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• 1w, 3d

  Creeping irony

  

  30 comments · 401 views

• 4w, 3d

  20 History Books (and Some Essays) About Art and Culture, part 1: The grand sweep of history

  If you've been reading my blog posts for a long time, you may have noticed that I posted a lot of theory articles in 2014, but that stream ran gradually thinner and shallower, until now I post less than one a month, and I've left my biggest teasers (the principal component of art and the general evolutionary theory of fiction) hanging for years.

  That's not because I'm thinking and reading less about those things, but because I've been thinking and reading more about them.  My reading got so far ahead of my blog posting that I couldn't post the things I was thinking about, because to explain them would require explaining other things first.  This snowballed as time went on.

  I put together this spreadsheet to organize my thoughts.  My overly-ambitious plan is to work through it, releasing posts in an order that will make sense to everyone, without needing to write them in that order.  (Some are already written; more are in draft form or are just accumulating notes.  My "$5 or more per 10,000 words" Patreon donors can read them in advance, which may or may not be a good idea.  Did I mention that I have a Patreon?  I have a Patreon.)

  I can, however, list some books and articles which I've found especially revealing about the big-picture history of thought and art.  I'm giving a short summary of each here in advance of their big reviews, in the hope that you'll be more able to see some of the connections between them.  Some I haven't finished but have just skipped about in, reading the parts that interest me.  Links are to Amazon pages, so you can buy & read these in advance if you want.  I'll post longer reviews of most of these books on my Patreon blog after I read them, and on this blog when the time for them comes along in my grand scheme.  Page counts end at the last page of text; they don't count bibliographies or indices, because I figure you want to know how long it will take to read them.

  (Did I mention that I have a Patreon?)

  Originally, I titled this post "great books", I guess because I wanted to encourage people to read them.  I'm taking that back, because I'm adding more books, some of which definitely aren't great, and some of which I haven't even read yet.  Many of them I consider great, but wrong; I don't endorse their conclusions.    My criteria for selecting these books is not how great they are, by any measure, but how helpful they are for my particular task, which is trying to detect patterns in art history.

  Each of these books looks at some historical period as a time of conflict between worldviews.  The biggest theme running through them is the intellectual conflict between faith, logic, and empiricism, and their use in the struggle between traditionalists and progressives.  Platonic idealism is very consistently associated with conservative, suppressive regimes, yet also logically validates independent thought, so the history of the major civilizations is one of careful control of art and thought by the traditionalists in power, who find Idealism useful but dangerous.

  This manifests as two opposed views of art.  The traditionalists and conservatives--certainly including Rome, medieval Europe, Puritan and Reformation England, neo-classical Europe (~ the late 18th century), Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union--used the word "art" but really meant "propaganda".  Art was good if it taught their own dogmas and reinforced their own political position.  The subversives, including the Elizabethans, European literature from the 19th century on, and Greek playwrights from Euripides until Greece's fall, sometimes see art as progressive propaganda (e.g., Brecht), but often as something mysterious which was a source of insight and an activity for original thinkers rather than a mere mouthpiece for tribal elders and logicians.  Traditionalists write down to an audience they assume is more stupid than themselves; subversives often seem to be discussing things with equals.  Traditionalists write about, paint, and sculpt archetypes; subversives care about individuals.

  In other words, when we today say "art", we are referring to a concept of art which has existed only during a small fraction of the history of the West.  I'll write our concept as "Art", uppercase.  If I use the term ars or "craft", I'm talking about the medieval concept.  The entire stretch of time from the Romans until about 1400 A.D. had no concept comparable to Art, which is why their ars sucked by our standards.

  Much of the art we really love--for us, notably Lord of the Rings and Star Wars--is an insidious mix of the two:  a comfortable conservative message over-simplifying the problems of life and calling for a return to old ways, clothed in the storytelling techniques of the subversives.

  Some of the large sub-themes of the development of Art include the development at the end of the Middle Ages of:

  - a belief in real numbers and in the real world, and a corresponding development of empirical philosophy and realistic art

  - the notion that humans could be creative

  - the idea that change might sometimes be good

  - a belief in the value of individual people, even if they were not rich or dead

  These sub-themes are all rigidly tied to the larger theme, as they're associated exclusively with rebellions against Platonic idealism and traditionalism.  Perhaps an unfortunate meta-theme of interest is that periods of intellectual and artistic freedom are unstable or weakening, and never last more than a few centuries before the societies that indulge in them collapse or are conquered.  Historically, that seems to be the case so far.

  I'll have some mercy on you and split this post into four parts:

  Part 1. The grand sweep of history:  Books covering more than one large period of history.

  Hazard Adams 1971, 2ed 1992. Critical Theory Since Plato.  1254 p.

  Vincent Leitch, ed. 2001, 2ed 2010.  The Norton Anthology of [Literary] Theory & Criticism.  2653 p.  This is similar to Critical Theory Since Plato, but with a much larger fraction devoted to hostile critiques of Western literature and Western society from social justice activists and deconstructionists.

  Mircea Eliade 1949, expanded+translated 1954. Cosmos and History: The myth of the eternal return.  162 pages.

  Pitirim Sorokin 1938.  condensed edition 1957. Social & Cultural Dynamics.

  Lawrence Brown 1979.  The Might of the West.  549 pages.

  Part 2. The Middle Ages

  Alfred Crosby 1997.  The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western society, 1250-1600.  240 pages.

  Umberto Eco 1959, translated 1986.  Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages.  119 pages.

  Johan Huizinga 1949.  The Waning of the Middle Ages.  Citations from 1954 Anchor Books edition.  335 pages.

  The Walters Art Museum 2011.  The Medieval World.  This is the best medieval art book I know for my purpose, because it discusses the reasons why people made art the way they did.

  Pamela King 2011.  Medieval Literature 1300-1500.  Edinburgh University Press.

  Part 3. Modern Totalitarian Art

  This random, insightful blog post on totalitarian art, which talked about Kundara, below.

  Milan Kundera 1984.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Part 6: "The Grand March".  Fiction.  Why totalitarian art is kitsch.  This seems to contradict most of the books below, which claim that totalitarian art is modernist.  Kundera summarizes totalitarian art the same way I've summarized medieval art: "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions."

  Marcin Giżycki.  "Modernism and Post-Modernism in Eastern Europe." Artium Quaestiones VI 1993, p. 39-43.  Argues that modernism is totalitarian.

