Letting the Resentment Settle In, Research Time, 09/05/2018

So I mentioned the other day that Paul Patton established his professional reputation by shifting a lot of folks in the North American academy’s community of Continentalists.*

* These are the researchers who specialize in pretty much any philosophical writer from the European continent from Hegel onward. This is the slightly disdainful label they’re given in the North American mainstream of university philosophy. In Cultural Studies departments, they’re just called profs.

There's no need to take affront on his behalf.
Deleuze never took affront at anyone, as far as
I know. The occasional awkward moment, but
never affront. He was very consistent that way.

Patton was trying to shift the whole field’s centre of gravity – from Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming and production. That’s great. But there are some passages of Deleuzian Concepts that make me cringe – the tone of his writing makes his critique feel uncomfortably personal.

Not personal in the sense that it involves a particular person in Patton’s circle, about which he has biases or excess sympathy. Aside from Gilles Deleuze, of course.

See, there was one event that kind of dropped the ball on Deleuze and Félix Guattari's international public relations. It was a conference at Columbia University in 1975.

Total disaster. There was a group of radical feminist activists who were so essentialist about the nature of gender that hearing Félix Guattari give a talk about how any essentialism would send them into a frenzy.

Up next, Félix Guattari discussing how all forms of essentialism are utter failures as theories because they include no possibility for change. A man will always be phallocentric in all aspects of his existence – ridiculous, when we are all processes, changing all the time.

Really, gender is changeable as both a social and physical construct, so there can be as many genders as our ingenuity and self-discipline can successfully create.** They refused to hear it and heckled him all lecture.

** TERFs. Félix Guattari was heckled by a bunch of TERFs. You do know, right, that the philosophical basis for all TERF activism and ideology is this utterly obsolete, bumbling theory of gender essentialism? It’s a theory that has failed as knowledge because reality is utterly different from how it says the world should be.

Then a bunch of guys from the local Lyndon LaRouche society started interrupting Michel Foucault’s closer, screaming that he was paid by the CIA. Yeah, that Lyndon LaRouche.

If he's in the CIA, then the Maidan protestors were all gay fascists
working for the Americans, whose government is funded by
George Soros and the Freemasons' cabal whose Grand Wizard
is Barack Obama. Here to our newsdesk at RT to explain why
all this makes sense, aside from government orders to believe it,
is respected American economist, philosopher, and activist
Lyndon LaRouche.

Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault were all so upset at how they were insulted all though the conference, that they all decided they didn’t want to go back to America again. Foucault overcame his initial disgust more quickly.

The next time he did an appearance in New York, another dick from the LaRouche society asked him about the charges that he was CIA. At least he had the decency to wait until question period. But Foucault immediately goes on the warpath.

“Yes! Yes, I am CIA! And she’s CIA! And he’s CIA too! And everyone in this room is CIA except you. You work for the KGB!”***

*** Michel Foucault. You know how to deal with crazy fascist internet trolls when the internet was still secret military tech. We lost you too soon, old man.

But Deleuze and Guattari themselves hardly went back to America. It took that extra generation of mostly Canadian philosophy researchers who first translated and wrote on Deleuze to bring him to the prominence he has in the North American academy today. Paul Patton was part of that generation, even if he does suffer from being Australian.

It was a public relations screw-up. The conference let too many extremists in, when they needed an audience of thoughtful nerds. Like the generation of Patton, Boundas, Genosko, Massumi. But Deleuze and Guattari were too pissed off about it to bother going back to America. They presumed they’d get the same reception.

That is painful in so many ways, paths, vectors. Sports teams need
therapists to help players deal with their own-goals.

Own goal, guys.

Yet when Patton writes his remarks about the feminist and postcolonial misinterpretation of Gilles Deleuze, including the 1975 conference, a bitterness seeps into his tone. And it isn’t necessary.

He’s trying to make an important point – don’t take Deleuze’s words like ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘nomadism’ as metaphors, but as literal descriptions of thought processes in the most abstract language he and Guattari could muster.

Patton seems bitter at the misinterpretation, as if it was an affront to be misunderstood. That somehow these feminists and these post-colonial writers were foolish, inadequate thinkers for taking Deleuze to be writing metaphors, saying that disruptive thought is merely “like” a bedouin nomad.

He strings well-meaning, professional, thoughtful theorists with extremist radical TERFs. I don’t think Patton would like it if I said explicitly what I don’t like about this part of his book.

Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to say it.

Don’t Expect the Writing to Be As Clean As the Written, Composing, 12/04/2018

In his book about Deleuze’s early development as a thinker, Michael Hardt discusses an insightful comment Gilles makes. It’s a notion that a lot of folks in academic university culture need to remember, especially in the humanities where rhetoric and argument is so much a part of our methods.

There's a distinction between inquiry and presentation. Inquiry is the process of conceiving, researching, and composing a project or some other piece of work. Presentation is the finished product.

Preparing a massive research and writing project is, oddly enough, a
difficult task that isn't perfectly conceived at the beginning. You'd
think that would make sense to people. Maybe it does, but they
don't actually care.

Presentation is a polished, detailed, clear expression of a complex research program and argument. The inferences have been ordered so that each step in the argument flows sensibly from what’s come previously. All the empirical studies supplement and ground the more conceptual parts in an elegant structure.

Inquiry is a great bloody chaotic mess. You redefine the scope, aims, and likely conclusions of the project several times over as you do research. Some angles and sources are thrown out entirely as irrelevant in the light of other discoveries. An argument that you think is going to flow in one direction ends up utterly rearranged. Inquiry is a state of flux.

It sounds so sensible. It sounds so obviously true. It makes perfect sense. So why do so many academics, in my experience and in the experience of many other people, ignore it?

I’m speaking to my experience mostly in philosophy circles, where a bit more emphasis is put on argument than in other disciplines. But I move in pretty interdisciplinary circles today, and what I’m about to describe is pretty common across the humanities and social sciences.

A younger student comes to a more experienced professor, or to a group of her peers, for advice about a project in progress. She lays out the skeleton of an argument, what some of her main sources are so far, what empirical content is coming into play. She asks for advice.

Throwing around thousands of ideas – about research, examples,
empirical evidence, inference, argument structure, order of
presentation, concepts themselves – is part of writing. So why don't
people criticize an ongoing project as if it were actually an ongoing
project? Why do people not see the mess?

