You Keep on Using that Word

So it's commonplace for people to describe SF writers like Heinlein and Pournelle as "fascist". It's hilarious; if you can think of anyone who is more opposite actual fascists than their brand of Goldwater conservatism, I'd love to know who it is.

See, the only parts of their worldview that mirror fascism, also mirror the views of the kind of person who calls them fascists. Between their egocentric view of foreign policy, their pseudo-scientific reductionism in sociology (with attendant free-love utopianism), and their belief in apocryphal population apocalypses: just swap in Keynes for Laffer and you've got a Democrat.

I did actually see one person who made something of a case for applying the term to Heinlein, that his stories often involve the naked will-worship also seen in the inter-war philosophies that spawned the Fascisti and Nazis. It's actually a good point, and quite true, but the problem is, that same amoral worship of the will as such, is pretty much endemic to the Post-Reformation West—it long predates Nietzsche, who's often blamed for its presence in the Nazis and sometimes the fascists (assuming the person doing the blaming knows they're not the same thing, which isn't common).

You find it throughout Romanticism, it's of the essence of Transcendentalism, it's found in the stupider republican writers on every continent; there's an element of it in the Great Awakening. Indeed, I suspect it can probably be traced to the Reformation—between Calvin's worship of God's will that damns or saves each soul before its birth, and Luther's worship of Man's will that, once it accepts salvation, can never after lose it, it's the will they were revering. Tolstoy even has a form of it, except in reverse: rather than saying all chosen actions are good, he says they're all bad (I wonder how many Orthodox monks just read Tolstoy and said, "Ho-hum, another quietist for the pile."). Still, he is denying any moral distinction between acts, trumped by the action or inaction of the will.

Basically, anyone who's calling Heinlein a fascist for that really has to call William Gibson one, too—after all, his characters dismantle the things that stand in the way of their will-to-power, don't they? Once having identified that as the fascistical element in Heinlein, a person capable of synthesizing their disparate items of knowledge would notice something. Namely, everything that informs whole swaths of modern culture is the same thing. How many discussions of morality, drugs or sex for instance, are simply cut off with the invocation of "two consenting adults"? Law, economics, "you don't like it, don't watch it": everything you hold most holy and sacred, whether right or left, red or blue, north or south, is held hostage that very same Wille zur Macht.

Forgive me, I read old books; but I was not aware "popular sovereignty" was supposed to mean "everyone is an unquestionable autocrat."

Happy Media

Essentially a random thoughts post, but mostly about film and TV.

• So Big Hollywood's talking about the Oscar nominees, and, uh, 'parently, "Black Swan" just took an anime dream sequence and stretched it out to feature length. Complete with yuri scenes!
  
  Also, some idiot talking about The King's Speech was saying that a King of England is an inherently unsympathetic character. Not only did this idiot seem to think kings are rich (which hasn't been the case since the Reformation), but he also chants his tribal dogmas about not judging people by their ancestry (which isn't even how monarchies work). Leaving to one side that the current English dynasty's ancestry isn't prestigious at all—the Hanoverians were a bunch of halfwit German squires brought in because they'd take orders—the inherently Stalinist nature of all ideology, even classical liberalism, reared its ugly head. It's the same mentality that lets columnists jeer at Nicholas II, when they'd trip over themselves to heap praise on any other murder victim whose last days were marked by such saintly serenity (and whose worst flaw was being a bit of a ditz). But they can't do that; they have to hate him just for being a king. At the mere sight of a crown, they transform into Che Guevara, keeping their hatred alive and fanning it to paroxysms.
  
  What's really horrible is, their unintelligent, kneejerk demagoguery has forced me to defend the Hanoverian kings of England, a bad dynasty of a worse country.


• On a related note, I've read four or five conservative columnists who say that Jeb Bush would be an excellent candidate, but they won't nominate him because they don't want to be founding any dynasties. Leaving to one side that it hasn't exactly stopped the Kennedies, and whether you think Jeb would be any good or not (or would have a chance), that's completely retarded. There's a name for the thought process involved—we have a good option but we can't follow it because of something irrational—and it's called a taboo. It's mostly associated with people who believe drowning can only be caused by witches.


• Back on track, Star Driver has, I think, the best protagonist in anything. Despite his borderline harem situation, and his showy mannerisms, Takuto actually has reactions to girls other than "dumb horny monkey", but also manages to avoid Tenchi's "generic nice guy"-ness. I was not aware one could write a character that believable.
  
  Pro tip, watch it again after you get partway through, and it'll make a lot more sense.


• So there's a series called "Houkago no Pleiades", which is a magical girl show...licensed by Subaru (which is the Japanese name for the Pleiades).
  
  Is that weird to anyone else?


• The Pleiades is known as the Hard Flint Boys in Navajo; apparently anime is quite popular on the rez. So you gotta wonder, how do they—for whom incest is identical with Satanism—react to little-sister moe?


• I recently watched the beginning of Johnny Mnemonic, which is apparently mainly enjoyed as a "So Bad It's Good"/"good-bad"/"differently good" movie. Is it just me, or is that opening scroll just about the most overwrought thing ever written? And the paragraph about the disease really breaks up the flow of ideas; it's just awful.
  
  Also, that "They'll negotiate, they're corporate", "So are the yakuza", exchange? Was that supposed to be meaningful? 'Cause the yakuza really will negotiate, they're downright reasonable as organized crime groups go.
  