  Igor Golomstock, 1990.  Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China.  I haven't read this yet.

  Boris Groys, 1992. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond.  Argues that totalitarianism is modernist, and modernism is totalitarian.  I haven't read this yet.

  Mikkel Bolt & Jacob Wamberg, eds., 2010.  Totalitarian Art and Modernity.  I haven't read this yet.

  James von Geldern & Richard Stites, eds. 1995.  Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, poems, songs, movies, plays, and folklore, 1917-1953.  Indiana U Press.  I haven't read this yet.

  The most-controversial thing I want to say is that both medieval art (European art during the High Middle Ages, 1000-1300 A.D.) and totalitarian art are bad art, and that they are deliberately bad art because they are both opposed to the expression of the human spirit, for the same reasons.  These reasons are extensively thought-out and documented.  Both the High Middle Ages and totalitarian regimes viewed art only as propaganda; both ended up producing only kitsch because of the nature of their power base and their resulting philosophy and morality.  None of my argument is new or even controversial; it just consists of many pieces which have not been put together before.

  Part 4. Everything else

  Jeffrey Hurwit 1985.  The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C.  Cornell U. Press.  I've only skimmed this, but it looks interesting.  It appears that Greece did not make realistic art in 600 B.C. and did in 570 B.C., a change which matches the time of Solon's reforms.

  [Something about Roman art and culture.]

  Geoffrey Marshall 1976.  Restoration Serious Drama.  Asks: "Why does restoration drama seem so bad to us?"  Murcushio has volunteered to read this.

  Pseudo-Longinus, 0-300 A.D.  "On the Sublime."

  Edmund Burke, 1757. "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful."

  Roger Shattuck, 1955.  The Banquet Years:  The origins of the avant-garde in France 1885 to World War I.  360 pages.

  Clement Greenberg 1971.  Art and Culture.  This is a famous book shaping the contemporary interpretation of modern art, by the guy who invented the concept of "kitsch".  Modern art largely sees itself as the war with bourgeois kitsch.  I haven't read it.  I expect not to like it.

  W. E. B. Du Bois 1926. "Criteria of Negro Art."  In Leitch et al. p. 870-877.

  Langston Hughes 1926.  "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."  In Leitch et al. p. 1192-1196.

  Zora Neale Hurston 1950.  "What White Publishers Won't Print."  In Leitch et al. p. 1023-1027.

  W.E.B. Du Bois & Langston Hughes both insisted that blacks should or could write only black-activist propaganda.  Zora Neale Hurston complained that blacks were allowed to write only black propaganda.  Collectively, these essays support my argument that cultural survival mode (a generalization of the conditions leading to what Nietzsche calls "slave morality") leads to totalitarian-propaganda art.

  Gregory Bruce Smith  1996.  Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity.  U Chicago Press.  This is a frequently illogical book which, contrary to the intentions of its author, alerted me to much of the bad philosophy in post-modernism.

  
  

  Part 1. The grand sweep of history

  ---

  Hazard Adams’ Critical Theory Since Plato is a 1271-page collection of the most-famous essays on Western literature from Plato up to 1988.  I already reviewed it here.  IMHO it was most remarkable in opening my eyes to the true history of literature and literary theory:

  1. There has been very little useful literary theory since the start of recorded history.

  2. Most "literary theory" has been a covert attempt to subvert literature for political purposes.  Many societies throughout history have tried to limit literature to mere propaganda.

  We can divide Western literary history into five periods:

  1. Ancient Greek:  There were two contending views of literature, Plato's and Aristotle's.  Plato saw literature as purely functional; it should be allowed only insofar as it was useful propaganda for the community.  Aristotle saw literature as being useful to individuals, and not just for conveying information, but for its emotional effect on them.  Literature was relatively free, particularly from Euripides onward, and good by our standards.

  2. Ancient Roman:  Aristotle's view that literature had a psychological, individualistic function is not represented in Roman writings, and the Roman attitude towards the "plastic" arts (arts manifested in physical form, notably sculpture and painting) was strictly functional.  A Roman statue might commemorate a battle, or an individual, or demonstrate the wealth or power of its possessor, or be a captured statue from a foreign capital whose presence in Rome signified Roman supremacy.  It would not be a work of individual or emotional expression.  Poetry was more highly respected, but there was no analogue of the Iliad in Roman literature.  They had only poems such as the Aenead that glorified Rome in an unreflective, socially conservative way, and comedies.  The fact that Romans thought the Aenead was comparable to the Iliad tells us they were rather stupid and unperceptive about art.  (This same fact tells us the same thing about every culture that thinks the Aenead was comparable to the Iliad, notably the neo-classicists.)

  3. Christian / medieval:  The attitude shown in writings from 400 through 1600 A.D. reveals a monomania with religion that is unique in human history, and occurs only in the Biblical-descended religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism) and in religious cults.  Christianity controlled every aspect of thought.  The degree of ideological control of thought during this period was, contrary to popular belief among historians today, stronger than anything Stalin or Mao could have done with modern technology, for it recruited faith (and guilt and fear) much more powerfully than communism did.  People self-policed more forcefully than any secret police could.

  During the years 400--1400 A.D., art was on the defensive.  The question in public debate was not whether art should have some expressive value or be purely propagandistic, but whether art should be allowed to exist at all.  Throughout that entire time period, clerics repeatedly called for the abolition of nearly all art.  Pictures, poetry, and music were all under nearly continual attack as being sinful, distractions from God, wasteful, and inherently untruthful.  The Muslims did outlaw most representational art, and the Byzantines destroyed all their paintings and sculptures in both the 8th and 9th centuries.

  4. Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic periods (with time-outs for the Puritans, Restoration, & neo-classicists):  Rather than describe these individually, I'll say these were time periods during which no one ideology controlled art, and so artists were free to express their own visions.  The art of these periods therefore matches our modern conception of Art.

  5. Post-Modernism:  There are strong ties between modernism and post-modernism, but the critical literature of the two is quite different.  Modernist theory was written by people trying to make sense and move forward; post-modernist theory was made by people trying to deny and destroy sense and move backwards.  It is destructive nonsense, and dominates literary theory from the 1960s until the last essay of this book in 1988.

