The West’s Third World Others (or, Hey, Thailand Has Prostitutes, What’s the Big Deal?)
The latest shitstorm in the SF/F community comes in response to acrackedmoon’s criticism of Pat’s (of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist) controversial perspectives on Thailand and travel (acrackedmoon offers a counter here). The short version: Pat reinforces some stereotypes about Thailand and non-Western culture, some of them through sexist and/or racist lenses, gets called out on it without the bells and whistles of mutual respect, and then posts a rebuttal under the threat that he “will monitor the comment section,” which turns out to be code language for “I’ll let anyone who wants to call acrackedmoon a dirty name, etc. post whatever they want, even if they’re full of shit.” A part of me wants to bring in every postcolonial non-fiction book I have ever read in order to tear apart Pat’s original post and his response, but the amount of effort needed to do that should probably be spent on more productive measures. But I am going to say something here by way of an insufficient summary and an insufficient criticism of my own. I should note that I don’t know Pat. He may very well be a nice fellow. But people these days aren’t judged by the selves we don’t get to see, but by the selves presented to the public. Any claim that “Pat is a nice guy in real life” seems to miss the point entirely: if you’re not a racist, sexist, or whatever-ist in your personal life, then why would you use your public persona for non-satirical, non-parodic opinions about other people’s cultures? acrackedmoon is right in more ways than one, but the accuracy of her (?) criticisms seems to have fallen victim to the “you could have said this without being a bitch” argument (and the “bitch” is not implied, but spoken — see the comments on Pat’s blog). Is Pat a racist/sexist/etc.? Yes. But so am I, so are you, and so is everybody (don’t bother suggesting otherwise; you are and you have to deal with that, and not because you’re white or a man — everyone is racist, sexist, etc.). Perhaps not to the same degree, but enough to reasonably say that none of us are “pure.” Does Pat know he has racist/sexist/etc. opinions? No idea. I know I have them, but because I am aware, I try to challenge them when they spring up, to varying degrees of success. Is Pat challenging his? It doesn’t seem so. His response is all defense and no (or few) admissions. One rather interesting response to this comes from of a literary discussion of Forrest Gander’s Core Samples of the World from OF Blog of the Fallen (a.k.a. Larry, the Book Eater): Recently, there was a post that took another blogger to task for his depiction of her native Thailand (and his views on Islam and near-slavering over this “Girls of Geek” calendar). When reading Gander’s prose-poem and the passage I quote above, I could not help but note the complete difference of approach between him and Pat. Where Gander notes the discomfort and explicitly states how “the foreigner can’t control his situation; mastery eludes him,” Pat in his response to the Requires Hate posts does anything but acknowledge his obliviousness to how his words showed a callous disregard for a complex situation. No, the narrative there is that he was just pointing out an uncomfortable “truth” about the sex tourism industry over there (while neglecting to point out or being very unaware that sex trafficking is a very serious problem in both the United States and his native Canada). Of course, the way he put it was taken as very condescending at the very least, not just by acrackedmoon, but by several others who read it. But what happened is that there was no communication to hint that hey, ya know, maybe a native’s perspective might just be more valuable in this case than someone who, like the people in the Holiday Inn commercials, think that they “know” a culture or society just because they visited a few places over a period of days, weeks, or months. Problem is that it takes several years at least for an outsider to become acutely aware of an insider’s perspective. Lord knows that in 2012 there are still all sorts of Mississippi Burning or Deliverance jokes told about my native American South region. Oh, sometimes there’ll be that bright, enlightened person who wants to sound all sympathetic and say “I am impressed by how much you’ve changed since the KKK days,” in that grating tone that seems to accompany an elderly adult patting the head of a young child who is tempted to kick that oldster’s shins but has to refrain from doing so because s/he’ll be in big trouble. It is understandable that after a while of being talked down to, as if an adult from another society/culture were a gifted child, you grow tired of being polite and being deferential to the irritating dumbfucks who can’t bother themselves to learn more than the most superficial aspects of your culture/society. (Read his full post if you want to see what else he has to say.) That’s a fairly long quote, but one that, I think, gets to heart of the matter without running the risk of that evil “tone argument.” Those of us who live in the West, who benefit from its inherent privileges, must be willing to interrogate that very position in order to get beyond, or at least to work through, our biases about elsewhere.* Issues of degree don’t seem terribly relevant to me when it comes to generalized opinions of a foreign land. Does it matter that prostitution is less visible in the West than it is in Thailand? No, especially in light of the West’s involvement in the development of prostitution in Southeast Asia (do some research on Vietnam and South Korea if you want to see how America essentially turned a nominal, fairly normal human occurrence into a disturbingly common practice).** That, to me, seems to be the underlying problem with all that