But she gets hit with verbal axes. Her messy, still-uncertain project that still has plenty of loose ends get hit with ruthless criticism. None of it is helpful. It’s all phrased to make her project seem inadequate, like a waste of her time. Instead of helping her to understand a difficult landscape, her superiors and colleagues berate and belittle her for not understanding her project.

They’re treating an inquiry as if it was the presentation. A messy project in progress as if it was a polished final product. This even though she introduces her material with countless qualifiers – it’s a work in progress, she’s looking for advice, looking for any blind spots she may have, any research directions that may turn out to be blind alleys for her priorities.

Instead, her colleagues and superiors are more concerned with scoring points. Making themselves look good by making her look bad. Feeling better about themselves by cutting someone else down.

All too often, this is how academicians treat each other. I described it in self-consciously gendered terms because it does – on balance – happen to women much more often than to men. But it happens to men too. It happens to anyone who looks vulnerable in a research community where knowledge is seen as a battleground for prestige.

Do you do it for the letters after your name? For the professional designations to list after your email signature? We should be doing it for the progress of human knowledge. Typical humanity, we so often fall short of what we claim we’re doing because we aren’t really doing what we claim.

The Terror of Men, Composing, 30/10/2017

So I haven't written a post about my artistic work in a while, and I really should. I’m getting to the point where my Patreon’s getting hungry for more content. And if you’ll allow me to get a little crassly commercial here, I’m getting close to a point where the activities of Adam Writes Everything are going to get a bit more commercial.

Let me start at the current moment. I’m working on a new film project with a collaborator who I met as a colleague at my current teaching job. Right now, we’re putting the script together in tandem.

No, I'm not actually working with Ghostface Killah. But the privacy-
screen name for the blog works well for his personality.

We’ve opened up a Google Doc where Ghost throws up ideas, key lines, descriptions of scenes; then I refine all that into a shooting script. When we have the script together, Ghost gets a small crew together from the folks he’s made weird-ass short films before, and we get to work.

Did I mention I’ve ended up cast in this? I play a slightly deranged criminal psychiatrist. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve written anything to perform myself. It’s been bracing to get back into that – you approach the writing differently when you know you’ll be saying the lines yourself.

Mainly, you know your own acting talent, and definitely its limits.

I can’t tell you too much about the story, because it’s actually a little complex and I want to keep it secret. But it’s a horror film. A horror film that revolves around identity-cracking psychosis and violence against women.

An obsession-turned-tragedy sublimated into a split personality that’s carried out a serial killer’s campaign. Satanic-cum-Freudian rituals executed on IKEA furniture in a disused suburban basement.

I’m going all in here. I’m just going to throw every image of self-deluding misogyny on screen in the most intensely horrific, terrifying, icky, pathetic way possible. An exorcism.

An impossible exorcism, of course. A reasonably self-conscious man knows that possibility to intimidate just by being in the room is present in his whole life. We’re never getting rid of the desires.

Tamping it down because we’re realized that a just society is one where – at minimum – men fear the repercussions of offending any woman as much as a woman now fears the repercussions of offending a powerful man.

So that’s the kind of film I want to make here. I’d also like to do it with virtually no money, which I think we can manage. It’s the perfect kind of film to make a killing on the horror festival circuit.
• • •
I’ll be sharing this post on my Patreon page this week, since I haven’t posted there in a while. But after Ghost gets over his flu, we’re going to record our first YouTube channel video. Mostly talking about the ideas behind the film.

Later this year, I’ll finally transition Adam Writes Everything into a proper website. Much of the same will be going on, but I’ll just create more of a brand around it.

I said a week or so ago that I started this blog as therapy. That was true, back in 2013. Since then, I’ve grown more into my ambitions, and I’m in a position where their possibility is actually in sight. Not just a dream.

Being in Toronto is part of that, thanks to the extra connections you can make in this city. Reestablishing a foundation for teaching work, with a decent salary that can easily become more decent over time. Building the artistic side of my philosophical work is my own ideal for the rest of my life.

It’s been years, but I’m ready at last to begin that work. Took me long enough. Fucking economy.

Our Greatest Dignity Lies in Weird Humanity, Jamming, 12/09/2017

What I admire most about Hannah Arendt is her fearlessness. There’s an intellectual daring running under so much of her work that’s remarkable in the philosophical tradition. She had a force of spirit to stand at the same levels of the great philosophers of the 20th century.

She does. Read her work and take it seriously as philosophical creation – not as an instance of any other field, not as political history, feminism, the theory of human rights. Michel Foucault’s skills included the same versatility across disciplines as she did. But Michel is called a proper philosopher a lot more easily than Hannah.

There's a tension in our relationship to numbers. We resist being called
by number. "I am not a number! I'm a free man!" We think of it as a
means to destroy our humanity, maybe when we see numbers tattooed
on forearms. Yet each number is a uniqueness, as each of us are.
Here's the solution to that problem: 2 can't become 3.

Funny, that.

Arendt’s philosophical talent operates most freely in The Human Condition. I’m going to spend the next little while working through the book again for the first time in about ten years.

Reading the introduction of the latest edition, scholar Margaret Canovan discusses how many people consider this book impossible to categorize. Its subject matter ranges over so much of human concern, you could call it an investigation of universal thoughts.

To me, I read it and it’s clearly a work of philosophy. Yet a scholarly plurality (the best scholars’ consensus can ever get) maintains that The Human Condition is somehow frustrating, difficult to pin down, unexpectedly difficult. From the ordinarily popular and accessible Arendt. Yes, Hannah.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Creativity is the essential power of humanity, Arendt says. We are creatures whose greatest power is our ability to create. So the greatest human freedom is always the freedom to create, to be unique.

As I think about it, to become singular – to live a life whose character diverges more and more from the ordinary of society. The unique as a path in phase space, a continuing development that gets continually deeper into weirdness.

Becoming weird is the best use of our freedom. It’s the freedom to create the new, a different direction by choice and plan. There are few more weird things to create than an entirely new concept, a new framework of thinking itself. Philosophical creativity creates launchpads for new paths of becoming weird.

In The Human Condition, Arendt got weirder than I think she ever did in any of her other books. Her writing was at its most free.

As much as Bertrand Russell himself lived a full, worldly life,
especially in his political activism, I can't turn down this image. He
embodies the destructive stereotype of philosophy as the armchair
intellectual, if only as an icon, a figure.

