Goat Notes

A proposed rule for political radicals, drawn from various experiences in Green, libertarian, and left-liberal politics:

If you can't even recruit the people who are getting it hardest in the neck from the existing system, you're not ready to change it.

This doesn't say what is wrong with your strategy. Maybe your policies are at fault, maybe your priorities, maybe your ambitions just vastly outrun your skills at this time. Maybe the system is so badly stacked that it needs some gradualist subversion-from-within before it allows any room for movement at all. The one thing you can't safely blame it on is the stupidity or viciousness of all those naughty disprivileged people who are inexplicably failing to rally behind you. Like turning into a snake, this never works. Actually, 'turning into a snake' is a pretty good functional description of what this tactic does to the doer.

A libertarian whose freedom the most constrained and bossed-at people in the country do not think is freedom, is not working towards liberty.

A Green movement whose sustainability sounds to people on shitty urban Council estates like the straw that will break their back, is not going anywhere sustainable.

An egalitarian whose equality feels like being ordered around in menacing high-priestly gobbledegook to 99% of the population, is not striking the blow against 1%-ocracy that they may, perhaps, suppose. And so forth.

Unfortunately, the people doing worst out of any social injustice really will be wrong about a lot. For one thing, a lot of very serious injusticiars will be working diligently to keep them that way. There is an even more practical side. All other things being equal, somebody who spends all day dodging kicks to the head is not likely to be the clearest thinker on most subjects. They will probably be unusually expert on such subjects as Whether Jackboots Are A Myth, How To Avoid Getting Kicked, Where Kicks Are Likely To Come From, and How To Sustain A Precarious Livelihood In A World Full Of Hard-Driven Jackboots. They may well show uncommon ingenuity in related skills, such as How To Regenerate Some Spoons In Moments Of Precious Leisure Despite The Worst Efforts of Jackbooted Jackasses. But jobs such as Carefully Sifting All Reports To Determine Whether Jackboots Are Ultimately Sent By Good King Richard Or Against His Will By His Evil Advisors may be better executed when possessed of more money, more leisure, and fewer daily kicks to the head. All this is true - as far as it goes.

It is also true that the radical is likely to be wrong about a hell of a lot. But this is unpleasant and potentially undermining to the cause, and it will be far more agreeable to return at once to ranting about the ignorance, bigotry, and ingratitude of the sheeple. This has the additional advantage of ensuring that the radical's favoured reforms will never come so close to reality as to demonstrate their defects. Thus we get libertarians who despise the poor (whilst ironically working in their realio trulio best interests, oww my martyr's crown hurts!);Green activists who pretty much despise the general population (WIWITRTBI, OMMCH!); progressive egalitarians who warn anybody without an appropriately expensive credential to cease their ignorant and objectively harmful challenges to the informed socio-political judgement of the expert 0.01%, such as themselves (WIWITRTBI, OMMCH!) - and generally the whole familiar bed of political narcissi.

I was such a misunderstood narcissus as a teenager.  I was better at spotting and opposing the tendency by the time I got into the Green movement.  Most of my accelerating leftwards progress through libertarianism has been about repeatedly realizing how many miles I had still to go. Radical narcissi are not mostly bad people - at least, I hope for my own sake that they aren't, since I doubt that my fannish slannish soul will ever be wholly cured of the fault - but they are bad for people, and they had better get down of their soapboxes and start talking on the level, if they expect to do their neighbours any good instead.

Full-spectrum egalitarians are not generally that great at rallying the disadvantaged, these days. Greens are noticeably worse. Libertarians are shit at it on burnt toast. As a left-libertarian heavily influenced by eco-politics, this probably makes me the poo of Pluto on scorched cycad starch. As J Random Petty-Bourgeois living in excessively interesting times, this definitely makes me worried.

If you can't even recruit the people who are getting it hardest in the neck from the existing system, you're not ready to change it.

