As a male writer, I’ve striven to compensate and write honest, well developed, three dimensional female characters. It works better some times more than others, but in general I’ve been complimented a lot on the results (it helped that I had seven sisters and most of my closest friends in high school were girls). But there is a balance that is difficult to achieve between strength and vulnerability, which Sophia McDougall nails on the head in her article “I Hate Strong Female Characters.” Clue: It takes a lot more than just a token butt kicker. Check out her excellent article!
Month: August 2013
Malice Towards None: Orson Scott Card, Gay Marriage, and the “Ender’s Game” Film Controversy, Part Two
Note: This is the second part of this essay. Part one can be found by clicking here.
“It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren’t for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn’t fight with honor… I fought to win.”
–Ender’s Game
“Somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn’t do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood [them] well enough.”
—Ender’s Game
Perhaps one of the most troubling things to me about the whole Ender’s Game boycott is the chill and fear it creates not only for those who, on personal, religious or ethical grounds, oppose gay marriage, but also to those who choose to work and associate with them. In these scenarios, all tainted parties are punished, even those who happen to be supportive with the gay rights movement. It’s a modern McCarthyism, creating a feeling that all people who do not pass that sociopolitical litmus test must be shunned and, if you do not shun them as well, you’re suspect as well. Thus, in the case Ender’s Game, Lionsgate, Harrison Ford, Gavin Hood, Asa Butterfield, and the rest of the cast and crew of the film would be punished by this kind of attitude, even though they have all come out staunchly in the favor of gay rights, and insist the story of Ender’s Game is a story about compassion and empathy, so has nothing to do with Card’s stance on gay marriage.
Fortunately, a lot of the more level headed members of the liberal community see the implications of such actions. Juliet Lapados at the New York Times, even though she hardly agrees with Card’s more extreme views, called out this sort of action:
Generally, boycotts are used to pressure companies or governments to end objectionable activities; consider the boycott of Chick-fil-A to protest the chain’s financial support of antigay organizations. What Geeks Out has in mind is closer to blacklisting. The group wants to “send a clear and serious message to Card and those that do business with his brand of antigay activism — whatever he’s selling, we’re not buying.” This isn’t about stopping the dissemination of antigay sentiments; it’s about isolating Mr. Card and shaming his business partners, thus cutting into their profits.
If Mr. Card belongs in quarantine, who’s next?
Science of Smiling
This is an interesting article about the science behind smiling, and most importantly the beneficial effects of smiling:
Smiling stimulates our brain’s reward mechanisms in a way that even chocolate, a well-regarded pleasure-inducer, cannot match.
The article even includes directions on how to practice your smile. That sounds off-putting initially (to me, at least), but it’s interesting that it’s specifically teaching you to practice your genuine smile. Fake smiles, apparently, just don’t give the same benefit.
Bono: Africa Unchained
Everyone loves Bono. He’s a good man. And U2 rocks. He has also been one of the strongest proponents of foreign aid. This is why the following has come as a bit of a shock:
Foreign aid has been blasted by the likes of economists William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo. But Bono? While not blasting it per se (not all aid is created equal, mind you), he recognized that it is economic development that is the key to reducing poverty. As The Economist recently reported,
The world’s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original [Millennium Development Goals]—such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds—will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early…The MDGs may have helped marginally, by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty. Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution…[T]he biggest poverty-reduction measure of all is liberalising markets to let poor people get richer. That means freeing trade between countries (Africa is still cruelly punished by tariffs) and within them (China’s real great leap forward occurred because it allowed private business to grow). Both India and Africa are crowded with monopolies and restrictive practices.
Many Westerners have reacted to recession by seeking to constrain markets and roll globalisation back in their own countries, and they want to export these ideas to the developing world, too. It does not need such advice. It is doing quite nicely, largely thanks to the same economic principles that helped the developed world grow rich and could pull the poorest of the poor out of destitution.
Bono appears to have grasped this concept (he is a self-proclaimed “evidence-based activist”). And he rocked it at Georgetown University (if for nothing more than his Bill Clinton impression). He spoke of how “it’s not just aid. It’s trade, it’s investment, it’s social enterprise. It’s working with the local citizenry to help them unlock their own domestic resources so they can do it for themselves. Think anyone in Africa likes aid? C’mon.” He said that the hero will be “the nerd” and, more specifically, “Afro-nerds.” These individuals have been using technology and social media to expose government corruption and increase transparency.
