Neil Gaiman allegations

Lila Shapiro’s 13 January 2025 article No Safe Word for New York Magazine’s Vulture is well-reported and convincingly demonstrates that Gaiman has been monstrously abusive: driven by ugly appetites, skillfully manipulative, brutally callous, lacking in self-awareness, and immensely destructive to people he encountered. It is impossible to imagine that the examples in the article do not reflect a larger pattern of his behavior. He denies those allegations and others, of course. I don’t believe him.

I recommend that people with sexual abuse triggers not read the article. It is detailed, explicit, and horrifying.

On 4 February 2025 one of Gaiman’s accusers filed a lawsuit against both Gaiman and his ex-wife Amanda Palmer alleging human trafficking, sexual assault, and rape, which he has formally denied. The court filing is available; the accuser’s lawyer offers a warning paralleling my own comment on the Vulture article.

Well, this was the most harrowing fucking thing I’ve ever had to work on, and I’m just the damn lawyer. Can’t imagine the client living it, and it’s a goddamn privilege to represent her.

Do not read this unless you can handle details of some truly vile sexual abuse by Neil Gaiman.

Maria Alexander has a chilling memoir of what seems to be a chilling near-miss with Gaiman, The Wolf In The Walls:

When asked which literary character he would like to be, he said Red Riding Hood’s wolf. He went on to say the wolf was “dangerously honest about what he wants: food, company, an appetite.” That, apparently, is who he is. Who Neil is.

On 2 February 2026 Gaiman promoted a lengthy series of posts: Technopathology | Neil Gaiman Is Innocent. At the time of this writing, I have only read the introduction, which makes it evident that Technopathology grounds their argument in the genuine problems with the Tortoise podcast, misrepresenting the whole of the case, and dismissing the much-better-reported Shapiro article as unsupported:

the actual acts which would make him guilty of these crimes appeared buried within the five hours of meandering podcast or Shapiro’s 11,000 word epic

The relationship with Gaiman’s fiction

It is worth considering his work in light of these revealations about his personal life. Gaiman’s fiction includes recurring motifs of dangerously untrustworthy caregivers to children, of lust for power, of the brutality of misogyny, of profoundly hypocritical disjoints between public and private life. There is a there there.

But. It is very easy to overdo this. Gaiman is not possessed of every possible vice; no one is. Folks claiming that reading his fiction had always shown them that there was Something Deeply Bad about him are saying something ugly in two ways:

• Seeing vindication of their taste in art as realiable in detecting the character of artists reflects a dangerous confidence. If one is smug about getting this one right, one can too easily end up carrying water for a predator whose work one enjoys.
• It implicitly blames people who drew joy and strength from Gaiman’s work and are currently heartbroken. That is both false and cruel.

Let’s not make those mistakes.

Tanith Lee

A post I have seen making the rounds claims that Gaiman’s long comics series The Sandman is nothing other than a copy of Tanith Lee’s Tales of the Flat Earth series. This compounds those problems in saying Well His Work Was Bad Anyway, by being a crock of shit on its merits.

Tanith Lee is a superb writer whom I have enjoyed for decades. I recommend her work to anyone seeking an alternative to Gaiman’s writing, or indeed anyone who enjoys fantasy, period. I have not read her Flat Earth work, but I am reliably informed by people who know well both it and The Sandman that this claim of plagiarism is nonsense.

It is obvious to me even in my ignorance of Flat Earth, from having read The Sandman and of many of the other works which influenced it. One cannot take it as lifted directly from any single work, since part of its charm is how it delivers a pastiche of multiple sources, rich in implicit and explicit references. William Shakespeare has a better claim of plagiarism than Lee does. Calling The Sandman nothing other than the stolen work of Tanith Lee is like claiming that George Lucas ripped off Dune to make Star Wars: A New Hope — sure, Dune was an unmistakable influence worth examining, but so was Kurosawa’s entire filmography, especially The Hidden Fortress … and countless flying ace stories … and Flash Gordon … and David Lean … and Jack Kirby … and and and and.

I am reliably informed that Gaiman has indeed praised Tanith Lee as a writer, and has named her among his countless influences, which is no surprise since one way that Gaiman built his false reputation as a stand-up guy was by frequently and enthusiastically bringing attention to lesser-known writers & artists, going out of his way to point toward people from marginalized groups.

We must not imply to someone informed enough to recognize that this particular critique of Gaiman as nonsense that therefore the allegations of Gaiman’s personal wrongdoing are also nonsense.

So what is it with Gaiman?

This is a guy who could have had plenty of lovers enthusiastically embracing him and calling him “Master” consensually. Why would he turn to coercion, abuse, and cruelty? He must have had an appetite for those things themselves. He is fucked up.

The Shapiro article implies, persuasively, that the horrors it describes emerged from a combination of childhood abuse Gaiman experienced, his increasing wealth & power, and the prevalence of woman vulnerable from their own early experiences of abuse. It seems that the cruelty of Gaiman’s Scientologist parents left him utterly broken inside, vigorously masking that, and believing that everyone is the same. It is hard not to see this animating the cocktail of horror and compassion in his work. Elizabeth Sandifer’s long reflection The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) suggests as much.

Gaiman has repeatedly drawn from his childhood in his fiction, however, and this paints a far darker picture. His earliest work to engage with it was Violent Cases, a 1987 graphic novel that begins with its narrator, drawn by Dave McKean to look like Gaiman, lighting a cigarette and looking straight out of the panel to declare, “I would not want you to think that I was a battered child,” a declaration that undermines itself remarkably. Indeed, Gaiman’s accounts of childhood are all ominous and haunted affairs, unreliably narrated from the perspective of his childhood self and filled with strange terrors that hover just on the edges of his awareness and understanding. He has intimated that these portrayals are based on his own childhood, but never really expanded on the implications of that. Ultimately, however, one needn’t have the gory details to draw conclusions. There is no plausible way that Gaiman, as the only son of the most prominent Scientologist in the UK, was not severely abused throughout his childhood for the simple reason that Scientology is one of the most comprehensively abusive organizations ever to exist, and David Gaiman devoted his life perpetuating that abuse.

Then he was cursed with wealth, fame, and adoring fans. No one can experience that without taking a blow to their sanity. Many people find a way to navigate that with grace, but it seems that Gaiman had no sanity to spare.

The Shapiro article suggests that Gaiman had a trajectory toward worse and worse behavior. In the 1990s I heard credible rumours about Gaiman having tawdry but consensual affairs with young fans. I am struck by a story from that era in which Gaiman does not sound anything like the predator of later years … but a young fan’s friends framed their warnings not to get drawn into an empty tryst with Gaiman as making her responsible for not “misreading” him. It is worrisome to imagine how that tendency of the community to protect him creates an opening for escalating bad behavior.

It also seems likely that Gaiman’s relationship with Amanda Palmer brought out the worst in both of them. I have long been fascinated by her as one of most transparent public examples of pathological narcissism. She has long been known for terrible behavior while believing she can do no wrong. She has offered creepy apologetics for rapists. It is easy to imagine the two in a mutually-reïnforcing pattern of making each other worse.

I see a lot of commentators registering Gaiman as a fella who uses feminist allyship and other good cultural politics as calculated misdirection. It is an unmistakable type, reflecting how cynical abusers always cultivate supporters who think, “Not that guy. He would never do such a thing.” But I believe there are also fellas whose good cultural politics are sincere rather than an act, while acting abusively anyway because their pathology rationalizes it away, which is even scarier than the cynical type. I take Gaiman as one of them. His cultural commitments run too deep for them to have been a long-game act to cover abusiveness.

There is a kind of horrified Buddha compassion in reading Gaiman this way. Had he never gotten famous, he might never have become so monstrous, and just been an ordinary callous shmuck who couldn’t do so much harm. This tragic reading does not excuse or forgive his behavior. He is accountable for his actions. And we need to face hard questions about having built a society which produces and enables people like him, because we know that he is far from the only one.

On the Tortoise reporting

On 27 January 2025, Rachel Johnson, publisher of the Tortoise podcast which broke the story in summer 2024, released a strange statement:

the blanket cancellation of Neil Gaiman was not my intention when I first heard Scarlett’s story, then the voices of four more females
[⋯]
Our intention with Master was to probe the greyest of grey areas — allegations of sexual abuse within an otherwise consensual relationship

That article’s question “golly, what is consent”, its feigned surprise & distaste at Gaiman being “cancelled”, and its use of the word “females” to describe women all reïnforce suspicion that Tortoise targeted Gaiman not in defense of people he abused but because of his support for trans liberation.

Johnson’s angle “golly, how do we think about sexual assault within an otherwise consenting relationship?” explains a couple of things which made me wary of their reporting, and demonstrates an important contrast with the New York / Vulture article.

• Tortoise reported an incident in which Gaiman gave a woman an unwanted kiss when both were in their 20s, then backed off when she told him she was not interested; such weak tea that it made me question their judgment about what constituted behavior meriting public reporting.
• Tortoise reported at length on a woman who did not pay rent on a cottage of Gaiman’s, instead exchanging sexual favors in a quid pro quo. That showed Gaiman as callous, skeevy, and manipulative, but was still far short of the cruel assaults and abuse in the Vulture article.
• Tortoise’s messy telling of the Bathtub Incident, the strongest demonstration of predatory behavior they had, cast it as so skeevy that it did merit public attention. In their telling Gaiman extravagently crossed the boundaries of someone in his employ. But it was categorically less damning than they more clear and full account of the same incident in the later Vulture article, which clearly described abuse and assault.

I had suspected that Tortoise were overstating the case in trying to indict Gaiman as predatory, adding weak examples in their zeal to offer as many cases as possible. But then why underplay of the Bathtub Incident?

I had it backward. The Tortoise series on Gaiman’s behavior blurred the facts, used reporting practices harmful to the women it quoted, and misrepresented Gaiman in his favor … all in service of working their “gray area of consent” angle, which is the opposite of how we should think about consent. I presume that this must plug in to some TERFy, transphobic pseudo-feminist nonsense about the impossibility of clear consent, casting The Patriarchy as coercing people into trans identity rather than trans people knowing and naming themselves.

