You ever notice?

Be sure to read the last one, about vampires, kay?

So anyway I noticed a couple of things, and I thought I'd share them:

1. The Packer power sweep (look it up), in which guys block the other side's defense and then the quarterback goes around on whichever side there's an opening, appears to me to work on the same principle as Napoleon's strategy of detached reserves. If that doesn't tell you football is the best sport ever, you're no son of mine.


2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, aside from being an example of how monstrously overrated Joss Whedon is, is something else, that I for one found kinda funny.
   
   It's Magical Girl.
   
   It wasn't so much, in the movie, but then the movie was directed by someone who realized how utterly laughable the concept "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is—if you name an idea that you mean seriously "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," they should lock you away. But in the series...how long, exactly, did it take her to collect a bevy of Slayer Scouts?
   
   What's really funny is that Whedon really thought he was thinking for himself...while recreating standard boilerplate mahô shôjô from end to end. Apparently he does that in his comics a lot, too—I hear (I don't read Marvel) that he did an X-Men story wherein he demonstrated that he thinks "computer simulations achieving sentience" is a downright groundbreaking idea. Did the name Moriarti occur to him at any time?


3. The President of the US (as such, I mean, not any one holder of the office) is the following, explicitly in the Constitution or by tradition:
   
   
   • The supreme executive of a state formally known as a Republic, that encompasses many "tribes".
   
   
   • The Commander-in-Chief of its military.
   
   
   • First among equals of its citizens.
   
   
   • Its chief of State.
   
   
   • Empowered to veto laws from the Senate.
   
   That is to say, he's the consul/censor, the imperator, the princeps, arguably the pater patriae, and claims tribunitia potestas. So, pace Pat Buchanan, looks to me like the only difference between the POTUS and Caesar Invictus is that Presidents are term-limited (and don't wear snazzy purple robes).


4. My little sister actually came up with this, but Hitchcock's The Birds is, essentially, a zombie movie.


5. Movies like Blade, and even more Vampire Hunter D, and anything where one of Them (whatever They happen to be) fights Them for us, are, interestingly, excellent arguments in favor of strong monarchy. See, monarchy does have a very real advantage of limiting the power of the society's elite; America and France have always been monarchies, that's why our Republics have such strong executives, while England has always been an aristocracy, at best—usually an oligarchy—which is why the PM is basically just a Super-Whip. A king—or any strong executive—is, in essence, one of Them (a politician) who fights Them for us, because they're the chief threat to his power if for no better reason.


6. Finally, has anyone else noticed that Riddick, as in Chronicles of, is essentially the Monkey King?

Vampires

So I got to thinking, and I realized, I really dig vampires. But they aren't usually done that well. You get one, or two, or both, of these gaping errors:

1. The science vampire. Vampires are mutants, or people with a disease, or some crap...yet they usually still lack reflections, and have about half their physically impossible powers.
   
   One could probably write a doctoral thesis on how our society feels the need to scientify (?) everything, turning elves and goblins into paraterrestrials or aliens—and turning flat-out trolls into cryptid great apes (read some actual accounts of bigfoot sightings: do apes whistle, have glowing eyes, or turn into mist?). Why would you bother to have a usually-bullcrap scientific explanation for vampires? Do you think your subliterate handwaving will heighten the realism? Newsflash, turkeys: nothing is less realistic than your mutants with magic. Ghosts, vampires, fairies, the gods, are just out of our ordinary experience, something we don't know about, that follows different rules. Your stupid mutants are a gross violation of rules we know quite well.


2. Inexplicably overpowered/de-weakened vampires. Often combined with the above, vampires are immune to their traditional weaknesses. Not usually sunlight, though—and they usually change it to "any UV", which is patently impossible for any creature that evolved on earth. Yet the vampires usually lose their weaknesses to crosses (or have it weakened to "only if the person with the cross has faith"—up yours, Kierke-tard), garlic, and running water.

Why do they do this?

The Science-Vampire is because they're half-educated, simpleminded slaves, the same as the reason for most of their failures. They've heard that science has disproved vampires, never mind that science is inherently incapable of saying anything about what are, in essence, ghosts on steroids.

Ignoramus: Walking through walls violates the laws of physics.
Sapiens: You're drinking beer. That violates the laws of Saudi Arabia.
Ignoramus: (confused) We're not in Saudia Arabia.
Sapiens: (insanely optimistic) Perhaps you begin to see the point.

As for the weaknesses, and neglect of same, they probably aren't smart enough to write around those difficulties, so they take them away with nothing to balance them.

That said, some of the rules as used by the classics, like Dracula, are actually more complex. See, the traditions of mankind were not invented by people raised on Sesame Street, they were created by people who could actually enjoy poetry in dactylic hexameters, without rhymes.

