On the Passing Scene XII

Hello, hooray, let the random thoughts begin!

• So Jeff Cooper apparently wrote a poem, at one point:
  

  A clip is not a magazine, a mag is not a clip;
  Neither is a grip a stock, and "stock" does not mean grip.
  I do not mean to nitpick, but improvement could be seen,
  If we could bring ourselves to say exactly what we mean.

  I know I've occasionally criticized Cooper, but you must understand, with me, your authority is dependent on the answers to these questions:
  1. Is your name Jesus Christ?
  2. If not, are you the successor to the Apostle appointed to settle disputes arising on issues of faith and morals, and speaking solely on those issues?
  If you don't answer "yes" to either of those questions, then your authority with me is no more than any other person, and always subject to my questioning whether—on that topic—you are not full of shit. And remember, if I am one of the 25 people in a room, only 1 of them is smarter than me, statistically. There is a 92% chance that you are not that person.


• So you know when you're on an internet forum, or commenting on a blog or a site, and someone else posts, y' know, "This is a very interesting topic, I am interested in is the time, our trading site for biggest deals on [insert potentially suspicious commodity here]."
  
  Yes, well, if the particular venue does not allow you to flag it as spam, I recommend posting this:

  Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Lovely Spam!
  Spam! Spam! Spam!
  Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
  Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
  Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
  Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
  Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
  Spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam.
  Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
  Spam spam spam spam!

  Feel free to copy and paste it from this page, I couldn't find a convenient source for it anywhere else.


• So when I pointed out, commenting on a review of the Atlas Shrugged movie (part 1 of three, part 3 will of course just be Galt talking), that Rand believed the rules didn't apply to her, some right-wing imbecile, taking me for a left-winger, said, "I think you're talking about Obama."
  
  Yes exactly, catamite, thanks for noticing. What I hate about Rand is that her ethics, precisely like the Left since at least Marx, have loopholes for your status. "If you are a great, moral, creative, productive soul, you can seduce another's spouse" is, exactly, like "If you have been oppressed, abused, downtrodden, and exploited, you can murder another's child." Please, what is the difference? Aren't they both saying the same thing? Rand gives it as payment for greatness, and Marx as restitution for smallness, but fundamentally both are saying "members of class x are exempt from the common bond of man and man".
  
  This is what you should hate about Randroids: they have all the same psychotic tics as the Left. Also they argue exactly like feminists, only probably with less reading comprehension.


• The principle is perennial, and is as hateful to the Puritan Right as to the Marxist Left (fortunately, not all on the right are Puritans, and a few on the left are still not Marxists). There is no elect, whether of the capitalists or the proletariat, only the people: which includes the capitalists. Nobody is exempt; nobody is special. The law is no respecter of persons.
  
  That, and not redistributionist policies, is what is meant by equality, in the thinking of all 18th century republicanism—again, the Jacobins were much more in favor of free markets than the Founding Fathers were. That is why Belloc renders the French motto "Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law". Remember, the economic movement he founded, with Chesterton, is at least as hostile to socialism as to capitalism, since, unlike both, it does not make the people dependent on the investor-class or on the state.


• Speaking of Rand being indistinguishable from leftists, I wonder if you're familiar with her gleeful account of the deaths of bureaucrats' families, who suffocate while on a broken-down train? I wouldn't inflict Atlas Shrugged on, well, even on the bitch who wrote it, but here's some dude at National Review talking about it. The relevant part is, she says they deserve to suffocate:

  . . . These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.

  Or, in other words, they—including the wife and children of a politician, the children young enough that their mother tucks them in—were "little Eichmanns" and their deaths were just "chickens coming home to roost".
  
  Who is John Galt?
  
  
  I almost hope she's right about the afterlife—her trotters would defile the floors of Hell.


• I was thinking about how, in my book, I have everything metricized, and it occurred to me, shotgun gauges, being based on pounds, are really gonna seem weird and arbitrary. So I decided to convert them to "number of balls that size in a half-kilogram", but then, well, why would they use a metric pound, if it comes to that? (Incidentally, the reason they call it the Royale with Cheese is not because they don't know what a Quarter-Pounder is—meat is sold by the metric pound in France—but because there's no way to say it in French that doesn't sound stupid.)
  
  Anyway, so then I thought of calling them "caliber x" (that's how French and Spanish do it, whereas Russian does it as "x caliber"—and you can translate the relevant hanzi as "gauge", "bore", or "caliber"), with the new number twice its approximate old equivalent—being based on the number of balls it would take to make a kilogram, which is twice a metric pound. But then I thought, gauge is a pretty esoteric concept—I just checked, my sister didn't understand it. There's no reason other than tradition to keep it around, and, in this setting, the only people allowed to have weapons are the UN foxtrotting Peacekeepers, why would they spare any trouble at all for tradition?
  
  Then I was like, OK, so they'll call them the measure of the barrel, in millimeters like usual. And I guess they just put "shot" afterwards, probably "S" for short like how they put "R" after round-nosed calibers? So 20-gauge becomes 15.63 mm shot, 12-gauge becomes 18.53 mm shot, and 10-gauge is 19.69 mm shot.


• You know when actresses shoot their mouths off in fields for which they are eminently unqualified? Cameron Diaz offered her profundities just recently on marriage, for instance. Anyway, every time they do it I am reminded of something someone said on TV Tropes, about Tyra Banks. I quote from memory, but it was something like

  She's not famous for her luscious reasoning skills or her round, firm intellect.

  I'm sure there's a similar line for the dizzying insights of, say, Ben Affleck, but the really sad thing is, he's Ludwig Wittgenstein compared to Diaz. That's how completely Hollywood ignores women's brains, even meatheads like Affleck are an informal intellectual aristocracy by comparison.


• I think I'll close with, remember a few back, how I compared Galt and Objectivism to a spadefoot toad, burying itself in the sand? I almost feel bad, because no way in hell are they as cute as spadefoot toads. They're so round!
  
  Also, Eruka, from Soul Eater: "frog-faced" just officially became a compliment.