#also its so bad that amazon is manipulating the perception of this show and not even trying to hide it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theunvanquishedzims · 4 years

Text

Calming my post-election anxiety with sweet sweet logic

So Trump is a wannabe dictator with crazy screaming fans who are headed toward violent armed meltdowns. What’s to stop him from going full dictator and refusing to leave office?

I’m glad you asked!

You see, the major difference between wannabe dictators and actual dictators is ALLIES. Dictators are surrounded with tight security, aided by the military, cheered on by media that they control, and are either helped, encouraged, or just ignored by other countries with the power to stop them.

Trump has charged the Secret Service money for the privilege of protecting him and his family since day one. You remember the first year, when his wife and son refused to move to the White House so the Secret Service had to RENT FLOORS in TRUMP’S BUILDING to be close to them? And how his extended family went globetrotting and the Secret Service had to accompany them? And when Trump himself insisted on hosting people at his golf club, he made the Secret Service RENT GOLF CARTS from TRUMP’S CLUB to follow him while he went golfing?

The end result was that halfway through the first year of his presidency, the Secret Service could not pay their own wages. Because half their yearly budget had gone straight to Trump’s pockets. And that’s just financially. I think we all remember how the White House came down with Covid and Trump still insisted on Secret Service agents driving him around to wave at people. He has not been kind to the people who are sworn to protect him. These people have had a front-row seat to his circus since 2016. When the time comes from Trump to leave the White House and Biden to take over, I doubt they’ll betray the country out of loyalty to Trump. If anything, they’ll be the ones to drag him out.

As for the military, Trump insulted and fired four generals from his administration staff. He said on multiple occasions that soldiers who get captured or killed are suckers and losers. He refused to visit a cemetery to honor the dead because it was raining. He tries to pander to the military by massive increases in defense spending, but that money goes to capitalists who make weapons and war technology, not the soldiers or veterans. (He also hypocritically accused military officials of being in bed with those same companies.) In a poll of 1000 service members 50% said they disliked Trump. Overall, he doesn’t act like a leader, and the way he skirts responsibility (like taking charge during the pandemic) doesn’t appeal to a group that functions on trust in their leadership.

A proper dictator would have spent the last four years cozying up to his generals and making sure they knew the financial and social benefits of answering to him personally, not the office of the President. And while Trump did adhere to the adage “find a foreign foe” to unite people against, he badly misjudged what most US citizens consider “foreign.” He hasn’t found a villain that we would root for the military taking down, and the people he targets (Latinx, Blacks, immigrants, and people in countries our military has already devastated) are not a minority he can turn the majority of the country against, especially with how many of the former two serve in the military themselves. When the time comes for him to leave office, the military might be the first to cut ties with the wannabe Dictator-in-Chief.

Now, the media. They’ve been treating him like a joke candidate since day one, but after he was actually elected and took office they’ve started to take him more seriously. He’s gotten his catchphrase “fake news!” to catch on, but that doesn’t change the fact that under his administration news reporters have been harassed, illegally arrested, and generally poorly treated by Trump, especially if they’re women. He’s trashed talked everyone, with Fox News being the last bastion of semi-legitimate news that openly supports him (and their credibility has taken a big hit over it.)

Despite this support, in recently months Trump has been increasingly dumping on Fox, even throwing the mediator they provided for the debate under the bus, and risking alienating them in the process. If his supporters listen to him and start considering Fox part of Big Fake News, it might possibly be the death of Fox, leaving most of his supporters adrift and isolated from their source of right-wing news, and sending the more extreme fringes into the arms of conspiracy theory websites. (I’m not saying this is bad, being cut off from Fox and its toxic stream of “information” can actually help rehabilitate the right.)

Honestly, I don’t think Trump ever had a shot at controlling the media like a dictator would, mainly because of social media. He’s in love with attention, and Twitter has provided him a nonstop stream of it. No other President has threatened, insulted, promoted, or hinted at war over social media the way Trump has, and he gets so much direct feedback and interaction with the public and the world as a result. He could have leveraged that by buying the company (through a shell corporation, obviously) and setting it up as The One True Source of Information, manipulating public perception of him and his administration by keeping a tight grip on what information he let out.

