Thursday 6 August 2020

A Possibly Ill-Advised Post about George RR Martin

First things first - I'm going to pay what used to be called the "Joesky tax":

Here is a javascript for generating treasure using the OD&D treasure tables from Bat in the Attic.

And here, as a bonus, is a d100 table of ways to open secret doors. 

Now, on with GRRM. You may have heard about this (there is more detail here). It is a complete non-event of a story, or at least should be (it has the feel of a publicity stunt more than anything), and I hesitate to give it any oxygen at all, but in the end I feel like it is such an absurd tale, and so symbolic of the madness of our current moment, that it cannot pass without comment.

We'll leave aside the fact that apparently making a bad and peurile joke about the Oscar statue being a eunuch is now deemed offensive. (To who? Eunuchs?) We'll also leave aside the fact that mispronouncing somebody's name is now considered racist. (As somebody who lived in Japan for almost a decade and has both a first and last name that are unpronounceable to the overwhelming majority of Japanese people because they contain non-Japanese phonemes, let me clear this up for you: it isn't racist.) It seems to me that in both those circumstances George can at the absolute worst be accused of having been the slightly inept and socially awkward nerd that he undoubtedly is, and which anybody who has seen him being interviewed will immediately recognise. I don't know at what point it was that it became a legitimate activity to hound socially awkward people for being socially awkward, and I don't find it remotely acceptable. But I suppose at least his accusers are on a wafer of solid ground in that it's probably his own responsibility that he said those things. 

But much of the vitriol levelled at him seems to be to do with him saying complimentary things about HP Lovecraft and John W Campbell. Now, I could understand this, perhaps, if for some reason George had turned up to MC the awards show and started ranting about Lovecraft and lauding his views about race off the cuff. That would have been a strange thing to do. But that was not what he was doing. He was in fact (here's the punchline if you haven't read the story properly) presenting Lovecraft and Campbell with posthumous awards, because they were both chosen by the people who vote for Hugos. What exactly was he supposed to do in such circumstances, other than explain to the audience why they were both significant figures in the history of the SF genre and why they were considered by many to have been deserving of their awards? "Now, the next two award-winners were both proto-fascists and had appalling views and should never have been voted for by the people who were balloted, who by the way should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, but nevertheless, it gives me great pleasure to announce..."

It takes a special kind of disingenuousness for "journalists" (I use the term loosely) to present the facts in this way. But it speaks to one of the great problems of the age: the unwillingness to extend to anybody the common courtesy that should be available to all human beings, which assumes good faith in the absence of compelling evidence. 

I am not a great fan of Sam Harris. But one thing I like about him is his (ironically, surprisingly Christian) emphasis on forgiveness. The great psychological insight of Christianity is that nobody should have their sins held against them, because nobody can help sinning. We're original sinners, not because of having eaten some fruit on the recommendation of a sketchy snake, but because our sins are all committed at the end of a long chain of causal events, none of which are attributable to our own volition. We say and do things because we are led to say and do them by our experience, our genes, our social context, our characters - in other words, nothing that we have ourselves chosen ab initio. Maybe you disagree with my position on the substance of what George said, but surely you can agree with me on the context: that he probably meant no malice whatsoever. In that case, why all the mudslinging? Why is the default to assume bad faith rather than good?

Until we can remedy that problem, the frayed fabric of our societies will not be repaired. 

[You're free to comment but I will not be replying to comments on this entry.]

33 comments:

  1. It's time for decent people to stand up against these woke fascist witch hunts.

    Yeah, I'm posting this anonymously, isn't that sad? But at least in real life I do stand up, honestly! I just don't have the time for a potential online fight with hordes of woke trolls you can't have a genuine discussion anyway.

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    1. I genuinely get angry at people using fascism to refer to overzealous woke people in an age when actual literal political fascism is at an all time high.

      Regardless of my actual agreement or lack thereof with your point just kinda gets. Buried by that.