Clemantine Danger has a reading of that:

Even if the allegations did describe sexual abuse in a consensual relationship (which they obviously did not, but TERFs as a group adore patriarchal hierarchy and do not understand consent) it would obviously still not be [a] grey area.

But I know what happened. TERFs hate BDSM and don’t understand those dynamics any more than they understand consent generally, because their worldview doesn’t allow for it.

The Vulture article does understand healthy BDSM dynamics and consequently was not waffling about any “grey areas”.

Man:
hand to my heart I thought we were having a consensual BDSM relationship

Every normal person in 2025 with an internet connection and 5 minutes of research:
lol

TERFs:
I see, wow, complex, how could the poor man have know, he was lied to if you think about it, consent is very tricky

Early post archive

For the record, I include below this my post as of the day before No Safe Word was published — in which I was diligently dawdling to judgment about the worst possiblities — altered only to add emphasis to the second paragraph:

---

TLDR

I have seen a lot of people call Gaiman a “rapist”. As of mid-September [2024], I consider that an irresponsible exaggeration given the limits of what we know. But, again, Not A Rapist clears only the lowest possible bar.

We have an unmistakable pattern of at least breathtaking entitlement and callousness, with a side order of manipulativeness. I’m uneasy with how hard this is to gague, but even the most generous reading of Gaiman I can imagine falls well into skeevy-as-heck Fuck That Guy territory. If Gaiman is worse than already apparent — predatory and cruel — the truth should out as more damning stories come out. I do not expect Worse to surface, but neither would I feel surprised.

Resource index

This invaluable collection of links from Some Kind Of Gay Boat Festival includes transcripts of the podcasts with the key reporting, other related reporting, smart commentaries, and much more.

My original post after the first reporting broke

I found a post with a very helpful review of the allegations against Neil Gaiman, smart about the messiness of the sourcing and what we can glean despite that.

To say Master was imperfectly executed is an understatement, but I’m grateful for it, both as a means of hopefully helping to ensure that Gaiman is held accountable for his behaviour, and for its willingness to explore the “gray area” of consent that so often impedes the police, courts, and other media outlets from helping survivors in any meaningful way.

I have not yet had the heart to listen to Master, the Tortoise podcast about Gaiman. Given what I have read, and how it evidently comes from the worst people, it seems plausible that it casts Gaiman as worse than he is. It also seems implausible that there is no there there.

Gaiman is far from the first frustrating example of allegations of sexual assault clouded by irresponsible reporting, social media shitstorm dynamics, and a weak vocabulary of Degrees Of Badness. We need to do better.

There have long been rumours about Gaiman’s liaisons with young fans. Skeevy, but short of predatory. The most generous-to-Gaiman reading of these new reports is much worse than that … and still not rape. Experience teaches us to hesitate to embrace a generous reading. If the worst is true, we can expect more survivors to come forward, which would be very clarifying. Part of Doing Better is letting things unfold as we sift those ambiguities … for a while.

I am a fan of Warren Ellis’ work. After a prudent hesitation to believe the worst I accepted that the worst was true. Fuck that guy. I am a fan of Gaiman’s work. The worst need not be true of Gaiman to get to Fuck That Guy; there is room for a lot of Bad which is short of As Bad As Warren Ellis. Part of Doing Better is taking seriously how Less Bad really can be less bad … and still very bad.

Gaiman’s accusers may have gotten played by the Tortoise podcast people, but they undoubtedly suffered from their encounter with Gaiman, and no doubt they are suffering from the pressures of coming forward. Part of Doing Better is giving them our wholehearted support, right away, before drawing firm conclusions about Gaiman.

My prudent hope — that Gaiman is not as bad as some have already concluded he is — wears thin, but it is worth letting more dust settle. Social media shitorms are destructive. There is plenty of time ahead to say Fuck That Guy, if it proves warranted. Part of Doing Better is combatting shitstorm dynamics, which I want this post to do.

I am sweating through this west coast heat wave, but it sure feels cold out there.

Particulars I find useful

The first two Tortoise accounts

From the summary at The Politics Of Dancing cited above:

Scarlett [⋯] [Gaiman’s then-wife] Amanda Palmer hired her as a live-in au pair/nanny [⋯] on Scarlett’s first day [⋯] Within a few hours of their meeting, Gaiman climbed into an outdoor bath that Scarlett had run for herself and according to Scarlett, anally penetrated her with his fingers without her consent. This was the beginning of a three-week sexual relationship between Scarlett, then 21, and Gaiman, then 61, in which Scarlett says:

• Gaiman entered her anally without consent or warning in their second sexual encounter, and used butter as a lubricant.
• on another occasion that he anally penetrated her, the pain was so intense she passed out. Scarlett described the pain as “celestial”.
• Gaiman repeatedly subjected her to degrading sexual acts [⋯]

According to Gaiman, Scarlett had agreed to share a bath on that first night, in which they merely “made out” and cuddled consensually. He says he never penetrated Scarlett with his penis and that within days of their meeting she “expressed an interest in mild BDSM.” He says their relationship was entirely consensual.

[⋯]

At the same time that she texted a friend the next day telling them about the bath with Gaiman and saying that he “crossed the boundaries”, Scarlett also texted Gaiman. She signed off her message, “Thank you for a lovely, lovely night. Wow. x”

when she was 20 and Gaiman was 45, K entered a romantic and sexual relationship with the author. K alleges that in one incident while on holiday in the UK, she pleaded with Gaiman not to penetrate her vagina as she had a painful UTI at the time. She says he ignored her and did it anyway, causing her agony.

Again, the details of their relationship are nightmarishly complicated for law enforcement and media lawyers. As with Scarlett, the assault happened in the context of a consensual relationship, and Gaiman and K continued to maintain a friendship up until 2022, at which point K says she “saw the relationship for what it was.”

Two more from Tortoise

I confess that these later reports do not bring the clarity I would like.

One is was a quid-pro-quo of sex in exchange for allowing a tenant renting a house from him to leave her rent unpaid when her circumstances changed and she could no longer afford it.

He can say it was consensual. But why would I do that? It was because I was scared of losing my place.

This is certainly repulsive behavior by a landlord, but I have a hard time counting it coercive for him to offer to give someone something in exchange for sex.

The other was an “aggressive unwanted pass” which included an unwelcome kiss when Gaiman was in his 20s. She says that Gaiman did back off after her firm refusal. Conceivably an honest mistake, though the woman coming forward to talk about it publicly is a very strong sign that it was not.

Claire

Another obscure podcast, Am I Broken, has an episode interviewing a woman under the name Claire, which has been transcribed, and summarized by Stephanie Kay on Bluesky thus:

She tried to reach out to journalists starting in 2019, but was told it wasn’t big enough, it didn’t indicate a pattern of behavior. But now …

Very similar to K’s story. She was a fan of his, met him at a book signing in 2012. Gaiman immediately kissed her, he drew her into his world and invited her places, VIP access, he appeared naked in Skype calls, unwanted phone sex and groping, culminating in traumatic experience on his tour bus.

She was 22, had a boyfriend, wasn’t interested in a sexual relationship. But she liked the connection to her favorite author and didn’t want to lose it. On the tour bus, he tried to pressure her into sex, on top of her, told her “I’m a very wealthy man and I’m used to getting what I want.”

And he told her to kiss him back like she meant it and like she would never see him again. She was scared. And when she didn’t sleep with him, contact died out. He blamed her for everything, said she’d started it all. Saying he normally keeps fans at arms length, that this had never happened before.

Again, the reporting is frustrating. The transcript has Claire saying:

I think he realized I wasn’t gonna let him have sex with me, without him… being… more aggressive, I guess? So, he kinda flopped off.

One can imagine a version of this which is traumatizingly bad consent practice while short of a consent violation. And one can equally easily imagine a version of this which is scary and sadistic.

Paul Caruana Galizia of Tortoise describes their podcast addressing Claire’s case:

On recorded calls, Neil Gaiman tells a woman he allegedly sexual assaulted that he “obviously fucked up”, offers her ^$60,000 for her therapy, and promises to make a “hefty donation” to a rape crisis centre.

He sent the money, but never donated.

Gaiman — whose account to us denied the woman’s allegations — also told her on the calls in July 2022 that:

1. He is “high-functioning autistic”, which explains why he gets “human relations” wrong. He had no comment to make on this when put to his lawyers.
2. He “normally keeps fans at arms length”. The woman met him as a 22-year-old fan in 2012. We have heard sexual assault allegations from former fans, dated between 2004-2007. No comment from him here either.
3. She made the first move on him because “I’d have never made the first move on anybody. I’d be terrified of that.” Even by his own account he made the first move on Scarlett (jumping into a bath with her in Feb 22) and on Julia Hobsbawm (sudden, unwanted kiss in 1986).
4. He admits the age gap of 30 years with this woman was inappropriate, saying: "The me of 10 years ago might have done. But the me of today has learnt a lot." Yet months before the calls, Gaiman had been with Scarlett, who was 40 years younger than him.

While Gaiman didn’t make a donation to the rape crisis centre, he did send this woman that ^$60,000 - the cost of her therapy over the preceding decade. Makes her the third woman he sent money to in the space of eight months. Two – Scarlett and Caroline Wallner – also got NDAs.

Since we began publishing our investigation into the allegations against Gaiman, on 3 July, he hasn’t made any public statements and has repeatedly declined requests for interviews or on-the-record statements. With the recordings, we now have him speaking in his own voice and he says he apologises and accepts responsibility for his alleged sexual misconduct in one woman's case.

Other grotesque affairs

Ulorin Vex on Bluesky offers a story:

I’ve been hesitant to comment because Neil is in my wider social circle and there are people very dear to me who are close to him and are being directly impacted by all of this but after weeks of lurking/getting mad at the victim-blamers I feel like I need to add my voice to support these women

Around 2010 my ex told me that Neil Gaiman had asked if he knew any young women he could send to “keep him company” while he was working alone in a remote part of Scotland. He stipulated that they be “interesting but not interesting enough to fall in love with”

That always stuck with me even though I didn’t acknowledge the creepiness of the entire request until much later. I’ve attached some screenshots (with permission) from a private conversation about this I had back in 2022. AA/A is my ex to clarify.

