No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

This is the last post before oblivion, and I make it only to repeat and highlight old news, buried in past Comment Streams, that

• the “Offensive Squid” forum does in fact exist now, right over here, and is just dying for pithy posts on anything from the neurology of mantis shrimps to the recurring philosophical themes present in the work of Yours Truly (I’m a bit surprised at the lack of a forum entitled “We’ll All Be Killed, Waaaahhhh!“, but then again, it’s not my forum.  Although I will drop in and post there occasionally);
• Facebook remains a viable option for quick updates while the ‘crawl is temporarily moribund; and
• My bedroom has now been torn apart in search of bedbugs (haven’t found any yet, beyond the fat gravid adult that I squished against my chest at 3 a.m. several nights ago).  This last item isn’t especially relevant to most of you, but any who remember the last scene of  ”The Conversation” (starring Gene Hackman) would find the sight of my apartment strangely familiar about now.

Radio Silence in 3 … 2 … 1 …

One last miscellaneous grab-bag before oblivion, folks:

Parsec:

As in, the award. This is old news (it was announced late last month, I think), but “The Things” — or rather, Kate Baker’s wondrous, melancholy performance of “The Things” — has been nominated for the Parsec Award under “Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form)”. Kate squeed like someone who’s just had her first date with the Lolcat Bible Translation Project until I sat her down and introduced her to my history with award nominations, aka the “Vortex of False Hope”. She pretended to listen, then countered by introducing me to her so-called “Abyss of Belief”. We have agreed that our differences are irreconcilable, and have gone our separate ways. However, if Kate wishes to come crawling back to me after we lose at DragonCon on Sept 4, I may be willing to forgive her. In time.

(And speaking of “The Things”, this would also be a great time to mention Jesus Olmo’s wonderful Online Coffee Table Book of the same story — yes, you read that right, and I know of no better way to describe it — but I’m still not sure if things like reprint rights and noncompete clauses have been settled to Clarkesworld’s satisfaction, so we’ll leave that unveiling for another time.)

Pictures:

Look what came for me in the mail the other day. All the way from Hong Kong, thanks to the tailoring artistry of Jeff Arychuk:

An especially nice touch is the tentacles themselves, which are stiffened with enough coat hanger wire to open my own abortion clinic.

This would also be a nice time to show you where Andrew Chase’s absolutely stunning movie-quality model of Theseus has ended up for the time being. The setting is temporary, and does not do it justice; but I have my eye on a nifty glass display case I saw at Ikea the other day (although that is sadly going to have to wait until the fall, when certain deadlines have passed and I am moved into my new office).

This is the front-and-back jewel-case art for the upcoming straight-to-DVD movie adaptation of Blindsight to be directed by Uwe Boll:

Steven Saus tells me that Lenie Clarke has been seen wandering around the more steampunkian ghettoes of Second Life.  Or if not Clarke herself, at least one of those rifter-chic faddists who were all the rage in Maelstrom:

I’m told you can see the electrolysis intake in the thorax if you kinda squint.

And here, in an abrupt shift of gears, are a very few of the friends who stood by me when the thugs and assholes of the world once again took the upper hand:

I took them on a dinner cruise a couple of weeks back, and felt awful because I could only afford to treat local folks who I actually knew¹.  So many more helped out who were complete strangers; so many more from out of town than in.  Still.  It was something, it was an open bar, it was a blast.

If you looked away from your friends and back from the bar, you could see where we’d come from.  This is where I live:

And, finally,

Pause:

Being what the ‘crawl is about to do for a while. I have taken on a new project which I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about just yet but which involves a shitload of work in a very short period of time, and something — actually, several things — are going to have to give. I am refusing new social engagements. I am avoiding pubs. My morning runs are increasingly sporadic. I am still reading e-mail, but unless the correspondence is vital I am not generally responding to it. (Some of you may feel that this policy has already been in place for some time; the difference is that before, I at least deluded myself into thinking that I’d get caught up on the backlog any day now.)

And the crawl is being put into a therapeutic coma, probably until mid-October.

There will doubtless be galvanic twitches in the meantime; I’ll raise the periscope in Australia/Worldcon/Dudcon, maybe from Vancouver en route, maybe even from Pearson Airport in Toronto if I’ve ended up on Harper’s Tewwowist Watch List and am denied boarding privileges. But the heart of this blog (which hasn’t been beating nearly as strongly as I would have liked over the past few months) has always been the crunchy scientific and philosophical issues that the bleeding edge serves up daily. It takes hours to properly sink my teeth into those things and say something worthwhile (or at least, something different), and even two or three such posts a week would devour an entire working day. I simply don’t have that time to spare right now.

It’s times like this I regret never having set up an actual forum where you guys can play amongst yourselves. That would probably be a better spot for some of the discussions I’ve been following in the Comment streams anyway. But of course, now I don’t have time to set up a forum either.

