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.

Random Thoughts

So I had a number of random thoughts, and decided to fill space with them. You know, like some of those political commentators do.

• Has anyone noticed how many "harem" anime can be summed up as X + Tenchi Muyo? So, for instance, Moon Phase (it's a small harem) is "Gothed-up Tenchi Muyo", and Elfen Lied (which ain't very good) is "Wes Craven Presents: Tenchi Muyo," and DearS is basically "Alien Nation meets Tenchi Muyo"...or maybe, "the unholy lovechild of ChobitS and Alien Nation, Meets Tenchi Muyo."
  I still like DearS, though; it has a fairly intriguing exploration of what it means to be free, and whether or not it's even always desirable--without getting into Slave-women of Gor country--that I thought was impressive.

• More generally, one can often express a major tendency of a show by assigning it to a network. Thus, for instance, "Lifetime: Television for Women presents Law and Order: Special Victims Unit", or "Bravo! presents Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or even more, Angel)". How about "Discovery Health presents A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila"?
  Don't know that there really is a network really uniquely suited to House and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, but if there were, it'd be one damn smart network. Even if House's writers can't seem to decide if he's a materialist (he's too smart to be a materialist, really) or some kind of mathematical realist, or maybe a nontheistic Platonist (like that guy whose name I forget, that wrote a book about the problems Goedel Incompleteness poses to the field of AI).

• As I edited the above, and changed "if there was" to "if there were," it occured to me how odd it is that English expresses the subjunctive by changing singular to plural. Someone needs to have a look at why that is.

• Apparently South Korea's sunshine policy (hopefully now abandoned), of being nice to the lunatics in North Korea, wasn't just stupid--it was also not named right. According to Wikipedia, the policy got its name from the Aesop's fable about the wind and the sun. I quote, from the article:
  

  In the fable, the sun and the wind compete to remove a man's coat. The wind blew strongly, but the man clutched his coat and kept it on. The sun shone warmly, and the man voluntarily took off his coat to enjoy the fine weather.

  Only, see, the point was not that the sun was being nice while the wind was being nasty; the point was that the wind was being hasty and direct and the sun was being slow and patient. He took off his coat so as not to die of heatstroke, not "to enjoy the fine weather"! Aesop was a Greek, and Greece is a mediterranean country where the sun was the cruelest of the gods--Korea is a cold-temperate country where the sun is a benign figure. A policy accurately named after the fable would involve the slow application of diplomatic, economic, and small-scale military pressure, until North Korea caved in. Or in other words, Reagan's Cold War strategy for dealing with the USSR.

• Nemesis, by HP Lovecraft, ought to be taught in every school in this country. It's one of the best copies of Swinburne that I've ever read, and it shows Lovecraft at his Dionysian (in Neitzsche's sense) best. Pretentious? God yes. But it's arguably one of America's greatest poems, for all it's a knockoff of Swinburne, and it's not like Virgil didn't copy Homer (not that Swinburne nor, especially, Lovecraft is either of them worthy of the comparison).

Ghost in the Shell and Death Note

Once again, I find myself needing to point out the nakedness of the Imperial personage. Unfortunately the two works in question can't be explored each in their own separate article--I haven't seen all of them, since I could barely stand the first five episodes of Ghost in the Shell: SAC, and only got through the 7th volume of the Death Note manga before I had to stop or go catatonic. But I won't particularly be dealing with the plots of the two stories (conceding for the moment that GitS:SAC has a plot), but with the themes.

Both stories are very, very shallow, an example of what I like to call "stupid smart people". Nobody can deny that there's serious hard SF meat in GitS (apart from the cyberpunk parts), and the intrigue and machinations of Death Note are very involved. If that were what people were praising about them, I'd be content--but it isn't. No, people insist these stories are deep.

Sorry, Kemosabe, ain't buying.

If GitS was deep, it wouldn't have dialog that largely consists of the name-dropping of concepts in psychology and philosophy, a la undergrads showing off in front of their famous professor. Do any of these concepts have any impact on the story? Well, no, no they don't. Basically, a Shinsengumi story with technobabble (good technobabble, I admit, and not of the Deus Ex Tachyons variety) is still a Shinsengumi story, except the terrorists aren't as interesting and the uniforms aren't as snazzy (although I notice a familiar shade of blue, on the Tachikomas' hulls). Also...is Masamune serious, that he thinks Buddhists would have some objection to cyborging for the sick? Someone show me anything in Buddhism that even trends in that direction. It's almost like he read in some Western book that religious people oppose that kind of progress, transplanted the idea wholesale, and didn't bother to check whether the religion he chose would have those kinds of objections. Nevermind that even Christianity (other than a few fringes like Jehovah's Witnesses) don't have objections to medical cyborging, in principle, either (so long, in Catholic teaching, as the brain and ideally the genitals remain intact).