I’ve removed a LOT of the conversation to protect people who haven’t gone public but suffice to say there is a pattern of behavior dating back to at least the 90s.

SFF writer Lewis Shiner has a short Facebook post affirming what we have heard and saying there is more.

I am relieved that sexual predator and narcissist Neil Gaiman is finally being exposed. I have first-hand knowledge of lives that he’s damaged, and I hope more and more survivors of his abuse come forward.

Commentaries

A bracing word from @rabbit.in.your.garden:

Two public victims … so far. Previously, widely admired by fans & other writers. A nice guy. I unequivocally believe the victims. One victim was his child’s nanny. The other a fan he met at a signing. The nanny he claims suffered from a mental illness that creates false memories. Let’s talk about that.

He claims the 23 year old nanny, his employee hired to care for his child was actively suffering from a mental illness associated with false memories. First, this doesn’t sound like the person a responsible, loving parent hires to watch their child. Second, if she did suffer from this illness, she was therefore incapable of true consent.

I have to interject that this last point is slippery. It is plausible that her memory is not reliable but he did not realize it at the time. But fergawdsake, Gaiman …

She was also his live-in employee, 40 years younger which also creates a barrier to true consent.

NG, by his public statements, admits to a sexual relationship with a woman who by his statements could not truly consent. As an employee, did she really feel she could safely say no to this rich, powerful man who has entered her bathroom while she was bathing on her 1^st day of employment? The dynamic suggests she could not. Even if she could, she states he did things to her without consent, which is definitely assault. Coupled with his claims, that makes NG undeniably a man who commits sexual assault.

This is why women choose the bear. We know the bear is dangerous. We know how to act around the bear to reduce our risk of harm. This successful, married man was an unexpected danger. He should have been safe but he wasn’t.

Where’s Neil When You Need Him (to Be Accountable)? is a long rant with links to numerous resources from Mer, who played a significant part in the rigorous effort to document the pattern of sexual predation by Warren Ellis.

As terrifying as the Warren Ellis social justice work was… somehow this is more frightening to me.

[⋯]

Some of the people who’ve thus-far remained silent about Neil are former close friends of mine. Writers and artists I’ve long since gone no-contact with, or just about, over rape culture awfulness. For the most part, they’re still cherished humans. I wish them no harm.

I also can’t be arsed to give one jaunty queef that they’re all “Very Important People, you know.”

Very Important People who KNEW.

Jonathan Fortin:

Stray thoughts on the Neil Gaiman allegations:

• Admission of bias: he’s my favorite author, so I’m naturally heartbroken. Then again, all my other favorite creators have been cancelled, and it's an open secret that Gaiman sleeps with his much younger fans, so I kind of expected this. Pains me nonetheless.
• Worth nothing: Tortoise Media, the only source for this story, is a far right anti-LGBT podcast made by the sister of Boris Johnson (basically the Tr*mp of the UK, who Gaiman has been highly critical of). It’s also interesting that this debuted literally right before the UK elections. However, this doesn’t mean the women who came forward are lying.
• Indeed, according to the podcast, Gaiman even admitted to intimacy in situations that definitely weren’t appropriate (such as “making out” with his son’s 23-year-old nanny in the bath on the literal first day of her job). Even if it was consensual (and again, it might not have been), it’s still extremely sketchy. This is a famous multi-millionaire author in his 60’s engaging in sexual contact with his 23-year old employee. With or without consent, the power dynamic there is nothing to sneeze at.
• As someone who also once had a relationship with a public figure, I know first hand how intimidating that can be. It can be hard to say “no” and deny them what they want. The apologist in me wonders if maybe Gaiman wasn’t even aware of how these women actually felt, but it’s certainly also possible that he knew perfectly well.
• As a reminder: SA [sexual assault] survivors rarely gain anything from coming out. It’s very, very rare for people to make this shit up.
• Another reminder: SA can absolutely happen even in established relationships where there was consent before. You can text someone that you love them and consent to everything one day, and feel quite differently the next.
• It is worth noting that right wing outlets are eager to paint any BDSM or sexual deviancy as SA or abuse. It’s also worth noting that predators absolutely exist in the BDSM scene just like everywhere else.
• Claiming “she was suffering from a condition associated with false memories, even though her medical history does not support this” is really, really not a good look.
• If this is a pattern for Gaiman, other women will likely come forward. I will not be surprised if they do.

“AI”, students, and epistemic crisis

Weird interaction with a student this week. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is actually a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I’ll open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.

The thing that made me feel crazy is like, every kid that’s using this as a browser is getting new bespoke false “facts”. This isn’t “a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it’s taught in schools.” Each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine.

With the “widespread misconception about X” you can start at a baseline. Like, OK, in tenth grade we talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world. But with this, each child is getting unique wrong facts they are sure are correct … because they did what we told them to do! They “looked it up”! They got it from somewhere! It’s not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption … it’s something they think they learned.

This kid was extremely combative with me, and I understood why. I was sitting in front of him telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things … were wrong. And that I, one person, was right. He basically couldn’t believe me. He decided that I was simply a teacher who’d made a mistake. He could check it, after all! He could look it up! He could find the real facts. I obviously hadn’t done that, I was just an adult who’d decided I was smarter than him. Hence the defensiveness. Like I said: I understood.

It was so fucking rough. I did my best, but I am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. This kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors.

Transcribed from Twitter. The author took it down because of harassment, so I am not going to point to who they were. Not that I know anything about them anyway. So you have to make your own tricky call about whether and how it is relevant.

Another fashy pipeline

Al Sweigart observes:

I totally see how self-improvement cults can be a pipeline for fascism. Fascism is rooted in social dominance, which in turn is rooted in sadomasochism: sadism for the dominator, masochism for the dominated. A self-improvement cult can become a vehicle for inflicting pain on yourself, where the goal is eliminating weakness, where "weakness" is defined as self-care, empathy for others, and non-toxic forms of masculinity.

For those who don’t quite see it, here’s a (very) rough outline:

1. The conservative mindset is based on hierarchy. There’s always a bigger fish. (And “you” don’t have to be winning. It's enough to self-identify with the winning team.)
2. This view means you don’t measure by doing well, you measure by doing better than others. Better than “those people.”
3. This promotes zero sum thinking. Good things for “those people” must have come at a cost to you and your group. There are no win-win situations and compromise means losing.
4. Therefore, good things never just happen. No pain, no gain. Focus on your individual improvement; solidarity with other people for systemic change and collective benefit is liberal bullshit. They just want free stuff (from you.) If you are feeling pain, you must be achieving something in return. You must. That’s how the world works.
5. You learn to ignore your pain. In fact, pain is a good thing and to be expected. Self-flagellate to signal your virtue. The wages of sin is death. Softness and mercy are weakness. My dad smacked me around as a kid, and it made me the man I am today.
6. You learn to ignore other people’s pain. Practice disabling your empathy. Practice dehumanizing the other. Hey, if you think about it, they’d do the same to you.
7. Arbeit macht frei

(Yes, it’s more complicated than that. Yes, plenty of evil has been done in the name of “the greater good.” But there’s a reason there’s so much right-wing overlap between self-improvement gurus, Alex Jones selling brain pill supplements, MLMs / crypto ponzis promising “financial freedom”, Make America Great Again rhetoric, and plain ol’ racism and religious bigotry.)

Tapeheads

This is a school of magic for characters in Unknown Armies, “an occult game about broken people conspiring to fix the world”, which is my personal favorite tabletop roleplaying game. It is directly inspired by my favorite horror movie, Videodrome and also relevant to the micro-genre which includes Archive 81, The Ring, and the V/H/S series. I created it for a campaign set circa 1990.

Lemnismancy (documentarian)

a.k.a. Tapeheads, Cassette Cowboys, O'Blivions, Videographers

Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.

— Professor Brian O’Blivion

Lemnismancy is actually a cluster of practices with variants on charging / taboo / spells. The magical idea animating all lemnismancy is that for most people, what they see on television outcompetes reality itself. Videotape is a magical fetish which represents this TV experience which tapeheads can use for magic.

This particular strain of Lemnismancy — the Documentarian school — focuses on emotionally significant real human experiences, and primarily manipulates memory and attention. One charges by watching tapes of important events in real people’s lives, and breaks taboo if one sees broadcast television. 

Stats

Blast style

Lemnismancy has no freehand Blast, but one can make tapes which attack physically using specific spells, below.

Minor charge

Be the first Tapehead to spend twenty minutes watching a tape recording of a memorable event from someone’s life: something like a first date or a fierce argument or getting a raise or breaking their leg. 

The tape can be a copy, but the tapehead must be the first tapehead to pull a charge from any copy; once the event has been used for a charge, any tape of that event becomes useless for more charges. (In this it is a bit like Cliomancy.) A tape can contain more than one event, but watching each event only works once. If half a dozen or more people are all shown in the segment with the event, and the event is memorable for all of them, the segment is worth two charges.

Significant charge

Be the first tapehead to spend an hour watching a tape recording of a major event from someone’s life: getting married, graduating college, a gunfight, a serious car crash. 

The rules for copies, consuming charges, multiple events on a single tape, and double charges are the same as for minor charges.

Major charge

Be the first tapehead to spend thirty minutes watching a tape recording of a world event of enough significance that millions will be able to answer “where were you when you saw that?”: the JFK assasination, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin wall.

Taboo

Get a clear look at a TV screen showing current broadcast television. For a tapehead, the cathode ray tube is for showing tapes, not for showing “TV”. 

Random magic domain

Memories, attention, videotapes, and TV displays. 

Spells

Most spells take effect when people watch a TV playing a tape prepared by the tapehead, generally in a lair of recording & playback equipment. Such spell tapes can only be used once; the tape can only run for as long as the tape format permits (20 minutes for a small ¾" cassette, or up to six hours for a VHS cassette). It takes twice the runtime of the tape to make a spell tape. The tapehead rolls to see if the tape creation process worked at the end of the time spent making the tape; if the spell fails, the tapehead of course keeps the charges and can try again, but has lost the time it takes.

A spell tape can be stopped and started, but once ejected it becomes inert, without magickal effects, unless otherwise specified in the spell description.

