Sigh. Longer, Deeper Sigh.

Tycho quote, reality check post.

• To Luke McKinney, and any other Irish anti-clericals who take the position Patrick was the first act of English imperialism against Ireland: Patrick was a Roman Briton. That is, he was Welsh. You go tell the Welsh they're the same people as the English, I want to watch.
  
  Also, congratulations—you've given Cromwell what he wanted. What the English couldn't get from your ancestors by terror-rape, torture, and genocide, you gave them for fear intellectuals might think you were still "peasants", and in reaction against corrupt churchmen who sold out to the same people you have. You mewling soup-takers, how can you stand the sight of your own country, when everything from the Parnell Monument to the Hill of Tara rebukes your utter headless cowardice?


• So the players have started a petition to get Bioware to release DLC that gives Mass Effect 3 a less tragic ending. Only, come on. You didn't see this coming? Remember how this series made you feel like big boys because it had political intrigue and gratuitous sex and violence? Well then don't be surprised that the ending was one that'll make you feel even more grownup. "Anyone can die" is a nigh-inevitable hallmark of this kind of puerile "edginess", in any work of fiction; the only surprise is that you were surprised.
  
  As for me, well, I stand with C. S. Lewis: "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."


• Ben Kuchera, over at Penny Arcade Report, had two remarks on the ending, both of which bear comment. One is, "The lesson of Mass Effect is much more brutal, and honest. Heroes die." To which I respond, "What if I am not a Puritan—insisting that all my art and entertainments must be 'moral'—and don't want a 'lesson'?"
  
  And the other is, "What makes this conversation so thrilling is that there is finally a science fiction setting in video games that features believable characters." To which the only reply is, "Mass Effect is not science fiction, it is unreflectively pulp space-opera—that is, it is space opera whose writers are so uneducated as to think they are writing science fiction. Also, its characters are less believable than those of a galge, and while we're at it, what is unbelievable about the characters of Halo? Shepard does ridiculously bigger things than the Chief, and he's not a super-soldier in a half-ton of powered armor."
  
  Mass Effect has, by all accounts, an impressive system for incorporating player choices into the story and world. Too bad that story and world are such utter puerile shit.


• I think hard scifi people, though, bear some of the blame for most "science fiction" in popular culture being so light on that first word. People got so tired of being ragged on for every little artistic license they took with physics that they finally threw up their hands and said "screw it, we're just doing whatever looks cool".
  
  It's the same as how Libertarian governments are just as corrupt as any others, and if you think different, you don't live in Arizona. In my state, we have very few actual Republicans; most of our GOP is actually Libertarians who prefer being allowed to vote in primaries. Cronyism, and ideological sabotage, are nearly as big a problem in this state as in California. Why, when Libertarianism is predicated on hatred for those things? Because it assumes those are the natural state of government. If you assume a thing cannot be done well, why bother not doing it badly?
  
  The same principle is also why many pacifist ideologies commit atrocities in wars. They just think that's how war is.


• I find all those jokes about Mexican food giving people diarrhea fascinating—and by fascinating, I mean "they make me want to pull your windpipe out through your nose."
  
  Seriously, which is it? Are you so racist you think Mexican food will be made with the sometimes-unsafe water of its second-world country of origin (never mind that cooking with it kills pathogens in water)? Or is it just that your wussy gringo digestive tract can't handle beans?


• Have I mentioned that I think atheists should be required to wear muttonchop side-whiskers, so we can tell what century they think they live in? Seriously, that "religion is so violent" thing was tenable in the 18th and 19th century, but in the 20th, about four atheist regimes killed an eighth of a billion people in 72 years. And that's not counting the dead from all the wars they caused, nor all the people China and Cuba have killed since 1989. Add those in, and it's roughly a fifth of a billion. In less than a century. Now, admittedly, the world's population has grown, but when governments that follow your ideas proceed to kill several times more people than your opponents did in over 83 times as long, you get to shut your self-righteous piehole.


• It's also funny how Europeans think America having flags all over is odd. Only, actually, they're the ones who are odd. Everyone in Asia, Latin America, and Africa puts their flag the same places we do—hell, Koreans say their flag-pledge before taekwondo classes.
  
  But I totally get it. If I was Dutch or English or German or Spanish or Italian, I'd be reticent about displaying my national symbols, too.


• An oft-overlooked reason China didn't develop science is, Taoism. In Taoist thought, see, an experiment, having been set up by humans, is not an accurate representation of the principle it's designed to test. To a Taoist, experiments are basically a superstition, like "Voodoo" dolls.
  
  Interestingly, a mystical tradition that does acknowledge experiments, because of the principle "as above, so below" or "microcosm recapitulates macrocosm", was significant in the history of medicine. I refer, of course, to Hermetic alchemy, one of whose later proponents, Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, is considered the father of modern pharmacology. As well as, supposedly, the only alchemist to successfully create a homunculus—probably why Arakawa-sensei named Ed and Al's dad after him.


• The next person who spouts that "you're more likely to harm a loved one with a gun than an intruder" statistic should be forced to eat one—a gun or a loved one, you can try it either way. Sorry, idiots, but that statistic arises from flawed methodology—the surveyors only counted injuries to intruders, ignoring any and all incidents where guns scared them off without shots being fired.
  
  Actually—again—guns, merely being brandished, prevent upwards of two million crimes per year. Nobody has yet managed any such challenge to that statistic's methodology, and not for lack of trying.


• Similarly, it's a common belief that we shouldn't fight terrorists, we should laugh at them. Only, no, mass murderers are something you should take quite seriously. Not to invoke Godwin's Law or anything, but we all also laughed at Hitler's little toothbrush mustache, and assumed the Nazis were just blustering oafs, too.
  
  It doesn't really matter how buffoonish someone is, if they have bombs. Also, the Middle East is markedly short on hipster irony; when someone there says he intends to kill innocent people, he's not generally saying it for laughs.


• To continue in the same vein, people like to say "there's no war on terror, because you can't make war on a tactic". To which the appropriate response is, "You are a slackjawed, wrestling-helmeted mental defective."
  
  Or more specifically, "Well, huh, we seem to be able to combat 'organized crime', and that's just a business model. Never mind that Islamic terrorist groups are far more unified in purpose, goals, and methods, albeit decentralized, than the Cosa Nostra, Ndraghesti, Camorra, various Eastern European gangs, Triads, yakuza, and kkangpae who we lump together under 'organized crime'."


• Here is an economic argument I wish someone else had the stones to make: contraception is disempowering to women. I know, counter-intuitive, but that's why games theory is good, it teaches you to analyze social interaction economically. Namely, contraception makes more women likely to have sex, by removing the inconvenience of children. Now quick, kiddies, what happens when you increase supply while demand remains constant? Oh, right, the price drops. Hence why men in our society are such bounder-cad prick-a-dicks. They don't have to do as much—pay as high a price—to get sex.
  
  Before you bitch at me, sorry, but, due to Bateman's Principle, males are, in essentially all species (even some flies), the ones who do the courting. All contraception does is lower the threshold for how cool your courtship display/nuptial gifts have to be, which decreases women's control over couplings. I'm sure you'd still love to insist that contraception is empowering to women, but the science of economics says otherwise.
  
  Actually come to think of it, I think a writer in First Things once made the same argument, but it needs to be more widely publicized.


• Finally, you'll occasionally come across people who object to people from the USA calling ourselves Americans. Only, nobody in Mexico or Canada cares. Also, America is the country, North America is the continent.
  
  Hell, people from Mexico actually call the USA "los Estados Unidos", even though Mexico itself is one, too.
  
  Also, dude, seriously? Go pick on the Afrikaners.