You Sure of That, Smart Guy?

Reality Check.

• A Cracked article I was reading said, quite correctly, that the typical portrayal of Jesus is due to the Renaissance artists simply painting everyone according to the Greco-Roman canons of art. They then, however, claimed that another factor was that—"during the Crusades"—they needed to disguise the fact people were praying to "a little brown Jew". Because, of course, that would cause confusion, as to "whether it's the one they're supposed to pray to, or to kill." First off, if you can tell what ethnicity medieval manuscript illustrations or monumental sculpture are supposed to represent, you need to go into forensics, because you have a sodding superpower.
  
  Second, though, they can shove their slander up their asses. The Crusades had nothing whatsoever to do with Jews. On the basis of one incident, the Rhineland massacres, it has been convenient for (lying propagandists and intellectual prostitutes) to paint the Crusades as anti-Semitic, but that's ridiculous. And, if the writer in question is Jewish, it's also grotesque ingratitude, since, again, it was actual Crusaders who finally put down the (not-Crusader) mobs responsible for the massacres (leaving to one side that, also again, the mobs killed more Germans than they did Jews, simply due to the demographics of the region).
  
  Remember how, shortly after 9/11, some idiot here in Arizona killed a Sikh, thinking he was a Muslim? Well imagine if he'd been stopped by military police. And then, nevertheless, everyone simply decided that the Sikhs ought to oppose the War on Terror and the US military, and if most accounts of the incident described the perpetrator as being a US serviceman. That's basically what people do with the Crusades—do you perhaps see the issue?


• Another Cracked article pointed out that the "obeying orders at all times without question" thing was never really a part of the samurai's code. But then they claimed that samurai were never loyal, and would simply kill their lords if serving them stopped being profitable.
  
  Sigh. Look, children, it is just very cute that you're interested in history—even if it's only because of your puerile fascination with "blood and a bit of undressing"—but there are at least 260 years between the period you're talking about, and the rise of what would become Japanese Imperialism. Yes, Sengoku era samurai weren't particularly loyal (though they'd never kill their lords just for not paying enough, it looks bad on a résumé), but the Sengoku was an unstable time. Edo-period samurai—which are the thing we mean when we say "samurai", Sengoku-era ones weren't even swordsmen, they were horse-archers—most certainly were loyal. Have you maybe heard of the 47 Ronin? 200+ years of adapting a military class to peacetime conditions tends to have an effect on its behavior.
  
  Then again, pretty much every (half-educated) amateur, talking about history, makes that mistake. E.g., they read the brutality and sexism of the Hundred Years War and Renaissance into the High Middle Ages (or to use Regine Pernoud's terminology, they read the medieval and renaissance periods back into the feudal—she restricts "medieval" to meaning "the transition period between the system of feudal obligations and the Classicist absolutism of the Renaissance"). It's basically like my mother's (high school!) students thinking that the black women in "The Help", set c. 1962, were slaves.
  
  Yes, that happened, and frankly I can't see any difference between that, and you idiots. Except a bunch of 14-year-olds have some semblance of an excuse.


• I must correct myself: I said that pretty much no Chinese martial arts other than Long Fist were any older than Queensbury boxing or savate, but actually, Hùhng Ga dates to the end of the Ming dynasty. The house of Hùhng were Ming loyalists, who absorbed several refugees from the fall of the Shaolin Temple, and there is probably a tradition of Southern Shaolin martial arts going back to a century or two before that—one branch of which was exported to the Ryukyu kingdom and became karate.
  
  There's also some Taoist martial art that's that old—the rivalry between Wudang and Shaolin wasn't just made up for kung fu movies, they were neighboring monasteries of partly-incompatible religions. Seriously, read Journey to the West: does "our heroes piss in the Taoists' holy water fonts" sound like the two religions got along? But anyway neither taijiquan nor baguazhang has much claim to be the original Taoist style; it's probably the common ancestor of those two plus xingyiquan.
  
  Someone needs to ask why Avatar (Aang, not Wicket Neytiri), despite basically being a love letter to the Dalai Lama, paints the two nations that do Buddhist martial arts as the ones more likely to try "imperialism", and the two that do Taoist ones (which are the ones they now teach, under the auspices of the Communists, at Shaolin Temple) are painted as blameless holy creatures.


