Never Let Yourself Become Useful, Jamming, 03/04/2017

The title of today’s post refers to a particular kind of idiot. The 2016 election and part of its aftermath created a particular subset of useful idiot that I want to talk about right now. Because that peculiar blend of idiocy grows a black, obsidian rock in the pit of my stomach.

Setting the stage. Sunday morning, I came across an article by Leah McElrath, a journalist I follow on Twitter. She described how she’s processing her own feelings since learning, through the American House and Senate committees on Russian subversion of the 2016 election, that enormous numbers of Twitter accounts were bots controlled by Russia’s intelligence agencies.

Not only that, but many of those bots were designed with personalities as Bernie Bros. Always the most vile, abusive, misogynist Bernie Bros. There were plenty of real incidents of Sanders supporters saying some awful things about Hillary Clinton. Plenty of awful things Bernie Sanders himself said about Hillary Clinton.

It’s not as though she didn’t deserve to have those things said about her. I would never have supported Clinton as the nominee if I was an American Democrat. I disagreed with her about many different policies, and I would have been an advocate in the party to move its ideas beyond the failed new liberalism in which Clinton’s perspective was trapped.

But I remember the horribly hostile tenor of the 1990s, and all the sexist attacks Clinton sustained against her for the entire time her husband was President. I never would have supported Clinton, and I would have fought against the party’s cliquishness and insularity at the level of the DNC.

Yet the bile of the online misogyny against Clinton was horrifying. And too many Sanders supporters played too deeply into that. Sanders himself definitely shares some culpability for Clinton's defeat at the hands of Donald Fucking Trump. It’s not like no one said anything before the election.

Rifts exist within the Democratic Party. Of course they do. In any state political system with only two parties, their coalitions are going to be big and diverse. Socially liberal and feminist neoliberals* are on the same team for control of the state with bourgeois eco-hippies, anti-vaxxer nuts, and radical democrats like me.

* Who still can’t see that there’s a serious problem with new liberal economics. How could you not by now?

Even in Canada, it’s the same. There’s an old joke that the New Democratic Party is where Canada throws all its crazy leftists. But there’s an intense hostility between the trade unionists and environmentalists, anti-colonial pragmatists and borderline anti-Semitic anti-Israel activists. And radical democrats like me.

Canadian progressives have plenty of other conflicts we generally sweep under the rug.

Now to discover that all those volleys of extra-hot boiling hate that hit so many women over the last year are Russian bots? Yes, the big, messy alliance called the progressive left has a lot of divisions.

But progressivism has been most effective when the radical democrat impulse – Get out to the streets! Mobilize the people! Demonstrate with your life that a better way is possible! – finds common ground in a struggle that unites us all.

It’s the struggle that’s always united democrats: the struggle for real, material freedom. Not the abstract and one-dimensional freedom of those sad libertarians. I mean the struggle for a society where more and more people are able to pursue their talents to the fullest.

The victory of Donald Trump was that of a kleptocratic white nationalist regime of oligarchs to the executive branch of the most powerful state machinery in the world. The elected representatives lost so many seats in the national legislatures that they have no real effective opposition.

The social movements against Trump and the radical Republican agendas that dominated pretty much every level of the American state are the only effective opposition.

That’s fantastic. And we shouldn’t let our resentment toward the insular idiots of progressive political parties overpower our need to drive that social movement.

The most depressingly illuminating perspectives I’ve seen on this issue are those on the left who refuse to let go of that rage. The people who say, “I’m glad Trump and the nationalists are fucking up our environment, our economies, and throwing millions of minorities in detention camps. At least it’s sticking one to Clinton and Obama!”

If you give in to hate, you’ve accepted dystopia.

No Wit Today – Just Exhaustion, Advocate, 24/03/2017

There are some days when, like everyone who’s had to move from one career to another, I miss my old career. I was good at teaching, and I enjoyed it. I loved writing philosophy – it’s why I still do it independently, and why I put that analytic and creative skill to use in my current work as a writer, marketer, and artist.

But I read something earlier today that left a bitter taste in my mouth. John Searle is the subject of a viscerally disgusting set of sexual harassment allegations.

I don't really want to go over this in much detail. If you read the Buzzfeed article, you’ll discover all you need to know. I don’t want to discuss what Searle might or might not be found legally culpable for. Those are the kinds of discussions for law courts, which have much higher burdens of proof than straightforward ethical discussions.

I never really liked Searle's work to begin with, either.

The truth is, I’ve become increasingly alienated from the academic establishment. Although I regret the difficult and sometimes painful path I’ve had rebuilding my career after leaving the university sector, I find myself increasingly repulsed by the arrogant and grotesque behaviours the institution seems to encourage.

Not all professors, of course. Not all professors I knew in my academy days look straight through me when they see me on a campus or at a conference. Not all professors conduct blatantly dishonest job searches. Not all star professors in their fields regularly abuse their prestige and offices to prey on young female students.

The professors I knew who don’t do any of those things are wonderful people who I’m glad to have known. But I’ve also known enough who’ve done all these things. On the small scale my own life, I’ve met the arrogant, I’ve met liars, and I’ve met bastards.

I see how the prestige of an academic position feeds personal arrogance. I’ve seen the institutionalized untouchability of a prestigious office erodes people’s sense of ethics.

Now it seems I can’t go a year without learning of some other American university-based philosopher faced with civil claims or forced to resign over what in each instance are credible allegations of using his office to prey sexually on young female students.

Four years ago, it was Colin McGinn. Just over a year after that, it was Peter Ludlow, who when I met just a few months before his fall, was one of those academics who looked straight through me when he discovered I held no position.

Last year, it was Thomas Pogge, a multidimensionally hypocritical case of an ethicist praised for his selfless approach to political thought. Well, he had also been using his office and research institute to manipulate and seduce a long string of young female scholars from the Global South.

The same reporter carried out the investigation into Searle, and the lawsuit by Joanna Ong that he propositioned her multiple times, then cut her salary and fired her for refusing him. Yes, Ong’s suit alleges that he did, indeed, make that very joke.

The What It’s Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy blog exists, chronicling everyday sexist bullshit throughout the discipline. It’s beyond tiring, and I don’t even work there anymore.