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    2. Nonsense. There's hardly any "actual literal political fascism" at all. White supremacists & neonazi's are a tiny, tiny, powerless minority. But very colorful, they fit all the clichés and make great TV. The biggest threat to freedom comes in the form of woke totalitarians supported by useful idipots & opportunist feloow travellers.

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    3. Uh. Hm.

      So leaving aside the issue of fascism in the US (which I assume is what you're talking about) a number of world wide governments have been embracing facism, from Hungary to Checkslovakia to Poland.

      I feel like at this point youre pretty obviously trolling though, so if you want to keep pretending everything's fine to Own The Libs, I ain't gonna stop you.

      Have a nice day and stay safe.

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    4. "Hungary to Checkslovakia to Poland."

      None of those have Fascist governments. There are Fascists - Jobbik - in Hungary, but they don't hold power. 'Mildly authoritarian' =/= Fascist.

      Delete
  2. Oh geez. And I thought this was going to be a lighthearted post about his promise to be voluntarily imprisoned if the next book wasn't released by last month (spoiler: it wasn't).

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  3. The interesting thing to me was the first person to complain about his mispronouncing the names of people of color had a note at the bottom of that post that said he mispronounced the names of white folks as well. So he wasn't racist, he just has trouble pronouncing names which isn't much of a story.

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    1. I mean, my instinct is that he probably should've just taken some time beforehand to learn how to pronounce the names? but eh

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  4. Every new school year my teachers in the small mountain town of Rye, Colorado were confronted by my name: "McKinney, Geof". While some got it right ("Jeff"), here are the mispronunciations that I remember:

    Gof
    Grof
    Golf
    Goof
    Jee-Off
    Greg

    Some teachers didn't even try and instead asked, "McKinney, what is your first name?"

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  5. It's less about GRRM doing anything wrong and more about the accusers wanting to be seen making those accusations.
    You're not a good witch hunter if you're not out there finding witches. They're everywhere, you know... and if you question that then maybe you're one of them yourself?

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  6. Man, this is a real dumb one. It's hard to even know what to say about this stuff that hasn't been said a thousand times already.

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  7. I've got mixed feelings on this, so I'ma try and do a quick (?) break down.

    1. Pronunciation
    There's this horrible idea in both overzealous woke people and in the people responding to them that 'racist' is a personality trait. It's not. Racist is a quality ascribed to actions more so then it is to people. The existence of media that paints racists as ridiculously over the top villains plays into this shitty idea. On the hyperwoke side, its a problem because it writes off entire people for one minor moment or mistake, ascribing a personality trait off an action. On the opposing side, it gets used to excuse actions that ARE actually racist- "Oh [person] can't be a racist, he's done X Y and Z non-racist things" gets used as an excuse when [person] does something that is genuinely racist. There's also a connection with intent- "[person] didn't mean to be hurtful, therefore [person] wasn't actually racist." Racism isn't a matter of intent, dang it, its a matter of harm inflicted.

    Now that I've gotten that digression out of the way: GRR, in THIS SITUATION, doesn't seem to have been coming from a place of racism when they were mispronouncing the winners name. Regardless, it clearly was something that was hurtful to her and to other people watching. A lot of people also don't bother learning non-white names even if they are totally pronounceable, which, while not an act of overt or intentional racism, still hurts (this is what a microagression ACTUALLY means. Something that comes not from hate but from ignorance or lack of thought).

    Point 1, tl;dr: GRR wasn't being racist but 'mispronouncing names isn't racist' feels like a huge over simplification.