Crying “Censorship”: Why Getting Banned Isn’t Censorship
You’ll probably have noticed that a lot of crazy nonsense took place here and then migrated over here when Jen and I put our feet in piranha-infested waters. This isn’t the first time Jen and I have played emotional bees and frolicked in the convoluted mess of gender politics. But that’s not really the point of this post. Rather, I’d like to use the aforementioned links as illustrative examples of my central point: Deleting a comment or banning a commenter on a private website is not censorship. Since Liz Bourke’s original post, a number of people have almost joyously proclaimed they have been censored when they were banned from Tor.com (or would be banned from The Skiffy and Fanty Show — one individual on Baen assumed we would delete anything he wrote simply because he would disagree with us; the comment is still there). Neither of these things, however, constitute censorship, in part because private spaces have specialized rules which determine what can and cannot be said. If someone waltzes into your house and starts babbling at you about why Obama is a bad choice for President or Gingrich will repeal child labor laws, you have every right to remove that person from your home and prevent them from entering again. This act is defended by the U.S. Constitution, by our laws, and by our social codes. Few would call that censorship. A house is a private space, inside which you make the rules for interaction (provided they follow the rules from the outside — no murdering in your house). The same concept applies to websites that are privately owned or run.* Much like the privacy guaranteed in your home, you equally are guaranteed privacy on your website. That means that you are able to determine who can and cannot see your posts, who can and cannot comment, and so on. In fact, Google does much of this on its own by snagging spam comments from the aether and casting them to the dark abyss (the same with WordPress, etc.). None of these acts are censorship, since nothing has been done to prevent you from being able to speak on the Internet. Provided you still have a place to speak, your rights have not been violated. You are entitled to your opinion and your voice, but not to a listening audience. Censorship on the web, thus, is rather tricky. At what point does the removal of content become censorship? I’m not sure there are any easy answers to this question. Because the Internet is vast, if not nearly infinite, there are few boundaries to free speech in the U.S. The tables turn when you go to a place like China, where hackers serve as police officers against online dissent, where content from main sources are removed from Google’s search database, and so on. Is that censorship? I would argue that the distinction between personal space and censorship seems to follow this logic: so long as the avenues of discussion remain open, your rights have not been infringed; so long as websites themselves are subject to removal without reasonable cause,** you’re looking at censorship. This seems like a relatively simple concept to understand, but plenty of people cry “censorship” anyway. Perhaps they do so as an emotional reaction, or because they really believe that the 1st Amendment means you can say whatever you want wherever you want. The truth is that private spaces come with limitations and rules, many of them unspoken. Many websites don’t have comment policies, running instead on the tolerance levels of the owners. Those tolerance levels will vary considerably. In other words, think of your website as a digital house. If you have no problem letting anyone come in and say whatever they want, then good for you. But if you want to limit discussions or focus them, doing so in your own space means you’re simply taking control of your house. And if we’re being honest, most of us have house rules that we expect others to follow (and house rules we set for ourselves when we visit other people’s homes). The difference between a house and the Internet, however, is that the Internet guarantees anonymity and/or distance. Bravery is necessarily an attending element. ——————————————- *I don’t know whether censorship applies to government websites, though there aren’t many government websites with comment threads, as far as I can remember. **For example, I wouldn’t consider the removal of a website that shares pirated files (not links, but files) as censorship, since free speech does not extend to violating the law.