But he’s just. Not. That. Clever. He blurts out everything that crosses his mind, leaving his administration to play clean-up on his messes, put out fires he keeps pouring gasoline on, and claim he’s joking when everyone knows he’s testing the limits on what he can get away with saying. He took advantage of the direct communication with legions of supporters, but seemed to forget that his detractors had equal access and would absolutely call him out on things he definitely said, it’s right there on his Twitter account, they have the Tweet pulled up on their phone right now. Instead of operating a single state-run media outlet while crushing all free press and limiting internet access like other dictators, he’s mooned the world’s cameras and acted surprised when they put his saggy butt on tv. “Fake news! That’s not my butt! THIS is my butt! [image attached]” he tweets. “Twitter is so biased, they haven’t censored any of Sleepy Joe’s photos!” he later tweets.

And lastly. The key to a dictatorship’s success. To prevent outside intervention, the country a dictator runs must be unimportant and ignored, wealthy and well-connected, or scary and well-armed. Minor warlords are the former, Putin is the latter, Trump might have weaseled his way into being the middle. But at the end of the day, America’s whole thing is new leadership every four years. It was revolutionary to replace a lineage of kings and queens stretching generations with a non-royal elected leader who only held office for four to eight years, but we’ve stuck to that for 200 years and everyone’s used to it by now. It would take a charismatic and powerful person to move the American people towards abolishing such a basic tenant of our democracy, and despite the mob mentality that lead a small portion of his supporters to chant “sixteen more years!” in the heat of the moment, Trump is not that charismatic. He’s not that smart. He’s not that well-connected. He’s not that savvy. He’s not that good at politics. And he’s not that powerful.

(I was going to say something here about him being the laughingstock of the world’s leaders and shouldn’t expect any outsiders to help him stay in power, especially since his tax returns came out and showed he owes people a ton of money that he doesn’t have, but this post is long enough so let’s cut to the chase.)

Trump is a greedy, small-minded man that has clung to power by appealing to the worst in humanity and scraping away at the best. But he hasn’t succeeded. He’s a sad old man who will say anything to be loved, and I don’t think he even knows what love is, so he’ll settle for attention. He doesn’t have money, he doesn’t have an army, and the only allies he has are using him as a political pawn to further their own interests. They will cut him loose the minute he stops being useful.

Now, the bad part: crazy screaming fans. Fringe groups on the internet. Mobs chanting “sixteen more years!” Men with guns and bombs and kidnapping plots, men trying to get into voting centers to destroy the election, men driving trucks with black flags that say FUCK YOUR FEELINGS, TRUMP 2020 (available on Amazon for $11.99, I wish I was joking.) I have no idea how many people in this country genuinely love Trump. It is hopefully significantly less than voted for him. There are some big issues in this country that are make-or-break, and unfortunately by reason of running Republican Trump has aligned himself with some of them.

There are people who hate everything about Trump, but he put a pro-life judge on the Supreme Court so they’re voting for him. There are people who are uncomfortable with Trump, but they’ve forgiven their grandpa for saying worse at Thanksgiving dinner, so they’ll vote for him. There are people who don’t know a single thing about Donald Trump, but they see (Republican) next to his name on the ballot, so they vote for him. None of that means those people will side with him if he tries to make a move towards dictatorship.

Now there are people who love Trump. They’ve heard and seen the vile things he’s said and done, and are genuinely okay with it, because they are full of hate and rage and want to change the world to put themselves on top. I do not know how many of these people there are. I know they exist all over the country, not just in red states. I know some of them have guns and want a reason to use them, because they’ve been talking about it for decades. I don’t know if we can trust the police to side with us over them if fights start breaking out. (And I pray pray PRAY people de-escalate any fights, because monkey see monkey do, and one news report of a MAGA extremist shooting someone can inspire a hundred copycats can lead to full-on civil war like we've never seen.) I know we need to be careful the next few months, to take care of ourselves and watch out for the more vulnerable in our communities.

