claudeb | Entries tagged with politics

We have an old tradition in SpinDizzy Muck: every year sometime in February or March we elect a mayor. It's a purely ceremonial position, yet it makes a big difference. Trust me, we tried going without. It sucked.

When I first got there (fifteen years ago, yikes!) it was right in the middle of the electoral campaign. My first instinct was to stay out because I was a newcomer. But Jaxen, one of the candidates, told me: "you're here now; it matters to you, too". So I read up on everyone who was running, and their platforms, and cast my vote. We do instant-runoff in SpinDizzy, by the way. That rules.

And you know what? My first or second choice actually won, and they were a fine mayor (Jaxen also won a term later). But as time went on, I became less involved, and one year I was too depressed to vote at all. Can you guess what happened? The candidate I was kind of rooting for lost by one vote.

Granted, we're a small community, but it's that much more important. Community is what we make it, all of us together and each in their own corner. And communities need a focus, or beacon. Not necessarily a leader, but someone who represents them. Someone to rally around.

There's "politics" of the kind that rhymes with "blech", and politics as in the fabric of social life. And someone has to weave the latter, too, because it doesn't happen by itself.

The world received a big shakeout over the past three years. Two different kinds of fallout drifted down from it. And the first one was the so-called "great resignation", which 1) isn't new and 2) it's just boss-speak for, "oh noes, workers are waking up". Well, there has been a more specific form of worker shortage in the UK (due to Brexit) and the US (due to anti-immigration policies).

I was talking to a friend just the other day (hi, Borris), who told me about the lack of certain medication from pharmacies in parts of the US. He blamed it on not enough truck drivers... while in the same breath telling me about a friend of his who can't seem to find work as a truck driver. Supposedly the governor of California introduced a law to only allow union workers into jobs like these.

Maybe it's even true, I haven't checked. But to me that sounds fishy as hell, for two reasons:

it sounds way too much like the systematic union fearmongering we've been hearing for even longer now;
I know for a fact that other US states introduced laws to bring the hiring age for truck drivers as low as 16.

My dear friend, I told him, you've been lied to.

Even so, I wouldn't have bothered writing this rant, but look what crossed my Mastodon feed this morning. Turns out the supposed worker shortage may have been fabricated by abusive employers keeping up job postings despite the lack of any actual openings, as a way to pressure their existing (and already overworked) employees.

Just like the supposed energy crisis turned out to be pure price speculation, using ongoing world events as a pretext. Go figure.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Location: late-stage capitalism

Considering how hard George Lucas worked to make the Galactic Empire into a bunch of cartoon Nazis, a surprising number of Star Wars fans never got the message. I mean, between literal Stormtroopers, officer uniforms, and the use of superweapons to commit genocide, it should be obvious, right? But it never is.

It's even harder to notice the problem with those other guys in the story, whom we're supposed to root for. And it's almost always guys. You know, those who:

preserve ancient traditions and turn their noses at the present;
live an ascetic lifestyle that they flaunt as a point of pride;
claim to be emotionless, yet take pride in their martial prowess.

At least Sith Lords just want to rule. Jedi want to tell you how to think.

It gets worse.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: uncomfortable

Heinlein is a classic of sci-fi, but nowadays it's fashionable to demonize him because Starship Troopers, his best known book, is considered fascist. But… I loved that book! It means a lot to me. Oh noes, am I the baddie? Or are his critics simply wrong?

Neither. In this essay, I will argue:

How Starship Troopers portrays a fascist society.
Why the book itself is not, and why it's in fact a good book.
That you also need to look at the wider context of Heinlein's other work.

Yes, Starship Troopers portrays a fascist society: one where military service is considered the only contribution to society valuable enough to give you a say. Sure, you can “choose” to be a second-class citizen, uh-huh. That will totally have no real consequences. You… do know what happens when entire categories of people are denied a vote, right? And where have we heard of such a society before? That's right, in the Roman Empire, which indirectly gave us the word “fascist”. Since, you know, they were the first. Funny that.

My main objection is that most of the book doesn't focus on that. In fact the main themes are duty and responsibility. Are you going to tell me those are bad things? Look around you. Look at the politicians running this world in 2022. Think again.

(Also the book features a father and son who part ways over differences only to find new common ground in the end. A happy ending I never had, and now it may be too late.)

( Read more... )

Current Mood: tired

There are two interesting critiques of Communism in sci-fi.

One is in The Disposessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. It’s about a distant planet where the Communists, instead of making a revolution, ran off to their moon (which is really big, more like Mars). They solve the problem of “who takes out the trash” by having absolutely everyone take turns, without exceptions. And the protagonist is all, “look, it’s kind of hard for me to be a brilliant scientist working to improve everyone’s lives when I have to stop all the time and spend a few weeks working as a garbage man”. The point being, sure, it has to be done, and it’s fair to share the burden, but that has to have limits.

(No seriously, imagine a surgeon having to personally wash the operating room spotless before being able to bring in the patient.)

A similar take can be found in The Doomed City, a novel by the Strugatsky Brothers. There everyone is rotated between jobs at regular intervals. A manager can always end up a janitor and the other way around. Which is good up to a point because everyone learns a little of everything and gets to know how everyone else lives. But ultimately it causes more problems than it solves because everyone is better at some jobs and terrible at others, but they have to switch anyway. In fact one of the main characters prefers to be a garbage man: a humble, low-key job that helps everyone but doesn’t put pressure on him. And he has to feint the system to stay where he’d rather be, at increasing peril to himself, while people who proved themselves as good managers must abandon their posts to be a sales clerk or whatever for a while.

That was the big problem with Communism, you see: much like Capitalism, it was deeply inhumane, treating people like cogs in a machine. “From each according to their abilities.” Measured how? “To each according to their needs.” Determined by whom?

Current Mood: pensive

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