I have an ambivalent relationship to the statement “fuck Trudeau.”
On one hand, yes, fuck that guy. The government of Justin Trudeau has overseen the collapse of Canada’s healthcare system across multiple provinces – in part due to the complete failure of Canada to set safe COVID-19 policy or to effectively communicate those policies that were set. The abdication of COVID policy to provinces was one of many failures of inaction. Another cogent example has been the failure of the Trudeau government to meaningfully address contaminated water in First Nations communities or to respond meaningfully to the multiple discoveries of mass graves on residential school properties. Further failures of the Trudeau government include out-of-control inflation leading to a Bank of Canada response that deepened the ongoing national housing crisis and a blind eye to monopolistic practices by Canada’s two largest grocery conglomerates and a general abdication of foreign policy to the United States and a failure of Canada as a reasonable diplomatic intercessor – as the Trudeau regime has largely fallen in line with American neo-cold-war policy.
With that being said I haven’t a single good thing to say about any person who sticks a “F(maple leaf)ck Trudeau” sticker on the back window of their car – this political expression maps almost as closely to crypto-fascist politics as the thin blue line flag icon. This is ultimately because the ultra-conservatives who advertise their desire to enter into carnal relations with Justin Trudeau fundamentally misunderstand the problem with Canadian politics.
The issue isn’t that Justin Trudeau is an incompetent, blundering, indecisive toady to the United States nor is it, as some conservatives might imply, that he’s a secret communist trying to sell Canada to the Communist Party of China. Rather it’s that Canada is an undemocratic systemic failure. These conservatives misapprehend that the problem with Canada is Justin Trudeau and if they could just get their guy in (be it Pierre Poilievre or Maxime Bernier) then things would be peachy.
Of course the best case scenario from a government headed by Poilievre or Bernier would be more of the exact same failures demonstrated throughout Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister. the worst-case scenario would be an acceleration to the same sort of open fascism that now characterizes the politics of the United States. This is not the sort of decision matrix that any decent Canadian should wish to see.
Canada, in 2023, is a neoliberal experiment in government by and for a vanishingly small number of resource extraction enterprises. Canada isn’t a society; it is ten mining companies, three telcos and two groceries in a trench-coat and all the policy positions of both the Trudeau government and their predecessors – the Harper-led Conservatives – make sense in that context. The remarkable continuity of these governments, divesting themselves of foreign policy decisions in favour of key trade partners, safeguarding mining and extraction at home and abroad, allowing unchecked monopoly power over food and communications all while sitting on their thumbs while all matters that can reasonably be described as provincial jurisdiction get perpetually more broken across the country isn’t a matter of Liberal / Trudeau policy nor of Conservative / Harper policy. There is a broad bipartisan consensus on these issues. The function of the two parties is to provide each with an easy scapegoat for the continuation of their shared policies. The collapse of healthcare? Don’t blame the Liberals! Blame those conservative governments at the provincial level with their unreasonable demands. And as for all the economic fallout of the bungled COVID-19 response? Well, “fuck Trudeau.” Parties in Canada are top-down affairs. The government is commanded by party leaders and the parties exist merely to amplify the will of these leaders. All the while these petty dictators in democratic guise bellow, “more of the same!” Their followers are contented merely to hate each other.
There is an imaginary in which there might be some cultural difference between Conservatives and Liberals which might serve as justification for personal grievance. The Conservatives are bigots, anti-vaxers and racists, right? But as the conservatives love hypocritically pointing out, the Prime Minister, a former drama teacher, just seems to love getting done up in cultural costume or even straight-up blackface. Ultimately the overt bigotry of the conservatives and the polite bigotry of the Liberals serves the same function: to divide the working classes against each other. This is why we must oppose bigotry in all its forms – only by overcoming homophobia, transphobia and racism can we form the sort of mass movement necessary to destroy the real enemy: Canada.
Because this is the real truth that the patriots on both sides fail to see. The problem isn’t Justin Trudeau nor is it Pierre Poilievre. The problem is Canada. Canada is a neoliberal playground for the rich and the various political figures are just distinct heads of a single hydra. A real democratic nation would depend on the elimination of Canada. It must be built, first and foremost, on a recognition of the treaties signed between the colonial powers who created Canada and the First Nations they sought to supplant and reparations for violations thereof but beyond that we must create a society which is not a neoliberal state but a post-state democratic culture in which the voices of all Canadians govern themselves rather than taking marching orders from party heads. This will not happen within Canada as it exists today because states are all perpetually terrified of their own mortality. Canada will cling to its neoliberal undeath until we drive a stake through its heart.
This is to say, while Trudeau can get fucked what we really should be saying is fuck Canada.
This is a specifically neoliberal hell wherein, “no ethical consumption under capitalism” has, as one online commentator put it, become, an ethical imperative to consume. People see anyone interfering with their unimpeded enjoyment of those things they seek to consume as being, at best, morally questionable. How dare somebody else tell me, an individual, how to go about enjoying the things I want to enjoy?
This sense that it’s somehow wrong to interfere with the flow of libidinal intensity does, however, require a fair bit of apologetics and this is where the corpse of Roland Barthes gets hauled out of the grave and paraded around. “I separate the artist from the artwork,” people say, as if to suggest that because we can void the authority of the author to grant a text meaning this means that the author is no longer materially connected to the text.
