Anne Rice: political correctness is new form of censorship in the book biz

[popobawa4u]

@anon50609448

Most people can’t conceive of the idea of deciding to want something different than they currently want. Their wants and emotions are part of their identities.

This always perplexes me, as it seems lazy and ineffective, yet extremely pervasive. Wants and identities seem rather insubstantial. And emotions, although quite real, seem to be unreliable bases for making decisions. I agree though that what tends to limit people’s capacity to define themselves is a strong tendency to identify with their own behaviors.

@anon50609448

So some people who lack control over themselves manage to nonetheless effect control over other people. That is, you can control others without controlling yourself, and those others are not controlling themselves

No, change and control are not necessarily the same, as the latter is directed. If somebody tries to exploit me and I instead choose to die, then their coercion is not effective. People cannot effectively exploit what they cannot understand. This does not suggest that there won’t be effects from their actions, but they will need to instead depend upon simplistic goals and methods to appear successful, making them victims of circumstance.

@anon50609448

What is the difference between being technically capable of self-control in a deep-down-whether-you-know-it-or-not sense but choosing not to exercise it (and continuing to make that choice for the rest of your live) and being incapable of that control? What test could we do in the real world to determine which of these hypotheses is true?

It depends who you ask. Neither are true in any absolute, objective sense. I think that some cultures discourage self-discipline because they are decadent, desperate, clinging to a lowest-common-denominator which is too simplistic to be practical. So it is easier for people to save face by insisting that brutality is to be held in esteem when it is rationalized by “the right people”.

@anon50609448

It is a choice made by billions of people, and as such should not be dreamed away by some kind of personal empowerment theory. That other people make money have power is a fact about the world. But if a billion people are giving power to money, then money has that power. Or are we incapable of actually making that choice?

Making a choice need not make something true, or accurate. Money and government are human technologies, so their power is not self-determined. Like other tools, they have no actual agency or autonomy. They only appear to by proxy through their use by people. So people have real power, and money symbolizes that power. But their agency is not transferable to it. Even governments staffed by humans work this way, as the power is seen to reside in the office, not the person. Like money, the political office is merely a technology which is impotent in itself.

Not everybody symbolizes the same way. And, even in a democratic society, there is no assurance that the most popular representations are necessarily the most accurate. Or that the same social tools will be applicable to different kinds of social problems. Popularity contests can work well in the realm of pure abstracted ideology, but this becomes problematic when it is supposed to interface with tangible resources, as playing games with the symbols has no direct effect upon these.

[anon50609448]

@popobawa4u

This always perplexes me, as it seems lazy and ineffective, yet extremely pervasive.

I don’t know why you assume it’s lazy. I don’t call you lazy for choosing to walk instead of teleport around. How sure are you that other people can do what you are saying they can do?

@popobawa4u

No, change and control are not necessarily the same, as the latter is directed. If somebody tries to exploit me and I instead choose to die, then their coercion is not effective. People cannot effectively exploit what they cannot understand.

Unless their goal was to have you submit or die and they didn’t have a preference as to which. People can definitely exploit what they don’t understand. Without understanding gravity, heat, friction, what solidity is, or hundreds of other things properly at all people build fantastic structures in the ancient world. The extent to which something is understood or not understood is just one of many variables.

@popobawa4u

Popularity contests can work well in the realm of pure abstracted ideology

I would say that popularity contests (insofar as the power of money, the power of government are popularity contests) have proven themselves to work in the realm of actual reality since real things really happen under these systems, whereas the ideas you are proposing are purely abstract.

Anyway, we fundamentally disagree about autonomy, agency, and how those interact with our physical environments. Traffic accidents are strongly linked to highway design. If I put benches in the hallway of my building, more people will sit in the hall than if I don’t put benches in. If you want a customer to leave a store you are working at, you slowly walk towards the door while talking to them, and when you get there, they leave more times than not. Our egos tell us we have autonomy, but really our actions are determined by factors both inside and outside of ourselves - including other people, environments, and tools.

