The Unforgivable Inaccuracy that Makes History’s Vikings (Almost) Unwatchable

History’s hit new show Vikings has drawn a fair amount of praise from critics who have hailed it as the next Game of Thrones and the show that will rescue the network formerly known as The History Channel from its ancient aliens past. The show follows the saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, a legendary 8th century Viking who carved out a small kingdom for himself. The show has been renewed for a second season and its unclear whether they’ll stay with Ragnar or jump ahead to show Viking quests to Iceland, Greenland, and beyond. Personally, I’d love to see them tackle the attempt by some eastern Vikings to sack Constantinople, but that will probably have to wait for season 67 at this rate. Either way, despite the praise from critics and viewers, the show has come under fire from historians. Often the criticism focuses on how the Vikings are dressed, whether Iceland Spar was really used , or what type of government they had. All these concerns are fine for the nit-picking historian, yet they omit quite possibly the most egregious error – that the Viking world had no knowledge of the British Isles or anything outside the Baltic.

Some have pointed this glaring inaccuracy out, most notably a piece in the American Spectator which was overshadowed by the author’s insanely paranoid argument that the show was an attack on American conservatism. The belief that 8th century Scandinavians were isolated  from the rest of the world is preposterous and so easily demonstrably false. For instance, ask scholars the causes of the Viking Age and one of the most popular hypotheses is that Scandinavian traders were facing increasing discrimination from an increasingly Christianized Europe. Viking raids began as reprisals for attacks on their merchants. In this sense the show does invoke the clash of civilizations and religions, yet again from a position that neither knew of each other. To see why this narrative of isolation is plainly stupid, one only needs to look at the origins of Anglo-Saxon England. The history of pre-medieval England, perhaps more than any other country, is one of invasion and assimilation. Some of the earliest invaders came from what is now Spain’s basque region, followed by the Britons, the Romans, the Angles and Saxons, the Danes, and finally the Normans before things settled down. The last two are more or less Viking invasions even though the Normans were Christianized at that point, yet the Anglo-Saxon invasion clearly shows some parallels to the later ones. First, take a look where they were before moving on to England.

Yup, that’s right at the mouth of Vikingland, in modern-day Denmark, a full half-millenia before the Viking Age. Of course the reasons for the Anglo-Saxon invasion differ from the causes of Viking expansion. Most historians agree that geographic pressures forced migration from the eroding landscape of Northern Europe and various communities of Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes lived side-by-side in England. A migration map provides a more detailed view of the 5th century.

It should be fairly clear then, that Scandinavian communities had a close relationship and history with the British Isles, (not to mention that all Danish Vikings had to do was walk south to realize that there is a world outside the Baltic). One could view Scandinavia as the center of two spheres, one in the Baltic and one in the North Sea. That would explain why Danish and Norwegian vikings raided and built trade networks to the West, and why Swedish vikings went east, establishing kingdoms in Russia. Viking expansion was very much based on already known trade routes and expanding those routes. For instance, Dublin was founded as a Viking trading post. Viking culture certainly focused on battle and personal glory, but these were more influences for their expansion and quests for new territories rather than their sole motivation.

I understand why the show might try to take such a narrative – voyage and discovery comprise the common conception of Vikings. But if this is what they wanted to go for, then why not tell the story of Leif Erickson or other Vikings who really were explorers? There is not a single episode that does not play off the supposed VIking ignorance of Britain or vice versa and every time it makes me cringe and takes it out of any historical context. In this way, Vikings comes off as much more fantasy than historical drama (the opposite might be said of Game of Thrones). The viewer gets lost in the mythical realm of Scandinavia with staggering mountains and fjords serving as symbols for its isolation rather than the flat plains of Denmark bordering the Frankish empire.

Why is this important?

This portrayal of Vikings would be forgivable if it wasn’t on a channel called History. I’m not saying they need to get every little detail right, but they can’t misconstrue the entire fabric of the past to try to milk dry a new world/clash of civilization narrative. Ignoring trade networks and cross cultural interaction ignores one of the largest driving factors of history, it’s how ideas spread, how alliances form, and how empires rise. Very few times, outside the age of exploration, have groups encountered each other unexpectedly, without knowledge of their existence. The Roman Empire knew relatively little of the Chinese, yet thrived off trade with them, especially for their silk. Scandinavia knew about their neighbors.

This view of history also promotes the myth of barbarism, that anything outside the Greek/Roman/Christian worlds were just tribes of barbarians, ignorant about their world and intent on raiding and pillaging. History has done some job to ameliorate that by giving glimpses of the legal system and religion, which is why I say it feels more like fantasy. We tend to view barbarians on the periphery of great civilizations as distinct and separate groups when in reality there was plenty of interlinking networks and cross-culture communication. Even before the Viking Age the Danes had begun constructing defensive fortifications against the Franks in the form of Danevirkes, clearly designed to mark their boundaries and keep others out much like Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland. Nonetheless the border town of Hedeby served as an important trading center during Ragnar’s time between the Franks, Slavs, and Scandinavians.

The Viking Age did not emerge as a clash of civilizations but rather as the north’s ascendancy to power relative to other European kingdoms, and alongside the economic growth of the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Portraying Scandinavians as internally responsible for the sudden start of the Viking Age by designing a new ship breaks a technological bottleneck that never even existed.

This critique may feel like nitpicking, but the narrative is referenced in nearly every episode and is the driving motivation for the Vikings. Outside of this glaring error it’s not necessarily a bad show, it’s just hard to compartmentalize the terrible history from the good.

LINO or DINO? Structural Differences Between the Parties

This is something I’ve been pondering for some time. I started writing this piece a couple months ago but stopped because it didn’t seem that relevant and I didn’t really care too much. Now I think it’s different. First and foremost is the emergence of the so-called drone memos and the Rand Paul filibuster follow-up which has served to expose some serious hypocrisy in both political parties. The other is the increased (and perhaps overuse) of the term “false equivalency” by the left. There’s no question that the media tends to “report the debate” and often gives an impression of equivalency, but understanding the structures of both parties might better help to explain why such a false equivalency might exist.

Since emerging as a term in 1992, “RINO” or “Republican in name only” has become increasingly common in right-wing political discourse. With the emergence of the Tea Party and the recent rejection of their candidates in the last election, the term has become even more meaningful as a troubled party tries to redefine itself. Politicians or pundits often get called RINO’s if their positions don’t live up to the hardline stance of the party. Any Republican compromising with Democrats is now viewed as a RINO by many on the right.