What you could do, I suppose, is follow me on facebook (I’m here on there). Facebook sucks in oh so many ways, but I’ll probably be updating my status there more frequently over the next little while. And I’m insecure enough to friend pretty much anyone who asks. Or you could just keep talking in the Comments. I also understand there are a couple of facebook fan pages out there, although they might be pretty moribund. There are options, is what I’m saying. We will make it through this. I promise.

But even now, in these dark and desperate times when even the briefest contact is to be treasured and held like a ragged-eared cat with a half’n'half addiction, one rule remains sacrosanct:

Anyone who even suggests Twitter gets thrown off the train. We won’t even bother to slow down first.

————

¹And no, in case anyone’s wondering: this did not come out of the Squidgate Fund.

Dear Neville,

I hope our Lord is keeping you safe in these most trying of times. I have tried to contact you through more conventional means but the network has been down for some time in Manhattan and now my batteries have died. I have resorted to the old-fashioned methods our ancient brethren used, in the days before the technophiles and idolators seduced us with their global networks and their internet pornography (although I must admit that I find myself missing the satellite feed and Prayer Line that funds our ministry. Praise the Lord, who turns the Devil’s own tools to such righteous ends!).

Our Mission here in Manhattan continues to make good progress, although perhaps more slowly than I would have hoped. New York was full of wickedness even before the End Days began, which is of course why Satan chose it as his first stronghold (though I admit I would have expected him to start with Los Angeles or Fergus). Communists and sodomites are almost as thick upon the ground here as demons, and while recent events have caused many of the locals to repent, others even now resist our attempts to lead them to salvation (none so blind as those who will not see, as our Lord said). Those damnable Anglicans, sensing an opportunity to spread their particular brand of liberalism, have also set up shop on the other side of the borough; many survivors encounter them first, and desperate for even the appearance of redemption, are fooled by their use of Christian props. I hear that even the ragheads have regrouped at a mosque over in Hamilton Heights! Fortunately they are wasting their time by launching jihad against Satan’s armies instead of converting souls (they know the easier enemy to beat, ha ha!), and we have had no direct encounters with them so far.

Our greatest enemy, of course, is Satan Himself. You may have heard mention of “The Rapture” on the mainstream feeds; do not be fooled. It is anything but. I have seen these so-called “Raptured” with my own eyes. They are infested, brother. They seek the light, but it is not the light of our Lord (you may remember that “Lucifer” means “bringer of light”). Some kind of demonic fungus grows in their eyes, in their mouths, in their open wounds. It steals away their souls. They are already saved, they say. They have already found redemption. And they are gripped by some evil wanderlust that draws them to wherever Satan’s spawn gathers in the greatest numbers.

And there is something else, Neville, something new. You have heard of the pingers and the grunts and the other abominations that stalk these streets, preying on sinners and saved alike. I have seen them with my own eyes; they are half flesh and half machine and not remotely human. But just today I saw something that looked and moved like a man, yet was as depraved as any demon. I saw a ghoul, feeding on the flesh of the dead.

It was the color of stone, or clay. For a few moments I thought it might be one of those golems the Jews go on about — as you know the Jews figure prominently in Revelation, even though they have spurned Christ — but it had metal seams and joints, and a head like a great stone. And its body, Neville, it had such muscles, they shone and rippled and flexed with every movement. I swear, were it not the color of slate it might almost have been you standing there, in the shower at the seminary after practise. But it acted nothing like you, Neville. It was crouched over a pile of corpses and it fed on them through some kind of appendage, some kind of thick nozzle or needle. I did not get close enough to see the details, but those penetrated bodies — they shrivelled up as I watched. This monster sucked them dry and left nothing but husks of skin draped over bone.

I was transfixed. And before I could recover my wits, this thing turned and looked straight at me. Its face— the air was full of smoke and there was maybe half a city block between us, but I could see that it had red eyes, or maybe just a single great eye. It stood up, still facing me; it must have been nine or ten feet tall. It took a step towards me. I held up my Bible, Neville, I was terrified but I had faith in Our Lord, I held up the Bible to this abomination and it stopped! It just stood there for a moment, watching me, and then—

And then it laughed.

It had the strangest laugh, Neville. It didn’t sound anything like a real voice, it sounded like some kind of primitive machine from the last century: Ho … ho … ho ...

And it began to move again, towards me.

I confess my faith failed me then. I turned and fled. I must have run for blocks, and when I finally stopped and looked behind me it was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps it was a golem after all. Perhaps it was the Beast Himself that I saw, feasting on fallen souls. I do not know. But it had the shape of a man and the aspect of the Enemy; and while I’ve seen the Devil’s other soldiers wreak much greater destruction, there was something especially intimate about the evil this thing wrought in the streets of this accursed place. Don’t ask me how I know, but I feel in my soul that this ghoul was the most wicked, the most evil of all the Satanic forces I have seen here. I pray I never encounter its like again.