    2. HP Lovecraft and racist past writers in general is a really complicated thing. It's not racist to like Lovecraft or Campbell or whatever. It's still not a great look to unreservedly praise their work, especially when not just the authors, but the WORK THEMSELVES contain major racist elements. See also, the Lovecraft story where the twist is just 'a black woman and a white man had a kid', or the poem where he describes black people as 'semi-human.'
    I guess its like when you're talking about the works of Leni Riefenstahl or something- you can talk about how she used revolutionary camera work or whatever but you should probably at least mention that said camera work was used to create Nazi Propaganda. (Does this count as invoking Godwin's Law? It's a close one, I wonder if there's any corollaries/sub-laws about comparing not the other person, but a 3rd (or 4th? ooh god im nesting parentheses oh fuck go back) party in the argument, to Nazis).


    So
    ULTIMATE TL;DR: Name mispronunciation sucks but wasn't a huge deal here, GRR probably could've at least added a side comment about how extremely racist Campbell/Lovecraft's works were.

    ...
    Yeah it really is a huge non-event of a story.

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  8. His only crime is being white. The racism and hypocrisy of the woke inquisition is driving me mad.

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    1. He will never finish the Song of Ice and Fire series now that HBO finished it for him. That has to count as a crime. Maybe a lesser one, but a crime none-the-less.

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    2. Such snowflake fragility. It must be hard to be so white and scared.

      Delete
  9. From the link you shared - "Martin was also called out for mispronouncing the names of a number of award winners, including this year’s Astounding Award recipient Rebecca Kuang, who used her acceptance speech to explain how the mispronunciation of one’s name is one of the many kinds of microaggressions that people of color have to deal with on a daily basis."

    Being a 49 year old white man who's lived his entire life in the US, it's only recently become clear to me that white men aren't really the best judges of what's racist and what's not. And that people of color deserve to live in a world where they don't have to deal with shit on a daily basis just because white people decided for them isn't racist.

    What I took from this blog post is that you were in a rare position to understand what it's like to live in a white world as a non-white, considering you lived in Japan for a decade and were surrounded by folks unlike you, the vast majority of whom judged you solely by the color of your skin. But the experience seems not to have increased your empathy toward others.

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    1. I can speak to your last paragraph being a lifer ex-pat in Korea. It's a different experience than being a minority born in a country. This place isn't my "home" and can never really be my home no matter how many decades I live here. But that's not really something that bothers me since, well, I'm American not Korean. But I'm sure it would bother me if I had only Korean citizenship and had lived here all my life.

      Also as an expat I'm given a pass on a lot of social mores. That doesn't really happen if you're a local minority.

      Lots of other differences as well. But yeah, some really blatant racism every so often.

      As for the content of the main post Annon #8107 said basically everything I came here to say. Great post. Don't have anything else to add.

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    2. Yes, racism isn't a thing for white people to define and (as Annon#8107 sums up nicely) it's not a personality trait. It's a system of biases that hold people to different standards, for example:

      1) A successful white guy can be let off of not only failing to pronounce the names it's literally his job that night to pronounce, but also we fall over ourselves to make excuses of how it's not his fault. Why should he have to make the effort to rehearse, etc.

      2) The person awarded literally listed exactly that as one of the many and varied ways they experience living in a racist system. But wait, here come white people to claim it's not racist. To explicitly say that they know better than a non-white person when it comes to the lived experience of non-white people...

      We don't have to cancel GRRM for *being* racist, but we can hold him accountable for *doing* at thing that perpetuates racism. And it's not even a huge intervention, we just say "hey George, one small thing you can do to help address racism as a system is take 5 minutes before you go on stage to pronounce names to make sure you can pronounce names properly." That's not even being a "woke snowflake SJW etc..." that's just being professional!

      In terms of the posthumous awards side of it, Campbell was being awarded *but* there's also the renaming of the New Writer award away from him due to his views on slavery. So yes, GRRM didn't vote for Campbell to get the award, but he didn't have to make a lengthy speech praising him either. We manage to discuss HPL as both a patron of aspiring young authors *and* massive racist even for his time, so why can't we do that for Campbell too?