RINO vs. Blue Dog

On the other side, you have the term “Blue Dog Democrat” to denote Democrats that lean conservative. Unlike RINO, the term was created within the party by a coalition of Democrats to describe themselves. Already that’s a huge difference as “Blue Dogs” is not the least bit derogatory and held up with pride by those in the coalition. This might be changing as Blue Dogs have pretty much died out as a Congressional group in recent years. However, as I’ve mentioned before, the Democrats are essentially a centrist party and therefore still have plenty of representatives in their conservative wing.

This chart shows my estimated center of each party on the political spectrum. The distribution is based on national self-identified polling with some heavy assumptions.

Why not DINO?

This brings up the interesting question of whether the term DINO could emerge. There’s no doubt that some have been throwing it around in forums, social media, blogs for quite some time, yet it’s never really caught on. I argue that this is precisely because the Democrats are a centrist party. Whereas RINO denotes Republicans that stray from a hardline conservative stance, DINO can’t possible denote Democrats who stray from a hardline liberal stance because it would then include the vast majority of the party. What about switching it around then? Could DINO mean Democrats that are too liberal? Well no, that would just be silly and nonsensical for the political narrative. Democrats represent the left so how could liberals be Democrats in name only.

RINO vs. LINO

So now that the Blue Dogs are almost gone and DINO doesn’t really make sense if used either way, what’s the analogous term for a RINO on the left? It has to be LINO. On the right, RINO is essentially saying that a person is a conservative in name only, and so on the left Liberal in Name Only seems most appropriate. Therefore the focus on the left are not moderates claiming to be Democrats, but Democrats who claim to be liberals. That’s an important distinction between the parties because it says that while Republicans speak for conservative values and are judged for it, Democrats do not speak for liberals. Instead the Democratic party is a loose coalition of often conflicting groups from all over the political spectrum. Whereas the GOP’s homogeneous character readily allows for the RINO label for those differing even slightly, the Democrats heterogeneity makes any labeling like that impossible and those that don’t conform to the party wear their ideology as a badge of honor like the Blue Dogs.

Because the Democrats are a center-left coalition, centrist politicians who try to appeal to the liberal base often run into more problems. This situation occurred after Obama’s election in 2008. He won the primary running on a relatively liberal agenda yet lost a large amount of liberal support when he set up a centrist administration and agenda. The outrage from the left eventually boiled over into OWS. Democrats do not run as centrists and then turn left once elected. Compare that with George W. Bush, who ran as a centrist and then moved swiftly to the right once elected. One of his few centrist policies was immigration reform, from which Republicans gave him a heavy beating.

When Republicans appeal to their base during an election and turn their backs during their tenure they get called RINO’s. As the Democratic base is more varied, the only appropriate term could be LINO to designate a centrist that appeals to the liberal wing of the Democratic party. In conclusion, the structure of the Democratic party varies enough from that of the GOP to the point where there can be no equivalent term for RINO. The ideological core of the Democrats is much more centrist than the ideological core of liberals and therefore any criticism from the liberal base against centrist Democrats must come in the form of LINO rather than DINO.

“The US is a Republic, not a Democracy!”

File this under the category of what’s mildly annoying me this week, or annoying me enough to write about it here.

Whenever someone mentions that the US is a democracy, even in passing, someone will undoubtedly chime in with, “the US is a republic, not a democracy,” as if that somehow negates everything previously said.

How people got this notion remains a mystery. I first recall one of my high school history teachers telling me it, and I’m undoubtedly guilty of repeating the statement as a teenager. Anyway, (before I start discussing my teenage years) it appears that people see a republic and a democracy as two distinct forms of government. Democracies supposedly elect everyone directly while republics elect representatives to vote in their place. By these definitions America is a republic – too bad these definitions are wrong.

People generally get these definitions from re-interpreting or simplifying the debate the founders had at the Constitutional Convention. Should the US be ruled by majority or should there by restraints in the form of elected representatives? The founders weren’t forced to choose from a list of governments; they were free to set up anything they saw fit. The nuances of that debate turned into democracy vs. republic.

Instead, a democracy and a republic are not two competing forms of government, but two aspects of government. A democracy simply means “rule by the people” as opposed to a monarch or tyrant, and republic means the government is considered a “public matter” rather than a private one. In other words, both are alternatives to hereditary rule. With the true definitions it’s very easy to see how you can have both a republic and a democracy. There are times when you can have a democracy, but not a republic, like in the case of Copenhagen’s Christiania or have a republic without democracy as some of the prominent Italian city-states had.

So what is the US? Well people either call the US a “representative democracy” or a “constitutional republic” which perhaps answer the questions of how we elect and how we rule respectively. These are not mutually exclusive, people elect representatives to run the government and create laws. For contrast, you can also have a direct democracy where people would vote on laws themselves like in the state government of California, or you can have a constitutional monarchy where the head of state is a king or queen as it is in many European nations.

Democracy and republic are just terms we use to describe a system of government rather than some all-encompassing organizational rule. It might be akin to how people say that the US is a Christian nation because the majority of its inhabitants practice Christianity while others say that the US is a secular nation because we don’t recognize a state religion. Both are true based on how you define the criteria.

I’ve decided to coin a word for statements like “the US is a republic, not a democracy,” which I’ll discuss in my next post.

How to Really Win an Argument with a Darwinian Evolutionist

In my last post I talked about how to really win an argument with creationists. Not to leave anyone out I’ll talk more casually about how to win an argument with an evolutionist. Let’s say you’re a young earth creationist.

You find yourself on the internet and you’re feeling adventurous enough to trade-in your allowed daily hour of GodTube for its more risque older sister YouTube. You check out the latest hit from the album “Death Metal and Resurrection” from Knights of Bethlehem when you notice a recommended video titled “How to win an argument with an atheist.” You click on it and it’s just a guy with a terribly-accented drawl making fun of creationists. This now has you belligerently enraged with love for Jesus and you decide to pick a fight in the comments. You begin by citing the Bible and that’s where you immediately lose. This tragic situation happens every day.