But enough darkness! There is so much comfort to be had even in the face of these abominations — for they prove, once and for all, that we were right and the liberal atheists were wrong. The Devil’s minions are everywhere, just as the Scriptures foretold. It is truly a joyous time (perhaps not for the abortionists and the unbelievers — who’s laughing now, Dr. Myers? ha ha!) The coming of our Lord is at hand.

One of Blackstaff’s Christian soldiers has promised to scan this letter to you as soon as he is able. God bless Blackstaff; they are truly doing the Lord’s work. Perhaps once they vanquish the Devil’s Armies they can do something about the homosexuals, ha ha!

Be well, and rejoice. If I do not see you at the convention next month, I’ve no doubt we will meet again in the presence of Our Lord.

Yours in Christ,
Franklin

This whole writing retreat thing is stranger than I remember it. This is the approach to my bedroom.  My bedroom door is the pale green thing with the poster taped across it:

For those of you with teensy monitors, here’s a closeup of the sign outside said approach:

Yes, you read that right.  My bedroom is inside the Gibraltar Point Women’s washroom.

Lest you think (quite reasonably) that I’m bullshitting you with a nondescript picture of a nondescript door, here is a picture looking back out through the women’s washroom from inside my bedroom:

It gets weirder.  The bank of industrial flourescent lights on the ceiling over my bed is hooked into the washroom circuit, and at least one female artist in this establishment has a weak bladder.  At 2a.m. this past morning, all the lights in my room went on without warning.  (Actually, there may have been warning, but being sound asleep prior to that point I could have  missed it.)

The local women artists also seem to be early risers.  Starting at 5:30 this morning, my lights started  turning on and off at 15-minute intervals, just enough time to let me drift back to sleep before reawakened by broad-spectrum white light and the sound of fecal pellets dropping into toilet bowls.   By 6:45 I’d discovered that the switch in my room also controlled the lights in the women’s washroom.  I had about 15 minutes to savor the experience of waiting until these thoughtless XXs were firmly planted over their toilets and killing their lights before I had to head off on the morning run.

I can only assume that one of the people currenting residing at the GP Arts Center is working on a postgraduate degree in psychology.

————

Title credit Dave “I Made Up The 900 Years Thing” Nickle

I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about Polaris. Formerly “Toronto Trek”, one of the huger local cons, it changed its name a few years back and started featuring sf novelists in an attempt to expand into the literary end of the sf pool. Their media roots have always remained front and center, though. When I appear it’s always as one of their token literary types, and none of my panels tend to focus on written sf; offhand I don’t think any of this year’s panels did.

If there’s a criticism here, it’s only that Polaris shouldn’t try to be something it’s not. There’s nothing wrong with cons that cater to fans of Doctor Who and Stargate — movies and television, after all, have far broader appeal than does science fiction in its written form. Of course, the larger your audience, the more difficult it gets to avoid offending all of them. The more people in attendance, the greater the odds that some will collapse into apoplectic hysteria the moment Janet Jackson’s nipple makes an unscheduled split-second appearance on national television.

I had my own personal nipple moment at Polaris this past weekend, delivered unto me by a woman who — well, some of you may remember a distant post in which I modestly proposed that the parents of young children should not be allowed to vote, on the grounds that parenthood causes a form of mild retardation. This woman exemplified that argument so powerfully that I’m now almost willing to take it seriously.

It began at “Avatar: the Theory of Pandora”, a productive hour of freewheeling bullshit, retconning, and evolutionary brainstorming between myself, Karl Schroeder, and a supporting cast of dozens. At some point I — as is my wont — used the word “fucking” as an adjective.

Exhibit A sat in the front row, two sprogs in tow (one 5-10, one possible preteen — my expertise in the age-determination of human larvae is not all it could be). She took strong exception: “Could we keep this PG? There are children in the audience, and if I hear that again I’m out of here.”

I explained  that the word “fuck” has a 900-year history, throughout most of which it was considered completely inoffensive. “It only became offensive 100-200 years ago, when a bunch of bible-thumping prudes who couldn’t get laid decided to stigmatize anything with an orifice.” Sadly, this cut no ice: “Well, I find it offensive.”

Ceiling Cat help me, I actually reined in my language for a bit there. Forced my tongue to articulate “ass-kicker” when it wanted to say “motherfucker”, that kind of thing. And those of you who’ve been making comments in past postings will be pleased to note that we covered a lot of ground: Pandora as an engineered construct, the obvious retcon represented by the prolemurs glimpsed briefly in the movie, Cameron’s famous admission that the Na’vi  “had to have tits”. Karl and I and our supporting cast covered it all, and inevitably found ourselves dealing with the anomalous fact that the Na’vi are biped tetrapods when everything else on the planet is hexapodal. Ms. Virgin-Ears 2010 piped up that “Earth people can’t breathe the air on Pandora, so maybe there’s something magical in the atmosphere that makes the Na’vi look like us.”