• Sunlight.
  Yes, yes, in folklore the sun doesn't kill them, we know. It does hurt ghosts, trolls, dwarves, and goblins, though. Anyway, vampires seem to be weak in the heart, and sunlight hurting them, or turning off most of their powers, may have to do with the heart being the organ of the sun in several different traditions. That or they're just spoooooky and therefore creatures of night.


• Running water.
  In folklore, it's the powers of vampires, witches, etc. that are stopped by running water, not the creatures themselves; since folkloric vampires are often projections of a witch's soul, or are tied to a grave, they obviously can't pursue a victim over running water.


• Garlic.
  In alchemical terms, garlic would be of use against vampires because of its sulfur—sulfur is the alchemist's gold, and is associated with the sun. Gold itself might have a similar effect. Anything with mercury in it would similarly be effective against werewolves, since they're alive and mercury is the opposite of alchemists' gold. Also, silver itself works against werewolves because it's the metal of the moon (it also has a purifying effect, in alchemy—and swimming pools—that might simply undo a spell that grants werewolf powers, and might also do away with vampires).


• Stake through the heart.
  Actually, in folklore, this won't do it: vampires, like Hopi and Aztec skinwalkers, often have two hearts. At best this'll immobilize them; you gotta do the head to get 'em, generally.


• Crosses.
  Vampires don't, in folklore, turn the people they bite; more often, they're like Japanese onryô: the lingering resentment of people that died badly—suicide shows up a lot. Of course, being killed by a vampire ain't a good death, so there's that. But anyway, the Cross, as a symbol of existence-as-a-good-thing (i.e. God), might not be too pleasant to look at, to a wrathful ghost.

Not only are you cripplingly ignorant...

...but you whine about it, too.

(100 Puuchuu points if you know what that's from.)

I needed to do another post like my "Reality Check" earlier—I do not suffer fools gladly, and the rest of the human race seems to be doing its damnedest to teach me just how much pain there is in living.

• So some conservative student group (YAF?) went around asking college kids if they'd like their good grades redistributed to students who weren't doing as well, in the manner of the welfare state. And of course, the students were none too pleased by the prospect. But they still insisted that it was okay to do the same with money. The comparison's not perfect (college is not a necessity of life), but it does rather nicely show up the inherent flaw of Socialism.
  
  But suppose I went around asking students if they'd like it if there were far fewer than enough textbooks for everyone, and the students had to scramble madly for them. And the students that didn't get the books had to borrow from those who did.
  
  And suppose those students who were borrowing, only got to keep a small minority of their gradepoints, the rest going to those who own the textbooks?
  
  That's capitalism, dude. Not looking much better, now is it?


• Why do people badmouth the Middle Ages, compared to the two eras after it? What mostly got reborn in the Renaissance was torture (copying the Roman legal system—medieval torture was much less nasty), and the main thing that got lit in the Enlightenment, was witches (fun fact: of the forty thousand people killed in all witch-trials ever, the vast, vast, vast majority were after the Reformation).
  
  The Middle Ages had much stricter rules on warfare than the Renaissance, let alone the Reformation/Enlightenment—conquest, without the excuse of wrongdoing on the opponent's part, was completely unthinkable in the Medieval world. Don't believe me? Then why, child, is the Bayeux tapestry so preoccupied with establishing that Harold and William were friends, and that Harold swore to give William the crown when Edward died? If conquest was the rule, why was William so concerned to establish his legal justification?
  
  The medieval economic system (or rather, three concurrent systems) were designed to maximize wealth and growth for everyone in a given industry, since they didn't need competition as a barrier to entry. Also their art and architecture were original, and they made several improvements in technology over Rome (the pointed arch, the water-wheel, even the glider (look it up)).
  
  The Middle Ages were an era of progress, and the Renaissance was a throwback to the Ancient world. The Enlightenment, though, wasnt even a throwback; nobody'd ever been that stupid before.
  


• Veganism. Just...Veganism. Two issues. One, doing it for ethical reasons? Really? Kingdomist. Have the testicular fortitude to only eat fruit, leaves, partial stocks, and seeds, like Buddhists (eating a whole plant is taking life). Ahimsa vegetarianism makes sense, and is as eminently respectable as someone taking the trouble to keep kosher; ethical Veganism is, pure and simple, stupid.
  
  As for nutrition...um, Kemosabe, humans are primates, and primates are omnivores. Most Vegans would be the first to argue for embracing our animal nature in matters of sexuality—well, why not diet? Your appendix is as small as it is because you're not evolved for digesting cellulose. Humans would never have gotten to where we are today if we were herbivores; meat's just the most efficient means of getting nutrients, because some other animal does most of the work.


