Going to see the new Trek flick tomorrow on the IMAX screen. Figured I’d blog about it now, while I’m still excited, in case it turns out to be lousy. Advance buzz is good though. Wil Wheaton posts “Star Trek has been reborn, and it is SPECTACULAR” and the Onion reports Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as ‘Fun, Watchable.’

And here’s someone else who’s excited:

“I grew up on Star Trek —
I believe in the final frontier.”

From the files of “What Were They Thinking?” here’s an excerpt from the acceptance letter that Avram Davidson sent to Roger Zelazny when accepting Zelazny’s early, classic story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”:

We are taking your novelet, ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’ (a minor point: to avoid inapplicable comparison with A Canticle for Leibowitz, would you consider, ‘For Ecclesiastes: A Rose’…?).

Ugh. I mean, that’s not as bad as Horace Gold on “Flowers for Algernon,” but it sure ain’t good. Fortunately Davidson goes on to say just a few sentences later:

It has occurred to me that the parallel with Miller’s title was deliberate. If you wish the title to remain as it is, it will.

And so it did. Thank goodness.

This morning I was doing a bit of historical research on poor working conditions, and I came across this tidbit on Wikipedia:

Upton Sinclair’s plan to end poverty quickly became a controversial issue. Conservatives in California were themselves galvanized by it, as they saw it as an attempted communist takeover of their state. They used massive political propaganda portraying Sinclair as a Communist, even as he was being portrayed by American and Soviet communists as a capitalist. Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein was deeply involved in Sinclair’s campaign, a point that Heinlein tried to obscure from later biographies, as he tried to keep his personal politics separate from his public image as an author.

That’s interesting, both because I’d never heard about any Heinlein-Sinclair connection before, and also because when I think about science fiction authors who tried really hard to keep their personal politics separate from their public image as an author, Heinlein’s not exactly the first name to come to mind.

In one of my undergraduate political theory seminars (this would be in about 1999), the professor posed this problem to the class: “A group of terrorists have planted a bomb in a major American city. The bomb is set to go off in one hour. If it goes off, it will kill hundreds of people. You’ve captured a member of the terrorist organization, and he knows where the bomb is. If you torture him, you can get the information and possibly defuse the bomb before it goes off. Who thinks you should torture him?”

There were about nine students in the class. Everyone raised their hands.

The professor was taken aback. “So we’re all in favor of torture? Wow.”

Nobody said anything.

The professor said, “Does anyone want to try to argue the other side?”

I said halfheartedly, “I mean, I could.”

The professor said, “Does anyone think it’s just wrong to torture? If you torture him, he may lie, and actually lead you away from the bomb. Maybe he doesn’t know where the bomb is. Maybe you’ve picked up the wrong guy, and he’s completely innocent, and you’re going to torture him.”

“But wait,” I said. “When you introduced the scenario, you stipulated that this guy knows where the bomb is, and that torturing him would get the information. Now you’re just introducing hypothetical counterfactuals. If torturing doesn’t work, or if you’ve got the wrong guy, then obviously you shouldn’t torture him. But if we’re serious about the ethical implications here, we should be discussing the hard case. Stipulate that you’ve got the right guy, and that torture works, and that you can save hundreds of lives by torturing, should you do it then?”

The professor said, “But that’s not real life. In real life you can never be that certain of the facts on the ground.”

This is a problem with a lot of debates in political science. If you don’t stipulate certain facts, you spend all your time arguing practicalities rather than ethics. But in real life there are seldom clearly stipulated facts.

Anyway, in the years since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that discussion. I mean, did I support torture? The best answer I could ever come up with, assuming that torture does work to saves lives, was that there should be harsh punishments against torture, and in the rare circumstances where torture was necessary, the individuals who engaged in torture should subsequently turn themselves over to the authorities and face the prescribed punishment, be it incarceration, execution, whatever. But still the issue bugged me. It didn’t seem right to punish people for doing what was necessary under the circumstances, but on the other hand, if people were permitted to torture without repercussion, torture would quickly become standard operating procedure, and there would be no question that it would be used gratuitously and on completely innocent people.