I realized at this point that the loss of this woman’s voice would not significantly diminish the quality of the conversation. I don’t know if that had a significant impact on the degree of my self-censorship; I can only say that shortly after the dawning of this insight, my tongue felt the urge to form the phrase “shit-kicked”, and my brain did not override. True to her word, the woman in the front row gathered up her sprogs and left the room, and something in me heaved a small sigh of relief. I didn’t even wonder too much when three or four different con officials dropped in at various points throughout the rest of the panel, only to hover briefly at the back of the room and drift out again. The remainder of the hour went smoothly — so smoothly that, when Karl wound up the session by remarking that he would rather see design than natural selection in the biology of Pandora, I felt no hesitation in responding “What are you, a creationist?” And then, a moment later: “Actually, since the front row seems to have bailed: What are you, a fucking creationist?”

It got a big laugh.

We packed up. Someone wanted me to sign a book. I told him he’d have to wait until I found a urinal, which I did; the men’s washroom was down at the end of a long white deserted hallway. And when I emerged a minute later, four red shirts were standing in the hall to block passage.

Four.

We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Watts. Someone has lodged a formal complaint about your language during the panel.

My unspoken reaction was WTF? My spoken one, I think, was “Tough shit.” Or maybe just “tough.” Either way, it didn’t seem to soothe the redshirt who’d called me out, since she added that I’d also been charged with being inebriated while on the panel.

“Do I seem inebriated to you?” I asked. “Am I slurring my words, having any trouble expressing coherent thoughts?”

She told me she wasn’t buying that because — I shit you not — writers are well-known for being able to speak coherently while drunk. Which was such a delightful self-contradiction I knew then and there I was going to really enjoy the rest of the conversation.

I trotted out the usual arguments. There are people who find gay marriage offensive. There are those who are offended by the concept of evolution. Will we be taking their hurt feelings seriously as well?

Well, no, of course not, but the issue is there were children in the room.

So a parent drags her sprog out into the big bad world and the world is now obligated to accommodate her particular standards of morality? Because yes, you have every right to remove yourself from settings you find offensive; but having done so, the issue is resolved. Lodging a formal complaint is tantamount to stating that you get to order the rest of the world how to behave, that your personal outrage is legitimate grounds for censure; and really, in a free society¹, is there an inalienable right to never be offended?

Well, we do advertise ourselves as a PG con, one of the redshirts replied, at which point another — name of Declan, I know him slightly, seems nice — pointed out that swearing is actually quite common in PG movies.

By now it was pretty evident that these people did not want to be here. They’d all checked out my panel performance in the wake of the complaint, after all, and seen nothing of concern; I hadn’t been spewing alcoholic vomit into the front row or insulting the audience. I obviously wasn’t anywhere close to inebriation. One of them even described my thumbnail history of the word “fuck” as “awesome”. But a complaint had been lodged, and they were obligated to interview me because there are two sides to every story (“No,” I protested, “there aren’t two sides, she’s completely right! I did use vulgar language! And I will fucking well continue to use it, not because I’m trying to offend but because that’s just the way I happen to talk…”). I volunteered to withdraw from the rest of the con if they had a problem with this, no hard feelings whatsoever, an option they unanimously rejected. As far as they were concerned, nothing had happened. The complaint was without merit. We shook hands. Declan even invited me to the after-con party on Sunday night, which I would have attended if not for a previous engagement. Everything’s cool.

I did, however, notice a shiny new sign outside the room when I showed up for my Sunday panel: CAUTION: ADULT LANGUAGE. Which, yes, I really should have grabbed and had framed.

Oh, and that guy who wanted me to sign his book? He waited for me, book in hand: the alternate-history anthology ReVisions, edited by Julie Czerneda. And the story I wrote for that antho, the one I belatedly scribbled my signature across? “A Word for Heathens.”

Which pretty much sums it up, leaving only the obligatory wail of anger and impotent frustration:

Connnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!

P.S. You won’t be hearing from me much the rest of the week. Maybe a comment or two, but probably no other posts unless I feel inspired to upload pictures of the local cats. I’m out at the annual island writing retreat; gotta read about twenty-five thousand words of other people’s writing every damn day, plus write two thousand words of my own.

Pray for me.

————

¹Of course, the assumption that our society is free becomes more suspect with each passing day.