[popobawa4u]

@wysinwyg

(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)

I saw that! I agree that this seems like common sense to most people. But people can in fact make decisions without having any wants or preferences, despite that this seems counter-intuitive to many. But I would argue that making such dispassionate decisions is more effective than feeling compelled by wants. Your preferred unit of measure may vary.

@anon50609448

How sure are you that other people can do what you are saying they can do?

Quite. Personal identity works not unlike memory, it is a discontinuous jumble which feels subjectively whole. Viewed from outside, the boundaries of ego, identity, and wants are easy to see in people. Some people choose to exploit these cracks for advertising, religion, and politics, but their real value is the enabling of the individual to enable different types of cognition. The only thing which prevents most people is the assumption that their ego is somehow more real than other things.

@anon50609448

Unless their goal was to have you submit or die and they didn’t have a preference as to which.

Submission to what? Their will? Do they actually have a distinct will, or are they merely motivated by the same pre-programmed desires as many other people? Who nonetheless each seem to like to assume that they are doing something especially clever, because their “self” must somehow be more significant than another “self”? Do they have a real will one could submit to?

@anon50609448

People can definitely exploit what they don’t understand. Without understanding gravity, heat, friction, what solidity is, or hundreds of other things properly at all people build fantastic structures in the ancient world. The extent to which something is understood or not understood is just one of many variables.

Then this could be divided between fortuitous accidents, and incomplete understandings. But are any understandings ever conclusively complete?

What I was getting at is that much of the modern world occurs within relationships which are too complex to be enveloped within classical territorial concerns. Even if a person thinks that they “own” a resource, they will still be unable to exploit it, relative to someone who understands it more thoroughly than they do. So accepting territory as control gets us only a revolving door of “the biggest monkey”, whilst ensuring an inability to effectively manage resources, which is hardly a plan for success. Is somebody who selfishly destroys their community, or even their ecosystem really in control? What if the process kills them as well?

@anon50609448

I would say that popularity contests (insofar as the power of money, the power of government are popularity contests) have proven themselves to work in the realm of actual reality since real things really happen under these systems

I’d say that this is a tautology. They “work” by fiat by displacing other systems, but don’t work well enough to reliably achieve specific goals, apart from “more of the same”.

@anon50609448

whereas the ideas you are proposing are purely abstract.

So people keep telling me. What abstract idea did I propose? All I basically said was that identity itself is abstract.

@anon50609448

Anyway, we fundamentally disagree about autonomy, agency, and how those interact with our physical environments.

I would say so.

@anon50609448

Our egos tell us we have autonomy

That is itself a large part of the problem. Believing anything tends to be a bad idea, and believing one’s own ego traps one in deeper subjectivity.

@anon50609448

really our actions are determined by factors both inside and outside of ourselves - including other people, environments, and tools.

I agree. But the boundaries of inside/outside self are far more arbitrary than most seem to suppose. This variance also redefines what even constitutes action and determinacy.

[anon8420928]

How do you guys do this? I can go a few rounds, but I just get bored.

[Daedalus]

@Missy_Pants

Who would have guessed that Anne Rice reads Jezebel?

That article gives a lot of valuable context.

I can say that I’ve got no problem with saying that the writer (or more likely, publisher-with-a-brand-name-and-an-army-of-freelancers) of a novel about Christian redemption of a Nazi starring a Jewish protagonist had better have their flame retardant suits on - you SHOULD have to answer a lot of difficult questions before you write such a book. And if you can’t answer them adroitly, perhaps you shouldn’t be writing such a book.

And if you CAN, you still have no right to expect the road to public acceptance to be an easy one.

[Missy_Pants]

Nazi porn usually takes on such a different format that redemptive romance novels…

[anon50609448]

@popobawa4u

I’d say that this is a tautology. They “work” by fiat by displacing other systems, but don’t work well enough to reliably achieve specific goals, apart from “more of the same”.

So my contemporary life, with 1 in 300 child mortality, life expectancy in the 80s, and time to even talk about this kind of stuff instead of working myself to death under a pharaoh’s whip is just “more of the same” compared to the slaves who built the pyramids? If so, then you’ll have to explain how anything could possibly be different…Every generation in history has thought the world was going astray, their children were disrespectful, and the concept of marriage was being destroyed. They were all stupid and wrong. Lots of progress has been made.