If you read my last post then you know I’m going to say that you must address an evolutionist on their terms. This may be a problem for stricter creationists as it seems difficult for them to switch epistemologies even on the surface. You also need to attack, to keep the debate alive, keep evolutionists answering questions rather than asking them. You believe that this is literally a fight for peoples’ souls and a fight over whether civilization will be based on religious principles or atheistic materialism. Your ultimate goal is to save souls by letting people know that they can embrace God but you also know that any little seeds of doubt you can plant would be above expectations on this socialistic cyber hellscape. Unlike my recommendations for arguing with a creationist, what strategy you use will largely depend on what type of person you get. Let’s revisit the four types.

1. Dull and stubborn – Oddly enough, this type of person isn’t that difficult to beat as they’ll often drag out the argument when less stubborn people would have given up and hurled scatological slurs. Having a long dialogue with someone less knowledgeable and articulate than you looks great for the creationist cause. Being on the attack by raising problems with evolution might also even cast doubts in their own mind.

2. Dull and persuadable – Bingo, this is who you want, a troubled soul feeding a newly-discovered atheist persona. They may have even been a creationist before but after two weeks away at college, they’re really discovering themselves. For these people you might not even have to address them on their own grounds but appeal to their spirituality with confidence and conviction. They are prime brainwashing targets.

3. Intelligent and stubborn – These people can be the gift that keeps on giving. If you encounter an arrogant atheist the best thing to do is play the fool to lure them in. Begin with something like, “Well how did evolution create consciousness?” At its heart it’s a stupid question and therefore both angers the atheist and marks you as easy prey; furthermore, you have addressed an issue on their grounds while still keeping a metaphysical outlet. From here the debate can go in any number of directions which I’ll discuss below.

4. Intelligent and persuadable – Like before we need to ask whether the beliefs are articulated or not. If they are, then the goal should be compromise, if not, then philosophy and casting doubt should be the focus. You will have to change their assumptions before they start weighing the options.

How to win an argument

First, to reiterate, you’re not so much concerned with converting people as you are with keeping a lively debate going and placing evolutionists on the defensive. You will also have to discard your intuition to talk about your theology – the second you come off as a Bible-thumping creationist, people start viewing you as the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind. If you approach in their own scientific paradigm you’ll still get branded as religious, but people might pay attention. After all, there are many Christians who believe in evolution; only 15% believe in non-guided (Darwinian) evolution, but 35% believe in God-guided evolution. Further, while evolutionary scientists might hold the view of strict Darwinian evolution, many of them are also Christians believing that science only studies the material world. and the spiritual world holds separate truths.

For all these reasons the first rule in debating an intelligent evolutionist is to never use the term Creationism. You could use Intelligent Design, but this is also pretty bad if the person knows their stuff. The term got a terrible lashing at the Dover trial where the plaintiffs showed a conscious effort to replace Creationism with it. Instead, focus on Science Criticism. This emerging re-branding does not focus on teaching creationism in the classrooms but on undermining evolutionary theory; it also provides your best attack. You will need to know your philosophy of science and pray that the other person does not. Philosophers like Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend both argued for teaching Creationism in the classroom at one point or another, and their theories can be useful during a debate.

Science Criticism, while designed by creationists to specifically criticize culture war issues like evolution, climate change, and stem cell research, must, at its core, question the scientific method. Popper’s notion of falsifiability has been used in the past against evolutionists, accusing them of relying on retroactive explanations. Be warned though, if an evolutionist knows their material they can point to numerous ways evolutionary theory may be falsified and that it has withstood such tests. Feyerabend provides a better mode of attack as he stated that there is no such thing as method and that science progresses through anarchism. You can use this argument to essentially attack any definition of science and open the door for intelligent design arguments.

There is another route to take, more rooted to the issue of evolution itself – purpose. Darwinian evolutionists hold that evolution has no purpose; that is a fundamental belief, yet one that most people have trouble grasping. This aspect of the theory also caused the schism between evolution and religion and may explain why most people who believe in evolution don’t really believe in Darwinian evolution. Purpose also brings up a lot more questions, which as you now know, is great for your side. For instance, nature exhibits a stunning degree on intelligence in even the simplest organisms. Is this intelligence a product of purposeful selection? Or, in other words, natural selection favors a greater problem-solving ability for some specific situation, providing a blueprint for some sort of purpose. Epigenetics also brings up a whole host of new issues, forcing evolutionists to reassess some of their semantics so feel free to go down that path as well.

These strategies and argumentation are probably all for nothing, as no creationist wants to learn about such matters and was most likely not converted this way themselves. I wrote this piece to make the larger points that people who debate are not the ones who will be persuaded. Winning an argument is about public appearance and for creationists, that means an offensive and aggressive campaign to ask as many questions as possible. Above should serve as a primer extending the fight and arguing within an atheistic and materialistic paradigm. Of course, if the evolutionist has read my previous post then you just wasted a whole bunch of time.

How to Really Win an Argument with a Creationist

The internet loves debates, and perhaps none more than the evolution – creationism debate which usually devolves into calling people morons or saying they’re going to hell. There is without a doubt more people on the Darwinian evolution side on the internet, yet polls in the US show a different picture amongst the general population. For instance, Gallup’s regular poll on evolution shows that only 15% hold a Darwinian view of evolution while 46% believe in young earth creationism. So within the general populace evolutionists are greatly outnumbered. This is further marred by the fact that many self-professed Darwinian supporters do not even understand the theory correctly. It’s clear that in the public discussion, Darwinists are at a loss despite their monopoly on the science.

There’s also plenty of advice on youtube and other places on how best to win arguments against Creationists or Climate Change deniers, or other hot-button culture war issues. The problem is that almost all of them rely on pointing to evidence to counter the other person’s views. This will almost never work. We no longer live in a world (and never really did) where wit and argumentation can settle controversies like it was some 17th century theological dialogue. People can only change their beliefs voluntarily and, (to paraphrase the famed hypnotist Emile Coue) the only type of persuasion is self-persuasion. There are many reasons people change their minds but only they can do so and no magic argument will change that.

But this is almost besides the point as the psychology of changing beliefs is far out of my intellectual range and cannot be reduced to some sort of argument flowchart. Instead let’s look at two types of attributes that combine to give 4 types of people that you might encounter in an evolution argument. First, the person could either be intelligent or dull. This distinction is important to determine your approach. A person’s overall intelligence dictates how you present an issue to them and different forms of evidence will be more appealing to people of different levels of comprehension. You would not convince a child that the Earth is round by having them calculate curvature, but you might by showing them pictures from space. Second, the person is either persuadable or stubborn. Some people will never change their opinions, others are so suggestible that they will contradict themselves within minutes. Let’s see how each of these attributes contributes to the 4 different types of opponents.

