james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2009-05-26 14:56:00
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Entry tags:memetic prophylactic recommended

Just in case you were worried
Despite the change in administration, SIGMA, whose members have offered such useful suggestions as the following:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

"The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway," Niven said.”


is still around.


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[info]agrumer
2009-05-26 07:22 pm UTC (link)
Hey, I got an idea! Maybe we could get obnoxious, self-important SF writers living off of money their ancestors stole from the government to leave the country by spreading rumors that the current president is a socialist who's going to confiscate everybody's wealth.

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[info]kynn
2009-05-26 09:18 pm UTC (link)
<3

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[info]roseembolism
2009-05-26 07:28 pm UTC (link)
Where's Senator Proxmire when you need him?

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-05-26 07:33 pm UTC (link)
(November 11, 1915 – December 15, 2005)

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[info]roseembolism
2009-05-27 02:37 am UTC (link)
No excuse for lying down on the job! Tha('s MY taxpayer dollers being wasted so Larry Niven can make stupid, bigoted comments.

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[info]gohover
2009-05-26 08:00 pm UTC (link)
I was tempted to comment on the Niven quote itself, but then I calmed down and reread this discussion on the subject: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1191274.html It saves time when a smart person has already said what you wanted to say!

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[info]roseembolism
2009-05-27 01:51 am UTC (link)
Oddly enough, one consequence of the various recent x-fail controversies is that I'm a lot less likely to give authors the benefit of the doubt.

When I first heard the quote by Niven I was wondering if it was supposed to be sarcastic, but now I basically just shrug and say "oh yeah, just another white writer who Just Doesn't Get It."

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[info]gohover
2009-05-27 02:26 am UTC (link)
Ah. I come down on the other side of the fence. For example, I think it is significant (as was discussed in the previous discussion) that Niven wrote a story called "the Roentgen Standard" (http://www.larryniven.org/stories/roentgen.shtml). And I feel very downhearted when someone says, in all seriousness, "another X writer" in a dismissive way where X involves a stereotype which involves race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, body type, and probably many other characteristics that I'm too downhearted to think of listing right now. See, oddly, I give you less slack than I give Niven. Is that fair? I'm just assuming you're being serious and Niven wasn't being serious. I dunno - maybe I'm unaware of all your tongue-in-cheek "modest proposals", in which case, please forgive me.

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-27 03:29 am UTC (link)
No, he's made other bigoted comments too. Blaming the Rodney King rioters for burning down his city, that sort of thing.

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[info]fridgepunk
2009-05-27 12:40 pm UTC (link)
Those weren't comments; that was the premise of a series of books he and pournelle wrote! and strictly speaking the full premise was that black people just like to go insane and burn down LA now and again, like in the Watts Riots! And have done so every so often since prehistoric time. The riots that occurred after the rodney king verdict was just the most recent example of this habitual behaviour black people are prone to.

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[info]gohover
2009-05-27 02:35 pm UTC (link)
Those books are some of the few books (co)authored by Niven that I haven't read. Niven just doesn't strike me as a racist, at least in print, but your comment (and Carlos' comment) made me curious, so I just skimmed the 54 reviews of Burning City on Amazon.com and not one of them mentioned racial issues. I don't conclude from that survey that you are wrong, but I have to admit I'm skeptical.

(Of course, this comment might inspire you to add your own review to Amazon.com...)

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(Anonymous)
2009-05-27 02:39 pm UTC (link)
Oh wait, I just remembered: Niven and Pournelle's arcology novel had some vileness in it. Hmph!

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[info]gohover
2009-05-27 02:40 pm UTC (link)
Oh wait, I just remembered: Niven and Pournelle's arcology novel had some vileness in it. Hmph!

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-27 02:48 pm UTC (link)
It's a very simple allegory.
The town consists of three classes: the Lords, the ruling class, who live in a separate area of the town; the kinless, the workers; and the Lordkin, organized into street gangs, who live by stealing from the kinless. The Lords supervise the kinless and tolerate the Lordkin. The kinless are unarmed and untrained in the use of weapons, and cannot resist the Lordkin.
Members of the Lordkin include characters based on Rodney King and O.J. Simpson, among others.

Translation: KNEE GROWS! KNEE GROWS! KNEE GROWS! RIVERS OF BLOOD! Nigra.

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[info]gohover
2009-05-27 03:01 pm UTC (link)
No, I got all that. Allegories about the LA Riots are treading on thin ice, and the three classes sound like a stupidly simplistic way to talk about the situation in LA, but I don't think your description alone demonstrates that the books are racist. If you want to say the books are racist, I'll pay attention to your opinion, but I'm not convinced.

Your translation whooshes over my head. Is it because I didn't see the movie about the Doheny family and milkshakes?

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-27 03:28 pm UTC (link)
Here's the thing: O.J. Simpson was a working class San Francisco kid who went to the same high school as Joe DiMaggio, who worked hard to become a professional football player -- the dude grew up with ricketts -- and a not-bad actor.

He is, however, black.

If N&P weren't making a racial allegory, why would they include Simpson among the Lordkin instead among the kinless?