@popobawa4u

So people keep telling me. What abstract idea did I propose? All I basically said was that identity itself is abstract.

That sure sounds like an abstract idea to me. What is concrete about it? I’d also hazard to say that you said a great deal more than “identity itself is abstract.”

@popobawa4u

I agree. But the boundaries of inside/outside self are far more arbitrary than most seem to suppose. This variance also redefines what even constitutes action and determinacy.

Then what was all this:

@popobawa4u

Money and government are human technologies, so their power is not self-determined. Like other tools, they have no actual agency or autonomy. They only appear to by proxy through their use by people. So people have real power, and money symbolizes that power. But their agency is not transferable to it.

It sure seems like you’ve drawn a hard line between what is inside and what it outside the person, with money and government being outside.

[anon50609448]

For moderators looking to move this side discussion to a new thread, but too baffled to think of anything to call that thread, I might suggest any of: “Philosophy Train Wreck - Look Away” “0th World Problems” or “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK”

[popobawa4u]

@anon50609448

So my contemporary life, with 1 in 300 child mortality, life expectancy in the 80s, and time to even talk about this kind of stuff instead of working myself to death under a pharaoh’s whip is just “more of the same” compared to the slaves who built the pyramids? If so, then you’ll have to explain how anything could possibly be different…Every generation in history has thought the world was going astray, their children were disrespectful, and the concept of marriage was being destroyed. They were all stupid and wrong. Lots of progress has been made.

The concept of “progress” relies upon the subjective viewpoint of the individual. I agree that there are changes to humanity over generations, but these still tend to be more accidentally accumulative than deliberate. And it still depends upon billions of people “just happening” to have the same goals, despite claiming to act as individuals. I can work with individualism or collectivism, but most people I talk with tend to jumble them ad-hoc, picking the worst of both worlds. Maybe I should get out more!

@anon50609448

That sure sounds like an abstract idea to me. What is concrete about it? I’d also hazard to say that you said a great deal more than “identity itself is abstract.”

What is concrete about its lack of concreteness? This is a logical regress. I know I said more, but “identity itself is abstract” sums the essence of my point. As the excuse most people rationalize their actions with, it can still be illusory even if their consequent actions are tangible. Humans are well-known for their informal self-contradictory systems, and even joke about them often.

@anon50609448

It sure seems like you’ve drawn a hard line between what is inside and what it outside the person, with money and government being outside.

In discussion, “other people” insist upon the line being there. I pointed out a few posts ago that individuals directly create and sustain these systems. Yet when I encourage people to hack them, to be more diverse and create other kinds of systems, they assert that such structures are concrete, and their own helplessness. When I happily explain to people that they themselves are, as much as anyone, free to do and change these things, they get angry, and lash out with litanies of fictitious boundaries which they usually yet admit exist only as artefacts of their social conditioning.

When money and government are on the inside, anyone can implement them. This is the secret world of egalitarianism, and acknowledging this out of respect for people unfortunately seems to inspire more fear than enthusiasm.

[anon26940528]

@anon50609448

But I disagree that being fired for your political affiliation is censorship. It’s not theft or murder either. Losing your job isn’t being censored, it’s losing your job.

Spoken like someone who doesn’t worry about anticipating homelessness after losing a job. I’m sorry, but if you can’t speak because of existential fear, it’s censorship. If you want to argue semantics, fine- do it without me.

[bibliophile20]

The “censorship” that Anne Rice is whining about is the mass recoiling in disgust and anger at a romance novel published last year, that nearly won a major Romance novel award (RITA)…

with the “romance” being between a Nazi Camp Commandant and a Jewish woman he plucked out from the killing line. (who converts to Christianity at the end, because it was written by an Evangelical Christian who saw the book of Esther and went, “I like it, but it needs more Jesus.”).

And the author also had the gall to use the Holocaust Remembrance Day to promote her book, along with the gates of Auschwitz, and, when called on it, made a non-pology that boiled down to “I’m sorry I offended people, but I’m not sorry I wrote this.”