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    3. I thought it was up to dictionaries and the language researchers who make them to define racism.... my bad, obviously it's up to the woke taliban morality police :-)

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    4. "considering you lived in Japan for a decade and were surrounded by folks unlike you, the vast majority of whom judged you solely by the color of your skin. But the experience seems not to have increased your empathy toward others."
      Thats literally the opposite of what Noism said. His argument was that not having his name spoken correctly wasn't a sign of lack of respect.
      But you might ask yourself if your lack of reading comprehenssion is?

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  10. I suspect an unconscious motive is career advancement. George RR Martin is light years ahead of other SF writers in terms of sales & popularity. Other writers have to compete with that and don't like it very much. If only you could get rid of the most popular authors dead & living, maybe it would be easier to find an audience. Accusations of prejudice are just an excuse.

    The unfortunate problem is that Martin is too big to cancel and doesn't care about the critics. Old nerds have thick skins. They could cancel him from future Hugos but I'd say the Hugos need him more than he needs them.

    As for Campbell - the man was horribly racist & sexist and a bit of a fascist. But he by and large improved the field of science fiction and if you didn't want to deal with his bigotries & eccentricities there were plenty of other markets. Remember all of the past but don't pretend you can erase it.

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    1. "I suspect an unconscious motive is career advancement."

      I don't think that will help them much if they're being published based on their race & sex rather than the content of their novels. Martin's from an era when a female author like Cherryh was published because people wanted to read her books. I don't get that impression of the current crop at all.

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  11. Elites in prestige economy default to conditions of their own success and that economy is presently bending on a social media onslaught displaying obstacles, often entrenched, to success based on racial or ethnic classifications.

    Everyone’s sins are at the end of a long chain of causal events, none of which are attributable to anyone’s own volition, nothing that anyone has chosen ab initio, but everyone’s sins are on display, sometime as currency in the prestige economy.

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  12. "he probably meant no malice whatsoever."

    He didn't, but his attackers are malevolent, of course. The biggest problem we have is the extent to which evil is lauded. It seems worse now than I can ever remember.

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  13. Good post, though unconvinced by your theology of original sin ;).

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  14. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor

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  15. You might have linked to d4 caltrops' original blogpost about the secret doors:
    https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2019/11/d100-table-this-secret-door-opens.html

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    1. Oops! I will break my no-comments rule to apologise for that. I had no idea it was his originally. His stuff is great.

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  16. As a Yankee, my point of reference is McCarthyism. Let me say, McCarthy didn't hold a candle to what we're seeing today. And it isn't an accident. I must say I think we're seeing what McCarthyism looks like when all the forces that opposed McCarthy (higher education, the press, pop culture institutions) instead have McCarthy's back. And again, there is a method to the sudden madness.

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    1. McCarthy was a clear demonstration of a threatened authoritarian majority lashing out against perceived threats from minorities, hence why the went after liberals, communists, etc.

      Your analogy is as flawed as it is nonsensical. Higher education, the press, and pop culture institutions are hardly a coherent ideological bloc. At most, you can unite them as being generally superficially opposed to blatant discrimination.

      Indignance at such mild progress really shows how deep seated racial and gender based dominance is in American "culture". It's even more ironic that much of the backlash is driven by consumer backlash- you know the capitalistic behavior that is supposed to be a positive of the system.

      It's almost like all these aggrieved white folks would prefer a more authoritarian government and controlled market system to keep those liberals, leftists, and minorities in place (the "wrong" people getting power is ruining our culture/values/etc). Maybe what is needed is a leader who is a vocal demagogue that reassures the right side that the others are the problem. Perhaps they even have a solution like locking up their political enemies and the "lesser" people until they can find a more final solution.

      But those who want more egalitarianism are *definitely* the real fascists.

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  17. Racism and other -isms, other than fasc-, seem to be more quickly spotted in the US than in Europe. I guess it makes sense, given the oppression of the black people well into the twentieth century. But it also means that many times yankees come across as over-sensitive.

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