  ---

  Mircea Eliade 1949, expanded+translated 1954. Cosmos and History: The myth of the eternal return.  162 pages.

  Eliade divides people throughout history into two categories that are forerunners to the modern categories of conservatives and liberals.  Traditionalists, he says, think the good things in life are those that repeat: marriage, love, birth, harvest, spring.  (I don't know about winter and old age.)  Unexpected things are always bad: famine, plague, war, death.  Traditionalists therefore think in cyclical time.  They take comfort in the idea that everything repeats, nothing ever really changes, and so nothing really matters.  Morality doesn't mean trying to reform society, but only to cultivate your own attitude of resignation.

  Their stories glorify things that repeat.  This includes people.  They try to fit even outstanding and historically important individuals into some archetype, so that they become just one more instance in a recurring pattern rather than someone unique in history.  Their stories subtly communicate that there is nothing new under the sun.  (Buddhism and Hinduism fit this pattern perfectly.)

  The Jews, he says, introduced the notion of history, with their signposts of significant events in historical time (the captivity, the Exodus) and a prophesied future coming of the Messiah.  Christians and Muslims took the concept further, and this eventually led to modern science and liberal progressives, who both see change as a good thing rather than as exclusively bad.

  However, Eliade says, history, which requires us to look reality in the eye, is so terrifying that humans can only tolerate it if they make up a God who directs it, to give this heroic confrontation "meaning".  Modern people, having progressed far enough to realize there is no God, have pulled out the floor from underneath themselves.  Without a belief in a God, they no longer have the courage to face the terror of History, and are turning back towards cyclical time and the idea that change is bad.

  I find this book potentially important for several reasons:

  1. It suggests an explanation for the rise of science in the West and only the West, as being caused by Judaism and Christianity.  It is interesting but confusing to note that Muslim lands also had a scientific revolution, but cast it away in the 14th century, at the same time that it was taking hold in Europe.  (Some historians have suggested that the Black Death caused Europe to reject its religion and the Arabs to reject their science.)  This hypothesis is especially interesting because Christianity was anti-scientific--it would present a strong example of a doctrine bearing the seeds of its own destruction.

  2. It makes a link between religion, philosophy, and the artistic theory of realism.  Realism--the depiction of realistic individuals doing realistic things, rather than Mary Sue heroes doing grand heroic things, is always a major break with earlier artistic tradition.  However, Eliade has clearly gone wrong somewhere, since his theory puts the Middle Ages on the side of realism, and artistically and philosophically, it very very obviously was not.  Also, he puts the classical Greeks firmly on the side of tradition and idealism, but classical Athens was experimenting with realism before it was weakened and then conquered.

  3. It explains the difference between people with progressive intent, and New Agers in progressive disguise.  I am, as GhostOfHeraclitus can tell you, anti-communist.  I think communism is unworkable, inherently violent, and unreformable.  But communists have progressive intent.  A communist will agree with me that tractors, fertilizer, and antibiotics are good things.  Contrast them with "progressives" who want to build a commune where they'll work the land with oxen and use only "natural" fertilizer and medicine (as if antibiotics weren't natural!)  You could try arguing with these people, but it won't do any good, because they aren't progressives, but regressives.  They don't want to help people; they want to return to cyclic time.

  4. It predicts that civilization is inherently unstable.  Civilization leads inevitably to atheism, which leads civilization to destroy itself.  I hope this isn't really inevitable, but if the argument has some merit, then we need to understand and deal with it to avoid destroying ourselves (as we seem intent upon doing at present).

  ---

  Pitirim Sorokin, 1938, condensed edition 1957. Social & Cultural Dynamics.  The link is to the 1957 edition, which is a mere 704 pages, about one-fourth as long as the 1938 edition.  Some of the data tables are only in the 1938 edition.

  I found this book while I was formulating my own theory of the principal component of art from reading Critical Theory Since Plato.  I think Colin Martindale referred to it in The Clockwork Muse.  Sorokin had come to the same conclusion I had about the principal component of art after decades of studying art from all time periods, from all around the world.

  Sorokin's useful insight is dividing ways of thinking into the "ideational" (by which he means what everyone else calls Platonic or idealistic) and the "sensate" (empirical).  He notes that the ideational is associated with conservative regimes, and the sensate is usually subversive, associated with concern for the lower classes (which he calls "decadent").  He notes that most great swaths of history produce either ideational or sensate art, but great art is produced only in brief periods of transition when the two are blended, such as in classical Greece or Elizabethan England.  His enumeration of the characteristics of ideational and sensate art are identical to what I've formerly called totalitarian and subversive art, and his observation on blended art is one I've also made.

  Sorokin also claims--insightfully, I think--that there have been only three bases for epistemology throughout history:  empiricism (direct observation of the world, associated with sensate art), rationalism (logic, associated with ideational art), and faith.  Nearly everyone else fails to remember that not only are empiricism and rationalism not the same thing, but they were historically opposed to each other.  The Greeks and the medieval scholastics were rationalists; they believed it was more reliable to deduce truth while sitting in your armchair than to go out into the messy world and try to figure anything out from it.  The Middle Ages, unfortunately, spent its brainpower trying to synthesize rationalism (which they called "reason") and faith rather than rationalism and empiricism, so that synthesis, which resulted in humanism, statistics, and science, wasn't begun until the 17th century, and wasn't completed until late in the 20th century with the discovery of information theory, Bayesian networks, and machine learning.

  (The distinction between empiricism, logic, and science will become especially important when studying post-modernism.  All phenomenology and deconstructionism is based on mistaking logic for science, on account of having a classical but not a scientific education.)

  However, Sorokin was a madly conservative Catholic.  He liked the Platonic, the traditional, the authoritative and hierarchical, and hated democracy, the poor, the sensory world, the new, and the free.  I think this is the only book I've ever read, outside of communist propaganda, which puts "freedom" in quotation marks when talking about Western liberties.  He thought the modern world could be saved only by re-instituting monarchy and placing the world back under the chains of the Catholic church--and not the Roman Catholic Church, which is a bunch of heretics, but specifically the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the only repository of good and true values in the world.  So I find his data and his observations brilliant and useful, but his interpretations sometimes stupid (to avoid contradicting his prejudices), and his conclusions insane.

