Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 2

Shabcast 41.2 - Holly Explains Final Fantasy VII to Jack, Part 2

Here is the next part of the loooong discussion between myself and Holly Boson (@fireh9lly) in which Holly explains Final Fantasy VII to me, a total novice, in pitiless detail.

This episodes moves on from preparatory context to the basics of the game and its history, Holly's textual approach to the game, and such subjects as Cloud Strife, fandom, shipping, etc.

Content warnings apply from this point on because some potentially troubling issues are mentioned.

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Part 3 will be posted in advance of publication for my Patreon backers. https://www.patreon.com/user?u=419661...

IDSG Ep77 Capitol Coup

Daniel and Jack respond to the Jan 6th 2021 attack/coup-attempt on the Capitol Building, Washington D.C.

Content Warnings.

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Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  From Jan 2021 onwards, patrons get exclusive access to one extra episode a week, plus other extra benefits.

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IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

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Episode Links/Notes:

Robert Evans, "How the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington, DC" https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/05/how-the-insurgent-and-maga-right-are-being-welded-together-on-the-streets-of-washington-d-c/

NY Times "The Daily" Georgia Runoffs Part 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/podcasts/the-daily/georgia-election-purdue-loeffler.html

Nick Fuentes Stop The Steal DC Speech: https://www.bitchute.com/video/qLNtMz6yKUyO/

Full Livestream "Save America" Rally Jan 6, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht20eDYmLXU

Mother Jones,"Meet the Right-Wing Trolls Behind “Stop The Steal”" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/11/stop-the-steal/

Ali Alexander claims he put together the January 6 rally with three Republican Congressmen. https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/1347943638203068417?s=20

Ali Alexander being terrible on Twitter:

Alex Jones says he paid $500,000 for rally that led to Capitol riot: https://twitter.com/Vicky_ACAB/status/1347799969609228289?s=20

Video of police officer assault by Stop the Steal rioters. https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1347749675777011714?s=20

Eric Munchel of Nashville, TN. Zip Tie Guy One: https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1347756693250330628?s=20

Larry Brock of Texas, Zip Tie Guy Two: https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1347756693250330628?s=20

Footage from inside the Capitol during the coup. https://twitter.com/insidernews/status/1347646782659031043?s=20

BakedAlaska Inside Capitol Building. https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=aRdK0_1609982302

Kim Kelly, "Is the "QAnon SHaman" From the MAGA Capitol Riot Covered in Neo-Nazi Imagery?" https://t.co/rw5LEvWWbZ?amp=1

"Given his penchant for showing up to protests shirtless, face-painted, and sporting a horned helmet like some kind of racist Party City Viking who took a wrong turn and ended up at Burning Man, Angeli’s many tattoos are often on full display, including his large trio of Odinist symbols. He has a mjolnir, or Thor’s Hammer, on his stomach, an image of Yggdrasil, or Tree of Life, etched around his nipple, and most significantly, placed right above his heart, a valknut, or “knot of the slain,” an old Norse runic symbol turned recognized hate symbol that is popular among white supremacists. In addition, the mjolnir has become a symbol of identity among self-proclaimed “heathens” (which is often code for white supremacy-aligned pagans)."

Talia Jane January 6 photodump. https://twitter.com/itsa_talia/status/1347215672133251078?s=20

"The National Justice Party Stands in Solidarity with the Uprising of January 6th." https://nationaljusticeparty.com/2021/01/07/the-njp-stands-in-solidarity-with-the-uprising-of-january-6th/

Betsy Phillips thread on January 6. "The first important thing to realize is that they won." https://twitter.com/AuntB/status/1347161090061463552?s=20

Megan Squire is quoted here about boogaloo plans to return for inauguration day https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/right-wing-extremists-vow-return-washington-joe-biden-s-inauguration-n1253546

Maggie Koerth, Authorities Tepid Response Not an Aberration https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-response-to-the-capitol-breach-wasnt-an-aberration/?ex_cid=story-twitter

Talia Lavin, this isn't 1776 all over again, it's the reaction against Reconstruction https://www.thecut.com/2021/01/this-isnt-the-revolution-they-think-it-is.html

Talia Lavin, When a Conspiracy is Deferred it Explodes https://newrepublic.com/article/160814/trump-protesters-attack-us-capital

