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Zach Weinersmith

30 Mar, 9 tweets, 2 min read

There's a lot of talk among space people about the importance of frontiers, implicitly or explicitly based on the Turner frontier thesis of 1893. I finally decided to sit down and read Turner's essays. Here's how he talks about the conquest of Native Americans:

"[When countries in Europe] expanded, [they] met other growing peoples whom [they] conquered. But in the case of the United states we have a different phenomenon.”

“The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”

This is why arguing about the use of the frontier metaphor isn't just semantics - there's a whole notion of how space will be, embedded in the advocacy discourse, and it's based on stuff that, aside from moral issues, is simply wrong.

I worry this sort of stuff gets taken as social justice quibbling or something, but it matters! Books as late as the 80s completely skip over the fact that it wasn't an expansion but a conquest.

This matters because if you believe space will be a frontier, that has effects on what you believe is safe out there and what sort of legal structure you think should constrain it. If frontier people are rugged individualist pre-democracy freedom fighters, it'll all be OK.

If they aren't, well maybe some safety measures would be good. What you tend to find is among modern space advocates something like "Well, yes, it was bad what happened to those people, but the point is that it was a hard life out there."

Which is kind of like if you had a family story about how Grampa got strong building the old barn, and it turns out he in fact strangled a guy and took the barn. Then, you say "okay, it's not quite like how we imagined, but the point is Grampa had a tough life."

(stay tuned for more ruining of nice Space Geek things - you're listening to The Space Bastards)

Last addendum, and my metaphor breaks down a bit here. BUT: Turner was explicit that conquering was part of the process:

“The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action.”

Frontier was “a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression.”

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

31 Mar

I think there's an informal fallacy that's fairly common which is something like "believing that all the people and views I dislike are part of a cohesive movement." There's a corollary assumption which is something like "everyone in my coalition agrees with me."

I think these two operate to make each other worse, because if you believe your enemies are unified and powerful that's scary, and if you assume your coalition is not a coalition but a cohesive unit, you overestimate how popular your own views are.

There are lots of examples of all this stuff, but one is the use of "postmodernism" which partially describes something real (academic bullshit) but also is used to describe anything from really non-postmodern leftism to trans rights to feminism.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

31 Mar

Fun Pagan History:

The tradition of the Easter Bunny is actually an early environmental sustainability ritual. Rabbits are a food source that multiplies rapidly.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

For the Space Book I've been reading a LOT about communes. One thing I've come to believe: A single generation can probably do real capital-S socialism commune life. I don't think it can be carried through generations.

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Linklater, himself a former communard, said the big misconception is that eliminating private property eliminates the need for governance. He said it meant *more* governance because you have to enforce behaviors instead of just using money/property to incentivize.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

Here's something interesting:

Frederick Jackson Turner, creator of the "frontier thesis" of American history that dominated scholarship for 70 years, and created much of the Western Myth, gave his first paper on the topic in 1893 in Chicago.

Apparently the audience was bored.

According to a person who attended the audience was indifferent, and nobody asked any questions. Newspapers didn't report on it.

According to Faragher 1994, it took off due to the 1893 economic crisis, which it was thought to help explain.

I find this absolutely incredible, if true. I take it no historians 20 years later cared about the connection to the crisis, but the theory had gotten firmly planted. I wonder if this isn't a frequent trend occurrence.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

29 Mar

Historian of the US West, Patricia Limerick on how all groups want history to give them an uncomplexly special place:

"*Everyone* wants faith-affirming history; the disagreement is just a question of which faith any particular individual wants to see affirmed. Each group wants history to provide guidance, legitimacy, justification, and direction for their particular chosen group.

These contests over history, often focused on the [American] West, resemble and echo more familiar contests over religious faith.

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Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

3 Feb

Astronaut Frank Borman's biography is mostly pretty straightforward, but he gets oddly eloquent when talking about his family. This is him recalling his thoughts before his flight on Gemini 7. He didn't sleep at all the night prior to launch:

“I didn’t feel fear; I felt agonizing concern for the wife and sons I loved. I didn’t want to be a heroic casualty in man’s conquest of space and I was not oblivious to the hazards involved. I wanted to stay a living, breathing husband and father.

There's a dichotomy in all this, a kind of conflict of interest. On one hand, there's a sense of mission accomplishment that becomes a very self-centered thing; the mission has been pounded until it alone is in sharp focus, with everything else blurred.

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