1. A dull and stubborn person – There is absolutely nothing you can say or do to change this person’s mind. The handful of arguments that might have convinced them are immediately negated by stubbornness.

2. A dull and persuadable person – We often use the term gullible to describe these people. You can convince them of things, but so can everyone else. Whoever is talking at that instance appears correct so there’s really no point in convincing this person unless you want to go the route of brainwashing.

3. An intelligent and stubborn person – This comprises the vast majority of publicly-known creationists. Often atheists and other commentators will label these people as dumb, yet they are grossly underestimated. They have a wealth of knowledge and can easily win any debate against anyone not thoroughly prepared. As an example look at Richard Dawkins’ attempt to debate Wendy Wright. Dawkins is a veteran evolutionist used to rationalizing his beliefs to all sorts, yet he is unable to make even the slightest inroads with Wright.

4. An intelligent and persuadable person – These people will hear all sides, weigh the arguments, and make a judgement. At this point it’s necessary to ask if they have an articulated belief on the subject. If you’re arguing with them then they certainly do, if they feel like they don’t have enough information then they don’t, as it’s something they haven’t given enough thought.. Once they have thoroughly articulated their view the only way to engage and possibly persuade them is to do so on their own terms. Why did they come to their conclusion and what assumptions or cultural context did they use? If they are a creationist, their view probably has a theological origin and so any fruitful argument would involve that starting point. Scientific arguments will fall flat and might be thought of as incommensurable to the creationist paradigm. A biologist trying to convince a smart creationist with scientific evidence is just as likely to succeed as a creationist trying to convince a smart scientist with quotes from the Bible. Unless you can argue with one of these creationists on their own turf you shouldn’t even begin.

But what about the intelligent and persuadable person with an unarticulated view? Indeed these are the only people that you should engage in a discussion. Plenty of people have not fully considered the issue of evolution and they might be open to hear evidence, but that’s a small percentage of people. Feel free to engage these people in a polite and respectful way.

How to actually win an argument

As I showed above, outside of a very specific scenario, you can’t, at least in the short run. Winning the public evolution controversy is not about the arguments of today, but those of tomorrow. The creationists know this and that’s why they focus so heavily on schools and promote “teaching the controversy.” It allows them to reach a young audience with unarticulated views and also puts up a front of public credibility. Children that grow up familiar with Darwinian evolution are more likely to accept it as fact and fall into one of the categories of people which with not to argue. Furthermore, while the scientific community has reached a consensus on evolution since the 1870′s, the public doesn’t believe they have. The existence of the public controversy gives the appearance of controversy over the science. Arguing with creationists only fuels this fire and their movement which is why many evolutionists simply refuse to engage in debates anymore. And this is exactly how you win an argument. Do not respond.

A controversy will only end when the public doesn’t think there’s a controversy anymore. Therefore treat creationist views as you would treat a child’s. Would you engage a child in a serious debate or would you simply ignore them and tolerate them for the time? Even if 46% of the country believes in a young Earth, their views should be ignored to give the public consensus the same appearance as the scientific consensus. The more they are engaged in debate, the more an actual controversy does exist. Children learning science will grow up conscious of the controversy and it will only serve to undermine their education; children who learn evolution free of controversy will be familiar with it as scientific fact and can continue on to more important questions.

Finally, to end on a more positive note, not all creationism should be ignored. Creationism and Intelligent Design, as much as they are just anti-Darwinian theories,  have, in the past, provided relevant problems for evolutionists. When the Intelligent Design movement proposed the idea of irreducible complexity, that some organs were too complex to have formed in stages, evolutionists were challenged to explain why these tiny machines evolved. Ultimately they learned that just because a complex mechanism in an organism serves a specific purpose today, earlier in its evolution it may have served a totally different purpose. Biologist Ken Miller famously illustrated how a mouse trap might make a nice tie clip with some key parts removed. The theory of punctuated equilibrium, controversial in itself, also arose from creationist criticisms of a lack of missing links. The theory answers the question of why we don’t have a continuous catalogue of transitional forms, even though this mostly arises from a misunderstanding on the part of creationists. However, these two examples deviate from the normal phantom problems and ghost chases typical in creationist criticism. Scientists can judge the merits of the criticisms as they come, yet for arguing on the internet, it’s best to just pay them no mind.

The Drone Strike Debate and Ruby Ridge

Yesterday Rand Paul made headlines for doing an impromptu old-school talking filibuster on the Senate floor to oppose President Obama’s nomination of John Brennan for the CIA head. Paul admitted that he would probably still vote to confirm Brennan and that his speech was more to bring attention to the administration’s drone policy. What has followed has thus far been the height of the debate over the drones.

However, it’s important to note that this really isn’t about drones. The anti-war left and many paleo-conservatives have long criticized the use of drones for many different reasons – the psychological disassociation of the drone pilots from the war, the use of drones to subvert another nation’s sovereignty, and the high collateral damage from the program. This new debate is about the legal justification given by the Obama administration for using drones to target American citizens for assassination. It mostly comes from the targeted killing of suspected terrorist and American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki and his sixteen year old son, both killed by drones in Yemen. The justification given was loosely defined as Yemen was not a traditional battlefield and Awlaki did not pose a traditional imminent threat. It led many, including Paul, to ask whether similar strikes could be carried out inside the US, and Eric Holder essentially answered that question in the affirmative. He said that there are scenarios where the US government would be justified in targeting an American citizen for assassination within the country.

While Paul’s filibuster drew applause from groups on both the left and the right, some see it as a perfectly reasonable and necessary measure for the US to take in the loosely-defined “global war on terror.” Their arguments often resort to law enforcement analogies, and one liberal pundit, Michael Shure, even went so far as to compare the legal situation to Ruby Ridge. Now this brings up something interesting and reignites the old debate over whether Ruby Ridge was justified. Except that we’ve had that debate and the conclusion was that it wasn’t.