Where did this come from? While it may have come from multiple sources, I’m willing to bet economist George Ayittey’s (above with Bono) impassioned TED speech and post-speech discussions with Bono had an influence. See why below.
A Titanic Blunder
My wife and I were trying to decide what to watch on NetFlix the other night and we somehow ended up watching Titanic: a film that was pretty good the first couple times (at least according to audiences and the Academy), but has worsened with each viewing.
But one scene in particular stood out to me with this viewing (no, not that scene). Recall as the young Rose (Kate Winslet) asked Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber) about the number of lifeboats, Andrews answered that there were only enough boats for about half the passengers. The reason? The deck would look too cluttered. This reminded me of a Wall Street Journal article from last year that was written for the 100th anniversary of Titanic’s sinking. The author, Australian columnist Chris Berg, explains that
the Titanic was fully compliant with all marine laws. The British Board of Trade required all vessels above 10,000 metric tonnes (11,023 U.S. tons) to carry 16 lifeboats. The White Star Line ensured that the Titanic exceeded the requirements by four boats. But the ship was 46,328 tonnes. The Board of Trade hadn’t updated its regulations for nearly 20 years.
Why no regulatory updates?
It had been 40 years since the last serious loss of life at sea, when 562 people died on the Atlantic in 1873. By the 20th century, all ships were much safer. Moreover, the passage of time changed what regulators and shipowners saw as the purpose of lifeboats. Lifeboats were not designed to keep all the ship and crew afloat while the vessel sank. They were simply to ferry them to nearby rescue ships…Had Titanic sunk more slowly, it would have been surrounded by the Frankfurt, the Mount Temple, the Birma, the Virginian, the Olympic, the Baltic and the first on the scene, the Carpathia. The North Atlantic was a busy stretch of sea. Or, had the Californian (within visual range of the unfolding tragedy) responded to distress calls, the lifeboats would have been adequate for the purpose they were intended—to ferry passengers to safety.
Yet, Cameron’s fictionalized account of the tragedy supposedly brought on by greed and aesthetics “hinges on a crucial conversation between Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the shipyard where Titanic was built, and his customer Bruce Ismay, head of White Star Line, in 1910.” Carlisle proposed 48 ships, but Ismay and others rejected “on the grounds of expense.” But as Berg demonstrates, this too is untrue:
In the Board of Trade’s post-accident inquiry, Carlisle was very clear as to why White Star declined to install extra lifeboats: The firm wanted to see whether regulators required it. As Carlisle told the inquiry, “I was authorized then to go ahead and get out full plans and designs, so that if the Board of Trade did call upon us to fit anything more we would have no extra trouble or extra expense.” So the issue was not cost, per se, or aesthetics, but whether the regulator felt it necessary to increase the lifeboat requirements for White Star’s new, larger, class of ship. This undercuts the convenient morality tale about safety being sacrificed for commercial success that sneaks into most accounts of the Titanic disaster.
Nobody in the industry questioned the judgment of the Board of Trade. This was no longer the industry’s responsibility, but the board’s. The “private risk management” of business had evolved into mere “regulatory compliance.” As Berg notes,
This is a distressingly common problem. Governments find it easy to implement regulations but tedious to maintain existing ones—politicians gain little political benefit from updating old laws, only from introducing new laws. And regulated entities tend to comply with the specifics of the regulations, not with the goal of the regulations themselves.
While many things went wrong in the case of the RMS Titanic, when it comes to the number of lifeboats, Berg gets it right: “British regulators assumed responsibility for lifeboat numbers and then botched that responsibility.”
Policymakers, take notice.
The Slow Hunch: Uncertainty Still Undervalued
Rex Nutting at MarketWatch has a recent article claiming that economic policy uncertainty had nothing to do with the sluggish recovery. I beg to differ. Check out my brief response at my blog The Slow Hunch.