SOPA and Piracy: A Brief and Random Afterthought
Google, Wikipedia, and all manner of folks have taken up the protest gauntlet against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), a bill that, if passed, would hand over an extraordinary amount of power to the Federal government, restrict freedom of expression (the 1st Amendment), and make life for website creators and owners difficult at best. As the co-owner of a website for young writers, these things concern me greatly, as SOPA would make me responsible for what a member posts. That’s not to say that Young Writers Online is a haven for plagiarized material, but it is an open website and things sneak through. The idea that the entire site should be taken down because I didn’t find out soon enough is absurd. But SOPA makes that possible. I won’t proclaim to be an expert in this area. If you’re looking for an expert, Cory Doctorow is probably the best choice. But I do find the direction the media empires behind laws like SOPA are trying to take us worrisome. I don’t doubt that piracy is a financial problem, but I’m not convinced that the figures thrown at us by SOPA supporters are accurate or necessarily relevant. What doesn’t make sense to me is this: if piracy really is a problem to the extent that we’re told (i.e., that if we don’t stop it, the creative industry will go belly up), then clearly the pirates are doing something really well. Maybe instead of wasting millions trying to create and pass abusive laws like SOPA or crack down on pirates and websites, the media empires could take that money to do the following: Create better content (let’s be honest: most movies, TV shows, music, and books suck, and not necessarily because of personal taste) Make that content easy to access, affordable, and unrestricted to a reasonable degree (i.e., if I buy a digital movie, I should be able to put it on anything I own within reason — say 10 devices at a time or something). Change the way copyright is enacted and enforced. In particular, I think we should move from region-specific copyrights, to a generalized “world” copyright for most forms of media. If not that, then at least all English-language materials should be accessible to everyone in English-language countries at the same time — in every format. There’s a lot more that could be said here, but I’ll leave it at that. Think of piracy as competition. You can’t beat it by trying to stop it. You can only beat it by doing better. I think #4 is the biggest issue here. The majority of the media empires haven’t had any real competition in decades. Few of us can tell the difference between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. based on what they produce (though certainly there are obvious differences between Disney and other studios), so it’s not as if any of these companies can reasonably assert that they make a better product. Movie studios aren’t like different brands of chocolate. And while these empires have been battling against one another in a futile battle of “who can make the better selling movie/book/etc.,” pirates have been coming up with unique ways to share things. In the process, they’ve left a lot of tools behind, which indie creators, software companies, and so on have used to create entire new industries, forms, and so on. That’s competition. Just because it’s not based in profits (with rare exception) doesn’t mean it’s not competition. The only way to deal with competitors is beat them at their own game. Sadly, most of the media empires aren’t doing that. They’re trying to find an easy way around the problem. Easy ways out always produce unexpected results, and damaging the Constitution is not a worthwhile unexpected result. Ever.
Ponce de Leon vs. Native Americans: Who is happier?
I recently came across this announcement of the University of Miami’s 500th Anniversary commemoration for Ponce de Leon’s voyages to Florida. Since I am currently teaching a course entitled “Writing About Postcolonialism and Genre Fiction” (which I’ll have to discuss in detail later), the event caught my attention. Why? Because the language used to describe the event seems, in my view, offensive towards those who were inevitable victims of Spanish, British, French, and American colonialism (in de Leon’s case, we’re obviously talking about the first). Those victims — we call them Native Americans, which is a pathetic term to describe the enormous variety of tribes/groups that used to live freely in the U.S. hundreds of years ago — were stripped of their lands, destroyed by colonial hands or disease, and otherwise decimated by the colonial system. So to talk about Ponce de Leon, an understandably famous explorer, within the language of celebration (“A public conference commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the landing of Juan Ponce de León on Florida shores” — commemoration associated, more often than not, with ceremony, memorial, and remembrance) is to privilege the imperial center (Anne McClintock’s term from “The Angel of Progress”) over the voices of the natives who survived him. While it’s true that many of the talks have to do with the interactions of Ponce de Leon, the Spanish Empire, and the Native Americans (though too many use the derogatory term “Indians”), such talks are still held under the rubric of the celebration which speaks not of Natives in its title and description, but of those things which are the domain of the colonizer. When will we get a major “commemoration” which privileges indigenous voices in relation to the famous explorers who led to their near-extinction? Perhaps we should have “Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Native Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges” instead of “Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges” followed by a reminder that this is all about Ponce de Leon’s 500th anniversary… Then again, I’m one of those crazy liberal people.