I go running in the Don Valley.  And something did kind of sting my face the other day, as I brushed past a low-hanging branch.  Felt like a nettle.  A two-meter-high nettle…

I thought Genesis was just ripping off Wyndham’s Triffids.   I thought it was just standard seventies prog-rock science fiction…

(Yes, this is a cover.  A recent one.  Early-seventies production values just don’t hold up on Youtube…)

If you’ve noticed the new “Coming Attractions” element on the sidebar (which only renders properly if you insert its code into the middle of the calendar elements, for some reason — some day I really gotta figure out this php stuff from scratch instead of just poking it to see what happens), you may have noticed that I’ll be appearing as one of the token literary types at Polaris this weekend.  I’m not doing a whole lot there — Polaris is aimed more at fans of the visual than the verbal — but I am up for a few panels and a reading.  To wit:

• Silicon vs. Meat: (Sat. 1pm) It’s a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred battle between biological and artificial intelligence — which will prevail, and why? Panelists: Robert J. Sawyer, Peter Watts, David G. Stephenson.
• Avatar: The Theory of Pandora: (Sat. 5pm) From floating mountain vista, to flora composing a planet wide neural network. What are the scientific truths, and theories behind this? What would lead a planet to evolve an ecosystem of neurologically interlinking flora and fauna? What would make mountains fly? What could Unobtanium be, and what uses does it have?  Panelists: Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder
• Bigger Guns Or Better Stories? (Sun. 3pm) Video games are becoming more about the story and less about the action. Richard Morgan is writing Crysis 2, and Peter Watts has been cited as an influence on Bioshock 2. What potential do video games have as a delivery platform for legitimate storytelling, as opposed to the shoot-everything-that-moves aesthetic that has historically dominated the field? Can video games be literature? Should they be? Panelists: Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder, Robert Herrera, Cliff Goldstein, Elizabeth Hirst.
• Reading (Sun 5pm — actually it was slotted at 5:30pm, the last session of the whole con— but I noticed that the 5pm slot was empty so they agreed to move me up a half hour).  I was originally tempted to read an excerpt from “The Island” here as a bit of promo leading up to Worldcon, but since that story’s already crapped out on two of its three noms I figured, fuck it.  No point.  Besides, I’ve got a brand new story that’s scheduled to appear in Jon Strahan’s Engineering Infinity, never before read aloud to human ears (although your lips may have moved when you read the first-draft excerpt here).   And it takes almost exactly thirty minutes to read from end to end.  Normally you don’t want to go over 20, 25 minutes in a half-hour slot, but it’s not as though there’s going to be anyone using the room afterwards.  Hell, if anyone cares enough about “Malak” to show up that late on a Sunday, they probably won’t mind hanging out for a extra five minutes to hear how it ends.

So, those are my panel obligations.  The rest of the time I’ll be on the road or in the bar.

Well, I warned you all. A shower of oxytocin, to fill all you bickering hordes with trust and mutual love.

Except, wouldn’t you know it, it’s never quite that simple.

You may remember oxytocin by one of its cutesy pseudonyms (“the cuddle hormone”, “the morality molecule”) if not by its technical handle. It’s the hormone that subverts the usual mammalian propensity for fucking around and turns meadow voles into lifetime monogamous pair-bonders. It’s the neurotransmitter that increases feelings of trust between individuals. (Vassopressin, oxytocin’s kissing cousin, made a brief appearance in Blindsight, when Siri Keeton’s dad snorted a noseful of the stuff to help him remain faithful to a wife whose own charms were not quite up to the task.) According to an interview with one Carsten De Drew it’s even been put forth as a tactic for calming violent crowds: just spray everyone with a mist of the ol’ cuddle compound, and watch the mob dissolve into a puddle of Woodstockian bliss.

There’s just one problem with this. According a recent Science paper by De Drew et al, oxytocin also makes you hate.

Context matters, of course. Oxytocin does make you feel more protective and altruistic towards kin and kind: friends, relatives, the so-called “in group” we all develop over time. But De Drew et al have now shown that it also increases your hostility towards to outgroups: the guys from the other tribe or the other school, at least when you’re worried about the security of your own group. The phrase they use to sum up oxytocin’s impact is “tend and defend”.  It makes you love your neighbour all the more, sure — but if there’s the slightest chance some stranger might pose a threat, oxytocin urges you to bash his skull in before that threat materialises.

What’s especially interesting about all this, though, is the ease with which these responses are provoked. There were no Thunderdomes in this study. Nobody was threatened with physical harm, no competing groups of blood relatives were pitted against each other. Payoffs and conflicts were over trivial amounts of money. The participants in these interactions never even met face to face; everything was mediated via computer. People were arbitrarily assigned to groups without knowing anything about their fellows beyond the fact that they were in the same group. They were then run through a series of Prisoner’s Dilemma variants.

And even under these arbitrary, artificial conditions, oxytocin increased loyalty to the unseen members of the in-group — and increased defensive hatred towards out-groups. It didn’t take kinship, or bonding, or any real threat to one’s well-being. It didn’t even take the presence of “outsider” cues like skin color or eyelid shape.

