More Uncorrelated (Though Not Uncaused) Remarks

More tidbits, my grandchildren.

• So there's a book called 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters. I haven't read it, and won't; I know it by references. Basically it appears to be "Try and match your characters to these archetypes from Greek myth (also Osiris and Isis, the only Egyptian gods the author can name)." Unfortunately, I can't fit any characters I like, especially none of my own, into the categories, because they're based on a series of cliches derived exclusively from books catering to a very narrow, modern demographic. These characters can only be written by, or appeal to, people who have mistaken Tamora Pierce for a thinking adult.
  
  Face facts: the only set of archetypes fiction needs is Jung. He's served JMS well enough, hasn't he?


• Know what's funny? I live fairly close to the ancestral homelands of three matrilocal, matrilineal Indian tribes, and know a thing or two about them. Guess what? In these tribes—where women own the property and descent is traced through the mother—the sex roles are...exactly the same. Men hunt and fight, and women cook and clean. Oh, well, Hopi men weave, but that's the only difference. Also, men still pay bride price, despite the fact they're moving into their wives' houses—basically they get together enough money for bride-price, to show they can be trusted to take care of her land.
  
  One difference is, actually, that in Hopi, Navajo, and Apache culture, religion is almost exclusively a male concern. Whereas patrilocal, patriarchal cultures like the Indo-Europeans, and the Eurasian "shaman complex" (Koreans, Mongols, Finns) all had more wise women than you could shake a stick at (if that's your idea of a good time).


• So someone was talking about a tengu character, in some series (books, I think). They said (I paraphrase), "tengu don't suffer from the 'Elf Superiority Complex' because they arise from human souls, but Western spirits would think they were tainted, because in Western culture the spirits always come from outside humanity—Easterners believe anyone can be reborn as anything (including inanimate objects)."
  
  You. Don't. Talk. No. More.
  
  Ever. Pretty please?
  
  See, actually, you'd only get reborn as a tengu—a yôkai and therefore, in Buddhism, a yaksha—if you committed one of the sins that gets you reborn as a preta (of which yakshas and rakshasas are varieties, in Buddhism). Reincarnation is not random—except in Dungeons and Dragons; it's determined by one's actions. Have you even frigging heard of Karma?


• So, question no. 47 of the Fantasy Novelist's Exam:
  

  Do you think you know how feudalism worked but really don't?

  90% of all fantasy writers fail this one, folks.


• I am not certain, but I think Kamen no Maid Guy may well take the prize—for now at least—in the category "Weirdest thing ever to come out of Japan." I know, I'm scared too—that's like "Worst political ideas in German history" or "Least honest Englishman."

Rant sampler

And now it's time for me to post another random assortment of rants. Ahem:

• As I said before, the Middle Ages originated the idea of consensual sex—the consent of both parties is what makes marriage a valid sacrament. Fun fact, by the way: sex is the sacrament of matrimony, in Catholic teaching; a wedding is just the ceremony approving a couple enacting that sacrament.
  
  I've recently come across several instances on TV Tropes, where some mouth-breather holds up the ending of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady (that what a woman wants is her own way), as an example of how sexist the Middle Ages were.
  
  That legend comes, I believe, from the Troubadours or something similar; I know it dates to the era of the sacramental controversies I describe above. Now, I trust it's hardly shocking that the story works out as a sort of metaphor for courtship—and a proper man leaves the whole thing up to the woman to decide. That is, it's an allegory about consensual sex being the only legitimate kind. Put more generally, it's simply, "Women want what they want, gentlemen, not what you want. Try asking."
  
  If it had come from now, That Retard Troper would be saying it was an Anvilicious anti-sexism story. But, because he assumes he's got the single most complex era in human history all figured out, he completely ignores the obvious point of the story.
  
  Seriously, who's reading him that wiki?


• So, Code GEASS: LeLouch of the Rebellion. First off, the word is actually geis, pronounced "gesh", and it means a taboo; it's only in Dungeons & Dragons that it's a command that has to be followed. Still, the mispronunciation lends to the show being called "Code Gay-ass", which it is.
  
