[NON BLOG] Things Which Couldn't Have Been Planned Better

I wasn't planning to run into talktooloose at 12:40 on the west side of Yonge above St. Joseph Street. It just happened spontaneously. Much fun was had over CD searching and dinner at a very nice and cheap Vietnamese place, before separating at the Reference Library.

My bill with Queen's was also paid off at the Bank of Montreal. Good to get that out of the way.

[BRIEF NOTE] Music's Negative Potential--the Jamaican Case

Recently, British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell has played a prominent role in leading a campaign against many Jamaican dancehall singers because of the violent homophobia frequently inserted in their lyrics.

Buju Banton, known for his violently homophobic lyrics as far back as 1993 and the release of his song "Boom Bye Bye," has come under particular pressure, as concert organizers have cancelled many of his planned appearances in Europe and North America. Recently, Tatchell and Amnesty International have publicized the fact that Banton is being sought for questioning in connection with a homophobic attack on a group of gay men on the morning of June 24.

In an apparent effort to try to prevent the meltdown of Banton's overseas career, an apology was released. It turns out that it was issued by Virgin Records without his involvement or that of Banton's management company, not that it was an apology in any case. The Jamaica Gleaner now reports that Banton would like to sue Tatchell and his organization, Outrage!:

Tatchell's cash-strapped two-man outfit could have a fight on their hands. A source close to Buju Banton told The Voice that the artiste was contemplating legal action against Outrage! following the circulation of an email that Buju was wanted in Jamaica for beating gay men. The source said: "It is time to go on the offensive. This group has had a free run at trying wreck people's careers for too long. It is time they were taught a lesson."

Clyde McKenzie, a member of Beenie Man's management team said: "If a man says he abhors violence against all human beings why do gays need to be singled out? Such a statement covers all human beings. Gays and straight people have been existing harmoniously in Jamaica for decades. It is this alien intervention from people like Outrage! that is causing problems." In a direct swipe at Amnesty International, he said: "I am concerned that entities that are thought to be reputable are being hijacked by nefarious characters like Tatchell."

[. . .]

A Jamaican music industry chief, who refused to be named, said he is putting together a plan to go on the offensive against Outrage!. "I am of the opinion that these people are unemployed and have too much time on their hands. We are going to be hitting them with actions from all corners. They are maligning the name of our country. Let Peter Tatchell come to Jamaica and see for himself that no one is murdering gays. There are gay people at the various levels of Jamaican society who are recognised by the contributions they have made. They are not exhibitionists wearing their sexuality on their sleeves," he said.

The anonymous source appears to be conflating the concept of exhibitionism with that of existence. He isn't alone in Jamaica in doing this, as The Guardian reports:

In the heat of January in Jamaica 30,000 people came to the Rebel Salute concert in St. Elizabeth to hear some of the nation's most popular singers deliver a chilling call. With Capleton and Sizzla singing almost exclusively about gay men, the call went out from the stadium:

"Kill dem battybwoys haffi dead, gun shots pon dem ... who want to see dem dead put up his hand" (Kill them, the queers have to die, gun shots in their head ... put up your hand if you want to see them dead.)

[. . .]

A recent poll showed 96% of Jamaicans were opposed to any move to legalise homosexual relations. And while the police do not condone homophobic violence, they are often unsympathetic to the victims.

One man described to J-FLAG how six men blocked a road in order to beat up a local gay man. "The crowd stood around watching, chanting 'Battyman, battyman, battyman', before gathering around him as he lay on the sidewalk. The crowd punched and kicked him. They threw garbage on him, all the while shouting 'Battyman, battyman'. They then dragged him down the road for half a kilometre ... The crowd was saying 'Give him to us! Let us kill him! He's a battyman'."

At least five gay Jamaicans have successfully claimed asylum in Britain on grounds of homophobia. "I had to leave because of the pressure," said one 26-year-old Jamaican who settled in Britain in 2000 and asked to remain anonymous. "I had been beaten up and chased and the police would not help you. Once I went to hospital after I was badly beaten up and they refused to treat me."

Xtra's coverage is equally depressing:

In Jamaica, a gay man or lesbian faces terror on a daily basis. Survival depends on how well you camouflage yourself and hide your identity. Every day you face potential violence by doing things that would normally be considered routine activities. A visit to the supermarket could result in serious injury or death for a gay person. Anyone who suspects a person of being a homosexual can at any time publicly denounce them, causing a mob to gather and beat him or her. It is literally terrifying just to exist in Jamaica as a gay person.

There is absolutely no relief from the onslaught of negativity that surrounds you. This negativity is experienced through popular songs on the radio and television and screamed from church pulpits. A gay person is considered a more heinous offender than a rapist. The sexual act between people of the same sex is illegal and attracts a penalty of 10 years hard labour in prison. Jamaica’s poor human rights record is reflected in the fact that on numerous occasions people suspected of being gay have had their homes invaded by the police. Not even in your home can you feel safe.