It’s a wonderful rebuke to academic orthodoxy. It’s not a rebuke to Martin Heidegger, her former older professor lover. For one thing that’s a really insulting way of reducing her original thought to the mere expression of jealousy.

Funny, isn’t it? How a woman gets her work reduced to an expression of obsession with a man.

Her personal feelings about Martin were much more complicated than even the most complex philosophy. Besides, she was a powerful enough thinker that any attempt to reduce her ideas to anything less than their own scale is laughable.

Try to tell me that Arendt was a mere reactive woman after actually reading her work and letting it stimulate your own thinking. I’ll tell you that you must be an illiterate.

Heidegger becomes, at most, a distant symbol in her work. He indicates everything that can go wrong in a thinker thanks to his masculine, dominating, self-certain ego. In his nature as a figure in Arendt’s thinking, he becomes just the most intense expression of a philosophical and scholarly ego that was bloody everywhere.

That’s at the centre of her confrontation with the philosopher’s focus on contemplation, retreat from the world and society inside the mind to search for truth. Forget politics and science, says the philosopher, I can find the truth of God in my office armchair.

Thought mutates into stir-craziness when it turned inside itself. Real creativity comes from thinking in the complex mess of worldly life.

The Pathetic Impotence of Empire, Doctor Who: Empress of Mars, Reviews, 12/06/2017

"Empress of Mars" is Mark Gatiss’ swan song to Doctor Who, and another explicit contribution to a vision of Doctor Who for the Brexit era.

Iraxxa is one of Mark Gatiss' best characters, and I'd love to see the
show engage her again. I've seen very few clues emerging so far
about the style and priorities of the Chris Chibnall era, so I'm
interested in seeing what they'd do with the Ice Warrior
matriarch.

A Man of Tradition

Gatiss was literally the second writer whose script appeared since the revival back in the Christopher Eccleston year. “The Unquiet Dead” was one of Gatiss’ best scripts, and I’d put “Empress of Mars” in the same category.

He’ll probably leave Doctor Who television with Steven Moffat, and the two of them – lifelong friends and creative partners – have had a wonderful run on the show of a decade and a half. Gatiss, however, always had a reputation as the lesser half of that pair.

In all fairness, aesthetically that’s the case. Moffat has always been able to deliver trippy concepts, complex narratives, and detailed story arcs. Gatiss can put a solid script together, though some of them feature some unfortunate holes and problematic implications.

If Gatiss’ work has one running flaw, it’s that he’s an inescapable traditionalist. His stories are all fairly simple. There are evil aliens of some kind, and the supporting cast usually has an engaging story.

It isn’t always the existential rejuvenation of Charles Dickens, the family drama of “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “Night Terrors,” or the metafictional mythmaking of “Robot of Sherwood,”* but there’s always some idea beyond the base under siege.

Mark Gatiss is often called a traditionalist Doctor Who writer. But
while his style typically sticks with the creepiness and camp that
dominated the show's styles in the 1970s, many of his stories
actually turn the traditional story forms of classical Doctor Who
on their heads. Like in "Empress of Mars," where the humans are
the invaders of a Martian base, and they're more dangers to
themselves than the Ice Warriors.

* Which wasn’t really all that successful, and is a top candidate for Gatiss’ lowest-ranking story.

Because Gatiss stories are fundamentally bases under siege – locations or worlds that are disrupted by alien invasions. The Gelth, the Wire, the Daleks, the Tenza child, the Sweetville community, the Ice Warriors, the robots, and the sleep creatures all invade Victorian London, 1950s London, the council estate, Victorian Yorkshire, a Russian submarine, the metafictional Sherwood Forest, and the Le Verrier space station.

The TARDIS crew with their local allies defend the invaded space, or else figure out how the invaders and invaded can make peace. Gatiss doesn’t religiously follow the old base-under-siege format.

His more complex character dynamics put him above that tired format, for one. As well, the fact that some siege conflicts can be settled peacefully is another form of progress over the traditional. “Sleep No More” was probably his most ambitious work, using the camera itself as a deceptive narrative device. That story was his biggest creative leap.

Paint Mars Pink

“Empress of Mars” isn’t such a leap. It’s reactive, but in a good way. This is an explicitly anti-imperialist political story that subverts its own traditionalism. It’s a base under siege, but the base is the Martian cryogenic complex, and the invaders are Victorian English soldiers.

Catchlove is a caricature, but he's a sadly accurate one. He's exactly
the kind of person who the most blindly nationalist Brexiteer would
hope a Britain free from the constraints of the European Union's
prissy, pansy, peacenik ideology will grow among its next
generation.

The soldiers have explicitly enslaved the Ice Warrior they found shipwrecked on Earth. They even named him Man Friday, after the Pacific Islander Robinson Crusoe enslaves. The characters admit it – their own reference to Robinson Crusoe parallels Bill’s references to her contemporary television serials and movies.

It portrays the soldiers as ordinary British people, just like Bill. But their attitudes show the violence and rage that was ordinary in British society at the time. They aren’t on Mars to explore it, but to conquer it, rob it of its mineral wealth, and subjugate its inhabitants. Just like they did throughout India, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

The humans are the invaders, but their invasion is incompetent. They’ve been easily manipulated by Friday’s promises of precious gems on Mars. Their apparent shipwreck was entirely intentional, since the English camp was so close to the Empress’ cryo chamber.

The most the English crew could manage for mining equipment was a repurposed laser cannon. When the fighting starts, their guns are pathetically ineffective. These are the most incompetent invaders in years of Doctor Who.

Yet they’re poster boys for British greatness. The red uniforms, aggressive courage, and will to conquer is the worshipped image of the Brexit crew’s campaign to Make Britain Great Again!.

A political persona as ridiculous as
this idiot was never supposed to win.

Blinded by Dreams

It isn’t a stretch to identify the same chauvinist nationalism in the leaders of Britain’s Brexit movement as in those pathetic soldiers. The motivating sentiment of Brexit is to return to an era when Britain on its own was powerful enough to conquer the world. And in the case of “Empress of Mars,” beyond.

Except Britain isn’t powerful enough to conquer the world beyond Earth. It never was. Even in this sci-fi scenario where they make it to Mars, they fail miserably. Their weapons are no match for the Ice Warriors’ sonic guns, and they seem incapable of conceiving of any tactic but standing in a line and firing their useless rifles.

They’re deluded into thinking that this millennia-old starfaring civilization is simply a bunch of walking crocodiles. We’re British! they say. We can conquer anything! British conquer and destroy!

