Trapped In A Neoliberal Hell

"Never think. Never feel. Interact only through financial transactions. Value only the commands of the market." These are the implicit messages of neoliberal consumer capitalism.

Yet human beings think and feel. Human beings require values and relationships that go far beyond the transactions of selling and buying. Human beings need human values. Take these away, and societies fall apart.

When people understand this, governments panic. Implicit messages become explicit, and so does punishment. Speak out against environmental destruction, and you will be ridiculed. Speak out against proxy wars, and you will be cancelled. Speak out against genocide, and you are finished.

Yet still, we think, we feel, we live by empathy. We continue to be human, because the alternative is an openly authoritarian hell on Earth.

Life is hard right now, life will get worse, but somehow, we must hang on to being human. We must persevere, because if we lose, we die.

Biden's Cancer Is Not Justice

Click for a better jpeg of this ghoul.

I would never wish cancer on anyone. Yet I would also never wish genocide on anyone. Genocide Joe, true to his name, is a thug who could have stopped a genocide, but instead, allowed it to happen, allowed it to persist.

Now that Genocide Joe has been diagnosed with cancer, many people have mentioned cosmic "justice." But no, there is no justice in cancer. Justice remains a human concept, a human goal. For Genocide Joe to pay for his crimes against the human species, he would need to face trial and conviction, but our current society rewards genocide while punishing those who speak out against atrocities. For this reason, Genocide Joe will meet the worms in his grave without facing justice.

No one deserves cancer. But Genocide Joe should have paid a social cost for his cruelty. That failure is ours.

Collapse

During my lifetime, two global powers have collapsed: the USSR, and now, the USA. The first died peacefully; the second seems determined to drag the rest of us down with it. (If we survive these convulsions, we can watch a third collapse: the European Union.)

I never wanted to see any of this, but here we are.

"Brothers Of The Head" -- The Inconsistency of Brian Aldiss

Cover by Mark Salwowski, 1985. Click for a better jpeg.

At the level of the sentence, from clause to clause, Brian Aldiss flickered for decades as perhaps the finest of all science fiction stylists. Yet he was also a story-teller of baffling inconsistency, in one tale brilliant, in the next, bathetic, in a third, downright embarrassing. Even worse, he could sometimes be all three in a single story.

And so he gave us "The Moment of Eclipse," which began with intensely sexual obsession:

"Beautiful women with corrupt natures -- they have always been my life's target."

But then it veered away in a moment of avoidance:

"It may appear as anti-climax if I admit that I now forgot about Christiania, the whole reason for my being in that place and on that continent. Nevertheless, I did forget her; our desires, particularly the desires of creative artists, are peripatetic: they submerge themselves sometimes unexpectedly and we never know where they may appear again. My imp of the perverse descended. For me the demolished bridge was never rebuilt."

Then it became a tale of parasitic infection, a biological haunting, until it suddenly deflated like a birthday party balloon:

"'I'm to be haunted by this dreadful succubus for fifteen years!'

"'Not a bit of it! We'll treat you with a drug called diethyl-carbamazine and you'll soon be okay again.'"

The End.

And so he gave us FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND: in its first three quarters, a fatuous Valentine's Day card to Mary Shelley, a tedious, unconvincing alternative-history treadmill that suddenly, in its final quarter, surged into life with a journey through northern landscapes progressively cold, stark, and bizarre. This final part brings out all of the descriptive power, visual evocation, and narrative tension of Brian Aldiss at his best. It ends the book superbly... but how many readers would be willing to drag themselves from page to page during the book's dull preliminary sections? How many readers would chuck this pile of pages half-way through?

And so he gave us "Brothers Of The Head," an account of Siamese twins who, somehow, unconvincingly, become rock-star geniuses, whose brilliant career is not shown to us directly, but with reports of dry detachment from business people on the outside. Yet after this career falls apart, the story turns around to stare at its twin protagonists; it suddenly becomes a visceral, ferocious, and ultimately moving tragedy of two people who hate each other with rabid passion, but who cannot break apart. They can only break down, and with unsettling brutality, they do.

Again: how many readers of the story would sit through its aridly journalistic opening and middle sections, to reach its worthwhile conclusion?

Behold -- Brian Aldiss!

And so he gave us the baffling monument of his work: one of the best writers of his generation, yet sometimes one of the worst.

Gore Vidal versus Google's AI Stupidity

Click for a better jpeg.

AI is more than dangerously misleading; it is infuriating garbage that should never be trusted.

An example: I wanted to quote a long passage from Gore Vidal's essay, "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel," and so, to avoid a long stretch of typing, I hoped to find a version online.

I entered into Google search a phrase from the essay: "The immediate and the casual."

Google's Artificial Idiocy not only spewed nonsense about Gore Vidal's non-existent interest in this "concept," it also belched up a photo that does not at all resemble Gore Vidal.

AI must die! I recommend fire.