  Have any of those Asian-American groups ever noticed the absolute grotesquery of Orientalism that is cyberpunk? 'Cause even in the books the bad movies are based on, that stuff is all over the place.


• Another example of how William Gibson is a waste of space would be his essay on Singapore, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". Basically, he's correct that Singapore is excessively controlled and organized, but then he goes too far. A lack of bohemianism or slums is not a bad thing, Gibson, and neither is the Kowloon slum of Hong Kong preferable to Singapore in any way.
  
  One suspects a false dichotomy is at work here: excess of order is bad, therefore I'll prefer anarchy and squalor. No, no, no. Failure can occur either by excess or by defect; too little order and control is just as bad as too much.
  
  I am continuously brought to tears by people's ignorance of the obvious.

Sur la Scène Passante

Things I've seen. Maybe that you people wouldn't believe? I don't know.

• Apparently a Marine general, James Mattis, in Iraq, would say to the local leadership of whatever area his guys were deployed, "I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all."
  
  That, ladies and gentlemen, is the single finest piece of discourse our species has ever produced. I didn't even excise the F-word: it's fundamental to the work, like the nudity in a Neoclassical painting. That is the summary of all rational defense policy, probably of all foreign policy period.


• I occasionally refer to my attitude toward the fallacy-spewers who pass for our thinkers nowadays as contempt, but that's probably not the word. I found a more appropriate word in a Belloc book: disdain. I hold such idiots in disdain, not contempt, for their ideas a six-year-old could see through and the fact they know no more of basic facts than do the beasts that perish.


• Tycho Brahe has occasionally inveighed against the mentioning of violent video games in connection with various crimes, and it's hard not to agree with him. Personally, though, I want the culture at large to see video games as a normal facet of behavior, so if a crime really does have a connection to games, we can talk about it.
  
  In my ideal world, you'd turn on the news and the murderer's former roommate would be saying, "Yeah, I knew that guy was messed up, 'cause he preferred harvesting the Little Sisters, in Bioshock, and he liked the Brutes better than the Elites."


• How come people think it's a rational position to believe that war is inherently evil? 'Cause, see, eventually, everyone has to acknowledge that war is sometimes unavoidable. People who believe war is inherently evil—like, just off the top of my head, Marxists, Neo-Confucians, and various kinds of Anglophone Jingo—do far worse things when they're at war, because they believe the war itself is already evil.
  
  Not only does such a belief open one to rationalizations like "I'm already committing the evil of war, I might as well loot, rape, and massacre, too", but it also leads to the far worse idea, "Any evil we commit, if it shortens the war, is actually good." Read some quotes by William Tecumseh Sherman if you don't believe me.


• Another example of "it's fine because it made the war shorter" consequentialism would be the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The issue is more complex than it's generally considered, since Japanese wartime manufacturing was largely a cottage industry (therefore it's very hard to distinguish "civilian" and "military" targets), but "it saved lots of lives on both sides" is not a legitimate argument. Cowing Chinese resistance by the atrocities at Nanking might've saved a lot of lives (and that verbal mood is called "irrealis" for a reason); that doesn't make it right.
  
  Personally, what I would've done with the nukes, is say, "On (whatever day, time), be observing (some uninhabited location where Japan could put military observers)." Then I'd nuke that, and say, "Surrender or your asses are next."


• Know what's funny? When modern "pagans" say "If it harm none, do as thou wilt", they are actually paraphrasing a Christian poet, Rabelais. The Rule of the "Monastery" of Thelema is "'Do as thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law, but keep ye to honor." In plain English, "Do whatever you want, since we're presuming you were raised right."
  
  Which is fine for a monastery—made up of and freely entered by adults. Not so great as a basis for a society, and "metastable helium in the birthday balloons" level stupid in child-rearing. But Rabelais wasn't trying to set up a new religion anyway; he died at least as firmly in the Faith as Pascal did.
  
  Funny varmints, humans, that Rabelais and the borderline-Puritan Pascal are both not only the same religion, they're from the same country.


• It makes sense for materialists to be individualist, of course—and as I mentioned, Marxist "dialectical materialism" actually isn't, it's actually naturalist Platonism. Anyway individualism is a form of philosophical atomism—it denies the reality of groups, and asserts that only the unit (one person) is real. Just because its atom is a bit larger doesn't actually make it any different from Lucretius.
  
  So, then, why do so many modern thinkers who rightly sneer at materialism, assert the doctrine of the atomized individual? As far as I can tell it's just from force of habit, coming from Protestant cultures.
  
  Sigh. I'm going to go over here and pretend anyone else is intellectually consistent.


• Oh wait, Buddhism exists! So there's at least a few other intellectually consistent people. Buddha's doctrine of anatman, roughly similar to the Panta Rhei of Heraclitus, denies the reality of what we'd call Formal Parts, the permanent identity of things. It arises from the doctrine of metempsychosis. The Mahayana doctrine of advaita, Non-Duality, arose as a way out of the infinite regress all denial of Forms causes, by asserting that only the Dharmakaya, the Monad of the Platonists (and therefore also the Christian God), is real.


• Did you know that that idea, a denial of permanent identity arising from the doctrine of metempsychosis, is shared by most of North India's thought? And did you know that it's why I became a Thomist?
  
