If Ignorance Is Bliss, You Must Be Ecstatic

Yeah, reality check-type thing.

• So people are self-righteous about the priest scandal, and say it has some implications for celibacy and the all-male priesthood. Except all the statistics say the rate of abuse is the same among Protestant clergy. Oh, and the rate for Christian clergy is slightly lower than the rate for rabbis. Yeah, I don't expect to see that reflected in pop culture any time soon; I don't even mind (anti-Semitism starting to be a problem again), I just wish we didn't have to have the priest thing so over-played.
  
  Oh, and fun fact, the rate for any clergy is about a third what it is for public school teachers. But that doesn't stop their media portrayal from being non-stop hagiography from end to end.


• I'm not sure where I'm gonna use it, but if you want it, here's an exchange that I thought would be cool:

  Journalist: "Military intelligence" is an oxymoron.
  Soldier: What, so sorta like "journalistic integrity"?

• Where do people get their ideas about war? I was just thinking about Avatar, and the anti-war movement, and all that kind of thing, specifically the question I asked before: why don't guys who are completely willing to kill women and children just firebomb?
  
  And that's when it came to me: Cameron's out of touch. I mean, watch Avatar; the last war anyone involved in that picture knows anything about is Vietnam. The most air support they have is dropping in guys (and yeah, their pathetically tiny mecha is still just a guy, not armor in any sense of the term). It's not like Halo where a Phantom will drop off a Wraith, just as you think you've got an area mopped up—because Halo is not World War II, it's not Nam, it's a modern war. But Avatar? Nope, it's still the 60s, man.
  
  Since the thing they're fighting over in Avatar is essentially guaranteed to survive firebombing, they would only be fighting the Na'vi in person if they wanted to be sure they weren't killing civilians. But they go out of their way to kill civilians...because Cameron is a complete idiot.
  
  Actually, it's painfully evident Avatar had no military consultants, because there's not a single "ex-Marine" merc in it who behaves remotely professionally. Sully doesn't appear acquainted with even the rudiments of fire-discipline, nor how one ought to behave while walking around in hostile terrain (hint, you don't play with flowers). Mercs might have lower standards than actual military, but a lot of military procedures are just common sense to keep guys alive. But then again the actual Marines in Aliens are no better; apparently Cameron doesn't know "soldier" doesn't mean "child with a gun and no real training or discipline whatsoever".


• Which reminds me, the constant comparing of Avatar to Halo is just insulting—to Halo, though apparently people mean it as an insult to Avatar. Aside from how Halo involves some knowledge of military discipline, and how war has changed since Vietnam, there's a lot more work in Halo, folks. Bungie put more thought into the Grunts than Cameron put into his whole setting. Yeah, I'll give him the spaceships having heat-radiators; I could stand to see that in everything. But his contempt for his audience is so total as to name the stuff "Unobtainium"—which is director-speak for "You unwashed plebs wouldn't understand if I came up with something more plausible, so why should I even bother?"
  
  And yes, I'm one of those people who wants to send half a dozen Spartans (or three dozen ODSTs) to Pandora.


• So my sister had been (I think she stopped) debating this alleged pagan girl, on the internet, about the concept of witchcraft. And of course, she's been getting the same "Witch Cult of Europe" canards nobody's actually believed since the 40s.
  
  It's funny to me because I know that witchcraft was a death penalty crime in Rome, Greece, and among the Celts and Germans for thousands of years—Rome only didn't kill witches under Alexander Severus, widely regarded as the most incompetent Roman Emperor.
  
  It was in fact Christianity that put a stop to witch-hunting; in some places you could actually get charged with heresy for making witchcraft accusations, as early as the 8th century.
  
  What changed? Why, the Renaissance, of course. It brought back Roman laws regarding witches. Then the Reformation brought back the Biblical ones. Nice going.


• So Martin Gardner died. Personally I held him in contempt; he was shallow and reductive, and we know how I feel about that. Dr. Thursday was entirely too generous to him over on the Chesterton Society blog, just because Gardner wrote some forwards to some GKC editions; personally I ripped Gardner's forwards out of my copies.
  
  Gardner's blatant anti-rational, wish-fulfillment view of God is actually not what I dislike most about him. That would be his skepticism; he founded CSICOP, the group that puts out the Skeptical Inquirer. He's lucky you're not judged by your effect on intellectual history, because he'd be in hell right now—their brand of skepticism is the epistemological equivalent of the Holocaust. Even as shallow, reductive, knee-jerk positivists go, they're shallow, reductive, and knee-jerk.
  
  May God have mercy on him, an obvious doorknob.


• Speaking of shallow skeptics, Mythbusters did a test (with their usual rigor) on the thing from Burn Notice, about using phone books to bullet-proof a car's doors. It works for pistol rounds, but not shotgun slugs or rifle rounds. And the idiots said it had been busted!
  
  The problem is, "bulletproof" is not a scientifically defined word—the industry prefers "bullet resistent". The rounds the phone book enhanced doors resisted render them the equivalent of Type IIIa personal armor, which is actually damn good.
  
  They seemed to be using "bulletproof" to mean "completely immune to bullets", and that doesn't exist, short of concrete-and-steel bunkers. Know why? The GAU-8 Avenger (main cannon of the A-10 Thunderbolt) shoots bullets, that's why.