All it took was the chemical.

And really, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? It always comes down to the chemical. All those other cues — the jingoistic appeals to flapping bits of colored cloth, the fact that the other guy looks different from you, the big-eyed awww-boosters of cats and babies and seal pups — all of those things are just cues, triggers that release the neurochemical hounds. You don’t actually need any of that stuff when you’re snorting the Big O directly into your sinuses.

Cause and effect is what we are. One set of chemicals reacting to another.

The study has its limits, of course; we are strongly multivariate bags of chemicals, after all. The P-values of some of these results weighed in at <0.001 (i.e., the odds were less than one in a thousand that random chance would produce the same results), but others hovered between 0.01 and 0.05 — still statistically significant, although some folks aren’t happy with anything above 0.01. Also the study looked only at men, on the grounds that human males are more naturally aggressive and would therefore manifest the strongest results. I dunno about that. The paper has nine authors; surely at least one of them got out enough to encounter a few of the many gloriously-aggressive women in our midst? At the very least, if you put some guy who joined the service because he rocks at Castle Wolfenstein up against a woman of the same age defending her cubs, I know who my money’s gonna be on.

Which might actually be a next logical step in the program. Isolate the neurochemical factors that come into play when a mother sees her children being threatened; synthesise them; dose every female soldier with an aerosol of the stuff before you send her into the field. If any of the boys complain about women in the military after that, it’ll only be because they keep getting their asses kicked on performance reviews.

Either that, or because they’re scared shitless.

A dispatch from a place we haven’t quite got to yet:

A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a
fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave
their lives in defense of glassy spires and luxury enclaves—
defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the
sheer weight of flesh against their muzzles. The weapons died of
exhaustion, disappeared beneath a tide of live bodies scrambling
over dead ones. The crowd breached the gates as he watched,
screaming in triumph. Thirty thousand voices in superposition: a
keening sea, its collective voice somehow devoid of any humanity.
It sounded almost mechanical. It sounded like the wind.

(The above photo is copped from an album of “Democramotivational” posters by Russell Barth.  They really are worth checking out.)

Today’s post’s going to be light on the links; I’m in a hurry, and there’s no real need. Pretty much every allegation I cite here is easily available online from multiple sources. Start with the local newspapers — The Toronto Star, the Globe & Mail, even the staunchly lawnorder National Post seems to have smelled the rot in the air — and move out from there to the twitter feeds and the myriad Youtube videos putting our fair city on such flattering display.

A whole week later, and most of the world seems to have moved on. We’re frogs, after all; take the stimulus out of our immediate perceptual sphere and we’ll forget it ever existed. But suppose we were mammals? Suppose we were capable of adding two and two, of learning from experience. What take-home messages would we have distilled from the G20 festivities?

For one thing, we might conclude that the best way to avoid an altercation with the police would be to start smashing windows and trashing cars; Yonge Street was rampant with random acts of vandalism last Saturday, and a myriad cops just stood around watching. On the other hand, if you were looking for a truncheon across the spine your best strategy might be to sit down in the street and start singing “Oh Canada”; our brave Boys in Blue didn’t seem to have any trouble at all rushing those troublemakers from behind. Other strategies included penning in peaceful protesters with rows of shield-whacking riot cops, ordering them to disperse, and then refusing to let them leave (one of these incidents happened about two blocks from where I live); refusing to recognize the press credentials of the journalists you arrested on, well, no charge anyone admits to now; or just beating on random bystanders for no good reason.

They tried to put a couple of kinds of topspin on the aftermath. At first they took the line that “property can be replaced but lives can’t”, so their strategy was to simply let the protestors “wear themselves out” against the storefront windows (and presumably against those abandoned police cars set alight, curiously bereft — one might even say stripped-down — of the computer hardware that normally festoons the dashboards of such vehicles). When that didn’t jibe especially well with the proliferating footage of unarmed civilians getting the ol’ snatch-and-grab or a boot to the head, they told us that evildoing anarchists had doffed their black costumes and were blending in with the regular folks; what choice did the police have but to attack folks who looked regular, just to be on the safe side?

A cynic might suspect that the truth was a whole lot simpler: behind the truncheons and the tear gas and the riot helmets, these assholes are just cowardly chickenshits who didn’t want to risk going up against someone armed with so much as a brick pried from the street. Why, those fuckers might actually fight back when attacked. Going after unarmed protestors sitting on the pavement is so much safer.