And above all, I know this: Trump is not going to keep this country. He got it through trickery and deceit and foreign influence and national indifference and people not taking him seriously. We’ve learned. We’ve grown. We’re taking him seriously now, and we will not let him take what we’ve already told him he can’t have. The election is over. He’s a loser. He’d better start packing his bags. Because he’s not staying in office.

#politics #long post #best case scenario: he tries to rehabilitate his rep as a man of the people #by pushing massive amounts of money into direct stimulus #funds it by cutting the military budget in half #everyone gets several thousand dollars next month #he screws over every white collar criminal he ever had help from #exposes a lot of corruption and behind-the-scenes stuff #and pardons every convict in jail on weed charges #''he really drained the swamp'' everyone says admiringly #''only took him four years and an impeachment''#then he gets convicted of crimes and runs away to Russia #where he's found dead in a snowbank #because PUTIN IS NOT YOUR FRIEND YOU USELESS LUMP #Melina inherits everything and never sets foot in the US again #the Obamas send her a gift basket every Christmas #at least one of his kids runs for president #and gets laughed out of the party #the kid in question might be Ivanka who gets a concerning amount of radfem votes #it's definitely not Barron though #(watch me eat those words in 21 years)

11 notes · View notes

marcjampole · 7 years

Text

The commercialization of Halloween has helped further the infantilization of American culture

The day after seeing the first TV commercial for the December holiday gift potlatch seems like an appropriate time to consider the point at which the celebration of Halloween transformed from a secular celebration of a religious holiday to a major factor in the infantilization of American culture.

Infantilization occurs when adults continue to act like children in their adult years, e.g., living at home after college (although many must), vacationing at Disney facilities, collecting My Little Ponies or Legos, indulging in superhero culture, participating in adult sleepovers at museums, engaging in cosplay or spending a good deal of time playing video games. The list of movies glorifying adults who remain children grows so quickly that I have tired of trying to keep up, and so supply a slightly old set of examples: The “Bad Mothers” series, “Tammy,” “Harold & Kumar” movies, “Old School,” “Big,” “Grandma’s Boy,” the “Ted” flicks, “The Wedding Crashers,” “Billy Madison,” ”Step Brothers,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Dodgeball,” “The 40-year-old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” all three “Hangovers,” the “Jackass” movies, “Bridesmaids,” “Hall Pass” and “Identity Thief.”

My central assertion over what has become ten pieces on the infantilization of American culture has been that retailers and advertisers embrace and encourage adults to keep their childish habits and ways of thinking because it’s easier to convince children to buy something, easier to manipulate their emotions and dissemble their still forming critical faculties.

Celebrating Halloween is different from attending a “My Little Pony” convention because it has a long history dating to the ancient Celts. Christianity rolled pagan customs into a three-day celebration of saints. When I lived in Germany in 1976, no one celebrated Halloween, but churches were opened and stores closed for the next day, All Saints Day. In England, by contrast, children have been trick-or-treating since the 16th century. Moreover in much of the civilized world, rich folk have dressed up for costume balls and parties since at least the Romans, if not before. Like all holidays that predate the establishment of the world’s major religions, Halloween is at essence a way of marking time, which means both counting years and separating the parts of the year—and the day—into parts and defining appropriate human behavior for marking those parts.

As it has done to all modern celebration, commercialization has slowly corrupted the holiday of Halloween. In every decade since World War II, fewer costumes are home-made and more are store-bought than in the prior decade. Virtually all treats are now prepackaged candy: a handful of highly-publicized cases of adulterating food aided by urban-legend type rumors of others in the 1980’s pretty much put the kibosh on distributing home-made cookies or brownies. Giving even a small amount of something healthy like raisins or nuts is way too expensive for most families. Decorations have gotten completely out of hand. Once people put a pumpkin or two in their window or on their porch. As children in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, my brother and I used to add a few cut-outs of ghosts, sometimes bought and sometimes created from construction paper. We would add twists of orange and black crepe to the living room when we threw a party. Decorations have become more and more elaborate with each passing decade and today symbolize an apotheosis of conspicuous consumption: elaborate and very expensive displays of three-dimensional witches, ghosts, goblins, gremlins, goons and monsters. Thorsten Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, would marvel at how Halloween now turns the exterior of the house into yet another opportunity for the bourgeoisie to demonstrate that they have enough money to waste large sums of it on trifling showiness. People now also routinely send Halloween cards. With the increase in the intensity of Halloween celebration has come, of course, a growing tsunami of TV and Internet ads and entertainment programming starting around October 1st each year. In total, Americans spent $8.4 billion to celebrate Halloween last year, or $82.93 for each individual making a Halloween purchase.