  Like Eliade, Sorokin sees something like conservatives and liberals as being the only two artistic traditions throughout all of time and space, but his theory slices up reality a little differently, putting the European Middle Ages on the side of tradition, and classical Greece in his transitional category.  This corresponds better to reality.  It's unfortunate that he didn't incorporate Soviet realism and Nazi art into his 1957 edition, because they add a new twist to the totalitarian / subversive art dichotomy, which turns out (I think) to be the exception that proves (in the modern sense) the rule. [1]

  [1] "The exception which proves the rule" has three different interpretations:

  - The original legal interpretation, which is that an assertion of an exception to a rule proves that the rule itself is otherwise in force, e.g., "Parking is free on weekends" proves that parking is not free on weekdays.

  - An extrapolated, hypothetical original interpretation, which is that it was using the Elizabethan sense of "prove" to mean "test", e.g., "The exception tests the rule."

  - A sophisticated modern scientific interpretation that it expresses the common phenomenon that something which appears to be an exception to a scientific rule will on investigation reveal further circumstances which only make the evidence for that rule stronger.  For example, most instances of particular animal behaviors that have been raised as objections to evolution have, on inspection, revealed new facts about those animals which predict the observed behavior under evolutionary theory.

  ---

  Lawrence Brown, 1979.  The Might of the West.  549 pages.

  This is a well-researched and insightful book which seems to have been ignored or dismissed by historians, probably because its conclusions are so weird.  TMotW combines one of the insights Sorokin relied on in Social & Cultural Dynamics (modern science is a blend of the opposing schools of the rational and the empirical) with the main argument of The Measure of Reality (the crucial impetus towards the scientific revolution was the development of measurement, which did not exist in the classical tradition).  Brown argues that, except for Archimedes, the Greeks knew nothing of the empirical, that the rationalist tradition is mostly useless, and that therefore the classical world is really not that important to Western history.

  I think that's an exaggeration, but still a really interesting insight.  We say Aristotle knew everything, but he didn't know arithmetic.  He probably couldn't multiply, and he would have said division was theoretically impossible.  Geometry is pretty useless.  It's only useful once you start computing sines and cosines, and then it's not Greek geometry anymore; it's Arabic.  Statistical (empirical) learning techniques trounce (rationalist) logic in nearly all artificial intelligence applications.  (Though note I am typing this on a computer that uses Boolean logic.)

  The sensible conclusion, then, is that European civilization owes most of its scientific inheritance, and thus its modern might, to Persia and the Jews, not to the Greeks and Romans--which Brown agrees with--and that, after acquiring this inheritance in the 14th century, Europe moved through the Renaissance and Reformation towards Enlightenment and modernity--which Brown disagrees with.  For some reason he wants to say Christianity's influence was entirely negative, so he argues that the Renaissance and Reformation were steps backwards.  I haven't read this part, but it sounds nuts.

  It's odd that the most-common objection made in Amazon reviews of a book arguing that Western civilization comes not from white people in Italy and Greece, but from darker people in the Middle East, is that Brown is racist.  I don't yet know what racism these claims refer to, but I suspect white supremacists are also not very happy with Brown.

  ______________ Part 2: The Middle Ages, to follow ______________

  67 comments · 631 views

• 6w, 22h

  AFK until Sept 18 or so

  Tomorrow morning I'm going away until maybe Sept. 18.  I might not have Internet access during that time.  Fimfiction purges unread notifications after 1 week now.  If you comment on any of my stuff between now and Sept. 12, I may never get the notification.  You can PM me to let me know.

  I'm shocked at how many things I "must" do on the Internet before Sept. 19, all of which I have to do before leaving.  It makes me doubt whether the Internet is actually saving me time.  I had to do an entire week's mundane Internet tasks all at once, and they took 2 full days--and I'm still not done.  This is an exceptional week, with several deadlines, and I ran into some exceptional tasks, like a prescription renewal which I need by 8pm today that has taken 3 hours over the past 2 days just to certify that, yes, it's in a complete deadlock, and my only options for the medicine I need seem to be either Mexico or Agway.  I have two GRE exams which I must register for before leaving due to a hard deadline, which should be a simple task, but the ets website has been on-and-off for 2 weeks, and my attempts to register have failed, and my account stopped working, and it's become a back-and-forth tech-support task.  Etc.

  But there are always exceptions.

  AugieDog has a story in the featured box now that's good, though I like the original version better.  Which you prefer probably depends on whether you like figuring things out for yourself.  The original is remarkable for how much it says in 530 words, but only if you think about it.

  11 comments · 171 views

• 6w, 2d

  Story recommendation: After the Races

  

  17 comments · 306 views

• 6w, 6d

  Emergency plug for an old story: Bouts of Forgetful Artistic Destruction

  

  11 comments · 300 views

• 8w, 1d

  Editor of Tangent kicked out of Worldcon for complaining about political correctness

  This past Friday, there was a panel at Worldcon called "The State of Short Fiction".  Its description said,

  More than just the magazines, short fiction is in a golden age, found in the magazine, online, in anthologies, and chapbooks.  The field's editors come together to talk about what they are seeing, and debate whether there is a short fiction renaissance.

  Dave Truesdale, the editor of Tangent Online, was the moderator.  He began the panel with a rude 5-minute speech/rant saying that he thought short science fiction was not in a golden age, because it was suffering from overly-sensitive people who complained constantly of sexism, racism, & homophobia, made writers timid, and bullied anyone who spoke out against them.  One of those 5 minutes was Dave quoting David Hartwell, describing science fiction fandom as an unusually tolerant and accepting place, presented as evidence against the accusations of systematic sexism & racism.  He concluded by saying,

  And I don't understand where we've come to this point where people, a certain segment, who seem to make it... their social agenda's more important than the literary aspect.  They bully, they terrify, they intimidate, they cost people their jobs, just because these people do not agree with exactly what they believe in.

  Naturally, Dave was expelled from Worldcon.  MidAmeriCon released a statement on Twitter saying,

  Dave Truesdale's membership was revoked because he violated MidAmeriCon II's Code of Conduct. Specifically, he caused 'significance interference with event operations and caused excessive discomfort to others'.

  Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld, turned his chair away in protest as Dave spoke.  Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's, attacked him as soon as he stopped speaking, saying "Dave, you've done the same thing for years.  You've bullied people when you didn't like a story."  As proof, she said that he once reacted very strongly to a story she published 11 years ago.  (She couldn't remember the author or the title, but it was something about a talking squirrel.)

