Plutocracy

A bunch of the names of surface features of Pluto and its moon Charon have been released.  There are some surprises, given their decision to name a number of things after either fictional places and people, or inanimate objects.  Yes, I realize this is the second time this year alone that I've had a post about naming astronomic stuff. And I'm aware my last one cautioned against taking the task too lightly and naming after the less deserving.  But hey, in the grand scheme of things, it's only a couple of rocks.  Sorry to rub it in, but not even official planets.

The big prize is the "heart" that has become Pluto's trademark. Fittingly, it was named after Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto. Too bad it will inevitably become the home to the 22nd-century's sleaziest motels. There were also shoutouts to scientists who worked on the outer solar system (e.g. Oort.) Some of the names were surprisingly dark, such as the huge Cthulhu Regio, named after H.P. Lovecraft's demonic character, even though most sci-fi/fantasy names were relegated to Charon.  But you have to remember that Pluto - for all it's modern association with cute dogs - was the Roman god of the underworld, and Charon the operator of the ferry that takes the dead to the underworld.

My thoughts on the names:

• There were several large areas named after robot spacecraft (such as Voyager and Viking) which seems odd, but I guess it makes sense since this whole mission is made possible by such a craft. I was glad to see Pioneer get some love.  It's always been the Rodney Dangerfield of deep-space probes.
• Not surprisingly, there weren't any obvious references to Pluto, the Disney character.  Any attempts to name things after their characters would cause the company's lawyers to craft an armada to send after New Horizons.  But apparently they're thinking of using Laika as a name for something, which would be nice.
• Maybe it just went over my head but I couldn't find any snide reference to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. 
• Since Charon has lots of science-fiction names on it, and the mythological Charon was a boatman on the river Styx, you'd think they could have fit in a Roboto crater.
• Although the usual suspects dominated the science fiction area of Charon, it was nice to see Macross Chasma.
• Speaking of the usual suspects, there was also a big chasm named "Serentity," after the ship from the short-lived-much-loved show Firefly.  I never cease to be amazed by the love for that show.  Future generations will wonder how it got right up there with Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and Doctor Who.
• Also predictably, Stargate got shafted.  Surely an "O'Neill mountain" wouldn't be out of place. 
• If you're going to name a bunch of things on Charon after Star Wars stuff, why not have a feature named, "This Is No Moon." That would look hilarious on maps.
• In the Mass Effect series of video games, Charon turns out to be an ancient alien transportation device.  You'd think they could have worked in a reference to that to make up for the fans' disappointment that it's just a regular moon.
• In the unlikely event they run out of names for things on Charon, how about naming a bunch of mountains after all the pronunciations of "Charon."  You could have Chahron, Kahron, Kairon, Chai-Ron, Shy Ron, Sharon, Karen etc.

Seeing A Difference

Lots of people are talking about the cover of New York Magazine. If you haven't heard, it's a picture of 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of rape.  There are also short write-ups of the experiences of each of the women.  They are as shocking as would be expected, but people still seem fixated on the effect of that cover photo.

That leaves me with a question: why does the picture have such an effect?  It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  We already knew the sort of numbers we were dealing with in this case; we could easily imagine what 35 women would look like.  I know, the medium is the message and all that.  But still, the effect of a visual is striking.

This first came to my attention last year in the case of Ray Rice, the football player who was arrested for knocking his then-fiancée unconscious in a hotel elevator. When the report came out, he was given a slap-on-the-wrist two-game suspension.  But later, when video of the incident became public, there was a widespread outcry, and he was released by his team and given an indefinite suspension.

A lot was said about the incident, but what I found shocking was that the video didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  You could understand the shift in attitude if the video had revealed something that wasn't in the reports of events.  But it showed that the report was pretty accurate.  To me that reveals our complacency about violence against women.  We're used to brushing off men assaulting their partners and accepting it as part of life.  The video forced us to confront what we were really talking about, and to judge the behaviour for what it really is.