• Speaking of martial arts, do you know who was the greatest martial-artist/philosopher in history? If you said Bruce Lee, get out. Anyone who represents the Mind of No Mind as "don't think, feel" should be hunted from horseback by rich guys in pink coats.
  
  No, the correct answer is Plato. Sure, Aristotle was a better philosopher, but Aristotle wasn't an Olympian wrestler—and I don't care what your "sifu" said, a pankration expert could eat a JKD practitioner alive. You have to put your limbs near him to hit him, after all, and the things he will do to your joints will make you think you crossed Mossad.
  
  That's an interesting point, by the way—pankration, and for that matter all the other pre-14th century European martial arts, look like nothing so much as Krav Maga, MCMAP, or the thing the Russians just call "Systema". Ditto actual battlefield jujutsu. What we think of as "traditional" martial arts, are actually, usually, martial arts after long periods of stagnation, generally due to unarmed combat falling out of use for various reasons. Actually, of course, most of them are sports, with arbitrary limits to make competition more interesting—traditional karate has throws, did you know? Ditto savate.


• On a lighter note, I do grow so tired of people saying Firefly was the best science fiction show in decades. And it's not even because Firefly is space opera, not science fiction. It's just, Stargate SG-1 and Farscape are both so much better than Firefly, it's like Dr. Who being compared to House. As a medical dramedy.
  
  Again, Firefly is the JFK of "sci fi" shows: people overrate it because they lost it. I assure you, Mr. and Ms. Browncoat, if it had been all that great, it would've lasted more than one season. Your quaint theory that Firefly bombed because it was shown out of order, is bogus, completely. Yes, the episodes make marginally more sense when shown in order, but in actual fact, it's only slightly less Caper of the Week than SG-1 was in the early days—while it might help, very slightly, to put the pilot first, after that you can see any episode at all, and they aren't confusing at all. You think Firefly was a work of SF genius by a great creative mind, and needs to be shown in order for the intricate plot arcs to make sense?
  
  Pfft. We know what that would look like, it was called Babylon 5, and you insult us all merely by causing me to have to compare the two.


• Interesting thing with actual sci-fi fans: hating the term "sci-fi" is supposed to be a thing for hard science fiction fans, who prefer "SF". Only, hating "sci-fi"—the sound of crickets doing what an MIT parrot allegedly did to him—originates with Harlan Ellison. And Ellison doesn't write science fiction.
  
  No, seriously. Aside from how pretty much everything he writes involves time travel or dystopias, he actually specifically repudiates the "science" label. Uh-huh. He prefers that you call it SF because he's writing "speculative fiction". He actually coined the phrase, because he apparently retains just enough intellectual honesty to notice his stories are scientifically bullshit.
  
  I, for one, prefer "sci fi", for its pleasing sound, and the fact it sounds like "hi fi" (and hey, "scientific fidelity" is an important quality in properly defining the genre). Besides, what does Harlan Ellison know? He writes Star Wars tie-ins.


• Finally, you know how people always say people with Asperger's "lack empathy"? Uh, how many do you know? Because no, no they don't. What they lack is much simpler: they lack the ability to tell how others feel. In Japan it's called KY, for "kûki yomenai" or "can't read the atmosphere". One of the things Asperger's—among other conditions—impairs, is the instinctive ability to gauge others' reactions.
  
  "Empathy" is something else entirely. Empathy is the ability to grasp that other people have feelings too, and to care what their feelings are. People with Asperger's don't really have much trouble with that; they know that other people have feelings, and they care just as much as anyone else. Don't be like Hollywood, and confuse autism with psychopathy. The thing is, caring what your feelings are and being able to tell are two very different things—and anyone who says otherwise is a needy girlfriend from a bad romantic comedy.
  
  Their inability to tell others' feelings gets Aspies into trouble when they have to adjust their behavior on the fly, because—unless you actually tell them, "That's annoying" or "You hurt my feelings"—they can't tell, and they can't adjust. Basically, it's like an IM conversation: you have to tell them your reactions, because they can't pick up things like tone of voice or facial expression, anymore than if the exchange were text-based.