• So I been reading up on Proto-Indo-European, and apparently the Kurgan hypothesis holds the field regarding its Urheimat (original territory, in this case probably Ukraine). I got no beef with the theory itself, since it seems to be best-supported by the evidence, but the lady who come up with it, Marija Gimbutas, was just a waste of nutrients. Mercifully the other scientists have jettisoned most of her crap from the hypothesis, as she had...no evidence for it, but why did anyone listen in the first place?!
  
  See, Gimbutas' interpretation was that the Indo-Europeans replaced a peaceable, matriarchal, goddess-worshiping people. Her evidence? They had a lot of female figures in their art. This is stupid, let me count the ways:
  1. Lord knows the Playboy mansion's got a lot of female figures in the art; ain't exactly a monument to the matriarchy.
  2. We don't know that the figures were goddesses; could've been Barbies, they're certainly distorted to conform to an ideal. Real Matriarchy-approved, Barbies, right?
  3. Even if they were goddesses, goddess-worship is not necessarily matriarchal; the Gorkhas worship Kali, but they're not matriarchal in the slightest.
  4. The Gorkhas and their goddess-worship sorta put to rest the myth of peaceful "people of the goddess," don't they?
  5. Even if they were matriarchal (and they'd actually have to be completely unique to be matriarchal, since there are no known matriarchies in the world), that doesn't mean they were peaceful. Aside from the fact we've got their fortifications, weapons, and yes, traumatized corpses, so we know they weren't peaceful, Golda Meir wasn't a Mensch and Margaret Thatcher wasn't a bloke, now was she?
  
  Now, admittedly, we have found that those (probably) pre-Indo-European Europeans were buried together according to enate (matrilineal) kinship, but that just means they were matrilineal, perhaps matrilocal. The Apaches and Navajo are, too—tell me, are they peaceful matriarchies? (answer: Good God, no!)

Outlaw Star

As promised, I'm a-gettin' another review out—though it ain't a new show.

Remember Outlaw Star?

Now let's do this properly, bad stuff first.

Um...

Nope, nothing. No, wait, maybe they could've stood to have more Ctarl-Ctarl. And Suzuka is a little Sue-ish, but female characters in Sunrise series that aren't strictly comic relief, or Yamato Nadeshiko love-interests like Melfina or most Gundam heroines, are always insufferable. It's like an iron law of the universe. Same goes for Hilda, now that I think of it—and Faye, in Bebop.

As for the good...first, how about the pirates? I'm a sucker for any SF that incorporates magic, as such, without pretending it's something else. And those ones are Taoists—their chant, Bagua Sanfa, is not, as you may have heard, nonsense. The "Bagua", or rather "Bāguà" is definitely "Eight Trigrams;" "Sanfa", if it's "Sānfǎ", is probably the Three Seals in Buddhism, Impermanence, the No-Self, and Nirvana. It's less weird that they're mixing the two than it probably seems—Japanese Taoism, in the form of Onmyôdô, is heavily mixed with Shingon Buddhism. I don't think this is quite as much the case in Chinese Taoism (where the rivalry with Buddhism sometimes got ugly), but Japan could make "generalization from the self" their official national fallacy.

Similarly, the caster: a gun that shoots magic spells! Oh, hell yes!

And then there's the SF. Yes they fudge it here or there for the story, and of course there's the flat-out magic, but the show's still more serious, literary SF than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yet it's not boring. How about the magnetic monopole in the prison episode? Right outta Niven, my friends. How about when the Outlaw Star passes between the two atmosphere-sharing gas giants, and they nearly get hit by a big wave of metallic hydrogen?

The characters! All of them really, except Suzuka, and even she's not bad, just Sue-ish. But Aisha? Seriously, find me anything American with a ditzy jock-girl. Yes, I'm a sucker for the catgirl, but most catgirls don't make you suspect their real job title is Speaker-to-Animals (except, you know, without Niven's raving misogyny). Melfina is up there with Armitage and R. Dorothy Wainwright as a robot, and Harry's a great character, too: he's basically a nice kid, but he was raised by a family of assassins, so his default reaction to disappointments is to kill something. Also, he manages to make giant pink bows look downright manly. Jim is one of the few good boy-genius characters (if that episode with the cats doesn't make you cry, you have no blood and no tears), and Gene is a sort of "Shonen hero who didn't have his adventure yet".

Finally, I'd like to point out how good a show this is...and then you consider it's mostly just an elaborate ad for model-kits!. Why are Japan's thirteen-hour toy ads deeper than the stuff we make to show how smart we are?

With this post and pixie dust, you can fly.

More random thoughts, since I had a few things to say. I might do a full-length post on something later--Trigun, maybe, or Outlaw Star.