Of course this is absolute nonsense. First off we would have to accept, fully, that Barthes’ premise was correct and that an author has no special authority over a text. Certainly Rowling, in particular, problematizes this premise as she has been particularly activist in the assignment of specific meanings to her text after delivery of it. Retcons such as the declaration that Dumbledore was a gay man, that various other schools of magic existed that were outside of the bounds of the delivered text (such as the nearly offensively named Mahoutokoro and Castelobruxo), or basically everything that happened in and around Harry Potter and the Cursed Child show that Rowling, as an author, has never been satisfied to allow an audience to construct meaning in her texts absent her influence; Rowling is a nearly uniquely activist author with regard to what her books mean. Furthermore, Rowling’s activism aside, the assumption that authorial intention is diffused by contradictions within a text is built around the asumption that authors are unified in their intention. If we start from assuming a certain polymorphic quality to authorial desire then we would end up with a situation in which any meaning that can be reasonably read into a text can be seen as an intended meaning. An author is not individual in that their authority, as an author, can be divided across all the things that they put into the text. All this is to say that it’s rather absurd to divide Rowling’s interpretation of her “wizarding world” from its implementation in texts such as a recently released half-rate Destiny clone.
However there’s something more insidious about attempts to divide Rowling from derivative licensed work such as Hogwarts Legacy – this is that Rowling gets paid for these things. While it’s true that the depiction of goblins in Rowling’s text is alarming at best, and while it’s also true that the “queer rep” of a transphobic straight woman will be problematic at best all this is somewhat irrelevant to the game itself – which Rowling didn’t write. She is, in fact, not the direct author here aside from her tendency to insert herself as an authority. The problem is that Rowling gets paid for this work and, with that pay, can continue amplifying her transphobia. There is a material relationship between the video game and the author of the books it is derived from that cannot be elided by any sort of pseudo-structuralist literary analysis. This is the problem with buying Hogwarts Legacy. It is not a question of the meaning of the text. By most accounts Hogwarts Legacy is a game that tries to mean very little of note. You run around blasting fire balls and other such violent magic at goblins only to discover it was all a frame job at the last minute. I’m sure this will be a cold comfort to all the goblins the players vaporized in the process of discovering the frame. So, no, Hogwarts Legacy looks like yet another committee-made, focus-group approved, skinner box that seeks to say as little as possible in order to maximize the likelihood that the audience will get hooked on the core gameplay loop and stay engaged. But it’s a skinner box where every person who buys it contributes a few pennies to the cause of bigotry via its material economic link to someone who regularly expresses bigoted views.
A a result people such as Jessica Conditt have, via their engagement with this game, helped to enable this bigoted agenda in the real world where you can’t just obliviate away all memories that Rowling is a TERF. It does not matter in the slightest that the reviewer has, “a big ol’ Harry Potter tattoo next to an anti-TERF tattoo,” because the issue is not the meaning she personally assigns to Harry Potter. The issue is money. Conditt, writing editorials for endgadget promoting that it’s morally Ok to buy this game, has, whether she intends to or not, financially aligned herself with TERFS. I couldn’t care less about the marks on her skin next to how she acts in the world. And how she acts in the world is as a promoter for this awful little game. The tendency of defenders is to fall back to individual subjectivity. This is, yet again, a reification of the moral imperative to consume. “As someone who searched desperately for an example of my own identity in the pages of Harry Potter novels, I deeply appreciate the evolution and inclusion in Hogwarts Legacy. This level of representation didn’t exist in AAA games 15 years ago, and it’s the result of all the progress made, through protest and education, since the books were published. Long before the in-fighting over a choice to play a video game.” Conditt says and I have no doubt she sincerely feels that way. She just fails to see that her feelings don’t justify how Rowling spends the money this game will earn her and the derivative money that she will gain through the continued cultural relevance of these awful wizard books. Conditt says, ” It’s usagainst the transphobic people in the world, not us against each other,” but this isn’t true. There’s no “us” here. She’s on the side of the transphobe because she’s promoting the transphobe’s product that will make her money. It’s really that simple.
Also Conditt’s plea, “boycott the game – just don’t boycott the players,” demonstrates an atomized and neutered view of the boycott. The boycott is, in fact, an act of moral shaming. It’s not just a person witholding their money. It’s a person publicly announcing it’s immoral to give money to this or that product. It’s “no ethical consumption under capital” arising as apologia yet again. And just as it’s clearly immoral to advertise for arms manufacturers it is also, clearly and obviously, immoral to give money to bigots. If you do it you are doing a bad thing and you should be ashamed. Stop trotting around Barthes’ picked-clean skeleton and actually take some accountability for the moral weight of your choices. Consider how your actions actually materially impact people. Think about the money for once.
Throughout the month of February, Canada has been gripped in a slow-moving crisis involving a group that calls itself the Freedom Convoy occupying Ottawa with a loud and often threatening assortment of tactics, blocking international crossings such as the Ambassador Bridge and generally being a nuisance on the roads.
The claim of this group is that their principal motivation is that they are protesting against a vaccine mandate for truckers who cross the border between Canada and the United States. Presently such mandates for COVID-19 vaccination are required by both Canada and the United States. Also presently compliance among truckers is over 90% within Canada. Furthermore this convoy is not supported by the labour movement that represents Canadian truckers with Teamsters Canada, calling the convoy a “despicable display of hate lead by the political Right and shamefully encouraged by elected conservative politicians.”
