Life under Capitalism – Page 5

is this commercial racist?

Published on November 18, 2011Leave a comment

I saw this commercial for the first time on tv tonight and I thought, hang on, is this, if not quite racist, at least a bit dodgy? Beheaded male and female Black bodies and stereotypical African imagery, all very sensual to sell a brand of chocolate called Afrodisiac? When the reality of chocolate production even in 2011 still depends for a frighteningly large extent on slave labour, including child labour in cocoa production in West Africa? To be fair Kraft foods, the owner of Cote d’Or, has signed the socalled Cocoa protocol which aims to child labour in cocoa production altogether, but as the Wikipedia article says, “ten years after implementation, it is unclear if the protocol had any effect in reducing child labor”.

So yeah, it makes me a bit uncomfortable watching this.

Truth will out

Published on September 28, 2011

Of course this video is bagatalised, made fun off, “revealed” to be a fake, dismissed as “old news”. All of which should not distract you from its message, which is not so much what this douchenozzle says but what it means. There’s no such thing as “the markets”, there are only people who have no problem profiting from sending the whole of Europe back into recession again.

(Via Vuijlsteke.)

Real names and other dangers

Published on August 29, 2011

On the subject of Google’s childish insistence on “real names” for its new Google+ service, jwz is scathing, but it’s this comment that gets it right on what mature online communities need to remain civil:

In 20+ years of online communication (much of it with people I either have never met, or only later met) I’d have to say the only reliable predictor of civil discussion is stability of identity, which allows reputation to work. You want people to use the same identity by which they are regularly known, so you can recognise it’s the same person again. As you note this worked just fine for most of USENET’s existence, through most of LJ’s existence, and across a wide range of BBSes prior to that. It even works across a diverse, but loosely related by theme, set of blogs, and their comments, providing there’s a general understanding that people will continue to use the same identity on all of them.

It’s not the only thing you need for a decent online community — you also need a good system to block the numpties, either through active but fair moderation or on the user side ala Usenet’s kill lists — but what you really don’t need and what’s in fact counterproductive is to insist on “real names”. Insisting on that is just another unnecessary hoop for people to jump through to start participating and only an idiot won’t realise that for very many people for very good reasons this is one hoop too far.

But of course Google and Facebook and all the other socalled social media sites are not interested in creating a proper online community, but rather an exploitable resource to sell to advertisers, for which purpose “real names” are much more valuable….

This was on my mind today

Published on July 15, 2011

In the midst of his vacation, Timothy Burke had to take an unforseen trip to the emergency room. Not a nice experience at the best of times, but this was in America and things are done differently there than in civilised countries:

After waiting two and a half hours, I began to get the picture. The nurse on duty repeatedly called patients who were not present, who had checked in and then left later on. At first I thought it odd that they kept calling and calling for almost thirty minutes for people who were very obviously not there while not calling cases of people who were present. Every once in a while, someone who was there was called and seen, though in a few of those cases, the nurse on duty simply took vitals again and sent them back to the waiting room. At the limits of my endurance, I finally went up to ask how long I might expect to wait. “We’re still seeing cases that checked in between one or two p.m. today,” I was told. Meaning it might be four in the morning before I was seen, I asked, stunned? Yes, that’s very possible, said the nurse. I gave up at that point: infection, disease, whatever it was, if I was going to continue to worsen overnight, I’d damn well go back and do it in my hotel room and hope for better in San Francisco. (Which I found, thanks in part to my Facebook friends.)

And why it’s on my mind is because I read about while I was waiting around an emergency room myself, as once again poor old S. had to be taken back into hospital. In our case though she was seen and helped within minutes and was it just the medicial process itself of getting her stabilised, getting an I.V. hooked up, blood tests, x-rays unsoweiter that took a long time. Bureaucratic nonsense? Much less. So whenever I’m starting to wallow in self puity I remember things could be much worse and we could’ve had all this shit in America and we’d been bankrupt or dead by now.