  It's true. I was arguing with, I kid you not, a Hare Krishna, on the campus of Northern Arizona University. He was saying that you're not only reincarnated after you die, but continually inhabit different bodies, since your particles are always being traded out for new ones, in a little thing called "metabolism". I wished to assert that nevertheless there is a continuity of identity, and remembered Aquinas' definition of Transubstantiation. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Dark Fantasy

I think I might need to take a bit of a break from science fiction, at least in some aspect of my life. Maybe it's just because Kore wa Zombie Desuka is so brilliant I've lost my eyes, but I thought I'd give some thought to the creatures of the night.

So my dad was watching "Being Human", and, um...am I the only one who remembers when shows about vampires and werewolves involved things happening? I mean, when a Joss Whedon show is less talky and angsty than yours is, just...wow, really. It's weird, actually, because in my own books the vampires are actually animated by angst (well, by vaskania, resentment considered-as-a-pollution, AKA the Evil Eye). But they know, at least, that they're a calamitous existence—they are the curse they've laid on the world. They don't whine about being "turned", because they turned themselves—also they don't have "sires", so their society is a pure Social Contract, with none of the relations that exist even in the state of nature, like family.

Also, werewolves. What's with this Larry Talbot crap? That's not from any real legends! Real werewolves are either placed under a specific curse, or they deliberately took on the power themselves. I deny categorically that they or vampires were metaphors for sex in the first place; how much less, then, is it legitimate to have this heavy-handed "safe sex" metaphor?

Which reminds me, RE: werewolves and sex (I wouldn't Google that, no sirree), what's with them always being sluts, male or female? Um, wolves have a complex, but more-or-less monogamous, breeding structure. I know halfwit screenwriters think "animal=lusting all the time", but maybe a little basic knowledge of biology? How about have female werewolves completely lose their sex-drive, except during wolf mating-season? They're not were-bonobos!

Basically, you need to think about wolf instincts. I think the slutty werewolves are an error by the writers (I know White Wolf does this): they assume that a werewolf's "animal" nature means not being able to suppress human instincts. But why would it? I mean, admittedly, both humans and wolves being pack hunters, there's a lot of overlap, but among wolves, the alpha-female ensures that no non-dominant females get to breed, and none of the non-dominant males even try. Those are not hominid behaviors. They are human behaviors, interestingly—one could make a case that human couples are transitioning from silverback and harem to alpha pairs—but that's just more argument for werewolves not behaving at all like they're usually portrayed.

Not, of course, that they should act like the weird Pern-dragon "Impressing" thing, like in Twilight. There's a middle ground; in my book, for instance, werewolves just tend to be a bit clingy (as the vampire-hunting priest puts it, "instant ball and chain"). Even then, human reason trumps everything; the main werewolf character is pretty shy, to the point where his girlfriend's hobby is making him blush. Still, though, even then, his shyness, and indeed most of his personality, is wolfish; he's a sweet kid (the priest habitually calls him "puppy") but he has a little bit of a bullying streak, and he doesn't like to be pushed around by people he perceives as peers. Dogs, remember, are hierarchical.

As for vampires, why, why, why don't people understand that they're ghosts? The ones in legend don't really have any more personality than the things in The Grudge; even if you're going to give them more personality you're going to have to remember that they're only here at all because something horrible happened. To me it's kinda fun: every single bad guy in a dark fantasy book is a brooding, world-hating Legato Bluesummers, Gaara, Sephiroth, Kefka, Seymour (huh, kinda a theme with FF) type of villain. The hard part of villains, for me, is not "why are they opposed to the hero", but "why are they a villain in the first place"? That'll give you an idea of what they want, that'll naturally set them up to oppose your hero. Plus, "resentment is a physiological function for him, he has to hate like you have to breathe" is interesting from a worldbuilding perspective. Lots of people's "vampire politics" revolve around hunting territory, and certainly that'd be a factor, but it's even more interesting to come up with systems for vampires to cope with the fact "grudges" are basically what they are.

I have a scene in my second book where this little girl vampire explains that you have to kill enemy minions who cross you, because if you don't, your own men will remember it, and resent it, whenever you have to discipline them. During a fight with another (vastly worse) vampire, she points out: do not, whatever else you do, become the thing a vampire resents most. Basically, every vampire has to walk a delicate balance between acting out his resentments, and getting other vampires to resent him; one false step and he'll just be making his enemies stronger, since, again, resentment is to vampires what badassness is for the Gurren Dan.

A New Policy

I've decided not to waste another word on Objectivists; it's just unproductive and the source of much bitterness in an already basic (and yet also acid) personality.

In the words of the atheist Tycho Brahe, "these are the people Jesus was talking about". So all I'll say is, "Pray they wake up to how stupid they are."

Deh...ah...wha?

Just a small sample of the incredulous noises I make upon discovering people who need a Reality Check bad. Thus do I refute thee!

• So I came across a forum thread asking whether River in Firefly is a Mary Sue. And someone said, "I've come to hate the term Mary Sue, because most of the time it just means a female character who's good at something."
  
  Get off your high horse, buttercup, a Mary Sue is a female character who's good at everything. You know, like ridiculously badly-choreographed fight scenes where ballerinas knock around Adam Baldwin and bad guys from Judge Dredd? And compute astrophysics probabilities in their heads. And, oh yeah, read minds. Without a word of explanation.
  