This convoy is principally composed not of long-haul truckers but rather of private citizens most of whom drive pickup trucks or SUVs. This is categorically not a protest of truckers nor for truckers. However, thanks to a leak of donation data from Give Send Go we can see certain things about the composition of the active supporters therein.
The largest single named donor to this convoy was an American billionaire. The largest Canadian donor is a New Brunswick small business owner. Within the PEI data, which I have reviewed with some level of detail, approximately half of those donors who could be identified at any level of support were entrepreneurs or small business owners. The largest PEI donation (listed at $700) was paid directly by an eavestrough business. This convoy is not in support of truck drivers but rather of small and medium business owners with the explicit financial backing of American billionaires and crypto investors. The majority of donations (roughly 56% of recorded donations) came from donors in the United States. (Before anyone brings it up, 12 of the nearly 93,000 donations came from Russia.) So this is who this convoy serves: Canadian and American Petit-Bourgeois entrepreneurs. Mostly Americans.
The stated goals of the convoy are to ease restrictions related to COVID-19 however most of these restrictions are time-limited and set to expire in coming months. This was already known in late January when these protests began. So if the convoy could achieve their goals in a reasonable timeframe doing nothing why did they bother to come out and protest?
Well it’s because their goals aren’t really to have COVID restrictions eased.
Frankly the convoy is not a protest. It is a show of force. And so far it has been stunningly successful.
Here’s what it has accomplished:
The ouster of the vaguely moderate federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole
The revelation that the police cannot be trusted to protect Canadians against the threat of far-right violence and that organized labour is too weak in this country to confront them directly
Free harassment of the citizens of the national capital
Airtime from news media outlets
A lot of money funneled to far-right figures in Canada from far-right figures in the United States; much of this money is being transmitted not via operational fundraisers like Give Send Go but rather via distribution of cryptocurrencies.
About the only thing this convoy has been unsuccessful in doing is ousting the Trudeau government – but the have struck a blow to his governance which has been weak, indecisive and overly-cautious throughout the crisis.
So what we have is a show of political force being put forward with the explicit backing of the petit bourgeois in defense of capitalist interests and in the face of crisis. As early as 1931 Leon Trotsky had that clocked as the material basis of a fascist movement. Despite his criticisms of Marx’s definition of the proletariat this is a point that Reich agreed with in The Mass Psychology of Fascism when he said, “As is done in every reactionary movement, Hitler relied upon the various strata of the lower middle class for his support. National Socialism exposes all the contradictions that characterize the mass psychology of the petty bourgeois”
We know this dance.
Communists, anarchists and other anti-fascists have spent the last two years trying to warn anyone who would listen about how the far-right, all these modern by-blows of fascism, have integrated into the anti-vax movement and how they’ve used this alliance to position themselves with increasing power. We explained anti-masking when the mainstream were bewildered by it. We explained how naturopathic concepts of cleanliness and purity fed into fascist fear of the other and everybody thought we were being hyperbolic.
Well now they’re here in force. Journalists are peeling the decals off their vans because they’re afraid of being identified. Tow truck operators are standing aside because they’re afraid of retaliatory violence. And the police don’t have the will to stop these neo-fascists from doing whatever the fuck they want. Don’t dare try and say we didn’t warn you.
But this presents us with a problem. Because, quoting Beauvoir, “When a young sixteen-year old Nazi died crying, “Heil Hitler!” he was not guilty, and it was not he whom we hated but his masters. The desirable thing would be to re-educate this misled youth; it would be necessary to expose the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint.” You don’t surrender public squares to fascism. A response is required and the desire for the government to do something is fully justified. But part of the problem here is the complete abdication of responsibility by an intransigent police force that seems very supportive of these far-right figures. Our supposed political leaders seem unable to command police to deal with fascists as they would with First Nations activists. As such, new laws prohibiting vehicular blockades and occupations or categorizing these economic actions as terrorism are undesirable. There’s plenty of existing law that could be used against these fascists. The police are demurring from doing so. New laws just give the police-allies of fascism new tools to oppress enemies of fascism.
One of the principal preoccupations of Marcello Tari’s very challenging eschatological work, There is no unhappy revolution. is the position of the strike in modern revolutionary praxis:
“{In the new form of strike} there is no classic demand of future closure – something that became even more explicit during the revolt against the French labor laws – but expresses itself instead through the blockages of normal social functioning on the one hand, and the immediate material transformation of life and how we think about life on the other. The more intense the form of the strike, the more intense becomes the ungovernable nature of the form of life that expresses it.”
Simply put, in 2017, Marcello Tari was telling communists that they should be occupying cities and disrupting metropolitan economies. The problem is not that disruption has occurred but rather the who and the why of the matter. A fascist revolution will not create those new and ungovernable forms of life that represent the eschatological beyond of the revolution on the threshold Tari wants to prophecy. The real desire of these movements is to put things back to how they were in 2019. Just with a little bit more death. So we cannot use these movements. We must remove them. But we must do so in a manner that will not foreclose upon the left or our allies making use of similar tactics in the future.
