Ender’s Game Trailer is Here!

I’ve been waiting a long, long time for this.

Reactions? [SPOILERS]

2013-05-07 Ender's Game PosterFirst of all: I’m cautiously optimistic. Book adaptations are tough, and this one has been in the works forever. The problem was that they couldn’t get a good script, from what I’ve heard, and for this version Orson Scott Card finally took a hand in writing it himself. That’s risky, but the fact that they delayed it this long makes me hope they were willing to wait for the right script.

Another reason to be optimistic: the actors. Obvously Harrison Ford (as Graff) and Ben Kingsley (as Rackham) are serious stars. But they clearly made a decision to depart from the book a little bit by picking older kids for the children’s parts. In the book, Ender is selected for the Battle School at age 6. Asa Butterfield may be able to pass for younger than his actual age (16), but at 5’10” he’s not going to pass for a kindergartener. And that’s fine: adjusting the story to have older kids makes sense to get more experienced actors. Especially given the violence of the book: Ender kills his first opponent before he even leaves earth when he’s still just 6.

Another major change I noticed has to do with the first war. In the novels, Rackham’s brilliant final defense happens around Saturn, but in the trailer the battles are clearly being fought in Earth’s atmosphere with what look like current-generation fighter jets. So the story has been ratcheted back to be much closer to our timeline (although the actual events of the book happen 70 years after the first war, so we’ve got spaceships by then). I’m not sure what to make of that change. I don’t have anything against it, but I don’t see what is gained either.

2013-05-07 Rackham

As for the rest: the production looks stunning (of course) and so far I’m a huge fan of the sets and costumes. It’s got a really beautiful blend of sort of gritty, hard-sf (check out the muted colors on Ender’s Salamander Army uniform) and then a ton of glossy, bright futurism as well. I love the fusion, and so far I’m very excited by that glimpse into the tone of the movies. The Battleroom looks fantastic!

But it’s definitely too early to be confident. They’re going to have to make major departures from the book to fit this all into one book. After all: it spans several years of Ender’s childhood and several very distinct phases of storytelling, a lot of which involve Ender in almost total isolation. There’s also the fundamental problem that Ender directs the human fleet from a hollowed-out asteroid in our solar system, so none of the space-combat is first-person. It looks like they are getting around that by having Ender use some kind of virtual-reality technology to control the fleet, and that could be a  really great way to make more of the narrative visual.

So, like I said, cautious optimistic. There are definitely hurdles to overcome, but the early signs are all mostly positive.

Six months to go…

2013-05-07 Ender's Game Graff Wiggin

Juvenile Instructor Links to my Times And Seasons Piece

2013-05-07 Juvenile Instructor Masthead

Well this is neat. Juvenile Instructor–a Mormon history blog–has a shout-out to my recent piece for Times And Seasons about Mormons and sci-fi. Edje Jeter notes that Mormons don’t just write sci-fi, they are often the subjects of sci-fi and lists 5 examples. I went ahead and added three more in the comments.

Forget Gun Stats: Yahoo! is Running Blaze Articles!?

I’ve seen the usual comments surrounding this article about gun stats out of Utah, but what shocked me wasn’t the article (and it definitely wasn’t the comments), it was the fact that Yahoo! News republished an article from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

2013-05-07 Blaze on Yahoo!

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s definitely a thing. Glenn Beck’s homebrew hybrid of Drudge and CurrentTV must be pulling some real numbers to get pulled in by Yahoo! like this. (Here’s the site, if you’re curious.)

When Racism Isn’t

So the first problem I noticed with this NYT op-ed is that it is based on research that is not research. Nancy Ditomaso makes the stunning observation that job-seekers depend on social networks to get jobs. The fact that Ditomaso appears to think that this required “research” to discover–and that the discovery warrants an op-ed piece–suggests quite a lot about Ditomaso. Starting, for example, with the fact that if you’re looking for someone who has anything like expertise on job-searching you should look elsewhere. Seriously, has she never heard of the term “networking”?