(Though apparently everyone in the intelligence community these days agrees that torture doesn’t actually work. If this is true, then of course the debate is over right there.)

One of the disturbing things about studying political science is that you realize when you’re about twenty-two that you know more about these issues than the people who are actually making the decisions, and that’s really, really scary. An example of this would be Condoleeza Rice, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, making the jaw-dropping declaration that no one could have anticipated that terrorists would use hijacked planes as weapons. Say what? That was something I’d been worried about since I was about fifteen, when I saw a step-by-step infographic in TIME magazine laying out exactly that scenario. And the freaking National Security Advisor was completely unaware of the possibility?

It’s the same thing with torture. I feel like I spent more time worrying about it than the people who were actually torturing people. I spent so much time pondering what sort of punishment or restitution a person who had tortured (as a desperate, last resort) should volunteer for, and it apparently never even occurred to any of these assholes that they should have to sacrifice anything.

The thing I just can’t stop thinking about, and just can’t get over, is that someone like George W. Bush, from one of the wealthiest families in the country, who attended some of the top schools, and who had an army of highly-paid lawyers and advisors (who also attended some of the top schools), made the call that we should start torturing prisoners. And when the first hints of that decision started coming out, he lied about it, and was willing to sit back in his comfy chair in the White House, where he was the most powerful person on the planet, and let a 23-year-old girl from a trailer park in Alabama, who had volunteered for military service to this country, take the fall for him — for a decision he made. What kind of person does something like that?

At long last there’s a new episode out of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast: Show 27 – Ghosts of the Ostfront I.

But the most haunting part of Donovan Webster’s book is when he takes several planes and a bunch of cars to get to this spot in the middle of nowhere, on the steppes of southern Russia, to see something that very few people know is there, especially outside of Russia, and he says he had a guide with him and they pulled the car up to this spot, and it was in the middle of a very flat plain, and he could see way off into the distance, all the way to the horizon, miles away, and he says that he and the guide got out of the car, their boots crunching on the snow-filled field, and the guide told him to look down, and Webster says when his eyes adjusted to the blinding white of the snow and the plains, he could make out strange shapes in the snow, and the guide picked up one of these shapes and showed it to Webster, and it was a bone — a human bone — and he and Webster begin walking around this field, picking up clavicles, and thigh bones, and jaw bones, and pieces of skulls, and they are everywhere. He says there are also jackboots that you come across, and all sorts of leather gear, all the refuse and debris of human existence that you might imagine still sitting around this field. And he says you can look off into the horizon and these bones are sticking up out of the snow as far as you can see, for miles. The guide tells him that this is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of how far this bone field, he calls it, stretches. This bone field is a monument, an inadvertent commemoration of an important event, with many, many, many lessons to teach modern people today, and it’s out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest major city is a place called Volgagrad, which may not ring a bell in your memory. But Volgagrad used to have another name. It used to be called Stalingrad.

ETA: I interviewed Dan Carlin for Episode 15 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

I had a request to report on the CFI panel on the evolutionary origins of religious belief. I didn’t take notes, but I’ll try to recall some of the highlights. These are not my views, I’m just passing along what was discussed.

Randy Thornhill, Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico, presented his “parasite-stress theory,” which essentially argues that people’s political and religious temperament is largely shaped by subconscious biological processes in response to their perceived risk of infection. In our evolutionary past, disease was a massive factor, maybe the primary factor, driving our evolution. In tribal societies, you’ve probably already been exposed to all the germs of everyone in your tribe, so the real risk of deadly contagion comes from outsiders. In this environment, hostility to outsiders can be a strong survival trait, but too much hostility to outsiders can also hinder your survival, as it cuts you off from trade, possible mates, etc. So hostility to outsiders has to be carefully calibrated according to the risk of infection. Religion, in his view, is a powerful force for strengthening in-group solidarity while increasing out-group hostility, and would therefore be expected to evolve in tandem with high levels of parasite-stress. The theory goes that the more stressed you are about possible infection, the more your biology responds to elevate your hostility to outsiders. Thornhill presented graph after graph demonstrating this correlation (though of course establishing causation from correlation is extremely problematic). Conservatism is generally characterized by higher antipathy toward outsiders. The more disease there is in any given country, the more Conservative that country is likely to be. The more disease there is in a given U.S. state, the more Conservative that state is likely to be. Individuals who are more concerned about disease are more likely to be Conservative. Most striking of all, pregnant women in their first trimester (when the immune system is suppressed so as not to reject the fetus) are markedly more Conservative on issues such as immigration than they are either before pregnancy or after the first trimester. Thornhill also concludes that the Liberal movements of the 1960s in Western countries — civil rights, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution — were the result of decreased parasite-stress, which was brought about by innovations such as chlorinated/fluoridated water several decades prior. (In countries without such technological innovations, no comparable social revolutions occurred.)