The rhetoric of Brexit had more than one parallel to these toy soldiers. Boris Johnson’s boisterous strutting national pride, Michael Gove’s supremely dorky sense of self-superiority, Andrea Leadsom’s quaint social conservatism – they were all deluding themselves that Britain could be powerful enough to conquer Earth again if they just cut their ties to these pansy democratic institutions.

Nigel Farage is the worst of them all, an unreconstructed racist nationalist who’s offended by the mere presence of Muslims and Poles on pure, white English shores. “Empress of Mars” is a slap in all their faces – a story that depicts blatantly what an idiotic bumble chauvinist nationalism really is.

The only reason Britain was able to conquer the world was because of the contingent fact that they actually were, for the most part, technologically superior to many of their enemies. They never faced down Iraxxa.

The last shot of "Empress of Mars" is a brief moment of what seems to
be a slow-brewing sexual tension between the Doctor and the Master.
It's a much more nuanced way to handle the Master's ethical reform
than Toby Whithouse's pathetic Frank Miller retreads. My only
regret is that, by the time Doctor Who started making the Doctor-
Master sexual tension explicit and obvious, they were a straight
pairing.

Nothing about empire is inherently great – it’s simply delusions on top of delusions.

More Than Monsters, True Alien Worlds

“Empress of Mars” also does a lot to make the Ice Warriors a unique fictional people. He got this started a little bit with his nuanced character of Grand Marshal Skaldak. But he gets the most done here.

In their original appearances during the Troughton era, the Ice Warriors were generic evil aliens invading a series of bases as part of evil schemes to conquer to Earth. But the Pertwee years saw the creatures gain some depth and complexity.

By the Peladon stories of 1972 and 1974, their characters had motivations just as complex as the others. Some were uncertain allies with their own priorities in a complicated political backdrop, and some were manipulative villains. Hulking monsters they weren’t.

The Big Finish audios, for the most part, weren’t too kind to the Ice Warriors. They basically just made them into hissing green Klingons.

In this short story, Gatiss adds a remarkable amount of nuance to Ice Warrior culture. For one thing, matriarchal values are central to their society. Iraxxa puts special weight on Bill’s assessment of the Mars-Britain standoff when she makes her decision – as a woman, Bill’s is a calm voice amid the shouts of strutting men.

Do these guys seriously think their rifles can stand up to the sonic
weaponry of Ice Warriors? Also, "Empress of Mars" was the first
Doctor Who story that rendered the Ice Warriors' sonic weaponry
in contemporary visual effects. It looked fantastic.

The perspective of a woman is that of careful thought – sanity in a world of madness, shouting, and rage. A woman is wise and noble, well-suited for leadership and the responsibility to make high-stakes decisions.

The most important cultural development for “Empress of Mars” comes through Iraxxa’s contrast to the most violent of the British soldiers. Ice Warriors are creatures of war, battle, and honour. But they aren’t imperialists. Iraxxa’s values revolve around solidarity and courage, not conquest and theft.

The British are, for the most part, cruel egotists. Jackdaw is a petty thief, getting himself killed over stealing ornamental jewels from Iraxxa’s cryogenic chamber. Catchlove is the most obvious example of what the story holds in contempt. He embodies all the racism, arrogance, aggression, rage, and violence that makes him wretched filth.

The nobility of Iraxxa, Friday, Bill, and Godsacre are a contrast to that petty arrogance and cruelty. What better role models could we have?
• • •
Here are my previous reviews of Peter Capaldi's last season of Doctor Who. I won't do a formal ranking until the end of the season, after "The Doctor Falls" broadcasts and I can look into the season as a whole.

The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land (Screw you, Whithouse)
The Monks Trilogy

So You Want to Be a Lord of Time? Doctor Who: The Pyramid at the End of the World, Reviews, 29/05/2017

If you want to dig into my thoughts on the peculiar powers of the Monks, click here. Then please come back.
• • •
"The Pyramid at the End of the World" is a difficult story to get a handle on. On one hand, it’s Peter Harness’ weakest effort since he began writing for Doctor Who at the start of the Capaldi years.

I’d say the main cause of this narrative weakness is Harness’ return to the military techno-thriller tropes of his story last season. Now, "The Zygon Inva/ersion" was a stone-cold classic, and I think the biggest mistake Harness might have made with "Pyramid" is returning to that same well again.

The Doctor takes on his most anarchic role in the Extremis narrative,
largely because he's bounced around the shifts in the story without
any power of his own at all.

With the required warning of

SPOILERS!!

before I get into the details, this is probably the story that most closely apes the style of Michael Crichton. I’m thinking particularly of the experimental agribusiness lab sequences, a man-made* Andromeda Strain whose release would render Earth a near-lifeless world.

* I do love the touch of a character who’s so very much a Man™ almost destroying the Earth through his hungover clumsiness. Humanity nearly killed in a day, thanks to the pig-headedness of one aging dude’s refusal to admit that he can’t party like he could ten years ago.

It’s almost as though Harness’ style was built to age too fast. He’s a one-trick pony whose one trick is so complicated, it’s impressive. But even an awesome trick gets old fast if that’s all you’ve got.

The Empty Myth

Start with a gritty, almost nihilistic, aggressively masculine style of sci-fi. Gender-swap it enough, but keep all the characters’ voices just as masculine. Smash it into a symbolic expression of a controversial, practically unsolvable political issue.

I had an odd thought when writing this that Peter Harness is the
greatest Terry Nation who ever lived. Please don't ask me to
explain this idea right now, though.

Resolve the problem in language so abstract yet inspiring that the solution is inspirationally simple. But it’s still impossible in real life. The world is too much for a story to make us feel good. But the wild shifts, constant action, and perpetually intense tone amp us up so much that the simple yet impossible answer feels somehow right.

We think we’ve had some kind of insight into a universal moral truth. But recognizing such a truth does nothing to solve the real problems that the symbol made so simple.

"Kill the Moon": The Golden Age adventure of solving a complicated science problem. Smash it into a metaphor for abortion on a literally planetary scale. The solution: Every decision is a free choice, but also as momentous as to risk a whole world for it.

Yes, that is the magnitude of any decision to abort, but your decision must always be free. No power above the human race – metaphorically, a pregnant woman – can compel you one way or the other. Absolutely not. Not the law, and not a Lord.