  Dave's account of what happened is here.  Here's an mp3 recording of the panel.

  Jim Hines gave a description of the first half-hour of the recording here:

  http://www.jimchines.com/2016/08/worldcon-expels-truesdale/

  You can interpret that either as that Truesdale was abusing the panel to harp on his private obsession, or that Truesdale was trying to express his opinion about the biggest problem in science fiction today, but kept getting shut down.

  Dave is being widely criticized for having recorded the panel, and Jonathan Strahan asked him to take the recording down because he was recorded without his consent.  OTOH, if the recording did not exist, people would be likely to misinterpret the many blogs & tweets saying that Dave hijacked the panel.  Listening to the recording shows that Dave did little talking after the first 6 minutes.  I clicked through the audio after Dave's 5 minutes, starting it at 42 different points.  Dave was speaking at 3 of those 42 points.  Sheila Williams did about half of the talking.

  By the 13 minute mark, 3 panelists and the audience had made it clear that they didn't want to talk about that subject, and at that point, Dave probably should have sucked it up, taken off his activist cap, put on his moderator cap, and talked about what the people wanted to talk about.  I think a panelist or a speaker should feel free to confront controversial subjects, but a moderator does not have that prerogative, at least if we take the word literally.

  The panelists, however, were the ones talking--Dave didn't harangue them; he asked them to talk on the subject of political correctness in fiction, and they expressed reluctance, then talked about it.  Especially Sheila Williams.

  Dave has a history of harping on this issue, often in myopic and bone-headed ways.  If you Google "Dave Truesdale", you'll find more blogs by members of SFWA complaining about him for being sexist and racist than things written by Dave Truesdale.  For example:

  Long thing about a SFWA cover that I didn't read

  Rant by same person about Truesdale that ends with a history of sexism in SF

  I find it hard to believe that Dave being kicked out of Worldcon has nothing to do with the Sad & Rabid Puppies.  I find it hard to believe that, had a moderator opened the same panel by saying that short science fiction today was suffering a lack of diversity because too many of the writers were white males, and kept returning to that point throughout the panel, that that moderator would have been kicked out of the convention.

  The next day, the Hugos were awarded.  Again, just as in the recent Nebula awards, by an incredible coincidence, despite the field's white male demographics, all of the major awards (novel, novella, novelette, short story) went to women.

  124 comments · 941 views

• 9w, 3d

  Retraction: The SCA is not that open-minded

  In my last blog post, I wrote that people in the SCA have the super-power of being able to “study people from a distant time and place and try to understand them.”

  I spoke too soon.

  I'm new to the SCA.  In the days since posting that, I’ve learned that, if the Scadians do have a super-power enabling them to be interested in people whose views they disagree with, it isn’t because they’re especially open-minded.  More likely it’s so they can have someone they can look down on without feeling guilty about it.

  I’m not even talking about the anti-brony invective I was subjected to at a campfire.  I’ve just come to expect that from people.  What surprised me was the audience reaction to a comment I made during a talk someone else gave on the question of moral authority in the Middle Ages.  I got schooled hard in post-modern rhetoric.

  The question at hand in about the year 1110--ironically, as you’ll see--was whether, when one is unsure what the right thing to do is, one should trust in tradition, the pronouncements of the Church, the text of the Bible, or reason.  At that time there was only one university in the world, in Italy.  So most young noblemen were sent to cathedrals for an education, to learn to reason and to argue.  The Church had a set of standard logical arguments their clerics taught.  Around 1110, Peter Abelard pointed out that all of these arguments were, logically, bullshit.

  The Church pointed out that their description did not say “Criticism welcome”, and burned his books.  Abelard still maintained that if you were going to say you were teaching people how to reason, you ought to have some interest in whether the way you reasoned might actually get the right answer.  The SCA lecturer said that the problem with that was that nobody at the time wanted the right answer--the Church wanted to arrive at an answer that agreed with the Bible, and the young noblemen wanted to use their rhetorical skill to persuade their neighbors and vassals to fight for them.  Teaching people how to find the right answer would ruin everything.

  (How far we've come.  )

  For some reason the audience got to asking questions about transgendered people.  I say “asking questions”, but these were mostly the kind of questions that have an exclamation point rather than a question mark at the end.  A lot of them came from a grim, earnest-looking young woman of about 20 who said she had learned in social anthropology class that science can never be objective in the way it pretends to, so we shouldn’t take it seriously.

  I was watching her and wondering what was going on in her head for her to be so confident that she knew all of the answers to all our social and economic problems and was on the right side of every ethical question--that, in fact, there were no ethical questions; the right thing to do was, after all, always obvious to everyone, and if people didn’t do the right thing, it was because they were either stupid or evil.  I mean, here she was rolling her eyes at David Friedman’s opinions on economics.  He’s been an economist for about 50 years.  5 years ago, she was probably reading Seventeen and screaming for Justin Bieber.

  The afore-mentioned irony was that the talk presumed that there were difficult moral situations.  If there weren’t, there’d be no need for any moral authorities at all.  (To be fair to her, she had wandered into the talk by accident.)

  One of her “questions” asserted that the persecution of trans-gendered people originated with wealthy patriarchical capitalists.

  I realize now that this was a trap.  It’s a classic post-modernist or social-justice move, and I’ve fallen for it before,

  So of course I walked into the trap, saying, “I don’t think capitalism is actually the source of the problem here.”

  The way the trap works is that the trapper says something that is simultaneously (A) in support of an under-privileged class, and (B) jaw-droppingly stupid.

  If there is anyone else with a brain in the room, they’ll object to the stupid part.  The people without a brain will only understand that the trappee is disagreeing with the person who said something in support of an under-privileged class, and so they’ll assume the trappee does not support that class, categorize him or her as the enemy, and that person’s views will be eliminated from consideration in the discussion.  The trapper hence pre-emptively eliminates all possible competent opposition.

  And that’s exactly what happened.  I hadn't said anything against the transgendered.  All I'd said was that opposition to them wasn't a capitalist plot.  I didn’t even get to finish my statement, because half of the audience immediately began attacking me all at the same time.

  The only one who could articulate why she disagreed with me was the earnest-looking young social anthropologist, and what she said was shockingly honest and made perfect sense:  She objected violently to the suggestion that wrongdoing could be the result of anything other than class warfare.