But while we can regret this commercialization of Halloween, there is no infantilization in these developments, just the same good old-fashion American commercialization that has corrupted Christmas, Hanukkah and Easter, while creating new opportunities to commemorate by spending such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Many adults, however, are celebrating Halloween as if they were still children, all involving costumes. When you get dressed up in a costume to stay at home and distribute treats, you have been infantilized. When you insist on donning a costume to accompany your children on their trick-or-treating journey, you have been infantilized. When you wear a costume to the office during office hours, even if it is to attend a Halloween party that takes place at the lunch hour, yes, you’ve been infantilized. In all these situations, you are extending the habits and thought processes of childhood into adulthood. These practices are of course new reasons to buy stuff for the holiday, and so have been encouraged by commercials and entertainment, e.g., situation comedies and family dramas.

Moreover, Halloween was a holiday for children for many years. Now it is a holiday for children and adults. Commercialization and infantilization have worked together to transform Halloween from a special occasion for the community to give its children sweets from the harvest bounty to another excuse for Americans to spend to show they’re human and to pretend, for one evening, to be children again.

When I wrote at the beginning of this piece that I saw my first holiday gift TV commercial yesterday, it was a mild distortion. The commercial alluded only obliquely to Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but instead pushed the idea of getting Black Friday prices before Black Friday, which has all but official recognition as a major American holiday, one dedicated to the greatest of all American past times—shopping for goods and services that express emotion and define relationships. The only benefit from this overlapping of the Halloween and the Christmas season is that it provides further protection from commercialization to Thanksgiving.

I want to close this piece with a base commercial announcement of my own: My latest book of poetry, a flipbook titled Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month is available from the publisher, Poet’s Haven Press or Amazon. Cubist States of Minduses language equivalents of Cubist painting techniques to depict mental states, such as anger, desire, jealousy, boredom, hunger and wonder. Not the Cruelest Month is a cycle of vignettes of New York City the April after Superstorm Sandy hit that explores the relationship between reality, perception and language. That’s a lot of thought-provoking poetry, and at $6 it’ll make a great stocking stuffer or small gift.

Now that I have ended my shameless shill, I leave it to my readers to determine whether I have subverted commercial culture or been co-opted by it.