I think we're seeing the same effect with the magazine cover.  We've heard for a while now about the sheer quantity of women accusing Cosby.  As much as the numbers have lead to more widespread belief of the women, it's also shifted it from a story of individuals to a story about numbers.  Forcing us to come face-to-face with these women has brought it back to a human level. Again, it shouldn't be that way; we should be able to give importance to a story on our own, without a visual cue. Hopefully stories like this one will allow more of us to remember victims' humanity.

I'm Sure You Weren't Looking For This Post

Searching based on text is a difficult thing.  Sure, it seems simple: if someone types in a word, you find things containing that word.  But people don't always spell things correctly.  That leads to Google's condescending "did you mean" or "showing results for" features.  They're slightly insulting, but less confusing than returning with a page of gibberish results matched to mistyped search terms.

But then the concept can be taken to ridiculous extremes.  For instance, there's probably more people who Google "kitchens" than my home of "Kitchener."  Should Google try to correct me by assuming I was looking for a new kitchen?  Fortunately it doesn't.

But then I was at Google's app store, searching for the oddly-named game, "Depths of Isolation" (which is just a physics puzzler, not as depressing as it's name would indicate.)  That's an unusual title, and its a new and little-known game, but still, I wasn't prepared for the store's search to return this:

Yes, even though there was an app that matched my search term exactly, it gave me a page-and-a-half of popular but completely unrelated apps first.  This would seem to be the Ikea model of searching: We'll get you what you want, but we'll make you walk past everything else in the store first.

Where Devils Fear To Tread

It may seem like politicians are completely amoral and capable of anything to get ahead. But even the truly sociopathic politicians are constrained by the limits of of the general public. As an extreme example, there may well be some politicians who wouldn't be above having an opponent killed, but the fact is that even our jaded electorate would turn on such a person.

Politics has lots of lines that politicians will not cross. But the problem is that we can only guess what those lines are. I used a ridiculous example above, where we can be sure murder would end the perpetrator's career. By in many lesser actions, we can't be sure it's a career-ending-move because we've never seen anyone do it. For instance, there are different levels of slander: a politician telling outright, easily-proven lies about their opponent would likely be punished by the voters, but more esoteric lies from a supporter kept at arm's-length are generally accepted.

That arrangement keeps politics a little more civil than you would expect, given the morality of its participants. And sometimes it’s kept more civil than even the standards of the electorate, because politicians aren’t willing to take the risk of pushing too hard against assumed standards of behaviour. At any given time, amoral pols are kept from breaking rules by the threat of the consequences, even though - unbeknownst to them - they could get away with it. It all works because you need skills of logic and self-preservation to get ahead in politics, even if you don't need morality.

To me, this is the greatest tragedy of populist maverick politicians. These are people who not only lack the sense of morality, but also the intelligence and logic. They may even get their popularity from their recklessness. And thus, they often cross the lines smarter politicians fear to cross. That, it may end their career; indeed, given enough time, it will. But until that fatal mistake, they may cross some lines that turn out not to have the fatal consequences everyone assumed. And having shown everyone that the line is an illusion, they've added it to the repertoires of more mainstream politicians.

Of course, I'm currently thinking about Donald Trump as the example here. There were worries when he burst onto the scene and into the lead among the Republican candidates. And now, he's committed career suicide by insulting John McCain's military record, leading people to breathe a sigh of relief that he won't get much closer to a position of power.

But in the process, he did step over at least one of those imaginary line: he's let everyone know that you can go to a new level of demonizing. Anti-immigration candidates previously assumed that courting the racist vote would require insults against Mexicans to be veiled, lest you be seem bigoted and get out of the mainstream. But from now on, they'll know that there is no punishment if you come right out and say what the worst of the electorate is thinking.

He/She/They Slimed Me

I'm not sure what to think about this new Ghostbusters movie. If you haven't heard, the main characters are all female. There are a lot of people complaining about it on the grounds of, ew, girls. I’m certainly not in agreement with them.  I like the cast, and the people from the original movie don't seem horrified by what's going on.  So I'm sure it's got as good a chance as any reboot.