I look at this institution that I had wanted to be part of, that defined a career path for me for a decade. It’s past being decadent. It’s past being sad. I feel a kind of sickly contempt at that institution. I don’t even know how I could have thrived there if I’d stuck out the career.

If I had seen something like what Searle and Pogge were apparently doing, would I have done something about it? Or would I have looked the other way? When I think about what my own livelihood would have depended on, what the established norms and moralities of my institution were, maybe I just would have been content with not doing such reprehensible acts myself.

Or maybe after many decades rising through the hierarchy of that world, growing entirely accustomed to its cultures and the power of an office, maybe I’d have done worse than turning away my eye.

I think it’s a profound and important ethical truth about humanity that when we think we’re incapable of monstrosity is exactly when we’re most vulnerable to becoming monsters.

Dialectic of the MRA: The Return of Doctor Mysterio, Reviews, 29/12/2016

Steven Moffat is the second-longest-running producer in the history of Doctor Who. He’s been in the role since 2010, and when he steps down at the end of 2017, he will have served as the primary creative producer of the show and franchise for eight years.

With The Return of Doctor Mysterio, he’s wrapping up his seventh year. The episode makes me think that the next year may see Moffat’s style running out of steam. Or at least looking for avenues of originality.

The Doctor and Nardole actually make a pretty decent team. Matt Lucas
is appropriately restrained but present in his weirdness, and has fine
chemistry with Capaldi. It looks like we'll be seeing more of him
throughout the next season, thanks to the trailer.

Small moments – bits of conversation with Nardole in the TARDIS, the final confession at the end – put this story in the aftermath of The Husbands of River Song. This whole coming season takes place in that shadow of that story – Moffat himself thought Husbands would be his last Doctor Who story as producer, but the production needed him for one more year before Chris Chibnall could get his crew together.

So it's quite fitting that Doctor Mysterio would return to a set of images that have haunted the Moffat era since pretty much the beginning of his tenure – the appearance of sexism.

Now, I don’t actually think Moffat is as sexist and misogynistic as his greatest detractors have argued. I consider him very feminist in his character construction and his narrative priorities. But I can understand how people can see sexism in his stories.

In Phil Sandifer’s review of Doctor Mysterio, he even mentions the interpretation of Grant’s character as a stalker, but only to say that it isn’t realistic. Sandifer himself wrote a definitive account of Moffat’s style and approach as feminist. But any critical viewer has to admit that the tendency to unfortunate imagery exists.

And Doctor Mysterio features some of the most unfortunate of all. To discuss it, there will inevitably be

The Ghost is a pitch-perfect homage to the transparently virtuous spirit
of traditional superhero comics. And it comes with all the positives and
terror of that tradition.

SPOILERS

because that cringe-worthy imagery lies in the relationship of Grant and Lucy. I call it the dialectic of the MRA because Grant and Lucy’s literally lifelong relationship conforms – I can only presume unintentionally – to the most horrible narrative of Men’s Rights misogyny.

I’ll present it literally as a dialectic. A few quick passes back and forth between a surface reading, and then a new angle that brings the problem to a deeper level. I hope it ends up with a moment of redemption. And I hope it will work.

A – The Sitcom Story

This is the classic farce of the secret identity love triangle. It’s as old as superheroes themselves – Lois Lane falls in love with Superman, without realizing he’s Clark Kent and that Clark is in love with Lois.

It’s a perfect story for Moffat, who achieved national mainstream success with a sex comedy sitcom all about these farces of missed understanding.

The central plots of most episodes of Coupling were just such farces – one set of characters understands a situation in one way, another understands it another way, mayhem ensures when they try to act all at once on how they see the world.

In his effort to be close to Lucy, Grant has made himself her servant, a
position which many of the most disgusting misogynist activists
denounce as turning away from manhood itself. Really, he should be
just negging her constantly.

Doctor Mysterio's central character dynamic is a textbook example. Grant is in love with Lucy, which Lucy doesn’t notice, as she gets a serious crush on The Ghost after her rescue from the Harmony Shoals New York office.

B – To Be Nice Is to Be Persecuted

Ask yourself why Lucy gets a crush on The Ghost. Try to figure out why, based on her character’s history.

Grant once had a friend named Lombard, who married Lucy but ran out on her when she had their baby Jennifer. If he’s the type of guy who’d leave a woman from fear of having a baby with her, it’s safe to conclude that he’s a stereotypically manly man.

Grant has always been a reserved, sensitive person. His superpowers, difficult to control in puberty, kept him socially awkward. Moffat’s script makes it a joke, but it’s actually a heightened version of what a lot of emotionally sensitive young men experience as teenagers.

He’s so overcome by his feelings that he becomes too nervous and embarrassed to act on them. The Doctor even jokes about it – “Finally, I’ve met someone who’s worse at this than me.”

That lifelong social awkwardness probably kept Grant from dating much as an adult. Maybe he’s even still a virgin well into his 30s. Since Doctor Mysterio adopts the mid-20th century aesthetics of Hays Code superhero comics, the characters quite possibly live in the same sexual milieu too.

Lucy clearly intended to seduce The Ghost during their interview, and
it's only when Grant begins to show the mannerisms he developed for
his Ghost persona that Lucy starts to show the same erotic drive
toward him that she did for the masked man. Yeah, he's keeping the
suit, alright.

Grant has a natural sense of empathy so strong that he works in child care. He kept his relationship with Lucy and cut off Lombard after the divorce because he’s a naturally sensitive soul. Grant cares, while Lombard never did.

If Lucy had really been attracted to the strength of caring men, she never would have gotten involved with Lombard in the first place.

C – She’s Nothing But a Whore

This is the point in the argument when the misogyny of the story becomes most stark. The Ghost is literally the most powerful man on Earth – Superman-like powers delivered with a stern, didactic morality. He’s a powerful man who gives orders.

In the light-hearted tones and contexts of the story, he says things like “Always have a working smoke detector!” But The Ghost is an authoritarian strongman. He dominates, takes control.

It’s implied that Lombard had that same aggression. Lombard was the alpha male to Grant’s gamma – the dominant, masculine sexuality that pushes Grant’s desires to the margins. He boasts his sexuality until Grant is completely overshadowed. In Lombard, Lucy found an outlet for her own sexuality – to be dominated.

