Rewriting Scalzi on Privilege

I've said this several times before, but still not quite got it to my own satisfaction, so I decided to try an experiment. I took Scalzi's essay straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is and rewrote it so "you are unbearably lucky" is the conclusion, rather than the premise rammed down people's throats three times in the first paragraph.

I'm not sure -- does that actually make a difference to anyone else, or is it just me? Does it undermine the point of the essay?

It seems like essays on privilege are actually trying to convey three points:

1. Everyone else is worse off that you.
2. That's not fair.
3. You're really lucky.

But for some reason, they present them in the reverse order, starting with an unsupported and emotionally difficult revelation that "all those things you thought you were good at, actually your parents lied to you and bought your success", and then proceed to explain that's not fair, and then justify it. But it always feels to me like presenting the explanation first, and then the conclusion gets the most important information across first, and is less likely to lose the audience.

Imagine you were talking to someone really really really privileged: say the child of a billionaire or a monarch, who was young enough to be generally well-meaning, but not really learned that other people have problems. Is it better to start with "you're a spoiled little brat" or "when some people break things, they DON'T get another one"? If you need to shock someone into attention, you may need the first, but I think it's more likely to vent your feelings than actually get someone self-centred to listen.

Here's the essay. There were very few changes, but to me it reads quite differently:

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for other people, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” ( Read more... )

Looper

As someone described it, it's the second best film where Bruce Willis goes back in time to try to shoot himself, and the second best film where Bruce Willis and his younger self argue which of them is more fulfilled.

Which is pretty good, but not as good as it might have been :)

The bad

My view on time travel (or anything else) in science fiction is that, so long as the relevant rules are clearly established, it doesn't matter if it represents a consistent set of physical laws. Conversely, if the plot depends on playing with those laws, then it _does_ need to be consistent.

So unlike some people, I'm perfectly happy with Back to the Future and Terminator, because they tell you immediately what you need to know, and maybe that wouldn't be enough if they kept travelling in time, but they don't.

But Looper takes a Back-to-the-Future half-and-half approach to time travel. When you change something in the past, it ripples forward and affects the future slowly. If someone loses a limb in the past, then in the future they become -- someone without a limb, but has all the memories of having that limb for 30 years. If someone is killed in the past, they vanish in the future -- but everything they've done in the meantime stays intact.

I think that's the closest you can come to a consistent rule: humans are magic, and changes in time affect humans sometimes less and sometimes more than other things. But even that's hard to get right.

And I could live with that, if they didn't base the plot on it. As it is, it doesn't really make sense.

I'm not sure. If you're less obsessive than me, is it obvious what is going to happen when someone changes the past? Or not?

The good

The concept is good. I love with films that play with time travel, and play with people meeting themselves and how they interact with themselves.

The implementation is pretty good. Young Bruce is cocky and stubborn, old Bruce is cynical and stubborn.

The ugly

There were a lot of more mundane plot holes:

( Read more... )

Surprise Hill

Atreic was right there's a hill on coldham's common. I knew it was hidden there somewhere, and I knew there was a grove of trees which seemed to be wider than it needed to be, but I never put the two together until I happened to pass a break in the trees and see the hill. Apparently I never stopped to question my basic assumption that a hill would be higher than a tree :)