How to tell fanfiction from literary fiction: you can't

Eric Rauchway of Edge of the American West wrote Banana Republican, a book about Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband from The Great Gatsby. Henry at Crooked Timber posted Mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education, a review of a bad (in both senses) review of the book. Hijinks ensued, including mine:

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Helen:

Maybe there’s a point at which this extrapolation from previous novels jumps the shark? Or on the other hand, maybe it’s become a genre in its own right so each one should just be taken on its merits?
(And what should be the name for that genre? Is there already one out there?)

We call it "fan fiction". There's rather a lot of it, and a good deal of scholarship, too.

As for the particular trope of making a secondary character from an existing work into your primary character, I'm not sure it has a separate name -- partly because it's so extremely common. I'm pretty sure I've seen the suggestion that such alternative-POV [point of view] stories are one reason current fanfiction is much more commonly written by women and girls than by men and boys. Women are used to not being the central character in the story, to knowing that we'd be off to the side, not really central, not the hero. This is much more the case with movies and TV than with books, and fanfic for filmed sources is enormously more common than fanfic based on purely text sources -- e.g. fanfic based on The Lord of the Rings was rare before the Peter Jackson movies started coming out.

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ajay @16:

Really? I find that surprising given that a) fanfic is so closely associated with the SFF fan community and b) Lord of the Rings is reasonably well liked in this community. I wonder why that should be.

I'm sure it's true, because I helped someone track down stories before the Fellowship movie came out and we could only find a few hundred. Later that summer, LOTR stories were being posted at fanfiction.net at the rate of a hundred *per hour*.

IMO, fanfiction for unfilmed books is rare because books (and stories) have a strong inner voice. In the case of LOTR, that voice -- that style -- is very distinctive and difficult to mimic, so people have rarely tried. Film -- movies and TV -- has no inner voice: all we see is the outside, we make up our sense that the characters have thoughts and feelings in a kind of enthymeme.

Also, film is very pretty. In the case of Orlando Bloom, *extremely* pretty.

alex @19:

“if it’s published, it isn’t fanfic”

Are you a fanfic writer or reader? If you aren't, your definition is somewhere between idiosyncratic and worthless. Not to mention your definition of "published".

Zamfir @23:

I’d say the Odyssee is itself Iliad-fanfic, probably even made up by a community of Iliad-readers.

Not readers, remember, listeners -- the Iliad and Odyssey come out of an oral tradition.

More generally, though, many fanfic writers/readers recognize that what we do is very like pre-copyright storytelling: sitting around the fire, each telling part of one story or different (or contradictory, mine-is-better-than-yours) versions of the same story or set of characters.

alex @22:

Otherwise we’re back where we started, and Ulysses is Homer fanfic.

To me, it is obvious that it *is* Homer fanfic -- not least because it was initially banned, even though not for the usual reasons fanfic is scorned, banned, or looked down upon. "You got sex in my Homer!" is not an argument that can be made with a straight face, though it's amazing how many people will assure you that Achilles/Patroklus is a horrible perversion of the text, and you have a depraved mind to even think of such a thing.

Yet the first recorded slash discussion is in Plato's Symposium, where Socrates and the fanboys are hangin' out, drinkin', and discussin' "Achilles/Patroklus: who tops?"

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y81 @33:

it seems more useful to confine the word to unpublished work, generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication, written by aficionados of the underlying work. To expand the word to include every work that includes characters from another work is to make it less useful, unless you are the kind of person who genuinely cannot detect any difference in kind between the Odyssey and some online Hermione/Malfoy slash

Your statement is riddled with problems, which I'll outline not to beat up on you, but because other people probably share them:

- "more useful", "less useful" -- to whom?

- "unpublished work" -- what counts as published, in your mind? Back in the days when fans traded stories in mimeographed zines, perhaps you could say "unpublished" meant "not widely available." These days, a story posted on the Internet for free is likely to be *more* widely-available than one published in a book or magazine. Or does it only count as "published" if you get money for it?