  Certainly not all female characters who are good at things are Sues. Kat, for instance, in Reach: she's a SIGINT operative. And a sodding Spartan. But that's it, more-than-enough though it is (I still say her death makes no damn sense; she should've had a shield, or else they should've shown that glassing beams knock them down). Or Teela Brown, in Ringworld—a shallow hack like Whedon could never write a character like Teela, because to him, the Teela gene (psionic luck) looks like a Sue. Only, Niven having actual talent for something other than wisecracks and angst, he shows how being lucky all the time can actually suck—see also xxxHolic, and indeed every worldview that incorporates the idea of the Evil Eye.
  
  Every damn one of Whedon's female characters is a Sue. Inara is Sexy Sue, Kaylee is the Sue Next Door and Inventor Sue, Zoe (and Buffy) is Action Sue, and River is Action Sue combined with Wacky Sue (gah, what an ass-lancing word!) combined with Psychic Sue combined with Tortured Sue. Oddly enough, though River is so many different kinds of Sue, she's not the worst one; that'd be Kaylee. Understand that I've had a crush on Jewel Staite since Space Cases, and as a member of the Irish diaspora I hold a grudge against people who use the threat of rape as a weapon. Nevertheless, Whedon is so clumsy a writer that I cannot help but root for Jubal Early in "Objects in Space": that makes those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads (that managed to make Microsoft look like an underdog) look like evil mastermind propaganda; they rock that Victor von Doom-in-Latveria shit by comparison.


• So Objectivists, in yet another example of their being born slaves, hold that force is intrinsically evil, only to be used in self-defense—but once it's called for, anything goes. As Rand said, "Morality ends where the gun begins"; see also Terry Goodkind's gleeful depiction of slaughtering pacifists. This is not the attitude of people with a mature attitude toward force: it is the attitude of moral and physical cowards. Also, when debating Objectivists on the Internet, don't be surprised if they at some point say something like "try and make me". It's the fundamental war-cry of all little bitches who talk a big game in cyberspace but submissively urinate at the first raised voice in person.
  
  But what gets me is the hypocrisy of it. Basically, Objectivists know they're contemptible little weaklings; but, their whole movement being predicated on monstrous egotism—they actually believe humility, even merely being able to laugh at yourself, is evil—they can't be ashamed of it, like actual humans. So they rule that force, the form of power they lack, is immoral. Uh, gee, isn't that exactly how Rand describes Socialists' attitudes toward property? "I don't have that power you have, therefore that power is bad and off-limits". If it was wealth and not "ability to use force", you'd be the first to talk about envy being an invalid basis for morals. Also, there's far less element of chance in the ability to fight than in commercial success.


• Not really a reality check but something interesting, not only might Objectivists and Marxists be described as atheist (and retarded, especially in the former case) versions of Aristotelianism and Platonism, respectively, but they're also the atheist versions of Calvinism and Lutheranism. Basically Objectivists believe that they are the Elect; I dare anyone to find a single policy position the Objectivists don't share with Oliver Cromwell, other than that he had sense enough to oppose adultery, abortion, and pornography. Ditto Marx: the Marxist theory of morals vis-a-vis the class war can be summed up as, "Sin, and sin boldly, but only have faith in the coming worker's paradise and it shall be forgiven you." Luther was a Platonist, come to think of it, and unremittingly hostile to Aquinas (he was an Augustinian, and they never forgave the Doctor for dethroning Augustine).


• So apparently it's supposed to be very racist and horrible, that Philip Sheridan put a bounty on buffaloes, to thin out the herds and force the Indians to be dependent on government rations, for which they had to stay on their reservations. Only, the Indians in question were the Sioux and the Comanche, or, in other words, Land Vikings and fricking Orcs.
  
  See, the incredibly horrible things the Comanche did to captives, especially women and children, were a calculated, asymmetrical-tactics terror campaign. And Sheridan showed admirable restraint, in that his only response was to attack their supply lines—basically the hunter-gatherer equivalent of an embargo. Know what Romanians or Balkan Slavs would've done to them? Hint, it involves red-hot crowns and thrones, and various imaginative uses of sharpened stakes. Yeah, an embargo sucks for the noncombatants, but maybe they shouldn't have based their whole economy on armed robbery aggravated by gang-rape and torture.
  
  To be fair to the Sioux, their occasional forays into war-rape and infanticide were, apparently, mostly due to poor discipline; when there were old men around, the young men usually behaved themselves. They were at their worst during the Dakota War of 1864, and starving people's discipline isn't generally tip-top. That's not the case for the Comanche; raping and torturing captives was a part of their discipline—indeed, it wasn't even "enhanced interrogation", it was the Army Field Handbook.


• So I got Orson Scott Card's book about writing SF and fantasy. Oddly, I don't really like the things he writes, but he writes very well about writing. "Those who can't do, teach", maybe? It is very nice for him that he's won both the Hugo and Nebula twice, though—and being a Mormon and dealing with SF fans has gotta take cojones made from General Products hull.
  
  But in that book he says that H. G. Wells was more serious about his uses of science than Jules Verne. That is the exact opposite of the truth, it is a message from a mirror universe. Presumably one where Verne is clean-shaven.
  
