficker and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein) left, Trump was touting the marvelous employment rates as if Acosta was delivering them. The Department of Labor doesn’t stimulate the economy or manage it in any way that effects job numbers. The Department of Labor is responsible for enforcing labor laws—making sure companies aren’t exploiting workers and so forth. It has nothing to do with how many people are employed! Trump clearly doesn’t understand that.
Similarly, I think he really doesn’t understand the tariffs, either. Yeah, China doesn’t want the tariffs, because it means that their industries will likely sell less to us, but the tariffs hurt the American consumers long, long before the pain is felt by the exporter.
I keep saying it: Trump is not at aberration: his is simply blatant about what the Republicans have believed for decades.
Let’s move to something that is probably just an amusing footnote to the looming presidential election: Gravel and his campaign teens end presidential run. Mike Gravel retired from representing Alaska in the U.S. Senate back in 1981. In 2008 he made a run for the Democratic nomination for President and didn’t make much of a splash. He tried to nab the Libertarian Party nomination the same year and also failed there. And he’s since been an executive for a marijuana products company.
The announcement that he’s winding down the campaign mentions that the aforementioned teens are moving onto jobs with a liberal political committee, so maybe that was the point all along? I’m not sure. I really don’t think anyone was expecting Americans to vote into the White House someone who would turn 91 just a couple months after being sworn in.
It’s been a busy work week and I have an insane deadline. Meanwhile, my personal laptop is being repaired so I’m working it a slightly older machine borrowed from my husband.
Anyway, welcome to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to the queer community, five stories about deplorable people, and five videos (plus things I wrote and notable obituaries).
Author of bestselling Christian book apologizes to LGBTQ community. I’m glad this guy has done this, after getting his publisher to agree not to print new copies of his books, and I’m glad he’s getting out of the grip of the fundamentalist evangelical church he was raised in.
Font Folly 