Minor spells

Plenty Of Tapes — 1 minor charge

The tapehead gets an infallible hunch about the nearest / most convenient way to get their hands on a tape.

Plugged In — 1 minor charge / effect

Ordinarily a tapehead manipulates tapes with a bunch of equipment, and plays or records them normally, but if necessary they can spend charges to forgo the gear. Each of these effects costs one minor charge; they can stack (but that gets expensive fast!)

• Record onto a tape, or play from a tape onto a CRT, by holding the tape in the tapehead’s hands and “plugging in” the machine cable to the tapehead’s mouth (or other orifice, because Cronenberg).
• Enact the effect of a tape using a player but not CRT, again by “plugging in” the cable to the tapehead’s mouth. The tapehead’s face serves as the CRT; though the tapehead’s face will look normal (rather than playing tape images), looking at their face has the same magical effects as if looking at a screen playing the tape.  
• Omit the wire from either of the wired effects above. This can connect things within [tapehead skill] feet. This effect will also switch on and power a device which is switched off … or even unplugged.
• Play the content of a tape directly into the mind of an individual the tapehead is touching, forgoing a CRT. Note that this still requires a tape player, unless the tapehead also spends additional charges.
• Instantaneously record a tape, or produce an enchanted tape’s playback effect.
• Erase a tape, magical or otherwise, without any equipment.

Note how this spell enables tapeheads to deliver a spell without resorting to equipment at all … if they have three extra minor charges to burn. 

Duplicate — 1+ minor charge

A tapehead may create a perfect duplicate of any existing tape, mundane or magical, in just a few seconds. This costs one minor charge … plus whatever charges necessary to create the original tape if it has magical effects. (Note that this enables a tapehead to duplicate a magical tape even if they cannot create those magical effects themselves!) 

The tapehead ordinarily uses recording equipment to do this, but may employ Plugged In effects at additional cost.

Mixtape — 1+ minor charge

A tapehead may decant charges they are carrying back into tapes. The charges can go into any tape, not just one which originally provided them.

This is time-consuming: it takes the same time to capture charges back into tapes that it takes to take them out (20 minutes for each minor charge, an hour for each significant charge) … and then the tapehead will eventually need to spend the time yet again to take the charges back out. And one minor charge is burned casting the spell to do the transfer. 

I Am A Camera — 1 minor charge

Create a tape of events the tapehead witnessed. This tape does not present the tapehead’s memories, it presents what the tapehead actually saw and heard as if they were a skilled and careful camera operator using very good equipment.

Seeing That Fucked Me Up — 1+ minor charge

Creates a tape of images so disturbing that it forces a check on the Madness meter of the tapehead’s choice on anyone who views it (except the creator) at a rank equal to the number of charges the tapehead spent.

Later viewings are still distressing but do not force a stress check.

The Screen Is Distracting — 1 minor charge

Creates a tape of a video so fascinating that anyone who sees it playing on a screen will not be able to look away for the duration of the tape, and will be preoccupied enough to suffer at least -20% for any actions they try to take while watching.

If a person does not know to try to avoid looking at the screen may go one round in its presence without being affected if they fail a Notice check, but they will be affected the following round. People who know to try to avoid the screen must succeed at a Notice check each round they are in its presence to not look; after they have failed once they cannot avoid it again.

This can be applied to a tape with any content. People who watched it during the first, enchanted viewing will have very good retention of the contents of the tape — including things which were on it before or after the segment they actually watched — such that they can recall even the smallest and most fleeting details with a Mind roll.

Reach Into The Screen — 1 minor charge

While any tape is playing, a tapehead may pass any object small enough to fit through the frame of the screen into the video, or to retrieve an item which any tapehead has placed in this way. 

Such a tape does not suffer the usual single-use behavior of tapes; it may be replayed repeatedly. The object will appear in the video starting at the point in playback when the tapehead placed it. It is usually possible to deposit the object just out of frame at the moment when it it is placed, such that its sudden appearance is not immediately conspicuous … but if, for example, a table appears in the recording, the view pans away a bit for a moment during which a tapehead places an object onto the table, and then the view pans back, the new item on the table may well be inexplicable or at least puzzling, such that an Unnatural check may be required. 

A tapehead may retrieve an object they themselves placed by reaching into the video at any point. A tapehead watching a tape with an object placed by another tapehead will always be able to recognize such objects, and can retreive them, but doing so at a point in playback when the object is not actually onscreen will require spending an extra minor charge.

Other people witnessing a tapehead performing this operation in either direction must make a rank-3 Unnatural check.

The Screen Is A Window — 2 minor charges

Creates a pair of tapes which can be used for communication. 

If both tapes are played simultaneously, the TVs act as a videoconferencing system. Nothing can block the “signal” between them. Each CRT acts as a camera sending to the other tape; it behaves like a broadcast-quality camera with a skilled operator, even intelligently zooming and directing its attention, though it must take a viewpoint from “inside” the screen. Likewise, on TVs with speakers, the speakers act like microphones for the tape on the other end, acting like high-quality broadcast mic arrays in the hands of skilled operators, capable of capturing the whole sound of the room, as directional mics pointed at people, and such.

As usual, if one or the other tape runs out the spell effect ends.

Both tapes retain the messages from the other side after they have been used. This can be harvested for charges if they capture a relevant event.

If a tapehead is near a Screen Is A Window tape whose pair is being played, they will “hear” it ring like a telephone and know what is happening.

Significant spells

Retina Of The Mind’s Eye — 1+ significant charges

Enacts a minor spell which would require a prepared tape, without the prepared tape, by spending significant charges instead of minor charges. Effects which require targets to look at a CRT require them to be able to see the tapehead’s eyes.

Video Mail — 1 significant charge

Creates a tape of the tapehead which can hold a conversation with the person who plays it, as if the tapehead were there, knowing what they knew and thinking how they thought at the time when they prepared the tape.

Watching such a tape is a rank-1 Unnatural check if one is familiar with the Video Mail spell, and a rank-4 Unnatural check if one is not. Unfamiliar viewer(s) will presume that the Video Mail tape is some kind of surprising but cunning trick until the tape has concluded, at which point they will suffer the psychological shock as they realize that the conversation was impossible.

A Video Mail tape will only show static if played again, unless the tapehead obtains the tape and plays it back, which will then reveal the conversation to them. If the tapehead does not recover the tape, they will not know what took place in the conversation.

Reach Out Of The Screen — 1 significant charge

A programmed version of Reach Into The Screen which will deliver an object the tapehead has placed into it, if triggered by a condition programmed onto the tape when it is created. (For example, “if no one is looking at the screen”, “if played by Jane”, “if played inside an office building”, “if someone says the word ‘Videodrome’”.)

The tape can only produce the object according to its program the first time it is played. Thereafter, only the tapehead who created it can remove it, using Reach Into The Screen.

While playing, the tape just shows a series of shots of the object in an array of settings: on a table, on the sidewalk, inside a refrigerator, and so forth.

Subliminal Messages — 1+ significant charge

Produces a tape which gives viewers a belief or compulsion of ten words or less, programmed by the tapehead when they create it. The compulsion has a level equivalent to the number of charges used to create it.

Characters given a compulsion automatically break the compulsion if they face a conflict between the compulsion and a shock check of the same rank of the compulsion spell or higher. (Thus it is hard to program someone to kill; in Videodrome Bianca O’Blivion spent a lot on turning Max Renn into an insane assassin.) 

Characters may also resist a compulsion with a Self check. If they succeed they simply break the compulsion. If they fail they must either obey the compulsion or accept a freakout & failed notch in disobeying it, and the compulsion remains in place.

While playing, the tape can show anything the tapehead chooses.

You Are The Camera — 1-2 significant charge(s)

A tapehead may produce a tape of events which another person witnessed, as in I Am A Camera. 

If the subject is cooperating:

• The subject takes a rank-3 Unnatural check; they will not have a fight/flee/freakout shock response but they will face adding failed/hardened notches
• This costs the tapehead 1 significant charge

If the subject is not cooperating (say, in the room while the tapehead fusses with their editing gear):

• The subject must be prompted to think about the memory, though not to concentrate on it
• The subject does not face an Unnatural check …  unless they see the tape later, at which point they take both a rank-3 Unnatural check and a rank-2 Self check 
• It costs the tapehead 2 significant charges

While playing, the tape shows the events the person witnessed, as if they were very skillfully using a good camera at their point of view.

Explosions Are Good TV — 1 significant charge

Creates a tape which effectively makes the CRT playing it into a bomb. 

The tapehead sets the bomb power when creating the tape, to a maximum governed by their Lemnismancy skill. The tapehead may either accept their skill as that maximum, or gamble on a roll against their skill; if they roll under, they can flip-flop the roll if that produces a more powerful bomb, while if they roll over they must accept the sum of the dice as the maximum.

The explosion does [bomb power]+2d10-2d10 damage to people within the max damage radius of [bomb power] feet of the explosion, -1 damage/foot beyond the maximum damage radius.

The explosion may be placed at any point in the tape’s playback, and this may be combined with other effects on the same tape in the lead up to the explosion. But only a real asshole would combine The Screen Is Distracting with Explosions Are Good TV, right?

The tape may show anything up to the point where the explosion occurs. Technically the moment of truth shows an explosion, but no one will ever see it.

The Screen Is A Gun — 2 significant charges

A weaponized variant on Reach Out Of The Screen.

The tapehead places a gun into the tape. The gun will shoot at people it has been programmed to attack by the tapehead when creating the tape. (“John Smith”, “anyone but me”, “cops”, or “anyone threatening me or my friends”, for example.) The tape has Shoot skill equal to the tapehead’s Lemnismancer skill and all of the characteristics of the gun used to create it: max damage, ammo, range. If the gun has been used in previous crimes, police will be able to do a ballistics match.

When played, the tape shows anonymous hands holding the gun, against an indistinct background.

Major spells

Decant the tapehead’s consciousness into a library of tapes, like Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome, so that they extend their consciousness to any screen where one of their tapes is playing, and become effectively immortal so long as tapes of them still remain.

Create a tape which completely rewrites the minds and bodies of people who see it.