  Late addendum: he also says Verne never seems to see a downside to technological progress. Or, alternatively, he simply chose not to write about it (indeed, he rewrote several of his early stories to have happy endings—"irrational optimism" is considered redundant in France, after all). Do you really think someone whose country shares a border with Germany can't see a downside to tech? That's very, very cute. Also, Nemo and Robur the Conqueror are crazy terrorists, I think that's a downside.


• Finally, and just in general: any argument you make about the early Church, that does not take into account that the first part of the New Testament committed to writing was the Epistles of Paul, is automatically void. The order they go in the book is not chronological, and the Gospels were basically written as "here's more detail on Jesus who Paul preaches".

On the Passing Scene IV

Ah Mr. Sowell, thanks again for the title.

• So, seriously, what's with people who mention "the peasants" in connection with the French Revolution? The Revolution happened because the reforms being passed by the États Généraux gave the right to vote to clergy, nobles, and peasants—but specifically not to urban professionals. Like Marat and Danton and Robespierre and St. Just and the rest of them.
  
  See, the reforms were predicated on the idea that the most important type of property—the kind that determines one's role in the state—was land. It was already becoming industrial and intellectual capital, hence the urban professionals' anger.


• Speaking of crap you don't know about French Liberalism, Rousseau, in Contrat Social, says, "The society can only function where all possess, and none possess too much." What's funny to me is, both left- and right-wing people, being apparently totally illiterate, interpret that as meaning he was advocating redistributionist policies. Never mind that it's blatantly obvious, at least if you can spell Rousseau on your first try, that he'd consider the state presuming the right to distribute private citizens' wealth to other citizens as rendering the contract void—"the state screws you to benefit others" is pretty much his definition of "breech of social contract".
  
  What Rousseau was saying was, both the destitute and the super-rich have no stake in society—the destitute because they have nothing to lose, and the super-rich because they can buy everything they'd want, even in the state of nature, without the contract's protections. Is anyone really concerned to deny this?


• So apparently it's common for anime fans, or at least people who write about anime, to like Yoko Kanno and dislike Yuki Kajiura. Only, what? Yoko Kanno is just the same BS experimentalism I can get from anyone doing music here; Yuki Kajiura not only, y' know, sounds Japanese, she has a recognizable style. I'm sorry if music that merely sounds appropriate to fantasy settings, with sweeping grandeur and a vaguely mystical choral sound, offends you; maybe you'd like more children singing in made-up languages that sound sort of like French? Oh, and Middle Eastern cultural appropriation! That's cool too.
  
  Some of the actual jazz in BeBop is okay, but otherwise, Yoko Kanno is the second worst Yoko ever involved in music. And you know who the first one is.


• So if you needed any further evidence that Paul Verhoeven is absolutely worthless—in every aspect of his life, probably, but as a filmmaker certainly—you couldn't do much better than noticing what's missing from Starship Troopers. Namely, powered armor. Not just powered armor, actually, as the term is currently used, but mecha. I have heard that Verhoeven did not, in fact, read the book. Anyone who thinks Starship Troopers is the Heinlein book that deserves to be mocked—rather than, say, For Us the Living or Stranger in a Strange Land—ought to be fitted with a brass collar and made the slave he was born to be. Plus, Dutch people don't get to disapprove of American militarism. I think it would be an appropriate punishment if Verhoeven was forced to live under the laws and mores of the freaking Nazis who'd still be ruling his country if not for American militarism.
  
  Also, Robocop: again, Verhoeven, in order to satirize something you have to actually have a passing acquaintance with it. And I can see no evidence that you have any acquaintance with any of the aspects of American society you claim Robocop is a satire of. More to the point, though your attempt in that regard was a failure, American society can be satirized. Dutch society? Please, it's like mocking a clown.


• Boy, this is a mean one, huh? Hm. Something positive...something positive...oh, how 'bout this? Know what part of the British Empire/Commonwealth has the most Victoria Cross recipients? To the point where, upon discovering their opposition would be troops from this country, the SS—not just normal German soldiers but the honest-to-God Schutzstaffel—had trouble with desertion?
  
  Canada. Just another example of how the popular image of a people may not be correct.


• Or how about this? Know what country has the longest reigning sovereign in history? It's not the one you're thinking of, whatever it is. The answer is, Hungary. Why? Because in the Hungarian monarchy, the Holy Crown of St. Stephen is the sovereign, and the monarch is merely the representative of the nation, before the divine power the crown represents. It ruled from c. 1000 to...probably the crowning of Maria Theresa's idiot son Joseph as Holy Roman Emperor.
  
  A lot of people writing about the Doctrine of the Holy Crown contrast it with the medieval conception of kingship to the disadvantage of the latter, but if you actually read medieval writings on kingship, for instance Aquinas' "On Kingship", the concepts are fundamentally the same. The only real superiority of the Holy Crown idea is it's much harder to muddy up with feudalism (the holdover from the Dark Ages) or absolutism (the resurrected concept from ancient Rome).
  
  Of course, if you actually think anyone in the Middle Ages believed in the Divine Right of Kings, you lose the right to talk anymore.


• So Ayn Rand is an "Aristotelian"—you always have to use the quotes, though, because she had about as much regard for real Aristotelianism as Cromwell had for the English monarchy. But you know something? Marx is a Platonist. A much better Platonist than Rand is an Aristotelian, not that that's much of a challenge.
  