Girl cooties in science fiction

Published on June 21, 2011

Judith Tarr comments over at the SF Signal post about the importance of the Russ Pledge:

I am actually new to SF Signal because when I gafiated, I gafiated like holy whoa. Blew completely out of the genre and went mainstream.

It’s not any better there. And my real heart is in the genre.But when I came back…well, it’s over on my guest blog. The world I found myself writing in narrowed down something fierce at the turn of the millennium. There just weren’t any choices, apart from a specfic few. And I was so disconcerted, and taken aback, and beaten down as it went on, that I got to the point where if I was going to post somewhere, I’d start, then delete it. “Why bother? Nobody cares what I have to say.”

(You’ll have to scroll down quite a lot; SF Signal doesn’t do comment links.) She expanded on the same sentiments in later guest post, detailing her own personal history with “girl cooties”:

2001:
“You want to sell some more fantasy? Great! But can you do female protagonists? And put more romance in? Romance sells.” – OK, no problem, but I’d really like to do a male protagonist for this one if I–
“No, you can’t do that. You’re a girl. You need to write about girl heroes. Also, don’t get exotic. Really. Can you write something set in England?”
2003: “Yes, I know this is a secondary series in an established fantasy world. Yes, I know it’s a great story. And it has plenty of romance. But you have to tell it from a female POV. You can’t sell male POV.”
2005: “Female POV. Romance. Fantasy. You’re good at it. Don’t write anything different. And no, no male protagonist. Please.”
2009: “We love this strikingly unusual cross-genre book! It’s brilliant! We just hate to let it pass. But Marketing feels it’s too ‘girl-friendly’ for science fiction.”
2010: “This is full-on, grand-scale, old-fashioned space opera. Twenty years ago we’d have killed to get our hands on it. Unfortunately, we just can’t sell a book like this any more, unless you’ve been publishing books like this for, well, the past twenty years.” – Actually I would have, I wanted to, I tried. But.
2011: Time to think really seriously about that androgynous pseudonym. No, not because I’m giving up. Because I’m the mood to experiment, and I like to test hypotheses in the real world. A woman writing science fiction set in the medieval period is, by universal fiat, writing fantasy. Likewise if the science fiction is set in a preindustrial technological period, though it’s actually a prequel to a cycle of space operas that predated Stargate by a fair few years. One of those got sneaked into print a few years back as, you guessed it, a fantasy. With a pointed historical sting in the tail. (Points if you can guess, accurately, which one that is.)(It’s not under a pseudonym.) Now it might be the tech level that’s doing it, but all things considered…

Now of course one woman’s experiences don’t make a trend, but at the very least it makes for a useful — as Coffeandink put it — “contradiction of cultural narratives of straightforward political progress over time”. From Judith Tarr experiences it seems science fiction and fantasy publishers have become less welcoming to anything that doesn’t fit into a neat little subgenre, exacerbated by a gender essentialism that assumes that men write/read hard sf and women paranormal romances and never the twain shall meet. The insistent rumour that only two female sf authors still have contracts in the UK doesn’t help here either.

In general, from the discussions currently going on in especially British science fiction/fantasy circles, it does seem as if the options for female writers in particular have only narrowed over the past thirty years, with less women being published, less being read/reviewed and those who do make it forced towards what publishers think are typically female subgenres: urban fantasy, paranormal romance and so on. What I’m wondering about is how this trend correlates with that other trend of increased commercialisation and globalisation of publishing in the past thirty years. Because I think it does.

Back in the seventies there was room made for more diversity, for feminism in science fiction because writers, editors, reviewers and publishers were able to act outside of narrow profit/loss considerations. Not that publishing ever was a charity, but it makes a difference if you’re working for an independent family business or if your publisher is part of a multinational media conglomerate which sees novels largely as fodder for its television or movie investments. The bean counters have taken over and they’re wary of taking chances. What they want is predictable, repeatable successes, formula fiction and anything that doesn’t fit a succesful subgenre is not even considered.

And of course this sort of thinking reinforces the systemic biases already present in science fiction, with the result that it has become correspondently harder for women — and writers of colour — to be published…