• So, Battlestar Galactica ended. There's a sequel/spinoff in the works, I hear; if you don't kill such creatures properly their power hides out, in Mirkwood for instance, and takes a new shape, and grows again. But anyhow, the series ends with the shocking revelation that all this horse-hockey is actually our past. Yes, you read that right. The people at BSG apparently thought they could get away with the hackneyed "Adam and Eve Plot." Wow, guys. You've reached Bert I. Gordon levels of suckation with this one. The whole monstrous run of your series, and you pick this as the only piece of real SF you use? Go die. In a hole. And be reborn a more sentient being--like a banana slug, maybe.


• There's an anime series I discovered, called Heroic Age, that is, in many ways, what BSG could have been--each of the races is named after one of the Five Ages of Man from Hesiod, the hero is basically Herakles (with some hints of Kintarou and Son Goku), down to having 12 labors. I'd just as soon he didn't transform into a giant monster, a la Betterman (I think there's a few designers in common between the two), but it certainly isn't any worse than BSG. Also, it's got characters! Weird, huh?


• Sartre is pretty much the definition of Euro-trash intellectualism--shallow, obfuscating, misanthropic...and an abusive, philandering squeeing-fangirl-for-Stalin! Also lied about being in the Resistance. All that, however, is immaterial, for with a wave of my magic wand (wait, that's my middle finger) I shall dispense with him.
  
  See, Sartre said that if existence precedes essence, God would be a a being-for-itself that's also a being-in-itself: which is a contradiction in terms.
  
  Aside from the question of whether that is contradictory (I don't think it actually is), Sartre's making a much more basic error, one that would've got him laughed out of the University in the Middle Ages. See, he's using the terms being and essence univocally of God and of creatures, as Duns Scotus did. Congratulations, Sartre, you dispensed with one of the weaker thinkers of Christendom. Unfortunately, we Thomists have always taught that any statements about God are true only analogically--there is more difference than likeness between any such statements and the Reality Who they describe. Since language is founded on subject and predicate, for instance, even the Tetragrammaton (I AM) is inaccurate, since the I is the AM and the AM is the I (and the fact that the word has to be marked for tense and/or aspect is another inaccuracy, since it's actually dealing with eternity...). God is not a being for Himself nor in Himself, since the concept implies a distinction between subject and predicate that's nonexistent. He's actually not even a being; he's just being.
  
  And now let us all thank God for the gift of gangrene.


• So, out of morbid curiosity, I read Roger Ebert's review of Twilight. My little sister and I had gone to see it, to riff on it (she'd read the book and didn't like it, quelle surprise)--and we were actually surprised that it wasn't too bad. Apparently actually being able to show vampire baseball makes it not suck (I've never understood how anyone can enjoy sports-fiction), and it helps not to have the climactic battle filled in, in dialog, after the fact. I know, who knew?
  
  But anyway, Ebert said something about how Edward (you fangirls may squee now; I am going to sneer) probably hates being in biology, since "Darwin came in during his time, and Darwin proved there can be no vampires."
  
  Well. Castrate and lobotomize me and call me a film critic. I knew Darwin was revolutionary, but I'd no idea he changed the rules of logic and made it possible to prove a negative! Darwin actually, of course, proved nothing (except for some revolutionary ideas about earthworms' effects on erosion); theories--which really ought to be called "models", to avoid this confusion--aren't proved at all, they're judged by their explanatory and predictive power. Darwinism is largely adequate as a model of biological change, especially the newer forms of it (Neo-Darwinism, in other words, though I admit to liking Punctuated Equilibrium's attempt to address the fossil record). But how exactly does a theory that only addresses what organisms do while they're alive have anything to say about them after they're dead?
  
  I think Ebert was just trying to be cute, but he only succeeded in making himself look philosophically illiterate.
  
  Also it said right in the film that Edward, 17, was sick in the Influenza of 1919, so he'd have been born in 1902, long after Darwin. But then, I actually know when Darwin was around.


• So a recent difficulty has revealed to me the fatal flaw in Liberal/Modernist Christianity (the fact it's a thin gruel of uninspiring platitudes is not a fatal flaw, just grounds for questioning whether something that's fatal is always a "flaw" absolute).
  
  They judge everything emotionally, not intellectually.
  
  Thus, nobody dislikes Puritanism, and indeed Calvinism in general, more than me. But I can tell you why: the doctrine of Predestination essentially makes God the author of all the evil that men do, and the doctrine of Limited Atonement means God wishes some of His creatures damned. There is also a certain Manichaean hatred of bodily pleasures, that goes beyond the caution all responsible moral thought treats it with, and a similarly Manichaean hatred of women, too (read Milton if you don't believe me); also it made possible a number of economic and social injustices in the places where it was adopted.
  