Some have seen it as a milestone for women in a couple of areas (blockbusters and comedy) where they're still searching for acceptance. But others have said that it seems like tokenism. After all, producers decided that this movie would feature female leads before anyone had been cast. So you can look at the gender switch as progressive, but it also looks like a publicity stunt to set it apart from all the other reboots and sequels out there.

Into all this comes Annalee Newitz's article criticizing news outlets (including her own site io9) for referring to this movie with descriptions like, "the all-female Ghostbusters." Complaint being that we don't refer to the original as "the all-male Ghostbusters," and this, we're contributing to the idea that women are the exception and men are the rule.

In most cases, I'd agree. But when conceived from the start as all-female (and we'll figure out which particular females later) then I think it's reasonable to identify them by gender.  It would be wrong to refer to say, The Supremes as an all-female band, since you wouldn't refer to, say, The Beatles as an all-male band. However, I wouldn't be against referring to a band as all-female if it was conceived of as specifically female. That is, you wouldn't call Weezer "all-male" yet I think it's reasonable to call their tribute band Sheezer "all-female."

Having said all this, I realize that there is a counterargument: I'm criticizing the fact that this movie was conceived of as "all-female," but the fact is that lots of movies are conceived of as "all-male," even if it's not explicitly stated.  For instance, The Expendables probably wasn't described by its producers as an all-male action movie, but the genders of its characters were as certainly male as the new Ghostbusters is certainly female.

Half-Dialog

Dialog in video games is an awkward issue. One day, voice recognition and artificial intelligence will be advanced enough that you'll be able to just turn to any character and start a conversation, and they'll respond intelligently. But until then, the game designers have to do something to cover for the fact that language - one of the defining aspects of the human experience - is missing. There are a few ways to do this:

• If the game is a dumb-enough violence-fest, they can ignore it entirely.
• They can concoct a setting where the player gets all their info in one way communications, like e-mail or recordings. Say, you're the lone cop fighting your way into the criminal's compound, Die Hard style. That's a neat solution, but it may require a really contrived plot.
• Have the player character say certain fixed lines. That can make the game seem more complete, since your character talks to others like a real person, but it can be frustrating if the character acts in obviously bad ways.
• Give the player a small menu of possible things to say. That gives the player more of a feeling of participation, but it still doesn't seem like a real conversation.

But there is another way: have other characters talk to the player, but not give the player a chance to respond. If the other characters give all the info the player needs, and never call attention to the fact the player is not talking, this approach can work.

That's the system used in the popular Half-life games. Main character Gordon Freeman never says a word. Others talk to him, but never seem to notice that Freeman himself stays silent. Well, there is one quick joke early in Half-life 2, when another character notes that he doesn't say much. It's a funny, self-deprecating joke from the developers, but it would have been better at the end of the game, so that you don't spend the whole game noticing how weird it is that everyone is talking to you without expecting any response.

The lack of speech would be easier to believe if your character were some underling that gets commands from more important people, without a chance for input. But Gordon Freeman is a physicist-turned-action-hero. Surely everyone would want to talk to him wherever he goes.

I suspect a lot of players don't really worry about this problem of game realism, since many of them try to break out of the story's reality anyway. In his book, Designing Games, Tynan Sylvester describes what he calls "desk jumping." It's when a player does something out of the ordinary in a game just because they can. For instance, you could jump on your commanding officer's desk while he's giving you your next assignment, just to see if he's been programmed to notice. I generally don't do this, and instead play my part: I want to get my money's worth out of the experience. So I've done what I can to try to make Half-life's conversations seem more natural. Unfortunately, that's usually limited to nodding or shaking my head in response to what others say, since that's the only way I can feel like I'm an active participant.

But it's occurred to me that Gordon Freeman has my ideal situation. As a person who is introverted but not antisocial, my dream is to have people care about me and pay attention to me, yet not require me to talk or start any conversation. I'd love to be in his place, even if I had to single-handedly repel an alien invasion to get there.