  Personally I prefer to render the title "Code GEACPS", because of the ending: a coalition of the countries of East Asia, led by Japan, against Western Imperialism, led from America. There was a thing like that, folks, it was called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperitiy Sphere. It has half a Holocaust worth of murders to its name, and is right behind Mao, Stalin, and Hitler in the "largest scale a-holery in history" contest—and Hitler barely edged it out for a spot in the Top 3.


• So, all the hooey about race, in fantasy books and science fiction especially. Apparently people in Western culture shouldn't default to assuming that a character whose race isn't specified, is white—even though everyone in Asia and probably Africa does, with their races.
  
  I hate to point this out, but this attitude isn't just ridiculously PC, it's actually racist. Essentially it's saying that white people are too good to be themselves; apparently the lesser races can have identities, but the master race has to transcend them all.
  
  Or to put it another way, you only presume you have to represent all races if you think you have the authority to speak for all of them.

Trumpy, you can do magic things!

So all this talk of magic and whatnot got me to thinkin' about fantasy in general, and I realized I am of two minds about it.

On the one hand, I like fantasy; I dig the whole magic and dragons and elves aspect, the idea of setting stories in other worlds (or rather, whole cosmoses {cosmoi?}). My folks read me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings before I could read; I read them myself before third grade. Fantasy is in my blood, man; it marches through my veins...like giant radioactive rubber pants! The pants command me! Do not ignore my veins!

Ahem. But on the other hand, I can't think of much fantasy that I like. It's doubly infuriating, because not only is it not done well, it's got so much potential—potential that's always wasted, thrown away so people like Ursula K. LeGuin or Terry Goodkind can preach to us about feminism/"Taoism" or S&M/Objectivism. The earlier Fritz Leiber is pretty good (basically books two and three of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, and parts of four), and Conan ain't bad, if you can get past the 30s-race-theory aspect (the movie's better). And then there's Tolkien, and various anime like Slayers, Zero's Familiar, and Lewie the Mage-Warrior (not "Rune Soldier"; look at the Japanese title). Other than that, it's a buffet of losers—especially Goodkind (see my remarks about Ayn Rand, and add in that his appearances should probably involve Megan's Law) and LeGuin (aside from her brand of feminism being just as asshat as the Marxism it's an unintelligent knockoff of, no Taoist thinks seeking immortality, as such, is a bad thing...since it's kinda the point).

I don't really know if there's any fundamental rules, but here's a few things I for one could stand to see done different.