David Sloan Wilson, Professor of Biology at SUNY Binghamton, began with a sort of survey of the various evolutionary models to explain religion. These fall into adaptive and non-adaptive categories. Non-adaptive explanations are ones such as that metaphysical belief systems really have no impact on an organism’s survivability, so religion spreads and changes more or less arbitrarily, similar to genetic drift. It might also be the case that religion is a non-adaptive necessary byproduct of a linked adaptive trait — for example, we evolved to be really smart, which helped us survive, but one consequence of being really smart was that we could worry about our own mortality, which created the impetus for not-terribly-constructive religious rituals. Another non-adaptive explanation would be that religion was once adaptive, given the drastically different environment in which we evolved (tribal societies on the African savannah) but is no longer so. (Wilson compared this to our eating habits. We’re biologically programmed to stuff ourselves with as much fat and sugar as we can lay our hands on, which is a perfectly rational survival strategy when you’re at constant risk of starvation, but which becomes extremely maladaptive when you continually have more food available than you need.) There are also the adaptive explanations, which he favors, i.e. that religion makes an organism more likely to survive, either at the group level (religious communities have more solidarity) or at the level of the individual (religious people are less stressed). This is in marked contrast to the adaptive explanation put forth by Dawkins and Dennett, which states that religion operates like a virus, spreading itself through populations, constantly mutating into ever more powerful and seductive narratives, aiding the survival of nobody but the ideas themselves. (For example, the Greek/early Jewish concept of the afterlife — a dismal place of perpetual boredom and emptiness — mutated into the more attractive notion of eternal bliss for you and your friends along with eternal torment for your enemies, and that second narrative therefore thrived while the first largely died out.) Wilson talked about the importance for human beings of having meaningful narratives for their lives — which religion provides. (Though there are equally potent non-religious sources of meaningful narratives.) He described an experiment in which one group of students was regularly assigned to write essays about the things that mattered most to them while another was tasked to write about abstract or trivial topics. At the end of the semester, the first group was actually measurably healthier than the second. Wilson also does research in which college students are asked to wear a device that beeps at them eight times a day. Each time the device beeps, the students are supposed to fill out a quick questionnaire about what they’re doing and how they’re feeling. Wilson was looking specifically at the differences between adherents of notably Liberal religions (Unitarian) versus notably Conservative religions (Seventh Day Adventist). One of the findings was that students belonging to Liberal religions were more stressed generally, perhaps because they experience more worry and anxiety around making decisions, whereas members of Conservative religions were more likely to apply a simple set of black-and-white rules, obviating the need to stress about making tough calls. Conversely, the study also found that Liberals spend about twice as much time alone, and are comfortable doing so, whereas Conservatives experience sharply rising levels of anxiety when separated from their social group.

I created a new NYC Events tag on my blog, so if you want to find out about fun stuff going on in New York City (and if you want to meet up with and/or stalk me) without having to wade through all my other blather, this is the link for you.

My friend Rob has a post up at Tor.com entitled In God We Rust: Final Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica. When Rob mentioned that he’d written this, I was like, “Wait, you wrote more about how bad the Battlestar Galactica finale was? Geez, man, you’re like that character in Office Space, when they beat the crap out of the printer by stomping on it and hitting it with a baseball bat, and then the printer’s lying there in pieces and they’re walking away, but one of them is so overcome with rage that he runs back and starts pummeling it with his bare fists, and his friends have to drag him away. You’re that guy.”