An ideal solution would be for organized labour to remove these occupiers. The streets they honk their horns down do not belong to them and there is justice in removing them. If police will not do so citizens should. But if labour is unable to accomplish this task we still must remove these people from our streets and we must do so without the police as the police have made it entirely clear they intend to do nothing at all. This means that a critical thing we can do is to give support to Ottawa area resistance to these demonstrators.
I know some socialists have declared the convoy “a distraction” from the real work of dismantling capitalism but I have to take issue here. Fascism is the old enemy in its most visible form. It is the mobilization of capitalist violence without pretense. This is why the police sit back and do nothing. The leaders of the police will say the rank and file are afraid to act. The rank and file will say the brass is restraining them but the truth is far simpler: the convoy are adjuncts of the police establishment. They want an end to mask wearing for precisely the same reason the police do. They feel entitled to see your face and confirm you are allowed. They want an end to biopolitical regulations such as social distancing, reduced capacity at restaurants and other venues, vaccine passes and the like because these measures interfere with the free flow of capital and this is the freedom this “freedom convoy” really cares about. Just like police.
I know this rhetoric, calling for direct action on the part of labour from outside the strictures of law, explicitly criticizing policing as a solution to fascist social disorder, will probably leave NDP-type social democrats feeling very uncomfortable. And that’s good. I’m not comfortable with anything going on in this country right now, are you? Should you be?
Ultimately what we need is a renunciation. There’s no prelapsarian past to return to. COVID has arrived and the epoch has turned. That’s it. We must renounce the very idea that there’s a normal to return to or that we would even want it. I mean were you satisfied with life in this country in 2019?
One more reflection on Tari. I have to admit I am still reading There is no unhappy revolution. It’s not an easy book, dipping heavily from Walter Benjamin‘s Marxist and rabbinical thought, Catholic eschatology and the poststructuralist formations of Deleuze, Guattari and Agamben. But I’ve got far enough into it to put forward an hypothesis about what the book is saying.
In his formation of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche effectively asks us the question, “would you say yes if you had to say yes to absolutely everything?” There is no unhappy revolution. is an inversion of this, asking, “would you say no if you had to say no to absolutely everything?” There are fascists occupying Ottawa and at time of publication the police have done nothing to oppose them. How much are we willing to refuse to remove them?
The Worldcon that never should have happened has had a wild ride after an all-too-easy to call COVID outbreak, some shady business at the business meeting that seemed likely an attempt to influence the site selection process away from the (ultimately winning) Chengdu bid for next year and then, the piece de resistance, the revelation that a major sponsor for the convention, with a branded red-carpet photo wall at the Hugo Awards was the Raytheon corporation.
This raises an interesting question regarding the duty of participants in Worldcon to respond to the interface of their science fiction convention with a “defense contractor” that was supplying materiel to Saudi Arabia at least as recently as 2017 and that is a key supplier of the US military. Should a concom be held responsible for how sponsorships are used to launder the reputation of corporations? What about the ethics of working for such an organization? After all, it’s something of a received wisdom in progressive spaces that corporations are de-facto evil; if we cannot work but to work for an evil organization is there a gradient of evil to mark against? How far is, ultimately, too far beyond the pale?
Buddhism provides a very concrete starting point for what constitutes a boundary with the Aṅguttara Nikāya, in particular containing discourses accredited to the Buddha and his disciples on the topic of right livelihood – one of the eight subjects of the Noble Eightfold Path. According to these early Buddhist texts, a right livelihood is one that does not involve traffic in, “weapons, living beings, meat, alcoholic drink or poison.”
As such it’s clear that, at least from an orthodox Buddhist perspective, there is a very specific line and it is one that Raytheon is entirely beyond. Of course the same could be said of the butcher and the liquor store down the road along with any pet store proprietors and certain garden shops that sell plants that could potentially be used for the production of poison so we could, perhaps, argue that such specificity is somewhat unhelpful to a modern context.
The Buddhist proscription is bound, inextricably, to a Buddhist ethical universe that seeks to avoid the causation of harm. As such proscribed livelihoods are proscribed because of their specific interaction with the Buddhist perspective on what constitutes the Good. However what the Buddhist example is best for showing is that a boundary can be set. We can, in fact, say that even if all things are not intrinsically ethical some things, in particular, are unethical enough that they should be avoided as moral hazards.
No ethical consumption under Capitalism
There is something of a mimetic phrase within progressive circles that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. This phrase appears not to have a clearly fixed origin although it does seem to arise out of online spaces. Now this argument – that ethical consumption is impossible within Capitalism points in two disparate directions. First, it is deployed as a form of absolution. “Yes I know this product was made by an appartheid state in an occupied territory but there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism,” at the extreme sure but also, “I’m aware that fast food restaurants deploy environmentally destructive agricultural practices to keep prices down but there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, I live in a food dessert and have few choices and ultimately I have to eat something,” would be closer to an ideal example of this absolutory use. The second is as a critique. A celebrity backs a T-shirt slogan – or some other commodified piece of political rhetoric – and critics point out that it was manufactured with exploited labour. Does a feminist really look like a white woman getting rich off of sloganeering at the expense of vulnerable workers in Bangladesh? There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.
And so, effectively this statement means either, “I am aware of the contradiction in my position and cannot avoid it,” or “you should be aware of the contradiction in your position,” depending upon whose consumption is the subject of ethical assessment.