1. Learn about the sodding Middle Ages, if you're gonna use a generic "medieval" setting. This involves three main sub-points, actually:
   1. Medieval property laws were complicated. There were guilds for crafts, peasant proprietorship and multiple forms of serfdom in agriculture, and nobles holding land in feudal gift with various kinds of tenants working it, and using it to pay their armies. There were also merchant guilds, which were a cross between insurance companies and "better business"/chamber-of-commerce type institutions, with licensing from guild-members akin to franchising. Women could have full membership in guilds, and unlike men could vote by proxy, which brings me to my next point.
   2. Women's status was a hell of a lot higher than they taught you in school—much higher than in Rome or Greece, and also higher than in the Renaissance or so-called "Enlightenment". Indeed, it wasn't till the end of the 19th Century that they even started making back what they'd lost. Just for example, the very concept of consensual sex is medieval, originating in the Church working out how sacramental marriage works.
   3. The main—almost the only—inferiority of the Middle Ages to any other era, was feudalism. Now what people don't understand about feudalism is, it wasn't hierarchical. On his own land, a Baron was the equal of a Duke, and often of a King. The only distinction was the size of land, and therefore of army, a lord had. This got really troublesome, since they had to negotiate before every battle, since nobody took orders from anyone else and had to be persuaded (your feudal obligation was to show up when your liege asked, and that was about it). Imagine an army where 2nd Lieutenants have to be bribed by Generals before they carry out any military tasks, and perhaps you'll see the difficulty.
2. Don't just rewrite Tolkien, or, more to the point, Gygax/Weiss-Hickman/Greenwood. Go and make a modified version of the elves from folklore, rather than the Quendi (or whatever Greyhawk's elves call themselves); go look up real legends rather than knocking off the Silmarillion (or Dragonlance). How about you learn about onmyôdô or obeah, instead of using Vancian Magic or that tired quasi-hermetic elementalism?
   Late addendum (09/9/27): Not that I don't like elementalism (I just recommended onmyôdô, didn't I?); it's just, it's always the same Aristotelian four, fire/water and earth/air, with the pairs in opposition—Pythagoras/India's Ether if you're lucky, and then as an afterthought. Not even Avatar escapes this, and it's set in a Chinese world! There's other ways to do elements.
3. A world where all the "good" races are actually just oppressing the "evil" ones? Not sodding original. Cliche, in fact, beyond the level of all other cliches because it's also trying to be edgy. Nothing is lamer than this Marxist class-war paradigm, kiddies, so just stop doing it; goblins and trolls are evil, in legends, how about you cope like a grownup? In Hindu myth the trolls (rakshasa) are like the Mazoku from Slayers: they actively seek, as an ideology, to destroy the world. They share an origin with the Jotuns from Norse myth, by the bye—is Surtr just misunderstood and oppressed?
4. Gender-restricted magic is fine—Korean shamans and Navajo medicine-men are both gender-restricted—but try and avoid the feminist/misogynist trappings that so often go with them. In fact, just steer clear of writing about gender-matters altogether; and actually just deny all your impulses to write about social issues "relevant" to now. You're not in eighth grade, and you're probably not well-versed in all the anthropological facets of, say, slavery, or polygamy. Without understanding the subtleties, and a hell of a lot of talent, it'll just sound like an after-school special. What if you try and be subversive, and point out that lots of societies' slaves weren't Uncle-Tom's-Cabin miserable? More power to you, but tread carefully, or you'll come off sounding like a heartless reactionary—like Terry "butcher the pacifists" Goodkind. Also, his gender-stuff leaves the vague impression he's very active in communities that have to specifically emphasize that what they're doing is consensual.

エリート Eriito

So my musings about Naruto and even Negima being better than Harry Potter, got me thinking: things are apparently just expected to skew smarter in Japan. Now, not always—One Piece, for instance, and anything involving even a cursory discussion of Western history, would tend to indicate there's a lowest common (moron) denominator in Japan, too—but huge swaths of work there are just smart enough that I just barely have to pay attention not to miss something. And that's impressive, because there's not really anything on American TV that I can't watch, and fully comprehend, while reading a book. I can't read while watching the dumber Japanese stuff, either (I prefer subs to dubs, sue me), but if my Japanese was better I could.

But these are some shows I can't do it with.

• Shakugan no Shana. Seriously, find me an American show where the premise is, "Beings from another dimension invade this one by stealing innocent people's reference to 'to be'." And if there was such a thing, it'd last six episodes and then get canned, for being talky and boring—rather than being Kugimiya Rie tsundere romantic comedy. Shana is the answer to the question, "What if Jacques Maritain had created Moonlighting?"
• Baccano. The being who grants the Elixir of Life, introduces himself with, "I know thy desires and I'm with thee everywhere." That is, the show contains a fictional depiction of Poemandres, Mind of All Mastery, and a quote from the first book of the Corpus Hermeticum. Now admittedly the Mind of All Mastery wouldn't be capable of curiosity (since, as the self-awareness of Being Itself in an emanationist pantheist cosmos, he'd know everything), but we'll give them a pass for that.
• Naruto. Among others. And all the existentialism—with the uniquely Japanese answer, that, pace Sartres, heaven is other people. That is, what confirms and gives meaning to one's existence, is one's friends, family, and community.
• Naruto again, for Kishimoto's understanding that all human conflict is essentially ideological—the first thing he asks when he creates a villain is, "How does his worldview conflict with the heroes'?"
• Black Blood Brothers. Aside from making me want to play Vampire: the Masquerade (tell me Kane Warlock's not a Tremere, I dare you), it's got Jiro's fascinating statement to the Kowloon Children: "You're not evil, you're just doing what you need to to survive. But since you're a threat to what I care about, I'm going to destroy you." Nothing American could ever have a hero say that (not and be right, anyway); Americans can't abide being told that the fact you love something, might mean you have to fight, and harm, its enemies, whether or not they're actually "evil."
• Xenosaga (this one deserves multiple bullet-points, actually). The mix of Jewish, Christian, ancient, and modern (Jungian) Hermeticism, for one (though admittedly Hermeticism is the dumb version of Gnosticism, and Gnosticism is the dumb version of Indo-European esotericism). Also the references to Shingon Buddhism (the smartest Indo-European esotericism, as filtered through the Japanese). Also the tech—using the Collective Unconscious as a warp drive? Now that's just a cool idea (hokum, but top-shelf hokum). And hell, find me an American SF show or game that knows enough to make the FTL comms be based on the EPR paradox. Now admittedly it wouldn't work, but you've got to be pretty good to even make that mistake.