Gentle Reminder: Jesse Jackson Isn’t Running For President
Amusing as it may be to play the “the liberal media is going after Herman Cain” card when it comes to the allegations recently made against Jesse Jackson, it is also prudent to remember one incredibly important fact: Jesse Jackson isn’t running for President. Let’s also be honest about something else: if he were running for President, you better believe that liberals and conservatives alike would, in their own way, go after him for his numerous failings as a “moral person.” Jackson is not unfamiliar to the controversy bucket, as his 1984 comments about Jews (shortly after losing the Presidential ticket) and his numerous infidelities make clear. And I think his history makes him unlikely as a legitimate Democratic candidate for the Presidency in the future. Of course, The Huffington Post did report on the incident. But I suppose we can just pretend they aren’t part of the “liberal media” or the “media” in general. Ever so insignificant that Huffington Post… In any case, the predominately right-leaning base will take this oversight as an indictment of the evil liberal media and its evil ways of leaving out the truth. This great conspiracy theory falls apart when you actually look at who comprises the liberal media: corporate-owned, largely conservative agencies who are no more liberals than their right-leaning counterparts. While such agencies may espouse liberal values, they do so only by paying lip-service to them, for the moment any challenge comes to the conservative elite, those very agencies flip over like dogs begging to be scratched and pounce on their liberal audience. We know this because various “liberal” papers supported the Bush post-9/11 narrative in order to justify gross human rights violations — they did so by changing the language they used to describe “torture.” We know this because the way the Occupy Everywhere protesters have been presented by almost all of the major news outlets has been less favorable than similar coverage by media sources from elsewhere, often at the expense of the messages actually being presented by OWS and her allies. This is because OE represents a threat to the establishment, who owns most of the so called “liberal media” and is quite apt at putting pressure where it needs to be in order to keep the narrative peddled by the media as divisive, entertaining, and supportive of the status quo as possible. And that’s really where all this rests: talking about who is a liberal and who is a conservative and who has the right narrative, blah blah blah, is all a giant game of ideology that serves no other purpose than to keep people nipping at one another’s throats. The truth of matter is that very little “truth” gets through corporate media. If you want to see what’s going on in the world, you have to go to independent media sources, or the rare corporate media source that doesn’t have its hands caught in the cookie jar (I would look at The Guardian as one such source). But to return to the original point: why is Herman Cain getting the shaft and Jesse Jackson a pass? Herman Cain is running for President. I can’t say whether Cain is innocent of the charges, but it goes without saying that a Presidential hopeful should be subject to public scrutiny. This includes Obama, who I will undoubtedly criticize throughout the next year in my evil liberal circles. But since Jesse Jackson is not running for President, and remains little more than an activist whose core values are really hard to disagree with (justice for people of color, etc.), I really don’t see the point in putting Cain and Jackson on the same public pedestal. Cain has a tendency to shove his foot in his mouth whenever he talks, which makes challenging him on allegations of sexual harassment all the more important. Any candidate who cannot keep his narrative straight deserves the kind of scrutiny Cain is getting. Did Cain know about the settlement or not? Should abortion be illegal or a choice? Whose fault is it for the high unemployment rate — those without jobs or the system? I could go on, but I think the point is made. I have the same misgivings about Romney and Perry, whose rambling and flip-flopping make it rather difficult to determine where they actually stand. And I have the same misgivings about Obama, who I think betrayed his progressive base by cowering before the opposition. Jackson isn’t really getting a pass. Plenty of news sources are covering the incident. But the truth is that very few people actually care. That’s not because Jackson is unimportant in a general sense. It’s that he’s unimportant when compared to the vast array of problems and events happening all around us. Are we really concerned with whether Jackson fondled someone’s testicles or whether Presidential hopeful Cain sexually harassed a woman, or whether the economy will bounce back or Obama’s Jobs Bill will get passed (and if it will be good for us), or whether Occupy Wall Street will effect any changes (or if it is really bad for the country), or whether the Arab Spring will produce good results in the Middle East, or whether we’ll withdraw troops from Iraq or Afghanistan, and so on and so forth. If you honestly think Jackson’s discrimination against a gay man is more important than those other questions, then your priorities are out of sync. And that’s okay, so long as you admit that you are governed by your biases and not by a need to see the big questions asked and addressed on the national stage. It’s not like talking about the case publicly is going to change whether Jackson gets charged with sexual harassment or not. For now, let’s be honest. Jackson doesn’t matter. He’s not going to make the election for Obama. He’s not going to make the election for Cain. He’s not going to damage the Democrats anymore than their failure to act. In the long run, we’ll
Dear Rick Scott: Your (Anti)Education Plan Stinks
