A Bit More Detail

Ryan Davidson, over at Law and the Multiverse, has an essay analyzing the Avengers‘ S.H.I.E.L.D.

He comes to the conclusion that, as depicted, makes most sense to see the organization as an American one with token representation from allies.

On balance, from a legal perspective and making allowances for artistic license, it would be better if S.H.I.E.L.D. were an American organization. Movies pretty consistently ignore what would be acts of war in the real world, even in non-speculative/comic book political and military thrillers. So if we give them a pass on that bit, the way S.H.I.E.L.D. acts a lot of the time really looks like a domestic military force. There’s still a problem though, given that The Council does appear to have members from multiple nations, but there might actually be a way of fixing that. There isn’t actually any obvious reason the U.S. couldn’t start a military force completely under domestic authority but, in a spirit of international cooperation, permit representatives from select foreign nations to participate in its operations. Given that S.H.I.E.L.D. is involved in some pretty hairy and advanced weapons R&D, this might actually be a decent way of convincing our allies to support the project, as they could exercise some control over the organization, trying to keep it focused on extra-terrestrial threats. This is, of course, not discussed in the movie at all, but there isn’t any obvious reason it couldn’t work.

Livejournaler dewline has posted on the nature of S.H.I.E.L.D., the paramilitary agency of great power in the Avengers universe that’s of uncertain constitutional status. He favours the idea of the agency as a paramilitary first-response team.

James Warner’s Open Democracy essay “Government Violence, Human Nature, and The Hunger Games” is an essay that takes a look at American writer Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games and Koushun Takami’s 1999 Battle Royale. These two stories feature children set against each other by their governments, forced to fight to the death for their societies’ edification. Warner contens that the brutal conflicts in these two novels reflect a more optimistic view of the human condition than one might find in the earlier Lord of the Flies, say; the earlier novel presumes that bloody conflict is inevitable, while the contemporary novels see conflict as a consequence of decisions made by more powerful outsiders.

In William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a group of boys on an island revert to a “state of nature” in the absence of adult supervision. The book is set during, and is on some level about, World War Two, in which Golding served as a Naval officer – but despite the murderous nature of some key governments in that conflict, the point of Lord of the Flies is that the violence ultimately lies within us. Golding wrote of the ending of the novel, “The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?”

Neither The Hunger Games nor Battle Royale bother with the ominous landscape descriptions Golding gives us in Lord of the Flies, partly because for Takami and Collins the evil is not in our nature, but in our government. For the same reason, few of the contestants in these books succumb to delirium as the boys in Lord of the Flies do – with only a few exceptions, they handle their predicament as rationally as if they were competing in a video game. One sense in which Lord of the Flies may be the darkest of these books, despite its comparatively modest death toll – only two murders – is that so many of its characters go mad. Even Ralph, the most clear-headed survivor in Lord of the Flies, keeps forgetting the boys’ long-term goal is to be rescued rather than to thrive as savages, and by the end all the other boys are united in trying to kill Ralph — whereas Katniss in The Hunger Games and Shuya in Battle Royale succeed against the odds in maintaining healthy alliances and remaining focused on a strategy, and only a few minor characters in those worlds go insane.

Moreover when a character in Battle Royale behaves evilly, Takami always supplies an explanation – this boy was born a sociopath, this girl was abused, most of the kids are just scared to trust each other in case they’re taken advantage of – evil is not seen as humanity’s default setting as it is in Lord of the Flies. The Hunger Games is less explicit on this ethical question, but the guiding principle of the series seems to be that people are good until power corrupts them. Both Takami and Collins portray the adult world as one of brutal conflict whose rules frustrate our normal instinct to cooperate. For Ralph, after he’s been hunted, wildness loses its attraction, but Katniss draws power from nature – hunting in the woods is how she becomes resourceful enough to stand up to authority, and it’s significant that even the harmful creatures she encounters there are not naturally occurring species, but mutations artificially engineered by her government.

Torontoist’s Steve Kupferman has a post up there highlighting the Toronto Public Library’s annual report. Despite cuts, he summarizes, the system is busier than ever.