Late addendum:It occurred to me, as I reread this (2009/9/23) that I come off rather harsh on One Piece, and its fans (since I sorta called its target audience morons). Now, I like One Piece, in small doses, and Oda Eiichirô is a pretty talented guy who tells silly stories that still have a lot of heart. That said, you can't deny that One Piece works best when you turn off part of your brain and go with the insanity—Luffy can give Kamina a run for his money in the "Kick reason to the curb" department.

Chiefly concerning wizards

Hisashiburi, na?

Anyhoo. So I recently decided to read Mahou Sensei Negima, and it got me to thinking: manga about children with magic, are much better than Harry Potter (the HP influence on Negima's pretty obvious). Just in Negima:

• The Latin. Negi's spells are just flat out in better Latin than Harry's—apparently Akamatsu Ken can be bothered to notice that Latin spellcasting is in the subjunctive, for instance. Also, when the Thousand Master casts older spells, they're in Greek! Real Greek, too, not English written in the Symbol font, though I don't know enough Greek to know how good of Greek.
• Negi's spells have a lot more range, though the change to an action series sorta made the utility spells get short shrift in favor of the combat. But Harry Potter made that same shift, and then we discovered the wizarding world has no combat spells that aren't illegal. Also, no area-effect spells! And then again, when Harry was carving things in his arms for Umbridge, who else wanted her to check...and get the message, "I took Explosive Runes today."
  Ahem. But in Negima, he's got like 29 different levels of Sagitta Magica (somehow I suspect we know that name from somewhere *cough*magic missile*cough*), for each element!!! Also I dig the combining magic with martial arts, though this series suffers from the bizarre conception Chinese martial arts are strong (also that Europe doesn't have any, or at least none of them have shown up—anyone else wanna see magic + savate?)
• Just, the shonen series-ness of it: Negi is more of a man at ten than Harry is at seventeen. Admittedly Akamatsu has an advantage in writing about a young boy's heart that Rowling didn't—as in, he is a boy—but I don't think his female characters are half as off as Rowling's male ones.
• All that said, I finally found a vampire character I hate more than Alucard and Edward Cullen: Evangeline A. K. McDowell. The real problem with her is she has her moments (her Kugimiya Rie-type tsundere scenes), and then she starts fighting, and you have to hate her Alucard!Sue-ness.
• Actually come to think of it, and I just realized it now, Akamatsu apparently has trouble writing strong female characters (as in "female characters who can kick your ass," not Strong Female Characters™ as in "good female role-model based on a hilariously androcentric conception of strength"). Other than Ku Fei (whose saving grace is she's a ditz), Asuna, and Setsuna, all the powerful girls are obnoxious bundles of stereotypes and cliches, and most of them are Sue-y, too—especially what's-her-name, the gun chick. Still better than Potter, though.

And then there's Naruto. "That's a reach," you say. No, it's not. It was originally gonna be a manga about a kid in a wizard school, but then Kishimoto-sensei decided he hated drawing Naruto's goggles, and drew other things on his forehead instead, until he came to the ninja hachimaki and decided to change them from wizards to ninjas (who have magic, in folklore). And the rest was history (and then, apparently, a couple years later, Kishimoto heard about some English book series, and realized he'd really dodged a bullet).