But Lombard eventually abandoned his own dominant role. He ignored the responsibility that comes with power.

On another note, I'm interested to see how the Shoal will develop
through the 2017 season. They appeared in The Husbands of River
Song, and now are the primary villains of The Return of Doctor
Mysterio. They seem to be a return to some of the aesthetics of the
Slitheen (head-zipping mostly), but concentrating on bodyswap-
possession horror instead of camp.

And Lucy only embraces Grant when she realizes that he’s The Ghost – that he’s the Earth’s most powerful source of authority. She will only be with him once she realizes that he’s truly an alpha – a dominant, powerful man who will put her in her proper place as a female with his authority.

D – The Power of Ethics

But there’s more to the narrative of Lucy and Grant than this tawdry Elliot Roger fantasy of alphas and whores. It’s about the transformation of values.

The misogynist narrative wouldn’t hold the power it does if there wasn’t some truth to it. A horribly partial, inaccurate, incomplete truth. But it is a truth.

Confidence is attractive, no matter the gender. And some women are attracted to strong personalities, especially if they’re young and immature. But those immature relationships often self-destruct.

Lucy doesn’t change her mind about Grant on learning that he’s The Ghost. She changes her mind in a moment of understanding what’s actually important to her. The confidence of quiet devotion ultimately matters to her more. And her conversation with The Ghost helps awaken her to that.

E – Pining and Obsessed

Yet Grant himself occupies the mind-set that the most misogynist, predatory MRAs have preyed on for recruiting – the sensitive but awkward young man who’s habitually suffered from unrequited love.

Grant has spent years of his life pining for Lucy and finding ways to inject himself in her life. Even at the most intimate circle of becoming a central caregiver for her child. All this time, he’s harboured a deep feeling of love for her. But for literally decades, she’s never felt about him this way.

And the Shoal's plan to conquer the Earth by replacing humanity en
masse recalls the ideas animating the old Patrick Troughton era story
The Faceless Ones.

Except that she has – she just didn’t notice it, and needed to be awakened by just the right accidental words from The Ghost. She’s justified her years of devotion by having felt the same way – just never having been conscious of it.

But this narrative of the loved one who has loved her lover back all the time without knowing it is a filthy, violent, repugnant narrative. Grant himself may not technically be a stalker, but his story justifies stalking behaviour.

It’s the contention that, even though your target – sorry, loved one – says and believes that she doesn’t love you back, she really does, and all it will take is the right words or actions to make her realize that.

F – Falling Back

And this is where I’m stuck. I loved watching this episode for the spectacle, the cracking adventure storyline, and the comedy performances of Peter Capaldi and Matt Lucas as new companion Nardole. I think I’ll love this part of the story when I watch the episode with the GF later.

But the core relationship of the key guest characters can’t escape these horrifying implications. I think it appears as a function of Doctor Mysterio's nature as an homage-throwback to the classic superhero narratives of the 20th century.

Many of those stories were told from a very masculine perspective. Women were often marginalized characters, even when they had significant page time. It’s only recently that mainstream comics creators have had more freedom and come from more diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences.

This is far from the first time Doctor Who has been in a comic, you know.

The era of comics written by people like G. Willow Wilson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Mariko Tamaki will produce some very different narratives than those from the shadow of Stan Lee, which brought us the first, literal woman in a refrigerator.

But if Doctor Who draws on the old tradition of comics for inspiration in its stories, like The Return of Doctor Mysterio, it will end up falling back into the worst habits of that tradition.

When Doctor Who takes on too much fealty to a tradition – even its own traditions – it collapses. The Return of Doctor Mysterio might be a well-told story, but it’s hobbled by its fealty. I hope Capaldi’s third season will see a greater spirit of rebellion and rejuvenation once it properly begins in 2017.

That’s the real strength of Doctor Who.

So Painfully Fragile, A History Boy, 13/09/2015

After writing my week-long series of posts about two of the most esoteric and difficult writers in the last century of European philosophy, I realized that I actually missed something I said I’d talk about in the beginning. Why I stopped reading D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace to pick up Spectres of Marx instead.

1. Simply put, it was getting dull. This is the clearest reason why I lost interest in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.* Wallace’s own writing is much more interesting than his life was. And it didn’t take much to be more interesting than Wallace’s life.

* Curious that I’d drop a book whose title purposely evoked ghosts in favour of a book that explored in detail the human experience of ghosts and spectral memory. 

Wallace poured his own life into Infinite Jest, which,
along with literary tropes, was really all he had.

2. Wallace’s young adult life was spent going back and forth between graduate school programs (whether as a student or a teacher) and mental health programs and facilities. The chapters I read in Max’s biography described how several harsher critics of Wallace’s early fiction found it disconnected from the gritty details of life.

Frankly, that’s because Wallace himself was disconnected from how most people actually lived their lives. Max is a sympathetic biographer, and Wallace is nothing if not a person deserving of sympathy (except when he isn’t). So he concentrates these early chapters on what Wallace was trying to do formally with fiction. 

Wallace got his MFA in a program dominated by the minimalist realism of the Iowa school of writing. But simplicity was not his cup of tea. Wallace spent the early part of his career pushing meta-fictional techniques and post-modern aesthetics to their breaking point, and combining these playful methods with an emotional heart that’s absent from a lot of what had come before.

That’s an admirable mission for art. Wallace succeeded, powerfully, and we should be grateful for that. But despite Max’s charity and sympathy for Wallace, simply describing the events of his youth paint a picture of a malignant person who was at best a wreck and at worst a tumour. 

3. I think what disturbed me most was his “relationship” with Mary Karr. I remember reading accounts of this period of Wallace’s life written shortly after he died, which described their relationship as genuinely romantic, but volatile and tense. Max’s biography reveals what these other articles, published in the immediate aftermath of Wallace’s suicide, didn’t have the guts to say.

Wallace never dated Mary Karr. He stalked her obsessively, pressuring her to divorce her husband and abandon her child to be with him. He created a fantasy life of meaning in their limited correspondence, and when he confronted her with his delusions, she rightly reacted with fear.