Create a tape which absorbs someone bodily into a permanent Video Mail tape.

Make events in a tape a part of everyone’s memories.

Edit the events in every copy of a given tape … including people’s memories of seeing it, written reports informed by it, et cetera.

Dan Secord

Dan, the character for whom I created this school for an UA 2E campaign, is a 36 year old tapehead, freelance video editor, maker of odd little art videofilms, and bassist for local Eagles cover band Hotel California. He lives in San Carlos, a fictional city inspired by Santa Cruz, California, in 1990.

Stats & skills

40 BODY — Scrawny		60 SPEED — Deft
General Athletics 15% Fight A Little Dirty 25% Stay Up Long Hours 20% Climb 20%		Dodge 25% Driving 15% Shoot 15% Initiative 30% Cameraman 10% Lockpicking 25% Sneak Around 25% Sprint 20%
65 MIND — Clever		75 SOUL — Reflective
Video Editor 25% General Education 25% Remember Stuff I Saw 25% Conceal 15% Notice 20%		Lemnismancy 60% Charm 15% Lying 15% Rock ’n’ Roll Band 35% Local Boho Fixture 20%
where Dan thinks he is at any risk of breaking taboo, he does not wear his glasses, so for visual checks he needs to roll under 20% to get just minor success as if rolling under Mind

Passions

Rage: Abusive relationships
Fear: (Unnatural) Losing touch with reality
Noble: Revealing necessary truths

Madness

failed		hardenend
☑☐☐☐☐	Violence	☑☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☑☐☐☐☐	Unnatural	☑☑☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐	Helplessness	☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☑☐☐☐☐	Isolation	☑☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐	Self	☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐

Relationships

The PCs’ cabal

Dan regards the whole crew as his protégé, as he thinks of himself as the most down-to-Earth and sensible among them.

Janet Philips

Producer of KSCO Eyewitness News San Carlo, who draws on Dan’s editing assistance and personal tape library … and allows Dan to skim raw tapes for his library.

Dave Gold

In-House Editor at Praxinoscope Studios who also daws on Dan’s editing assistance and personal tape library, allows Dan to skim raw tapes for his library, and is amused by Dan’s odd art films.

Alice Morrow

The cabal’s young punk entomancer, whom Dan introduced to the cabal after he saw a recording of her doing magic on video shot by a KSCO reporter. Dan feels responsible to look after her.

Hotel California

Dan’s mediocre Eagles cover band. He plays the Randy Meisner role: bass (and for “Journey Of The Sorcerer”, the banjo) and sings harmonies. Half the reason why he does these gigs is to show his cut-up style art videofilms on a cluster of old TVs, and to shoot candid video of the crowd. Shows typically act as mixers for folks in the local occult underground.

Resources

The DanCave

Dan lives and works in what was a storefront in the bohemian old part of town.. It has a largish “public” portion which was once the front retail space, his workspace (and tapehead lair) with video editing gear and tape library, and a little living space in back.

The Screen Ying Room is the former retail space in front. He has put old TVs and artistically arranged junk in the window displays and boarded up, light-sealed, and soundproofed the big space. Hotel California practice here, and he has it set up for occasional showings of his and others’ art films; he has a couple of dozen folding metal chairs, and if he’s willing to violate fire codes he can squeeze in almost 40 people. The room has a big TV, a bunch of little TVs, and a screen and video projector; all are rigged to play tapes loaded here … or played from inside Dan’s workspace.

The Back Yang Room, Dan’s workspace, is cluttered but orderly … in a way that is almost entirely incomprehensible to anyone but him. The large former storeroom has video editing equipment for several tape formats (plus an 8mm film editing table gathering dust), many of them eccentrically rigged from combinations of half-broken machines. Most of the volume of the room is dominated by metal shelves stacked with tapes, all of them carefully but inscrutably labeled. Dan is not superstitious about it, but he rarely lets anyone in here; it locks with its own key. Dan’s living space is small and tidy. There is just enough room for the bohemian splendor of a carefully-organized kitchenette, a queen-size futon, and a large old wardrobe/dresser. He has one of those weird radios which can play AM/FM/Weather/Shortwave/TV audio so he can listen to Star Trek. There is a back entrance which Dan rarely uses.

The DanVan

Dan drives an old bakery van; he likes the leftover internal shelves. There is seating for two up front and one in back, though the back can hold six if five of them don’t mind sitting on the floor. He keeps a couple of battered old video cameras in it and has a couple of tape players connected to a TV running off of a battery system scavenged from an RV, so that Dan can shoot video or watch a video to pick up charges away from home. When he uses it to take Hotel California to gigs, they complain about “all that junk taking up space”.

Magic tape library

Dan always has at least one tape prepared for most of the major spells he knows, stashed in the Back Yang Room, all on six hour SP VHS tapes:

• Seeing That Fucked Me Up at rank-4
• The Screen Is Distracting
• Reach Into The Screen with a large knife and an envelope with several hundred dollars in cash planted in it
• The Screen Is A Window (pair)
• Subliminal Messages with “Ignore Dan and the people with him”
• Video Mail from 1989

On a successful Lemnismancy roll Dan also has a second prepared tape of whatever type is useful.

Note that Dan has never had the nerve or occasion to make either an Explosions Are Good TV or The Screen Is A Gun tape, though he knows how. He does not even have a gun.

Dan’s backpack

Dan carries a largish backpack with him almost everywhere. It always contains at least an RF converter for connecting a tape player to an ordinary TV, a VHS tape with a significant charge waiting on it, and a 6-hour SP VHS tape enchanted with The Screen Is Distracting which does not show video which might identify Dan; he often will have another tape in it as well.

Dan’s Tapehead Life

Dan has been a tapehead for six years now. He corresponds with about a dozen tapeheads across the country from from other lemnismancy sub-schools he knows — Reporters who always shoot their own videos, Pornhounds who never have actual sex, Performers who try to get tapes of themselves broadcast, Programmers who do some creepy thing with mind control he does not understand — and has heard that there are others.

Between KSCO and Praxinoscope, Dan gets an erratic but voluminous enough amount of video editing work to pay the bills and keep him in tapehead charges. Hotel California, his video showings, occasional events for other folks he allows in the Screen Ying Room, plus the San Carlos bohemian scene this connects him with enable him to maintain a little more social life than he really needs, bring in a little pin money … and gives him an excuse to show up with video cameras which capture “drama” on tape for him to harvest for more charges. If his charge library thins out, Dan is not above creeping on weddings, funerals, and other events, but he generally does not lug a videocamera around.

Charges & tapes

The “economics” of tapehead magic are a bit different from most Unknown Armies adept schools. It is possible to store a large library of potential charges, but it is hard to gain charges out in the world. A tapehead can have a large arsenal of prepared tapes without having to worry about that spellcasting ability getting disrupted by taboo, but they require very particular conditions to deploy, unless the tapehead is prepared to burn through a lot of charges.

And Dan has arranged his life such that he has a steady supply of charge-bearing tapes.

Rather than start with a precise accounting of Dan’s charges, unless explicitly established in play, I played him with a set of rules for charge availability when circumstances call for accounting:

• When Dan is not expecting trouble, he only carries a handful of minor charges: roll 2d10 and take the lower roll under 4, or zero if neither roll qualifies
• When Dan might expect trouble, he will generally be better supplied.
• He can roll Lemnismancy to have an enchanted tape he reasonably could have thought to have prepared in his backpack; if he fails he has an extra tape, but it is enchanted with a spell chosen by the GM.
• He can roll Lemnismancy to see how many charges he is carrying. On a successful roll, he has the sum of the dice in minor charges and the lower die in significant charges (treating 0 as 10); on an unsuccessful roll he only has the 1s die in minor charges and no significant charges.
• If we need to know how many charge-bearing tapes Dan has in his library at the Back Yang Room at the moment, he has a reserve of tapes in his library worth 2d10 significant charges and d100 (flip-floppable) minor charges, d10 of which are double charges.
• If we need to know how many charge-bearing tapes Dan has in the DanVan, he ordinarily has 2d10 minor charges plus two significant charges.
• If we need to know what Dan can harvest from KSCO and Praxiniscope, in a week he ordinarily will bring in 1d10-1d10 significant charges (doubles yield one double tape) plus 2d10 minor charges (rolls of doubles also produce an additional significant charge).

Some capsule political definitions

For now I want to directly lift a Twitter thread by astute leftist Margaret Killjoy:

I’m going to define some terms, because most of them have become essentially jargon. Socialism, communism, anarchism, democratic socialism, libertarian socialism, authoritarian socialism.

First of all, the meaning of these terms shifts country to country and year to year, confusing matters greatly. An anarchist in 1880s Chicago would also call themselves a socialist. “Communist” had a much broader meaning before 1917. So I’m going to be a bit broad.

Socialism is the broadest umbrella term here. Roughly, a socialist fights for a world without gross economic inequality and generally does so through seeking for workers themselves (or the state, but not private companies) own the means of production (factories, farms, etc). It has a more specific meaning for much of the 20^th century, which is to say “not a communist [in the ‘aligned with the USSR sense’] but still into socialism.” It is sort of shorthand for “democratic socialism” for a long time and in a lot of writing.

Communism also has at least two meanings. Generally, communism is the word for a stateless socialist society, in which power rests in communes.

But ever since the Russian Civil War, when Bolsheviks took power and changed their name to the communist party, the word “communist” has generally meant “aligned to the communist party,” which generally took orders from the USSR. So if you read Orwell talking shit on “communists,” he was still a socialist … a democratic socialist. He despised Stalin, and during his lifetime, “communist” was used to mean “literally takes orders from Stalin.” This was not strawmanning, but structurally true.

Democratic socialism also has multiple meanings, because the Bolsheviks among others used to identify as democratic socialists. Generally speaking, a democratic socialist believes in using the democratic power of existing republics to transition them into socialist societies. By the mid-20^th century this was very much distinguished from “communists” aka bolsheviks.

Then there are the anarchists. Anarchists generally believe in not using the existing state to develop a socialist society, but instead using revolutionary structures (such as, well, soviets … worker’s councils basically) to transform society into a stateless society. Anarchists would sometimes call themselves libertarian socialists, in order to distinguish themselves from authoritarian socialists (aka “communists” like the bolsheviks).