Now a fan convention is most certainly an example of consumption. In fact, fewer things are more purely consumptive than a fan convention – an event that seeks to lionize and institutionalize a category of consumption, to bring consumers into the proximity of producers so that they can consume more effectively. And with a fan convention being a form of institutionalized consumption, sponsors of a convention are certainly to be counted both as consumers of the product the convention offers (largely the attention of other consumers) and simultaneously as producers of the event. Raytheon is both a consumer of Discon III and also a product that Discon III attendees are being invited to consume. And anybody who took a photo at the Raytheon branded red carpet photo station, anybody who went to the Raytheon booth, they were consuming Raytheon. So when people respond to this consumption of Raytheon by attendees that there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism our question then becomes whether this is the consumer being asked to be aware of the contradiction in their position or if it is the consumer aware of the contradiction claiming they have no choice.
It honestly seems mostly to be the latter.
Certainly, unless that consumer was on the concom they had no choice about whether to invite Raytheon to be a sponsor so we may be able to absolve most attendees of that specific blame. Although members of the concom should certainly be called to account for their funding decisions. However, while the attending membership had no choice whether Raytheon was to be a sponsor, this doesn’t mean they had no agency in this situation at all. And this is where things become even more difficult.
Ambiguity
In her seminal work, “the Ethics of Ambiguity,” Simone de Beauvoir grappled with the fundamental problem of making ethical judgments in recognition of the inability of a person to have an objective understanding of all consequences. In this book Beauvoir remains consequentialist in her outlook, maintaining that the ethical value of an act had to do with its movement toward liberation but problematized consequentialist ethics by pointing out that it would be nearly impossible to judge, in a moment of action, whether any given well-intentioned action, in fact, moved in the direction of liberation. Antagonistic to the virtue-ethic of the Buddhists that would declare it is wrong livelihood, a consequentialist might ask to whom weapons were being sold and to what purpose. Beauvoir then points out that, no matter how great the purpose the consequentialist cannot possibly know what the ultimate consequences of selling those guns must be.
In the end, Beauvoir’s ethic proposes something of a Sisyphean life – one of constantly striving toward a greater freedom fully aware that it can never be obtained. The struggle for liberation is an endless and ever-changing task. All a person can do is their best. As Beauvoir puts it, “Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods. Thus, in science the fundamental problem is to make the idea adequate to its content and the law adequate to the facts; the logician finds that in the case where the pressure of the given fact bursts the concept which serves to comprehend it, one is obliged to invent another concept; but he can not define a priori the moment of invention, still less foresee it.”
Beauvoir argues that meaning is constantly changing and that the movement of life with purpose, of a good life, is thus also constantly a moving target. But that doesn’t mean she provides no lodestone. Instead Beauvoir takes a nearly Epicurean approach, saying, “However, it must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way.”
And, of course, this idea of a good life as being one that pursues some sort of genuine happiness both on our own account and through others is something of a shared quest between Beauvoir, the Epicureans and the Buddhists.
What then is the ethical weight of a red-carpet photo against the death of a child in Yemen? It should be such a simple formula – arms dealers bad – and yet it brings with it so much other baggage. Did the actions of the red-carpet walkers contribute to Raytheon’s ability to sell the weapons that kill? Were factors such as the ability of convention members to pursue a career in the arts (which received wisdom says necessitates participation in fan conventions) ones that moved their own actions, in that moment toward a concrete mode of liberation? Should an artist who discovers their participation might give a company like Raytheon access to an audience disengage immediately? How much burden to know what, in fact, Raytheon is and does should be ascribed to the hosts of a Science Fiction podcast or the creators of a popular semi-pro zine? I don’t think I need the certainty of the Noble Eightfold Path to say that Raytheon is ethically compromised. It sells weapons to many of the most aggressive and warlike militaries in the world. No country has as many extraterritorial military bases as the United State. Few states wage war as readily and egregiously as Saudi Arabia. That Raytheon partners with these militaries makes it obvious that there’s very little ambiguity at play with working in their employ or with deliberately selling them advertising space at your convention. A good Raytheon employee is an employee who quits.
But I think the “no ethical consumption” line creates more problems than it solves. Certainly it’s true in as far as capitalism is a system that pushes back against Beauvoir’s idea of a life of love on our own account and lived through others. It’s a system that depends, instead, on a zero-sum gamification of existence where every moment of joy we squeeze out of life must, at its core, be a moment of joy denied to another. But the moment of radical freedom we call revolution depends on a level of mass action that doesn’t reside with some atomized individual. Turning around and walking out of the Hugo awards upon sighting the Raytheon banner would have been a decent action. It would be what Buddhists call “right intention” but it would be ineffectual. It would not overthrow the rule of Capital; it would not unmake the missiles and the bombs. In order for it to be a truly revolutionary moment it would require a total desertion of Discon III – for every single person there to spontaneously refuse to cross that threshold. And absent that sort of spontaneous and revolutionary moment ambiguity rules here. Hugo awards make careers and it’s just a banner.