Actually Naruto's got more similarities to HP than that. Except it's better.

Consider.

• Team 7 is made up of the chump, the bookworm, and the broody last survivor of a rich family. Also the chump has orange hair. Also the last survivor has a mark put on him by a guy who can talk to snakes. So Naruto is Harry Potter, except about Ron.
• Orochimaru is basically Voldemort, except with a good motivation and actual talent as a villain.
• Sandaime Hokage is Dumbledore, except he doesn't make everyone else make sacrifices and endure suffering, while getting off the hook himself by forcing someone to euthanize him. Oh, and he actually stands up to the evil student he couldn't kill before, rather than hoping a bunch of children can pull it off.
• Itachi is Snape, except Kishimoto realized the whole double-agent assassin thing was a really nasty thing to make someone do, and had Danzo do it, instead of the Hokage—because Hokage actually earns his people's love and loyalty.
• The Chûnin exam arc was the Wizarding Cup—which I realize makes Gaara Viktor Krum, for which I apologize to the fangirls—except instead of "this minor international school contest makes international news," it was, "this thing that directly affects the military strength of every nation on the planet, except the one that uses samurai instead of ninja, is obviously international news."
• The Akatsuki and Sound Ninjas are actually competent, and the ninja villages actually have defenses. Meanwhile the Death Eaters re-enact Three Stooges bits during battles, and the wizarding world's entire defense appears to be Aurors, which would be like England's only law enforcement and military forces being the CID. At its current strength. And staffed by the gumbies from the Monty Python Architect Sketch.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Rowling should be embarrassed.

Plaudite, amici, epicus finitus est

Well, took less time than I'd thought, but I've finished rewriting my SF novel Faith of the Phoenix. It comes out to 336 pages, letter size 11-pt Times New Roman, 1-inch margin, or 571 pages in 9-pt trade-paperback size. Yes, I never do anything small, children. Now to get someone to edit it (probably my mother), and then to figure out how to get the thing published.

Ah, you ask, why that title? It has nothing to do with the Phoenix-as-Christ-image thing—which I hate. It has still less to do with the Order of the Phoenix (though the confusion of the two might sell my book for me, as Belloc hoped his Green Overcoat would with Baring's Green Elephant). Indeed, the Phoenix Society is the name of the bad guys of my book. Though if you ask my little sister, Dumbledore's plenty likely to strap a bomb to a 12-year-old (he gets seventh graders to fight an awful lot of his battles for him, and wizard brats are civilians, not trained black ops soldiers like in Naruto).

Faith of the Phoenix is a rather free and easy translation of the Latin Punica Fides, more literally Carthaginian (=Phoenician) trustworthiness. It's basically the Roman equivalent of "White Man Speak with Forked Tongue," because the Carthaginian honor-code only applied to other Phoenicians, while the Roman one applied to everyone (ideally, anyway; the Carthaginians didn't even try).

Betrayal of "outsiders" is a major theme of the book; too many modern thinkers (Communists, to name an obvious example), say one need only keep one's word, alliances, etc., with people who agree with one ("That which advances the program of Marx is alone good; that which impedes it is alone evil"), and more generally, that only those who serve whatever ideology have any rights.

The story is about a future where the humans have colonized many nearby stars, under the auspices of the UN (it's the same UN, though some of its rules are different), and they've run afoul of an alien race that's rather more of a stickler for the sanctity of promises. They're felinoids whose culture is sorta part Roman, part Medieval, and part Napoleonic. Now imagine if those people had to deal with our politicians...and had more advanced tech than us, and liked to fight as much as the Romans, medievals, and pre-WWI French.

