Commentary 7

Random thoughts.

• There was a stupid thing about witches on DeviantArt, where a person was repeating "Witch Cult of Europe" canards that are as dead as luminiferous aether. I pointed out that A) witch-hunting had nothing to do with persecuting pagans, although banning witch-hunting did, and B) a witch is not intrinsically female. In many cultures—most Native American ones for instance—witches are male, all spiritual power being male-dominated (generally because the gods are too dangerous for women to approach).
  
  I also mentioned in passing that "witch" doesn't simply mean a person with spiritual powers, but solely and exclusively one whose spiritual powers are not only used unlawfully, but originate in unlawfulness. The English equivalent to the words in various languages that are generally translated "witch" is "diabolist", just FYI.
  
  I decided not to stick around (silly people were responding to my comment completely without reading it, which I consider a deal-breaker). The very next day, though, I found out how you say "witch" (in the real sense) in Japanese (and no, not "majou"). Namely, shujusshi (呪術師), "curse-art practitioners". Google Translate thinks the word means "shamans", which, I'm sorry, is just offensive.
• So I thought I'd give Alternity another look-see, now that I have a better handle on the particulars of my SF setting. I realized, the one big flaw is, the rules for spaceships, even in the Warships book, are not set up for realistic ships—realistic ships have a hydrogen-to-everything-else ratio reminiscent of the Hindenberg, while the Warships rules describe fuel/propellant tanks in terms you'd associate with a long-haul truck.
  
  But I realized, if you just take the mass of everything that isn't fuel or tank, and treat that as the ship size, you can pretty much get away with it. Basically you track your ships' fuel in terms of mass ratio, and, for the sake of brevity, just ignore that the acceleration increases as fuel gets used up (I suppose you could re-compute your delta-V round by round, but I don't know of any space-tactics game that does that).
  
  I also realized I had to make up a bunch of new ship-parts, to make the game stats approximate the setting I had in mind. Then again, I realized, Alternity's nonsensoleum "dark matter" tech resembles my idea of the dilaton alternator, if one just realizes that most dark "matter" is actually dark energy. (My sister—not this one, the other one—and I had a devil of a time trying to explain dark energy to our mother. I guess the fact that 73% of the universe's mass isn't actually matter, but rather is the structure of space itself, is counter-intuitive, for some reason.)
• I think I've mentioned—what is the universal consensus—that much of Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" is knocked off from the Wheel of Time, but have I ever really mentioned the implications?
  
  Dude. You are knocking off Robert Jordan. Only you're mixing in Ayn Rand sermons. That is the Reese's Freaking Peanut-Butter Cup of shitty literary influences. The outlook is doubtful whether even harakiri can erase your shame.
  
  Also, this is the Wizard's First Rule, Goodkind:

  In shadow, we find the light
  Safely sealed in darkest night.
  So make sure y’all keep it tight.
  Wizards only, fools.

  And then probably something about kidnapping princesses, or managing penguin minions.
• How about when people talk about "the futility of war"? One always wants to ask, "futile how?" Many if not most wars actually did accomplish their stated aim. If you thought there could actually be a War to End Wars, well, your beef is with H. G. Wells, or yourself for listening to him; nobody with a brain in their head thought the Great War had a chance in hell of accomplishing that.
  
  And while we're at it, what about the futility of medicine, agriculture, industry, hygiene, and pretty much every other field of human endeavor? I can't think of a standard that makes wars futile that doesn't also make everything else futile.
• Further news in the "John Scalzi is a provincial little Jingo who thinks he isn't" department, is his "Being a straight white male is the real world's Easy mode" thing. Why? Because it reveals that, to Scalzi, "the real world" means America.
  
  In every part of the real world that isn't the US or Western Europe, Scalzi, being straight, white, or male has little to no effect on your chances of being abused, cheated, oppressed, or even murdered. In some places it significantly increases them. Plus, our identity politics working like Pokemon, as they do, even in places where straight white males are allegedly at an advantage it tends to work out more that they're Normal type—not strong against anything. I don't know, Scalzi, does having Rattata as your starter sound like "Easy Mode" to you?
• I realized just a little while ago what's wrong with journalists. They're a part of Hollywood. They view the world through the precise lens that gives you movies and TV. Sure, "liberals", but there's specific elements to it that, I think, are less "politics" and more "shallow superficial asses". John Stossel is not a liberal, but he's just as shallow and superficial. (Also he plainly does not know Asia exists, or he'd know most of his pet theories have had millennia of test-run, and been found sub-optimal.)
  
  Take, for example, the Duke lacrosse case. The journalists did not go in asking "what are the facts" or "what does the prosecutor say, and what is the suspects' response". They pretty obviously (read any of the coverage at the time) went in asking, in essence, "What would have happened here, if this were an episode of Law & Order?" Or see religion coverage: does any reporter actually seem to understand that religion is not primarily about feelings? Nope. Why? Think of even the positive portrayals of religion in movies or TV. It's all sentiment. Salvation, law, ritual purity—none of those is what religion is for, to Hollywood, they're just metaphors for "making you feel good about yourself".
• NCIS probably jumped the shark a few seasons back, but the seeds of their downfall were pretty much sown the second they introduced Ziva. She's an obnoxious Mary Sue. And as with Firefly, it's because they tried to both possess and consume their birthday confections.
  
  See, Ziva is, by turns, practically an assassin android, and an über-hip self-assured quasi-Eurotrash swingin' broad. Only...how? There's only so many hours in the day, and generally speaking being raised as a professional murderer leaves one ill-suited to social butterfly-ness. Personally I dislike the emotionless assassin trope but it is at least more believable than the assassin with better social skills than all the normal people—at least if that assassin is not a psychopath, which Ziva ain't. If you want to know how Ziva should act in social situations I can tell you—two words, "Sagara Sôsuke".
• Something David Brin said about being "a true child of the Englightenment, humanity's one chance to break out of the age-old feudal trap" struck me as funny. Because—apparently astrophysicists don't have to take history?—Enlightenment politics was characterized by absolutism, either of the state or of some individual who was held (in an Iron Age Roman formulation) to embody it. In the context of the nation-state, the most quintessential Enlightenment concepts are most familiar to us from those Indian boarding schools where they'd whip you for speaking Navajo.
  
  Now, no feudal leader was an absolutist. Nope. Feudalism is a system fundamentally characterized—those monsters!—by mutual obligation. Fail to protect your vassals, and they are released from their obligations. Fail to back your liege, and you lose what he gave you. There is not a single thing in, e.g., the US Constitution, that is not at least as feudal an idea as it is an Enlightenment one, and most of them are vastly more feudal than Enlightenment. Admittedly genociding the Indians is a quintessentially Enlightenment idea—ask the Basques about the French Republic or the Poles about Hohenzollern Prussia—but it's not actually in the Constitution.
  
  Brin is, here, revealing himself to be about as much a historian as Ayn Rand—or in other words, the equivalent of Velikovsky on astrophysics. I'm sorry, Captain Reading Comprehension, but you aren't allowed to characterize things you like as all being "enlightenment", and things you don't as all being "feudal", any more than Rand can describe everything she likes (including individualism—the closest Ancient Greek word to which is probably the etymology of "idiot") as "classical". Those words actually refer to time-periods, and like all time-periods things happened in those times that weren't all good or bad—and actually those things most essential and unique to those periods are those which modern ethics has most specifically repudiated, generally in favor of ideas far more typical of feudalism.