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[info]gohover
2009-05-27 04:16 pm UTC (link)
Oh I see. Sorry, I got confused - I read the name "Lordkin" and was thinking "kin of lords". Yes, I'd expect a Simpson analog to be part of the ruling class, although perhaps still subject to some form of prejudice despite his wealth and fame. But if the ruling class rejects the possibilty of social mobility, then it depends on how you think of Simpson: do you think he is a murderer, and if so, is he a member of the working class who went bonkers one day, or was he always a secretly evil person and his murders revealed who he always truly was? In either case, Simpson being a murder suspect might have seemed more relevant to the authors than being African-American. But I can understand why you would find that argument tiresome.

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-27 04:39 pm UTC (link)
It's not like Niven's family hasn't had its share of celebrity crime, including a famous murder/suicide (and no one is quite sure who killed whom). And yet, they're white, and Niven isn't opining about the dysfunction of white society that causes those people to up and kill and cheat each other on a regular basis.

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-27 05:13 pm UTC (link)
Incidentally, while Niven has made unpleasant claims about black culture, his coauthor Pournelle believes that blacks are genetically inferior in IQ, praising the utterly debunked book The Bell Curve:
In almost all cases, for any definition of success, the single most effective predictor of success among the individuals of nearly any group will be IQ, except in situations in which particular skills dominate (such as sports and music performance). That isn't controversial among those who measure such things. The problem is the implications, since IQ is between 40% to 60% inherited. All this was made pretty clear in The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein, but the implications are so politically incorrect that the book remains nearly forbidden in academia. I was present at a AAAS meeting at which they had a special session to denounce The Bell Curve, led by a professor who chaired the meeting -- and began by announcing that he was proud to say he had not read the book they were about to review. The horror that ran through Big Science because of The Bell Curve has remained, even though the refutations have mostly be denunciations. The data indicate that Murray and Herrnstein were correct in general.
He'll die a bigot who believes in pseudoscience.

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-27 02:36 pm UTC (link)
He's gone into detail about the riots and the genesis of The Burning City and The Burning Tower in his personal commentaries scattered throughout his recent work, interspersed with his ideas about black manhood gathered from his partnership with Steven Barnes (and how it might be different for black women because Octavia Butler that's why).

His autobiographical comments are important, because otherwise one might be accused by the jackass contingent of basing an author's politics on their fiction. No, I base it on their direct personal testimony.

He's seventy-one and mentally fading, so the problem will solve itself soon. He wrote a good schtick forty years ago. Pity he hanged out with a bad crowd.

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[info]roseembolism
2009-05-27 07:45 pm UTC (link)
I've read the organlegging stories by Niven as well, but that's irrelevant. The point is, that even if it WAS a joke, it was a joke said at a conference that supposedly was sponsored by a government agency, in a capacity where tax moneys may be spent on Sigma. It was in incredibly poor taste, and demonstrates an insensitivity to racial issues that nobody in an alleged government think tank should have.

Get the picture? His comment was at the level of some idiot invited to speak at a conference on Israeli's west bank saying the answer to the problem is to scare settlers away by constructing concentration camps and ovens. So I really don't like the idea that some of my money may have gone to these Sigma morons.

As for calling a group what it is? How many authors in a circle of acquaintances have to put their feet in their mouths on the issue of race before we conclude that there's an institutional problem? I've lost the ability to give writers like Bear, Bujold, Wrede, and the rest of the SF Writer's Mafia any slack, especially when they think to peer down from their golden towers and lecture the rest of us on race.

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[info]gohover
2009-05-27 08:32 pm UTC (link)
Niven's remark certainly was in very poor taste - and even if he was making a joke, I think it is fine if you don't want your taxes spent that way. His remark also didn't make any economic sense (I think). There is the counter-argument that you can't be creative unless you loosen up, and I think the goal was to generate some creative ideas, but you're still entitled to request the proper amount of sensitivity, decorum, and good sense.

The problem I have with your comment is that you're openly admitting to racial prejudice and acting like that's ok. I read you as saying "Oh, a white writer, I'm going treat him differently on that basis alone."

--

Just as an aside which really doesn't matter, about your Middle East analogy: people have such varying views of what's going on in the Middle East that I think your analogy might not mean for a lot of people what you wanted it to mean.

As for me, given my view of what's going on there (I'm against the settlements but I am sympathetic to the large number of non-ideological recent immigrants who live in settlements for the cheap housing and wouldn't mind leaving), I think I understood your analogy and it made me laugh. It is difficult to imagine anything that would help the pro-settlement side more than something like that.

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[info]roseembolism
2009-05-28 01:39 am UTC (link)
Should I feel sorry for the poor oppressed writer here? Or should I be more concerned about your attempt to derail the topic?

This isn't about me, and stop trying to make this about me. The real issues involved are the following: Niven said something massively racially insensitive, possibly using some of my tax money to do so; also, there is a large group of white SF writers who display both similar racial insensitivity and no inclination to change. That's it. To accuse people who note that there is an institutional problem of racism is just yet another method of trying to derail the topic.