Honest Company vs. Honest Toddler
Something that sucks about the US legal system: sometimes it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong. It matters who is funded and who is not. I hope that’s not how the feud between The Honest Toddler (which is a hilarious and independent mom blog) and The Honest Company (which is backed by celebrity Jessica Alba and the guy behind LegalZoom) ends up. Read about it at the aptly named blog: People I Want to Punch in the Throat, but here’s the gist:
The Honest Company appears to think that any company with the word “Honest” in the title infringes on their trademark. (Except for Honest Tea, of course, because that’s owned by Coca-Cola and The Honest Company only picks on companies smaller than itself.)
So far Honest Toddler has refused to give in, and I hope she never does and that she ends up kicking ass.
Malice Towards None: Orson Scott Card, Gay Marriage, and the “Ender’s Game” Film Controversy, Part One
“But mostly he got to power on words, the right words at the right time.”
—Ender’s Game
With the upcoming release of the Ender’s Game film, adapted from Orson Scott Card’s novel (which is rightly considered a sci-fi classic), a flurry of controversy is building up around the release, especially since Geeks OUT called for a boycott of the film due to Orson Scott’s Card vocal views on homosexuality and gay marriage (some of Card’s views on the subjects can be found a little more rationally in his early work here, and a lot less rationally in his later work here). This is not the first time this issue has come back to haunt Card recently, as DC Comics had to temporarily shelve a Superman story Card had written for them due to some backlash the company had received about Card’s views (even to the point of the artist leaving the project). And, frankly, I can totally understand why the gay community wants to color Card as a boogeyman when he issues incendiary, inflaming, alienating statements like this:
How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die (Deseret News, July 24, 2008).
Now, whoa there, pardner! This style of “vive la revolution” diatribe is seriously extreme, no matter one’s belief system or worldview. And it’s also pretty impractical. This sort of rhetoric did much more to paint Card as a fanatic, than it did to rally the troops around Captain Moroni’s flag (I don’t actually think Card’s crazy, he’s actually really brilliant, but this particular article certainly made him LOOK crazy).
Card can hardly play the victim, nor be particularly surprised that the gay community has organized so thoroughly against him, when he says that he would prefer to see the government destroyed than let gay marriage stand in America. Statements like that are like holding a lightning rod in a thunderstorm. Card put too many of his RISK armies on one part of the board, and the opposition took advantage of his tactical error.
“I will remember this, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, to give honor where it is due, so that defeat is not a disgrace. And I hope I don’t have to do it often.”
—Ender’s Game
“Since when do you have to tell the enemy he has won?”
— Ender’s Game
Yet such brash words were obviously spoken in the heat of the moment since Card has now given up the fight, stepping down from his position on National Organization for Marriage, and has called the gay marriage debate “moot” (technically not correct, since there are still 37 states who still outlaw gay marriage, but I do think Card is prescient to see the writing on the wall). No revolution, no overthrowing the government, no going down with the ship… Card has presented the “enemy” with his sword and conceded defeat with this statement, “With the recent supreme court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The full faith and credit clause of the constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.”
Cornered by fun
The other day Ben Kuchera wrote a really fascinating piece on Penny Arcade about free-to-play video games. He kept his focus fairly narrow but I think his thoughts inform a broader discussion ranging from ethical business practices to analysis paralysis, beyond that of just video games. Mr. Kuchera starts out by comparing free-to-play business models to amusement parks which charge per ride vs. those which charge a higher price for a single ticket but give customers unlimited rides once they’ve paid. He says “the reality is that I would probably pay less if I gave a few dollars for every ride, but then I’m stuck having to make that purchasing decision over and over.”
I was having a discussion with a coworker the other day about my strong distaste for most video games built on a free-to-play or microtransaction model, and as usual I tried to frame my opinion in logic, but I found it difficult to explain exactly why I so disliked a business model which allowed me to pay only as much as I wanted to for the enjoyment I was having. It seems to makes a lot of sense, right? Mr. Kuchera’s article was illustrative of how my negative feelings toward this business model are largely based on emotion, and how forcing people to make frequent, stress-heavy decisions about something as important as money, even if it’s just a dollar here or there, can turn an otherwise-fun experience into a decidedly un-fun spiral of indecision and doubt. While some games do free-to-play well, most do not, and they’re worse for it.