Jamaica's leading gay-rights activist, Brian Williamson, found out the truth of this last sentence very recently when he was brutally murdered. Writing a memorial for his friend, one Jamaican expatriate suggested that this homophobia is seriously hurting Jamaica's reputation:

Make no mistake­ years from now, the world will look at Jamaica the way we do at Nazis today. Jamaica's hatred of homosexuals is the equal of Nazis' hatred of Jews. It is the equal of racist whites' hatred of blacks, is the equal of all hatred everywhere ­just as ugly, just as destructive and self-destructive, just as ignorant and narrow. Just as evil.

One can only hope that the bulk of Jamaicans still living in their country would come to agree. In the meantime, I think that Jamaica's potential attractiveness as a vacation destination has just dropped off catastrophically for me.

[BRIEF NOTE] There's Something About Titan

I've already mentioned that one excellent and realistic piece of time-travel alternate history fiction on the Internet is Dragan Antulov's Just Another September 1939 ISOT, concerning a Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that was transported back in time from 1985 to the first day of the Second World War. Perhaps the best unrealistic piece of time-travel alternate history on the Internet is James Nicoll's "There's Something About Titan" [1, 2, 3].

As I wrote in the previous posting on Mr. Antulov's story, the in-the-sea-of-time subgenre of alternate history has the inherent risk of becoming a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy, when people represetning your preferred nation and/or ideology come back and remake the contemporary world as you think it should be remade. This makes for unsatisfying stories: If an American-libertarian Mars, or a European-social democratic Eurasia, or an aggressively transhumanist South Atlantic federation, comes back in time with technologies and militaries decades if not centuries ahead of the rest of the world, who can doubt the eventual outcome?

James Nicoll is well-known on soc.history.what-if for his well-thought astronomical alternate-history questions--what if Mars was covered by an ocean as proportionally dense as Europa's? what if Venus was tide-locked to the Sun and had a quasi-habitable darkside? what if Sol had a binary companion? He had the genius to realize that if one's destroying the contemporary world and reorganizing it along the lines of an unstoppable import from the future, one can be imaginative and propose a very foreign culture. So it is that on New Year's Day in the year 2000, astronomers on Earth notice that Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan has undergone radical changes:

There's no Y2K disaster (except at Canada's Royal Ballet, where the computer tech decided to handle the problem by taking the last two weeks of 1999 and the first of 2000 off, insert sound of networks crashing here). There is, however, a stunning display of pretty lights out by Saturn which goes unnoticed by pretty much everyone except a few amateur astronomers. The news makes the rounds in the astronomy field within hours, thanks to the internet, but the event is transient. It doesn't take a super-genius to realise that Titan has changed its appearance and in a few hours there's a significant amount of commentary about the odd blue colour of Titan. There's also what seems to be two bright objects at the Saturn-Titan L4 and L5 (Although the angles involved prevent Earth from realising just how bright they are) while Titan itself is much brighter than it should be.

A first suggestion is that the entire atmosphere of Titan has undergone some sort of phase change. This is a little alarming since Titan's atmosphere is roughly comparable in mass to Earth and if one of them can suddenly change its properties... However spectroscopic analysis soons shows the transformation is more dramatic. Where there was a 1600 millibar nitrogen atmosphere at some ungodly cold temperature, now there is
a 1000 millibar 280 K atmosphere, still mostly nitrogen but with 20% O2. Somehow Titan has become human habitable, or so it would appear.

It takes some time to get the Hubble to have a look (It's booked years in advance and senior astronomers get cranky when you take their observation time away from them). The Hubble's field of view is narrow enough that it misses the bright sparks heading away from Saturn's system at 1 m/s/s but it clearly shows the L4 and L5 structures as artificial and on the thin wedge of the nightside which is visible from Earth what appear to be city lights are visible.

Roughly speaking Saturn is about 1.5x10^12 meters from Earth. The bright sparks take 28 days to get from Saturn to Earth. For the deceleration period of the trip, they are clearly visible from Earth and it's trivial to calculate that the sparks represent more power generation capability than the entire industrial might of the Earth all together. It is also trivial to calculate what would happen to a city if the rocket hovered over one. There's a certain amount of tension for the last two weeks of January 2000 but aside from the riots and mobilizations, not much happens.

Who arrives? Emissaries of a 26th century Titan home to a half-billion people with an incredibly advanced technology who speak a French-Tahitian creole that is the 26th century's world language, as the world wars of the 21st and 22nd centuries caused the extinction of the languages of English, Spanish, and Chinese. Oh: They're also all comparatively kinky lesbians, and they really don't like misogynists. (The Taliban is informed that its members can expect to experience ten special pain units for an extended period of time until things change, for instance.)

In "There's Something About Titan," Nicoll demonstrates in witty, scientifically-grounded fiction that our contemporary world is completely vulnerable to alien incursions, whether from the depths of interstellar space or from our far future. There will be no Independence Day-style rally to drive off the invaders; there would be little possibility of compromise; there would be, in all likelihood, relatively little that we'd like about the models we would be forced to accept, and little correspondence with our current social or political goals. There would only be the reality of radical change, and the hope that our descendants would accept it.

Anyway, go read. I promise you that you'll like it.