2013-05-07 NYT Race Jobs OpEd

Still, despite the fact that the starting point of this piece is basically “when it rains things get wet”, the fact that it appears in the NYT (even the blog section) shows that if you add charges of racism to an otherwise banal story, you’ll make waves. Or at least ripples. Ditomaso’s argument is that since people use their social networks to get jobs, and since social networks are correlated with race (“we still live largely segregated lives”), and since white people have better jobs, the end result is that white people can effectively discriminate against black people not by discriminating against black people, but by showing favoritism towards white people.

As an observation about systemic inequality, Ditomaso is right. I think it’s a real problem, and I think it’s one that should be taken seriously. But there is a huge problem with the way that Ditomaso addresses this legitimate concern. That problem is that she sees the problem entirely through partisan political lenses, thus intertwining left and right with black and white. That’s a terrible thing to do.

For example, Ditomaso levels the heavy accusation that “despite complaints about “reverse discrimination,” my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.” The thing that’s most troubling about her specific reasoning is that she never even considered the possibility that people might oppose affirmative action for the reasons that conservatives actually state as their reasons for opposing affirmative action. For example, many conservatives believe that affirmative action is counter-productive, and they have good empirical reasons for believing that. Ditomaso doesn’t even acknowledge that possibility. More generally, conservatives tend to believe in the ideal of a race-blind society.

This doesn’t actually mean that people would have to abandon their heritage of culture. In past centuries, there was significant discrimination among white people against other white people (such as Irish and Italians), but this kind of discrimination is largely non-existent today. That doesn’t mean that white people of Irish or Italian descent have had to abandon, hide, or deny their heritage. It’s just that the specific categories have been largely subsumed. They are there, and people are aware of the stereotypes (positive and negative), but they don’t seem to really matter.

That is the kind of future that conservatives would like to see: the same process of integration that brought various European ethnic groups into tolerant interdependent existence continuing to grow to incorporate all races into a common humanity. That’s not such a bad vision. It’s definitely not a racist vision. And it’s easy to see why conservatives might feel that affirmative action obstructs this progress, by entrenching racial differences in society and law. Ditomaso doesn’t seem to see any irony at all in lamenting that we’re still segregated, and then calling for race-based differential treatment. Conservatives, on the other hand, would love to live in a world where favoritism still exists (if you think that’s going to be stamped out, you’re insane) but social networks are no longer strongly correlated with race.

But Ditomaso isn’t having any of that. We never get to have that discussion. It is cut off at the knees by her myopic insistence that opposition to affirmative action has to be about one of two things: white people don’t like giving black people jobs (“reverse-discrimination”) or white people just really like giving white people jobs (favoritism). Given this whopper of a false-choice dichotomy, the results of her study are not nearly as powerful as she thinks they are:

The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs. Whites who felt entitled to these positions believed that affirmative action was unfair because it blocked their own privileged access.

Yes: it must be about entitlement and white privilege. The possibility that the other side of the political aisle actually has sincere desires to improve race relations but simply a different view about how to accomplish that is not even entered for consideration.

Please note, by the way, that I’m not denying the existence of entitlement and white privilege. I think these are concepts that do exist. Of course a part of the desire for conservatives for racial integration is that it by white racial integration: integration into a white culture as opposed to integration into a new, pan-racial culture. Everyone prefers what is familiar. There are no angels on earth, and everyone’s politics are going to be tainted with self-interest or prejudice to some degree. The fact that conservative views on race are not perfect shouldn’t be used as an excuse to pretend they are not goodNor, by the way, do I think this is such a big deal. A couple of centuries ago we would have been talking about the need to assimilate Irish immigrants into American culture. Now we all celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Clearly integration is intrinsically a two-way street, so I just don’t think that white or black unease with integration should be a dealbreaker for this plan.

I’m not writing this piece because I think America has no problems with race. That would be laughable. I’m writing this because it seems that the only folks who feel at liberty to discuss race come from a particular political viewpoint. And that hamstrings the discussion and also our progress. If there’s one thing I’d like to see change about America’s race dialogue, it would be to make it a dialogue. To actually have a diversity of opinion. I think affirmative action is a terrible idea in practice, but I don’t question the sincerity of those who advocate for it. It’d be nice if that good faith was a two-way street.