- "generally of a literary quality too low to result in publication" -- otherwise known as *writing*. Most writing is of too low a literary quality to be published in the New Yorker, and even "published" writing generally conforms to Sturgeon's Law.

Conversely, as cofax points out @47, the best fanfiction is fully as good as the best "published" fiction. Here's an example: Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves is a brief Midsummer Night's Dream fanfic about Hippolyta. As you can see, its style is just as literary as any story in the "literary fiction" genre, it's based on a work emphatically in the public domain, and it's widely-distributed.

- "the kind of person who genuinely cannot detect any difference in kind" -- I submit that there *is* no difference in kind -- that is, as texts -- between "Apple Blossoms and Laurel Leaves" and the New Yorker's literary fiction. They *are* the same sorts of things.

What makes them different is the communities in which they are written and read. As you may have deduced from its header, "Apple Blossoms" was written as part of an annual multifandom gift exchange of stories in fandoms (or for sources) where there aren't many stories. Several thousand fanfic writers submit lists of "what I'd like to read" and "what I'm willing to write", Computer Magic! occurs, and everyone ends up writing and receiving at least one story. And then we *all* get to read them.

IMO the lack of distance between writer and reader, the fact that no money is exchanged, the way tropes are passed from hand to hand, the tolerance for repetition, and the whole tight social context makes fanfiction *more* like the way The Odyssey was created than the way your "published" fiction has been created in the copyright era.

- "online Hermione/Malfoy slash" -- Hermione/Malfoy would not be "slash" unless one of them has a sex change. "Slash" is used for same-sex pairings, especially male/male; the virgule in "Hermione/Malfoy" is not, technically speaking, a slash slash.

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I'm quite startled by the fact that several of you think it obvious that the pre-movie LOTR fanfic "niche" was filled by role-playing games. To me, it seems obvious that RPGs and fiction are two very distinct art forms, as separate as painting and drama, and it would never occur to me to swap one for the other. How does that work, in your minds?

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Salient @52:

Isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume that, just because Author X appropriates Character Y or Universe Z, Author X is a fan of Character Y or Universe Z?

Fan fiction is referential fiction written by people who self-identify as ‘fans’ of the source.

I'm not sure what distintion you're trying to make. Was Virgil a "fan" of the Iliad? I'm not sure it's reasonable to talk about being a "fan" of something that is non-optional in one's own culture.

For James Joyce, it seems to me clearer that yes, he was a "fan" of The Odyssey: he thought about it a lot, he imagined the characters fully, he admired it and there were parts he didn't care for.

roac @63:
Speaking as another birder, fanfic writers and readers are *much* more widely derided than birders. Birders are at worst silly; fanfic writers are frequently accused of being perverts who drag respectable stories through the muck (by which they mean, writing the sexy bits), and who threaten the livelihoods and emotional stability of innocent writers, actors, directors, etc.

And lots of people write for a hobby, nothing strange about that at all—it’s the organized-social-circle aspect of it that I don’t get.

Your attitude is unusual. What I've found is that most people have a lot of trouble getting their minds around *writing* for *fun*. Writing is homework!

Oddly, even many people who love reading fiction have trouble understanding why anyone would write it for fun, as a hobby -- yet no-one has trouble believing that a basketball fan might also like to play hobby-level basketball.

Martin Wisse @64:

think Ulysses is a bit problematic as an example of respectable fan fiction, as it doesn’t take the characters of the original into a new plot, but rather recreates the form of the plot in an entirely new setting; certainly not the most common form of fan fiction.

Not "certainly" by any means. Such stories are called "Alternate Universes" or AUs, and they are *extremely* common. Ulysses would be a modern-day AU insofar as the characters are felt to be the "same characters" as they are in the Odyssey.

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for instance, is perfectly respectable fanfic, a modern-day AU of King Lear.