Ruby Ridge is a messy and complex story to piece together but it essentially came down to whether the FBI agents on-site during a siege were allowed to “shoot on sight.” Randy Weaver, with his family and some friends, was holed up in his house after an earlier shoot out with agents. He was armed, and given the earlier confrontation, considered extremely dangerous. As agents staked out his house, they had sharpshooters target any adult male with a weapon and use deadly force. Weaver, his wife, and another were all shot. Weaver and his friend survived; his wife was killed.

What’s the relevance for the drone debate? Well the conclusions reached by the Senate Subcommittee in 1995 completely contradict the administration’s current justification and it’s pretty clear. They found that “Rules of Engagement cannot eliminate constitutional rights to certain suspects, even if they are particularly dangerous.” The shoot on sight orders were completely unconstitutional and deadly force could only be used in self-defense or defense of another, and only after the person is given an opportunity to surrender. I find it also important to note that one of the members on the committee that issued the report, Senator Diane Feinstein, came out against Paul to support the use of strikes in extraordinary circumstances, echoing Holder’s type of cost-benefit analysis, rather than as a rule of law.

Drone strikes are necessarily shoot on sight as they don’t give an option to surrender at any point. It is a kill order no different than what was given at Ruby Ridge and therefore, according to the Senate report, completely unconstitutional. People like to pretend that because we are in a war on terror, we should make exceptions for the time being, that new definitions of battlefields and threats are necessary. But when will it not be necessary? Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, but when it was over, the right was restored. When will the war on terror be over and when will some places stop being battlefields? It is hard to imagine that time; it’s not like terrorism didn’t exist before 9/11 or will ever stop existing. Were we foolish throughout all of our history to protect this civil liberty at the cost of our security, or are we foolish now for conceding a constitutional right that we will never get back?

Is Anyone Truly Ahead of Their Time?

It’s a phrase we hear constantly when discussing the great people of history – “they were ahead of their time.”  Often the label is used to denote someone or something as too advanced for people to properly appreciate, while other times it simply means something better than the rest.  These are fairly contradictory sentiments so I’ll discuss which is more appropriate first and then go on to examine four people in history – Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Hieronymus Bosch, and Gregor Mendel – to see if they were truly ahead of their time.

To call someone or something ahead of their time is to essentially say that they would be more comfortable living in an age beyond their own or that a product would have been more successful if released in the future.  Assuming nobody has been time travelling, the only way someone could be ahead of their time is if their works were appreciated later.  This has led some to abuse the phrase to simply mean something ground-breaking. For instance, take this piece on movies that were ahead of their time.  It contains movies like Jaws, Tron, and Star Wars, all movies, while ground-breaking, were popular in their own time and therefore not really ahead of their time.  In other words, if something is successful enough in its own time to influence tastes in the future then it can’t possibly be ahead of its time. If those movies did not exist then movies today would undoubtedly look very different. Instead, being ahead of time means something grossly under-appreciated to the point where it’s forgotten.  Something can only be ahead of its time by coincidence – an idea disappearing and then re-emerging unrelated to the first.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci is perhaps the most difficult person to pose this question of because he was proclaimed a genius in his own age and went on to influence many after him while at the same time having many of his engineering ideas discarded as being impossible.  As a personality, painter, and scientist it is hard to say that he was ahead of his time, he was simply a great Renaissance man.  However, as an engineer there is a serious case to be made, not for the good engineering ideas that worked, but for the ones that never worked or were never given a chance.  As an example, take his design for a bridge over the Bosporus.  During his time the construction was called impossible yet in the 1990′s Norway took his design and built a bridge with it.

Does this make his design ahead of its time?  Err, maybe.  Da Vinci’s fame undoubtedly influenced the desire to build the bridge rather than some engineer proposing something similar by coincidence.  Just because he wasn’t able to realize his inventions in his lifetime does not mean he was ahead, there are plenty of people designing space stations today but they’re simply looking towards the future rather than living in it.

Isaac Newton

Newton is often considered ahead of his time for being one of the founders of modern science and introducing new ways of thinking about the natural world.  Science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is often viewed as being ahead of its time in general as people often see it as an inevitable cultural development (see my last post) and that the scientific method is self-evident.  Therefore scientists before the late modern era are considered ahead of their time by breaking with traditional thought.  The problem is that history has imposed a more modern vision upon Newton to erase his own time from his work.  The truth is that Newton was very much within his own time and relied on magic and alchemy to develop his scientific theories.  Most of Newton’s writings dealt with esoteric subjects like the occult and even his theory of gravity relies on occult concepts like “action at a distance.”  Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry similarly pursued what we would now consider less-than-scientific activities.  Even while espousing openness, communication, and the repeatability of experiments, Boyle kept his alchemical work secret and hidden.  Both Newton and Boyle serve as classic examples of why geniuses in history are not ahead of their time.

Hieronymus Bosch

Bosch needs to be mentioned here because he brings up an interesting case of context and whether someone can be ahead of their time through re-interpretation.  Bosch was a sixteenth century Dutch painter known for his busy and imaginative paintings.

He was well-admired and quite prolific for his time, being considered one of the Flemish masters along with Pieter Breugel and Rembrandt.  His works had a heavy religious connotation and helped to portray heaven and hell as much more vivid and real places.  In this sense he was not ahead of his time, yet when the counter-culture movement began people started realizing how much his work represented psychadelic experiences.  Lots of art gets re-interpreted over time which hardly amounts to some profound genius of the artist so it would be unfair to say he was ahead of his time on this ground alone.  However, what if his original intention was to create a psychadelic experience rather than just vivid and imaginative Dutch Renaissance artwork?  Some have proposed that this is exactly what he was doing, relying on the ergot in bread to provide hallucinations.  In this case he might have been ahead of his time despite getting his drugs the old fashioned way.  His original intention was forgotten and only re-discovered by coincidence through history.

Gregor Mendel

Mendel is often considered the poster boy for rediscovery.  He was a friar who performed experiments on pea genetics before genetics were even a thing, only having his work discovered posthumously and tied into an emerging Darwinian synthesis decades later.  His work also provides a case of re-interpretation as his original focus was hybridization rather than inheritance.  He sought an explanation and application in botany rather than biology and only after the theory of evolution took hold did his ideas begin to make sense.  Therefore it would be inappropriate to think of him as completely ahead of his time.  If his goal was inheritance all along then he would have been as he would be doing genetics without evolution.  However, it is not clear that this was the case; his work was under-appreciated and forgotten for sure and even re-discovered by coincidence, yet history has re-written what his work was really about.