Robert Evans, Extremists were able to lay siege to the US Capitol because America's law enforcement ignored warnings of right-wing extremism for years https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-siege-happened-because-police-ignored-right-wing-extremism-warnings-2021-1?r=US&IR=T

Mike Davis, Riot on the Hill https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/riot-on-the-hill

Melissa Gira Grant, This Isn’t an Insurrection. It’s an Alliance. https://newrepublic.com/article/160816/congress-mob-law-enforcement-alliance

Right Wing Watch, Capitol Breach Preceded by Widespread Calls for Violence on Pro-Trump Social Media https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/%e2%8bcapitol-breach-preceded-by-widespread-calls-for-violence-on-pro-trump-social-media/

Neil Faulkner, Fascist Riot in Washington https://www.anticapitalistresistance.org/post/the-fascist-riot-in-washington

QAnonAnonymous Podcast Episode https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/episode-125-coup-anon-feat-elle-reeve-eleanor-janega

Citations Needed Podcast https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/us-media-incapable-of-criticizing-maga-mobs-without-evoking-racist-cliches-about-third-world

Worst Year Ever Episodes https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-week-of-2021-is-going-well/id1478794003?i=1000504749630

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/happy-coup-year/id1478794003?i=1000504570156

Stuff They Don't Want You To Know podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-attack-on-dc-part-i-breaching-the-gates/id732915228?i=1000504755639

Revolution of the Daleks Review

This review was brought to you by 106 patrons over at Chrisine's Patreon. Thank you to everyone who helped my daughter through a long, difficult, and ultimately transformative year. I'm real proud of her.

The nice thing about the festering debacle that was The Timeless Children immediately followed by the *entire rest of 2020* is that it finally lowers your standards enough to appreciate Chibnall. Was this good? Absolutely not. Did I care anymore? Also no. So, you know. Detente. It was, at the very least, not actively, malignantly bad. It was instead just sort of inoffensively there. An entirely adequate piece of Doctor Who. Given that even Davies and Moffat failed to achieve that about half the time on their Christmas specials, this has to be taken as some sort of result.

For the most part, what we have here is Chibnall’s worst instincts being overcome by sheer volume. At the end of the day a double companion departure, two returning villains, and Captain Jack is simply enough stuff that as long as you don’t do something like have the Doctor stand still for half an episode while the villain explains the plot to her you can probably just about make it work. Things explode at a basically reasonable frequency with emotional beats in the middle. One of the many problems with the Chibnall era has been that it’s never been entirely clear who it’s for. This is for hung over people who watched the show in 2008. There’s a reasonable number of those on New Year’s. So, you know. Job done. This is fine, as the kids say.

The problem with banal adequacy is that it’s easier to note the things that went wrong than the virtues. The directing was flat and unimaginative. (What on Earth was that “Yaz and the Doctor face the camera to deliver their final lines” bit? Why did we pan up the Dalek clone farm over a dramatic chord twice?) The emotional beats as ever suggest that Chibnall thinks they’re called that because you’re supposed tol club the viewer over the head with them, having characters simply assert the growth and characterization that Chibnall had forgotten to write for them previously. John Barrowman and Chris North spend much of the episode in a perverse duel to see who can offer the flattest line reading. (North ultimately runs away with it, as Barrowman’s efforts are undermined by his narcissistic desperation to be a fan favorite.) The Doctor apparently can’t be assed to even try escaping from prison for decades because she’s too sad over The Timeless Children. Which, I mean, that’s also kind of how I feel about it, but for fuck’s sake, even Eight tried to escape from prison regularly and he spent most of his era with amnesia about his amnesia.

The most egregious part of it, and the thing I’ll no doubt pick up most on if I ever hate myself enough to do an Eruditorum of this era, is the bizarre squandering of Daleks as cops. And look, I know this was all done in 2019 and wasn’t able to respond to anything that happened in 2020, but this still has to go down as one of the most amazingly wasted ideas in Doctor Who. What, exactly, does this episode think the problem with Dalek cops is? Is it that they’re fucking nazis? Is it that they’re inhuman and emotionless authority that prioritizes law and order over all else? Is it the severity or heavy-handedness of their tactics? No! It’s that they’re built on a corrupt contract with stolen alien technology, of course! Sure, they exterminate fake Theresa May, which, man, the 2019ness of the script sure shines through there doesn’t it, but even that’s fundamentally and crushingly vapid. Nobody can be surprised that there’s not much there to a Chibnall episode, but this is surely the most grandiose premise he’s ever squandered.