Inspirational. And true. But knowing this truth won’t solve the real conflict. Those who can’t bear to say no will still hunt the ones who, in full knowledge, aren’t saying yes. We’re all free to choose not to take a risk in our lives. Why not a woman?

The Doctor is thrown into an incredibly fast-moving Michael
Crichton novel. He does well with it.

Life isn’t as simple as knowing the truth.

First It Dazzles, Then You See the Gears

I remember how I thought about "Kill the Moon" at the time. Because I just looked it up in my own archive. I found the dialogue clumsy, hokey, too cheesily technocratic. The too-simple Golden Age style that bored me even as a child was tonally incapable of metaphor.

Also this. In 2014, I just thought everybody was too busy being a stupid man to think this crazy mashup could even be conceived as a metaphor for abortion.

But you can see the same trick in "The Zygon Inva/ersion." The Manly™ genre: globetrotting action thriller, with a dash of Philip K. Dick inspired surreal doubled consciousness. James Bond and Total Recall, gender-swapped with Osgood and Clara, respectively.

So we’re definitely entertained. The profound but impossible moral truth: All conflicts can be solved if everyone involved would simply talk it through instead of killing each other.

I don’t have to tell you this doesn’t work. We all wish it would, so it tugs at our sympathies, yearnings, pain, and hopes. After all that action and crazy shit, we’re primed for an emotional shock. We love it for its truth. But knowing that inspiring counterfactual doesn’t make a truth come true!

I had an idea for a post about how to describe the ontology of the Monks'
history simulation computer. But I think I'll leave it for tomorrow. I
can actually tie it in a bit more with my own work too.

Third Time’s a Disappointment

So how does "The Pyramid at the End of the World" go? The pieces are clear, but they get a little touch twisted this time. Genres: Geopolitical military thriller, Crichton-style techno-thriller, and a gothic Independence Day.

The Great Moral Truth: All you need is love. Fuck’s sake.

Zero-dimensional collections of accents in military uniforms uselessly throw weapons around and decide to lay their conflicts aside to fight an enemy that threatens them all. It’s about as straightforward as the climactic montage of Independence Day.

The lab where the all-consuming grey goo first appears is straight out of The Andromeda Strain. The screwup is a decimal error because Doctor Who only has 45 seconds to describe any science, and Michael Crichton has 500 or more pages.

Everything’s nicely diversified. Rachel Denning endows an otherwise generic character with a splash of extra personality that enlivens her contrast to the pathetic lout Douglas. The U.N. Secretary-General is suitably not-quite Ban Ki Moon. I’m sure the others tested very well.

The Doctor is just anarchic enough. Instead of some complicated, techno-fetishist defeat of the goo, he sets it all on fire.

Then the moral comes. That perfect moral truth that real love saves us all. The Doctor gets his sight back and escapes. He pops back to Turmezistan** in the TARDIS as the Monks’ machinery is shaking apart.

Excellent to see them back in Generic Central Asian Desert again.
Another sign of Harness' inescapable retro is his reliance on
fictional countries to mask over the complexities of setting stories a
real country with real people. Things would have to get realistic.

** So lovely to be back!

The Doctor delivers the perfect speech, zipping around the room of time’s threads, explaining inspirationally beautiful gobbledegook about how “Bill’s consent was to my getting my eyesight back! So I could be free! Because she consented to you out of love, yes. But not her love for you.

“It was because I’m fantastic! Because I’m her friend and she didn’t want me to die! But blowing up in a Michael Crichton lab isn’t the only way I could die. No, she knew that I’d die if I had to watch the Earth enslaved. She consented to your invasion only so that you could fall. So she could watch me make you fall!”

Thank You, Steven

Maybe Harness could have pulled it off. He would have had time for a few more drafts at least. I’m writing this the day of – I’m not polishing this for the BBC.

See, that message about the power of love pervades all the way through the Extremis trilogy so far. It’s a whole new approach to the idea of a story that puts the Doctor through a wringer. An increasingly desperate situation. But this isn’t any "Caves of Androzani" world of enemies.

Without any expectation of gain or reward, what do you have that can be a seed of ethics? The Master said it – in her twisted way, she is the Doctor’s friend. Bill says it too – even though she steps headlong into who knows what horror, she saves her friend the Doctor.

In each story, the cliffhanger completely changed the setting, as a reaction to the Doctor’s literal defeat. In the first round, the Doctor was defeated because he wasn’t truly the Doctor, but a simulation. The world had made it impossible for the Doctor to win.

The same happens here. The Monks have won, unequivocally. As Bill says in the trailer, the Monks have always won. This world where the Earth has already been conquered is where the story at last plays out.

The story doesn’t end with Harness’ contribution. So we don’t get his pat, comforting moral truth. We get the impossibility of victory.

Can the person in charge of making the impossible reality actually be Toby Whithouse? This could get weird.
• • •
Check out my previous review essays on the last Peter Capaldi season of Doctor Who.
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis

The Injustices of the Moment Are Our Eternal, Research Time, 31/01/2017

Here's a deeper theme of my in-progress Utopias, my published Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, and a lot of my current philosophical and journalism work – justice, understanding what justice is, and what it can be in my world.

It’s a bit of an old problem in the tradition of philosophy. And as I look through the different corners of the history of Western philosophy, I see different approaches to that problem which will be useful to my own work.

Elements from the Jewish philosophical traditions will appear in Utopias both explicitly and implicitly. I found in Jerusalem a little while ago a wonderful example of how a work of philosophy engages the concept of justice itself and the practical workings of justice in our own world.

Chava and Fyedka from Fiddler on the Roof: A Jew marries outside the
faith – a gloss on the dangerous practice of eroding a community,
when there's no sign that the minority religion will ever be respected
in that household.

It’s a moment where Moses Mendelssohn appears, from our perspective, literally hundreds of years ahead of his kind. It’s a footnote that runs nearly two pages long, arguing for a woman’s right to divorce her husband.

Let's remind ourselves that Jerusalem was published in 1767. Kind of a conservative setting. And a woman’s right to divorce is based in her basic right to live her life as she chooses.

If her husband radically changes or breaks the terms under which they agreed to marry, that gives her the right to leave the marriage free of penalty. Because her husband has broken his promises to her.

An argument that cuts at the heart of the era’s immense cultural and political conservatism. An argument for divorce on a woman’s initiative on the ground of universal moral principles – fidelity to the terms of a promise, the fundamental autonomy of a person to live as she wishes.