#halloween #americanculture

1 note · View note

nebris · 7 years

Text

Her Prophet Speaks: Transhumanist Matriarchy

~I was watching this gorgeous video of our Sun and being who I am and doing what I do, my aesthetic thoughts were secondary to my...well, let's call them my Pragmatic Thoughts. For all its undeniable beauty, as I watched gossamer tendrils of 'star light' dance off the Sun's radiant body, I was all too aware that if one of them glanced against our Pale Blue Dot for even a few seconds, most if not all life would be instantly seared from its surface. Maybe that was foremost in my mind because I was two hundred or so pages into Neal Stephenson's SEVENEVES at the time. [Spoiler: The Moon blows up] But I likely would have thought the above anyway. I am usual aware of how fragile life is here on the Pale Blue Dot and of how deadly and violent the Universe truly is and because of that reality, it is crucial that we as a species get a substantial number of ourselves Off Planet ASAP if we wish to survive. From that point of view Deep Green politics are Pure Suicide in that they reject the entire idea of Technological Civilization. And I would say to those ecologically minded folks who say we have to 'clean up the Earth first', “It is a highly dangerous assumption to think we have time to wait for that.” Besides, going Off Planet is an essential part of 'cleaning up Earth'. The primary caveat to all of this is that it has been shown that we Baseline Humans do not do very well in Space. In zero gravity we lose bone and muscle mass and 'bad things' happen our internal organs. And we know that the raw radiation of Space is harmful as well. We just do not yet know how harmful it will be over the long term. I use the term Baseline Humans because we are now at a place were we can actively modify ourselves. But we Homo Sapiens Sapiens are only 'baseline' because of that scientific 'baseline'. Homo Sapiens Idaltu [our now extinct direct ancestors], Homo Neanderthalensis and Denisova Hominins were just as 'human' we are. And there may well have been a few subspecies before them who were also 'just as human'. But they are gone and we are here. ...which brings us to Transhumanism. First we need to redefine one term... Cyborg: this word has been misused by The Terminator franchise. 'Terminators' are NOT Cyborgs, they are Androids, aka Humanoid Robots. It's something of a pet peev of mine. A real Cyborg [Cybernetic Organism] is a human who has been augmented with Cybernetic elements. They walk among us already. Someone with a pace-maker and/or Cochlear implants is technically already a Cyborg, albeit more with a small 'c'. When we talk about brain controlled artificial limbs - something that is also already happening - then one is moving into capital 'C' Cyborg territory. The Transhumanist Cyborg will be a far more extensively modified human. This would include an on-board computer to monitor and maintain all the systems said human contains. It would probably be about the size of a credit card and be placed just under the skin. Ultimately these systems would include, though not be limited to; ~a carbon fiber reinforced bone structure to maximize strength and protect from impacts, ~cerebral implants [Neural Nanonics] to maximize cognition and perception, download information directly and communicate via 'cyber-telepathy', ~micro-electronic contact lenses that allow the eyes to see the entire light spectrum and which contain both macro and micro focusing elements, information screens and measuring elements, ~a subcutaneous microfiber mesh to prevent puncture woulds, maintain level body temperature in extreme environments and promote rapid healing, ~millions of nanobots, microscopic robots that permeate all of the body's tissues and fluids and constantly monitor and repair all tissues and organs using a regular infusing of raw stem cells. For certain situations, limbs could be replaced by fully mechanical prosthesis, but those would be special cases, such as loss of a limb, but eventually organic limbs could be regrown. In other special cases, various organs, such as eyes and lungs, could be replaced by fully mechanical prosthesis in order to operate in highly extreme environments, with the possibility of having them replaced with organics [wetware] when the individual returns to a human friendly locale. Obviously, that crosses over into Genetic Engineering, which is in some ways the 'other half' of Transhumanist development and, in my view, the more important one. Cybernetics are really just “Enhancements” of the Baseline Human form. Genetics are how we begin to move beyond the fundamentals of Baseline Humanity. This is where people start getting frightened because we will in fact be designing and breeding the species that is going to replace us. That brings up all manner of existential terror, visions of remorseless Supermen on a crusade to exterminate the Baseline Humans. But the truth is they are our descendants, our Children...and do we not always want our Children to do better than us, to BE better than us? The human genome has been fully mapped, though there is much we do not yet understand. But we are learning more everyday, even in the face of the above terrified opposition. Though many Baselines scream, “We cannot play God!” that is what we have always done. It is hardwired into out basic nature. [I will address the Metaphysics of this later] One of the things we have learned is how mutable our DNA actually is. It seems that powerful events in early childhood can cause chemical and hormonal surges that can quite literally change the structure of our DNA, changes that we can pass on to our children. Most of that work has focused on trauma for obvious reasons; it is the easiest to track. But it is also highly probably that an intensely positive childhood can do the same. However, this process can also be effected by direct manipulation of our DNA, removing negative inhibiting traits, disease causing genes and adding/augmenting genetic inclinations. Raise such Enhanced children in a positive and supportive environment – we require both Nature and Nurture – and the possibilities are endless. Genetic Engineering can be used to increase muscle and bone density to create greater strength and endurance, to improve organ function...including brain function, to retard and reverse aging – one day even prevent it all together once a certain state of being has been achieved – to strengthen the entire human organism across the board so that we can survive and prosper in almost any environment. On a less esoteric level, we need to do this. The Race needs to become spacefaring because the surface of a planet is a dangerous