So I just read the post, and it really is sharply observed, but now it’s got me all angry about the finale again. Man, that thing really was like a hundred-car pileup in the middle of Route Stupid, between the Dumbassville and Fuckwittown exits. And this whole time they’ve been teasing us with that whole “And they have a plan” crap. What plan? Plan 9 From Outer Space? There was no plan. Argh.

Anyway, go check out the post.

I did some tagging on my WordPress Blog to make things easier to find, so you can now browse by categories such as “How to Write,” “My Fiction,” “Art & Animation,” and “Photos.” Look under “Entries Tagged.”

So I’m now davebarrkirtley on Twitter.

Here’s the cover of the new John Joseph Adams anthology Federations (“From Star Trek to Star Wars and from Dune to Foundation, science fiction has a rich history of exploring the idea of vast interstellar societies … The stories in Federations continue that tradition”). Features a blurb from Wil Wheaton!

“Many thanks to the following … The NYC Rebel Alliance — consisting of Christopher M. Cevasco (C3P0), Douglas E. Cohen (R2D2), David Barr Kirtley (Chewbacca), Andrea Kail (Leia), and Rob Bland (Han Solo), among others.”

Which occasioned this conversation among the alliance in question at KGB last night:

Rob writes:

I’ve just begun preparations for a clothing company, and I would like to use your doodle of a zombie in one of my T-shirt designs. The doodle will be heavily changed and effect-ed, but I would like to use it as a basis. If you agree and the T-shirt goes into printing, I will happily send you one all the way from sunny England!

I told him sure. I asked which doodle he was thinking of using, but haven’t heard back. It would be one of these four.

Here’s my diploma from the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing program. I focused on screenwriting and fiction.

I just learned that my good buddy Tobias S. Buckell tuckerized me in his Halo novel The Cole Protocol.

Lieutenant Dante Kirtley ran the communications station with Lieutenant Burt on the UNSC Midsummer Night in 2534. He was responsible for relaying messages throughout the ship. Kirtley believed that the Office of Naval Intelligence tortured their prisoners, which greatly offended Major Akio Watanabe.

He survived the Battle of the Rubble and the Battle of Metisette.

How cool is that?

I set up a profile over at LibraryThing if anyone wants to browse my bookshelf. These are mostly all books I’ve actually read. (Click on “xxx books cataloged” and then “Covers.”)

There’s now a website up for the independent film The Arrangement, which is being produced by my good friend Rob Bland. I attended a staged reading of the script last fall, I’ve seen some of the preliminary footage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished movie. Check it out.

Now this is interesting. I just watched this debate on “Freedoms of Speech” between Christopher Hitchens and Shashi Tharoor. I studied Constitutional law in college, and even I didn’t know the history behind this famous legal declaration:

Shashi Tharoor: I think it’s also worthwhile quoting the American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that freedom of speech does not extend to the right to shout fire, falsely, in a crowded theater.

Christopher Hitchens: Justice Holmes’s famous judgment, it seems to me, is one of the stupidest remarks ever made from the bench of the United States Supreme Court and, by the way, he made it in the following context: A group of Yiddish-speaking socialists, who were opposed to Mr. Wilson’s first World War … America’s participation in the imperial bloodbath, gave out leaflets — in Yiddish — in New York saying don’t sign up for the war, don’t believe in it, you’re being led into a disaster. They were put in prison for life, for producing leaflets in Yiddish making a socialist case against the war, and bloody fool Oliver Wendell Holmes had the nerve to say it was the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater where there was no fire. Course there was a fire! There was a bloodbath on the Western Front. That’s a fire enough for anybody.

** Spoilers for Battlestar Galactica Series Finale **

Are you fucking kidding me? Adam & Eve meets There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know meets Touched By an Angel? The second half of this abomination has got to be the worst hour of television I’ve ever sat through. If I hadn’t been at a party with a bunch of friends I would’ve turned it off forty-five minutes before the end. This was so bad it nuked the whole series. I can never watch Battlestar Galactica ever again. Just the prospect makes me nauseated. What were they thinking? Hey, let’s take the lamest, hoariest, most notorious science fiction cliche, mix in the sort of reflexive anti-science hysteria that makes real science fiction fans despise media sci-fi hacks, toss in a generous helping of patronizing, soft-headed ecumenical hokum, and top it all off with a bunch of crass sermonizing and really shitty dialogue.