Ultimately the concom of Discon III has earned scorn. It was the height of irresponsibility to hold a convention in Washington DC in 2021. We all knew perfectly well the pandemic would not be over and I think it’s not too much of a stretch to assume most people knew the pandemic would not be over in the United States specifically considering the disorganized way it responded to the crisis. Frankly there should have been no opportunity to pose in front of a Raytheon banner at all. And even if we set aside the irresponsibility of holding an in-person fan convention during a plague year the concom should not have sold its sponsorship opportunities to a “defense contractor.” Awarding a sponsorship to Raytheon was an egregious lapse in ethics by the standard of the Buddhists, the Epicureans, the standards of Beauvoir and frankly even those of Kant who would have fixed upon the concom the duty of acting in a manner that advanced respect and dignity of all people. Death from above at the hands of missiles manufactured half a world away is, at its core disrespectful. It is a death lacking in dignity to be snuffed out like an unwanted candle.
Capitalism operates through a diffusion of responsibility. People who have worked within the IT divisions of defense contractors talk about jobs that center around entirely abstract snippets of code – work toward abstract benchmarks where they haven’t the first clue what their code is even intended to do. This sort of diffusion permeates capitalist organization such that, ultimately, no one person is ever to be blamed for the cruelties of the system. And the concom could argue, in their defense, that then never dropped a bomb nor asked one to be dropped.
Ultimately the question becomes: where do you draw the line? As Jello Biafra said, “I’m not telling you, I’m asking you.”
For me, the line is drawn not at being an audience for Raytheon but it is certainly drawn before collaborating with Raytheon to give them an audience. But each person must construct that line for themselves. This is the ultimate paradox of collective spontaneity. We must each, alone, decide to act together in the moment. If a spontaneous moment is lost to ambiguity we should, rather than ripping at those people who, enmeshed in ambiguity, may have made a wrong choice, aim toward building better preconditions to make the right choice in the future.
As such my final word is this: No more arms manufacturers at fan conventions. And if anyone violates this clear line by inviting arms manufacturers to participate, let’s deem them outside what we see as the genre community. In that moment of collaboration they have put themselves beyond the pale. But let’s stop there and work to build solidarity around this line.
This isn’t about squicking anybody’s squee. Well, it is, but not in the way you might expect. With that being said, fuck Star Wars Legends.
I hate, HATE Legends. I have read a grand total of 0.5 Legends books, and that some decades ago. Usually I don’t hold passionate opinions about sprawling franchises that I’ve no investment in. So why the hate for Legends?
Because of the fans who won’t let that shit go.
These are the fans who are so convinced that their manic pixie dream villain Thrawn would be better than Hux, Snoke and Kyllo Ren for Reasons.
These are the fans who heap insults upon Chuck Wendig books that haven’t been released yet, up to and including one who said he hoped Wendig had an accident that permanently ended his writing career.
These are the fans who whined that there were two Star Wars movies, (In A Row!) with a woman as the main protagonist.
I am generalizing a group a bit here. I don’t think every one of the misogynistic SW fans is also a Legends EU fan, but the venn diagram kind of looks like this:
Mostly overlap.
And here’s the thing: When, every time I hear, “but it should have been THRAAAAAAAAAAAAWN!” it’s accompanied by, “eeew, girls and gays all over my Star Wars!” I am less likely to want to read about Thrawn ever again.
I bounced off the EU books because they were crap.
Sorry fans.
They started off as bland corporate tie-in fiction, and they turned into a dog’s breakfast of bad plot decisions and shocking twists that failed to shock or twist much.
So, no, the Heir to Empire books should NOT be movies 7, 8 and 9. But what’s more, I’ve been re-examining a lot of Star Wars media because of how wildly successful the film was. I might have considered revisiting the Legends books. Except that fans who aren’t happy because the story they like isn’t the annointed official narrative for some reason that I’ve never been fully clear on have poisoned that well.
So congratulations Sad Banthas. You’re so worried about Disney taking Star Wars Legends off life support that you’ve killed the franchise yourself.
Meanwhile I still don’t understand why the fuck canon status matters.
This is the first Star Wars book I’ve read. I don’t give a pair of dingo’s kidneys for Admiral Thrawn. I’ve only dug a small way into Part 2 so I can’t properly review it, but here’s what I can say with certainty:
It is very Wendig. If you like him you will like this book.
The jagoffs giving it one star for any reason other than they don’t like Wendig’s highly distinctive prose style are full of shit.
This was going to be a post about what happened to Chuck Wendig. Jim C. Hines has a decent write-up on that up, and while I disagree with him ever so slightly on one point it’s a good general writeup.
And this would have been enough for a full blog post right here. The issue with Wendig’s books, and the response both of the culture warriors who I’ve taken to calling antisocial injustice warriors (after all, if they oppose what SJWs stand for…) and of the EU fans who will lash out at any change to the Star Wars canon dovetails so perfectly with Gamergate and the Sad Puppies on so many levels that it’d certainly be in keeping with some of my usual topics.
So here’s a link to Amazon.com for anybody who wants to buy it. Because with state censorship that’s basically the only response I can make.
I just can’t with all this today. I want to talk more about how parts of fandom have become toxic with what Wendig poetically calls, “weaponized nostalgia.” This vile habit of longing for an imagined better time, and attacking creatives in the present for not adhering to the standard of this fantasy land has actually soured me on the very idea of nostalgia at all. If Michael Bay’s TMNT ruined your childhood, YOU HAD AN AWFUL FUCKING CHILDHOOD ALREADY.
