Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

Trump: Not a Philosophy, But a Pathology

Posted on December 9th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

For some of us, a wrong-headed answer to a question doesn’t just reveal that we’re uninformed, or stupid, or evil; it reveals that there’s something profoundly dysfunctional about the very mechanism we use for thinking. It can serve as diagnosis, by showing the precise path we take as we travel from Point A to Point Purple.

Donald Trump has just had one of those moments.

Of his plan to bar Muslims, even current U.S. citizens, from the U.S., Trump was just asked by George Stephanopoulous, “You’re increasingly being compared to Hitler. Doesn’t that give you any pause at all?”

Trump cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese many years ago” during World War II. “This was a president that was highly respected by all.”

Now, there are any number of things about that reply that are just plain wrong. Roosevelt did not imprison German or Italian Americans en masse; he did not take from their jobs, dispossess them of their homes, or make their children sit out the war behind barbed wire. This he only did to the Japanese-Americans, the ones who looked different from everybody else.

And while history has been kind to Roosevelt in general, this is pretty much universally regarded as the black mark on his record, the awful act of an otherwise largely commendable man, staining his legacy in much the same way that Thomas Jefferson’s continuing ownership of slaves, decades after he trumpeted that the practice was morally wrong, blots his.

But those are simply elements that mark his answer as wrong.

This is the sentence you have to look at.

“This was a president that was highly respected by all.”

Not quite true, actually. Conservatives hated Roosevelt, thought him evil and Anti-American. They questioned his patriotism and generated made-up scandals about him even during World War Two. But let’s not parse the sentence for fact. Let’s parse it for logic.

“This was a president that was highly respected by all.”

Is that a functional defense of the morality of this particular decision?

Consider that Hitler was, within Germany, one of the most adored men of the twentieth century.

That doesn’t work as a defense of the Final Solution.

Apply this to a somewhat lesser offense, the internment (but not genocide, hence “lesser”) of Japanese Americans under Roosevelt.

The love people felt and feel for Roosevelt doesn’t mean that Roosevelt was right.

Apply it to Jefferson.

“This was a president that was highly respected by all.”

it doesn’t mean that his slave-holding was right.

Trump is the man who, a few months back, was asked to respond to a couple of his followers who chanted his name while brutalizing a homeless man. Remember? He couldn’t be bothered to say that they’d done anything wrong. Instead, he said that his supporters certainly had a lot of passion. That was all. He was not moved by the savagery of their act, but by the power of their motivation. He was not bothered that his words resonated with their bloodlust; he was self-congratulatory about the success of his message.

Was Roosevelt wrong to imprison Japanese-Americans? No, this was a president that was highly respected by all.

Shouldn’t we question whether his policies were right? No. People loved him.

A logical leap from Point A that bypasses Point B and lands on another track forever, landing on Point Purple.

This has long been part of the Trump pathology. People ask him about questionable business practices. Rather than answer those questions, he has always said, no, look at my casinos, look at my properties, they’re fabulous. In other words: I make money; I’m a popular figure; therefore, your questions about my ethics are void. Roosevelt was loved. Interning Japanese-Americans didn’t cost him any political points. Therefore, questions about the morality of it of void.

It all translates to: if it sells, if it advances the brand, to hell with questions of right or wrong.

This is something we always knew about Trump, but that answer crystallizes his thinking.

Should those guys have beaten up that homeless man? “What it tells me is that they certainly had a lot of passion.”

As the campaign goes on, as he rides it as far as he can in the direction of the nomination, and God help us, possibly beyond, keep an eye out for this particular form of answer from him. Mr. Trump, isn’t that morally wrong? Heh, heh, look at where I am in the polls! It sells! You will see not just that his thinking has never been much deeper than that, but also more critically that it seems to be limited to that.

This is a man who, if we’re unlucky enough to see him become President, will never stand against the will of the people even if the people are dead wrong; will never stand up and speak hard truths that will cost him, because he believes in them with all his heart; will never make a decision based on right and wrong, only what sells.

This is not a political philosophy. It is a pathology.

But it is Trump.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics

Writers: How You Can Avoid Unconscious Plagiarism

Posted on December 4th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 4 December 2011.

Guys, with recent high-profile plagiarism cases on everybody’s mind, I keep receiving emails from new or aspiring writers who want to know how to keep from second-guessing themselves when starting a new story, how to know that their story isn’t “too much like” some other famous piece some other person is already written.

Here is the answer. It’s very simple.

Do the work, step by step.

Create your characters. Figure out who they are. Figure out how they speak, and what they care about. Figure out why they conflict with others, and how. Determine what their problems are. Concoct a starting situation and have events follow naturally. When you have something to describe, describe it in your own voice. Don’t force innovation onto the page; see it as a series of problems that you need to resolve in order to get the narrative down. Introduce complications where you feel they belong, and have your characters react to them as they must.

You may find, upon doing all this, that you’ve come up with a situation that simply travels a path well-worn by others. Ah, well. True, startling originality is rare, and some paths become well-worn simply because they’re the most natural. But if you try to build a house and you’ve built your own frame, hammered in your own nails, put up your own wallpaper, constructed your own furniture, and spawned your own characters to inhabit it, then all of it still reflects your own creative DNA, reflecting both your strengths and your weaknesses. And if it’s totally derivative, down to the point of being unpublishable because of it — a difficult proposition given the past success of the Shannara books — then so what; “derivative” is not the same thing as “plagiaristic.” And more importantly, you’ve shucked your paralysis and DONE it, meaning that you can now do it again, and try to do it better next time. You can’t let the editor in your head keep you on such a tight leash that you never move. You’ve got to throw caution to the winds and do it, before you look back and see what you’ve done.