These examples should show that it is very difficult for anyone to truly be ahead of their time as everyone exists within their own time-dependent cultural context.  The meaning and implications attributed to a work in one period of time does not easily translate to another.  Only the most simple, basic, or vague ideas can be said to transcend time yet these are often the most influential, allowing people to mold and re-articulate them to suit their own cultural needs.  In conclusion, nobody is really ahead of their time, except for Hieronymus Bosch, because he kicks ass.

Evolutionary Ideas and What It Means for Politics

There appears to be a broad consensus that ideas evolve.  Ideas and beliefs emerge, die off, replicate, and mutate within our society, yet whether they are part of a grand evolutionary scheme is still hotly debated.  It mostly comes down to how literally we want to talk about evolution in the biological sense and how we want to describe mechanisms that contribute to evolution.  We’ll first have to figure out what we actually mean by evolution, then look at how various scholars have described the evolution of ideas under a rational system like science, and then look at how it might work under an irrational system like politics.

What is Evolution?

The problem with defining evolution is that the word was used in the lexicon far before Darwin’s theory.  Just as Copernicus more accurately described the orbit of the Earth around the sun by building on the previously-conceived notion of orbits, Darwin merely gave a better explanation for an already established notion of evolution.  Before Darwin, evolution simply meant an “unfolding” and had been used to describe the biological development of an individual organism among other things.  Darwin himself even shied away from using the term, preferring instead to use “descent with modification” to describe his theory.  Even today, with the explicit biological connotation of the word, it is still used fairly metaphorically to describe change over time with Google searches returning evolution of “hipsters” and “dance” just as much as Darwin’s theory.

In this broad metaphorical sense of evolution, ideas undoubtedly evolve.  The ideas of today are obviously not the same as they were 50 years ago and so this definition adds nothing to anyone’s understanding.  But what if we go in the opposite direction and take evolution at it’s most literal biological meaning?

In this case it’s a bit trickier, but as ideas are not genetic (even though they might be passed down from parents to their children), it’s ultimately inappropriate to call them hereditary.  Even if individuals can be linked to certain beliefs as they are linked to genes, ideas are still much more malleable and a person can change their beliefs whereas they are unable to change their genes.  On the opposite side, ideas are not the same as genes and therefore don’t follow the same specific biological mechanisms.  But perhaps biology has missed the point of evolution, taking what’s really a much broader natural phenomenon and specializing it to the progression of organisms.  After all, the other natural sciences have their own concepts of evolutionary processes such as the evolution of the universe and chemical evolution.  However, both of these are used more metaphorically to simply describe a direction of a natural process rather than the competitive push-pull world of biology.  Ideas, on the other hand, fall within the biological world.  For instance, it is impossible to distinguish evolutionary advantages resulting from physical modification from those resulting from intellectual modification.  An organism capable of holding certain concepts may be better suited to survive than those that can’t.  In this sense, human consciousness may be seen as a biological singularity in which evolution transcended genotypic modification and added another layer to the mechanisms of evolution.  Some, like Donald Campbell have taken this a step further to argue for a broad evolutionary scheme and have placed science at the pinnacle.

Evolutionary Science

In the 1970′s Campbell proposed the idea of Evolutionary Epistemology which essentially states that evolution is simply a natural process using a “blind variation-selective retention” mechanism.  By describing the mechanics this way, ideas are not all that different from genes, and while the process of evolution does not dictate increasing complexity, given enough time, complexity will emerge.  At the highest level of this complexity sits science, where ideas evolved to a point of creating a method to objectively validate other ideas.  According to Campbell, science creates its own subset of evolution where ideas evolve based on rational criteria.

Campbell was not the first to establish such a scheme and even co-developed his ideas with one of most prolific philosophers of science, Karl Popper.  Popper’s main contribution was to establish the notion of falsifiability which is still invoked by scientists to justify why their knowledge is superior.  Falsifiability states that science seeks to falsify their theories by performing experiments to test if they’re wrong.  Corroboration for a theory does not prove it, but simply means that it has survived until another test is performed.  Through these series of tests we are left with the theories we know today.  Over his life Popper toyed with his own scheme of evolutionary epistemology, eventually trying to apply it to the biological world, and, oddly enough, leading his critics to point out that his views were anti-Darwin and more in line with the overthrown evolutionary theory of Lamarckism.

Thomas Kuhn, in a response to Popper’s philosophy of falsifiability, also developed his own theory of evolutionary epistemology through his concept of scientific revolutions.  He said that science fluctuates between periods of normal science, where scientists work within a theory, and revolutionary science, where a theory is overthrown.  Some of you may know Kuhn’s ideas from the notion of paradigm.  If your boss tells the company that they need to switch paradigms, they are referring to Kuhn’s notion of scientific revolutions.  Kuhn briefly outlined how his model of scientific progress is evolutionary yet it was not until Stephen Jay Gould published his theory of punctuated equilibrium that it became fully articulated.  Like Kuhn’s theory, punctuated equilibrium states that evolution fluctuates between times of little variation in species and massive changes in species with high variation.  Gould was even later accused of appropriating Kuhn’s theory for his own, charges which he completely denies.

In all these schemes, science operates to dictate the evolution of ideas through testing, articulation, and shifts.  While generating consensus on ideas, it also requires an extreme malleability of belief where ideas are quickly discarded if evidence shows them to be wrong.  This ideal view of science may represent one end of a spectrum of peoples’ ability to change their beliefs.  Interestingly, on the other end, we might find that ideas more closely resemble genes, where an individual is unable to change their mind at all.

The figure above is a simple illustration of the spectrum but it’s important to note that science itself can often be found on the other end where older scientists may stubbornly cling to their beliefs until their deaths, as Kuhn once put it.  Nonetheless, if we can establish an evolutionary view for ideas at both extremes, then surely we can come up with something for the middle where most mass beliefs lay.