  This snapped into place with my thoughts from just seconds before, wondering how she could imagine she had the answer to every question.  Well, that’s how.  And it’s the only answer consistent with post-modern theory.

  See, post-modernism is purely destructive.  It’s been adopted as a tool by much of the progressive movement, but whereas the progressive motivation is to help the deprivileged, post-modern theory can’t do that directly.  What it does is tear down the privileged.  Post-modern theory doesn’t say you should help the deprivileged, because it says that there is no such thing as “should”.  It says there are no ethics, no right, no wrong, no good, no bad.  It merely insists on tearing down anyone and anything that says there is, by exposing the personal agenda they must have for saying such a ridiculous thing.

  So post-modern theory can’t admit to any genuine disagreements about issues.  Even if it did, it would have nothing to say about them.  All it does is look for privileged classes to knock off their pedestals.

  But it’s hard to build a consensus to name everybody who isn’t transgendered as the oppressor.  Hence, capitalists and the patriarchy.  It doesn’t matter if it makes sense as long as you can build a consensus against them.

  By allowing the possibility that the conflict over, say, which bathroom transgendered people should use, might be a conflict between individual preferences rather than a fight against an oppressive power structure created by a small privileged social class, I was claiming that it was an ethical question.  And if it were an ethical question, then she couldn’t dismiss everyone who opposed her view as simply acting on behalf of their selfish class interests.  She couldn't dismiss all questions of fact as subjective.  She’d have to think for herself.

  And, man, that can sting.

  192 comments · 893 views

• 11w, 13h

  Why Publishers Should Care about David Friedman's Conversion to Islam

  

  55 comments · 658 views

• 13w, 1d

  Uninteresting ideas: Could Batman beat Superman?

  

  72 comments · 664 views

• 13w, 2d

  Stylo, darf, and NTSTS

  

  28 comments · 416 views

• 13w, 5d

  Trotcon, 8AM: Admiral Biscuit is in my bed

  Dammit, PresentPerfect!  You tricked me again!

  ---

  (confused people click here)

  10 comments · 210 views

• 14w, 1d

  Brexit Bad?

  IN WHICH I give my opinion on something I know very little about

  (If I wasn't supposed to stick my nose into things I don't understand, why did God make it so big?)

  I didn't know what "Brexit" was until after the vote.  I saw it in Google search results and guessed from context that it was a right-wing blog.

  I have no opinion on whether leaving the EU is the right thing for Britain to do at this time.  The strange thing is that, since the vote, I've read a lot of impassioned blog posts about how awful it is for Britain to leave the EU, and none of them have any opinion on whether it's the right thing for Britain to do at this time, either.

  Let's take, for example, the Schlock Mercenary blog which I just read.

  I don’t know what the UK’s older generation, the ones who voted “Leave,” have spent twenty years thinking, but the younger generation has spent those years looking forward with hope, not backward with fear. With Brexit, the older generation voted against the future that the youth of the UK overwhelmingly desired.

  ... Young me probably would have been won over by words like “sovereignty” and “independence.” Old me sees how connected we all are, and how every single act of ignorant distrust tears at the fabric of the future we want to build.

  Fellow old people: Look around.  Listen and learn. That thing you’ve believed for decades may not be true anymore. It might not even have been true then. Inertia is not wisdom, and those who praise common sense are often calling for you to remain ignorant.

  Young people: Old people aren’t all jingoistic relics of the isolationism that has been useless since before most of them were born. Some of us want to hand you a world that is better than the one we were handed, better even than the “good old days” that we, in our more honest moments, will admit never actually existed.

  The blog called the vote "disastrous".  The peculiar thing is that, in explaining why it was so bad, it said nothing about Britain specifically.  It didn't even say anything about economics.  It spoke instead in terms of universal ethics:  Staying in the EU is morally good.  It's "looking forward with hope" and "connected".  Leaving is bad.  It's "ignorant distrust", "isolationism", and (in defiance of the meaning of the word) "inertia".

  This is pure demagoguery.

  Any discussion of Brexit, particularly any discussion that condemns it as the End of the World, needs to say something somewhere about Britain.  Like, what trade laws are advantageous to Britain and what laws are advantageous to the EU.  Who will be hurt and who will be helped because the pound falls.

  So far I have not seen that.  I have only seen blogs that condemn it in general terms because it's against a "progressive" ideology that says bigger nations are always better, and integrating bureaucracies has somehow become a moral issue, equivalent to joining hands and singing "Kumbayah".  Sometime in the past 20 years, this apparently became a universal truth.  I didn't get the memo.

  If you don't have anything to say about Britain's specific conditions, you have no opinion on whether leaving the EU is the right thing for Britain at this time.  You just have an opinion on whether leaving a larger union is the right or wrong thing to do in principle.

  If we follow that logic, either every person should be zer own nation, or every nation everywhere should always join with its neighbors to make bigger nations until there is just one.

  This is idiotic.

  Look.  Nations gotta be some size.  There are advantages to being big, and there are advantages to being small.  There is no a priori reason to think that Britain is too small to be a nation.  Historically and theoretically, the evidence is that Britain is a pretty good size for a nation.  (See, for example, The Size of Nations, an entire book about calculating the theoretical optimum size of nations given their circumstances.)

  Britain can take care of itself.  Or it can stay in the EU.  I don't care.  The sky is not falling.  What I care about is the dangerous idiocy of insisting--without argument--that bigger is always better.  Of the substitution of a theological principle for rationality.  This is a return to the mindset of the Dark Ages, in which right and wrong were decided on the basis of religious metaphors rather than facts.

  ---

  (The unanimity of the parts of the Internet that I frequent is also alarming.  Logically, there must be people out there who think "Leave" was the right thing.  Because, you know, Leave won.  Yet not only don't I hear from them, I don't hear from anybody who thinks "leave" is a rational alternative, e.g., probably the entire Internet that I know is two degrees of separation from anyone who voted "leave".  That suggests a deeper cultural divide than I'd imagined could exist.)