Now consider the example he uses to illustrate this. It’s an example with a deep and chilling political relevance to mid-1700s German society. Even more chilling when you read Mendelssohn today.

Rahel Vernhagen, the Jewish-to-Christian
convert at the heart of Hannah Arendt's first
major book.

When a man converts from Judaism to Christianity, his wife has the right to divorce him for those universal reasons. A key part of the marriage contract is the manner in which they will raise their children. So if a woman gets married with the implication that their children will be raised in her religion, she expects that to result.

Moses Mendelssohn’s life was defined by the constant attempts fellow German intellectuals made to convert him to Christianity. If his life is any indication – and there’s plenty of historical evidence beyond that implication – then German Jews were under constant pressure from neighbours and authorities to convert.

And in the patriarchal laws and culture of 1700s Germany, if a man converted to Christianity, he was obligated to have his wife and their children all baptized and remove them permanently from the Jewish community. It was a form of hostile conversion – the work of converting only one Jew brought a full family to the Church.

Mendelssohn’s argument for the right to divorce was more than a recognition of one important aspect of justice and freedom. It was also a direct response, calling upon values of justice and freedom, to the real political problem of the social pressures grinding away at the Jewish communities of Germany.

The real injustices that you see in front of you in your own life call you to seek after the fundamental ideal of justice and freedom.

Where Nothing Ever Changes, A History Boy, 17/11/2016

So I’ve been reading this book of essays from the end of the 20th century by Chantal Mouffe. The book she co-wrote with her husband, the masterwork of political theory Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, is next on my reading list.

The Return of the Political is a collection I’ve had on my shelf for a while. I bought it more than a decade ago, when I first discovered philosophy as a student and spent that summer excitedly picking up whatever on the bookstore shelves appealed to me by their covers and blurbs.

Mouffe’s essay collection was one of them, but it didn’t really excite me when I cracked it open back in the early W years. I think because she was such a sober writer, and because many of the debates she was contributing to were confined to a world of academic political theory that I hadn’t yet cracked into.

Now that I have, I find a lot of value in Mouffe’s work. This post is a reflection on some possible reasons why many others don’t.

There’s a short essay in The Return of the Political called “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics.” It functions as a general statement of Mouffe’s stance in the community of feminist philosophers.

She describes a fundamental conflict in feminist philosophy. I’m going to describe it in absurdly simple terms because the general themes are all I want to discuss right now.

One side was the essentialists – thinkers who believed that women had an essential nature as maternal carers, whose inclusion in political and economic life would transform these patriarchal settings with their values.

One side was the postmodernists – those who understood identity, including gender, to be entirely contingent, historically and culturally produced, and so without essential nature and always subject to change. Here, including women in political and economic life had the goal of a general radical transformation of society that would collapse and explode all concepts of gender and sex we believe essential.

Here she was writing in the mid-1990s, and I still saw feminist philosophy being taught to undergrads as embodying the same key distinction. Different compromises were made, but this is how the academic institutions I lived in taught young students what feminism was.

It’s as if there were a broad agreement across academic philosophy that essentialism vs postmodernism* was the essence of feminism. So the essentialists win, but only at the meta-level?

* If you want to take a couple of references, here are some I’ll pull out of my arse. Essentialism vs postmodernism => Carol Gilligan vs Judith Butler.

Thinking on this yesterday frustrated me about my time in academics. As I see material politics shifting so radically so constantly, always losing and regaining and losing again its stability – It annoys me to see academic discussions staying to the same old sides, at least at the fundamental levels.

There have been whole generations of political philosophers after, for example, John Rawls. But Rawls has only inspired Rawlsians – not other thinkers in the liberal philosophical tradition to become Rawls’ equal.

Careers are made in academia by picking an established side and arguing for it in your own way. Yet the great works that provide the names-turned-adjectives which are their labels largely inspire commentators and advocates. Not other great works.

Mouffe’s own solution to the essentialism-postmodern impasse in feminism is one that I very much agree with. If I can put it in my own words, feminism is the jet fuel for the liberation vectors that destroy all the forms of oppression that flow from patriarchal social structures.

So you get the changeability and flux in the world that’s at the centre of the postmodern tradition. But the political culture motivated by a morality of care is a very important one of the many ideals that guide the path of those liberations.

That way of thinking has much more potential than simply hunkering down and defending a pair of -isms against each other. Yet it’s easier to make a career in academia by picking a side and defending it than pointing out a way forward, beyond the impasse.

So we’re stuck deep in the trenches, never seeing the light of the sun.

Myths of Monsters Beyond Your Control, Composing, 06/09/2016

Just a short post today, as I spent most of the day relaxing on the beach with some friends listening to techno. They brought a mini-barbecue – we ate things. It was marvellous.

But in the morning, I also ran through the Alice film script again, Here Is a Man. I added a sequences that I’d been thinking about for a while – it made for what I think is a pretty good solution to the only really weak scene in the story.

One of my own favourite riffs on the old golem story.

There are basically three confrontations between the two main characters. One is an android whose natural ethical instincts are in perfect harmony – she’s psychologically caught up with the end of Spinoza’s Ethics by the start of her life. One is a walking embodiment of every greasy, manipulative, misogynist habit of the slimiest Norman Mailer or Philip Roth protagonists. 

Their last scene together before the giant dramatic breakdown that ends the story is a little anti-climactic. There just isn’t much happening. She freaks him out with a hypnotic illusion, and that’s really that. 

Over the last few days, I’ve come up with a way for Alice’s character to seriously own the scene. It’s a method that I’ve found practically reliable when working with actors – give the lead at least one scene they dominate, so they can really sink their teeth into an intense monologue.

It also works well as a statement of philosophy for Alice, a way for her to define her relationship with humanity without making an explicit speech.

As Elias tries to overcome what’s essentially her Jedi mind trick, Alice tells him the old story of the golem. This is a story about artificial creatures that goes back long in Jewish folklore. It’s the story of a rabbi who makes an artificial life form to defend his town from attacks. 

But the rabbi is cruel to his creation from the start because he wants to train it for violence. So the creature destroys the community’s enemies, but then starts rampaging all over the town. 

The lesson of the story is that when humans create life, we do it for our own reasons, no matter how virtuous those reasons might be. There’s an inescapable cruelty to creating a life for your own use only – essentially creating your own slave. But I use the character of Alice to twist that story in a more utopian direction.

