Spot Check V

Random thoughts + reality check. Per usual, mostly random reality checks.

• In Tony Hillerman's The Dark Wind, an elderly Hopi says (rightly) that "tribal councils" are not how Hopis actually settle things; they are a bahana innovation, an artificial replacement of the kiva societies. But they are an innovation for the bahana too; when the bahana was at his best, his way of doing things would be to say to the Hopis—or the Irish, the Saxons, or the Basques—"What is your custom?" In Common Law in its pure form, the kiva societies would be the "tribal council"; for most of Irish history, even long after the Normans annexed them, matters were settled by councils with a similar makeup—basically one or very few clans—to the kiva-societies. The idea of introducing the forms of parliamentary democracy, to people who accomplish the exact same things by other means, is what gets you tied up "nation building" in places like Afghanistan (which isn't one "nation" in the first place, it's about a dozen).
  
  One thing I find very funny about that book is Hillerman's idea that the Navajo don't understand revenge. Poppycock. They don't understand it in the same way that whites do, but they certainly understand it; "war", after all, among Southern Athabascans, is entirely coterminous with "revenge-killing". The Apache traditions regarding war, as those regarding raiding, are pretty much the same as those of the Navajo, when the Navajo were still primarily raiders. And the way Apache (and therefore Navajo) war worked, generally, was a man would be killed on a raid (i.e. in self-defense against armed robbery—and remember that their raiding included enslavement). So his female relatives would demand revenge, and offer gifts, sometimes including marriage, to men who took up the cause and went out on the punitive expedition against whoever had killed the dead raider. Then they would go out, massacre as many members of the responsible group as they could get their hands on, and bring back adult captives to be tortured to death, and child captives to be raised as a a replacement for the dead raiders.
  
  Indeed, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"—the actual phrase comes up in The Dark Wind—arose in the first place because the ancient Mesopotamians had tried it the Navajo way, and it just got lots and lots of people killed. The Navajo method assumes that after the single punitive expedition (and attendant massacre), the matter is closed, and that's the end of it. That, not a denial of revenge as such, is the real difference between Navajo and European custom—I can't fathom that Hillerman can have failed to know that. But, of course, the Navajo custom assumes you get to decide what is "the end of it". People whose words for metal are not "flint" and a modifier are not so naïve; around about the Bronze Age a person starts to realize, in Chesterton's words, "that, in the eyes of the other man, he is only the other man". If the other man happens not to consider it "ended", after you've massacred his people, and maybe wants to massacre yours right back, your choices are pretty much "fight until you're all dead", or else "figure out some form of revenge other than punitive massacre".
• If you needed another problem with Interstellar—although "nitrogen-metabolizing organisms are making the plants die" is, again, the kind of thing Bert I. and Robert L. would look down their noses at—how about, they still have internal combustion engines? Working just fine, that is. On an Earth whose oxygen-levels are being depleted (because nitrogen-metabolizing organisms kill plants now, so there are fewer plants to exhale oxygen).
  
  I mean hey, it's not like oxygen and combustion have anything to do with each other. Why it's certainly not as though "combustion" is listed along with "corrosion" as one of the quintessential "oxidation-reduction reactions", or anything!
  
  I don't know, maybe it's somehow related to a Cracked article I read, which repeated, for the second time (the other was Tycho) the insane idea that "hard science fiction" means science fiction that uses "controversial" ideas from science, to, like, grapple with the "deep" questions, or some hippie crap. Actually, "hard" science fiction means it uses ideas from science. Like, period. Instead of, you know, stuff like "nitrogen-metabolizing organisms kill plants" or "appreciable time-dilation in the vicinity of a planet humans can walk around on unassisted".
• Remember how Aristotle said women have fewer teeth than men? And how that's totally stupid and just shows you he never bothered to look? Yeah, well, apparently, in ancient Greece, women did have fewer teeth, on average, than men. Between breastfeeding and pregnancy, on the one hand, and universally sketchy nutrition on the other, Greek women were more prone to ailments that cause, among other things, tooth loss. (Those iron deficiencies nearly all women have to worry about, even now—because the human body thinks blood is a good agent to flush an unused uterine lining with—probably didn't help, either. Iron deficiency can contribute to gum disease, which can cause tooth-loss.)
  
  Of course, remember, the people who began the quaint legendry of Aristotle's not-bothering-to-look-in-women's-mouths also took till the 19th century to (re)discover the hectocotylus (penis, ish) of the octopus. Yep. When they first (re)discovered it in the body of a female (many squid detach theirs, during mating), they thought it was a parasitic worm. Aristotle already knew about it, though—and until he was proved right, that was the go-to example of his ignorance (possibly because women in Descartes's or Kant's day probably also didn't have as many teeth as men, nutrition and general health in the so-called "Enlightenment" being little better, if any, than in the 4th century BC).
• I was thinking about how the American right-wing narrative is, like the left-wing one, an oppression-narrative where the intrinsically virtuous are exploited by the intrinsically vicious. It may not, however, be a "wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft" situation (although that too is almost certainly present); it might just be that both groups are fundamentally Gnostics. Literary critic Harold Bloom alleges that Gnosticism is the religion of America; certainly it was the religion, in the form of Freemasonry, of most of America's founders.
  