But it’s not just the weaponized nostalgia. It’s the regressive taint-stains who can’t tolerate the idea that the world has moved on without them: that the average person under the age of 25 is so comfortable with the idea of the Kinsey Scale that only a quarter of respondents age 14 to 24 in a recent British survey self-identified as exclusively heterosexual; that books for teens should address the anxieties, conflicts and dangers faced by modern teenagers, rather than trying to sugar-coat the world; that marginalized people have gotten enough of a platform to point out institutional biases and try to do something about them.
But these trolls, these nihilistic dinosaurs so wedded to a past that never was, are just so relentless. I go away for a weekend and they’re attacking Scalzi, I get back they’re already on to the next raid, attacking Wendig. And then another group go after this Ted Dawe author. And that’s even ignoring perennial targets like K. Tempest Bradford, who puts up with more bullshit from these trolls in a week than most people should have to in a lifetime.
And I’m like: don’t these assholes have lives to live?
So I’m tired.
I’m tired of shouting into the void that life is changing and you can either learn to live with it or get out of the way.
I’m tired of bigots being given platforms because they’re good old boys who remember when men were men and rayguns were chrome.
I’m tired of backward religious fanatics trying to cram their holy books down the world’s throat.
I’m sick of all this shit.
Hi, I’m Simon. And here’s what I pledge: if you say don’t read women or people of colour I’m going to. I will because there are some amazing people in those groups writing amazing books.
If you one-star Wendig for putting gay characters in Star Wars, or even if you do it just because you’re angry his books aren’t about Admiral Thrawn, I’m going to buy his book, read it and then give it the fucking rating it deserves on Amazon (which, considering how much I liked every other Wendig book will probably be 4-5 stars).
If you ban a book because it hurts conservative feels I’m going to bloody well put a link directly to its sales page on my blog.
These fucking trolls may never sleep. But at the very least we can make sure all they’re doing is ramming their thick skulls into the wall of historical inevitability.
There’s a situation unfolding right now that has me pretty steamed. But I’m not convinced that I can really add much to the conversation that hasn’t already been said by people who are both more affected and more involved.
I’m happy to add to this list if anybody knows of other places its being discussed. Priority will be given to Chinese voices.
Again, I’m pretty outraged about the comments, but the worst of them (certainly the actually slurry part) were pointed firmly at Chinese people, so for the most part I’d rather just shut up and let the affected people speak for themselves.
There is one thing I do want to mention: I voted for the Three Body Problem. I’ve publicly said that it not only deserved the Hugo but also deserves some serious consideration in the big literary fiction prizes. And I don’t say this hyperbolically. When I reviewed the book long before it was on the Hugo ballot, I mentioned how it incorporated themes regarding chaos and stability in multiple levels and ways, creating a wonderful thesis about the shape of history with a deft touch that belied a depth of introspection and of reading.
I’m jumping the gun a bit since I haven’t finished, but I see similar signs in The Dark Forest despite this book having a rather different central thesis. What’s more, one of the first parallels that stood out to me is with Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, which won the Nobel Prize. Gao’s assessment of how we construct ideas of the identities of the people in our lives is a brilliant part of what makes that book special, and the same key questions are explored with Liu’s book as part of a multi-leveled question regarding the boundaries of communication.
When you combine Liu’s deftness with thesis construction and exploration with the evident depth of his reading you already have something worthy of serious academic recognition. Adding in the exceptional translation artistry of Ken Liu in the first volume just is icing on the cake.
So, no, I didn’t vote for the Three Body Problem to support communism. And anyone who would default to that suggestion is an asshole. That being said, the suggestion that one must either A) repudiate all communism or B) love the cultural revolution, is such an obvious example of both Black or White fallacies and Loaded Question fallacies that this construction alone is kind of insulting.
I am an anarcho-communist. Being communist is a big part of that. So is a large anarchist streak. This is an admittedly utopian view, which is why I generally default to positions not THAT far off of social democracy for practical discussion, BUT, it is one that is antithetical to the authoritarian excesses of the stalinist and maoist states.
Look at it this way: if I said you must either repudiate Capitalism entirely or love Augusto Pinochet, you’d say I wasn’t being fair. But that’s what this construction is proposing!
Furthermore there’s a lot of arrogance in the assumption somebody knows what Liu’s thoughts are about the Chinese state entirely from his writing on the Cultural Revolution in one book. Spoiler alert: plenty of people in China are both patriotic and think that MUCH of what happened between the ’50s and the ’70s was wrong. And some don’t. And others aren’t patriotic. Because China is a huge, massively diverse place. And for the most part people are able to form opinions about stuff there subject to no more propagandist control than the average American. And history is inherently complex, which lends nuanced and complex perspectives on nationhood strength, not just in China but pretty much anywhere people actually spend the time and effort to think about the question in more complex terms than, “how many tea bags can I staple to a tri-corn hat?”
Ok, so that went on longer than I intended. Basically, short form: if somebody says, “that’s a slur, don’t call my people that,” then apologize and find different ways of describing those people in the future. It’s a fucking slur. And if you’re only doing this to try to score a weak rhetorical point by proposing that readers of an exceptional novel that is very worthy of awards on literary merit alone, notwithstanding politics, only awarded the book because of what you view as their misreading of that book’s author’s politics, perhaps you should get your head out of your own ass.
Ok, I know this one will probably get me some flack but it needs saying, because it’s an idea which has impacted the frames of reference for our current conversations: Famdom is not a family. What this means is that it’s a cop-out to say, “I put up with homophobe uncle John and besides he doesn’t know any better,” as a justification for why we should just accept that our sub-culture will always include bigots.