* Wi-Fi Use Is Way Up: The Toronto Public Library offers wireless internet in all its branches, and Torontonians are evidently taking advantage. In 2011, TPL recorded 2,526,757 wireless sessions in its branches, up 126.5 per cent from 2010. By a wide margin, that’s the biggest usage jump in any service category. Library staff attribute the increase partly to the prevalence of new mobile devices, which sometimes connect to wireless networks without their owners realizing.
* Workstation Use, Also Up: Library computers had more users than the TPL’s wireless service, with 6,380,037 sessions in 2011, for a 6.5 per cent increase over 2010. Workstation usage numbers have been trending upward since at least 2007.
* Circulation Has Been Climbing Steadily for Five Years: Circulation (that is, the number of materials that were borrowed) at the TPL was 33,252,235 this year, up 2.9 per cent from 2010. And that’s no fluke: every year for at least the past five, circulation has increased by a comparable amount. The biggest growth category was e-books, e-audio, and e-video—though the report says these formats still make up only about 1.6 per cent of all items borrowed.
* Program Attendance, Too: 865,495 people attended library programs in 2011, which is a 9.4 per cent increase over 2010. Interestingly, the number of programs offered increased by 10.8 per cent over 2010: there were more events, and there were more attendees. We can only assume the two things are related.

io9 has featured an interesting book excerpt, “Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet”, taken from one Mark Dery‘s latest book. In it, Dery argues that the figure of HAL, the artificial intelligence from 2001 and sequels, is marked by a certain queerness notwithstanding the repression of sexuality in Clarke’s book and Kubrick’s movie, indeed because of this repression.

In the movie, the few female characters who flit through the novel have lost even their chauvinist, neo-colonial charm: Clarke’s “charming little stewardess” from the “largely unspoiled” island of Bali, who entertains Dr. Floyd with some zero-gravity dance steps during his flight to the moon, is reimagined by Kubrick as a weirdly sexless creature in a white uniform and bulbous cap that gives her a distinctly brachycephalic look, somewhere between an overgrown fungal spore and one of the walking, talking sperm in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex by Woody Allen.

Still, the repressed has a nasty way of returning. If HAL could cry digital tears, as the AI theorist Rosalind Picard speculates in Hal’s Legacy: 2001′s Computer as Dream and Reality, wouldn’t he also be capable of sexual arousal? Although her inquiry into machine emotion leads her to conclude that “emotion appears to be a necessary component of intelligent, friendly computers like HAL,” noting that “too little emotion wreaks havoc on reasoning,” Picard gives love a wide berth (many researchers don’t consider it a “basic” emotion, she says) and studiously avoids any mention of sexual desire, save for a passing remark about the slipperiness of a concept like “lust.”

This is a notable sin of omission, since the question is less laughable than it sounds. Turing believed that a true thinking machine would be a feeling machine, too—a computer with a sex drive as well as a hard drive. In a 1951 radio broadcast, he epater’d the bourgeoisie by declaring that a machine that thinks would be capable of being “influenced by sex appeal.” It seems only likely that an ultra-intelligent computer like HAL would, as Sir Geoffrey Jefferson put it in a lecture Turing was fond of quoting, “be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, [and] be charmed by sex.”

As for the question of HAL’s sexual preference, it seems significant, somehow, that the modern chapter of cybernetic smartness—Turing’s 1950 essay, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”—opens with a tongue-in-cheek bit of gender-bending, dreamed up by a gay man. Although the scenario commonly known as the Turing Test is usually envisioned as a human interrogator in a room with two terminals, one connected to a computer, the other to a human, attempting to determine by sending and receiving messages which of the unseen conversationalists is a machine, Turing’s original “imitation game” involved an isolated interrogator trying to decide, through written communications, which of two people in another room was male and which was female. Intriguingly, the woman is instructed to tell the truth and the man to lie, which means that he has to engage in a sort of electronic transvestism, or MorFing, as on-line crossdressing is known (“MorF” = “Male or Female”).

Turing writes, “We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?,” reformulating the question of gender identity as one of machine intelligence. As the cultural critic Hillel Schwartz points out in The Culture of the Copy, “Turing reframed the debate about the limits of mechanism in terms of the limits of our ability to see through social simulation. Without surgery but from close-up, onstage or at a party, a woman can pass as a man, a man as a woman. What we think we know about maleness and femaleness is a social knowledge.” And so, by extension, is what we think we know about human intelligence or, alternatively, hetero- and homosexuality.