Evolutionary Culture and Politics

However much people like to think they aspire to standards of ideal and unstubborn science, they simply do not, nobody does.  We all hold beliefs that would be very difficult, if not impossible to change.  Maybe you think that your ex was a shitty person, or you think that A-1 is the best steak sauce ever, or you’re so stubbornly open-minded that you refuse to hold another idea besides that one.  In mass political culture it’s often worse, as entire blocks of ideas are non-negotiable amongst a political party’s members.  Furthermore, to even understand how political beliefs evolve, you also have to consider that many of the beliefs are completely unarticulated in the population in the first place.  Candidates will often compete for these non-partisan or undecided voters by attempting to spread their party’s beliefs simply by being the first to introduce people to it.  Without being the first, the process must be one of conversion, requiring at least some ability for people to change their mind.

Unfortunately, we are only able to validate the evolution of these beliefs in retrospect, unlike science which validates beliefs through testing.  In this sense political beliefs may be more akin to the famous evolutionary phrase “survival of the fittest.”  In science “fittest” describes a theory’s ability to stand up to tests, yet in Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the evolution of ideas it essentially means that whatever survives was the fittest; fitness can only be determined retrospectively.  Therefore, while we are in between the two useful criteria of ideal science and dogmatism, the middle of the spectrum provides nothing and is almost meaningless.  But there is not reason for total despair as it does tell us the limitations of how beliefs evolve.

As we are not at either extreme, beliefs will emerge, grow, survive, and die out not in a rational method, and not in a genetic one, but some combination of both.  Some people will never be converted on some issues while others could possibly be converted on nearly every issue.  Between these two groups, only the latter is relevant for politics or ideas in general.  As ideas diffuse and culture shifts between generations, ideas gradually shift with some fading as the last people that hold them die out, and others growing through conversions and the welcoming of younger adherents.  The GOP was shocked by such a shift this past election when they neglected the evolution and a complete need for conversions.  I might try to follow up on this analysis more in another article.

Ultimately, the evolution of ideas should be brought back to using an analogous description for “survival of the fittest” that was once put forth by the physicist Max Planck while criticizing science’s failure to live up to its ideals.  He stated,

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

While politics does not elicit the same authority of knowledge that science does, it is still fundamentally true for ideas in general.  Conversions to a new theory are only important so much as to create a sizable mass in which to generate enough momentum to carry it through time.  In other words, debates we have over ideas now are not to win over immediate opponents, but to establish those ideas in a realm of their own, one that transcends any individual, and can therefore be said to evolve.

I’m far too lazy to cite everything in this post but if you need a cite please just ask.

The Secret Occult History of James Bond

Most people know Ian Fleming as the creator of James Bond, and, as has been noted before, a remarkable badass himself.  Despite his well-documented personal achievements in the British government and as a writer, Fleming was also deeply mired in occultism, leading to a strange and mysterious Bond universe more intrinsically tied to Victorian occultism than the modern spy we know today.  The story of Fleming’s creation of Bond takes on new light when considering Fleming’s connections.

The story begins with the author Richard Deacon, who in the 1960’s wrote a book on the famous English alchemist John Dee.  In it he alleged that Dee was the James Bond of his time, serving as an adviser to Queen Elizabeth, and acting as a spy in some of the largest plots of the time.  He also said that Dee was the first to use “007” in his correspondence with the Queen, the code meant  to represent a lorgnette and meaning for the queen’s eyes only.  While Deacon’s work has been roundly criticized by Dee scholars, there are some basic truths that served as the foundation to his work.  In Dee’s time spying was prolific throughout the courts of Europe with prominent intellectuals often being employed as they had easy access and a good cover.  The famous philosopher and founder of modern science, Rene Descartes may have even served as a Jesuit spy to infiltrate occult societies during the Thirty Years’ War.

It should also be stressed that the word “occult” is misleading at this time.  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alchemy and mysticism were indistinguishable from science.  Many, including Newton and Boyle, believed in the spiritual aspects of nature and often kept their work hidden to keep the arcane traditions secret.  To keep these secrets, alchemists and mathematicians developed codes – John Dee in particular is often credited with forays into cryptography.  Already there are two links between alchemy and James Bond – espionage and codes.  This emblematic view of the world would get re-interpreted in the late 19^th century by the spiritualist movement, and alchemy would become more about personal transformation than actual transmutation of metals.  This sets up the context for Flemings early life, and here’s where things start to get weird.

Richard Deacon is the pen name of Donald McCormick, a British author responsible for numerous books on intelligence agencies and personal friends with Ian Fleming.  McCormick would eventually go on to write a biography of his friend in 1993.  McCormick authored several books on secret and occult societies, including the Hell-Fire society which was also associated with espionage.  Fleming also shared a deep enthusiasm for the occult, having grown up in the shadow of occult-obsessed Victorian England.  In his schooling Fleming even went so far as to contact the psychologist Carl Jung to translate one of his papers on Paracelsus.  Jung, who also shared an interest in occultism, had examined the works of the sixteenth century alchemist Theophrastas von Hohenheim, who went by the name Paracelsus, and compared them to themes within psychology.  Fleming’s link to the occult didn’t end there.

Working for British intelligence undoubtedly must have piqued an interest in cryptography and the different types of ciphers at work during the war.  It also put him in touch with the most looming occult figure of the age, Aleister Crowley.  Crowley represented everything that was right and wrong with the occult, and brought magic and ritual to the public’s eye.  However, he was also a spy.  It was certainly not public knowledge at the time, not simply because he had to maintain cover, but because the British government did not want to be seen as associating with a man people called “The Devil,” and Crowley didn’t want his followers seeing him associating with the government.  Crowley maintained contact with Fleming and Maxwell Knight, another Occult enthusiast whom Fleming reportedly based his character M on.  In Casino Royale you can see Crowley in the character of “Le Chiffre,” a corruption of the word cipher.

At the forefront of the occult revival in London, Crowley believed he was re-introducing ancient and esoteric knowledge and in doing so, revealed himself as the re-incarnation of English alchemist Edward Kelley.  And this rounds out our weird history of James Bond, as Kelley was the best friend of John Dee, so close that they even shared each other’s wives.  Is it possible that McCormick painted Dee as a James Bond character to impose his friend’s interpretation onto the past?  McCormick had claimed Crowley was a spy before it was made public and so perhaps knew things through Fleming that others did not.  The link between James Bond and John Dee will continue to be shrouded in mystery, yet perhaps the best way to look at them is as a lesson for history.  We try to examine the past with our own tacit knowledge of the present.  Late nineteenth century occultists saw Dee’s alchemy as hiding secrets to a personal spiritual transformation yet in reality Dee and others were just doing basic “science” at the time.  I put science in quotes because at this time science as we know it still does not exist but falls into a broader category of natural philosophy.  Just as alchemy was re-interpreted into the new age spiritualism we know today, perhaps so were Dee and Kelley.  Two figures on either side of Fleming, McCormick and Crowley serve to link James Bond to his early English predecessors, and thus bringing the occult baggage along.