We have got to get less shit at this, and toot sweet.  All thoughts gratefully received.

I've just run across some excellent posts on the subject of Mary Sue and her variously-named male equivalent - that Very Special Character, arising from the world of fanfic, who can scarcely be better described than in these words of blackholly's:

Spock gets a long-lost daughter with purple eyes who's an even better doctor than McCoy and when she arrives, Kirk instantly falls in love with her and makes her captain in his place. She takes them to the planet of the Sparkle Ponies where she defeats Khan with her beauty and that of her new glittery equine friends.

Heh! But also not so much heh, because here are some good cases made in that very article and several others within the same conversation, to the effect that 'Mary Sue' has become a lazy and insidious way of dinging on female characters disliked by the reviewer - most especially, female characters written by women - in ways which are both unfair to said authors, and in danger of limiting the public supply of awesome female characters. All sorts of subtleties of the true and false Mary Sue Effects are explored in these discussions, and I highly recommend all of them. In chronological order:


You Can Stuff Your Mary Sue Where the Sun Don't Shine, by Zoë Marriot (Aug 1st 2011)

Ladies, Don't Let Anyone Tell You You're Not Awesome, by sarahtales (Aug 4th)

Ladies Ladies Ladies, by blackholly (Aug 7th)

I Know a Little Girl and Her Name Is Mary Mac: the Misuse of Mary Sue, by seanan_mcguire (Oct 11th)

What Would Mary Sue Do?, by Zoë Marriot (25th October)


Here is my head hitting the desk, repeatedly.

My only real addition to the debate concerns the case where the name's deserved. I think one good test for whether a character is a genuine Mary Sue/Marty Stu or not, is whether they have the defects proper to their virtues - or, indeed, the virtues of their defects. If what is wrong with them has nothing to do with what is right with them, except to serve as a foil for the sparkly shininess of it, this is a warning sign. And if their most salient flaw is wangst, and yet they are in no other way anything of a wanker, that is an enormous neon warning sign flashing DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER !

At the age of thirteen, I independently invented the concept of fanfic and the character - but not, alas, the concept! - of Marty Stu, as a side-effect of the dire worldwide shortage of new Pern books. To encounter him at the age of thirty as a known public nuisance was both a revelation and a sort of relief, not to mention a salutary reminder. But if his sister is now being seen more often in pieces of vaguely girl-cootied speculative fiction than the Virgin Mary has manifested in pieces of vaguely toasted bread, then it may be that the pair of them are coming to the end of their useful work as Awful Warnings.

Either that, or Marty is going to have to start pulling more of his own weight. Which one, eh?

Following on from Nicola Griffith's Russ Pledge post in June, and the ongoing discussions about the literary invisibility of female authors* -

Since the end of May, guestblogger Anna at Echidne of the Snakes has been posting a Sunday series on A Literary Canon of Women Writers, beginning with Enheduanna of Ur (23rd century BCE).  She's now reached the thirteenth century, featuring the distinctly SF-friendly troubadour Marie de France.  The scope is global, the detail often considerable, and the vast majority of its subjects previously unknown to me.  But not, by any means, unknown to the literary communities of their day.  Highly recommended and a big eye-opener.  I'd be interested to hear other people's responses to it.

Echidne's archiving system is somewhat peculiar, and I can't find any way to link to the latest post directly, but it is easily found by a little scrolling down.  Direct links to all previous posts are provided at the top of the new one - though, because of said archiving system, they may initially appear not to be taking the reader to the post specified, even on broadband.  But a few seconds' wait will hit the target.


* I began to write 'women authors', before realizing that this required me to be cool with the phrase 'men authors', which scrapes fingernails down the slate of my soul. Though not as much as those charmings who freely refer to groups entirely composed of humans as 'males', 'females', 'whites', 'blacks', 'olds', 'youngs', 'clevers', 'stupids', 'sicks', 'healthies', and all those other adjective nouns which they deploy with impartial style and elegance.