The word Libertarian was consciously stolen by pro-capitalist forces decades later, in the 20^th century.

Confused yet? Anarchists generally want communism. The USSR was not a communist society (by its own definitions) but instead a society that claimed to be developing towards communism. (And generally would define socialism as the in-between stage.) Democratic socialists want to reach socialism democratically, that one is pretty clear. If it’s confusing to you, that’s because it’s confusing. Everyone uses these words differently. Someone calling themselves a communist in 1950 might mean a very different thing than in 2024. The cold war and western propaganda thoroughly complicated matters.

In the end, these labels only sort-of matter. What matters to me personally is that we move towards a society in which people control their own destinies but also take care of one another. A society built on mutual aid and solidarity (more jargon words, but I believe in them).

I would focus a little differently than Killjoy does in describing socialism. Socialists are motivated by eliminating economic inequalities, but I would not locate the definition of the ideology there. Rather, I would put it this way:

Socialism boils down to public control of the means of production. The “means of production” refers to wealth which enables creating other wealth: factories, economic infrastructure, et cetera. “Public control” could mean worker-owned corporations, democratically-accountable commons, state control, or other arrangements.

Most Americans confuse socialism with a different social-economic ideology:

Social democracy means systematic public provision (by the state or otherwise) of people’s material needs — stuff like healthcare, housing, et cetera. To some degree, every industrialized society in the world today includes an element of social democracy, so it can pair with socialism, capitalism, democracy, authoritarianism, et cetera. The term is usually employed to describe a society in which those provisions are strong, including such resources as “free” healthcare and education.

Capitalism means private ownership of the means of production, where “private” means individuals — either directly, or indirectly through corporations.

Markets are a social / economic arrangement in which there is a shared sphere in which people may buy & sell a resource. There is a tendency to equate markets with capitalism, but the relationship is more complicated than that. Capitalism implies a capital market in which people may buy & sell the means of production; socialism forbids this. Capitalism also implies a labor market in which people may buy & sell their time working; socialism does not necessarily forbid this, but does at root seek to prevent anyone from needing to sell their time in a labor market in order to survive. The market for consumer goods & services (shoes, cars, massages, house painting, et cetera) is a feature of capitalism which some socialists yearn to eliminate, but socialism does not necessarily mean its elimination, only the elimination of the capital market.

Libertarianism in the US means wanting universal rights including private property without a state, where “private property” means not shoes & cars but capital, the means of production. In practice, libertarians prioritize property rights so strongly that they accept the the state as a guarantor of property as a compromise which can hopefully be overcome in time; in this they differ from anarchists who see socialist public control of the means of production as integral to (and part of the point of) the elimination of the state.

I hope to stack up several more short, clarifying definitions here over time.

Good user experience design

It is hard to name the good-ness of good UXD.

Intuitive?

People outside the field often say that they want a user experience which is “intuitive”. I have talked before about how under-considered that word is.

When people say they want a system to be “intuitive,” they typically think they mean that users should immediately understand how a system works when they encounter it. But you cannot really do that with many systems … not even with most systems people talk about when you ask them for an example of something “intuitive.”

Consider the mouse-and-cursor. Most of us have forgotten the first time we encountered it, and thus forgotten how unintuitive we found it the first time we used it. A little box on a string with a button or three on top? If you have just arrived from the 23^rd century, you might pick it up and try talking to it. But with ten seconds of demonstration you understand it completely and have some sophisticated applications of it immediately available to you, and even if you didn’t see a mouse again for the next ten years you would still remember how it worked.

There you have what people really mean by “intuitive:” easy to explain, powerful in its implications, impossible to forget. You get that through systems that possess a clear, coherent internal logic that feels natural and obvious. Of course, it can take hard work to figure out those “natural and obvious” behaviors; we interaction designers call that work “interaction design.”

So that is not quite enough.

Delightful?

Cyd Harrell has a good critique of facile uses of “delight”:

delight [is] an ambiguous word, referring to either a level of pleasing someone (a high level) or a way of pleasing them (charm, surprise, in any case a very conscious pleasure). adopting a high level of pleasing users as a goal is good - mostly - but when designers, through some kind of linguistic slippage, adopt the “way” sense of delight to inappropriate contexts, it’s like following the script of a romance when trying to get to know a colleague — awkward. that said, lots of designers meant the level.

in recent years I’ve come to understand that the level can also be a problem in a more subtle way. if delight is a conscious pleasure - the spirit stirred somehow - multiple “experiences” or products or whatever trying to stir our spirit can be taxing. it’s not always additive & if it happens to miss — if it’s the wrong way of pleasure for the context, or the experience is just trying to make sure that it visibly, maybe measurably, exerted a high level of pleasure on you - it asks for attention it may not deserve. collectively, it can be a burden.

sometimes, especially with a longterm relationship like, well, a longterm relationship or like belonging in an institution, what we really need is the background level of assumption that we matter & are cared for, & then the occasional sparks in a special smile, the bed, a voting booth if you’re talking about stirring the civic spirit (I have a story I tell about being overwhelmed with institutional belonging in a library) - those become reinforcing & sustaining.

spoiler: those are harder to design for. & they can’t be accomplished entirely through the tools of design; so that’s where I think delight is tempting - it is suited to our toolset, & we can push it towards measurable. but in doing so (sometimes) we can get on the wrong foot.

Giles Colborne has a rap about how designers tend to justify gimmicky, interesting design as pursuing “delight”, but when one asks people about delightful experiences, they often describe effortless resolution of anxiety, a good UX design goal.

Boring?

Ryan Bigge’s In Defence of Boring UX:

“Only when a product is functional, reliable, and usable can users appreciate the delightful, pleasurable, or enjoyable aspects of the experience,” notes Fessenden. In other words, boring underpins delight — and sometimes boring is delightful.

Cap Watkins praises The Boring Designer:

Maybe it’s born out of seeing apps choose flash over function, or trying to understand just one too many indecipherable icons-as-buttons. Whatever the case, here's an ode to the boring designers among us. The designers who …

• Choose obvious over clever every time.
• Rarely stand their ground.
• Are Practical.
• Value Laziness.
• Lead the team.

Delivering power & pleasure?

I used to talk about “systems which deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them”. In 1997, when I was at Alan Cooper’s studio — then the only shop exclusively dedicated to what we now call “UX design”, we had a lively conversation about our mission statement coïnciding with us rebranding from “Cooper Software” to “Cooper Interaction Design”. Alan Cooper had a draft mission statement which was pretty good, but I was uneasy with its allusion to “designing software which is easy to use”. We were simplicity radicals then (and still), but we also worked on a lot of desktop apps which were necessarily complex.

I proposed “systems which deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them”, which I look back on with a mix of pride and unease. It has some distinct advantages as a way to articulate good UX design, and for a while the Cooper studio used it a lot in our materials. (It didn’t work as branding, though. Google search results were … worrisome.)

These days we rightly criticize the concept of “user-centered design” — we need a more global and ethical ground than that implies. (Though fergawdsake in the world we have we need more designers who are at least advocates for users.) But at that time that turn of phrase was a clarifying place to stand, and it still grounds much of how I think about UX design solutions:

Deliver

A lot of tools promise things which they do not deliver, either because they simply do not deliver the right function, or because they are too clumsy in their execution. A feature one does not use just acts as clutter, in the way.

Power

UXD should aspire to make things that are effective and make make people effective; a simple tool can be powerful if it is the right tool, and a tool should not shy from sophistication in the right context.

Pleasure

We need to talk about well-crafted design. This can mean fun, delight, or excitement, yes. But most often UX design should offer the subtler joy of an unobtrusively graceful tool.

The tech “libertarian” right turn

I understand the confusion of people surprised to see many tech “libertarians” have been making a turn toward far right authoritarianism. A few things to help make sense of this:

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Understand the split between anarchists and libertarians in the United States.

Anarchists’ opposition to power & authority includes an opposition to the power of wealth.

The libertarian tradition embraces private property emphatically — it regards anything less than total control of one’s property as a violation morally equivalent to violent bodily assault. “I created that wealth with my time and effort, so taking any portion of it treats me as a slave.” Though libertarians regard private property as logically prior to the state, they have shown again and again that they are eager to support exercise of power by authoritarian states to enforce it.

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Many American “libertarians” are fascists & white nationalists engaged in misdirection. For example, I have an old post cataloguing how Ron Paul was never really a libertarian, but loved misleading people into thinking he was.

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Sincere bonehead contrarian libertarians have a tendency to make the switch.

Partly it is just going from one contrarian form of zealotry to another. Partly it is an easy drift from “I am awesome, and I would prosper were I not handicapped by the state” to “my people are awesome, and we would dominate were we not handicapped by liberalism”.

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Neoreactionaries — a distinctly nerdy strain of far right ideology — have a fantasy of authoritarian minarchy. They argue that the state per se is not the problem; they fault the liberal state as “too big”. If the government is unencumbered by due process and regulatory responsibility, they believe, its ruthlessness allows it to be “small” so that in practice citizens are more “free”.

They misread Singapore as embodying their dream. “You might get the death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk, but if you steer clear of obvious mistakes and political dissent, the government stays out of your way. There is so little regulation of economic freedom!”

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Libertarianism has a crisp simplicity and superficial elegance which appeals to the Engineer Mindset common in the culture of the “tech” industry. But libertarianism is not the only facile “rational” simplification of a complex domain which plays to that frame of mind.

It also produces notorious crackpottery like 9/11 Truthers: “jet fuel cannot melt steel beams, QED!” Fashy “logic” is full of exactly that sort of move:

• pseudoscientific racism and sexism
• Clash Of Civilizations claims about the superiority of Rational Western Culture
• the Fremen Mirage

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Silicon Valley culture understands itself as standing at the top of a competitive meritocracy with authoritarian & fashy implications:

• we defeated supposed experts in their domains because we are smarter and better — competition is the truth of the world which reveals inborn excellence
• it is good when this concentrates resources in our hands, because it empowers our efforts which make the world work better — they must rule, it is destructive when others try to “steal” their deserved wealth and power
• our corporate organizations are Super Effective, unlike the clumsy state — democracy is stupid & inefficient, unlike heirarchical exercise of authority

(It is necessary here to caveat that the common claim “Fascism = Corporatism” is a misleading canard.)