And yet for all of this I want to return to the fact that this was perfectly, mundanely adequate. You could show this to someone without embarrassment or undue disclaimer, though you’d need a lot of backstory fill-ins. That’s more than you could easily say about Voyage of the Damned, The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe or The Return of Doctor Mysterioso. It’s more than you could say about Orphan 55 or The Timeless Children too. And yet all of those stories are, inept as they may be, accurate descriptions of what their eras were. Show someone Voyage of the Damned and they get an accurate understanding of Davies in all regards save for basic quality. So what do you get if you show someone Revolution of the Daleks? What sort of show will they conclude that Doctor Who is? An aging franchise with its interests firmly rooted in the past, with little to offer save for past glories.

Speaking of a Whittaker Eruditorum… it’s currently unlikely. As my reviews make painfully clear, I’m not having fun with this era. It’s a chore to watch once. The idea of writing a minimum of 60,000 words on it just to cover the actual episodes feels miserable. The idea of putting down a project I love like Last War in Albion to spend the better part of a year on it sounds even worse. If Doctor Who eventually gets good enough again that I feel a deep compulsion to write about it the way that I did after Series 5 then I’ll probably work through whatever backlog I have. But I want to be clear about what that bar is, because it’s “get someone who wrote over a million words about Doctor Who and then fell very out of love with the show to love it again,” and that’s not a small task.
And speaking of Last War in Albion, the first bit of Book Three is already available for Patrons. It'll be here in a bit; I want to bank a decent chunk before I start serializing. 
“I forgot you were here” is in fact a really good gag.
Unlike the Harry Potter quoting. Not because Rowling is a TERF—that wasn't well enough known in 2019 for me to be bent out of shape about it. Just because the setup of the Doctor talking to herself and telling herself "one of the classics" as a bedtime story in an episode shot not long after August 2019 was so obviously the setup for her to begin, "Through the ruins of a city stalked the ruins of a man..."
I think the thing that most sums up this episode is the use of the squareness gun. It makes a return, clearly displayed so that fans can appreciate the callback. And then this cheeky, weird, silly concept that’s worth remembering fifteen years after its debut… gets used as a completely generic laser gun.
The new Dalek design worked better on screen than it looked like it would in photos, though it’s hard not to be glad the classic design remains the standard. For all that trading on past glories is tedious, sometimes a truly perfect and iconic piece of design is in fact a truly perfect and iconic piece of design.
Two of Chibnall’s most defining yet puzzling tendencies on display in the final thirty seconds: the belief that guest stars are the single most attractive thing about the program, and the belief that Doctor Who cannot function without a middle aged white dude.
Another bewildering squandering: the Doctor was arrested by the Judoon. This story is about Dalek cops. There are no Judoon in it. That’s… weird.  
Also, this episode contains no actual revolution.
No, seriously, did Chibnall just call it that to do an R of the Daleks story?
That’s embarrassing, dude.

IDSG Ep76 Birth of a Nation

And so 2020 - notable mostly for being IDSG's second year - comes to an end.  This time, in a change to the advertised program, and with apologies for our absence throughout most of this last month, we return with another of our periodic movie discussion episodes, this time looking at D. W. Griffith's epic, lauded, infamous, three-hour, silent-era blockbuster of hate, prejudice, and bigotry, Birth of a Nation.

Content warnings very much apply.

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The promised Part 2 of our coverage of Tom Metzger should be along as the first IDSG of the new year. 

Thank you all for sticking with us through thick and thin, sending us words of encouragement... and special thanks to those of you who helped us out financially.  Let's hope we all have a better one in 2021.  We have plans for the show in the new year, so stay tuned and stay safe.