  134 comments · 903 views

• 14w, 2d

  Bronycon post

  

  54 comments · 409 views

• 15w, 5d

  Bronycon meetups & other info

  

  36 comments · 348 views

• 18w, 3d

  What pisses me off about the Orlando attack [retracted for now]

  I've taken this post down until more complete information is available.  It was premature of me to post in anger before having sufficient facts.  Sorry.  Basically, the reported timeline seems to require that about 100 police officers listened to one gunman shoot 100 people over a period of 3 hours because they were waiting for an armored vehicle and a SWAT team.  Given that one of the police officers who was involved in the stand-off was already inside the club when the shooting started, and that the man was reported to have only semi-automatic weapons, it does not seem possible that he shot 100 people before the firefight began and/or during the firefight.  I will be very angry if it turns out that he shot most of the 100 people during the 3 hours that the police waited for the SWAT team.

  59 comments · 618 views

• 18w, 5d

  "Breaking Peeved" explanations

  A lot of readers left comments saying they didn't know what was going on in "Breaking Peeved".  Here's a complete spoilerific explanation of what I had in mind, followed by writing issues.  I've used spoiler tags only to conceal the ending, because otherwise they make it too hard to read.

  What was going on:

  The name is a reference to Breaking Bad, a TV show about Walter White, an innocuous chemistry teacher who becomes a horrible crystal meth kingpin.  It's one of the best-written shows that's been on TV, and I recommend it highly, though I'm only into the 3rd season of it so far.

  In the first scene, Fluttershy's friends don't want her to know that Angel is a criminal kingpin, because he supplies each of them with something they want.  That determined that the rest of the story would show the illegal activities of each of the other Mane 6, and then wrap the story up somehow.

  Pinkie puts addictive stimulants in her baked goods, either cocaine or amphetamines, which both suit Pinkie. Apparently cocaine is absorbed more efficiently if you eat it than if you snort it, but much more slowly, so there's no sudden peak high.  She says “Welcome to Sugarcube Corner, where the first one’s always free!” at the end because of the trope saying that dealers of addictive drugs give out the first sample for free.  (I doubt this trope is true.)

  The bag "looks just like the ones my duck feed comes in" because it is a bag her duck feed came in.  Pinkie says "That's the point!", meaning she hopes anyone who sees it will assume it's duck feed.  (This is problematic, as one would not like to see sacks of duck feed in Sugarcube Corner.)

  There are clues in both of the scenes with ferrets that Fluttershy has trained them to act that way to fool others into thinking the ferrets understand what they're doing.

  Fluttershy had to count her money after getting home, because if she were really puzzled about why she still had money, she surely would have counted it, so not counting it would have given away the ending.  But there was a lot of it, hidden in an odd place, and she wasn't surprised by how much there was, making her action compatible with the ending.  The first version had her money in a glass jar, but then Leonzilla convinced me the scene was too misleading, so I changed it to be more money, because she ought to have more money if she's making lots & isn't spending lots.  Then I had to change it not to be a glass jar on a high shelf, because it would weigh hundreds of pounds.

  Rainbow supplies the Wonderbolts with performance-enhancing drugs, including at least some that can be taken shortly before a competition.  (Leonzilla suggested she was also fixing the race with Angel Bunny, which was a good idea that I didn't think of, but that would require Dash to have talked with Angel, which she couldn't.)

  Dash can be alone with Angel because Dash is the only pony who could be alone with Angel and not figure out that Angel couldn't talk.  Now I wish I'd had Dash be afraid to be alone with Angel.

  Rarity wants prostitutes and maybe drugs to entertain high-society ponies who can fund her business expansion.

  Twilight, who treats Spike like a slave and is part of a conspiracy-theory group that thinks there's a big cover-up of the laws of physics, wants magic-enhancing drugs.  She might be overdosing on them because, in typical Twilight fashion, she always panics and thinks she needs more.  Or Fluttershy might have given her drugs that made her sick, because she knew before giving them that Twilight was supposed to help Celestia with something.  (Spike is clueless about the drugs.)

  Applejack is part of an ultra-right-wing earth pony militia and buys weapons for them.

  Celestia is either working with or for Cadence, or (my thought) is the big Equestrian crime boss of them all, and takes Angel away for trying to push into Cadence's meth territory again.

  At the end, we find out the animals can't really talk--Fluttershy pretended they could in order set up Angel, who's just a bunny, to take the inevitable fall for her.

  Story stuff:

  Friendship is Witchcraft was a big influence, as Sypher noticed.

  I used a third-person exterior point of view (POV), meaning not showing any character's thoughts, because I had to avoid revealing Fluttershy's thoughts.

  The last paragraphs shift into some genuine sadness for Fluttershy.  She is all alone again.  I think this gives the last line an extra gut-twist, but it also gets at stuff I had not thought out clearly, but which DustTraveller articulated and went beyond in this comment.

  That's why Fluttershy keeps offering ponies tea, and they keep turning her down.  That was to show that they were using her, not seeing her as a friend, even though they would have if she hadn't been so useful to them.  (I wish now I'd had her offer Spike tea, and had them drink.)

  Another slightly serious subtext was Applejack's militia.  She gives a theoretical justification for it which sounds noble, yet in practice the group attracts mostly racists and hypocrites, and turns to mass violence.  This mirrors my own despair at how every noble cause breaks down or gets hijacked when you try to put it into practice.

  I don't think this is a great story, but contrast it with the usual treatment of this idea on fimfiction, which would be for the description or picture to suggest that Fluttershy was dealing drugs, and then have 2000 words which end with "ha-hah, Fluttershy deals drugs" or "ha-hah, I fooled you into thinking Fluttershy was dealing drugs when she was really doing X."

  - Instead of introducing "Fluttershy deals drugs" as the punchline, or introducing it at the start and taking it away as the punchline, I took it as the starting point, and lampshaded that the story was a mystery about whether or not Fluttershy dealt drugs.  The ending didn't pretend to come out of the blue.  Every scene was designed to suggest one resolution, yet also, in retrospect, to necessarily play out the same way under the opposite resolution.  TL;DR: The hook should not be the story.

  - The story had a lot of other jokes along the way to the ending.  This is important.  Don't ever think one joke at the end is big enough to ask the reader to read a thousand words for.

  Trivia:

  I began the story as a cynical attempt to get into the featured box by combining a reference to the latest episode with Flutter-dealer click-bait.    That's why I wrote it quickly and without pre-readers.

  It worked.  

  PresentPerfect came up with the name.

  The very first scene I started writing was Derpy delivering a ridiculous amount of cold medicine, & Fluttershy explaining to Dash that there were dozens of bunnies deep underground who never came up to the surface because they always had colds.  Then I switched to using Scrivener, started again from scratch, and forgot to incorporate that part.  