Some of the biggest regrets in my personal life come from the way I’ve treated some women in my life. I sometimes displayed such awkward, awful behaviour that I now know appeared horribly creepy. And at the time, I’d spin narratives of my own motivations and emotions that validated my disrespectful, off-putting behaviour. 

To see Wallace, a person I generally admired, engage in an even more offensive, manic, obsessive form of this behaviour, blasted to a ridiculous intensity by his bipolar disorder, leaves a disgusting taste in my mouth.

4. The last reason why I put down Max’s biography – and why I may never go back to Wallace’s own writing – is because of how strangely his own mental illness feeds back into his writing. Max, at one point, mentions how Wallace accepted an op/ed journalism job with a 1000 word limit that ballooned into an enormous project.

And I realized that was at the heart of Wallace’s maximalism. It wasn’t a conscious style choice. It was all he could do to bring some kind of order and purpose to his manic tidal waves of expression. 

Yes, he happened to be a genius, and that made his manic bipolar word vomit conceptually interesting and beautifully crafted. But that can’t disguise what it really was.

So that’s why I can’t go back to Wallace now that I know more about his writing, his life, and his personality. I see enough similarity between myself and Wallace (middle-class writers from an intellectual family who’ve struggled to different intensities with depression) that he no longer inspires me.

He makes me feel sick.

The Duty of a Female Profession in a Sexist World, Advocate, 17/08/2015

This weekend, I discovered an amusing little thing floating around my Twitter feed. When I thought about it, this image, which seemed pretty inconsequential at first, actually reflects a very deep problem in our society. And speaking as someone at the start of building a career in professional communications, it also reflects an issue at the heart of the ethical practice of public relations.

The Joke Is On You

I discovered this gem on Twitter this weekend. It started as a joke post on the Facebook page Liberty Memes. Liberty Memes is a place where libertarians can go to trade jokes. The image highlights a short quotation from Friedrich Hayek, the grandfather of modern libertarianism and the co-founder of the Mt. Pelerin network of think tanks around the globe that have shaped modern neoliberal economic and political policies. 

Yeah, sure. Misandry. Fuck.

The quote appears on a picture of Salma Hayek, a Mexican-American actress with the same last name. It’s a typical example of the funny misquote, like images of Abraham Lincoln reminding us not to trust everything you read in an internet meme. 

Fake quotes became a cultural joke after a phrase, misattributed to Martin Luther King Jr, blew up online, as one woman’s eloquent response to Osama Bin Laden’s extra-judicial killing by US Navy Seals was attributed to the most famous martyr of the American Civil Rights Movement.

So the combination of a Salma Hayek image with a Friedrich Hayek quote is funny on the face of it, at least good for a chuckle, especially thanks to the extra wink of the attribution, Hayek. 

Then some of the group members took it to a whole other level, which reveals quite a lot about the trend of reactionary Twitter activism that pollutes the internet with sexist, racist, horrifying bile every day.

When a Man Hates and Fears Women

The Friedrich Hayek quote in the image reads, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” He’s talking about his own mission as a philosopher of economics, showing the limits of humans to realize their dreams of a perfect society.

Hayek’s era was dominated by political figures who had visions of the perfect society, utopian dreamers whose political movements hijacked the military and police machinery of the state to erect those societies within a generation. States built complex mechanisms of oppression to force unified, simple visions on society. 

They usually killed and severely oppressed millions of people to do this. And they always failed. Hayek had a sensible core to his critique of using the state to build a perfect society by design: the world is always more complicated than human intelligence can account for, so every human attempt at absolute control of all the economic forces and processes in a country or the world will collapse and cause abject misery on the way. This quote states his philosophical mission of cognitive correction.

But when these folks at Liberty Memes saw the quote apparently coming from Salma Hayek, they presumed she was attacking men as a gender. Not, as Friedrich wrote in the style of the 1940s, referring to humanity in general. They thought this image was another example of a powerful woman in the media using her position to encourage the marginalization and oppression of men.

Why Do People Say Stupid Things?

So we have a moment where the overlap between right-wing arch-individualist conservatism and the rabid, raging sexism and persecution complex of online anti-feminism and the Men’s Rights Movement becomes clear. No matter what conceptual distinctions you can make between libertarian principles considered in abstract, and actual online harassment of women, if you believe one, you likely believe the other.

I was originally going to post a picture of Zoe Quinn,
the woman whose resentful ex-boyfriend started a
massive harassment campaign against her, sparking
one of the largest reactionary movements in the West.
But I was disgusted by how many images I found on
Google of Quinn photoshopped onto horrifyingly
strange and degrading pornographics. So here's a
promo image of her award-winning game
Depression Quest and a link to buy it.

But I’m not here to make a nuanced ideological analysis of how these intersect. I want instead to focus on how dumb these commenters are. When you go back to the photo at Liberty Memes, the most offensive comments have been removed, but I’ll trust that this image captured them faithfully as they appeared.

The commenters seem to have no idea how memes are actually made, talking as though Salma Hayek (or her staff) actually manufactured this meme: “It’s ironic she feels the need to bash men while she shows plenty of cleavage to reel them in.” 

Consider the total lack of logic in the argument: “Dear Selma;* If men designed the world we live in today (which we did as a sex, by the way) and you claim we know so very little it goes to show how absolutely awesome men are . . . you bitch.”

* He also misspells her first name.

Or one commenter’s moronic rage: “Well then she needs to just GIVE UP all the things in her spoiled little existence that she takes so for granted that MEN have DESIGNED!! Otherwise she can just SHUT HER PRETTY LITTLE PIE HOLE and be far more THANKFUL MEN EXIST!! DAMNED FEMINIST BIGOT!!”

These are people writing on a comment thread, but these words are violent. They’re the words of online harassment, creating a web space where women know they will not be allowed to express themselves, or even take part at all. They're representative of one of the largest reactionary activist movements in the world, and many seem to be incredibly stupid.

What This Has to Do With Public Relations

The profession of public relations and corporate communications more generally is already a female-dominated industry, not without controversy. A textbook from my own PR program describes the worries among the top tier of the field that more women working in it would lower the field’s prestige or average incomes. 