  In every kind of Gnosticism (though admittedly least in the Hermetic kind the Founders went in for), the evil principle(s) in the cosmos are motivated by, essentially, envy, of the good principles, and trap them in various kinds of illusory "law", to constrain their excellence. That's why spirit is "trapped" in matter. That, of course, is the current right-wing narrative peddled by sources as diverse as Ayn Rand and The Incredibles; you say "politics of envy", I say "King of Darkness becomes greedy for the World of Light". (Bloom himself identifies Marxism as "politics of envy", when in fact Marxism is actually just a different flavor of Bloom's own Gnosticism, merely locating the agents of the Archons and Aeons somewhere else.)
  
• So by this point it is abundantly, almost tautologically clear that George Lucas has no idea what he's doing. And what's less obvious but no less true, is that he never did. For example, remember Marion, in Raiders (the first of the only two Indiana Jones movies that exist, the other being Last Crusade)? And how when they're reunited, she says "I was a child"? Yeah, well, originally, that was going to be literal. She was going to have been twelve when she and Indy first got together...oh, and she seduced him, which isn't creepy child-predator logic, or anything.
  
  And then the third installment, which was going to feature the Monkey King? Leaving to one side that the old stone monkey, the Heaven-Equaling Great Sage, would mop the floor with Nazis and then with Indy, for looking at him cock-eyed (not the most even-tempered Taoist Immortal, Sūn Wùkōng), is the fact that one of the side-plots has Indy get slapped by a student for cheating on her...with her mother...in her bed. Are...are we sure that the "Luke and Leia kissing" thing was really because Lucas hadn't decided they were going to be siblings yet? It's starting to look like he might've just thought "accidental near-incest" was high comedy.
• Twice now on Cracked (as I discovered during the archive-binge that produced that Indiana Jones business, above) they've said movie monsters won't work, namely King Kong and Buckbeak in Harry Potter. Both are supposed to be too large to move, let alone run or fly. But in both cases, "extinct animals pulled it off" is the simple refutation of the point. Kong, for example, has a precedent: brachiosaurs are basically built like apes. Indeed, titanosaurs are built like that and even put most of their foreleg-weight on their metacarpals, although that's because they haven't got any phalanges, whereas apes fold theirs out of the way. The one counter would be that a dinosaur's respiratory system is much more efficient than a mammal's, so Kong might not be able to breathe—but gorillas have much shorter necks than sauropods, and even a mammal's crappy respiration doesn't seem to bother whales much.
  
  And as for hippogriffs, while Buckbeak's wings as depicted are almost certainly too small—fair enough—there have been animals his size that could fly. They're called azhdarchid pterosaurs. Arambourgiania philadelphiae stood as high as a giraffe, and walked in a somewhat similar posture (though its forelegs' length is metacarpals rather than phalanges)—but its torso is only somewhat larger than yours, dimensionally, but with much more muscle. It probably weighed a mere 250 kg, not that small considering its torso is only about as big as a 70 kg human's and its bones are hollow (pterosaurs are the closest non-dinosaur relatives of the dinosaurs, which are kinda known for their hollow bones, remember); hell, they could even jump right into the sky, which wouldn't at all be horrifying to see a giraffe-stork do. A hippogriff might spread its mass out a bit differently from a pterosaur—"torso only about as big as a human's" could give you a jaguar-sized griffon, think about it—but there's no reason that even the horse parts wouldn't have the same hollow bones as the eagle parts. Remember, the biggest ostriches only weigh as much as offensive linemen, despite being the size of Utahraptor.
• You know the asinine atheist assertion that Hitler and the Nazis were totally Christians, because Gott mit uns belt-buckles? Let us leave to one side that the phrase has been a part of German military regalia and nationalist rhetoric since at least the Thirty Years War—and was as major a subject of mockery by the other side in the First World War as the "seventy virgins" thing in jihad is, in the War on Terror.
  
  Leave also to one side the demonstrable fact that Nazism is as obviously "Marx plus blood-and-soil nationalism" as Ceausescu's Romania. And the demonstrable fact that Nazi cosmology is Hegelianism with elements borrowed from Schopenhauer (I know, that's just another way of saying they were Marxists). And that the Reich's nationalized "churches" explicitly reject not only the Old Testament (so at the very least they are Marcionist supercessionists, not orthodox Christians) but, actually, God—the object of the worship of the Reichskirche is the Volk, not God, whose existence (save perhaps as immanent within the Volk) is denied.
  
  All those are true, but they are secondary. The primary point is that the same logic requires the atheist to admit that America is a Christian nation, and has been since 1864, because that's the year "In God we trust" was first put on the money. And money's just a bit more major than military belt-buckles. Only...America is not, strictly, a Christian nation (though it is a nation, statistically, of Christians); it is arguably a monotheist nation, but most of its founders were Unitarians.