Over the past week, creepy clown sightings have been reported all across the continental United States and in Britain and Australia.  Most are unsubstantiated, but arrests have been made of both menacing clowns and clown-sighting hoaxers.

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?)

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.

An allegedly very trustworthy rodent left an intelligent, well-written comment on one of my posts.  So I checked out this rodent's home page.  Mysterious, pretentious phrases in lowercase, yes, but some good story choices, too.  One of his or her stories was already on my "Read it Later" for some reason.  So I read it.

I'm preparing to take the GRE in English Literature in October, and I began collecting and plowing through a list of about 100 short stories last week, all the ones remaining on a study guide list that I hadn't read before.  Stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane, Eudora Welty, DH Lawrence, people like that.  Good stories.

"After the Races" doesn't look shabby next to those famous stories.  The creative descriptions of Adagio's thoughts and feelings really pulled me into her point of view, even though I hate her in canon.  It's a beautifully-written story about how each of the Dazzlings deals with becoming mortal and losing her powers.  There is no stunning plot twist or resolution.  (Well, there is a stunning plot twist, but it's not the point of the story; it's about a third of the way through.)  This story's strength is its precise, convincing description of how the Dazzlings might have reacted, and why.  It makes them all fuller characters than they are in the movie.

Many readers will be unsatisfied with its ending.  They'll want to know what happens next.  But it isn't that kind of story.  It's about Adagio realizing what's already happened and what she's already decided.  The VTR calls it "a little piece about independence and self-discovery."

Those tags, though.  I think "drama" and "slice of life" are a genuine case of tags that are incompatible by definition.  I'd just call this "drama".

It has 406 views and 21 thumbs up, and was rejected by EQD.  The rodent has 25 followers, myself included.  So if you want to say you liked it (the story) or it (the rodent) before it was cool, now's your chance.

I had Bouts of Forgetful Artistic Destruction on my Read-it-Later list, with about 500 other stories, and made time for it because HoofBitingActionOverload says he'll unpublish all his stories sometime this week.

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'.

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.

Noted atheist, futurist, and libertarian economist Dr. David Friedman, author of The Machinery of Freedom, recently converted to Islam.  Here we see Dr. Friedman studying his notes on Islamic history.

When the Superman vs. Batman movie came out, it reminded me that I'd written a blog post in 2015 about Superman vs. Batman.  I couldn't find it then.  Today I found it by accident.

darf recently made public that he is also NTSTS, so I can finally show you this tree I made using stylo back in 2014 of some fimfic authors:

Look closely at the darf / NTSTS entries:

If that's not definitive proof that they're the same person, I don't know what is.

What's that?  What're my stories doing mixed in with darf's?

I have no idea.  

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