Thankfully, these sexist old men have retired or died, and the men who do choose communications for a career are more open to having female superiors at work. Or else they think that a business where more women are in charge makes for genuine social progress. Such men are intelligent, reasonable, and enlightened. 

The exact opposite of the type of men on display in this sad example of pop-libertarian sexist, violent stupidity. So as members of a profession that has prospered as it has become female-dominated, I wonder if public relations as a professional community has an obligation to combat sexism in the public sphere.

One of the recurring ethical problems of public relations is that agencies are client-serving companies, and many of us who choose the agency route for our careers will often work toward solving problems for companies whose own activities we oppose. 

Some potential clients are a bridge too far for anyone.

Imagine an environmentalist working for an agency that assigns her to work on a campaign to build support for a crude pipeline running through ecologically sensitive areas. My own program’s “Ethics of PR” class often examined how best we can “sleep at night,” given how uncomfortable we might be with some of our clients. 

No matter the reputation the public relations industry has for a mercenary attitude (and no matter how much some industry leaders may deserve it), there are limits. Navigator’s mission statement basically is, “No matter how awful you are, we’ll spin for you.” And they still dropped Jian Ghomeshi.

A Duty Beyond the Contract

The truth is, if you’re a woman who holds any kind of position of power, you’re open to having an army of sexist trolls unleashed on you. No matter how many interns you can employ as your anti-cyberbullying army, the fact that you might have to organize one for yourself shouldn’t be tolerated. 

I don’t think PR agencies should choose to work for client organizations or individuals with sexist or racist goals. Ghomeshi didn’t deserve a PR professional’s help. Roosh, the National Coalition for Men, and a Gamergate crowd-fund don’t deserve it either. I at least think it’s an urgent conversation for the industry to have, given the prominence of sexist online harassment in the public sphere today.

Maybe PR professionals should go beyond even this, or at least encourage each other when we do. PR professionals could, in their private lives or their non-billable hours, become online activists. Agencies could lend a few staffers pro bono to work as advocates for equality causes. Agencies led by women or members of other marginalized groups would be especially effective here, because of the rhetorical weight of their identities.

It’s easy for me to say something so provocative and controversial because I’m a recent graduate just starting his career. I have little invested so far in the public relations sector aside from my student loan for taking the program. But it could also be a mistake for me to say what I’ve said because I'm a recent graduate just starting his career.

But I’m still a professional. I have a part-time position and am looking for more permanent work in the communications field. I still have my blog and my public social media accounts. If my personal brand says anything, it’s that I’m dedicated to my beliefs. If anyone wants to hire someone like that, I’d be glad to work with them.

One More Reason Why I Left, A History Boy, 20/06/2015

There are a lot of reasons why I left the university system. Most of that has to do with the fact that I was never able to secure even entry-level, low-paying work as an adjunct-sessional lecturer. As I spent longer building an already-impressive research and publication record, I fell farther behind on collecting teaching experience until I realized that there was no way I’d be taken credibly by a hiring committee.

It didn’t help that my first visit to Versatile PhD, a web community for networking among former academics looking for new careers outside universities, discovered a forum of people proudly throwing away all the books they had bought for their research, setting fire to copies of articles, purging their hard drives of any pdfs or ebooks related to the field to which they had devoted years of their life.

I still care about philosophy – I love reading it, I still write and publish philosophy, and I take part in communities of researchers – and it disgusted me to see so many people throwing that part of their lives away. It made me feel like I had wasted my entire 20s professionally. It’s taken a long time for my mental health to recover from that experience of constantly feeling hopeless and worthless.

I do feel some healthy contempt for some aspects of my previous career, but I still love philosophy, and think it’s a valuable tradition that should survive its marginalization in an increasingly corporate university sector. I came across an article this week that made me think of one particular reason why I don’t think progressive thought and research (at least in the humanities) can happen in the university sector anymore.

Peter Ludlow has been politely asked to leave Northwestern
University in the wake of his misconduct trial and barrage
of lawsuits. He's resettling in Mexico.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a long feature on the saga of the deservedly disgraced Peter Ludlow. The short version is that Ludlow was in a very sticky and emotionally weird relationship with a graduate student in his department when he was a research chair at Northwestern University in Chicago. There was fallout.

A level of fallout so huge in American academia that it’s spread beyond the scandal itself. Laura Kipnis’ essay in Chronicle applied “lessons” about Ludlow’s case to the wider student movement on campuses around North America: if students have the right to accuse their professors of sexual misconduct, it would “have a chilling effect” on academic free speech. 

Those thinkpieces which disparage campus left-wingers as destroying education with trigger warnings, and which turn underemployed teachers against over-indebted students? They began with Kipnis’ conservative reaction to the Ludlow case. 

But I’m not here to add to this general discussion. I don’t really have much to add, other than reminding people that the truly destructive force in modern education is the management model of raising institutional debt levels and promoting prestige projects at the expense of accessibility and any sense of public service. It’s not students who demand respectful education at less life-crushing debt levels or the burning out precarious professors whose chronic underemployment has turned idealistic teachers and writers into embittered defenders of their poverty-level contracts. 

I want to add my own story. It's minor compared to the disaster in Chicago, but it illustrates an important part of what I think is incurably sick about the modern university system. Because I met Peter Ludlow once, when he was a prestigious invited speaker of McMaster University and its philosophy department in November 2013. 

This was just a few months before the lawsuits that destroyed his credibility and career. He gave three talks over a week, all of which I attended and found fascinating. But he did something that, before I discovered the full extent of his sexual misconduct, tainted him already in my eyes.

Earlier that year, I had been turned down for the only university position I managed to score an interview for in the entire three years I spent on the faculty labour market. Despite living in a region with ten large university campuses within inter-city bus range of my Hamilton home, I was locked out of eligibility for adjunct teaching positions through union rules prioritizing seniority. I was just about to start work at an editing company as a contractual telecommuter.

I was speaking with Ludlow after his Monday talk, and we were having a very deep conversation, the kind of talk with an experienced, knowledgeable, and intelligent older philosopher that has always animated me. But then he asked me how far along I was in my PhD. I told him honestly that I had finished, but had not found a teaching position for that academic year.

This was my old philosophy department at McMaster
University. I had some wonderful times there, but that's
all over now.