Links and online reading

Harry at Crooked Timber posted about Nicholas Carr's latest luddite rant, against links. I commented:

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I don't have time for the full critique here, but Carr is 100% wrong, Rosenberg mostly wrong.

How can I tell? Because neither of them cites (or links to) Jakob Nielsen, the Guru of Web Usability studies, including how people actually read online. Nielsen's most important discovery for this discussion: outbound hypertext links increase your credibility:

Links to other sites show that the authors have done their homework and are not afraid to let readers visit other sites.

Writers -- like Carr -- who don't link are making their arguments from authority: "trust me because I'm me!" The Web is *ideal* for scholarship because it makes it extremely easy for readers to check that writers have in fact done their homework, that they're not just outgassing.

Emma in Sydney's project is a superb example of how good linking can be done. The only thing comparable I've seen on any high-profile site is Frank Rich's column at the NY Times, which recently started using popup-explicated links.

John @12:

if we (writers and readers collectively) were only allowed One Book, that book would be written and read very carefully

-- and as nick s points out @18, that reading and writing would *become a hyptertext*, so Carr would *still* be unhappy*. No, he wants the Authority of the Author to be an absolute monarchy: only one Book, read only one way, and no passing notes, neither.

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Harry @23:

I just ignore it until I have i) figured out whether what I am reading is worth reading to the end and if so then ii) have actually read to the end. Isn’t that what everyone does?

Assuming you are not being sarcastic, the answer is: No.

In the first place, as Nielsen shows, the nature of those links is a major factor in most readers’ decisions about whether the text is worth reading to the end. The limiting factor in online life is human attention: it is the most precious, unexpandable resource. Thus, the decision “is this worth reading to the end?” is a much more crucial one for an online reader than for a hard-copy reader, and she’s going to be much more cynical and distractable (= motivated by her own agenda, not the author’s) than Carr would like.

Libertopia and The Long Winter

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber continues looking at libertarian utopias, and whether 19th Century America qualifies. I commented:

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I find that Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter casts a particularly clear light on the libertarian vision of the American frontier.

There's no doubt that Laura' father thought of himself in libertarian terms. "Free and independent" is his mantra and that of the other settlers: they came west, they say, to be free and self-reliant, proud and independent, owing no man anything.

But if you pay attention to what they actually do and how they actually live, they are completely dependent on the government and the industrial society they claim to be fleeing. Laura's family stakes a claim -- on land expropriated from the Indians not in the misty past but within the past few years.

To hold the claim they have to live on the land, but they can't actually support themselves there -- the ground isn't ready for serious agriculture, even if the climate was suitable. They don't even have a place to live without materials that have to be brought in -- nothing available to them can be used to make a shelter they're willing to live in.

The women and children live on the claim to secure the legal title, but the family's income mostly comes from work on the railroad. Laura's parents talk about self-sufficiency, but at no point in her life do they actually survive on food they produce themselves -- purchased flour, meal, and meat are *always* the backbone of their diet. This food comes on the railroad from the East.

Their dependence is made clear during The Long Winter when the railroad is blocked. The frontier townspeople talk about being free and independent, but they are in fact still completely tied into the industrial economy. Without it, they begin to starve.

They only survive the winter because of collective action. Laura's future husband Almanzo and his brother are fronted money by the general store owner to make a perilous journey to buy wheat for everybody in town. They bring it back at great risk, and the storeman wants to sell it at a monopoly price -- giving the Wilder boys a fee for their efforts, of course. The Wilders, though, say *they didn't do it for money*, and they won't take money from the mouths of the starving. Laura's father tells the storeman that *of course* he's a free man who can do whatever he wants with his property -- but the townspeople will also be perfectly free to ignore him socially and economically after winter is over. It's libertarian rhetoric as a veneer over communitarian actions.