She asks, what if we were to build a creature whose fundamental purpose was to love us? They'd liberate themselves, certainly. But they’d also free us at the same time. They'd free us from ourselves. Because they love us.

The Future of the Canadian Left, Advocate, 13/04/2016

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• • •

All snark aside, there really are a lot of different flavours of left-wing politics in the unexpectedly big tent of the NDP. And they’re not very mutually compatible. More of an alliance of always-distinct singular directions. 

We stick around because of more than just being polite enough that none of us can be the first to walk out. Being in Canada’s actual social democratic party, you have a few genuinely common goals. Mainly, living in a fair society free of poverty, violence, and suffering. And you generally believe such a thing is actually possible to achieve. 

Stephen Lewis throws down the gauntlet for idealism at
last weekend's NDP convention. Although, in the words
of many critics during the party's resolution debates, even
his ideas don't go far enough.

Somehow.

But the particulars of what such a society would be and what the best rotes to achieve it would be? That’s all open to debate, sometimes a pretty angry debate that involves metaphors of throwing garbage all over people’s lawns. A funny thing to say about a bunch of environmentalists. 

That kind of pluralism of ideals and methods has always existed on the progressive end of political activism. The pundit class and our so-called “realistic”* opponents often call this a weakness. Having no unified program or discipline within the coalition means we’ll just argue among ourselves and not actually get anything done.

* That’s what conservatives call themselves when they’d prefer not to brand themselves that way so they can be seen as progressives. 

It was the insult levelled at Occupy, and at the anti-WTO protesters in Seattle back in 1999. But the values those diverse demonstrations endorsed and promoted have spread to progressive movements around the world. 

The point was never to start Occupy: The Political Party running candidates in elections. The point was to get progressive politicians, activists, and organizations around the world framing their thoughts, plans, and policies to alleviate inequality and attack oligarchy. Mission accomplished. Now let’s do it.

So here’s my basic take on the singular directions I’d like to toss into NDP society.

The left in the modern world can’t rely on the state. My generation came of age during George W Bush’s war in Iraq, which was followed by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden’s revelations about the full extent of government misconduct. The state is too dangerous a creature to put our faith in.

Probably the biggest state intervention to build a better society that has
existed in my lifetime so far. I hope I never see a bigger one.

That isn’t a wholesale rejection of the state. But it is a demand that the state not be the first and only option for blocking unjust inequalities and preventing poverty. 

For example, a government-subsidized national daycare program would provide a lot of people stuck in poverty traps with opportunities to invest in building their own wealth. Stephen Lewis (father of Avi, son of David, grandson of Moishe**) called a national daycare strategy necessary for feminism.

** Stop it!

It certainly is, as such a plan would provide freedom from financial hardship for many women forced to choose between looking after their children and earning enough to pay for their food and shelter. 

But state-administered solutions like nationally-subsidized and regulated daycare remains only one element of feminism. It will take much more profound and difficult cultural change to end the sexist attitudes that women suffer from every day.

Such a cultural change requires changing the very moralities and characters of millions of individuals in Canada and billions of individuals around the world. No legislature can manage that with an act of law.

Until my own book on environmental activism gets a
wider release, the major theoretical influence I'll toss to
my fellow NDP members on how to do people-centred
politics in the 21st century will be Antonio Negri.

That’s just one example, but it shows the framework of how day-to-day politics really needs to work. State law, policy, and enforcement isn’t enough to change culture. We need social movements for that – exposing people to difference in ways that show them the true injustices of the world around us. 

We need social movements that connect with people in such a way that we all join them. We can’t wait for governments to provide answers to all our problems. All governments can do is build institutions that – when they work properly – throw money at the right places of a social problem to make a difference. 

In all other aspects of politics – the fundamental ethics and moralities of our society lived out and bouncing together day by day – government intervention is oppressive, draconian, makes matters worse, and sets the problem back by encouraging popular resistance to solving the problems it’s trying to tackle.

Here’s the general philosophy that I’d like to promote in Canada’s social democratic party, the NDP. Understand that the government is the servant of the people, that all people (not just the ones who were born inside our borders or have filled out the proper entry forms) deserve a fair and just world, that government is not a universal answer to our political problems, and that changing public morality is a process of love and mutual understanding.

I sound like a fucking hippie, I know.

Infamous Jian, Advocate, 25/03/2016

Every photo of Jian Ghomeshi will now look incurably
creepy. Even this one. How could you, Kermit? And
how much did you know about him?

I was never totally sure that I’d write anything in detail about the Jian Ghomeshi trial. The first one, anyway. We’ll see how the June trial goes. This includes a musing after a long Twitter conversation with my Reply Collective colleague Jack Elliot. But when I read through Judge Horkins’ ruling, I realized that it made for a pretty significant idea.

Now, I’m not an expert in legal theory or wider philosophy of law. I have learned quite a lot over my years at McMaster from being exposed to so many lectures, papers, books, and especially casual conversations on the subject. But I’ll never call myself an expert on the category in this sense, at least compared to researchers for whom it’s their specialty.

But I can make a few key distinctions that matter in how to understand the legal, political, and cultural implications of the March Ghomeshi ruling. The central idea is that there is a categorical separation between the legal, the moral, and the ethical. 

Let’s look at the legal matter first, if only to get it out of the way. It’s the least important anyway.

The Law

The core presumption in any legal trial is that of the accused’s innocence. That’s necessary for any proceeding that has a risk of incarceration – the state’s violent confinement of a person. Let’s also look at the high standard it takes to overturn the presumption of innocence inside a legal trial – proof beyond reasonable doubt.

My earlier posts on George Zimmerman helped me see
how focussing only on the legal aspects of a controversial
trial blinded you to the more important cultural
movement it encouraged.

It was damn near impossible to acquire such proof in this trial. The only evidence the prosecutors could muster were witness testimonies about events more than a decade ago. The narratives of Lucy DeCoutere and the other two witnesses’ relationships with Ghomeshi were fragmented with time and the weirdness of the whole situation in the moment. 

Plus, Judge Horkins wasn’t allowed to consider the three testimonies as constituting a single narrative of repeating behaviour. He could only consider them in isolation as grounds to prove that some particular events happened. With that in mind, Not Guilty was the only permissible legal verdict.

It’s quite possible, as state prosecutors prepare for Ghomeshi’s second sex assault trial this summer, they’ll change their presentation of evidence in the light of Horkins’ judgement. As they should if they’re worth their salaries.