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Animating much of this we can see the libertarian misunderstanding that “authoritarian” means a “big” state. But authoritarianism is better understood as “power unchecked by limiting institutions”, the thing these guys want for themselves, because they are so much smarter than everyone else that they will use that power well.

My trouble with Trek

Numbskull conservatives grumbling about Star Trek “going woke” can go to hell; anyone paying attention knows they don’t understand Trek.

I have the opposite problem.

The mission

A proper Trek story is a parable in which liberal-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin values prevail. (More on how that works in an earlier post.) In The Original Series, this expressed the hopes of Cold War America, countering dread that technology — in particular, nuclear weapons — would doom us all.

For a while I thought that both Discovery & Strange New Worlds Understood The Assignment:

• The pilot episode of SNW ending with Captain Pike talking down a society about to destroy itself with cold war brinksmanship could not be a more direct revival of the spirit of TOS
• The pilot episode of Discovery gave Captain Georgiou my favorite line of Trek dialogue ever: “Starfleet does not fire first”
• In Disco S3E02 “Far From Home” Tilly won over a room full of hard-bitten, hostile people from a brutal society just by relentlessly acting in good faith
• In SNW the Enterprise crew respected Hemmer’s resolute pacifism
• Disco characters called the Mirror Universe Terrans “fascists”, describing their seeming strength as “painted rust”

I could go on.

But.

The problem

It seems unmistakable that the people currently making Trek sincerly think their stories deliver the song of the liberal ethos. But more often they fumble the ball so badly that they say the opposite.

I understand why people took SNW S02E02 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” as first-rank Trek reflecting the values I am talking about … but I could not get past the Federation having regulations requiring apartheid planets.

I was thrilled when S3 of Discovery ended with the Federation refusing to compromise its values in the face of profound temptation, demaning that Osyraa must face trial if the Emerald Chain were to join the Federation. But then I was mortified that the story turned toward Captain Burnham resolving the conflict by running and punching.

SNW gave us big-hearted Dr. M’Benga as the moral center of the Enterprise crew … then revealed that he too is really good at punching … and might be is a war criminal.

The TOS episode S1E11 “Arena” which introduced the Gorn was a perfect exemplar of a proper Trek story: under the pulpy action and monster costumes, we got Kirk resolving the conflict through understanding. So when SNW revisted the Gorn and portrayed them as — in the showrunner’s own words — “not every other iteration of representation of the human other in alien skin, they’re evil”, it altered not just the worldbuilding canon but reversed what a Trek story is.

And worst of all, the worldbuilding of the far future 32^nd Century revealed in Discovery is a worse betrayal than any one botched story could deliver.

Yes, the Federation retained its liberal values for centuries, despite further technological change, but the Burn curtailing space travel shattered the Federation’s strength. Progress did not progress. Humanity did not mature further. Liberal values did not prevail on the merits; the Federation’s ethos only worked under historically-contingent material conditions.

So of course Discovery ended with the Federation refusing the Progenitors’ technology, fearing that they lack the wisdom to use it without it becoming destructive.

The people making Trek cannot find it in them to portray liberalism working, even as a fantasy.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Sean Kelly on Twitter describes how the Trek parody show dodged these mistakes and made a more Trekkian statement than actual Trek has done lately:

Interestingly, the Season 3 finale of The Orville took direct aim at the idea that Star Trek’s utopian future is only possible because of the replicator, and the typically-conservative Trek fans who make the argument.

A woman from an underdeveloped planet keeps begging for replicator technology on the grounds that it would bring her planet into the same socialist utopia that the crew of the Orville enjoys, and the first officer says “You’ve basically got that backwards.” She explains that it was their socialist utopia that brought about the cooperation necessary to invent the replicator, and that had it been invented during Earth’s 20^th or 21^st centuries it wouldn’t have worked, because the rich and powerful would have hoarded the technology.

As @BoomerNiner often says, we have enough resources on the planet right now, without a replicator, to give everybody food and housing — if we wanted to. The invention of a replicator wouldn’t change that.

Zefram Cochrane, famously, tried to invent the warp drive with a profit motive — he thought he was going to get rich off the technology, and it was only the realization that we weren’t alone in the galaxy (and perhaps a few lectures from people from the future) that changed him.

But mankind wasn’t ready for all the various technologies that sprang from this revolution, which is why the Vulcans tried to keep a close eye on humanity’s entrance into the galaxy. A few years after First Contact, Earth’s government launched a probe, called “Friendship-1” that tried to give other planets the means to contact Earth.

Instead, the people the probe found reverse-engineered the antimatter technology and accidentally destroyed their planet.

The same thing happened in The Orville — early explorers, acting like missionaries, tried to bring their advanced technology to other worlds in the hope of helping people — but the technology just created conflict and ruined entire planets.

People don’t suddenly become moved to share because of abundance — Elon Musk had 44 billion dollars and he didn’t decide to share it with the world, he decided to buy Twitter with it. He has always, and will continue to, hoard his wealth for himself no matter how much he has. If Tesla invented a replicator they wouldn’t give that away to everyone for free. They’d patent it, and sell it to world governments with DRM software they could deactivate remotely if those governments didn’t pay a subscription fee.

If governments had replicators, they wouldn’t suddenly start handing out free, delicious, nutritious food to everyone — “that will collapse the economy,” they’d say. “Free food for the needy would be unfair to people who’ve been paying money for food all this time.” “How will people be motivated to work,” the Republicans would say, “if they don’t have the threat of starvation hanging over them? If everyone has enough food, how will we motivate people to join the Army?”

Even though the replicator was producing molecularly-identical food to the real thing, conservatives would insist it wasn’t “real” enough for them. “Real” beef, they’d say, demands the slaughter of an animal. Replicated beef is basically vegan. The beef industry would quickly draw battle lines with their donation money, congressmen from places like Texas would move to outlaw replicated meat from being served on the grounds that it hurts entire industries. Conspiracy theorists would insist that replicated beef is full of additives the government is trying to sneak into them to feminize men and make you sick, even though real beef is full of antibiotics and hormones. Campaign ads would show Republicans personally slaughtering cattle and gutting deer to show their commitment to only eating meat that was really alive. We’re already seeing this type of thing when, like, Cracker Barrel tries to introduce plant-based sausage that’s entirely optional to order. People freak out that you might take their meat away.

In short, inventing a replicator wouldn’t save us — right now, it’d ruin us even faster, as the amount of bounty the wealth plays keep-away with would just grow even larger and more ludicrous.

Capitalism would never allow a replicator to exist to its true potential, too many people would go broke. Replicators didn’t create the Star Trek future, the Star Trek future comes first, then replicators.

A way out

I am not the first to notice how the Federation resemble us culturally more than they should, given the radically different world of teleportation and space travel and aliens and replicators and so forth which they inhabit. Indeed, they are obsessively backward-looking — Shakespeare and baseball and Dixon Hill and so forth.

Consider also:

• They vigorously oppose gene modification, and recent shows have underlined the point
• They recoil at AI personhood, despite the ability to produce it surfacing again and again, including in recent stories

These people are kicking and scratching to avoid the transhuman change implied by their technologies.

In-universe, we can see why they make this turn. The outcomes of embracing transhuman-like change they run into during their explorations are either baffling Pure Energy Beings or nightmarish dystopias.

What if they encounter something different?

I feel certain that someone in the current Trek writers room knows their Iain M. Banks. We just got two stories about the Federation botching their encounters with Excessions! So let’s bring in another thing about the Federation:

• The Prime Directive forbids them intervening in lower-tech societies, even where they could easily correct political and material horrors

We know where Iain M. Banks’ high-tech hippie anarchist Culture stand on this stuff. When they encounter the Federation, they are gonna be pissed.

A bunch of Starfleet officers will turn coat. Do you doubt that Christopher Pike would warp back to Omelas and set things right?

The Ballad of Michael Burnham

a later addition to the post

I wonder what the heck the writers of Discovery thought Michael Burnham’s story was about.

Discovery was going to be a Bryan Fuller project, but he dropped out shortly before its initial release. He has been politely evasive about what he wanted the show to be — letting the people who actually delivered the show own it — but it is obvious that much of the first season was assembled from his work and I have a hypothesis about where he wanted to go which sheds light on where it did go.

In the first episode, after a little prologue, the first real sequence in Michael’s story has her committing mutiny because she objects to the captain delivering the best line of Star Trek dialogue ever written: “Starfleet does not fire first”. Michael is talented, capable, goodhearted, and … bad. Her mutiny was as wrong as wrong can be, and it seems she knows it.

From that very first episode, we of course know that the story will eventually make Michael the captain of the USS Discovery. Starting there makes that look impossible. She’s a mutineer! How will she earn it? How will the show earn it?

I think Fuller wanted to portray a slow, hard process of Federation values redeeming Michael, making her into the person we want her to be. (In this long arc I think she resembles another SF TV antihero played by a charismatic actor whose story changed in the telling.) Fuller needed Michael to be so charismatic that we would root for her despite being a dangerous loose cannon who demonstrates at every turn that she shouldn’t be in Starfleet boots, much less destined for a captain’s chair, so they cast Sonequa Martin-Green.

I think her acting chops and screen presence let the post-Fuller writers tell a lazier story — Michael Is Awesome, Actually — trusting her to sell it without the story working to earn it. In a jiffy, everybody on the ship loves her; there are conflicts where characters disagree with her about what to do, but not out of profound disagreement. And while Michael has feelings — the show does good work with them — she doesn’t have inner conflict shaping what she decides to do, which I think is a serious problem.

In 1973, David Gerrold wrote a book about how Trek works which eventually landed him the gig writing the show bible for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He argued that one can talk about two kinds of Trek stories:

• Kirk in danger
• Kirk makes a decision

Gerrold argues that putting Kirk in danger can be fun but it is not compelling because we know he’s not going to die. Good Trek is about decisions. A morality play.