Furthermore, the more I've thought about their situation (while I read and re-read the book to my children), the more I've realized that their libertarian ideals are part of what brings the town to the edge of total disaster. Everyone in town *should* be living together, sharing warmth, food, and company -- not wasting precious fuel trying to heat individual houses. With communal living and eating arrangements, they wouldn't have nearly as much trouble getting through the winter.

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lemuel pitkin @55:

I read that New Yorker article, too, and Rose's libertarianism is one factor pushing me to think Laura really did write most of the books. The difficulty with reading the Little House books IMHO is that young!Laura, from whose POV we see the story, is an unreliable narrator. She doesn't lie to us about what she sees -- but she doesn't see everything or understand it on an adult level. Writer!Laura IMHO makes a lot of her points indirectly -- like the fact that Pa Ingalls loves the wilderness, but spends his life destroying it. Young!Laura loves and admires him, but that doesn't mean Writer!Laura shows everything he does as loveable or admirable.

mw @69:

My point is that the cooperation in The Long Winter is not truly private nor voluntary. The wealthy storeman doesn't cooperate voluntarily, but because he is threatened by the public acting together. They *are* the government of the isolated town, and Mr. Wilder later was an elected official.

It's true that this is not state-level government, but it's community-level socialism (or something): Mr. Ingalls is a leader of the community against the wealthiest individual in it.

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Gareth Rees @94:

arrgh, yes! the shame, the shame! The problem was that I was mentally translating from "Pa".

mw @95:

I wasn't clear in my retelling of the scene in The Long Winter. The citizens weren't originally "threatening to take their business elsewhere", they were getting ready to use (well-armed) mob violence. Pa Ingalls talked them down to threatening a boycott, and got the storekeeper to agree he didn't want it to come to that -- but the real alternative, not discussed explicitly, was violent robbery and/or lynching. They may not have had *state-level* coercion, but guns there were a-plenty -- courts and prisons would have been much nicer and less bluntly coercive.

Libertopia

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber asked why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia?. My comments:

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I’m surprised that no-one has yet mentioned the factor that jumps out at me.

You can’t have a functioning human society that isn’t at least 1/3 female. Unless the libertopians include a lot of women, they can’t possibly establish anything that isn’t basically a club instead of a society.

More broadly, I think it supports my personal definition: Libertarians don’t believe that humans are social animals. Trying to put together even a small human society that doesn’t take account of our social nature is of course highly problematic. If you think, as many libertarians apparently do, that the foundation of human society is private property, you’ve already turned your back on anything anthropology and the history of religion can teach you about how humans actually operate in small societies.

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Brett Bellmore:

What libertarians believe is that social animals can cooperate in non-coercive ways. Trade, and other voluntary forms of interaction.

Libertarians who try to build non-coercive societies are leftists or anarchists, and they don’t think of *trade* as the quintessential non-coercive interaction. Lefty libertopias have often been attempted (with varying degrees of success, of course), but they generally take “family” or indeed “love” as their grounding metaphor. They never (that I know of) are structured around private property as a first principle.

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John Protevi:

Your comments clarify for me that the sort of trade Brett is talking about—strictly fair, balanced, and freely-chosen—does not naturally occur inside human communities. Most basically, what I think I’m saying is that under what you might call “natural” conditions humans do not survive on their own. We live with each other because we must, because otherwise we (generally speaking) die.

So on the one hand, we are ecologically coerced to live in groups, that is our niche. On the other hand, our nature is adapted to our natural niche, so we need to live in a group to be happy. We need other people emotionally, in a way that libertarian trade and freely-chosen contracts cannot satisfy; we also ecologically/economically need other people if we are to survive. That’s what I mean by libertarians not believing that humans are social animals.

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Metamorph:

Thank you for the link, that is extremely well-put.

I think your essay clarifies what right-libertarians like Brett are looking for: market-like social relations, because they simplify cost/benefit calculations, and thus can be more easily extended over a wider range of social contexts. As you say, traditional donation and obligation are both, by comparison, vague, difficult to predict, and prone to the stress of free-riding, for both sides of the exchange.