I remember I was at a con once where David Brin was on a panel. This was between Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. He said it was possible to watch Reloaded and believe that the filmmakers actually knew what they were doing, but he was extremely apprehensive because, as he explained, it is an ironclad law of the universe that the third movie in every sci-fi film trilogy must suck, and must completely undermine and betray everything that was established and done right in the two preceding films. And, of course, that is exactly what came to pass in the execrable Matrix Revolutions, which resembles the finale of Battlestar Galactica more than a little. Both share the same contempt for the audience, for delivering upon the answers that were promised, and for basically just conforming to some minimal degree of logical coherence. Both also share the appalling tendency, which is lamentably all too common in our culture, of trying to pass off vapid pseudo-mystical gobbledygook as profundity. Why does nothing in the whole Battlestar Galactica series make any goddamn sense? Oh, simple really — the whole plot is part of a divine plan that is sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent and which is all beyond human comprehension. Talk about the mother of all deus ex machina endings. What a sad day for science fiction. What a sad day for television. What a sad day for anyone who cares about good writing. This is a fiasco almost beyond comprehension. The whole time I was watching it I was thinking, “I must be dreaming. This must be a nightmare. I’m going to wake up any moment now, and then I’m going to go meet up with my friends and watch the real series finale to Battlestar Galactica. Any moment now I’ll wake up. Any moment now…”

When it was — mercifully — over, my friends were all like, “Why did I ever start watching this stupid show?” “Dave got me into it.” “Yeah, Dave got me into it too.” “Yeah, me too.” “Thanks a lot, Dave. It’s all your fault.”

Mea culpa, all. Mea culpa maxima.

I just watched this lecture by Kenneth Miller. Here’s one part I found surprising and fascinating:

“It’s interesting that you brought up Muslim science. About three or four years ago, I started — because I have a little web page with a lot of evolution stuff up on it — I started to get emails from Turkey, and Lebanon, and even a couple from Iran, believe it or not, from students who wanted me to answer their questions about evolution, and a few of them I asked, ‘Why are you asking me this?’ And they connected me with the writings that go under the pen name of Harun Yahya, who is an Islamic writer based in Turkey, who has written a whole series of anti-evolution books, and one of the students was actually kind enough to buy me an English translation of the book and mail it to me from Turkey so that I could see what all this was about, and it astonished me. Two parts about it were — one was, I suppose, not so astonishing and one was downright hilarious. The not-so-astonishing part is that all of the arguments made in the Islamic world for the scientific insufficiencies of evolution are just recycled versions of the ones that I’ve talked to you about here, so there’s nothing new. But the second part was genuinely amusing, and that is Harun Yahya argued to his young readers that they should appreciate the fact that evolution is a Western Christian plot to subvert the morals of Islamic youth, and as part of his proof of this he pointed out that Charles Darwin studied for the priesthood of the Church of England, and that proves to you that he’s just another crusader, which I thought was a rather interesting take.”

There’s some interesting material on the Wikipedia page for Thomas Paine.

Following the outbreak of the French revolution, Paine traveled to France to take part in the fun, but found himself on the outs with the faction in power and was sentenced to death:

While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine on the morrow. He placed a 4 on the door of Paine’s cell, but Paine’s door had been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell was overlooked. “The Angel of Death” had passed over Paine. He kept his head and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

This section is amusing:

Loyalists vigorously attacked Common Sense; one attack, titled Plain Truth (1776), by Marylander James Chalmers, said Paine was a political quack and warned that without monarchy, the government would “degenerate into democracy.” Even some American revolutionaries objected to Common Sense; late in life John Adams called it a “crapulous mass.”

Oh snap.

Paine certainly seems to have made himself a lot of enemies. I guess that’s what happens when you write stuff like this:

“The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.”

Which leads to this last interesting tidbit:

Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, reports that Lincoln wrote a defense of Paine’s deism in 1835, and friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln’s political career.