Yo Kanye, We're Really Happy For You, We'll Let You Finish

Kanye West has been signed to perform at the closing ceremonies of the Pan-Am games in Toronto. My first reaction to this is that it's such a Toronto thing to do.

It's reminiscent of SARS-stock, the concert to announce that Toronto was open for business following the SARS outbreak. It had the basic problem that they were trying to advertise their city by hosting a concert of The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, and other acts who were almost completely from other places. The message came out as, "Toronto is great, because we can afford to hire famous people." CNN had the best line, commenting that this was the first time Keith Richards has been used as a symbol of public health. It was a great indication of how Toronto desperately wants to publicize itself, but doesn't really know how.

The irony is that although Toronto often seems quite separate from the smaller communities of Southern Ontario, it still has essentially the same mentality. A small town down the 401 from Toronto might think the key to being taken seriously is to get a Walmart, not considering that lots of places have Walmarts. Similarly, Toronto tries to get world respect by gathering more of the things other big cities have.

And that leads to perhaps the strangest part of this hire-famous-foreigners phenomena: the officials responsible are so oblivious. When questioned about the choice, the head of the games said that the closing ceremonies of most sports events have big acts, so this is not unusual. A quick look at recent Olympic closing ceremonies show that they do indeed feature big acts, but he didn't seem to notice the pattern that it's always big acts from the host country. Even our antipodean doppelgänger Australia had a performance of every musician they've ever produced except AC/DC.

And news reports (usually emulating from Toronto) don't seem to get it either. One CBC report began by flatly starting that people were uncomfortable with Kanye because he isn't a nice person, dredging up the footage of him interrupting Taylor Swift. They then proceeded to show person-on-the-street interviews about it, all of whom criticized the choice based on West's not being Canadian.  So it seems many of us - even Torontonians - do get it, it will just take a while to filter to the top.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #25

They'll use electric guitars to advertise retirement homes.

Forced Deduction

You sometimes see hood scoops on cars. These are to get more air to the engine. Though a lot of them are fake and just there to make the car look cooler. Some cars come with them, but many are added by the owner.

I imagine that adding a hood scoop would be a fair amount of work. You’d have to cut the hole in the hood, attach the scoop with welds or some sort of adhesive, smooth out any imperfections, then paint, all the while making sure the measurements line up right. You might do this yourself, or you might pay a bodyshop to have it done. It will take some time, during which you are either doing the work yourself, or waiting for it to be done.

My point is, you will have plenty of time to think. I saw a guy driving a vehicle with a custom hood scoop today, and he should have used this time to ask questions. Questions like, why am I putting a hood scoop in a minivan? Since it is a minivan, and I use it to drive my kids around, would they really want to be seen in this vehicle now? Is this supposed to be some kind of irony? Is this a desperate attempt to look cool, like a kind of minimal mid-life crisis? Am I trying to start some new branch of tuner culture, seriously believing that Vin Diesel will be driving a souped-up minivan somewhere around Fast and Furious 12?

I'd Like To Make Some Suggestions To The Academy

It's time once again for the ESPY awards, ESPN's annual award for all sports.  It's existence has gotten a little bit stranger this year since it won't actually be on ESPN (it's moved to corporate cousin ABC.) 

Last year I suggested the ESPY's would benefit from some new, more creative categories.  Well, given another year, I've thought of a bunch more:

Football

• Best performance by a quarterback when faking going-for-it on fourth down.
• Peyton Manning award for longest audible.
• Most original facemask design
• Best endzone font
• Subtlest “deflated balls” double-entendre
• Most sarcastic throwing of a challenge flag
• Smuggest reference by CFL commentators to being on American TV

Baseball

• Most gratuitous old-timey ballpark feature.
• Most optimistically-placed "hit it here" sign.
• Best stalling before asking for a replay
• Most creative defensive shift
• Most character shown by an old batting helmet
• Ballpark whose centrefield amenities most exceed that city’s park system.
• Base coach achievement in blocking cameras
• Most rustic behind-home-plate half-wall