place to live and all the evidence shows that Baseline Humans do not do well in space. So this is a matter of the long term Survival of the Race. As one looks deeper into the Transhumanist Community, you will find that it is largely dominated by Western Middle Class White Beta Males, a significant number of them twenty/thirty-somethings who are Atheist, Libertarian, personally awkward and who cannot wait to upload their minds into a box to escape that awkwardness. I have no time for them as they are an evolutionary dead end. Mind uploading should be a Final Option, not a primary one. In parallel with this is the most profound contradiction of their Transhumanism; that for a group that is almost uniformly Atheist, it has a near fanatic desire to create itself a God in the form of an AI, which will then 'transform Earth into a Deathless Paradise'. Maybe this accounts for the community's distinct aversion to Metaphysical study, for such would quickly lay bare its clearly Judeo-Christian underpinnings. For a whole set of reasons, both practical/mundane and esoteric/Metaphysical, I am firmly convinced that the Future of The Race lays with Enhanced Females, in effect Cyborg Amazons. Their enhancements would allow them to reproduce with each other – which would produce only daughters – and so leave Baseline Males, and all of their inherent instability, far behind. And said enhancements would also make carrying a child to term and childbirth itself a far easier and safer process that it is naturally. Some advocate that we totally transfer human reproduction to entirely artificial means, e.g. Uterine Replicators. But that is heading in the same direction as Mind Uploading and is the path to becoming non-humans instead of Superior Humans. With the pain and difficulty of bearing children removed, what is left is the Primal Bond and that is what will keep us Human no matter how advanced we become. Those are the basic tenets of Transhumanism I see them. There are however many other aspects, a whole world remodeled to support these Superior Humans, what we presently call The Internet of Things, all the myriad machinery of Modern Civilization networked together and at the beck and call of each human's on-board cybernetics. And then there is the requirement of creating Homo Servitus, which is also the title of the following short essay; “The need for a reliable Labor Force is one of the oldest and most difficult issues of human civilization. The harsh truth is that we Baseline Humans are too varied, too impulsive, too inconsistent and always dissatisfied with something. To create order among us eventually requires lies and coercion and as such leads to Tyranny, which damages the Oppressor as much as the Oppressed by brutalizing both. Better then to turn the Means of Production to the production of Workers themselves, a genetically engineered Servitor Class, beings who are happy with their lot and take pleasure from performing their duties. Such beings would have simple needs, requiring only humane treatment and modest comfort beyond their Purpose as Workers to make their lives pleasurable. Many of you will react with horror at this entire line of thinking. Yet consider this; the device upon which you are reading these words requires a number of Rare Earths to function. Many of those elements are mined in the Congo by people who are essentially slaves, most of them war refugees and quite a few survivors of War Rape. Their lives are a daily regime of brutality and for most their only escape is death. I'm sure you're horrified by that as well, but you're not going give up your device, are you? The technologies necessary to create Homo Servitus are already under development. The parsing of genes that guide certain behavioral tendencies. Cloning from ordinary human cells. Uterine Replicators. Cerebral implants to guide and control behavior. Many of the various members of this Servitor Class would be designed and grown with their specific tasks in mind. A small number would be more generalized servants. But they would all be grown, which is their major advantage over robots. Robots require complex engineering and lots of raw materials. This type of biological Servitor Class also avoids the existential danger of creating independent and mobile AIs. On the other end of the scale, we need to evolve a type of Homo Superior..but that's a tale for another time. Either way, we Baseline Humans will soon need to move off the stage before we wreck the whole place.” Given that I envision the idea Homo Superior as Cyborg Amazons, the DNA to be used for Homo Servitus would be that of Baseline Males. And there will even be some Baseline Males who will happily volunteer to undergo transformation into some types of Servitors, much in the fashion of submissive Males who wish to be Collared by Female Dominants today. This then is my view of the optimal form of Transhumanism, a Transhumanist Matriarchy. It should be noted that many in the Transhumanist community seem share a certain outlook, the admirable view that Transhumanism will succeed by pure reason and logic alone. But the vast majority of Baseline Humans are *not* reasonable nor logical. As a species we tend to automatically view Change as Loss, are largely superstitious, fear driven and more often than not act with a violent irrationality upon anything we perceive as threatening whatever little epistemological ghetto we happen to live in. Something like Transhumanism is utterly terrifying to most Baseline Humans as they quite accurately see it as heralding the end of their line. That is a profound existential threat that I guarantee will be meet with an extreme and brutal reaction. To deny this reality is suicidal foolishness. This is a Struggle for The Future. Such is not for the faint of heart nor the weak willed. We in the Transhumanist community have a double challenge, that of upgrading and improving The Race while simultaneously fighting off those who wish to maintain the status quo. At certain points that will require the use of Violent Force. I repeat, 'To deny this reality is suicidal foolishness.' Many in the Transhumanist community will find this a repugnant paradigm and reject it. I suspect no small number of those will have an unpleasant fate upon actually encountering said paradigm. The more bloody minded of us will carry on and do our best to defend those with that more 'enlightened' world view from the brutal ugliness of the real unenlightened world Something to keep in mind; that those who want the species to remain just as it is vastly outnumber us, their 'reality' is already in place and no small number of them will be quite happy to kill us in order to stop our work.