  Marxist philosophy is "dialectical materialism", but that's a misnomer; it's not materialist as we usually mean the word (just as Dvaita Hinduism is not dualism as we usually mean the word). It's "materialist" only to the extent it restricts itself to material explanations, just like Objectivists, Stoics, Neo-Confucians, and most Existentialists do. A more accurate name for Marxist philosophy would be "naturalist Platonism", forgetting for the moment that restricting "natural" to mean "physical" means you're an idiot.
  
  Marxism is fundamentally Platonist in being hyperrealism: hence, class. The individual, in Marxist thought, is merely an imperfect reflection of his class-traits. Know what you get when you combine hyperrealism with an esoteric liberation narrative, which Marxism emphatically is? Neo-Platonism. Or Marxism.
  
  Marxism, being hyperrealist, is much better Platonism than Objectivism is Aristotle, because Rand seems to think you can avoid making a form-matter distinction. If a philosopher is not a mitigated realist, though, what right do they have to claim to be a follower of Aristotle? None whatsoever, that's what.
  
  Also, anyone who's ever talked to or read Objectivists in any quantity (my sympathies) can tell you, they're far more Gnostic—preening that they're in an inner circle, morally and intellectually superior to the uninitiated, to whom they owe no duty of compassion or aid—than any Marxist, even a Stalinist. Hence Rand's appeal to high school kids, shared with every other kind of Gnostic.


• Talk of Gnostics reminds me, you know the Cathars? Whole bunches of idiots try and show that the Albigensian Crusade was so terrible; as if the Cathars weren't a psychotic, world-destroying death cult. Americans think the Civil War was justified? Slavery was nothing on the Cathars.
  
  Imagine, if you will, that most of the legislature of some state—Alaska or California, pick whichever one you hate more—had adopted some kooky religion wherein marriage and childbearing would be completely illegal, and all contracts would be rendered void. Also giving food to beggars would be a crime, unless they were themselves members of that religion. Oh, and then that religion conspires to poison a federal agent. Do you really think there wouldn't be a war?
  
  That's the Cathars, folks.


• Late Addendum: So to end on a positive note, for real this time, how the hell did I forget Gosick, when I was talking about this season's anime? Leaving to one side that it is a physical impossibility that people in a Mediterranean republic would be even slightly unacquainted with black hair and eyes, it's awesome. Most specifically, Art Nouveau opening credits for the win.

On Fictitious Equipage

So I was thinking about the gear in SF books, and how monumentally lame a lot of it is. Why don't people do more work on that? Firefly's an egregious offender, in that every single property either looks like something from the 1880s, or from the late 1990s—though I'd expect the guns to look more like the Kalashnikov, wouldn't you, given their social structure?

Anyway.

• So remember when I said the assault rifles in my setting might use the "blowback-shifted pulse" system of the AN-94? Turns out, no, they probably wouldn't; the AN-94 is only issued to the elite of the elite, because it's a monster to maintain and clean. That's pretty much anathema to the Kalashnikov design philosophy ("a gun even a semi-illiterate, oft-brutalized conscript can use, even if his monstrously incompetent, irretrievably corrupt superiors skimp on his training").
  
  But there's hope: the Balanced Automatic Recoil System of the AK-107. Basically it has a second gas piston, that goes forward when the other goes back, and balances out the recoil and muzzle jump. It was developed by a guy named Alexandrov (whose name is the A in AK-107, instead of Avtomat), but originally conceived by a gent named Tkachev (a Georgian, I think, since even Slavs don't think T and K can go together like that).
  
  Maybe the Marines in my setting will use Blowback-Shifted Pulse in their Stoner-type rifles. It's a bit more in line with the AR-series philosophy ("even if you are a conscript, like in Nam, you're a citizen, and you damn well better know what you're doing").


• I might have to rewrite something. Before, the humans in my book sometimes used bullets made of crystallized tranquilizer, à la the "mercy bullets" in Niven; the aliens used what were essentially paintballs full of contact-vector tranquilizer. So, yeah, you had to load differently depending on whether you were fighting an alien, or your own species.
  
  But that was before I found out about Leyden balls. Basically, it's a little spherical Leyden bottle shot out of a gun by compressed air (a system like this). So I think now, both species are going to use special electric-stunner rounds; the two species are roughly the same size, so one wouldn't need drastically different loads.
  
  Incidentally, isn't Verne awesome? Tiny round Leyden bottles fired from a Girandoni air rifle: that's what I want in science fiction, dammit! It's probably easy to read too much into the fact that hard science fiction was invented by a French Catholic, and soft science fiction by a British atheist—who was also a eugenicist socialist—but it's still fun to point out.


• So leaving to one side that everything Transhuman SF is based on is logically impossible—between "Post-Scarcity" and AI, they live in a fantasy world—they seem to be unacquainted with people. More-so than usual for SF fans/writers, I mean, and that's already a hole with no bottom.
  
  Do they really think, for instance, that it's more likely that people will get phones and computers surgically implanted, than that everyone will simply carry around handhelds? I mean, sure, a 24th-century Pacemaker is probably going to be a nanomachine injection, but absent need, will people really get surgical implants? Put aside your fetishes—yeah, I've seen Sorayama's "Gynoid" pinups too, thanks—and answer honestly. The answer of course is no, not when they could get all the same functionality from a cheaper, more convenient, and more replaceable cell phone.