Roundup of the whole issue (posts, reviews, etc)

[anon33466019]

@popobawa4u

Nobody has more power than anybody else

I have the power… To move you.

Tenacious D - Wonderboy (Official Video)

But in all seriousness, yes some do. I convince people to do things they don’t want all the time,and more skilled people do it to me all the time. Is this not representative of a pyramid of power?

[lishevita]

Even if it is offensive to write about a Nazi converting a Jewish woman to Christianity, it still shouldn’t be censored. (And the fact that I feel the need to point out that I’m Jewish is proof that the intense rage machine that is the Internet does create a censorious environment.) But, besides that, I have heard people complain that white people shouldn’t write books about Native Americans or blacks or Asians because white people just can’t KNOW what it’s like to be any of those other things. Same same with the Christians writing about Jews thing. She’s not making this up.

And, yeah… I don’t like the term “politically correct”, but what she’s saying is true. Fiction SHOULD be a place to explore all sorts of ideas – even the really awful ones – and the public’s role is to read and absorb, read and discuss/critique, or simply not read. The public’s role should not be to say, “You shouldn’t write that!”

[lishevita]

Sounds like a truly horrid book! But, it’s also a fantasy story that a lot of Evangelicals would really enjoy. Yeah, I don’t like it, but I can discuss it and say how gauche it is without saying that she shouldn’t have written it. I find a lot of Evangelical Christian fiction to be offensive. They don’t much care for the fantasy and sci-fi I usually consume for entertainment, so we’re even.

[anon33466019]

I have been lectured by dear, close, intelligent friends that a white person can never, ever understand a person of color, specifically because of system theory and concepts like symbolic anthropology.

When I point out, politely of course, that they are using models to defend a real world construct instead of using the model to understand the real world construct, I usually get a drink thrown in my face.

But back on topic, I haven’t read the book. It sounds awful. But as kids said back in my day, what-ev-uh.

[Thebarton_Gamer]

@lishevita

The public’s role should not be to say, “You shouldn’t write that!”

But if nobody buys your shitty, offensive book, that’s exactly what the public has done.

[Mitchell]

@popobawa4u

When I happily explain to people that they themselves are, as much as anyone, free to do and change these things, they get angry, and lash out with litanies of fictitious boundaries which they usually yet admit exist only as artefacts of their social conditioning.

You pointed out yourself that individuals directly create and sustain these systems, thing is lots of individuals trump a single individual.
If just about everyone agrees money is a valuable thing, that governments have control over territory and make rules that most people agree to live by, and that property is a thing, then they are effectively real.
A single individual cannot change things at that scale.
You need other people to go along with you, and the only way that happens is if you can convince them there is another way to do things and it works better than what we have now.
People get irritated when you tell them to do that because you seem to think that’s a big revelation. It isn’t.
Thing is, while you’re working for change you still have to deal the society we’ve got now.

Sure; Money, government, power, all that stuff is an illusion, the aggregate of all our collective individual decisions.
But the choice isn’t between treating that stuff as mattering or living in your own utopia, it’s between being a part of society or cutting yourself off from everyone else.

[bibliophile20]

I can make the criticism of saying, “You (the author) claim to have ‘the greatest love and respect for the Jewish people’. If you truly felt that you wouldn’t have written this book.” I’m not saying that the copies should be rounded up and mulched (as tempting as it is to make that statement) but I also have the right to free speech, and that includes voicing my own opinions, and, nowhere in her right to free speech is the freedom to avoid the consequences of writing something so incredibly offensive.

[Missy_Pants]

I posted that above, Jezebel covered it, truly truly horrible. I should be amazed at the hubris of the “American Christian Redemptive Romance Novel” clique, but I’m not.

[Missy_Pants]

People weren’t upset that it was written so much as it was published and won awards.
People are free to write whatever the want, thats what Tumblr and fanfic forums are for.
But to be published and win awards for terrible books? Yeah, no, I’m going to say “no, that should not happen”.

(And full disclosure; as a Canadian, I will always defend the Governor Generals award being given to Marian Engel’s ‘Bear’.)