Is AMC’s The Walking Dead Racist?

I’m going to take a break from politics this week to address something that must be addressed about the hit show, The Walking Dead.   The show on AMC is based on the comic by Robert Kirkman yet only loosely follows the original plot.  SPOILERS FOR BOTH THE SHOW AND COMIC will follow below.

The series first tackled the issue of race in the second episode, painting a redneck character as blatantly racist and thus being dealt swift justice by the show’s protagonist, Rick.  Hooray for people overcoming prejudice in the apocalypse, unfortunately the writers and producers haven’t come nearly as far.  In the opening of the second season we first started to glimpse that the show was unable to unshackle itself from traditional stereotypes.  The female characters provided all the source of conflict, being panicked, incompetent, stubborn, and leading some to label the show as sexist.  For instance, one of the first scenes of the second season involves the group encountering a zombie horde.  Andrea, at first oblivious to the danger, immediately starts panicking and only barely manages to fend off an attacking zombie, Carol begins exhibiting signs of hysteria and must be physically restrained, and Carol’s daughter Sophia runs off for no reason twice.  The first half of the second season was based entirely around Sophia’s disappearance and the drama between Lori, Rick, and Shane with Lori’s most notable contributions being her patented “deer-in-the-headlights” look and her inability to drive a car.  However perhaps I am being too harsh, for all the sexist fall-traps of the second season, by the third, the female characters have become strong and capable.  Furthermore, we are introduced to Michonne who is pitched as a badass zombie-slayer that completely reverses any instilled notion about gender and the ability to dispatch zombies.

However, the appearance of Michonne carries with it the realization that the writers and producers can’t handle black characters.  ”Showrunner” Glenn Mazzara has already made it abundantly clear in interviews that he has no appreciation for the show’s source material and is more concerned about marketing the show to a mass audience.  Given this consideration perhaps the writers are merely  reflecting a deeper consciousness about race that prevails in society rather than their own personal projections.  Nonetheless, this third season has been the most problematic in terms of race and like the sexism, would not necessarily be racist in itself, yet when compared to the comic, production and character decisions become much clearer and quite frankly, much more racist.  Let’s start with T-Dog.

First, the name T-Dog is already problematic, having already successfully been mocked for its connotation in the 2005 film Waiting… where a young wigger called Theodore insists on being called “T-Dog, yo.”  Then there’s the whole T-Dog/Tyrese controversy.  Tyrese was a character from the comics whom Rick’s group meets early on in the series.  He’s a big black guy that quickly becomes Rick’s good friend and essentially (and perhaps more literally) his right-hand, if not the group’s leader altogether.  Tyrese has a relationship with Carol and his daughter is also in an interracial relationship yet both are absent from the show.  Tyrese is the one who goes on a zombie-killing rampage out of rage instead of Rick and plays the foil to Rick’s poor leadership at times.  In other words, Tyrese is a huge character in the comics.

Meanwhile, the show has insisted that T-Dog is a completely different character, yet the fact that Tyrese is absent, T-Dog is there, and both their names start with “T” is enough to raise some eyebrows.  In some sense Tyrese’s spot is also filled by Shane and Daryl, both appearing in the show when they are absent in the comics.  So there’s the first decision, a positive black character is replaced by either meek T-Dog with hardly any dialogue or two white characters.  When T-Dog inevitably passed, there were two main threads of comments on his character, one that you knew it was coming because T-Dog had an unusually large amount of dialogue that episode, and two, that as soon as he was killed, he was immediately replaced by another black character.  This has led to speculation that the “T” actually stood for “Token.”

And then there’s Michonne, a character far too big to exclude, yet quite possibly the biggest letdown of the entire series.  On last night’s Talking Dead, AMC’s never-negative self-review, black actress Yvette Nicole Brown compared Michonne to the Terminator, calculating and deadly, yet this is perhaps the most forgiving interpretation out there.  In the show Michonne is always angry, confrontational, and paranoid.  She is a killing machine no doubt, but her humanity is non-existent.  Even her implied friendship with Andrea never gets past the implied part.  Every discussion they have together Michonne is cold and stubborn, which might be a side effect from a zombie apocalypse, but a horrible trait when dealing with other survivors.  She lacks any sort of cunning or saavy, or any ability to hide her feelings.  Instead Michonne becomes the stereotype of a Zulu warrior – brutal, aggressive, and distrustful of others, certainly good traits for surviving zombies, but also pretty racist, especially compared to her character in the comics.  Michonne enters the comics as a lone survivor approaching the prison where all of Rick’s group is, including Andrea.  She came there for refuge, preferring to be in a community then left alone on the outside – the exact opposite of the show.

Once inside the prison they take her weapon but she doesn’t seem to mind and treats everyone in a fairly congenial way (especially Tyrese), again the opposite reaction from the show.  As the story continues we learn that Michonne used to be a lawyer and will often hallucinate and talk to her dead boyfriend, something she and Rick bond over.  Later we even see Michonne feign interest at a dinner party, at least for a little while.  The Michonne of the show exhibits none of these traits and therefore her character comes off as racist.  Perhaps over time she will become more coy and trustful, but then we still encounter the racist narrative of the civilizing of the African savage and so at this point her character is too far gone to be saved from racial undertones.

Commercially successful shows must be based on familiar archetypes in society and therefore I don’t blame the show’s creators fully.  There is a serious problem with black characters in shows diverging from more positive portrayals in the source material.  Game of Thrones and Harry Potter both changed the race of characters out of convenience.  Shows not based on earlier works have a much harder time being labeled racist because they create their own characters.  Even if all the black characters in an original series have negative traits you could still explain it away as there being plenty of bad blacks in the world, the same way there are many bad whites and simply chalk it up as a coincidence of personalities that makes the show work.  Even while that is stretching to apologize for some shows, it takes an even farther leap to justify the choices surrounding the black characters in The Walking Dead.  When you take from source material you are forced to make very conscious decisions about the characters and the show’s creators were completely unable to provide any distance from the formulaic black character types.