Links/Notes:

Notes: Birth of a Nation (1915) Full Movie on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQaAddwjxg

The Clansman (1905) Full Text: https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/dixonclan/menu.html

Birth of a Nation at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation

Dan Olson "Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ1Qm1Z_D7w

DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation at Millennium Park (6/20/16): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNp-VHAueE

Within Our Gates (1920) Library of Congress (no score): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtwrCto9az0

Within Our Gates (1920) (lower quality, but with a score): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1E0NrcnwAE

Movies Silently debunks myths about Birth of a Nation: https://moviessilently.com/2015/09/07/silent-movie-myth-the-birth-of-a-nation-was-the-first-feature-and-the-first-film-shown-at-the-white-house/

Wikipedia, Timeline of Highest-Grossing Films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#Timeline_of_highest-grossing_films

Behind the Mask of Chivalry, Nancy Maclean: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Behind_the_Mask_of_Chivalry/xOamVVhPQ6UC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=mask+of+chivalry+nancy+maclean&printsec=frontcover

Shabcast 41: Holly Explains Final Fantasy VII to Jack, Part 1

The first part of a new, multi-part Shabcast in which my brilliant friend, writer and podcaster Holly Boson (@fireh9lly), takes me on a journey into a realm of which I was previously entirely ignorant, the complex labyrinth that is the Final Fantasy series of video games, especially Final Fantasy VII.  

This first episode is an hour long and is just the preparatory context she needed to give me to set me up for the actual trip.  

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My Patreon backers got advance access to this and already have advance access to Part 2.  Consider pledging me a dollar a month here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true
 
IDSG Ep76, on D.W. Griffith's three-hour silent epic of hate Birth of a Nation, will be up soon.  Hopefully tomorrow.

The Annual Slightly More Post-Christmas Than Usual Ebook Sale

Hello and happy "Oh thank God the recycling people are finally coming to get rid of all these boxes" day. Sorry I didn't get this up sooner, but here is the traditional post-Christmas ebook sale.

Our headline item is Volume 1 of The Last War in Albion for a mere 99 cents. I'll be starting work on Last War in Albion Volume 3 as soon as this year goes into the rear view mirror, so it's the perfect time to catch up. Volume 2 remains in blog form in omnibus chapter-long editions that are also extra easy to read. Volume 3 will start work on my Patreon on January 1st. But the massively oversized Volume 1, featuring the early career works of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, is yours for 99 cents.

We've also got a sale on all volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum, including a small sale on the only just released Volume 7. Those increase in price as you go through the series as follows:

Volume 1: $0.99
Volume 2: $0.99
Volume 3: $1.99
Volume 4: $1.99
Volume 5: $2.99
Volume 6: $2.99
Volume 7: $3.99

And finally, becuse even though Trump is headed out of office, I have a grim feeling Neoreaction a Basilisk won't get wildly less relevant any time soon. So it's on sale for $2.99.

Thanks to everyone for your support through what I think the official term among businesses is "a uniquely challenging year." I've been really humbled by your support and what it allows me to do. Please enjoy the books. 

Olive Peaseblossom in... Hive City Hootenanny

Penn and I finished a second comic! Here it is, in all its very silly glory. Clicking to expand images works. If you'd like to read artists notes, they're up at Penn's site (where the comic is also frankly in a better for reading version), and I have writers notes up at Patreon.

Think this is it for me this year. I'll see you all in January for Doctor Who discourse, which I'm sure you're all terribly excited for. And it shouldn't be too far into 2021 that Last War in Albion starts up again here.

 

We Will Reach The Promised Land: Liberal Science Fiction at the Fall of Democracy

There isn’t any promised land. This is just… it’s a superstition that you have picked up from all the humanity you’ve stuffed inside yourself. - Doctor Who, “Deep Breath”

I’ve been on a weird media kick for the past month. It started with that HBO Max West Wing reunion, which sparked a nostalgia for a show whose impeccable craft of writing is matched only by its absolutely dire sense of politics. That led to rewatching some favorite episodes in the lead-up to the election, a carefully tailored medial junk food to wash out the obvious taste. Then, in the wake of the election, as Donald Trump’s idiot coup meandered onwards, I found myself reading Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land. And around that time Season 4 of The Crown dropped, which Jill and I watch, so obviously I sat down with that, and by the time it had roughly caught up with Earthshock I’d well and truly fallen down a very strange rabbit hole of ritually fetishized liberalism. 

Consider this essay my climb back up.

Let’s start with The West Wing, which has aged more strangely than any other critically acclaimed TV show I can think of. On the one hand, its sparkling dialogue and immaculately precise construction stands up as one of the finest writing lessons out there—one that you can tell Steven Moffat studied intently. On the other… woof. Its most rightly acclaimed stretch of episodes features a plot in which it’s publicly revealed that the President has repeatedly lied to the American people (in his case, concealing the fact that he has multiple sclerosis). The result of this, which can in hindsight safely be called breathtakingly optimistic, is a concrete process of accountability in which transparent investigations take place and there are clear public consequences. These admittedly do not ultimately involve the President losing his reelection campaign (which plays out as a repudiation of a thinly veiled George W. Bush, culminating in a debate in which Martin Sheen’s bookish yet folksy New Hampshire scion Josiah Bartlett roundly humiliates the dunderheaded governor of Florida), but the fact remains that The West Wing portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people matters.

