Lady Wisdom's Favorite: Just Stop Being Wrong All the Time

2011/03/06

Reality Check.

So apparently in "The Sentinel" there's something about a Secret Service agent "deactivating the safety with one smooth motion". But I'm pretty sure by 2006 they'd already adopted the SIG P229 as their sidearm...and it, like the Glock, has no manual safety.

Oh, and then there's how some idiot on TVTropes said it's illegal to open carry in most US states, but concealed carry is legal. Uh, no, Eurotrash, actually, open carry is legal in many areas, but concealed carry usually isn't without a license. Like it says on our money, "In God we trust, everyone else keep your hands where I can see 'em." Admittedly that second part's implied.

So in my perennial search for people denouncing the non-science fiction-ness of Firefly, I ran across a bunch of people who seemed to think the only reason you couldn't like the show is that you don't like science fiction.

Oh, dear child, not at all. What I don't like about the show is its poor cultural setting, lousy world-building, and cliche plots. Also, the dialogue is too snarky. I actually just don't like snark, it's cultural, but let me demonstrate my SF bona fides for a sec. Snark is humor, and humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism. No sapient species interrupts its defense mechanisms.

So apparently it's theorized that a part of River's ridiculous LevelInBadass—which is actually just Joss setting aside some unassigned Advantage points for her, à la GURPS—is her using her Rain Man math skills to calculate physics and aiming and such.

Now, see, I get why this is. It's because, to a little drama pixie like Whedon, math looks like magic. So, of course, he thinks (if that's the word), I'll explain this nonsense magical power I give River by reference to this other magical power. I mean, after all, those men in the blue shirts salute and sweep runways, and the spirits send them cargo; plainly if I do those things I'll get cargo too. This is a pet peeve of mine. Other than the conservation of angular momentum, and that only in theory, none of this stuff is directly applicable. Nobody, other than actual artillery gunners, is doing the math for this; you eyeball it. I don't care how fast you can do math, adding extra steps in an actual combat situation will get you killed dead. And that's the worst kind of killed.

So one of those atheist idiots who thinks religion is the most violent force in the world (though the top three murderous regimes of all time are all atheist, as are some of the runners up) also said, get this, that "human rights" is an idea that's only 60 years old.

Huh. You better tell Bartolomeo de las Casas, and all those other Spaniards who passed the world's first secular human rights legislation, since they sure seem to think they lived more than 60 years ago. And then there's Bernard of Clairvaux and all those others who did it on the religious side, formulating a consistent war-ethic during the Crusades. I'm pretty sure the Crusades were more than 60 years ago, right? No, I guess not. Wait, when was Buddha? Was he really only 60 years ago? Damn, India sure has packed a lot of living into such a short time, I guess.

2011/03/06