There’s this, too. While unconscious plagiarism exists, the kind we’ve seen recently was very much conscious and deliberate. It took work, possibly even more work than sitting down and writing the story. Your concern over the issue shows that you’re an unlikely candidate to commit the sin, in the same way that your concern about possibly saying something wrong makes you an less likely person to cause scandalous offense at a party. The people who care, who question themselves, are less likely to sin than those who act as social bulldozers, never giving a care to consequence. How do you know you’re not committing plagiarism? Chances are, you know because you care enough to ask the question.

 

Tags: , , | Category Blog Business, Books, Commentary, Frequently Asked Questions, Life Wisdom, Writing

The Trolls Want To Pummel Us Into Silence

Posted on November 28th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Perhaps you can explain something to me.

I am obviously an opinionated guy. I don’t mind writing manifestos about one issue or another.

I also don’t mind arguing with people I know, or people I don’t know but am for the moment having conversations with, about our principles and opinions.

What I don’t do is harass strangers who I can see disagree with me, for the sake of being rude, or pummeling them into submission.

I have mentioned before that a few months ago I was having some home connectivity problems and started going to the library to do what internet stuff I had to do during the day. The problem is now blessedly over. But while I was there total strangers, just people in the neighborhood, started interrupting my work sessions to demand to know what I thought of Donald Trump. I simply said that I didn’t think much of him, and indicated that I wanted to return to my work. On all occasions they didn’t take the hint; they wanted to win the argument with me, right then and there. Why? Did they envision an outcome where I clasped my forehead, shouted, “Jumping Jehosophat, you’re right!,” strapped on a sandwich board and devoted my days to standing in intersections exhorting people to decorate their homes with Trump wallpaper?

I contend that they didn’t. Whether they realized it or not, their desired outcome was to hector me into silence, to make me feel unsafe disagreeing with them.

A few years ago a bunch of liberal-oriented friends advertised an organizational picnic in a public park. I forget the precise cause they were supporting, but you will picture them accurately if you imagine a bunch of well-meaning folks in their forties and fifties who had spent as much time organizing who was going to bring the potato salad. There were no more than twenty of them. They were harmless. A local Tea Party group had also learned of the event and was there in equal force, with signs, standing around them in a semi-circle, shouting slogans and insults, ruining their day. By dint of being unpleasant and unrelenting they chased the graying liberals away from their picnic tables and indoors to the house of one who happened to live in the area, and then, then, they stood in the street outside continuing to wave their placards and hurl abuse.

I wish I could remember which major conservative media figure painted this on his show as a major victory for his ethos.

No, it was a major victory for a bunch of assholes who thought folks who disagreed with them should not be permitted to exist unmolested.

Online, it’s even worse. Sure, I will post a thousand words of political commentary at the drop of a hat, and I will argue with people who are on my Facebook page over one issue or another, but I also happen to know how to find people whose convictions are so different than mine that they set me to screaming inside. It’s not hard. There’s a page with the rather innocuous-sounding name of The Conservative Newsfeed, which is not so much conservatism as gibbering Obama-hate, conspiracy-theory nonsense, and manifestations of bigotry both coded and overt; I used to go there and read a bit, just to horrify myself. Not so much anymore. But even when somebody there said something that makes me want to burn modern civilization to the ground, I never dive-bombed threads with “Ha ha ha, Reagan was an asshole,” or “all conservatives are stupid,” or “you’re all a bunch of limpdicks,” or whatever.

Why would I do that? It doesn’t solve anything. I’m not going to win any arguments that way, or any way. Not there, not with those people. It would be a pointless activity.

And yet, guys, on any occasion where I post something political, and make it public to all as I am wont to do, inevitably some human hemorrhoid drops by to post something as enlightening as “All dems and libs suck,” or “put on your big boy panties,” or so on – entering a conversation among people they don’t know in order to drop an abuse turd.

In most of these cases the only way to get rid of them is to block them. A few have simply created new accounts and returned, to fling different abuse another day. I know they’re the same people in some cases because they even use the same names.

What do they get out of this except for the sheer illicit thrill of picking at scabs?

What do they want to accomplish?

In recent years we have learned that some trolls are actually paid. There are think tanks, mostly right-wing, who pay folks to come to work and spend their days doing abusive drive-by rants on liberal threads. This seems a waste of money to me as there are so many willing to do the work for me. But this is less about trying to win arguments than about making the expression of liberal opinions an unpleasant and risky proposition; disrupting the gathering in the park, driving everybody back indoors.

It’s about harassment. Making the area too noisy for a civilized argument.

I don’t think any of the guys who come into my threads are paid assholes. I think they’re very talented amateurs. But I believe that their goal is the same – not to win arguments, but to terrorize, to bother, to let it be known that the expression of certain beliefs, even in private spaces, will not be permitted without venomous cost. It’s throwing rocks at anybody who sticks his head up. It’s that, and that only.

What else would they get out of it?

And have you noticed: how many of them can’t spell or punctuate worth a damn, either?

Tags: , , , , , | Category Blog Business, Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics, Sneaky Metaphors

 
 
 

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