More than that, however, it portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people is something that can be straightforwardly handled by the existing system of structural checks and balances. Where, in fact, this system is a reified and beautiful thing, certainly not blind to whomever is in charge of it, but fundamentally capable of handling the prospect of those empowered within it engaging in egregious misconduct. To put it mildly, this was an extremely strange thing to watch in the leadup to an election that Donald Trump came very close to winning and, at the time of writing, may yet manage to stage a coup to overturn. 

Thinking about it, I realized what the experience most obviously resembled: watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its easy and woefully unexamined confidence in the utopian potential of post-scarcity capitalist imperialism. Indeed, I’d long remarked that West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin would be a perfect fit for Star Trek, the nauseating liberal utopian instincts he’s so frustratingly capable of turning into sparkling repartee a perfect balm for that franchise’s staid vapidity. Alas, I always reckoned, Sorkin has never really shown any interest in or flair for science fiction. But watching The West Wing in the waning days of 2020, I realized that he already has written four seasons of a sci-fi series about utopian liberalism.

There’s an artful structural comparison I could make here about the structural similarities between the West Wing’s core cast of a President, his close friend and second in command who he loves deeply but platonically, and the larger cast White House aides and the structure of a Star Trek ship. Heck, there’s no shortage of West Wing episodes you could rewrite as Star Trek episodes with relatively few changes; take out a container ship of Chinese refugees seeking asylum for their Christian beliefs and put in some dissident Cardassians and you could basically rerun the Season Two Thanksgiving episode, and you’d probably have a solidly entertaining time figuring out how to revamp the c-plot about Charlie trying to buy the President a carving knife into a heartwarming story of Data trying to buy Picard a birthday present. But that’s not actually the point I want to make here. What interests me is not the fact that a procedural is a procedural and that you can substitute helming a futuristic spaceship for running the White House as easily as House could turn detective fiction into medical drama. What interests me is the idea of liberal democracy as technology.

Broadly speaking, this is a mode of analysis that works. Take the institution of states as a fundamental constitutive element of the USA. There are a lot of things that went into the decision to create a government that was built out of thirteen semi-autonomous regions some of which were given disproportionate power compared to their actual populations, including the pre-existing structure of English colonies. But one thing that the creation of states was in 1787 was a piece of governmental technology to reckon with the fact that the United States occupied a very large amount of land at a time in which the speed of information was capped by how fast a horse was. Much of the structural antidemocratic nature of the US Government in 2020 is simply a product of continuing to use this technology long after information transmission had become instantaneous and same-day travel was possible between any two points in the country. This certainly isn’t the only way to look at structures of government, but it’s both a coherent way and one that provides useful insights.

Looking at The West Wing from this perspective in 2020, one is reminded of Frederick Pohl’s observation that good science fiction should not only predict the car but the traffic jam. The West Wing failed miserably at this task, imagining the structures of liberal democracy (or at least documenting them, Aaron Sorkin blessedly not being one of the founding fathers) but singularly failing to anticipate anything that could extend from this beyond how rapturously wonderful the basic idea is. In Sorkin’s view, the underlying structures of democracy are a tool essentially indistinguishable from modern medicine or crime scene analysis—a set of technologies more than capable of solving the problems they are designed to solve. In the hands of the right people their use might provide enough competence porn to sustain twenty-two hours of television a year, but crucially, the tools also simply work. The West Wing is not so naive as to think that a malevolent or incompetent President could not cause tremendous damage, but it has a deep and abiding faith that the larger systems of American Constitutional democracy limit this damage. More to the point, it has a faith that the weight and moral rectitude of the office is somehow capable of elevating those within it, getting them to aspire to worthiness of the office itself. And it is very clearly the office itself—not power or responsibility, but the specific piece of governmental technology itself. In Sorkin’s world, Republicans are the noble opposition—well-meaning idealogues with whom Sorkin’s characters happen to disagree, but with whom they are positively eager to find common ground (and thus fulfill the lofty promise of the office).