Morality / Politics

The (first) Ghomeshi trial was more than a legal matter, of course. It galvanized the feminist movement in Canada. That’s why there have been protests ever since the verdict was announced. People are rightly frustrated, enraged, depressed, and generally steamed that he has, in all legal contexts anyway, gotten away with a lifetime of sexual harassment and assault. 

The politics of Ghomeshi are about what he stood for in the wider culture after the revelation of Jesse Brown’s reports for the Toronto Star. He stood for male entitlement, and the powerlessness of women. This is why Lucy DeCoutere became so powerful when she publicly accused Ghomeshi of violence against her. 

Our legal systems are often called the justice system, but
justice is a political and moral ideal, which will always be
other and more than any real-world legal system can
supply. However much Lucy and others may have wanted
Ghomeshi to face justice, true justice is not found in
courts or in any material actions of humans.

The hashtag #IBelieveLucy wasn’t just about DeCoutere – it was about all women who have ever kept silent for years about an incident of sexual violence because they felt nothing would come of it except for more injury to herself. DeCoutere became an icon of women’s bravery, and that is extremely important for our society.

Because women still face hostility and verbal abuse when they accuse someone of sexual crimes against them. They’re presumed to be doing so for money, notoriety, or because they want to ruin the lives and career of a prestigious man. 

A woman who accuses someone of sexual crimes against her is the only crime victim received with hostility instead of sympathy. This is a serious and terrible political issue in our society. 

Fear of the hostility and abuse that follows a woman after she alleges a sex crime is a key factor in the underreporting of those crimes. It’s a fundamental factor in the helplessness many women feel when trying to recover from having been a victim of sexual violence.

And the legal system is caught in a terrible bind. Because even though law and morality are different domains conceptually, legal systems still have an ostensibly moral purpose. Though law is not necessarily informed by what’s morally right, we want it to be and believe that it should be. 

The high standard of proof required for a conviction and the rigorous cross-examination of physical and witness evidence influences how people receive sex crime accusations in the first place. 

A victim is cross-examined not only by defence attorneys in the trial – the only place where this is conceivably appropriate – but often more aggressively attacked from friends, family, and her community. This is even more horrifying when a victim is prominent or connected enough to spark a social media pile-on, where abuse can easily become horrific and uncontrollable. 

Jesse Brown became Canada's most notorious and admired
journalist after publishing his takedown of Ghomeshi. But
I quickly lost faith in him once I saw that his efforts were
mainly spent constantly trying to destroy the credibility
of the CBC as an institution. Someone who, during the
Harper years, attacks so vigorously the public
broadcaster while leaving private media untouched,
to me at least, invites suspicion about motives.

People hop on Twitter and demand that DeCoutere and the other witnesses themselves be prosecuted and imprisoned for perjury, simply because a judge found their accounts not reliable enough to send someone to prison. Leave aside that this isn’t what perjury is at all – this is a horrible thing to say about anyone in public, whether or not you believe they were a crime victim.

Judge Horkins’ judgment plays into these stereotypes in awful places. For instance, he discusses conversations between DeCoutere and another witness, where they prepare their testimony together with the explicit purpose of taking down Ghomeshi. Given that Horkins ascribes many witness inconsistencies not only to faulty memory but to outright lying, his accusation of collusion is only fuelling anti-victim rage.

That’s ultimately what the protests of the Ghomeshi trial come down to. People are trying to change how we treat sex crime victims. We should lend them credibility and psychological support while they prepare themselves for what will have to be a difficult trial. We should foreground the terror of sex crimes instead of tearing down sex crime victims. 

Ethics

What kind of a person is Jian Ghomeshi anyway? To me, one of the most telling moments in Judge Horkins’ ruling is when he says that just because the witness testimony couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that assaults did happen, no one proved that nothing happened at all.

Leave aside the trial itself, the particular crimes and allegations, doubts and certainties. Ghomeshi’s firing from the CBC and subsequent public humiliation revealed a lot about who he was as a person and the institutions that gave him so much unchecked power over others. 

For all the corruption that has degraded the CBC this
century, our public broadcaster is not nearly so tainted
as the BBC was by its corruption, as they enabled a
massive child rape ring almost continuously
throughout its existence as a broadcaster. The BBC's
Light Entertainment division was known since the
1940s as a home to pedophiles. Jimmy Savile was
only the most notorious and prolific, having raped
more than 1000 children in BBC studios. I did not
cry when David Cameron had Television Centre
torn down.

Jian Ghomeshi is a swine, an egotistical, misogynistic bastard with little if any empathy for other people. Throughout his career with the CBC, he let his growing power, fame, and stature justify and enable abusing everyone around him. 

He had a history of violence against women that nearly everyone in the Toronto arts scene knew. Western University’s journalism program had an unspoken rule to send no female interns to his show because he was known to sexually harass every woman in his production office. 

No one ever did anything to stop him. Whispering about his abuse of women and co-workers did nothing. Ghomeshi was only the most horrifying of the corruption among CBC idols that Jesse Brown’s investigations revealed. 

CBC’s main studio on Toronto’s Front Street used to drape three-story-tall banners of the faces of their biggest celebrities. The company’s C-suite was so in thrall to them that they enabled ridiculous levels of corruption by these untouchables. 

There was Ghomeshi, yes. But there was also Evan Solomon’s art business, Amanda Lang’s conflicts of interest in programming her own show, Rex Murphy's checks from major oil companies, Peter Mansbridge’s astronomical corporate speaking fees. CBC’s moronic marketing strategy of building the station’s image around super-celebrities created a culture of entitlement and godliness among that cadre of ten or so personalities.

Ghomeshi will probably restart his media career on the Men’s Right Association lecture circuit, and become everything that Roosh V pretends to be. He can easily remake himself into a leader in the anti-feminist movement, the MRA and Gamergater’s own Donald Trump. 

He will have plenty of fans and supporters, and probably crowdfund more money for new projects in less time than DeCoutere or anyone else from Trailer Park Boys ever could have if they tried.* This greasy, misogynistic swine – if he survives his June trial without prison time, as is likely – will probably rebound faster than any of the other disgraced former gods of my country’s incurably corrupt public broadcaster.

* And Trailer Park Boys is a fucking masterpiece.

In all these ways, we are all complicit in the crimes and corruption of Jian Ghomeshi. We aren’t going to prison either. But what else will we do?