  What do most Modern Christians say about Puritanism? That it saw God as stern and unloving, disgusted with His creatures' sins. Whereas Liberal Christians see him as loving and kind and forgiving...and, historically, completely fine with the Rape of Belgium and gung-ho for the Master Race's acquisition of Lebensraum.
  
  But I kid sellouts to the Zeitgeist. The point is, their description of Puritanism is emotional, not doctrinal. They couldn't tell you in a vigintillion years where they differ from John Calvin--or Simon Magus, for that matter. All they know is Puritans were mean, and they're not. Puritans were also of human intelligence, which they most certainly aren't.

Kids get everything

So, thought it'd been too long since I did a review, but the problem is, I haven't seen anything in a while that made me want to review it at full length. So I thought I'd just mention two movies I'd seen relatively recently, Kung Fu Panda and Coraline. Maybe the kids'll turn out okay, after all.

Yes, I know KFP came out a while ago, but I'd been putting off seeing it. Frankly, the ads drove me away (Good God Effy but they do that a lot); why must they show the most dimwitted and irritating gags in the entire movie? Are they attempting to attract the Head Injury Ward set, or something?

But anyway, I thought I'd start with Coraline, since it's less deep. Yeah, I know that sounds nuts, but keep yer britches on and you'll see what I mean. Anyway, I can't think of a single thing I didn't like about Coraline, which is not something I can say all that often (Dirty Harry, the original, is another film I saw recently of which I can say that).

Great voices, great animation (shocking insight, that)--wasn't the cat Goliath in Disney's Gargoyles, and the narrator for a bunch of Navy ads? I also liked that the moral of the story was more subtle than "good vs. evil" or "reality is preferable to fantasy." See, this was actually, "never sacrifice the goods you've been given for the ones you think you want." It's not about gratitude, precisely; it's about humility, and understanding that everything good is a gift, including existence. That idea, not coincidentally, is at the heart of nearly every fairy tale--it's what good ol' GKC called "the ethics of elfland," in a chapter of Orthodoxy (wonder if Gaiman's read that). It's the fundamental ethic of Paganism at its deepest--certainly a step up from the airy-fairy po-mo nonsense that passes for most imaginative fair.

Now, Kung Fu Panda actually gave me a few complaints. I wish Jackie Chan's monkey had gotten to talk more. All that talk of "belief" was irritatingly Kierkegaardian. I don't think the villain should've been a snow leopard (I like snow leopards, sue me), and I wouldn't've made the Tiger a girl--I like catgirls as much as the next guy (probably significantly moreso, actually), but Tigers are purely Yang animals. You want a Kung Fu chick, make her Leopard (they're more Yin than Tigers are, though I don't remember that they're actually Yin).

But otherwise...A-frigging-mazing. The choreography was good, both for the gags and for the serious fights; the slapstick was vintage Jackie Chan (I wonder if he helped them choreograph it). A lot of the gags are funnier if you've seen many wuxia films; the whole thing shows a familiarity with the genre that's impressive by my standards.

Here on out, it's SPOILER COUNTRY (text purpled out).

More importantly, the turtle...is a Taoist. The stuff he says, that sounds sorta profound, but might just mean he keeps a bong in his shell? Taoism. It's reminiscent of, "And the master said, 'What if my buttocks turned into cart wheels, and I rolled down this hill?' And the pupils were enlightened." He grows peach trees, for Heaven's sake (small joke). And then when he died, he became a frigging immortal!

It don't stop there, though, kids. The whole movie's an allegory of the Zen teaching of the Everyday Mind! What's the secret technique? What's the secret ingredient?

Mu.

What's the mind of a master? Why, your everyday mind.

I didn't know Yagyu Munenori had registered any screenplays with the Writer's Guild, did you?

Reality Check

Reality n. Philosophy. 1. That which exists independently of the mind of the observer. (Latin realitas from re "thing" and alia "other").

So of late, I've been noticing...everyone is a moron. Everywhere you look, people say patently ridiculous things, violating every orifice of the Principle of Non-Contradiction. So, I thought I'd list just a few of their capital offenses against logic. Not that anyone will read them, but I'll have done my bit—the rest of you can go to hell.

• Routinely, conservative commentators denounce "spread the wealth" or "redistributionist" policies as Socialism. Um...you slept through Economics 101, didn't you? By definition, no economic system where the means of production are in private hands, whether distributed or concentrated, is Socialism. In Socialism they rest in the hands of the State. Now certainly granting the state the right to decide how wealth is distributed is somewhat socialistic, but in principle an even distribution of ownership of capital is preferable to concentrated ownership (notice, the capital itself may still be concentrated--I'm talking about ownership of it). Conservatives need to relearn economics.