The queer theorist Lauren Berlant, writing a few years before The West Wing’s debut, advanced a notion she calls infantile citizenship—a naive form of citizenship invested primarily in the fetishes of American politics. But The West Wing offers something else—a notion of infantile governance. To Sorkin, running the country is just a matter of putting good, smart people into the machinery of government, at which point the natural tendencies of the machine will attend to things. An exchange early in the third season highlights the nature of this, as Bartlet explains his decision to allow a forest fire to burn itself out. “It's the end of the season and the fire isn't anywhere near tourists. Letting this fire burn is good for the environment. You know how I know? Because smart people told me.” This is the function of government: great men enacting the judgment of smart ones. Do that and everything will be fine. 

Which brings us to A Promised Land, the first volume of Barack Obama’s memoirs. Obama, of course, offered a sort of empirical testing of The West Wing’s notions of governance—America as governed by an intelligent and principled man who sincerely wanted to make it a better place. My interest here is not in talking about how well he did—the fact that we’re watching a fascist coup unfold less than four years after he left office kind of gives a definitive answer anyway—but in looking again at the machinery of government—at how the system functions. 

In many regards A Promised Land cycles through the same basic story with different details. It goes like this: Obama confronts some significant political issue facing America (health care, the financial crisis, climate change, terrorism) and vows to fix it. Immediately a team of wizened advisors (typically some subset of David Axlerod, Robert Gibbs, and Rahm Emmanuel) inform him that this will be very hard. Obama declares that this is why they’re here, and that they will try to do it. At that point, a lot of legislative wrangling begins as Obama confronts the reality of the Senate filibuster and the sheer intransigence of the Republican party. Nevertheless, Obama prevails and is able to do something that addresses the issue. At this point, Obama will acknowledge criticisms of his efforts as being inadequate and address the accusation that he should have done more, which he will respond to by throwing up his hands and pointing out the political realities he was operating under. 

Obama is not, to be clear, unaware of the bad faith with which the Republicans are operating, or of the structural flaws of a system requiring a sixty vote supermajority in the Senate to do anything. He acknowledges the flaws of doing things this way at length. But he always returns to the cold political reality: that he did as much as he possibly could. And for what it’s worth, he is ultimately persuasive on this point. He documents the barriers to doing more in detail, explains their intractability, and makes it clear that even doing what he did was very hard. All of this comes off as a reasonable assessment. It genuinely sounds as though Obama was the best President he could be.

What’s puzzling, then, is what Obama thinks the book is doing. As he explains it, the point of the book is to inspire young people considering a life of public service. To quote the end of the preface, “More than anyone, this book is for those young people—an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.” But this is a frankly baffling account of the book he wrote, which appears to be a very thorough argument about how fundamentally inadequate electoralism is. It’s genuinely strange—Obama is clearly an intelligent man. His book is well-written, cogently organized, and clearly the work of a thoughtful and perceptive person. And yet he is singularly unable to come to the most obvious conclusion—that an aggressively antidemocratic system in which bad faith actors can prevent legislation to avoid cooking the planet even in the face of an overwhelming voter majority against their party is fundamentally doomed. Indeed, not only can he not bring himself to come to this conclusion, he genuinely believes that his account of this system constitutes a moving story about the merits of public service.

Between these two examples we can see the central mechanism of liberal science fiction. In order to sell the idea that the technology of American liberalism can offer meaningful solutions to the world, it is necessary either to aggressively redefine the mechanisms of American government or to define success downwards into the tautology of “whatever is possible.” The world, in other words, is cut down to fit the imagined technology. This realization has profound implications for how we understand science fiction, since it’s scarcely a move limited to liberal science fiction. This is, in the end, its central trick: to tailor the world to its purposes and hide this fact behind the illusion of technological consequences. 

But in the context of 2020, the comforting lie of liberal science fiction is less intellectual comfort food than the seeping narcosis of a fatal overdose. We have just witnessed a four year sustained attack on the much vaunted American democratic system, and it has failed on virtually every count. An idiot kleptocrat has made it clear that corruption can absolutely go unchecked and that there is no abuse of power severe enough to get the Republican party to turn on you. Meanwhile, the ability of a fanatical minority to exploit the deliberately undemocratic distribution of power across the fifty states to retain power in the face of a consistent majority against them remains unchecked. A majority of one of the two major parties believes that election results that go against them are prima facie fraudulent, while a majority of elected officials have been perfectly willing to abet an absolutely farcical coup attempt. And over this backdrop we have hundreds of thousands of people dead.