But what is Fandom if not a family?
Fandom is a loose-knit collection of communities
Seriously, even calling Fandom one community, let alone one family, is a misnomer. There is a professional organization called SFWA, another called the HWA, there are various convention boards and membership lists, and each of these things could be called a community. And some people cross between these groups, some people might be in dozens of these groups, but that doesn’t mean the groups are all one polyglot community.
And this is important, because people can choose who they want in their communities. Part of the core of all this year’s kerfuffle was when, a while back, a certain individual was invited to leave one community (SFWA) after a public meltdown.
Fandom is a sub-culture
With specialized language (mention a SMOF to one of your non-fannish colleagues and see the look of complete unrecognition), dress (not just cosplay either, the ribbons, the pins, they’re dress markers), and interests (obviously) fandom is almost the textbook definition of a sub-culture. And, looked at in this sense we don’t have much choice about who adopts those cultural markers. Anybody can like genre fiction if they want. Anybody can learn the Turkey City Lexicon and the acronyms that get tossed around at cons. Anybody can learn what the in-jokes are and what those damn ribbons mean.
But here’s another example of a sub-culture: punk rock. Now both Jello Biafra and Michale Graves are very much part of the punk rock sub-culture but they probably have almost entirely different takes on politics, philosophy and well… everything. There’s probably nobody who would suggest that the former lead singers of the Dead Kennedys and the Misfits are not real punks; and yet Biafra is a left-anarchist, while Graves is a staunch conservative.
And yet, I doubt anybody would try to talk those two into touring together either.
Fandom is a workplace
Not for everybody, but for lots of people: writers and actors, makers and booksellers. For these people Fandom is where they work. It’s simultaneously built of their suppliers, colleagues and customers, sometimes all in one body.
Now here’s where we can make some progress between the wide-open, anybody can sign on nature of a sub-culture and the much more exclusive nature of specific communities. Because we have a pretty strong understanding of what is acceptable and not acceptable reasons to invite somebody to leave a workplace. And it’s not because you don’t like their politics. But when it crosses a line from, “I disagree with this person,” to, “this person is harassing their co-workers,” then we’ve got a pretty good reason to exclude them.
And this is a pretty good litmus for how to decide what people we want in the Fandom tent. We want the people who don’t:
Touch inappropriately, stalk and sexually harass people
Threaten people with violence or incite other people to violence
Advocating for the extermination of a sub-set of people or for discrimination against people on the basis of inherent traits
etc.
And I’m going to say right now that there’s plenty of conservatives who don’t do any of these things. And there are leftists and centerists who do some or all of these things. And how we treat them should not be dependent on their position on a political spectrum but on their actions.
And besides, why do you tolerate bigotry from your relatives?
My relatives are pretty cool so I don’t have much experience with this, though I have to remind certain relatives on occasion that Conservative does not equal stupid or evil; and the thing is I do that even though I disagree entirely with everything Conservativism stands for, because I understand that it’s possible for decent people to disagree wildly.
But if a relative told a racist joke at Thanksgiving dinner, I’d say, “that’s racist. Why would you say that?” Progress depends on us, personally, having the courage of conviction to confront outmoded and harmful discourse.
If you say, “Oh, that’s just Aunt Jane, she’s from another time / some specific place / this or that faith; she doesn’t know any better, bless her heart,” you’re letting that particular thread continue unchallenged. And bigotry should be confronted by all decent people wherever it’s found.
Fandom is my workplace. I come there to network, to sell and to buy. I come there to learn and to teach. Many of my friends are members of the communities that compose fandom, and I’m happy to use the elements of material culture that signify membership in the sub-culture. But it’s not my family. So while I’m happy for the big tent to include communists, anarchists, socialists, liberals, centerists, conservatives and libertarians, I won’t tolerate harassers and unrepentant bigots. A big tent is great, but we can choose what is acceptable behaviour in our group. And if somebody violates that behaviour we can invite them to leave.
Another roundup of links related to the fallout of the Hugos. Again, sharing link doesn’t imply either endorsement or chastisement of the contents.
Let’s start with the absolute craziest as John C. Wright produces an absolutely unhinged screed claiming that us not awarding him, the greatest gift to writing since clay tablets, lets Patrick Nielsen Hayden (also the gays?) win.
Asia Times (and the China Daily) mostly just concentrated on the Best Novel win for Liu Cixin, entirely ignoring the puppy kerfuffle in their coverage.
The Nielsen Haydens hosted a discussion thread on their blog which is mostly interesting for some otherwise quiet big names who popped in to leave their five cents.
Aliette De Bodard saw the Hugos as a win for a global vision of SF/F between the Liu Cixin / Ken Liu and Thomas Olde Heuvelt wins.
Arthur Chu suggests that the Sad Puppies really only exist online, thanks to the ability of the internet to favour those willing to burn the most time on an issue, and are effectively absent from physical spaces.
I may add to this as I see new things of interest. I moderate comments with a light hand but I too have a copy of Scalzi’s mallet of loving correction which I will use as I see fit. Please feel free to share links to either side of this discussion, except for Vox Day. No link to his blog will get out of moderation.
This isn’t about squicking anybody’s squee. Well, it is, but not in the way you might expect. With that being said, fuck Star Wars Legends.
Simon McNeil 