Soccer

• Best attempt by an MLS fan to act like a European fan.
• Goalkeeper whose uniform most clashes with teammates.
• Team with most unrecognisable alternate uniforms.
• Subtlest fake injury
• Best performance by a referee presenting a yellow card
• Most complex stutter-step approach to a penalty kick

Hockey

• Best analyst's excuse for why an obviously-dirty hit shouldn't have received a penalty.
• Hockey goalie/baseball catcher with equipment that best colour-coordinates with uniform.
• Most valiant attempt to pretend Americans care about hockey

Basketball

• Best performance by an injured player in street clothes to look involved in a time-out huddle
• Most non-committal attempt by a commentator to imply Lebron James is as good as Jordan

Team Awards

• Mascot that looks most like it could survive in the wild.
• Least racist portrayal of Native People
• Least ugly stadium exterior
• Most colour-coordinated fans
• Best performance by an owner shown reacting to events on the field

General Athletes’ Awards

• Most surgically rebuilt joints.
• Best below helmet/hat hair
• Best excuse for missing an all-star game
• Best acting in a post-free-agent-signing I-always-wanted-to-come-here speech
• Lebron James award for best image rehabilitation

Commentators Awards

• O.co award for career achievement in pronouncing sponsored stadium names without sounding stupid.
• Best attempt to sound sympathetic to fans caught in the rain/snow/cold while sitting in a comfortable booth
• John Madden award for best use of a sound or grunt as a word.
• Best attempt to ignore the crowd chanting a profanity.
• Breakthrough award for male sideline reporters or female commentators

And finally, a lifetime achievement award to the guy who recorded "Everybody clap your hands"

From Uber Down To Snapchat, I Must Have Bought Them All

I was just at Google Play, which is the name Google gives to its app store. I noticed a game called “Pinball Wizard.” And I thought fine, they’re naming it after The Who’s song, that’s clever. But then I realized that the icon they had chosen was the actual album cover, which is surely a copyright violation.

But alas, the joke was on me. Google Play fancies itself a vendor of all sorts of media, and I had unknowingly scrolled down passed the array of apps, and into the music section. This wasn’t an app, it was the actual recording of The Who’s "Pinball Wizard."

That makes me wonder just how often this sort of thing happens, and how many times people actually buy the wrong thing. I had already figured that a few people every year must confuse Sue Grafton’s V is for Vengeance and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. But now that you can easily confuse items that aren’t even the same media, there’s a whole new level of mistaken identity. When Canadian musician Owen Pallett went by the name Final Fantasy, he may have been on to something.

The Dismal Science-Fiction

Here's a discussion starter: If you could take any technology from Star Trek and make it real, what would it be?  Would you choose warp drive? Phasers? Transporters?   I'd take a different choice than most people: I'd want the replicators.

If you're not familiar with them, they're the machines that instantly construct anything the crew needs.  When Captain Picard goes into his office and says, "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot," and a hot cup of tea appears in the alcove in the wall, that's the replicator.

I don't think they've ever made it clear, but I've always assumed that there has to be a way to reverse it too. Like maybe Picard puts the empty cup back in the replicator and says, "recycle," and it dematerializes and gets added back to the big heap of generic stuff in a back room of the Enterprise that the replicators make stuff out of.

But I digress.  If you're wondering why I would chose a technology of convenience over the chance to explore the universe or destroy my enemies, it goes back to the show's economics.  Or lack thereof.  The Star Trek future has no money, which is something that many people think is unworkable no matter how mature and advanced our species gets. 

But it always made sense to me, because of the replicators.  If you can produce anything you want whenever you need it, then you no longer need money.  Economics is a way of forcing people to produce before you can consume.  But if production has no real cost, and most things are automated, then there is no need to force people to work.  Or to put it another way, economic systems (whether capitalist or communist or anything in between) exist to deal with the fact that there isn't enough stuff to go around; so if there is enough stuff for everyone, then there's no need for an economic system. 