In the face of this, the best immunoresponse that American democracy has been able to offer to any of this is to elect a doggedly cautious centrist without a working majority in Congress. By all accounts Biden isn’t even inclined to take the basic step of prosecuting someone who has been perpetuating a comprehensive fraud and theft against the American people for four years. He’s transparently unwilling to do the kind of root and branch reform necessary to make the resurgence of Trumpism difficult. As an openly queer leftist woman, it is difficult to view the next four years as anything other than sufficient lead time to get to where fleeing the country is feasible. 

None of this is surprising, of course. As I (and countless others) have noted before, fascism is well-engineered to exploit liberalism’s flaws. And it’s notable that neither The West Wing nor A Promised Land offer any thought about fascism. It’s not that it’s entirely absent from liberal science fiction, but, well, I’ve already written about what that ends up looking like. By and large, however, fascism is the thing that liberal science fiction pointedly refuses to see, a silence as conspicuous as Obama’s failure to reach the most obvious conclusions about the story he tells. It does not and in fact can not acknowledge fascism’s presence, because fascism’s presence exposes its deception. 

Which is in fact a pretty accurate account of the Biden transition, with its scrupulous revival of Obama’s typography and its empty bromides about unity and governing for all Americans as if a sizeable chunk of the electorate isn’t openly declaring they’ll view his Presidency as illegitimate. This is liberal science fiction cosplaying as actual government, and is every bit as transparently, self-evidently doomed as that sounds. But crucially, it would have been an accurate account of *any* transition. Even the most utopian of counterfactuals, in which Sanders won the nomination and Presidency and had enough coattails to ensure a Senate majority that was willing to throw out the filibuster was going to run into the problem that there are simply too many centrist institutionalists in the Democratic Party to ever do the sort of aggressive reform necessary to fash-proof American democracy, or even to break the back of the already existent fascist movement. It’s worth recalling that denazification in Germany involved hanging people for war crimes, barring others from future political participation, and the actual outlawing of nazi views. Anybody who imagines there was a single Democratic candidate who was going to accomplish that is encouraged to read A Promised Land for a thorough overview of what is actually possible in American politics. Electoral politics were never going to offer a credible solution to Trumpism, and any fantasies about how Biden could just use recess appointments to pack his cabinet full of leftists are just writing their own versions of liberal science fiction.

The laws of narrative structure decree that I turn this essay towards something hopeful now. This is, of course, a form of science fiction all its own. And I’ll stand by a degree of anarchist science fiction, not because it’s immune to the basic deception by which the genre operates but because in spite of that deception I think the genre illuminates more than it conceals. All the same, the move seems dishonest. The truth is that the political situation in the US and, by dint of its power, the world is very, very dire. In the short term, there are some modest but meaningful changes coming, most obviously an actually coherent pandemic response. Anyone who is not relieved to know that it will be the Biden administration handling vaccine distribution and not the Trump administration is, bluntly, an idiot. And a number of basic protections for women, people of color, and sexual minorities are likely to go into place. That these are obviously inadequate does not actually diminish my relief that the executive order declaring it legal to deny me health care for being trans is not long for this world. 

The medium term, however, is likely very fucked. There exists a fascist bloc of sufficient size to influence decision making. Literally nothing good can possibly follow from this, while a great many bad things can. As Jack points out in what’s currently his pinned tweet, “The Beer Hall Putsch was an attempted coup.  It failed.  The leaders were lightly punished.  Their movement grew.  Under ten years later, with the assistance of establishment reactionaries waging a war against the left, they took power.  Coups are processes not events.” If your politics are treating Biden as an endpoint as opposed to an opportunity to regroup, you are making a very big mistake. Frankly, even if Trumpism fails to successfully retrench and the Republican Party deescalates into the normal level of moral horror that characterised it from the Reagan-Romney period, the prospects of right-wing terrorism alone should have you deeply anxious. And I don’t have any plausible way to spin this as good. The awful reality that there is not a global consensus to tackle climate change within the at this point desperately short window we have in which to do it remains horrifyingly present. Frankly, I could cut the first four words from Neoreaction a Basilisk at this point.