• So is it weird, that one of the Japanese spies in my book, being a woman, carries around several lipstick-weapons? One is the KGB lipstick-gun from Metal Gear Solid 3 (which I believe is real); another is the polymer-lipstick from Kiddy Grade, though she only uses it for garrotes, not a full-length whip. It's cute and girly, without being bizarre, and it makes sense for a spy.
  
  Actually the gunrunner's wife (who's also a gunrunner, actually) carries one of those lipstick guns...and a belt-buckle gun...and maybe guns in her heels, like Bayonetta (and Ray, from GunXSword). Because, you know, why not? She also has a shotgun taped to the underside of her kitchen table, but loaded with 10-gauge grenades. It's really just not a good idea to mess with gunrunners.


• Thought of 10-gauge grenades reminds me, the Hague Convention is going to go by the wayside in the future. Its ban on hollow-points was stupid anyway—the stats say hollow-points are less lethal, not more, since they only leave entry wounds, and the main way you die from a gunshot is bleeding out. Besides, low-caliber spitzer bullets are better against body armor, and if they tumble in tissue, like 5.56 NATO does, they're actually more traumatic than the average hollow-point.
  
  That to one side, though, that ban on explosives under 400 grams—which actually was in the older St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, but it's usually discussed under the heading of the Hague Convention—is just not going to cut it, against the kind of armor we're going to be fielding pretty soon. Also, do things like the 40 mm grenades we use in grenade launchers violate it? 'Cause apparently those weigh 230 grams. Maybe the grenade launcher counts as one of those cannons that was exempted? And, of course, it's stupid to distinguish between grenades thrown by hand and grenades launched from firearms.


• Which is not to say, as Germans have historically been fond of saying, that "treaties are just pieces of paper". It is to say that treaties really ought to be realistic. I can see trying to limit things that make wounds untreatable, like poisoned bullets or those things that explode when medics start treating their victims, but if we're allowing big bombs, we should allow small ones. High-explosive rounds will be expensive enough that they'll still mainly be used against armor, rather than infantry, just as they are now (HESH and HEAT rounds are, apparently, in a legally questionable area, though).
  
  Besides, when the Germans introduced mustard gas to the battlefields of World War I, do you know what their rationale was (since it violated a treaty)? "Oh, well, since bullets are propelled by expanding gas, everyone already uses gas to kill people." But the Allies were just as bad as the Germans, because...we need that to be true, so we don't feel bad about Wilson and the Brits trying to let them off the hook after the war (and thereby causing the second one).


• So one thing I have in my book that I'm quit proud of is, all the prepackaged drinks come in bottles with recloseable straws. Why? Because the story takes place in space colonies (most of them on planets, though), and that's what drink containers are, on spaceships. Even with artificial gravity, probably; it's probably a bad idea to risk screwing something up with a spill.


• I forgot, so I apologize to those who read this during the, what, half-hour or so that it was up, but I came up with a little difference for how my aliens carry their long guns. Remember how I said their "rifle" resembles a Henry 1860? Yeah, well, the Henry rifle is almost exactly the same length as the M1840 cavalry saber. So, why not have them carry their "rifles" in scabbards? There is such a thing as a rifle scabbard, after all.
  
  An interesting side-effect is, even riflemen can cultivate a quick-draw art; anyone heard of iaido?

Fonts!

So I actually read one of the things Blogger sends you about itself, and there's a whole bunch of fonts available now. I decided to go with Consolas and Inconsolata, since they captured a similar feel to the old look...without being Courier. People look down on Comic Sans, when Courier exists? I'm pretty sure we all bought computers precisely to escape that particular typeface.

Speaking of, how come it's so hard to find fonts with the Latin Expanded unicode subrange? I have dialogue in Czech and Romanian, people, is it too much to ask that it be in the same font as the rest of the letters? Oh, and screw you, China, for using a diacritic in pinyin's tone-marks that's damned hard to find. Even if it wasn't easier to pronounce, I'd probably like Cantonese just for the fact its only tone marks (other than the macron, which is basically omissable in Standard Cantonese) are "á" and "à". Yeah, I use Yale Romanization; aside from Jyutping's deliberately obscure phonics (Jyutping is pronounced Yutping), writing a number after every syllable looks retarded.

Also, there is no excuse—none whatsoever—in this day and age, for any font not to code Greek and Cyrillic. Again, these things ain't typewriters, you don't have to stick on new keys, and those two alphabets work just like ours.

Maybe everything wouldn't be written in Times New Roman if other fonts had half the language support it does—Hebrew and Arabic, too, come to think of it.

Check Please!

Reality Check! Because people are idiots.

• So some schmucks were, for various reasons, snagging loogies at the idea that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." One was, "Law-abiding gun-owners will fight to retain their weapons." Historically, no, no they haven't. Europe exists, you know, you may've wanted to examine the history of gun control there—especially Germany, which was rifleman central pretty much since the things were invented. Now, not so much, though its gun laws are pretty loose for Western Europe (so are Scandinavia's).
  
  But the others were apparently skeptical that outlawing guns won't keep them out of the hands of criminals. Again, the rest of the world exists. Japan is the only country I can think of where gun control works as advertised, but that's for two reasons: Japan's prisons are horrible, and the yakuza, who have guns, take a dim view of non-member violent criminals. But both Australia and the UK have seen violent crime, including with guns, skyrocket since their gun bans—though immigration and the illegalization of self-defense may also be factors, in that second one. What do I mean? In the UK, if you defend yourself with, say, a kitchen knife, you can be charged with assault. Also, if someone attacks you, you're taught to shout "call the police" instead of "help". That's so stupid I can't even feel Schadenfreud, and it's British people it's happening to!