So, after humanity got its nether regions handed to it, a guy starts a sort of "pretend we never lost that war we deserved to lose" movement, on this one planet, and kidnaps some of the aliens' citizens. The aliens dispatch one of their cops to find the victims (and whomp their kidnapper), and the story's about the cop meeting various people, his species, humans, and members of this other species with super psionics and a religion best described as Evangelical Heideggerianism. There's also one of his people who's been kidnapped (a cranky, not to say tsundere, computer technician who loathes humans, though she comes to like a few), a telepathic gunrunner who's been betrayed by the kidnapper-guy, and a girl whose family got killed when the aliens blew up the station they lived on, so she joined the bad guy. There's also an assassin droid and the alien emperor (most easily described as Tamaki from Ouran High Host Club meets Jacuzzi Splot from Baccano); those are the viewpoint characters, anyway—I got a cast of sodding thousands, dude. Major non-POV characters include other androids, the gunrunner's fiancée, another alien comp-tech (a boy this time), and several members of a revived samurai caste.

The humans've compromised between socialism and capitalism, with a thing called permanent employment (see the economic works of Hilaire Belloc); the aliens' economics is a mix of guilds (be seated—think of them as professionals' co-ops if you must) and Chesterton-style distributist agriculture (peasant proprietorship). Humans' politics are like their politics now, only usually worse (I know, I'm scared too), while the aliens' government's a militarchic democracy with a strong executive, called an Empire for convenience (political power's attained by military service, but anyone can be promoted from the ranks).

I also have dialog in two different, related alien languages, plus a third spoken by the existential evangelist aliens. Also in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, and two dialects of French. And mottoes in Latin! Keep yer shirt on, I translate when it matters.

Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu. Eventually.

Things I'd like to see

So I thought I'd make a list of some things I'd like to see in movies/TV. Doubt I will, but hope springs eternal.

1. How about one of those gun-toting pacifists' companions disarms them every time they point a gun, and says, "Hey, idiot, second rule of gun safety: never point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy."


2. How about a tiny chick, like River in Firefly, who gets her a$$ handed to her on a plate after trying to use brute force on guys twice her size? Yeah, tiny people can kick butt...but they better damn well use technique. And no, moving like a ballerina is not technique. How about jujutsu? It really works, and it looks utterly awesome, at least to people who know anything.


3. Vampires who aren't only dead, they're actually based on specific legendary types. How about Slavic vampires, with their long (and bladed) tongues, two hearts, rising at noon, and iron teeth?


4. Elves who aren't like the ones in Tolkien, but like the ones in legends. Actually I have seen that, but most people don't know Sesshômaru is an elf.


5. Shows that have learned the Kzinti Lesson ("There is no such thing as a disarmed spacefaring civilization"), and the law it's a special case of ("Anything usable as an interesting spaceship engine, is a WMD.")


6. Settings where the WMDs we call spaceships are really regulated like they would be—no "no formal training" people with mystical (and, ironically, sexist) intuitive skills with engines, like Kaylee in Firefly. Seriously, do we let nice little hippie undergrads use the LHC? 'Cause a decent rocket makes it look like a damn laser-pointer.

Yes, I used the abbreviation on that last one just to play with the acronym command in html. You can do it with abbreviations, too (Mlle.), and apparently definitions (slavery).

Curiously well-armed pacifists

So, I was reading a largely forgettable little manga called Zero In, and in it, there's a chick from this private para-police force, if that makes sense, who's a genius with guns...but won't kill. There's similar characters in Black Cat (Saya, and later Train), and Kaoru's school of kenjutsu in Rurouni Kenshin (except, you know, with swords). All of them insist that you don't have to use guns (or swords) to kill, in a pitiable little "this is a shonen series so we can't have a body count" gesture, that makes Batman's hoplophobia look downright respectable.

Unfortunately, it's codswallop. Guns and swords have one purpose: killing stuff. Yes, you can use them to hunt as well as to fight, but their only purpose is to spill the blood of other living things. You can't, in real life, "intentionally miss the vital spot", or whatever; while swords have flats, if you get cut, blood-loss and infection will do you pretty soon, especially in a premodern setting. Guns are even worse—even little bullets make some big holes. There's a reason the M16 (which shoots itty-bitty .22 caliber) was nicknamed "the Meat Axe." People survive gunshot wounds all the time (now), but frequently lose the use of limbs or major muscles...or have to have their wife get into the shower with them, and take out their intestine and wash it so it doesn't get infected while they heal.