Is HAL queer? As Dery suggests, his tone of voice and choice of language is suspicious, as is the stridently and entirely male environment in the halls of the military and academia where HAL grew up, and his multi-year mission on the spacecraft Discovery with its all-male crew. And, well, there’s the music:

When Dave unplugs HAL’s brain, the computer’s swan song is easily the movie’s most powerfully affecting moment (and a close second, for Wagnerian romanticism, to the dying android’s soliloquy in Blade Runner). In Hal’s Legacy, Clarke recalls, “In the early 1960s at Bell Laboratories I had heard a recording of an Iliac computer singing ‘Bicycle Built for Two.’ I thought it would be good for the death scene—especially the slowing down of the words at the end.” If we presume HAL’s homosexuality, however, the song begins to sound like a deathbed confession of star-crossed love.

I’d made note myself back in 2005 of the queerness of Arthur C. Clarke’s fictional universes expressed via lacuna, in the description of heterosexual relationships that take place outside the scope of the book or don’t take place at all (the homosexual relationships that actually are explicitly described play a secondary role in this case, and are not themselves necessarily diagnostic of anything).

I really quite like seeing Clarke’s impressive body of work be explicitly reclaimed in a queer context; I like the recuperation, or perhaps reconstruction, of themes which could have been/should have been explicit yet are easily recovered.

L.V. Anderson at Slate comes up with an interesting examination of racism in reactions to the casting of the movie version of The Hunger Games. How? She talks to two people quoted at the Hunger Games Tweets blog. Anderson doesn’t think that the approach of naming and shaming people who say racist things necessarily works.

[@ Zoee Toh
pinkmartini_1D

WHY IS RUE BLACK SIGH]

Zoee is also a student; she’s 16, and she lives in Singapore. “I was not being racist AT ALL,” she told me in an email. “When i [sic] tweeted that, it was because I was surprised Rue was a black girl as it was said in the book that Rue reminded Katniss of Prim, who was a small blonde pale girl.”

Zoee says she was “majorly pissed off” when she found out the creator of Hunger Games Tweets had published her tweet, which she described as tantamount to “slandering me.” (Zoee’s tweet appeared alongside the comment, “Why so sad? Is it really such a bummer that her casting stayed somewhat true to the book?” How this amounts to slander is unclear.) Zoee received a number of responses from strangers on Twitter, who “said stuffs [sic] like I was ruining humanity, I was fcking [sic] ugly and that I couldn’t read.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, being told that she’s fucking ugly and ruining humanity didn’t make Zoee reconsider the content of her tweet. “Maybe I could have phrased my surprise of Rue not looking like Prim in a less offensive way even if I had no intention of being racist AT ALL,” she wrote.

[. . .]

Being publicly shamed on Hunger Games Tweets didn’t [. . .] teach Zoee why it’s racist to ask why a character is black as though that’s a bad thing. Instead, it made her dig in her heels in her insistence that she’s not “racist AT ALL.” (Being insulted on Twitter seems to have taught Zoee that phrasing, rather than intention, is what matters.)

If the highly visible mockery of teenagers leads to a serious examination of the practices and institutions that perpetuate racism, perhaps it will be worth it. But I have my doubts. This kind of drive-by scapegoating does not seem conducive to genuine reflection (and it definitely doesn’t encourage reflection in the individuals it scapegoats). It allows us to point the finger at other, younger, relatively powerless people, rather than consider the ways in which we’re implicated in a problem that is much, much larger than a few misguided teenagers on Twitter.

This article on the dire economy of Panem, the far-future North American state of The Hunger Games trilogy, was written by one Kevin Baier, writer for the student paper of St. Mary’s College in Maryland (The Point News). Without giving away any spoilers, I can say that he has got the political economy of Panem down but good.