Police Chief Bill Blair didn’t just admit to lying about sweeping and draconian laws that never actually existed; he bragged about it, with a smirk on his face. Countless citizens — demonstrators, journalists, joggers, grocery shoppers for fuck’s sake — were told that they would be arrested if they didn’t submit to searches on the street, if they didn’t hand over their papers on demand. Most submitted; and many were arrested anyway, on whatever flimsy pretext the badges could sift from their illegal searches. If you happened to have a pen-knife keychain in your pocket you were guilty of possessing a “weapon of opportunity”. If you happened to have a filtermask in your backpack — you know, those disposable things painters and pest control folks wear to protect their respiratory tracts from fumes and smog and solvents — you were attempting to “disguise” yourself. (One woman arrested on that pretext had a filtermask because she was an artist — who did freelance work for the Toronto PD.) I’m given to understand that one dude was hassled because he was coming back from a soccer game carrying a vuvuzela¹; it could have been used, he was told, as a “call to violence”. (Of course, he was told this before he identified himself as a crown attorney. For some reason he was not among the nine hundred ultimately arrested.²)

The take-home message from these reports and images might be: if we didn’t want to mow those armed and helmeted stormtroopers down before, we sure as shit do now. When the people charged with upholding the law lie to the citizenry about what that law even is; when they give “lawful commands” to disperse and then prevent anyone from dispersing; when they detain, search, arrest, and attack jes’-plain-folks for no better reason than that the Cylons look like us now — maybe we’ve passed the point at which we should be letting these thugs and bullies stomp all over us. Maybe we should start stomping back.

It’s an easy reaction to have, given the evidence of our own eyes, the smug admissions of the authorities themselves. It’s hard not to feel the blood boil. The problem with fighting back, of course, was articulated very eloquently by a dude posting under the name AngusM following my rant about the BP spill: every act of violence on the part of us little people can be used to justify “increased repression in the name of ’security’. The attackers can be painted as ‘extremists’ and ‘fanatics’, while the state presents itself as the guardian of ‘peace’ and ’stability’. Terrorist attacks strengthen rather than weaken despots.”

I don’t think there’s any denying the truth of AngusM’s argument. It bears pointing out, though, that it really isn’t an argument against the use of violence at all. It is an argument for violence — or rather, an argument that highlights the unparalleled effectiveness of violence as a means of getting your own way. When the state cracks down, after all, it doesn’t do it with daisies and fluffy kittens; it cracks down with guns and gas and snipers. The problem is not that violence doesn’t work; it’s that it works too damn well, and the other side has cornered the market. No matter how many guns any individual might stockpile, next to the state we are as naked as newborns.

But if violence plays into the hands of the repressors, nonviolence does exactly the same thing. I don’t think we have in this country any realistic possibility of bringing about real change by working within the political process, simply because it’s impossible to mount a political campaign without corporate sponsorship. You can’t get elected without getting your message out; you can’t get your message out without backing from wealthy benefactors; potential benefactors got wealthy in the first place because the status quo works just fine for them, thank you very much, and they’re not about to throw their support behind any candidate who’s likely to force them to clean up the messes they make³. In fact, they will do everything within their power to ensure that such candidates never rise to power. Hell, look at Obama down in the US; potentially the most radically innovative president in generations, and in terms of his performance on matters of civil rights and governmental transparency you’d be hard-pressed to tell him from Dubya.

Bureaucratic and political organisms are like any other kind; they exist primarily to perpetuate themselves at the expense of other systems. You cannot convince such an organism to act against its own short-term interests. So we seem to have a situation in which working for change within the system is futile; rising up against the system (even non-violently) provokes greater repression from the state; and protest itself is only permitted if it is ineffectual and if (in the case of the recent summits) none of the targets of discontent are ever even line-of-sight to the discontented.

It’s not really news, but we seem to be living in a soft dictatorship. The only choices we’re allowed to make are those which make no real difference.

But there is one possibility that might give some cause for hope; the chance that deep down, as strange as it may seem, they are more afraid of us than we are of them. The chance that ironically, it might have been that very fear that made them rub the G20 in our  faces, even when other sites would have so much less disruptive. The chance that disruption of the little people was, to some extent, the whole point of the exercise.

They didn’t just have to show us who was boss, you see. They had to convince themselves.

For once, this isn’t an offering from my own fevered paranoid little brain. I’m cadging it from a dude called Geoff Dow (aka Edifice Rex). His intriguing conclusion about the choice of locale for the G20 summit is that, consciously or unconsciously — but nonetheless, deliberately — it was “designed not so much to cow the nation’s citizens … but to comfort our so-called leaders”.

His reasoning makes a scary kind of sense. Surely by now, the world’s leaders have seen the portents: the collapsing infrastructure, the financial meltdowns, the countless environmental disasters which — absurdly and against all their cherished beliefs — are actually wreaking economic havoc already, long before they’re safely dead and the next generation is left to foot the bill. If their conscious minds haven’t yet acknowledged the smell of rising sewage, their brain stems at least must be serving up some diffuse sense of dread as they lie in the dark each night between their zillion-thread sheets, something they can’t quite put their finger on. On some level, consciously or not, they know that something is seriously wrong here, and — consciously or not — they’re scared shitless.