Yeah, that really happened to the husband of one of my mom's friends after he got gut-shot (he's a cop).

If you want guns in your story, you damn well better make it a story where people die, because that's what guns (also swords) do. You want your hero not to kill people? Fine (though I think you're a sissy); give him/her/it/Mokona nonlethal weapons. Jutte, for instance (Japanese cops' truncheons). Otherwise, man up and show your hero coming to grips, like a grownup, with spilling the blood of other people.

A final, irksome point: for some weird reason, people in manga who follow this nonsense, are frequently supposed to be following the path of Yagyû Munenori's Life-giving Sword (I think Kaoru in Kenshin is, though I've never paid much attention to that overrated series).

But, uh, gee, the whole point of Life-Giving Sword is that, by killing evil men, you give life to the thousands they would harm.

Those who take up arms when this is necessary, are also following the Way of Heaven. If you ask me why this is so, I reply that flowers and greenery bloom among the spring breezes, but they wither and fall in the frosts of autumn.

But then, I've actually read Munenori.

Random noticey bits

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.—H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Unfortunately I was never granted that mercy, and I see connections everywhere. That it might be connected to my anxiety disorder, is basically the premise of Monk. But here's a few of the things I noticed.

• Shinto, and indeed all traditional, non-transcendental religions (so, Native American and "animist" religions, folk religions, ancient paganism, but not Christianity, Buddhism, or {probably} Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism), can have their ethics summed up in one sentence:
  

  "All of human society is a Nash equilibrium."

  Think about it. A Nash equilibrium is a state of affairs where no individual will improve his chances of success by acting unilaterally. In Shinto, it's not even good to do nice things unilaterally, since that puts people in your debt, and if they can't pay it off, they'll resent it.


• Karl Popper, the vastly overrated philosopher of science, established falsifiability as the standard of science. It's not without its value as a standard, but it can't be used as an Occam-style "Razor".
  
  Here's why.
  
  So, apparently they managed to disprove one of Michael Behe's chief Intelligent Design arguments, irreducible complexity, by producing something he said was irreducibly complex in random circumstances. Thus, by Popper's standard, ID was science, it was just wrong. So far so good.
  
  Now how exactly would we disprove Darwinism?
  
  Somehow it seems to me that anything that says ID is more science than Darwin is, is probably not a friend to the kind of science-fetishists who think Popper was so brilliant.
  
  I say ditch Popper, keep Darwin, and ignore ID. As theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr essentially said of ID, "Life is where you're looking for the signs of design? And what about the ten billion years before it showed up?" Course, that also kinda blows those Darwin-fetishizing atheists out of the water, too. See, if Darwin is an adequate explanation of the entire universe, not just one aspect of the tiny part of it that's alive, then LBJ's Great Society is an adequate explanation of America, and we have no need of the hypothesis of the Founding Fathers.


• So, linguistic note. When people pronounce Iran and Iraq as Airann and Airack, they're actually being more correct and consistent, for English.
  
  See, ever since the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels in English, other than E, have become diphthongs (A is ei, I is ai, O is ou, and U is...iu? jü?).
  
  Anyway, there's a rule in English, similar to rules in several other Germanic languages, that vowels before single medial consonants are long. That's the difference between the English pronunciations of "irate" and "irritable". I think it might actually be why final-silent-E makes the preceding vowel long: because it makes the final consonant orthographically medial.

Are you qualified?

So, I had to go to some irritating SF websites (I was trying to find a decent rocket engine; I found the beam-core antimatter rocket, which, however, brought with it a number of headaches—but I'm okay now). The folks running the sites knew their rocket science, though they had an oddly-shortsighted conception of science—they don't seem, for instance, to have even heard of the Alcubierre warp (not that it'd necessarily work, but they didn't even seem to know that there is a theoretical way to get FTL without violating relativity).