The President and senior government officials of Panem must have slept through ECON 101 back in their heyday at District 13 University (or maybe they were too busy rebelling). Minus The Capitol, Districts 1 through 12 have to suffer through the awfulness of pre-industrial agrarian economies. Many economists estimate that the GDP per capita of Districts 1 through 12 is a measly one loaf of bread, a two pound bag of berries, and one haunch of squirrel meat (approximately $7) whereas the GDP per capita in The Capitol is three supersonic trains and one eccentric wardrobe (approximately $36 million). Whereas The Capitol is home to approximately eight million people, all 12 districts house the other 300 million Panemians. Some welfare economists estimate the gini coefficient of Panem to be approximately .992.

The economic structure of Panem creates a net loss of human capital each year as some of the countries brightest and innovative entrepreneurs are forced to kill each other. Even human capital superstars like Katniss Everdeen are used inefficiently as her labor specialization lies far away from coal-mining, the main economic activity of her district (12). The Capitol has removed virtually all capital and labor incentives and has suspended all investment and capital flows to the outlying 12 districts. In District 12, for example, The Capitol has forced a labor intensive coal-mining operation where historical economic records note that before the rebellion District 12 grew at an average rate of six percent thanks to its capital intensive economy. The few Capitol scholars who say more than “punishment for the rebellion” when asked about District growth rates said District 12 is one of its more promising cases, growing at -26 percent every year.

Eventually, the inefficient allocation of resources to labor-intensive operations will skyrocket costs so the high the CBO estimates that Panem’s unemployment rate will increase from 35 percent to 62 percent. Real wages have been so depressed for years that consumption and savings levels are at historic Panem lows. Because the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is approximately one, the citizens of Districts 1 through 12 have fallen into the “poverty trap.” With such low levels of consumption and savings, and subsequently output, the tax base will shrink incredibly. This shrinkage will force The Capitol to dramatically increase marginal tax rates for its citizens from zero percent to 91 percent, a level not seen since the Kennedy administration, which will eventually cause severe contractions of capital, investment, and labor because of the low-value of work and the high level of leisure. The inevitable substitution effect will eventually cause The Capitol to resemble something like a Hooverville.

On Facebook a week ago I’d linked to the blog Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr blog that collected screenshots of various of the racist statements made by fans of The Hunger Games who were shocked and angered that–as explicitly described in the book–major characters were cast by African-Americans. Anna Holmes’ New Yorker article goes into more detail about the genesis of the blog, written by a 29-year-old Canadian male of Caribbean descent who was stunned by the racism of many of the people who were angered and upset by casting decisions based on the book.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Hunger Games Tweets took off: the project is a potent mix of pop-culture criticism, social-media sharing, provocative statements, and public shaming. But more important, and no doubt more disturbing, is what Adam’s time line of ignorant tweets—what he calls “the repository of death”—says about a certain generation’s failure of imagination. (A look at the tweeters’ profile pictures suggests that most of the missives were written by people in their teens and early twenties. Jezebel reported in a postscript that most of the people quoted on Hunger Games Tweets have since taken down their accounts or made them private.)

In addition to offering object lessons in bad reading comprehension, Hunger Games Tweets—there are now more than two hundred up on the blog—illuminated long-standing racial biases and anxieties. The a-hundred-and-forty-character-long outbursts were microcosms of the ways in which the humanity of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscored how infuriatingly conditional empathy can be. (“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad,” wrote @JashperParas, who amended his tweet with the hashtag #ihatemyself.) They also beg the question: If the stories we tell ourselves about the future, however disturbing, don’t include black people; if readers of “The Hunger Games” are so blind as to skip over the author’s specific details and themes of appearance, race, and class, then what does it say about the stories we tell ourselves regarding the present?

Adam says that the pivotal moment in the evolution of Hunger Games Tweets came on or around March 23rd, after he posted a tweet by someone named Alana Paul, a petite brunette who went by the handle @sw4q. Alana’s tweet was not the most offensive or nakedly racist of the bunch (that award could go to Cliff Kigar, who dropped the N-bomb, or to @GagasAlexander, who complained of “some ugly little girl with nappy…hair.”) but perhaps the most telling. “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture,” she wrote. She cc’ed a friend on the tweet, @EganMcCoy.

“That tweet was very telling, in terms of a mentality that is probably very widespread,” says Adam, speaking softly from his office high above Toronto’s downtown financial district. He doesn’t sound angry, but he also isn’t amused. The phrases “some black girl” and “little blonde innocent girl” are ringing in my head as he talks, as are thoughts about how the heroes in our imaginations are white until proven otherwise, a variation on the principle of innocent until proven guilty that, for so many minorities, is routinely upended.