Most of the time Discovery is not about hard decisions, it’s a variant on danger which is Can Michael Crack The Problem, which is the same kind of tepid because we know that of course she will.

This can be proceedurally engaging, and sometimes Discovery gestures toward an approach to that which could make Michael an interesting character: Michael’s superpower is meant to be that she comes at problems in a unique way that nobody else would think, or dare, to do. This also papers over her mutiny by suggesting that that she wasn’t wrong to want to fire on the Klingons unprovoked, she was a lateral thinker. It could be made to work.

But again the storytelling rarely earned it. Most of the time, Michael succeeds because she is just Good At Everything. A certain kind of hater grumbled a lot that Michael is a Mary Sue, too competent to be interesting, and most of them were motivated by misogynoir rather than substantive critique of the show. The critique is not quite right — a proper Mary Sue experiences no adversity, while Michael encounters plenty — but it is adjacent to the problem.

Worse still, as I grumble above too often the thing that she is decisively Good At is just running and punching. Which is fun, and part of the pulpy joy of Trek, but should not define our central character or the heart of a Trek story.

So: what was the Ballad Of Michael Burnham about? She had good friends and cool adventures because she was so awesome.

Often that was fun. But it wasn’t interesting, and it wasn’t great Trek.

We deserved a better story about her, about Starfleet, about What Star Trek Is About. Given how we were introduced to Michael Burnham, she deserved a better story.

Trans women in prison

Returning to an old theme, I was recently asked about whether it was “appropriate” to place a trans woman convicted of multiple rapes in a women’s prison. Even if I assume that the specifics of the instance which inspired the question were rightly reported, which is not a safe assumption given the absurd lies which opponents of trans liberation use as a deliberate strategy, I have to say —

It is more appropriate for that individual to be placed in a women’s prison than it is for …

• … thousands of men to serve as guards in women’s prisons.
• … prison guards of any gender to be so weakly accountable that inmates are vulnerable to rape by guards.
• … inmates in prisons to be so poorly secured that they notoriously vulnerable to violence from other inmates including but not limited to rape.
• … prison rape to be a routine subject of “jokes” in our society.
• … the overwhelming majority of cis women in prison now to be placed in a women's prison, given the cruelty and counterproductiveness of even the best prison as a remedy for the things we use them for now.
• … Ted F*@%ing Cruz to pretend he is motivated by concern for the safety of women in prison rather than motivated by pandering to transphobia for political advantage.

I hope that clarifies my position.

Numbers

Someone dissatisfied with this answer demanded that I speak to how many trans women rape cis women in prisons.

This is question-begging, intended to seed the idea that trans women are prone committing sexual violence. It leaves important related questions unasked.

But okay. Here is an answer.

In the Anglophone world we have a repugnant culture which does not just leave people held captive by the state unprotected from sexual violence, as I noted above, we routinely make meanspirited jokes about prison rape. Clear information is hard to come by.

My interlocutor lives in the UK, where TERFs TERFs have strong institutional support, so I knew the kind of transphobic propaganda they wanted me to respond to. Consider the article ‘Transgender’ Inmates Sexually Assault, Rape Female Inmates at a Shocking Rate, Ministry of Justice Reveals on a website with the TERF-dogwhistle URL WomenAreHuman.com. It quotes the Ministry saying:

Since 2010, out of the 124 sexual assaults that occurred in the female estate a total of seven of those were sexual assaults against females in custody perpetrated by transgender individuals.

Seven sexual assaults is seven too many, but on horrifying scale of rape in the world, one sexual assault every second year is trivial.

Opponents of trans liberation would say that the point is that this demonstrates how trans women commit sexual assault at a higher rate than cis women, and thus present a threat everywhere. The post quotes the rightwing UK Daily Mail saying:

although trans women make up about one per cent of the 3,600 female jail population, they are to blame for 5.6 per cent of sexual assaults

There are a million methodological questions which arouse skepticism about these figures, plus opponents of trans liberation routinely lie outrageously. But let’s follow the logic WAH.com offers for a moment. Two questions come up.

First, the unasked question I alluded to above: how many trans women are raped by cis men in mens’ prisons? WAH.com does not address the question. The best resource I have handy says 1 in 3. So if we link that to WAH.com saying that about 1% of the UK’s prison population of ~3600 women are trans, then if those ~36 women were housed with men, 12 of them would have been assaulted. This suggests that housing those trans women with cis women prevented five sexual assaults.

Second: what about the other 117 sexual assuaults on women in UK prisons? WAH.com does not address those.

Looking at the evidence & arguments presented by opponents of trans liberation I must conclude that they do not actually care about preventing sexual assault in prisons. They are looking for a “concern” which sounds plausible if you don’t think about it, in order to justify their bigoted disgust at trans women and turn it into policy which hurts trans women.

A familiar pattern.

The Fremen Mirage

One sees this bullshit around a lot:

Historian Bret Deveraux calls shenanigans briefly in Foreign Policy and at length on his blog.

I’m choosing the Fremen — and really the Dune series more generally – to stand in for a particular set of oft-repeated historical ideas and assumptions. It is not one idea, so much as a package set of ideas — often expressed so vaguely as to be beyond historical interrogation. So let’s begin by outlining it: what do I mean by the Fremen Mirage? I think the core tenants run thusly:

• First: That people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies — what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune — are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ — we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.
• Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
• Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.
• Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and ‘decadent’ themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn. Or, as the common meme puts it:

Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And weak men create hard times.

(The quote is originally from G. Michael Hopf, a novelist and, perhaps conspicuously, not a historian; one also wonders what the women are doing during all of this, but I have to admit, were I they, I would be glad to be left out too).

[⋯]

This complex of ideas is what I phrase as the Fremen Mirage, and as you might imagine from that word ‘mirage,’ there are real, gaping problems in this vision of history. I’ve picked the Fremen to stand in for this idea in part because — being a fictional people — they are unconstrained by the real world messiness of actual societies. Instead, Frank Herbert quite clearly intends the Fremen to be a sort of purified form of this trope, the hardest people from the hardest conditions; they’re even presented as being more extreme than another example of this same trope, the imperial Sardaukar, who also indulge in the same ‘hard men from a hard place’ idea. Moreover, Herbert plays out this cyclical vision of history in the books, with the going-soft (slowly) Sardaukar being no match for the hard-ways Fremen and the latter – despite a near total lack of modern military or industrial infrastructure and what should be a crippling manpower disadvantage — spreading out and defeating all of the ‘civilized’ armies they encounter (with attendant worries that they will will become ‘soft’ and thus weak, should their planet, Arrakis, be made more habitable).

Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people — say the Greeks — may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon). But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized). Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.

The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)

[⋯]

... the idea at the core of the Fremen Mirage is that the Fremen are militarily stronger in a general sense. If I may lean on a sports analogy, we would not call a team ‘better’ if they lost 98 games but happened to win the last 2. The question is both the ratio of victories to defeats, and the impact of those results. And that’s why the march of the state and of farming is so instructive: we can see the same process repeat itself, in a wide variety of areas, over very long periods of time, with what must have been many hundreds if not thousands of small wars. And it is quite clear from that evidence, that at the dawn of civilization, it was the least Fremen societies who tended to win the most.

A bit related

A little history of how Iceland changed from a violent to non-violent society:

So, for those from countries where, paradoxically, routinely arming police makes people feel safe, a short history of Iceland’s path from being one of the more brutal and violent nations in Europe to being a largely pacifist one.

The Vikings were not known for their pacifism. The voting system for Iceland’s Althing, for example, was proxy combat. Effectively, you assessed which side, for or against a proposal, was likelier to win in combat. Recounts or challenges to that assessment meant doing the actual combat and seeing which side won. And, yeah, that could mean that having a noted sociopath and former mercenary like Egill Skallagrímsson on your side could result in it winning even though it had fewer numbers.

Our predilection towards violence continued until internecine violence escalated to such a point where the country became completely dysfunctional, our resources depleted, and we lost our independence to Norway in 1262-4. Then Norway lost their independence to the Danish and once the Danish took over things steadily got worse. The Danish ran monopoly and starvation policies in Iceland, where each part of Iceland was controlled by a regional governor (sýslumaður), who operated on behalf of the Danish crown, and who had legislative, executive, and judicial powers. The authorities were effectively free to loot their region at will. Most of the violent massacres in Iceland’s history after we lost our independence were done at the direction of these regional governors.

[⋯]

Combined with Iceland’s tendency towards natural disasters — weather, volcanos, and earthquakes — and the ruling authority’s refusal to build any infrastructure to deal with any of it, meant that Icelanders died a lot. Like, a lot.

[⋯]

It should not surprise anybody then that the Icelandic independence movement was largely pacifist and non-violent. If the Danes threatened violence, like by sending a representative of the crown with an armed guard to demand that you ceded your demands of independence, you stood your ground but didn’t raise your fist. “We all protest.”

We attained self-rule in 1918 and from the start our constitution called for both pacifism and neutrality ….

Bow to no one

I know that civilians complain that Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings spends half an hour delivering a succession of several endings, but I am a nerd and they are wrong and I was sure glad to have the time to regain my composure before the lights came up when I first saw The Return of the King.

(Also I hope that the people who complain about the care The Lord Of The Rings takes in closing off several characters’ story arcs at the end have learned their lesson from several recent examples of epics which were lazier on this score. But I digress.)

Because I am that kind of nerd, I have watched the writers’ & director commentary on the Extended Dance Remix home video release, and when the “you bow to no one” moment comes, Jackson says that it is probably his favorite thing in the entire film series.

Jackson does not say why, but I think I know, because it is mine too; it makes me misty every time I watch it.

Jackson committed hard to the original book’s feudal worldview. We get Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor talking about their “quality”, ferggawdsake.

And then for a single blessed minute of screen time, Jackson says hell no. Your kingly bloodline did not do this, Aragorn II Elessar Telcontar. The restoration of the line of Isuldur is not the story here. Ordinary people standing up during extraordinary circumstances saved the world.

Damm right the hobbits do not bow.

Democracy.

I quite like this video-essay on the moment ...

… but I have to caveat that it references the Fremen Mirage, a far-right aphorism which is utter BS:

Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
Weak men create hard times.