Dow again:

… Stephen Harper deliberately “made a bloody mess” of downtown Toronto not only because he could, but because doing so made him feel strong; exercising the power to order 19,000 armed men and women is a form of magical thinking which he “and his buddies” feel will translate into the power to order about the economy and the weather.

Consciously or not, Toronto was turned into an armed camp, because our ‘leaders’ foresee a time when brute force will be all they have to hold on to the reigns of their illusory power.

I don’t know if I’m convinced by this. It credits the G20 leaders (or at least their brain stems) with a degree of insight I’m not sure is especially common amongst that crowd. But it’s a plausible model at least, given the data; maybe these people really did built the Bastille in downtown Toronto last week.

Maybe what we witnessed was — on some subconscious level, at least — a dress rehearsal for the Revolution.

———————

¹An offence deserving of incarceration, granted.

²Neither were any members of the so-called Black Bloc, as far as I’ve heard. But by now, who’s counting?

³To be honest, the majority of the population is also unlikely to vote for a candidate who tells them to stop living beyond their means, grow the fuck up, and rein in their standard of living to something a bit more sustainable.

They could have held the whole damn G20 summit in Huntsville, like the G8 immediately before it; the infrastructure was already in place, after all. But they didn’t. They decided to stick it in the heart of downtown Toronto, and then build an indoor wading pool with fake plastic trees and wall-sized pictures of the Muskokas so that visiting dignitaries and journalists could get a feel for Canada’s Great Outdoors.

Or, if they had to do in Toronto, they could have used the brand new facilities at Exhibition place. Right on the lake, state of the art, much easier for security. Designed explicitly for just this kind of thing. But no: too unobtrusive.

Instead, they’ve walled off a huge section of the downtown. Nobody gets in or out without ID and security screening. Trains and streetcar routes have been chopped in half like worms. UK-level camera networks have been installed throughout the core, and the fuckers aren’t even bothering to pretend that those will be coming down when the festivities are over; we’ve jumped into a whole new surveillance-state bracket over the course of a single extended photo-op. Half the city (including the Ministry of the Attorney General) has been told to just stay home for the rest of the week. Bay Street execs have been warned not to wear suits and ties to work: such attire constitutes “posing as a dignitary”, you see, makes you suspicious by virtue of the fact that you’re dressing to blend in with all those world-class entourages deep in the Forbidden Zone. (Of course, if you don’t wear a suit and tie in the heart of TO’s business section you look like a protester, and I don’t have to tell you what’s in store for those poor bastards.) [Update: haven't been able to confirm this; all official sources say the warning is meant to protect Bay Street types from being targetted by protesters, not badges.]

A lot of the local journos have been outfitted with gas masks and body armour, courtesy of their employers. None of them expect to be shot or gassed by protestors; the Fourth Estate is protecting its own against the gentle protections of local law enforcement, who have been out in force for some time now. The core is infested, the police are literally moving in packs; we encountered two separate gangs of them just walking home the few blocks from dinner last night. Tourists caught taking snapshots of the Great Wall are forced to delete their files or be arrested. The sound of helicopters outside my building has been incessant and deafening; I barely noticed the earthquake this afternoon.

Way back on Monday night I was coming home from dinner with a fellow whose acquaintance I recently made via Squidgate; he’s in town running satellite feeds for the network coverage. (Some of you may know him as uplinktruck; interesting guy, good dinnertime companion, and one of those folks you want to keep around to remind yourself that not everyone thinks the way you do. I hope we get to do it again.) I live blocks away from the Forbidden Zone, and at the time it was almost a week before the summit actually started; but this is what I encountered parked across the street from my apartment:

I took out my camera. At which point I was immediately accosted by these two gentlemen:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking a picture.” I even smiled.  And kept smiling.

“You’re taking a picture of these vehicles.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you taking pictures of these vehicles?”

“I live here. It’s unusual to come home and find four paddy-wagons parked outside your bedroom window. I take it this is for the summit.”

Nod.

“Say, can I take your picture?”

“No.”

“How about yours, then?”

“No.”

“Then I guess we’re done here.”

And we were, too. Except for the picture I took from the laundry-room balcony on the fourth floor, once I was safely home (I’ve arrowed the vantage point on the pic above). Night setting, no flash, digital zoom, taken by someone who doesn’t know Aperture Science from an F-Stop, and it still turned out pretty well; you gotta love the Canon Powershot.

This nasty, belligerent thing my city is turning into? This place where wearing a suit has suddenly become a suspicious act, and unsmiling dead-eyed orcs emerge from the darkness to try and intimidate you for the act of taking a snapshot on a public street?

That, you don’t gotta love so much.