#The Sisterhood

2 notes · View notes

ericschumacher · 4 years

Text

A new post, (Christian Sloths: Lazy Reviews (and Review-Readers)), is available at Eric Schumacher

New Post has been published on https://www.emschumacher.com/christian-sloths-lazy-reviews-and-review-readers/

Christian Sloths: Lazy Reviews (and Review-Readers)

This post is part of an on-going series examining sloth in Christian communities.

Someone once said that Christians are a “people of the book.” It’s true (or, at least, it ought to be). We take our faith and practice from the pages of Scripture. The doctrine of “sola scriptura“—the belief that the bible is the sole inerrant authority for faith and practice—was at the Protestant Reformation’s center.

It is equally valid (or, at least, it ought to be) that Christians are a “people of the books.” In his last letter, the Apostle Paul asked Timothy to “bring the books” when he visited. In the 2,000 years that followed, books served to instruct Christians in the faith and spread Christian ideas. It is no less so today.

Of course, given the number of books published (not to mention the access to information provided by the internet), it is impossible to a fraction of the books published today. Who should we read? What should we read?

Book Reviews

One apparent solution is found in book reviews. Reviews consume the material (or are supposed to) and then tell us whether it is worth our time and money.

Good reviews, rightly used, can spare us time and resources. Bad reviews (or the wrong use of reviews) can rob us of new insights, silence helpful critiques, and ensure that valuable contributions never see the light of day. Bad reviews and its twin, the wrong use of reviews, are often sloth’s children.

“The golden rule of book reviewing,” writes Andy Naselli, “is to judge a book based on what the author is intending to do—not based on what you would do if you were the author.”

Slothful Reviewers

From Naselli’s correct and straightforward observation, it becomes apparent that a quality book review is hard work. One must labor in self-control to interact with the book itself, not with one’s perception of the author, the topic, or hopes for the book. It is hard work to summarize the author’s purpose, methodology, argument, conclusions, and skill in a way that the author would recognize as her own—and then critique the book on how effectively the author executed.

Much easier is to approach a book with expectations and demands—”The book should be structured in this way, deal with these ideas and sources, and come to these conclusions.” Disappointed that the author didn’t do what you wanted in the way that you would have, you can critique them severely and give them a lower rating. Likewise, being with pleased that the author came to the conclusions you hoped in the way you wanted, you may ignore a plethora of deficiencies in how they wrote or handled data, to dish out high praise and five stars.

Anytime you read a review in which the bulk of the reviewer’s critique and conclusion rests on what they wish the author had done, what the author didn’t do or the conclusion, you are likely dealing with a slothful reviewer—sheer laziness.