I realized all this during one of my many hours watching the various Star Trek series in university.  It seemed pretty clever to me, but it turns out it's called post-scarcity economics.  Trek assumes that in a world where work is not required, people still would want to work just for personal enlightenment.  But the point is that the non-economy would still work even if most people sat around watching holographic soap-operas.  You'd just need enough people voluntarily working to do the work of programming, debugging, and improving the machines that do production.

The New York Times has an article about an economist who believes all of this is possible, and probably the only aspect of the show we're likely to see any time soon.

I think he's got a point.  It's surprising how close we already are to a post-scarcity society.  In information-related fields, we already have the needed technology; that is, we can reproduce anything that consists only of information (text, audio, video, software) as easily as Picard's tea.  Of course, those things haven't become free because people still have to eat and sleep, and we can't reproduce food and housing as easily as information.  I'm willing to believe that if we could produce those necessities of life that easily, there would be plenty of creative types producing original work even without any economic incentive.  Writers would still write, singers would sing, and programmers would program.

But for all of this to work, we need to make food like we copy files.  And that's why I'd want to see replicators for real.  Getting to that life of abundance would do more good for us than exploring the universe.  Yes, I know we're not likely to see a machine that can materialize things one atom at a time, but I'm hopeful that we could have machines that could produce things almost as easily.  If 3D printing advances as fast as computer technology has, who knows?

Short Films

Occasionally you see guerrilla marketing, where the intent is to get people talking about the ad itself, thereby creating a groundswell of word-of-mouth.  I try not to get involved in this, since I'd rather not be a part of someone's cut-rate marketing campaign.

But yesterday, I saw an element of guerrilla marketing, and thought it was both unusual and clever, but didn't mention it online to avoid being a pawn of advertisers.  But then I found myself wondering if I'd actually seen it, or just dreamt it up.  So I had to go online to reassure myself of my own sanity. 

If you are in the same boat, let me reassure you.  Yes, that was a tiny little billboard advertising the new Ant-Man movie.  It seems the campaign started a while back, but they must have ramped it up with the release in just over a week.  So no, I hadn't somehow forgotten that I'd taken a large dose of psychoactive drugs. 

So, an ant-sized billboard for a movie about a tiny superhero.  That is pretty funny, I have to admit.  It makes me sorry that this is probably the movie that will prove that Marvel can't be successful with all their characters.  But please do me a favour, and don't talk about this with anyone so I won't feel like a marketing tool.

Rodeo Dive

News is getting way too excited about this balloon guy. He attached balloons to a chair and intended to skydive into the Calgary Stampede or something - I can't be bothered to pay attention.  But news organizations are loving to use it to fill space and time.

There are plenty of reasons why: It's unusual, it presents a nice visual, it ties in with the movie Up.  And here in Canada, it's local content. Plus it's a difficult time for news in general, since it's hard to make the Greece story intelligible or interesting, while Canadian news just keeps reporting on forest fires.

But even modern media has some ethics, and this was a very thinly-veiled publicity stunt.  Usually sports broadcasters have a policy not to show spectators who run on the field, and that's essentially what this is.  No, it's worse than that, it's essentially a less-clever version of that Fan Man guy who crashed (literally) a boxing match in 1993.

And while we're talking about being less-clever, this is the YouTube age, and our bar for being impressed by stunts is pretty high.  Just using lots of balloons to perform a stunt that didn't really work hardly seems notable any more.

A Good Standing-Around Spoiled

Today I noticed a driving range that also had a miniature golf course on premises.  Not being a golfer, I don't pay attention to those things, so it could be quite common, but it seemed unexpected to me.  I would have thought that the driving range would appeal to actual golfers, who would look down on miniature golf.

But I suppose there's no reason why that would be.  Many sports have miniature versions of one sort or another: arena football, indoor soccer, 3-on-3 basketball, table-tennis, go-karts, etc.  In each of those cases, the folks in the big game wouldn't take the small game too seriously, but they don't seem to despise its existence. 