That leaves the long term. My on the record advice, to haunt the future, stands. But I’ve never really offered any sort of explanation for how to do that. In part that’s because it’s not a one size fits all sort of approach. The sort of gothic wound necessary to generate a good haunting is definitionally transgressive, sitting beyond or in excess of what the world imagines. Like the Situationists, I am being reasonable and demanding the impossible. Scarring the world enough to force a future reckoning is necessarily left as an exercise for the reader.

What I’ve been doing for the past four years, though, has been a process of trying to build a radical community in Ithaca that will be able to survive this. There is no shortage of privilege involved in this. I live in an extremely progressive town that makes investing in a leftist community easy. The financial advantages of a polyamorous family combined with the fact that Anna and Jill both work well-paying professional class jobs means that we have disposable income that can be put towards activism. More to the point, it means we have the budget to just directly help people—we’re currently helping support two broke queer kids on top of doing things like contributing substantially to the local bail fund and helping the local street art organization create a repairs fund for when some racist dicknob vandalizes something.

The endgame here is bluntly simple: create a community that has a plausible chance of enduring in the face of climate change, and that has the resilience for long-term resistance to fascism. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got: try not to die. Its horizons are as meager as its ambitions—a single small town in upstate New York and the idea that maybe, if we work very, very hard at it, we’ll still have a functioning community that keeps each other safe after it all comes crashing down. I want to imagine more. I look at Jack’s dreams of a mass workers movement with a certain degree of puzzled envy that he’s capable of seeing such a thing as plausible. But the reality is that most days imagining that we get Ithaca over the line feels audacious. 

The world is in a very scary place, and a lot of us aren’t going to survive that. Maybe there’s something better that follows from that than what I’m capable of imagining. But if so, we’ll have to start by admitting what we are, and more to the point what we’re not dealing with. The future is coming, and it isn’t science fiction.

Book Launch and the Rani

After quite a lot of delay, Eruditorum Press is proud to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy. Adapted from a blog about Doctor Who I imagine you've heard of, this is the revised version of my essays on the final years of the original television show and the first phase of the Wilderness Years, the Virgin New Adventures. Over 600 pages it covers every televised Sylvester McCoy episode and the highlights of the Virgin line. It's also got a huge bevy of book-exclusive essays, including new ones on Nightshade and The Pit, an essay on Lloyd Rose's The Algebra of Ice, an essay on the recent Seventh Doctor comics by Andrew Cartmel, and a bunch of essays on arcane points of Doctor Who continuity like "When Was the Time War?" and "Was He Half-Woven on His Mother's Side?" 

It's a big, epic book that was very hard to get together, and that I'm very proud of in spite of its troubled gestation. And it's very much available as a holiday gift for the extreme nerd in your life.

If you backed it on Kickstarter and filled out your survey promptly you already have a copy. If you were slow in filling out your survey, please check Kickstarter for updates.

Here's some purchase links:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Smashwords (for non-Kindle ereaders)

I hope you enjoy it.

Some other orders of business while I have your attention. Christine's Patreon has dipped to $286 since the pledge drive earlier this year. I politely remind you that I will only be reviewing Revolution of the Daleks if that goes over $300 again. I would very much like to not review Revolution of the Daleks, but somewhat annoyingly I would prefer my daughter be able to pay her rent even more.

Also, check back tomorrow for an actual essay by me—a standalone piece on liberal science fiction, a term I promise you I am not using how you expect.

IDSG Ep 75 Tom Metzger, Part 1

The first in a two part series on Tom Metzger (deceased), former Grand Dragon of the California Klan turned Neo-Nazi, pioneer of using cable-TV for propaganda and hate music to recruit young people. 

Content Warnings.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

This episode is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Mulugeta Seraw.

Notes/Links:

Louis Meets the Nazis (at BBC iPlayer): https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02q8d5v/louis-theroux-louis-and-the-nazis

James Mason and Tom Metzger on Race and Reason: https://www.bitchute.com/video/C80lEHzlqfaB/

WAR website: https://resist.com/

SPLC on Tom Metzger: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/tom-metzger

SPLC on Mulugeta Seraw case: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/10/25/remember-mulugeta-30-years-after-splc-lawsuit-life-and-legacy-man-killed-hate-group

IDSG Ep 2 on David Duke: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/i-dont-speak-german-episode-2-david-duke

Uprising podcast: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-uprising-a-guide-from-por-73255667/