Spotting Sloths in the Wild

Dan Reid, writing from years of experience as an editor (who reads reviews), outlines several sloths in book reviewing:

“The author failed to write a different sort of book, the sort of book that I prefer; and so I dislike this book.”

“The author is an evangelical (or liberal or feminist or …), and we all know what they are up to. So this book, which barely deserves my attention, is a very bad book indeed.”

“The author presumes to know quite a bit about her topic, and there is evidence that this is the case. However, I happen to know a lot about the topic brought up in the last paragraph of chapter six and virtually nothing about the content of the other chapters. So let me take this platform to talk about a narrow slice of the book and judge the whole on its basis.”

“The author takes no account of my work on this topic. This is regrettable, and I shall now condemn the book on the basis of my being slighted—but not before I take the opportunity to tell you all about my thesis.”

“I have never liked this author. In fact she blocked my bid for tenure. So this is pay-back time. Oh yeah.”

“I have a deep-seated need to show my superiority, not least in my area of expertise. And so I will point out certain small but unforgivable failings in this book that will subtly cast it in a bad light.”

“It is clear to me that anyone who holds the views represented in this book has questionable or possibly bad (or racist or misogynist or _) motives, so I shall ferret out and expose those motives and then attack them.”

“I believe in reading for authorial intent, but that applies only to Scripture. In this review I shall employ a hermeneutic of suspicion and tell you what I think this book is saying despite the explicit protest of the living author to the contrary.”

“This book takes on a sacred cow of our discipline. It shakes the foundations of my academic cosmos. It quivers the posts of my sacred canopy. It shivers me timbers. It threatens to cause me to start again from the ground up. In this last decade of my academic life, I’m not about to let that happen. So here’s my fatwa.”

In his post, Reid offers commentary on several of these sloths, worth your time to read.

Christians would do well to take the time to understand the nature of these expressions of laziness and be ready to spot them in book reviews. Of course, such sloth is not limited to reviewing books. They show up frequently in Christian critiques of sermons, churches, other people, culture, politics, etc.

Slothful Users of Reviews

The temptation to laziness is not limited to the writing of reviews. We can also be lazy in our use of reviews. It is a particular temptation because reviews are written to reduce our workload. But anything created to lighten the load can become an excuse to avoid the responsibility to work.

One sloth in the use of reviews is skipping to the bottom line. Skip the review, what does the reviewer say in conclusion. Skipping the content to cut to the conclusion gives one no way of knowing the basis or methodology for the review. (I’ve seen some quality reviewers give a few lazy reviews.)

Another lazy approach is to look at only the stars. “3-star average? I’ll pass.” Too many people approach the ranking system this way. That’s why authors and publishers encourage reviews and rankings. But, as everyone knows, the system is easy to manipulate.

Your company makes widgets and sells them on Amazon. Your only competitor just released a new widget to compete with your new release. There are twenty-five employees in your company. On release day, each one leaves a five-star review of your product and a 1-star or 2-star review of the competitor. Each negative review mentions the same problems with the competitor’s product. Each employee then asks three members of their household to do the same. Your product has one-hundred five-star ratings within a week, while your competitor has one-hundred negative ratings, each complaining about the same problem.

If you don’t think this happens with book reviews, you’re naive. (The screenshots from the Genevan Commons reveal at least one attempt to sabotage a woman’s book release.) It’s easy to read a book review and then post a negative review on a bookseller website parroting the concerns. Unethical? Sure—but how is a book browser to know any different. All they know is that a brief skim of the reviews will reveal that many people had the same complaint (and several were pastors!). And the book (and your neighbor) is torpedoed before even leaving the dock.

It’s a quick way to get a feel for responses. But is one truth negated by a thousand lies? Does a falsehood become a truth by repeating it a hundred times?

Work Hard

Lazy reviews and the lazy use of reviews are quick and dirty ways to silence a voice or prop up yourself. But how do such promote the exchange of ideas, learning, scholarship? Do dishonest means celebrate the truth?

Both reading and writing are hard work. They have no place for laziness. If you want to take the easy path, perhaps you should avoid books altogether.

#Books #Christian Sloths

0 notes