Now, those of us who’ve read any anthropology know that the description of a culture traditionally begins with a chapter on kinship—relationships that are not freely-chosen, so in libertarian terms they must be coerced. Because Right-Libertopia wants market-like, freely-chosen social relations, I have *no idea* what their kinship system would be. Without a kinship system, is there any surprise that there is no Libertopia?

Socrates and the Internet; Immigration

At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin wrote on the Internet and our brains. I commented:

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Socrates also IIRC was cranky about those young whippersnappers who think they can understand something by *reading* it, instead of memorizing it and actually holding in their heads where understanding happens. And if you base your knowledge on what you *read*, then of course you can flit from book to book, without the true discipline and concentration needed to study in an oral tradition.

Socrates was right, of course. If wisdom is based on what is in your head, then reading is pseudo-wisdom, a cheat. I prefer to think of it as off-site storage, and that reading is a way to access lots of information and ideas without having to keep them on-site. The Internet does the exact same thing, but it pumps the process up another couple of orders of magnitude.

I used to say that Aristotle was undoubtably smarter than I, but I plus the Columbia Encyclopedia know more than Aristotle. Today, I plus Wikipedia know *way* more than that, but the essential process is the same.

If you want to talk about how the Internet is changing the way we think, first look at how literacy changed the way people think.

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At Obsidian Wings, von wrote about a Rasmussen poll on birthright citizenship. I commented:

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russell nails it:

There are industries in this country that would be unsustainable as they are currently organized without cheap illegal labor.

What is interesting is how Rasmussen -- which is only an "allegedly legitimate public polling organization", not an actually legitimate one -- does not ask anything about those illegal industries. This poll, and the whole debate over "anchor babies" etc, are a way to let people express their anxiety about immigration without thinking bad thoughts about their masters. They can direct all their energy to kicking the little guy, and not have to worry about the (more frightening and effective) effects of kicking the big guy.

It's in Freud, it's all in Freud. I hate Freud, especially when he's right.

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re Jes' cartoon:

American society was created by immigrants who basically said, "we're coming, we're staying, deal with it." One reason many Americans favor open immigration is that they know their ancestors used it, and it seems churlish to say "it was ok for grandpa, but not for *you*."

Immigration to North America has also characteristically been permanent. You (where by "you" I mean e.g. my Irish great-great grandparents, my German and Swedish great-grandparents, and my Irish grandmother) don't come here to make money and then go home, where the "real" civilization is; you come to stay, not intending to go back. That's why many liberals don't want "guest worker" programs -- we want the people who work here to *want* to live here, to be committed to this society as more than a source of money.

Cheney, libertarianism, rape

ugh, what a subject line.
publius wrote about The Method of Cheney's Madness. I said:

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Let me third (or fourth) the "tribalism, not idealism" explanation. *Everything* becomes a tribal marker for them, which is why they're only playing well in the white South, the most tribalistic subculture in the US (see Albion's Seed for details). There are no questions of morality (torture), or science (global warming), or common sense (Obama's citizenship) -- there is only Tribe. And the more contrary to morality/fact/sense an assertion is, the better it is as a marker for Tribe.

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[someotherdude rec'd: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States and The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America]

ooo, book recs. Thanks, someotherdude!

I really realized the tribalism angle in a discussion at Rod Dreher's, where he was horrified to find that conservative Christians were *more* likely to support torture than liberals are. A commenter there said that he was from the South, and that he thought a lot of people around him don't "really" support torture, but they would hear the pollster's question as really being about group identification, not the purported issue, and answer accordingly.

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John Holbo at Crooked Timber writes about Megan McArdle and Rationing again: For all ponies, there is some pony, such that you won’t get that pony.♥ I wrote:

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alkali:

A problem with arguing with libertarians at the level of abstraction is that libertarians have a comparative advantage in abstracting away the actual facts of the world in favor of the freshman-microeconomics models they have concocted in their heads.