• Another economic error conservative commentators make is equating Capitalism with a Free Market. Now, Capitalism means "that economic system where the means of production are possessed by a minority, and the majority, dispossessed of the means (proletarians) are compelled by economic necessity to labor for the minority, to the minority's profit, while political liberty is retained by all." Notice--nothing about state involvement at all. In 18th Century Mercantilism the state was seen as identical with trade, but the system was still capitalist because of its distribution of capital. A Free Market is one that is minimally regulated, and then generally only in the interests of public safety. One can have a free market without Capitalism--the American South had free market slavery (political liberty not possessed by all, but the market largely unregulated), and some medieval nations had fairly free markets with the capital all in the hands of private individuals, the peasants and the craftsmen.
  
  Conservatives, or more usually Libertards (er, -tarians), having these two concepts muddy in their minds, frequently denounce grassroots, bottom-up movements to increase private ownership of stock and other forms of capital, as interference with the free market, since they increase the proportion of peopl with wealth. They interfere with capitalism; if anything they increase the freedom of the market.


• So over on Wikipedia, the policy that everything has to be backed up with a published source, the weirder the claim the more sources necessary, quotes Hume's soundbite that exceptional claims require exceptional proofs. Now, leaving to one side that Hume was a fourth-rate philosopher, Wikipedia has nothing whatsoever to do with Hume's conception of proof. "No Original Research" means, pure and simple, that you're forbidden from actually producing proof. No, on Wikipedia, you have to find some published source that says it. Of course, this is a classic argumentum ab auctoritate, the weakest form of proof, and is not dissimilar to the most blind, fideistic forms of Sola Scriptura. Maybe it's a bad idea to quote one of the early Empiricists in support of basing everything exclusively on blind allegiance to authority.


• So, Ayn Rand, again. God, she's dim. Let's count the ways:
  
  1. These two quotes:

     Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

     and

     The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a conscious rebellion against the anti-human, otherworldly values of medieval Christendom. In its metaphysics and epistemology, the Renaissance was essentially Aristotelian.

     Hey, retard: the medievals were Aristotelian (heard, perhaps, of Aquinas?); the Renaissance saw a huge revival of Platonism, owing to the influx of Byzantine scholars after the fall of Constantinople. Also Hermeticism, Neo-Gnosticism, and less pleasant thngs--it was a golden age of alchemy and magic, compared to the rationalistic progressivism of Aquinas, Nicole Oresme, and the Chartres school. Two words the medievals coined: modern and progress.
  
  
  2. If one reads Atlas Shrugged, Rand's ideal seems to be one where individual craftsmen own the means to express their talents, independent of corporations or governments--and then the stupid bint goes on to sing the praises of capitalism! I must admit, while she seems to think competition is necessary to insure quality (it's not--do doctors compete?), she is remarkably free of the fetishization of it that characterizes many of her followers. But that's not really the point; the point is, Ayn, Ayn, Ayn, sit down before you hurt yourself. The system you dream of existed, it was real, it could've been yours (look, I referenced John Galt!): it was called a Guild. Competition is replaced as a barrier to entry by the simple expedient of tests (if you're not good you don't get in--again, seems to work for doctors); the individual owns all his tools and contracts with whomever he wishes.
  
  
  3. I'm not the only one who's noticed, but she completely ignores the existence of children. "I'm self-made!" she screams, and all her characters scream. Really? You fed and clothed yourself at the age of two months? Leaving to one side the fact she didn't make herself exist either (Existence exists, Aynny, true—your betters call it God), her philosophy breaks down the second one considers how people come into the world. Absent a concept of morality more complex than "rational self-interest," there's no reason to have children, certainly none to care for them.
  
  
• My sister (younger, not older) is currently in education college, training to teach English and Math. My parents are both teachers, as is my aunt and was my paternal grandmother. Now, frequently, they encounter people who complain about "teaching to the test," as though American teachers would go into so much depth if not for the tests. Thing is, though...Asia teaches to the tests. Has for 2400 years, give or take the odd rebellion by palace eunuchs. Their education systems ain't doing too bad. Funny how the problem with American education is always anything except "the teachers are incompetent" or "the parents don't give a damn" (God help the kid who's got both troubles).


• Just people in general, feeling themselves justified in spouting off with no information. A few gems from my first and second year at Northern Arizona University:

  Capital offenses are handled at the national level.

  Um, not in America, 'cept for a very few crimes, dude. This from a Poli Sci professor, for god's sake.

  In Japan they don't have schoolkids in all these clubs and sports, distracting from their education.

  Actually it's frequently mandatory to join a club, and when it's not, kids who don't are referred to as "the go home early club".

  They don't have machismo in Japan.

  Just read that line a few times. Yeah.

Energy Beings

Yeah, so I decided not to digress onto the matter of the Navajo gods--bit off topic. It's gone.