(You’ll all have to excuse me while I rant about something political on this blog.) If you haven’t heard already, Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (where I live), announced his intention to change the Floridian university system by shifting funding away from the humanities towards “job creating” STEM majors.* Plenty of folks have poked fun at him for singling out anthropologists (for having degrees in nifty fields, but which (apparently) do little for society).** But I’d like to talk about a different problem: Scott’s assumption that STEM majors will create jobs or assure graduates that they will be able to find them. I’ll set aside, for the moment, that his program would likely affect me personally, since I am an English major in a field that would inevitably be cut. To start things off, STEM majors don’t produce jobs. True, putting more funding into those majors will mean hiring more teachers, which would create some jobs, but this is counteracted by all those teachers in other fields who would likely get fired as a result of the budget shifts. Scott’s plan would do little more than produce more graduates in fields that are already overwhelmed with graduates. There aren’t enough jobs in the sciences to begin with. When graduates in any field aren’t able to get jobs in or relevant to their field, it’s ridiculous to assume that producing more majors in any particular field with result in more people going into the job market as STEM workers. Roughly 42% of college graduates are either without jobs or working in jobs not related to their degrees. That’s not a number that can be ignored, since it shows how difficult the job market is for people who, in theory, are members of our professional and educated class. But what people also need to pay attention to is the fact that Rick Scott, who ran on the Republican brand of “jobs, jobs, jobs,” has also refused numerous opportunities to take on projects that would employ STEM graduates. A prime example is the $2.4 billion high speed rail project he rejected because he thought it would be too costly on taxpayers. That project would have been funded almost entirely by federal dollars. While federal money comes directly from taxpayers, Scott’s political maneuvering makes it seem as though he is saving taxpayers from having to pay for the project. The problem? That money was going to be spent anyway. Scott’s rejection only meant the federal government could take the money elsewhere. Florida taxpayers are paying for a $2.4 billion project in another State, while benefiting not a lick from the economic boom such a project might have had for Florida. And that’s the key: while Scott plays at being a pro-jobs governor with rhetorical pleas against the job-destroying humanities, his policies have effectively created an environment that is hostile towards workers, particularly STEM graduates. True, Florida has added many jobs to its economy, but that has come at the expense of government employees and Florida’s taxpayers, who now have to contend with a health and employment market that is less inclined towards their well-being. In fact, Rick Scott is so disliked by so many Floridians that it’s hard to pat him on the back and say, “Good job creating all those jobs.”*** After all, Scott has screwed over or pissed off the elderly, teachers (twice), police officers and other public workers, civil rights activists, at-risk women and mothers, and anyone in a labor union (which includes teachers, firefighters, police officers, and on and on down the list).**** But more strikingly are the statistics about those jobs: The fields of leisure and hospitality had the largest growth, growing by 58,500 jobs between September 2010 and September 2011. The field has grown 46,600 jobs between August 2010 and August 2011. State, county and local governments lost 14,000 jobs in September after shedding 20,400 positions in August. Construction jobs fell by 12,900 in September, after 17,600 positions were eliminated in August. Doug Darling, director of the new Department of Economic Opportunity, noted that there remain 977,000 Floridians eligible for unemployment. Rick Scott likes to think that Florida’s economy will be open to STEM graduates. That all those engineers and scientists will come out of their degree programs and jump right into a field glowing with opportunities. But what he won’t tell you is that one of the largest growing industries in Florida remains the tourist industry, which puts little attention into STEM-based development. And yet, what we see are governments losing thousands of jobs, construction workers going out of work by the thousands, and so on. They are people who build the things engineers come up with; people who need projects to work on; and people who are, sadly, losing their jobs. The tax breaks he gave to his corporate buddies, sadly, haven’t exactly panned out the way his narrative would suggest.***** What this all comes down to is a problem of ethos: Scott doesn’t have any. His claims of being a job creator are specious at best, and so too are his claims that shifting educational priorities will result in greater job opportunities for Floridians (or anyone wanting to live here). There’s no rationality behind his claims. Effectively, Rick Scott is a walking talking point. He peddles the familiar arguments while functionally decimating what he perceives to be the bastions of the left. And perhaps he should be worried about the leftist fields, because despite burying our faces in books all day and learning about the depths of human history, humanities majors have an insight into our underlying problems that continue to plague humanity. We all may not come to the same conclusions — in fact, most of us don’t — but the training we receive allows us to see between the lines in a political system that needs us to be under educated so we will avoid challenging the status quo. And that’s the problem. The less willing we become to put intelligent people into office