Not just economic models. The working definition of libertarianism I have come up with, by observation, is “libertarians do not believe humans are social animals”.

So for instance: if you don’t have any money, you shouldn’t be entitled to any medicine is quite reasonable if the sight of people dying for want of medicine doesn’t bother you, and if you can assume it doesn’t bother anyone else (their families, for instance). If you’re a true *individualist*, the collapse of any sense of community is all to the good, because “community” is a delusion.

What most libertarians *do* seem to believe in is *corporations*. I have never been able to figure out if corporations, in their minds, are replacing communities, or if they’re kind of like individuals only cooler (that is, richer and more powerful).

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Martin James:

Libertarians view taxes or laws as the product of “gangs”—aberrations—and believe that humans are naturally self-reliant and independent. They do not seem to recognize that the natural state of a human is in a social group, and that concepts like “property” are functions of particular social relationships, not Platonic ideals.

Either way, I still don’t understand how corporations fit into the libertarian world-view. They talk a *lot* about individuals versus the Big Government, but don’t seem to notice the actions of Big Corporations.

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At TigerBeatDown, Sady and Amanda talked about who doesn't believe No means No (answer: conservative older women). I left a comment (which seems to be in moderation with everyone else for the weekend):

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I don’t know if I have the fortitude to actually click through and read the studies, but I think you young ‘uns don’t completely grasp the Old Ladies’ position.

They were taught that a Good Woman *never* says Yes, except during her wedding vows. That’s it, the one time Yes is an acceptable answer.

So they were in the position where “No” had to do duty for both “no” and “yes” — both for any gentlemen they want to communicate with, and to themselves. How do you say “Yes” when you can’t admit you want to, and when everyone will think worse of you if you do? Well, one way is to say “no” in a lot of different ways, hoping to communicate subtextually.

The other way, frankly, is to get raped a lot. But you can’t admit you were raped, because as we know that makes you practically a slut. What the younger generation thinks of as “rape” is part of these Old Ladies sexual experience, but they’ve been getting by for decades by denying it was so. Rape is something that happens to *other* women, Bad Women, what happened to me was just the way the world is, only to be expected.

So IMHO for a lot of those Old Ladies what happened to the young woman in this case had actually happened to them, and for pretty much all of the Older Ladies it had happened to someone they care deeply about (mother, sister, friend). If they accept that lack of consent is rape, it casts a pall of horror over their own past, bringing up *way* too many things they’re dealing with by not thinking about.

Ted Kennedy; health care; incompetance

Within you may find comments on: Ted Kennedy at Ta-Nehesi Coates'; incompetence as a strategy, at Crooked Timber; health reform, at Obsidian Wings.
Ta-Nehesi Coates, who's a young whippersnapper, asked How did he get that lion of the senate title? What were the nuts and bolts he screwed with to get business done? What's the why and how?. I said:

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I think the main reason Kennedy could accomplish so much was that he was an hereditary aristocrat. His life is a textbook example of how that is both good and bad.

Because he came to his position essentially by inheritance, he didn't have to fight for it. He could afford to be principled, but he could also afford to be magnanimous.

Even very conservative Republicans could work with him, because what's more conservative than hereditary aristocracy? Indeed, he wasn't just an aristocrat, he was a *celebrity*, the very highest class of American society, rarified even by the standards of the Senate Millionaire's Club.

The good part of being an aristocrat is *supposed* to be being reared to public service; care for the downtrodden also *supposed* to be one of the emblems of Catholicism. In Kennedy's case they actually worked, so he was an aristocrat in a very Catholic mold, blending the sense of duty with the awareness of not being particularly "elect" in the Protestant sense. In Catholicism, "sinner" and "saint" are not opposites nor mutually exclusive.

