All I Survey III

Thoughts.

• It's almost shocking how naïve many science fiction theorizers are. For instance, people often wax lyrical about the advantages of sci-fi "stunners"—how if something goes wrong, you just stun people; if there's a riot, the cops just stun everyone; if the cops abuse their power, everyone else just stuns 'em. I suppose that kind of vie-en-rose optimism was permissible in the 1970s, since everyone else was also doing it. Now, though? "Oh, great idea, a long-range date-rape drug that doesn't show up in toxicology." Fortunately, a convenient, "point and click" stun-gun, that doesn't stand a good chance of killing the target, is probably impossible. The only thing I could think of that seemed realistic, for my setting (it's an action story, people being unconscious without dying is a necessary plot-device), was medical-nanobot darts. Those show up in a screening—indeed, they would probably log who used them.
  
  Everything else I considered was unlikely to produce convenient unconsciousness, without a significant chance of killing or permanently incapacitating the person they're used on. Plus, I mean, something that'll reliably incapacitate humans would probably just annoy zledo—which "less lethal" weapon designed for use on humans would you like to take with you, to deal with a jaguar?—while things that would reliably incapacitate zledo would be likely to kill humans. Medical nanobots, though they're probably not quite as tidy as I have them, are at least a lot more precise than any of the alternative methods. (It's kinda funny, to me, by the way, that "less lethal" tech is all, pretty much, some variation on the blackjack or the cattle-prod—think about what rubber bullets and "active denial systems" actually are. Hell, even the nanobots are pretty much just a high-tech Mickey Finn.)
• The discussion of those who wish to introduce shari'a law into the governance even of some portion of some Western community, is usually not accurate. The trouble is not "states within the state"; that is the same as "Common Law" (you might've noticed "states within the state" is a phrase originating from the Huguenot controversies, i.e. not in a Common Law jurisdiction). Did you know that Navajo religious law is recognized in the United States? Yeah, because Common Law asks "what is your custom?", and when you decide inheritance disputes for the Navajo, the custom bears the name of the goddess Changing Woman.
  
  But Changing Woman's Law is recognized by the Navajo as pertaining only to them, and not to those who did not receive that law (from Talking God, not Changing Woman, despite the name). Hence why its other name is "Our Grandmother's Law", the "we" being the Navajo. Shari'a, on the other hand, is very different from any other law-code recognized in the Common Law, because shari'a acknowledges no other law, and claims authority over all—Muslim, 'Ahl al-Kitab, and mushrikûn/kaffir—alike. (Shari'a doesn't actually even acknowledge a distinction between civil and criminal law, although they're hardly alone in that.) That would be the problem of allowing the incorporation of shari'a into the law of some community, if there is one—Islam can be considered to deny the authority of non-Muslims to adjudicate even in terms of shari'a. No rational state deliberately delegitimizes itself.
  
  Of course, in Common Law, there is precedent for it—Spain and the Crusader Kingdoms adjudicated for Muslim subjects with no problems. So...it may not actually be a problem. Rather (given what circumstances generally motivate the suggestion of incorporating shari'a), it's probably, under current conditions, a symptom of a problem.
• Tom Simon, the Superversive, at one point denies the existence of "pro-drop" languages, based on the fact that Spanish verbs actually include their subject "argument" in their inflections. Well and good, but you've really only demonstrated Spanish isn't one. Japanese and Korean? They are. They are languages that can omit the subjects of their verbs, when it's (ostensibly) clear from context, and yet in which the only thing any subject can inflect a verb for is register—and that, only in relatively few contexts (the humble/honorific dichotomy, as a component of business/service speech).
  
  Until you have seen a speech obviously (from context) about the person doing the speaking, i.e. first-person, translated as in the third person and about a member of the opposite sex—as I saw in a fan-sub just a few months ago—you may not appreciate just how explicit Indo-European languages are, in terms of little things like "who is the subject of this sentence?". (On the other hand, until you have seen a character convey that they were born as the daughter of a samurai house, and regard human beings as individual servings of food—an example I made up just now, I dunno, she's a vampire or something—simply by their choice of first-person pronoun and how they inflect numbers, you may not appreciate that there are, in fact, things that even the most highly-inflected Indo-European languages actually leave to "context".)
• More and more I am convinced that there are only two things that would really spur large-scale interstellar colonization, since the "Earth is used up" thing would really only spur space-habitat colonization (aside from requiring ever more far-fetched handwaving to justify). No, the only things that can really motivate humans to leave this star, are ambition and fear—either "because it's there", and humanity, as such, is a thing with the right to spread to every corner of the universe (at least that someone else isn't already at first); or "because they're there", and "they" are at least a potential threat, so we need to expand beyond our one star-system.
  
  That second one requires that the "they" be themselves interstellar—and intelligent. All unintelligent risks are either predictable and manageable in the long term (yes, even stars going nova...which we won't have to worry about for the time-frame it is not a joke to plan for, anyway), or just motivate, again, moving to space-habitats (asteroid impacts being the obvious example—leaving to one side that with a few rockets and the world's nuclear stockpiles, we can move asteroids that are on collision courses with Earth).
  