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[info]gohover
2009-05-28 03:05 am UTC (link)
If you like, you can show me which bingo spaces apply to me after you're done dissecting how I'm derailing the topic. When you're done, I'm still going to think that that the problem of racial insensitivity in SF and the corrosiveness of white privilege both stem from racial prejudice, and you're not going to making any progress on that front if you go around dismissing people on the basis of race. I'm sorry you couldn't have found a way to express your displeasure with Niven's remark without grouping him by race. I suppose you'd retort that Niven was being insensitive because he has benefited from white privilege, and that may be the case, but that's no reason to exhibit the same racial thinking that caused the problem in the first place. Actually, this does remind me of the middle east after all: stop the cycle!

The bingo space I'm occupying is labeled "color blind". The argument against being color-blind is that it asks people to suppress an important part of their identity. I would never do that. I would ask that people not impose a racial identity on someone else, even when pointing out how they may have benefited from others doing that. I think that when you refer to Niven and his friends as "white writers", you're perpetuating the cycle of racial prejudice.

(If you're not in the mood for this kind of conversation, I won't take offense if you don't want to have a debate. I read a ton of the racefail posts for months without commenting, and I suppose I'm letting out some of my frustration about a rather narrow point. I probably agree with you about the big picture, but people's resistance to transitioning to a post-racial era really bugs me.)

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[info]icecreamempress
2009-05-29 05:34 am UTC (link)
I think that when you refer to Niven and his friends as "white writers", you're perpetuating the cycle of racial prejudice.

Niven himself self-identifies as white, and draws boundaries between "white people" and other groups. Pointing that out isn't creating the issue.

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-26 08:09 pm UTC (link)
I DRINK YOUR EMERGENCY ROOM! I DRINK IT UP!

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[info]burger_eater
2009-05-26 08:52 pm UTC (link)
Oh, how I LOL-ed at this.

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[info]mjlayman
2009-05-27 12:06 am UTC (link)
And you know who gets treated and really don't pay is Medicare patients. Since it took three days for two ERs to figure out I'd had a big stroke, I'm getting copies of all the bills from those days and Medicare is paying very small amounts. I have a $50 copay for each stay, but Medicare isn't paying much more.

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[info]fridgepunk
2009-05-27 12:47 am UTC (link)
Oddly enough this is the exact same bollocks the BNP is trying to sell on the little election leaflets where they have a polish spitfire representing a british fight against european invaders, and some italian actors pretending to be british doctors and pensioners complaining about how all these immigrants are coming over here and somehow stealing money from the NHS and national pension schemes.

And considering the BNP is largely funded by a bunch of evil minded upper class american conservatives...

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[info]jakekesinger.pip.verisignlabs.com
2009-05-27 02:32 am UTC (link)
oh, thank God.

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[info]tekalynn
2009-05-27 05:51 am UTC (link)
*headdesk*

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[info]martin_wisse
2009-05-27 12:23 pm UTC (link)
Worse luck, WJW is still part of it and he's a much better writer than the people he associates with in it...

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-05-27 02:24 pm UTC (link)
I think Michael Swanwick is also a member, so WJW has some competition. Wait, there's a member page here:

http://www.sigmaforum.org/members.php

Dr. Arlan Andrews, Sr.
Austen Andrews
Dr. Catherine Asaro
Greg Bear
Dr. J. Douglas Beason
Dr. Gregory Benford
Dr. Ben Bova
Dr. David Brin
Jeffrey A. Carver
Marianne Dyson
Michael F. Flynn
Alan Dean Foster
Dr. Charles E. Gannon
Kathleen A. Goonan
Steven Gould
Peter J. Heck
John Hemry
Dr. Yoji Kondo
Jeffery D. Kooistra
Nancy Kress
Dr. Geoffrey A. Landis
Edward M. Lerner
Dr. Paul Levinson
Tom Ligon
Wil McCarthy
Victor Milan
Elizabeth Moon
Dr. Larry Niven
Mark O'Green
Tom Purdom
Dr. Jerry Pournelle
Mary A. Rosenblum
Dr. Stanley Schmidt
Bud Sparhawk
Bruce Sterling
Steve Stirling
Michael Swanwick
Dr. Ian Tregillis
Walter Jon Williams

</pre>

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[info]scentofviolets
2009-05-27 03:29 pm UTC (link)
Well there's a minor bit of oddness, the three best writers fall in the last five positions.

I'm curious as to Larry's state of mind when he made this comment; had he been drinking? I get the impression that Larry sober might be a quite a bit different guy than Larry drinking.[1] At least, I hope that's the case. I also get the impression that all those years of boozing might be having an affect on how he writes now. His last three entries, the Fleet of Worlds novels and Building Harlequin's Moon have been forgettable snoozers.

I'm concerned about the drinking for strictly personal reasons; I was for many years a two-pack-a-day man and didn't quit until I was forty. So even though I now run seven mile circuits, I worry about health issues later on in life.

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[info]akuchling
2009-05-27 03:32 pm UTC (link)
Some of the authors also did a panel at Reiter's Books, DC's technical bookstore at all; the WashPost covered the panel. I also went to the Reiter's panel, and it was like pretty much every SF con panel ever.

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