Sed Est Verus?

Reality Check (and a Latin title!). Mostly concerning history.

• It will shock many of you to learn, not only did Pius XII save more Jews than anyone else, by a wide margin (that whole "Nazi collaboration" thing was, provably, made up in the 70s by the Stasi, to undermine the Vatican), but another ally of European Jewry was...Francisco Franco. Yeah, I know, weird, but he apparently helped a lot of Jews escape places occupied by Nazis or the other Fascists.
  
  Of course, what people don't know about Spanish Fascists would fill a pretty thick book. They sure weren't nice guys, but let's just say the fictional cruelty of the fascist in "Pan's Labyrinth" still isn't as bad as the stuff the Communists actually did, in the Spanish Civil War.


• So a lot of ink gets spilled on the topic of why science arose in the West, and not elsewhere. Certainly it has something to do with Christianity, but a lot of writers ascribe it to the Christian view that nature is orderly and intelligible—yet Asia also generally believes that, but they didn't come up with science.
  
  Myself, I have a different theory. The reason Christians came up with science, and Asia didn't, is simple: we're not allowed to do magic. China and India both had much better astronomy than the West, but the primary thing they did with it was ever more detailed horoscopes. Similarly their biological and anatomical studies were inseparable from their folk-magic and alchemy. And the main use of astronomy in Mesoamerican cultures was horoscopes; all three of those cultures' much-lauded accurate calendars were at least half of divinatory origin.
  
  I'd say a related element, the much quicker technological development of the West compared to its contemporaries, is that, unlike both polytheist Asia and the Islamic world, the West didn't have slaves anymore: so they needed good machines. That's certainly why the Classical world had such great military tech but such bad plows: soldiers were freemen, but farmhands were slaves.
  
  Huh. It just occurs to me that the same is true of the Renaissance: technological development slowed to a crawl in that era, except in military equipment. What's really fun to point out, though, is that there's exactly one Renaissance scientist of any greatness (Copernicus), and he was mostly building on Oresme and Buridan. The two initiators of the Age of "Reason", meanwhile (Descartes and Galileo), were pretty much just picking up where Oresme and Buridan left off (Oresme actually invented "Cartesian" notation, did you know?).


• So Cameron, not only is your plot economically impossible, but apparently its exogeology is wrong too. Seems the Alpha Centauri system's not that likely to have gas giants (Pandora is a moon), but is quite likely to have earth-sized rocky planets. Oops.
  
  Maybe someone should have pointed out that living on the "forest moon" of a gas giant is just one more parallel the Na'vi have to Ewoks, and they're pretty heavily-laden with those as it is.
  
  And I think the Unobtainium nonsense stems from Cameron being a flatlander. See, Unobtainium is just an unintelligent analogy to oil. Only, oil doesn't have to fight every law of physics and chemistry just to exist; in fact it happens because something else (a living thing) lost that fight. But a hot superconductor is not the kind of thing that is particularly likely to happen on its own at all, let alone on any planet a human can walk around on, breath-mask or no.


• So there's this strange idea among many on America's right that Mexico (and much of the rest of Latin America) are having their recent political instability because of European-style statism. But actually, no, a lot of Latin Americans, and indeed Latin cultures generally, have a "screw the government" mentality that'd make Ron Paul's head spin. Its most extreme form is the Mafia's omerta code; Belloc was once in a French town that made about 2/3 its living by smuggling.
  
  Personally I think it's just what happens when you try to make Liberalism (classically defined, I mean) intellectually consistent.


• Another example of how people know nothing of the history of Liberalism is, ask the nearest American conservative, "Who was more pro-family, Locke or Rousseau?" And of course they'll say Locke. Only, no, actually, Locke placed everything under the social contract, including familial relations, while Rousseau said that the family exists in the state of nature and its relations precede the contract.
  
  The other thing that's interesting is that "volonté générale", as used by Rousseau, doesn't mean anything remotely like "general will". It's much closer to "consent of the governed", except that Rousseau denies that the people are the governed—his thought, remember, defines them as the sovereign, and acts like it. It's arguably also something akin to "common good," as used by Aquinas (not by the quasi-Liberation Theology activists who've usurped the phrase).


• Late Addendum: Reality check for myself! So I was thinking, and it turns out there is a way that the Serenity can use its artificial gravity to make its rocket more efficient, without something nonsensical like negating rest mass. If your gravity device works like a Kzin gravity planer/polarizer, you can put a gravity well just in front of your ship, and that makes acceleration easier, because it's quite literally downhill. Of course, at that point, you don't need a rocket anymore, and that's not how the artificial gravity in Firefly seems to work—if it was, the deckplan would be different.
  
  Come to think of it, the Serenity's exhaust seems to drift remarkably slowly. Its delta-v must be ridiculously low.