  In my book, I use both—initially humans expand to other stars for ambition, but then the thoikh kill 2% of the human species in practically no time at all, with the explicitly stated goal of annihilating all of them (depending on the result of a test humans don't know they're taking). Humanity responds (after the thoikh stop their attack, the test having been—barely—passed) by a new wave of colonization, motivated by the desire to spread out their population base, making it harder for a single attack to wipe out the whole species. Between the zledo being a lot stronger than the UN—and thus people the expanded population-base can hide behind—and piggybacking on zled infrastructure saving money (losing 2% of the species causes a recession), the places they choose to colonize are all worlds already inhabited by zledo. This, of course, leads to the friction that causes the UN-Imperial War.
• If you—perhaps doing the Lord's work in pointing out that Firefly ain't all it's cracked up to be—say that Cowboy Bebop was a space-western, well, congratulations, people like you are the reason they put mining in the film of Enemy Mine. Were you really confused about how there are no dogs in Straw Dogs?
  
  Cowboy Bebop is, full-stop, in terms of its actual plot (which takes up about six episodes), a space yakuza movie, or at least a space HK-style Triad film. Please, what element, other than television Indians and the mere word "cowboy", does it actually have in common with westerns? Other than the things Westerns have in common with basically the entire "gun action" branch of fiction, I mean.
  
  If Bebop is a Western, please, what Blaxploitation movie isn't a "modern-day Western"? (Shaft in Africa? No, Quigley Down Under was still a Western, and it was in Australia.) Because Bebop has a lot more in common with Blaxploitation than it ever did with Westerns.
• I don't think mankind would use much beef in space-colonies (pace Firefly and their "space cattle-drives"). Now, it might be different if your colonial effort comes after having to abandon the Earth—you'd be bringing all the animals, and cattle only exist because we eat them, wild cattle are extinct. But colonizing because you have to abandon the Earth is, as I said, a stupid premise; so you can pick and choose, and what you're gonna pick is less resource-intensive than cattle. In my books, people raise ostriches in the colonies. If you don't like your steak well-done (and if you do, "I'm sorry, but please leave"), it's not much different from beef, and it's much more efficient. Ostriches produce half again as many young as cattle (it takes them one-fifth the time to get them: 42 days incubation vs. 200 days gestation means 30 chicks a year vs. 20 calves), take 63% as long to get to slaughtering weight (407 days vs. 645), and use, from what I can tell, 1/6 of an acre per head compared to the 2 acres per head that seems to be a typical minimum for cattle.
  
  I assume that people prefer the texture and structure of "real" meat, that actually comes from an animal; currently, in-vitro meat makes "pink slime" look like filet mignon. The "ethical" considerations of vegetarianism are, frankly, BS unless you're a Buddhist (and thus don't kill plants for your food, either). But it is possible, I suppose, that a society that can 3D-print organs for medicine, can also 3D-print in-vitro meat to give it a texture and structure like real meat—although it would be pointlessly expensive and complicated. Moral grandstanding is the main motive of Western vegetarianism; while "have your supposed moral superiority while indulging all your appetites" is certainly an impulse, and one that people will pay extra in order to indulge, vegetarianism specifically has just spent the last 200-odd years attacking the eating of meat, as such, along with the slaughter of animals for the purpose. So I figure it's slightly more reasonable to suppose that people will continue to either eat meat or be moral-posturing vegetarians, than to posture morally about slaughtering animals, while 3D-printing their meat.
• It occurs to me that a lot of what's called "Freudian" analysis (though to be fair, Freud himself wasn't quite that stupid) is a "correlation/causation" error. E.g., the old leftist-peacenik bromide about weapons being phallic—when it's actually that the shapes of both guns and penises share a common origin. Namely? They're both designed to shoot stuff. Bullets into animals to end life, sperm into ova to begin it—point is, they look the same because they do the same thing. Likewise, the "phallic" shape of missiles? Aerodynamics. Not to get graphic but both missiles and penises are designed for smooth forward motion. I hate to break it to you, but that principle predates sexual reproduction itself; there are unicellular organisms that reproduce by fission, and are streamlined and thus "phallic". (That's also why swords are "phallic", come to think of it.)
  
  When tall buildings are supposed to be phallic, on the other hand, you just have raw, undiluted idiocy. Right, the only reason to build defensive watch-towers or high-rise apartments in crowded cities in a tall, thin shape, is a sublimated obsession with the penis—there certainly can't be any other reason. (Interestingly, it occurs to me, the watch-tower and the high-rise have their shapes for opposite reasons. You make a watch-tower thin so it can be tall and still minimize the amount of material you have to move and manipulate to build it, whereas you make a high-rise tall so it can be thin and still fit all the population you need to house. The watch-tower one is also the reason most realistic rocket-ship designs are long and thin, even if they don't have to be aerodynamic, since you usually want your habitat and electronics a good space from the rocket nozzle, and yet need to minimize the mass.)
• Watched some of Tokyo Ghoul with my brother; apparently the second season not only goes off the rails, but completely departs from the manga, too. Personally, though, even before the derailment the whole thing strikes a discordant note, for me—because there is absolutely no justification for ghouls, which live on human flesh and can breed (albeit usually unsuccessfully) with humans, to have the physical capabilities they're depicted as having. I mean, it hunts humans, and go look up what kind of large predator does that—it's not exactly even the junior varsity squad.
  
  Plus, if it's made from the same kind of tissue as other terrestrial life (and it has to be, to eat our flesh or breed with us), then it ought to be as easy to kill as terrestrial life is. Admittedly, that can easily mean much tougher than a human, but this "you can only take them down with weapons made from them" is bullshit. I would forgive all of this if they were actually supernatural—this series was pretty much a by-the-book Vampire: The Masquerade campaign anyway—but if you're going to give me science-y technobabble, then unfortunately, you're required to run things by those rules.