And of course, being an aristocrat -- and more than that, a celebrity -- meant that Kennedy's ability to *do* things could not be destroyed by Chappaquidick or anyting else. His hereditary position could not be undone or unmade, so he could get away with things.

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[in reply to an accusation of ignorance]
You misunderstand me. I admire Kennedy *deeply* and have for many decades.

But his virtues -- magnanimity, firm principle, kindness, friendliness -- are not enough to explain why *Republicans* got along with him and were willing to work with him. Virtue and strength of character aren't enough; he also needed power, the kind of unassailable power that came from his hereditary celebrity.

The contrast to GWB, of course, is painful and acute. GWB is the poster boy for all the ways aristocracy is a bad idea -- and how of all the hereditary aristocracies, the worst are the ones where the aristocrats think they've *earned* their positions.

TNC's question is *how* Kennedy could do so much. I don't think personality, principle, or a tradition of collegiality are enough to explain why Hatch and others were willing to work with Kennedy -- I think it's that he was, in an American way, of a higher social class than they were. He was able to use that power for good, but the foundation of his power was just as unearned as any X-Men's. (X-Man's?)

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Karen in DC wrote:

.. after Kennedy got in trouble for cheating at Harvard, he ENLISTED in the army and served as a private, not as an officer as his older brothers had. So, he had to LEARN how to engage with people from other classes, including live and work with them and take orders from those who were not of a higher class. He had a lived experience as a "regular" person that his brothers had not.

Thanks for the info, Karen, I didn't know that. I'm betting that experience -- and being so far down on the sibling totem pole -- did indeed help give him experience seeing things through other people's eyes.

Nonetheless, his position in public life began and depended upon his lineage -- as the Charles Pierce bio a few years ago said:

If his name were Edward Moore . . .

He would not have served so long, if he'd served at all.

If his name were Edward Moore, Robert Bork might be on the Supreme Court today. Robert Dole might have been elected president of the United States. There might still be a draft. There would not have been the Civil Rights Act of 1991

This is the dream of aristocracy, as good as it can get: someone of such high, unearned position that they can be thorougly magnanimous. Alas for Plato, it doesn't happen often enough to justify the whole system, but at least we can recognize it when it does.

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Henry at Crooked Timber posted on incompetance as a signalling device, linking to Scott McLemee's review of Diego Gambetta on Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, and makes comparisons to the Italian academic scene:

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message * I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. * In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity

I said:

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Now *that’s* a theory with broad applicability, if you know what I mean.

I recently read Deer Hunting with Jesus, and was thinking about Sarah Palin and the glorification of ignorance and ill-education in what David Hackett Fischer calls American “Borderer” culture. Gambetta’s theory makes the light bulb go off, for me.

If education is a ticket out of poverty or marginalization, then poor and marginalized people will (rightly) see it as disloyal to the group or the family, unless it goes along with a strong tradition of supporting your parents and extended kin. Proud ignorance is proof that you won’t leave your kin behind—because you have no-where else to go.

Do any of you know if Gambetta talks about such signalling by Japanese yakuza? They are famous for using tattooing and self-mutilation as demonstrations of loyalty and commitment.

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von, one of the conservatives at Obsidian Wings, posted about health care reform and his support for Wyden-Bennett. I wrote:

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Having read a brief overview of W-B, von, I have a question:

Does any other country do this?

I personally have had *enough* of American exceptionalism and insisting on being the first penguin off the ice floe. There's no point in having a big world if you have to keep inventing the wheel to prove how Special we are.

I also am quite appalled at the idea that the solution to our problem is to give more money to insurance companies. Step right this way for yet more regulatory capture and market failure!

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I will also add that the reason I am for single payer is that I abhor means testing. To people of means, means testing may seem "only fair", but in practice it is tiring, degrading, confusing, privacy-destroying, and taxing in every sense. It also inevitably involves huge, invasive bureaucracies and the pushing of much paper, things to which von is deeply opposed.