But the discussion of the gods did remind me of something that could be interesting, but is absolutely never handled right: energy beings. The Q, the Ancients, even the First Ones (yeah they're handled better, but "better than Star Trek" isn't saying much). Energy beings are, very largely, an excuse to have fairies/gods without rattling the cages of the materialist troglodytes (four words: allegory of the cave).

Now, there is an opinion abroad in the land that energy beings represent, in the words of TVTropes, "the unpopularity of philosophical materialism among science fiction writers."

You fail metaphysics forever. Also relativity.

See, if something's made of energy, it's still material. Relativistically speaking, energy is just matter-in-potency--"potential energy" is a rather awkward idea; it'd be truer to speak of it as "actual matter". Energy is something between material and efficient cause; it's not a form or an end. Philosophy that only deals with efficient and material causes, is called materialism.

But the energy beings are always portrayed erroneously in two ways, one scientific, the other artistic. First, the science.

Energy, as we understand it, is not really something that you can make a "body" out of. It's really questionable if energy, properly so called, has any existence, save when it's actualized in the mass of matter. Most of what we call "energy" is just an effect on matter--a motion, a change from one state to another. Yet energy beings in SF are always portrayed as, at best, balls of light, or floating goldfish made of plasma. Now it's occasionally pointed out, "if they're made of energy they should move at light-speed", on the assumption that their "bodies" would be made of photons. Which is still questionable--can you make anything understandable as a body out of photons? I doubt it.

Still worse, is that they're all assumed to have once been "physical", by which is meant "made of actual matter." Um...I like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann as much as the next guy, but where's this potential to evolve into pure energy? Is there some kinda critical mass of adaptations, after which an organism just stops being a very complicated gravy (water held together with proteins)?

Maybe they're reading some collector's edition of Origin of Species that I never saw.

Okay, so the second part is the artistic error. The energy beings are always portrayed as basically childish, and as if their arrogance in presuming to tell humans what to do was somehow wrong. And yet the Federation? Always the good guys. Now I know this is fantasy, but come on, Roddenberry--a human government that doesn't need a massive overhaul (not to say purge) about every forty years? There's a hell of a lot more evidence for the gods than for that, dude.

Forgive me, but I grow tired of these stories about "humans are old enough not to need 'gods' anymore", as proudly proclaimed in Babylon 5, Star Trek, and arguable Stargate SG1. After the 20th century, I think it's a reasonable question whether humans are old enough to cross the street on their own, let alone not need the gods.

Now, what would a real energy being be like? I must here pause for an explanation, that some of you might have seen before:
Mortimer Adler, in several of his writings, felt the need to contradict the existentialists' denial of a single human nature, in the face of the extreme variation observed across human cultures. This he did by explaining that an animal's nature largely consists of actualities--a certain sort of calls and body language, a certain kind of den, a certain family makeup, etc. Human nature, however, consists mostly of sets of potentials--potential to speak, potential to order the family or the state, potential to organize the concepts by which they view reality.

What if, therefore, it is in the nature of some beings to have bodies, but only as a set of potentialities that they can realize as they see fit? Now, bodies are material...and what, pray, do we call "potential matter"?

So a real energy being would probably not even be "around," unless it was in a body made simply of straight-up matter, indistinguishable from any other matter (though probably lacking a lot of organs, since it wouldn't need to eat for energy). Q actually seems to work like that--point to Star Trek (I know, I'm scared too). Conveniently, this saves on budget.

So, what would it behave like? Hell if I know; it sure as hell wouldn't act like anything that has a body full of chemicals. Probably it would have a much flatter, by our standards, emotional range--probably just "liking" and "disliking", since it wouldn't need fear or, probably, sex, being practically indestructible. Being an intelligent being, it'd also have love (willing others' good), hate (willing their evil), and desires, though the main desires we could understand would be the intellectual ones (curiosity, for instance). Hell, it might enjoy gamma rays as humans enjoy having their backs scratched, too.

Under no circumstances would it serve as a strawman for a thickheaded sermon about religion, authority, or such crap. Any rational person meeting a creature like that, especially if it's also got psionic powers, would be quite right to consider it worthy of respect--more respect, in fact, than the semi-rational varmints who are the protagonists of the book or show. Might make for an actually intelligent point, namely, "Just because you're undeniably vastly inferior to it, doesn't make you worthless." Or, "People are only equal in their intrinsic dignity, and anyone who says otherwise is just too much of a coward to admit that denying the existence of human nature makes the concept of 'human rights' meaningless."

But I realize I'm asking that writers acknowledge that some philosophies have different ethical implications; I think I got a better chance of meeting an energy being.

Actually, Canyon de Chelly's not that far away.

New Color Scheme

So...changed the color scheme. Why?

I was bored.

Why the new colors? Ah, therein lies the tale.