  (Had Derpy appeared, she would have been sweet and innocent.  )

  I wrote 3 of the 7 scenes still thinking the story would end with Angel being the drug dealer.  It didn't occur to me until then that I could make the end stronger by changing that.  Then I had to rewrite 2 of those scenes, changing the events and the POV.  So this is an example where writing the story starting with the ending would have been less work.  That's to be expected, since it was a story relying more on how it would end than on character realism.

  Some of my favorite jokes are things nobody else has mentioned as funny:

  - when Fluttershy says Angel was speaking via pheromones

  - when Dash explains away her bag of stuff by saying the trading cards are life-sized

  - when Rarity unknowingly points out that pony names sound like stripper names

  - when Applejack talks about Angel's other associates as "dangerous ponies" while loading weapons of mass destruction onto her wagon

  - when Applejack is trying to cling to her ideological justifications for her political movement in the face of the evidence that it mostly appeals to ponies motivated by racism and greed

  29 comments · 749 views

• 19w, 8h

  Bronycon PSA: Crime map of inner harbor

  

  16 comments · 458 views

• 19w, 3d

  Writer's block

  I just wrote this on a thread and decided to post it here.  [Then of course I got OCD and expanded it.  ]

  What I mean by "writer's block" is when someone stares at the paper / screen & can't think of what happens next.  This should never happen.

  If you're ever reduced down to just one interesting thing that could happen next, it means you've written your story onto train tracks, and your story is now boring, because only one interesting thing could happen next.

  If you're down to zero interesting things, that means you didn't stop when you had just one interesting thing.  You need to back up at least to the last point where you had to choose betweentwo interesting things that could happen next, because everything after that point is no good.

  But even focusing on what happens next is weird.  Why are you staring at the last word on your page?  What about the setting of scene two--should it move to a different location to symbolize progress from scene one?  Is the level of omniscience you gave Pinkie Pie in scene 3 inconsistent with her puzzlement in  scene 1?  If your story isn't finished and you don't still have a dozen different issues to reconsider, something has gone wrong.  Either your story is too simple, or you're an incomparable genius, or you're not being demanding enough.  Stories don't drip out of the pen in an ordered, final state.  It just can't happen that you're stuck on the last word you wrote, yet have no questions about anything that came before or will come after it.  There should always be problems throughout the story all shouting for your attention.  The particular point in the story where you last stopped writing should not be so prominent in your mind.

  Why are you writing the story from start to finish?  Seriously--why would anybody do that?  Do you not know how it's going to end?  That means you're not writing a story, because you don't yet have a story idea.  A scenario is not a story.  If you don't know which direction to go in because you don't know where you're going, I don't think we should dignify that with the term "writer's block", as if it were an aberration rather than exactly what you'd expect to happen.

  The normal state of writing is not staring at the last word on the paper and wondering what could happen next, but thinking about the entire story, the entire set of possible stories, characters, and events you considered while writing it, and choosing where to strike next, what to change, and which alternative to use, to hammer the thing into one unified story.  The normal state is to have too many possibilities, not too few.

  For instance, I'm in the middle of writing a terrible crack-fic based on the last episode, on the question, "What is Fluttershy's job?", which I'm tentatively calling Breaking Not Very Nice.  I considered two overall stories, one that stays light-hearted, and one that goes very dark.  What appeals to me about the dark story is that it explains Fluttershy's shyness as fear of bad things happening to anyone she makes friends with, and that gave it some depth in addition to comedy.  What I don't like about it is that (a) it involves carnivores picking blue feathers out of their teeth, and that's not good for popularity, and (b) it's psychologically implausible, because Fluttershy has shown mostly fears that can't be interpreted as fear for the safety of her friends, and doesn't act like someone who is afraid of hurting others.

  Notice that both of these are "Fluttershy is Walter White" stories, but I did not call "Fluttershy is Walter White" a story.  That's not a story idea; it's a writing prompt.  I can't write anything that I have any chance of keeping unless I know how the story ends, and what attitude / tone it takes along the way.

  Going with the light-hearted story, I have 7 short scenes that need to take place.  I can work on them in any order.  So far I've written scenes 2, 6, and 1, in that order, because those are the longest scenes, and it's easier to start with scenes that have some meat to them.  I have a lot of issues up in the air:  How much should Fluttershy know about what's going on?  How much humor do I get from her being oblivious versus being sweetly nefarious?  Same question for Spike.  Should Twilight appear in the scene related to her interests, or should Spike stand in for her?  Have I got too many ponies in scene 1?  I have a weak transition marked in the middle of scene 1, around a joke that doesn't really work.  Can I punch it up and make it funnier, or rip it out?  Can I substitute a similar joke?  Can I delete the entire opening and so not need that transition?  Is scene 6 too long--it should be picking up steam as we head into the final scene, not dragging out its joke.  How can I reconcile Applejack being a member of an Earth Pony supremacist militia with her canon character?  Maybe I can make her a radical libertarian instead.  Maybe she's part of a movement with both these elements in it, and I can relate that to the difficulties of how real-life liberal movements often get hijacked by extremists.  Maybe that's way too much to take on in scene 6 of a crack-fic.  Etc.

  My point is that even though this is a very short story, I could easily reel off twenty issues in the first 2,000 words demanding my attention.  If I were stuck, I'd start working on these 20 issues, and I guarantee that at least one of them would open up a path forward where I was stuck.  To get writer's block, first I'd have to resolve all these issues to my satisfaction, and that never happens.

  There are always dozens of issues that could go another way in a story, even when it's "done".  If you're staring at the screen and don't have even one issue demanding your attention, something went badly wrong long before you got to that point.

  Most likely, the problem is either

  (A) you don't know how the story ends, or

  (B) you've eliminated tension by closing off too many possibilities earlier in the story, or

  (C) you haven't got enough awareness of craft, technical issues, and how life works to detect the problems in what you've already written, and to focus your attention on what the unwritten sections of the story need to accomplish and to avoid.

  39 comments · 456 views

• 20w, 2d

  Group: Conventions

  

  8 comments · 229 views

• 20w, 3d

  Insanity of the day: Chinese elementary-school kids scale mountain to get to school

  

  21 comments · 474 views