He immediately turned away from me, and ignored me for the rest of the gathering.

At the time, I was upset. Here was someone who had achieved incredible success in the field that I had just finished my training to enter, but who presumed me to be not worth talking to because of bad luck in a hiring cycle. 

I’ve met public relations and communications professionals who earn a couple of times Ludlow’s Northwestern salary, which itself was extravagant by most faculty standards. When I tell them about my difficulties in the labour market, these people respond with collegiality and sympathy. They’re impressed by what I’d achieved in my university career, and what I continue to achieve in my artistic career, even though it isn’t really that much yet. 

University researchers are supposed to be public servants speaking truth to power in the name of lifting up the downtrodden through education and public critique. Indeed, Ludlow’s talks at McMaster included harsh words for the surveillance state and the new liberal attitude to intellectual property that drove the American prosecutors who hounded Aaron Swartz to suicide.

But the man who came to McMaster in 2013 to speak those truths also regularly abused his position at Northwestern to take sexual advantage of younger female students. He betrayed his egalitarian politics by discounting the contributions of people to philosophy because they hadn’t gained a foothold in the university institution. 

Perhaps I wouldn’t be as upset as I am with the university system if it hadn’t become clear to me that opinions like Ludlow’s are widespread throughout it. When I was last at the Canadian Philosophical Association conference in 2014 at Brock University, the professors from McMaster, Memorial, and others who knew me well would stop and chat with me as a colleague. I'm happy to know all those people, especially those I've spoken with since starting my new career who are glad that, even though I won't make my career in the university sector, I'm not giving up on writing philosophy.

But there was also a professor from my old department who refused even to look at me, continually blanking me in the corridors as if I didn’t deserve to be there because I didn’t have a teaching post. This hypocritical attitude – standing up for egalitarianism and the rights of the disadvantaged in all labour markets but their own – is so widespread that it contributed to my conclusion that progressive philosophy can no longer be written in the university system.

Not a bad role model for a writing career if you ask me.

I have more faith in online communities of philosophers from many disciplines (not just the ones that took their degrees or work in philosophy departments) like SERRC as sites to keep the vibrant character of philosophy alive. These are publicly open venues to hold debates over philosophical issues, develop and promote ideas. It's a truly friendly place for thought.

I'm thankful for their support as well for my future work. I'll make my career in the communications and business sector, but like Harvey Pekar, I'll continue my writing work as well. And I'll publish essays and articles, fiction, philosophy, theatre and film scripts. I think I'll probably write a book on communications theory and practice once I have a few years of experience in the industry. I think it'd be really interesting.

Because I'm not bitter, like too many other people who gave years to a university discipline and couldn't find a place there for themselves. I've felt hopeless before, but I know I'd be even more hopeless if I just gave up on something I loved. I don't think there's much room left in the university system for love of philosophy and writing anymore. There'll be less and less as time goes on.

Ludlow isn’t being punished because it was wrong to have taken advantage of his position of institutional power to control and manipulate those around him. He’s being punished because he overreached and couldn’t control the mess whose conditions he lay himself. He’s being punished because he got caught.

Unfortunately for university philosophy, hypocrisy and classism isn’t a rare thing. It’s only rare that anyone faces real consequences for it. That’s one reason why I left.

Another New Feminist Revolution II: Overcoming Anger, A History Boy, 14/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . It took me a while to understand all the implications of systematic causation’s reality. I’m saying this as a person who wrote, and will release through a major non-fiction publisher, a book of ecological philosophy.* Systematic causation is simply difficult to understand.

* Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, available from an online bookseller with a major global forest’s name sometime this August. 

We’re accustomed to actions being generated from intentions, from personalities and acts of will. This is the conception of action that descended from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. When I was working on my doctorate, I encountered the field of action theory, which centred on a very human model of what it was ‘to act.’ How could such a profoundly human thing like a framework to marginalize and oppress the already vulnerable not be intentional?

Anger is powerful and cleansing when you let just enough
of it through you. But it can easily cross its point of
soul-toxicity.

This failure to understand how the genesis of actions could be anything other than the individual’s will is the dynamic of thinking that provokes hatred in regard to feminism. Feminist hatred, done correctly as Laurie Penny does, is a rage toward particular men who embody the sexist norms that permeate so much of our society, and the forces and concepts that twist us all into patriarchal shapes. 

A man who harms women deserves anger from two justifications. 1) He harms women through his aggression in violence. 2) He harms women through his idiocy as he acts uncritically, with no attempt to develop real empathy or knowledge of how uncomfortable or frightened women become around him. 

Such a man – the idiot – can become violent towards women if he becomes convinced that the reason women turn from him is not his own way of carrying himself, but in the corruption of women themselves as a species. Because this is their essential and definitive message, this is why I hate Men’s Rights Activist groups. They interpret their mistakes as her evil.

I’ve been such an idiot before, so self-absorbed and unable to conceive that he might make a mistake with someone, that he leaves only a wasteland where there were once happy memories of old friends. 

Yeah, this sure turned into that kind of post. 

If a Men’s Rights Activist group found me at one of my most vulnerable moments, I don’t know what I might have become. I won’t say they definitely would have ensnared me, but I can’t say for sure they wouldn’t have. But instead, at a time when I felt lowest, I actually found love. 

That’s why I almost cried when I read Penny’s second chapter of Unspeakable Things, “Lost Boys.” It’s the chapter that showed me how deeply and perfectly Penny understood systemic causation, the processes that shape human action and society that are beyond all our conscious intentions. This is a feminist perspective that not only understands when to be angry, but also when not to be angry, when a woman must be compassionate.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate. 

You know what they say about small minds . . . 

Once, I put my foot in my mouth on Facebook talking about trans activism before I really knew much of anything about trans activism. I was subject to an enormous pile-on from friends of mine who did know slightly more about trans activism,** but who spent all night yelling at me on that thread, treating my every attempted apology as a fresh provocation.

** I’ve since learned from another friend who knows a whole lot more about trans activism than anyone else I know that my question actually hit on a subtle ideological schism in the trans activist community about advocacy methods. I still sounded pretty douchey when I first asked the question, though.