• I don't know if I mentioned this, but, Teflon-coated bullets: does anyone actually still think they'll go through police Kevlar vests? Because they won't. Bullets are coated in Teflon for the same reason full metal jacket bullets are coated in metal: to keep them from shredding in the barrel, and fouling it with bits of lead. Gun barrels, after all, are much harder than lead.
  
  Someone else who was writing on the topic pointed out that ordinary rifle rounds will go through a police vest quite easily. So why do police use the vests? Because less than 1% of crimes are committed with rifles. That includes the weapons covered by the "assault weapons" ban, yet another reason it was stupid.


• A third note about guns, so this dude said something about "31-round clips" and "is suburban America under siege from rogue elephants and nobody told me about it?"
  
  Isn't it cute? Aside from "magazine, not clip", or the fact the magazines (of assault rifles, submachine guns, and Lugers with snail-shell magazines) are 30 rounds (31 being one in the chamber, maybe?), "rogue elephants" was funny to me. I don't know of any popular self-defense round that'll work on elephants, do you? .44 Magnum isn't even very popular for defense, and it's barely adequate for grizzlies. Either this dude was overrating the power of self-defense rounds, or underrating the toughness of large animals—or he suffers from the delusion .454 Casull is popular for self-defense.
  
  Speaking of, grizzlies' hearts, even when they're mad, apparently beat once every second and a half—so even if you shoot one, it won't bleed out in time to save you. Permit me to recommend a shotgun, with either buckshot or slugs.


• The same dude, elsewhere, said that demand for drugs has been "constant since the beginning of mammal evolution tens of millions of years ago", and that therefore we should legalize them.
  
  Again, let's leave to one side that the Mammalia appeared hundreds of millions of years ago (they are in fact slightly older than the Dinosauria, I believe); apparently this jackass cannot be bothered to look up the history of drug trafficking. The Crack Cocaine Epidemic of the 80s and 90s, anyone? It was Acid in the 60s and 70s; heroin came back in the mid-90s (though not to the extent the guy in Pulp Fiction claimed); currently the drug is meth, which was the big one in Asia in the 70s and 80s. Marijuana has probably been relatively constant, but pot's not really a money crop like the others are.
  
  Pretty sad, huh? I'm hardly Mr. Drug Guy, from the use or enforcement angle, but even I know that different drugs, and drugs in general, have waxed and waned in demand within various markets.


• A third point from this idiot—people like this are like alcohol poisoning, the rock-bottom I hit to recover from my periodic bouts of internet-forum addiction—was about a case where a UK couple, who owned a bed and breakfast, didn't want to give one of their couples' rooms to a gay couple, for religious reasons. And said jackass said that Christians only want their own religion to get special treatment, "like Islam in Saudi Arabia".
  
  That's not just stupid, it's evil—it's outright Orwellian! "Arguing that Christians should not have to violate their conscience is exactly like saying that non-Muslims should have to violate theirs." War is Peace. Love is Hate. Down with Emmanuel Goldstein!
  
  Truly, in the words of Tycho Brahe, the discourse is a shit spigot with the valve snapped off.


• Said imbecile calls himself a pagan, which reminds me: do modern "pagans" own books? Because they sure seem to be a bunch of Liberal Protestants to me. They talk a lot of pretty stuff about individuality and freedom and "if you harm none, do as you will". All of it rather inoffensive, if uninspiring—but not pagan in the slightest.
  
  Individuality isn't really a pagan thing; the Spartans were outright Stalinists and all the others were Fascists. Manlius killing his son for dueling against orders? Yeah, not real individualist, the pagans. The city, or the tribe, was everything; then came the clan, and it, too, was everything, that's why letting oneself be sold into slavery for one's parents' debts was seen as filial piety. I'm curious, how many of these pagans know that their father, according to their religion, has the right to kill them for any reason, until he dies?
  
  Another one, who my sisters debated in vain on a different forum, has two mommies, as they say: does she know that in the entire European pagan tradition, she hasn't got a family? Households exist only where there are men, in paganism; someone might want to show her the kinship terminology of Indo-European languages.
  
  Does anyone else think it's a laugh riot that they actually think they're more feminist than Christianity?


• Speaking of people whose opinions about religion aren't just idiotic, they're actually invalid, you know all those people who try to prove Christianity is evil, from the Old Testament? Has anyone ever pointed out that the only cause they're serving is anti-Semitism? 'Cause Christians—all orthodox Christians, and the vast majority of Protestants—do not consider themselves bound by the precepts contained in the Tanakh. If you want to show that the people who get their morals from the Law and the Prophets are evil, the only reasonable result is to hate Jews, not Christians.
  
  But even so, evil compared to whom? Contrast the marriage by capture rules in the Torah with the ones among Vikings, or Native Americans. I mean, know how many ancient cultures didn't think you had sexual rights to your slaves? Exactly one: Jews. Sure, it was more about avoiding adultery than about the slave's rights, but if I'm a slave-girl and it's against the rules to rape me, do you think I care why?
  
  Context is everything—funny how people who went to school and learned Post-Modernism always forget that principle when it's actually relevant.