Checkin' Myself 'Fore Wreckin' Myself

Some thoughts, mainly of a reality-check-for-myself nature.

• I am frequently unkind, often to the degree of unjustifiability, to atheists with whom I debate online. Now, admittedly, since it only ever happens on certain religious blogs I read, they are the ones who start it; but certainly I often don't acquit myself honorably.
  
  The explanation, though not excuse, lies in a form of generalization from the self, but not the one you probably think. It seems, to me, that the existence of God—the God of the philosophers though not of Revelation—is simply not open to dispute. To one acquainted with ancient philosophy, Thomism, and the existentialists, that there is such a thing as the Monad/Actus Subsistens Essendi is self-evidently true; to deny it exists is to say that sugars are not sweet, when "resembles a sugar in taste" is the definition of sweet. One may hold any number of beliefs that closely approximate atheism, but atheism itself is proscribed by logic, placing atheists in the same category as Holocaust Deniers and people who think we never landed on the Moon. Hence I debate with them on the internet as if they had swung by an astronomy site to deny the Moon Landings.
  
  But (here's where the generalization from the self comes in), most atheists know no philosophy. What little they do know is generally bad, either empiricism (which is just as self-refuting as Biblical literalism—Sola Scriptura is not found in the Bible, and empiricism is not empirically verifiable) or something like Rand or Spinoza, who never learned that Existence and That-Which-Exists are two different things. They undoubtedly are irritatingly ignorant, but my mistake is in often treating them as if they were willfully so. They are not. They have been deceived or deprived. It is one thing to be a member of the Flat Earth Society; it is quite another to be from an isolated people that never heard the earth is round. I owe them the same courtesy as the second, and frequently I give them the opprobrium of the first.
• On a lighter note, I may have jumped the gun, flattered as I was, in endorsing John Wright's post about a Czech movie being the first steampunk. It may not really count, since it's a movie of a Verne book—Heinlein juveniles don't count as Rocket Punk, because when they were made, that was just how SF was done.
  
  On the other hand, Morlock Moorcock's "Warlord of the Air" can't really claim to be the predecessor of modern steampunk—then again, neither can Sterling and Gibson's "Difference Engine", and it named the genre. No, see, steampunk now is not primarily about (usually terrible) alternate history. It's about making cool overscience gadgets using materials and methods of past eras.
  
  Personally, I'd say the first example of that kind of steampunk is the awesome manga and anime "Steam Detectives", by Asamiya Kia, who doesn't appear to have ever encountered any other steampunk ideas before he came up with the thing. That's gotta count for something.
• For the longest time, I thought the Japanese for "equivalent exchange" was "tokaku kokan". But, turns out it's just "toka kokan".
  
  I wonder, is it perhaps that Paku Romi (Ed's seiyû) renders consonants slightly differently? She is Korean, after all, and Korean tends to render the more aspirated consonants found in Japanese and English as its own emphatic consonants—except in the North, where instead they render them as geminates. Now, Paku Romi has virtually no accent—at least nobody in Japan ever seems to have complained—but tiny little differences of pronunciation can persist years after the rest of one's accent is gone. Every once in a while Agent Scully will evince just a bit of Gillian Anderson's British accent, for instance, and I pride myself on being able to spot when Hugh Laurie says something that sounds more like Blackadder's sidekick George than it does like House.
• On the reality-check-for-me front, I can point you to the most shameful thing I ever said on this blog: in my review of Outlaw Star, I said it was "more serious, literary SF than 2001: A Space Odyssey". Now that's just ridiculous. This setting has an entire species of weretigers.
  
  Of course, Outlaw Star never claimed to be hard SF, and the setting also has hundreds of effing wizards, whereas Clarke's work is supposed to be atheist rationalism but it's loaded with mortals-becoming-gods from end to end. Nevertheless 2001: A Space Odyssey is still serious, literary SF until the last several minutes. It just also happens to be glacially paced, boring nonsense, more interested in Clarke's quaint bastardized-Whiggism-meets-Gnostic-soteriology than in a rampant AI, while Outlaw Star is interesting and entertaining space opera whose makers consider becoming a god the opposite of salvation.
• Not really a reality check, but my seventh post on the whole blog, called "Identity Crises in the midst of Actual Crises", about how people in modern fiction have whiny existential angst nobody would have in their situation ("what am I good for" tends not to be asked by people whose everyday life is a struggle for survival), was remiss.
  
  It was remiss because it does not include this awesome quote from Peacemaker Kurogane, said by Yoshida Toshimaro to his page:

  "Is this who I really am?" "Is this my true nature?" Do not entertain such doubts, Suzu. If you have such doubts, you will hesitate. If you hesitate, you will die.

  Let the record show I did not pass into the night without correcting this heinous omission. Seriously, what the hell happened, that I wrote a blog post on that topic and didn't use that line?

Huh, so, in the end, I could only think of five things to correct myself about. If anything, I'm even more surprised than you.