But whenever they mentioned something other than physics, they uttered howlers that a third grader would sneer at.

Basically, science fiction writers seem to think if they write the physics right, they can make up whatever horse-hockey they want in other fields. Who knew the Baron d'Holbach ("All the errors of men are really errors in physics") was the only critic they were worried about? (That'd come as news to Robert "bang the research assistants and sell secrets to Stalin" Oppenheimer, too, wouldn't it?)

• Bad linguistics arising from bad philosophy. So some idiot's story involved a logical conlang a la Lojban, because natural languages ("originating in superstitious eras") are full of inaccuracies. The example? The verb to be having all those senses, "all of them false to fact."
  
  Little boy, don't play with grownups' things. No language, natural, artificial, or machine, can cope with Being. As mentioned previously, language is composed of subject and predicate; Being is radically simple. Remember how the laws of physics can't describe a black hole well, because it's a singularity? Well, a black hole is actually a three way composite, in logic: it's a thing (essence) that has properties, however ill-defined (accidents) and it exists (being). Even math (most rationalists are some form of mathematical realists) is a composite, since it's things (essence) that exist (being). But Being? Just being. Your language is incapable of coping with that logical singularity, little boy.


• Bad sociology, deriving from errors in history and economics. How about, "You can't have lords without peasants." Really? 'Cause, um, the Glorious Revolution, which about quintupled the power of England's Lords, also ended the existence of England's proto-peasantry. The Lords, and their party the Whigs (the original Tories were populist, that's why they were monarchists), were the driving force behind England's Industrial Revolution, too.
  
  How about capitalism? 'Cause lord knows the Meiji era zaibatsu didn't have a bunch of samurai and noble clans running them, and not a single Scottish, English, or German noble was involved in industrialism in their cultures, right? If you have an elite class—which is a part of the definition of Capitalism, toddlers—you could have a feudal or Austrian-style aristocratic system. There's no reason the economic elite couldn't also be the military elite, as was the case in Prussia and is the case in both halves of Korea. Crew-based elites, a la Mt. Lookitthat in Niven or the Guild in Dune (and its knockoff in Last Exile) would be quite likely, too.
  
  How about we junk the Hegelian nonsense about the ever-unfolding increase in social equality, since it ain't gonna happen?


• Pointless, rather provincial naysaying. "Space ranks will be Air Force, not Navy." I have three problems with this.
  1. Just because NASA is Air Force doesn't mean its successors will be—navies have a lot more manufacturing infrastructure.
  2. Large spaceships are more like sea vessels than air vessels, and therefore the organization will be more like that on a ship (large organization for handling one vessel) than that on an air base (large organization for handling multiple small vessels).
  3. Most importantly, the Royal Air Force is organized quasi-navally, you provincial little infant cornpone.
  
  
• Bad scientific anthropology deriving from bad philosophical anthropology. Specifically, aliens determined entirely by their ecological niche (I'm looking at you, Niven). Really? As everyone knows, humans behave just like ostriches (terrestrial, bipedal, plains-dwelling omnivores). The total homogeneity of all human cultures—ancient Romans, 19th Century Navajos, and modern Englishmen behave precisely the same way, right?—is due to ecological niche being far more important than culture, history, or, God forbid, free will. Right, zygotes?
  
  Also, zygotes, must we have all those bizarrely misogynistic, or radically feminist, gender roles? Considering how advantageous human sexual roles were for our survival, I'm guessing aliens are going to have had to develop something similar. That is, different roles, but approximate social equality (though whichever sex handles the more glamorous jobs is probably going to get higher status). The really lopsided gender roles observed in some human cultures—the Middle East, Joseon Korea—are usually only possible once a certain level of civilization sets in, and generally only under the influence of consciously-simplified ideologies. Confucianism proper, for instance, is much easier on women than Neo-Confucianism, because Neo was a conscious striving to conform society (prescriptively) to an order that Confucianism was just observing (descriptively) as a tendency.
  
  But I doubt most of them have even heard of Joseon Korea.

How about we don't write things into our books until we've cleared the fallopian tube and read up on them, hmmm?