So what's up with other sports.  We should have miniature hockey.  Okay, there's floor hockey and road hockey, but that's not as organized as the other small sports.  Imagine pro road hockey, with teams of three on a squash-court-sized playing surface.

But back to the driving range and mini-golf course.  It occurs to me that this place is a kind of deconstruction of golf.  By driving the ball and then putting, you get the whole golf experience.  It's just like how you could skate around for a while, shoot a puck at some targets, then run into a wall a few times, and you've effectively played a hockey game.  But golf is probably the sport that could most benefit from this post-modern virtual experience: golf courses are big and expensive, you could save lots of money (and walking) this way.  Just make sure that your golf-replacement experience centres are all located within walking distance of a bar, and it will be just like an afternoon on the links.

Lowering The Flag In Capital City

The tide has turned in the U.S. against the confederate flag.  Next thing you know, rural Canadians trying way too hard to be country will stop using it. I'm glad to see it, but there's still something to get off my chest.  Commence geography geek-out:

People keep referring to the controversial flag as the "Stars and Bars." However, the Stars and Bars was a different flag.  The flag we've come to know as the confederate flag is nicknamed "The Southern Cross." That misconception actually further incriminates the use of the southern cross.

The southern cross wasn't the national flag of the Confederacy; it was only used in the military.  The national flag was the Stars and Bars. which looked different.  Having said that, the Confederacy later altered the national flag to incorporate the Southern Cross.  But the thing we now know as the confederate flag didn't become a symbol of the south until the twentieth century.  (End geography geek-out.)

Lots of people are discussing the important issues around the flag, so let me take on a less-important issue.  It's time to say goodbye to The Dukes Of Hazzard.  The repeats have been taken out of syndication because of the confederate flag on the roof of the car. Strangely there used to be an urban legend that Bill Cosby owned the rights to the show, and wouldn't let it be shown in reruns be shown because he thought it was racist. 

The roof of the car that is the focus of the series is not something you can just edit out, so the show will probably be sent to the big DVD case in the sky, at least until American society is so equal that civil war symbols are no longer toxic.  Of course, long before that we'll probably have computers that can concoct original episodes of old shows on demand, and they can put together new Dukes episodes without the flag.

Of course, we could just CGI-out the flag right now, but realistically we'd have to wait a few years until such technology is so cheap they can apply it to an old series that's mostly running on nostalgia.  But what would they replace it with?  They could just put an American flag, but it would be nice if they could find something else that would symbolize The South.

So when I was feeling particularly courageous, I did an image search for "symbol of the south."  Disappointingly, there wasn't much other than the confederate flag.  Indeed, the only other symbol was, ironically, the cast of Dukes of Hazzard.  But to be fair, my non-specific search also got lots of symbols for South Korea and South Africa.  Even young South Sudan had a few symbols in the results.  And there was one reference to the old South African flag, but I wasn't about to look up which South that was supposed to be symbolizing.

You could have the flag of Georgia, but it is just a modification on the Stars and Bars (the actual Stars and Bars.)  So that does it: just put a picture of a bowl of grits.

While we're all growing up, let me share a couple of things I realized about the Dukes after the fact:

• They occasionally mentioned that the Duke boys couldn't use firearms under the terms of their parole.  Of course, that was to avoid the gun issue.  In real life, the General Lee would have a gun rack, and suddenly the show isn't as fun any more.
• Similarly, it seemed strange that the Dukes were all just vaguely described as "cousins" was likely a way to refer to, but dance around, the southern stereotype of relationships with close relatives.  Even when they had to create replacement characters during the infamous contract dispute, the writers just concocted even more cousins.

Societal Transformation

Lots of people are celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court's granting of gay marriage rights. Yeah, I remember supporting gay rights; this was back before most people had even heard of it. It was cool then, but then it went mainstream, the big companies got involved, and it just wasn't the same. Hey, you know what is hot right now? Trans rights. You should look into it; it's gonna be real big soon.