When one of my now-former right-wing friends read through this exchange, he used it as an opportunity to show me the true colours of feminism, the left in general. They were only interested in taking my dignity from me, forcing me to live subject to constant abuse or fear of violence. The left would take my freedom away, he said.

Of course, that’s just what a privileged person would say at the prospect of losing their privilege: they’re going to throw on me the oppression and violence I’ve been throwing on them for centuries. He didn’t say this explicitly, obviously, but his basic message was that feminism’s goal was women treating men as men have historically treated women. It was a movement to punish, a vengeful attitude.

Until you read Penny talk about how boys and men are twisted by patriarchal social norms and frameworks of thinking until violence dominates their souls. Either we give in completely and embody all the worst possible sexist traits a man can have, or at least most of them. Or we resist, simply because violence isn’t in that individual’s soul to the same intensity as a proud date rapist, and are tortured by social pressure to dominate despite our individual nature. 

This is how you understand systemic causation, the power of a presumption into which you’re socialized from birth. If the teenage girl driven to anorexia and suicide by constant sexual violence and bullying is a victim of patriarchy, then so is a Men’s Rights Activist or the most aggressive #Gamergater. 

Perpetrators of violence whose roots are in systemic causation are victims too, twisted by forces more powerful than they are into demons. And they don’t even know enough of this force to perceive it as it mutates them. Punishment and revenge miss the true cause of destruction. Only healing and educating can fight a systemic cause. . . To be Continued.

“Difference Inhabits Repetition . . . Difference Lies Between Two Repetitions,” Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express, 13/10/2014

After some weeks, I feel less like myself, and more like this.

I hope no one really minds that I never posted anything over Thanksgiving weekend. Quite frankly, I needed some time off from the school program at Sheridan, the production and promotion of You Were My Friend, the work I’m doing on the Alice script, reading the philosophy and fiction that I like to read for my future writing projects and for fun, and writing all this on the blog. It’s fun, but sometimes you just have to go to St Catharine’s and take a break.

I don’t even really think that I need the spoilers tag today, because I’m not really discussing any of plot-related details of Mummy on the Orient Express. Instead, the episode offers me the chance to discuss a concept that’s been running under this season quite a lot. At least it appears more explicitly than it usually does in Doctor Who, a show with an immense and complicated history, made by very talented people who have been longtime fans and know that history intimately. 

Repetition. 

Phil Sandifer’s review of this episode did a fine job of identifying many of the common tropes that recur throughout the production of 21st century Doctor Who, but recursion occurs throughout this season with an intensity that I think is of a different quality than the usual tendency in any long-running television production of falling back on techniques that have worked well in the past. Mummy on the Orient Express finds new spins on each repetition, though, because that’s what repetition is.

Deleuze: An inspirational philosopher with whom
I share increasingly fragile lung health.

The kind of repetition I’m talking about isn’t the colloquial meaning of the term, the repetition of exactly that which has gone before, repetition of the same. I’m talking about the conception of repetition as the repetition of a creative moment, a concept that is pivotal in the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze. What repeats is the departure from what is the same. Time without this departure, at least at some minimal scale, is no time at all. Repetition is a reiteration that is also a change. You can recognize the new event as a development of what has come before, but it is also unique in its own right.

We should also be careful about what is a genuine repetition and what is a coincidental resemblance. One of the commenters on Phil’s review discussed how Clara’s being drawn to the danger and power of the Doctor’s life appears to echo that of the young Sarah Jane Smith, and Donna Noble. Yet this example also helps us figure out precisely what is a repetition.

We don’t really learn anything from pointing out this similarity. It is a similarity, but it doesn’t signify any meaning in the context of the episode itself. It’s a similar image in Doctor Who’s history to the current moment, but it doesn’t trace a causal path of signification or serve as a profound enough echo. To do that, the story element should either be the explicit product of the creators choosing an idea within the history of Doctor Who and reiterating it, either as a major or minor story element, or as a fleeting image. 

The most important fleeting images were callbacks to the Tom Baker era, which occur both here, and as a curious element of the art in a companion comic book. Peter Capaldi, in a scene where he talks to himself in his sleeper bunk, does an impression of Tom Baker, and he later offers a character a jelly baby from an ornamental cigarette case. As well, Capaldi’s Doctor as drawn in the companion comic strongly resembles former Doctor Who producer Phillip Hinchcliffe. 

This is all I need to post. Learn more about the comic here.

As this season is probably the most consistently horror-oriented of the 21st century series, to the point that my girlfriend no longer understands how Doctor Who in its current form can be a show that’s appropriate for children. My telling her that children enjoy having nightmares never really goes over that well. But these images are inserted intentionally, so that people who are similarly familiar with the history of the show will understand these signifiers as markers of success. A horror-oriented Doctor Who is undergoing a creative renaissance, its producers know it, and they’re using these signifiers to let the audience know.

A more substantial repetition is the setting, the Orient Express in space. Because Doctor Who is part of the centuries-long tradition of British popular narrative entertainment (stretching back as far as, since the medium is immaterial to narrativity itself, the sagas and The Canterbury Tales), it can engage in dialogue with elements of that tradition, including Agatha Christie novels.

A more immediate aspect of that repetition is that Doctor Who has already engaged with Agatha Christie explicitly in The Unicorn and the Wasp, which was, in the blurring of text and tongue-in-cheek meta-text typical (some would say definitive) of the Davies era, an adventure with, and commentary upon, the Christie model of mystery storytelling. 

Mummy on the Orient Express also reiterates Christie, but instead offers a commentary on its over-artificiality. The entire reason they’ve been thrown into this situation was for an unscrupulous businessman to reverse-engineer a terrible weapon.* The mummy being on board the train was itself used to call out the implausibility of the coincidence, which is that it was part of someone else’s plan. 

* A plot device that was the motivating factor in the storyline of Aliens. 

You'd think there was only so much to be done with Agatha
Christie pastiche in Doctor Who. But to say that, shows
you don't know all that Doctor Who can do.