Another way to look at it is Hanlon’s Razor, which states: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The gist of this is that when something bad happens, don’t assume malice. It could be incompetence. It could be stupidity. It could be bad incentives. It could be ignorance. There is no doubt that the combination of social networks and pre-existing racial inequity is self-perpetuating. The outcome is racist. But it’s time we learned to separate between 21st century racism, which is primarily about unintentional perpetuation of pre-existing disparities, and 19th century racism, which was about the belief that some races are intrinsically inferior to others. Using the same terminology to cover innocent (but dangerous and sometimes stupid) behavior and evil behavior is not constructive.

That’s what the title of this article refers to. I’m absolutely not denying the reality of systemic racial injustice in our country. Far from it. I’m saying that the best way forward includes an admission that the battle to be fought in 2013 isn’t the same as the ones that were fought in the 1960s or 1860s. That struggle is not over, but it has changed. Our tactics–and our language–should reflect our past progress if we want to see more progress in the future.

Elizabeth Smart, Chastity, Politics, and the Value of Human Life

2013-05-06 Elizabeth Smart

In the short few minutes it took me to re-find the original Christian Science Monitor piece on Elizabeth Smart’s comments at a Johns Hopkins University forum on human trafficking, my take on the article shifted dramatically.

The first few references I saw were all from fellow Mormons on Facebook who were highlighting and agreeing with Smart’s message which is, to put it simply, that a lot of the conventional ways of teaching young people and especially  young girls about chastity are irredeemably terrible. From the CSM:

Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

So originally I intended to just link to that piece and basically say that I thought it was great that such a strong and compelling spokesperson was drawing attention to this issue. I have tremendous respect for Smart and the way that she has risen above her ordeal and refused to be a victim. Her criticism is absolutely right, and religious people (including Smart’s fellow Mormons) need to learn to separate the ideal of chastity (which ought to apply to both genders equally) from out-dated, sexist cultural notions that mix chastity with the horrific notion that women and girls are products or goods that have most value when in “like-new” condition. It’s a simple but vital distinction: chastity ought to be about the choices that women and men  make, not something that applies only to women and includes events that happen with or without their consent.

But while I was hunting around for that article, I was surprised and disappointed to see headlines like these in secondary coverage:

Elizabeth Smart: Abstinence-only education can make rape survivors feel ‘dirty,’ ‘filthy’ (MSNBC)

Traditional Mormon Sexual Purity Lesson Contributed to Captivity, Elizabeth Smart Tells University Audience (Joanna Brooks)

Smart’s comments are being exploited for political gain, and that is neither respectful to Smart nor illuminating for the discussion. An open-ended discussion of the real issues without political prejudice might, for example, talk about the connection between American consumerism and sexual exploitation. The fetish of unwrapping expensive technological gadgets has twisted and eerie parallels with the way women’s bodies are treated as products to be consumed. I believe the problem is deep and pervasive, but MSNBC and ThinkProgress see just left vs. right. The entire discussion, and not just Smart’s views, are being shortchanged.

It’s particularly frustrating because a short perusal of Smart’s Wikipedia page indicates that she continues to thrive within her faith community as an observant Mormon, including serving a mission and marrying the traditional Mormon temple ceremony. Both of these facts indicate–in the absence of any statement from Smart to the contrary–that she remains dedicated to traditional conceptions of virtue. This is why her criticism of Mormonism is so important and insightful (and why I was excited by them in the first place): it genuinely comes from within.

I also think it’s important to realize that Smart seems to have found not only problems, but also solutions within her faith. A traditional Mormon children’s song is titled simply “I am a Child of God“, and Mormons heavily emphasize our divine heritage as children of heavenly parents. As Smart concluded (citing the CSM article again), children need to be taught that “you will always have value and nothing can change that.”

And that, too, is a part of Smart’s Mormon upbringing.

The McDonald’s Theory

2013-05-02 RonaldJon Bell’s strategy:

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

Seems plausible, but I think some people suffer from being afraid to start things, and some people suffer from starting too many things and/or not finishing things.

I know where my weakness lies…