Adam tells me that, on the post featuring a screenshot of Alana’s tweet, he added, “Remember that word innocent? This is why Trayvon Martin is dead.” As he says it, I am thinking the same thing: of our culture’s association of whiteness with innocence, of a child described without an accompanying adjective, of a child rendered insignificant and therefore invisible because of his or her particular shade of skin. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” explains the protagonist in another famous work of fiction, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” which was published sixty years ago this month. “Invisible” can mean unseen, but just as often it speaks to others’ inability to see beyond something, or someone. The renaming of Rue as “some black girl” is a version of this, as is the pursuit and murder of the seventeen-year-old Martin, who, by some accounts, was shot dead by the self-professed neighborhood watchman of an Orlando-area community because all George Zimmerman could see was that he was young, male, and black.

Torontoist’s Graeme Bayliss contributed an interesting detailed history of Ernest Hemingway’s experiences in Toronto some days ago. I’d known about Hemingway’s history in Toronto, writing for the Toronto Star as a correspondent in the 1920s even while he enjoyed the Paris experience.

It was, as you might expect, Hemingway’s proclivity for storytelling that landed him a job in Toronto. While cottaging with his family in Petoskey, Michigan, Hemingway was asked to deliver a speech at the local women’s club, sharing with the audience his experiences as a soldier with the Italian army during the First World War, from which he had recently returned.

Of course, Hemingway had never fought with the Italian forces. He had been a volunteer ambulance driver with the Red Cross. He was handing out chocolates and cigarettes to Italian soldiers when his leg was seriously wounded by mortar fire. After extensive surgery and a long period of convalescence, he was sent home to the United States, having served for two months. This, however, did not make for a good story. So Hemingway procured a custom-tailored Italian officer’s uniform and cape, and made up a better one instead.

Harriet Connable, a wealthy Torontonian who was vacationing in Petoskey with her husband, Ralph, was so moved by Hemingway’s speech at the women’s club that she asked if he would consider staying at the couple’s mansion in Toronto. Harriet believed that the courage and pluck Hemingway showed in recovering from his leg injury might serve as an inspiration to her invalid son, Ralph Jr., and so she offered him a position as the boy’s caretaker and mentor while she and Ralph Sr. travelled to Florida on holiday. Through the elder Ralph’s business connections, Hemingway was able to secure a job writing features for the Star Weekly.

Hemingway was excited by the prospect of working for the Star, but less enthusiastic about taking care of Ralph Jr., whom he regarded as an irredeemable bore. The Connables insisted that Hemingway, who was adept at nearly every sport he tried, should attempt to interest their sickly son in athletics. One such attempt entailed taking Ralph to watch the Toronto St. Patricks, who, seven years later, would be renamed the Maple Leafs. Although the St. Pats were not a particularly skilled team in 1920, they were an undoubtedly truculent one, and Hemingway admired their scrappy style of play. That’s right: Ernest Hemingway was a Leafs fan.

Apparently, though, Hemingway’s liking for Toronto diminished sharply over time.

Go, read.

A Crooked Timber link quotes Victorian cookery writer Isabella Beeton‘s paradigmatic book Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management on the subject of coffee.

-It is true, says Liebig, that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea and coffee; and daily experience teaches us that, under certain circumstances, they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal functions; but it is an error, certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects; and it is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them. Science, which accuses us of so much in these respects, will have, in the first place, to ascertain whether it depends on sensual and sinful inclinations merely, that every people of the globe have appropriated some such means of acting on the nervous life, from the shore of the Pacific, where the Indian retires from life for days in order to enjoy the bliss of intoxication with koko, to the Arctic regions, where Kamtschatdales and Koriakes prepare an intoxicating beverage from a poisonous mushroom. We think it, on the contrary, highly probable, not to say certain, that the instinct of man, feeling certain blanks, certain wants of the intensified life of our times, which cannot be satisfied or filled up by mere quantity, has discovered, in these products of vegetable life the true means of giving to his food the desired and necessary quality.

So true, Isabella, so true. (I’m typing on my laptop in Starbucks on Church).