But seriously, there seems to be an assumption that the trans movement is just going to follow along and repeat the progress that homosexuals have made. The gay rights movement went at incredible speed: I’m sure it didn't seem that way to people struggling to win rights for themselves, but compared to the progress of blacks or women, it's pretty amazing.

So can transgender people expect a similarly quick breakthrough? It could be that there is an accelerating effect in social justice. That is, each movement we go through gives a push to the next one to come along. During the gay rights push, there's been a lot of talk about being "on the right side of history" as people seem to be automatically looking at the issue in the long term and considering the comparison to other previous struggles. I've also been impressed at how other groups are drawing lines between the Indiana protests and their own struggles for acceptance. That empathy makes me hope that we are developing a more universal attitude to equality.

But there's also reason to believe that we'll be slower to accept the T than we were to accept the L, G and B. One problem - that trans activists themselves seem to have missed - is a lack of knowledge.

The fact is, society doesn't know much about the concept. I mean, homosexuality wasn't widely accepted when I was young, but we were still taught about it in health class. Pretty much everyone knew what it was, and that was a big part of its quick acceptance: it didn't seem mysterious or scary.

But for most of us, transgender people are a mystery. Most of what the mainstream knows about the concept has centred around reassignment surgery, and that's only been reported on as a novelty. That was an easy sitcom joke in the 80’s with some vague relationship to Sweden, but people didn’t learn anything about the actual transgender experience.

And this is where I believe the trans community has done itself a disservice by assuming that the wave of acceptance will be quick and easy. There's been a frosty reception given to people who ask questions of transgender people.

Of course, some of that is completely understandable. There have been a few embarrassing interviews where transgender celebrities have been asked about the state of their genitals. I think we can all relate to that; no one wants to talk about their genitals on national TV (hopefully.)

But I've also seen condemnation of people being unaware of the difference between transgender people and, say, drag queens. While I'm sure that's aggravating to people living in the trans community, I have to admit that only a few years ago, I wouldn't have known the difference. I consider myself fairly open-minded, but that ignorance would have been due not to prejudice or lack of concern, but just from not having the opportunity to learn.

But there's another roadblock to trans acceptance: the sheer amount of rearranging of concepts we're all going to have to do. As the last century has shown us, it takes a while to change our view of gender. Feminism has been a coherent political force for over half a century and we're still working on how we see women. Now we have to change the very idea of gender, that's not going to be easy.

This reminds me of the criticism often levelled at the campaign for gay marriage: that they are "redefining" marriage. That argument has never been convincing to me because 1. Who cares? Let's make a new definition if the old one is no longer adequate. And 2. Gay marriage really wasn't redefining marriage, since marriage - even among heterosexuals - had come to mean a commitment between people in love, not a basis for procreation. I think that's a big reason why the acceptance of gay marriage spread so fast: it fit into most people's idea of what marriage is.

The acceptance of transfolk really is a redefinition of the popular concept of gender though. The fact is a lot of people really do think of gender as defined by our genitalia. We've had enough trouble trying to grasp the idea that gender roles can't be universally enforced while still acknowledging that there may be differing tendencies between the genders. Now we have to see the genders as highly fluid and changeable, but without throwing out the idea of gender altogether.

One of the more interesting (and disturbing) aspects of the trans rights movement that I've seen is that there is a subset of feminists who are highly opposed to them. That may come as a surprise if you think - as I do - that feminism and other struggles for rights are based on the philosophy that people should be free to be the person they want to be, without having to conform to what society expects of them. But if you’ve dedicated yourself to allowing everyone freedom from the restrictions of gender roles, then changing your gender seems unnecessary, and indeed seems like undoing your work against prejudice.

Don’t shoot the messenger here, I’m just trying to explain others’ point of view. Personally, I don’t buy it, since transgender people don’t really seem like exaggerations of their adopted gender. They usually are no more feminine/masculine than cisfolk. My point is that people from all over the political spectrum are going to have their views on gender challenged by the acceptance of trans rights, so this is going to be an uncomfortable struggle for all of society.