So instead of a retread of Murder on the Orient Express, we end up with a version of And Then There Were None, one Christie story turning into another. But that transformation only occurs through a narrative splice with another repetition of a Davies-era trope: the small-scale villain with epic-sized powers thanks to the sci-fi setting they operate in. Mme Karabraxos in Time Heist was the same type of figure, this story's mysterious GUS being a villain whose petty motivations, like weapons manufacturing, are even more criminal in the mythic and epic registers of the story. Here, not only does the setting evoke the trappings of the legendary Christie, but the narrative evokes the tradition of British horror films and, through their twisted mirrors, the Pharaonic culture of Egypt. 

Fleeting images in the narrative can be intentional, but they can also be unintentional, as I suspect this last repetition is. Their unplanned nature makes them particularly disturbing, as repetitions that emerge from the component activities of a narrative are uncontrolled, and perhaps uncontrollable. So I’m rather disturbed to see an unintentional fleeting image repeating, with variation, the Colin Baker era, a moment that finally does necessitate my 

SPOILERS

tag for this review. As I discussed in my review of Deep Breath, the spectre of Doctor Who’s most intense moment of self-destruction haunts Capaldi’s first series. One of the most important aspects of this explosion, the near-suicide of the program itself, was the horrible way the character of Peri Brown, the Doctor’s main companion in the brief Colin Baker period, was treated.

Nicola Bryant as Peri doing what she was frequently
directed to do in her time on televised Doctor Who,
whimper with fear.

As I, and Phil, have said in our separate discussions, Peri was the living embodiment of rape culture paraded at the front of Doctor Who, not to be condemned, but to be celebrated as the essence of the Doctor-Companion relationship. Peri was constantly threatened with sexual violence, and victimized throughout her adventures from The Caves of Androzani to Timelash. She was rarely able to rise to the occasion, always a victim in need of rescue. 

After Peri laid bare the most unsavoury aspects of the Doctor-Companion relationship that had been lurking creepily in Doctor Who’s implicit text for decades, the companion could never really be treated in such a way again. The role began its period of experimentation: no character could ever be the generic companion again. Clara is probably the most radical experiment in the continuing process of finding new takes on the companion yet.

However, her hair here is precisely Peri’s haircut in Season 22. This is in no way intentional, as her hair was explicitly designed in this episode to evoke the 1920s flapper aesthetic of the Orient Express space train.** Yet the haircuts turned out to be hauntingly similar.

** However, when I think about it, there’s no way that, if we ever do go epically into space as Doctor Who prods us to do, any space-based tribute to the Orient Express will ever be so simple as a period piece. Thanks to the cultural power of Agatha Christie, the train is more famous for there having been a murder on it than anything else. So any Orient Express in space will probably end up being a murder mystery cruise.

Clara becomes a perfect inversion of Peri, linked only
through the unplanned repetition of the earlier actress's
haircut, shining through her flapper wardrobe.

And Clara, at the end of this episode, reveals that if she has any relationship to Peri, it is as the character’s total inversion. Jenna Coleman and the young Nicola Bryant physically resemble each other, here most explicitly, but the episode ends with Clara choosing to continue lying to Danny about her adventures. After she accuses the Doctor of addiction to taking upon himself those serious decisions where lives and worlds hang in the balance, she herself clearly displays that addiction. 

Upon facing the accusation, the Doctor is hesitant, perhaps seeing an edge of truth, but knowing that this is not the full story of why he lives as he does. But Clara, in speaking about the Doctor, reveals more about herself. Clara is a repetition of Peri not only in surface imagery, but in that her character is defined through her engagement with danger and threat. 

Peri cowers, and becomes a living embodiment of the sexism that had long infested Doctor Who without ever being dealt with. Clara embraces the danger and the power that danger offers, becoming a progressive figure for female characters in mainstream televised sci-fi. The challenge is whether the denouement of Clara’s arc will save this potential or squander it.

The Right Wing I: The Challenge of Ambition Without Pedigree, Composing, 15/09/2014

Most of what I write about on this blog is philosophy, particularly the research I’m doing for my Utopias book. However, I don’t actually do philosophy for my major source of income anymore, and it probably won’t ever constitute my major source of income for the rest of my life. At its worst, philosophy is a hobby. At its best, I’ll be a well-regarded independent contributor to the tradition. 

I doubt that most of my work will be well-regarded in the university system, where most people who self-identify as philosophers are still currently employed. This won’t be because of lack of quality. As you can probably tell from my posts, I’m not exactly slacking off on my primary and historical research. Indeed, one of the reasons I keep this blog is to slowly build an audience, at least a cult audience, and an online profile for my work. 

Some of my first teachers of philosophy were professors who
were born into the lower and middle classes, rungs of the
economic hierarchy that no longer have the same access to
success in university research, no longer able to support
oneself in an elite institution on scholarship funds alone.

But I know that most people who leave the university sector, especially those who left with regrets and long periods of underemployment, no longer want to contribute to the discipline they worked in. I understand their bitterness, even though I don’t share it. Most people who contribute to philosophy outside the university sector are regarded by university professors in the discipline as cranks, even if they manage a popular audience. Yet here’s an example of why I don’t think the university system is going to maintain a monopoly on the practice of the humanities disciplines much longer.

I was once snubbed by a prestigious guest speaker at my old department, when, despite having happily engaged in intellectual conversation with me during and after his talk, I honestly told him that I’d had trouble finding steady work after finishing my PhD. That man was Peter Ludlow, who I would discover only a few weeks later was a walking disgrace to the profession of university teacher and the discipline of philosophy.

The problem is decadence. Professors at the top of the heap can too easily phone in their work while taking advantage of their position for personal gain and pleasure. The insecurely employed professors at the contractual and adjunct levels are, meanwhile, too overworked and underpaid to achieve any worthwhile scholarship or creative contributions to the wider traditions. Ambitious work is discouraged in the culture of a corporatized university. It is the independents who, despite their unfortunate status among the entrenched scholars of the university system, are the only ones in the best place to take risks as thinkers and writers.

So, if you’ll let me indulge in a little pretension, just as Franz Kafka composed his literature after spending the day at his insurance firm and Wallace Stevens composed poetry walking to his office, the most creative philosophy of the next 100 years will likely come from independent practitioners networking through the internet across the world. 

With regard to my own particular work, I’m preparing to enter a field of political philosophy that I think I’ll need some help from my networks to get a true grip on. The right wing. To be continued. . .