These four colors--white, blue, yellow, and black--are the four colors of, well, everything, in the Navajo worldview. Much as the Chinese have the five gods of the directions (Blue Dragon, Red Phoenix, White Tiger, Black Turtle, and Gold Dragon), the Navajo have four chief gods, each associated with one of the directions. In the Fourth World (the one before this one--they have one more than the Hopi), those gods were even called by the name of the colors, starting east and going clockwise to north:

• The Fourth World's "White Body" is Talking God, Maternal Grandfather of all the gods.

• The Fourth World's "Blue Body" is Water Sprinkler, the Hopi's Kokopelli, and god of rain.

• The Fourth World's "Yellow Body" is Growling God, Talking God's brother.

• The Fourth World's "Black Body" is Black God, god of fire and hunting...and probably, also, the Hopi's Masauwu (and perhaps, therefore, also the Aztecs' Mixtlantecutli).

I find the Navajo religion fascinating because there's no "nuancing", no pretense that the gods are just symbols of something "profound" (read, airy-fairy nonsense), still less that they're personifications of natural forces. Black God and Water Sprinkler, it's true, have natural associations, but I defy you to even tell me what Talking God is the god of. It's not talking, by the way, since gods can't talk--one of their titles is "the speechless ones." Only humans have the power of speech.

It's funny how, merely by knowing the basics of some Navajo mythology, most of the theories of comparative religion are blown straight to hell.

I think I'll stick with the new scheme. Why?
Shił yá'át'ééhgo, he replies, showing off that he knows how to say "because I like it" in Navajo.

I was gonna do a thing discussing the peculiar intellectual challenges posed by the Navajo gods, the Diyin Diné'e. But I realized it was sort of weird (not for me, but for people that don't know where the Cave is), so I changed my mind. It reminds me, though, of "energy beings", as they appear in science fiction.

Filler Bunny

I felt the need to write more, but couldn't think of enough for a whole post. So, more randomness! I might come up with something meatier later.

• The excellent, and terribly entertaining, book How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman, contains a piece of unintentional irony. In their example dealing with villains whose sole motive seems to be evil for its own sake, they write:

  These villains unselfishly dedicate all their free time to plotting Mother Teresa's downfall, without any cash incentive or reason to hate Mother Teresa other than "her phony nice act makes me see red."

  This is very true of too many villains; but the unintentional irony is, see...there's this guy named Christopher Hitchens. "Plotting Mother Teresa's downfall, without any cash incentive or reason to hate Mother Teresa other than 'her phony nice act makes me see red,'" is a pretty good summary of his life's work, actually.

• Ayn Rand makes me sad; she's got far too much influence on the conservative movement, even among social conservatives. I wonder, though, if anyone's noticed that she's essentially got that form of Stockholm syndrome where one identifies with the abuser rather than the victim? Her whole worldview, from economics to religion to gender relations, is explained by her wishing she was one of the strong, that get to do the hurting, rather than the weak that get hurt.

• News on the "Joss Whedon sucks" front: according to Wikipedia, he considers himself an absurdist. Um, is this some insanely technical definition of absurdism I'm not acquainted with? Because last I checked absurdism didn't involve quite so much preaching.

• To snag another loogy at the winner of the Billy Quizboy Look-alike Contest, Whedon apparently said, of Firefly, "So I wanted to get a show that took the past and the future, and put them together by making them feel like the present…" Now, translate that out of Whedon's usual Randall's-cousin-Walter prose, and we get, "I sorta cribbed some oversimplified history (inasmuch as he appears to have got his understanding of the Old West from Sam Peckinpah), combined it with some rocket ships, and then made a story that's really set in the modern day." Or in other words, "I just about went by the recipe for bad science fiction."

• Ever hear of a movie called Idiocracy? It's a phenomenally classist, elitist--and eugenicist!--dystopian sci-fi (in the worst "crickets getting it on" sense of the word), about how the world becomes stupid in the future because the yuppie-scum, who, of course, are so damn smart, don't have as many kids as the blue-collar types, who are of course stupid. Although, of course, it's not the blue-collar folks who are watching "Real Housewives of Orange County". But that aside..."Idiocracy" does not mean "rule by idiots." It means "individual rule," like how "idiolect" means the way a particular person talks. Here's a hint, a-holes: when you set out to openly insult the intelligence of the actual humans, don't get the Greek in your title wrong.

• Late addition: So my father was watching Terminator 3 the other day, and I realized something: the good Terminators from that and the second one, as played by the Governator, are...well, let me just list their traits. They're powerful robots from the future that simulate a living thing, and are sent back in time to help a young person, by people with a relationship to him. In other words...they're Doraemon. Weird, huh? Humanity's chances suddenly look a lot bleaker, what with its future being in the hands of John "Nobita" Connor.