And if Death Note was deep, the characters might have actual feelings. Any guy that treats Misa, who's cute as a Hello Kitty button, the way Light treats her, is a sociopath. Pure and simple. Even a gay guy wouldn't be able to be that nasty to a girl that cute--it's not a sexual thing, it's the basic human desire not to kick babies or shoot kittens. I, for one, feel it impossible that a story can be "deep" if it doesn't have any characters, and only L and Misa have anything resembling personalities (call me kooky, but oughtn't the protagonist to be one of the characters? Yet Light isn't).

Still less can it be deep by having a bunch of characters who are inexplicably blind to the vast, terrifying cosmic issues raised by their actions and the things they witness--it's like a Lovecraft story starring the Girls Next Door! Maybe the writer wanted the thing to leave those questions open for the reader, but where I come from, people don't witness stuff like that without seriously considering some major questions (like, "Wait, if shinigami are real, doesn't my whole worldview need to be re-examined?"). And considering Death Note ran in the same magazine as Bleach, Naruto, and Rurouni Kenshin (which, oddly enough, was deep but not terribly intelligent--nor very good), I'm guessing people actually work much the same in his neck of the woods. Making the characters inexplicably stupid hurts the suspension of disbelief.

I have a feeling this wholly undeserved acclaim is connected to Cool Table Syndrome, since both of the above are considered more "adult" manga/shows--they're more akin to the anime from the 80s and early 90s that were supposed to be so good, like Akira, which had very nice art but a story that didn't exactly go anywhere.

Get over yourselves, people. The objective fact is, Naruto is deeper than Death Note (seriously, my little brother's the only sixth grader with an inkling of what existentialism is), and the fact that it's more entertaining and has better characters demonstrates, once again, the inseparability of the True and the Beautiful (the denial of which, by the bye, was one of Neitzsche's chief failings). Similarly, Bleach is deeper than Death Note, too (and Kenpachi, Byakuya, or Renji could kick Ryuk's ass). Trigun and Gungrave are deeper than GitS--hell, the Trigun manga is deeper than the Trigun anime, and that's saying something. GeneShaft was deeper than GitS, and it managed to explore a transhuman future without either dumbing down or being breathtakingly talky.

The mere fact that important concepts are mentioned, does not make the work that mentions them deep. And even if a work does, in a very roundabout, mindlessly slow-paced way, explor the penumbra of an issue, if it's got no characters worth giving a tinker's damn about, why ought anyone to bother?

Fear of Victory

100 puuchuu points to whomever can tell me what the title above comes from. (50 bonus points if you know what "puuchuu points" comes from--specifically, I mean).

I realized something that's been bugging me: an unwillingness, on the part of people involved in the production of comic-book, SF, and fantasy shows and movies, to let them be the geeky, geeky things they are. Closely associated is a willingness to settle for second-rate work just because the mainstream thinks it's neat. Let's look at each in turn, shall we?

The people behind the new Batman movies, for instance, are unwilling to let them be comic book movies. Ras al-Ghûl is no longer immortal (removing all justification for his character, actually--and he's supposed to be an eco-terrorist); Joker's no longer white, and god forbid he should get any gas (or Harley: why why why couldn't we have had Harley Quinn?!).

Peter Jackson's LOTR movies felt the need to add a bunch of anachronistic "jokes," if that's the word--yet not once does Gimli get to yell, "Barûk Khazâd, Khazâd ai-menu!" (the only sentence in Dwarvish). They cut the Barrow Downs and ruined the whole point of Gandalf the White by letting a Nazgûl--that is, a dead human!--overpower him. As if he couldn't snuff the stupid lich with a thought, this is a Maia we're talking about.

And hell, it's not like Harry Potter isn't essentially mainstream, but after the second movie they brought in a bunch of "edgy" directors, each of whom screwed the story over worse than the hack before. The character development, hell, most of the plot(...the setting? Seriously, what's with Cuaron's hatred of establishing shots)? No, that's none of our business. If we actually told the damn story, people might think we'd read the books (I think that's a prerequisite to adapting a book, reading it, but then I was taught with old books of logic).

Compare, for instance, the Spider-man movies, the Conan films, and the adaptation of Narnia. Sam Raimi felt "like he'd been handed someone's baby," and it shows--those are still the best comic book movies (followed by Hellboy, then Blade). Peter is absolutely Peter Parker, there's no pretense of being more "realistic"...and hey, characters who've shown they'll save the Joker don't leave Ras al-Ghûl to die! Ring any bells?

Why is it Marvel comics are nowhere near as good, but they make better movies?

In the Conan movies, they don't adapt any particular story, but there are certainly elements from several of them, and...frankly, Conan never really had a terribly compelling plot; he made Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser look downright driven. But the films're a very faithful rendering of the feel of the Conan books, and the characters never break out into dwarf-tossing jokes, and there's no @#$%&®© skateboarding, either. It's called "take the material seriously, and stop with the snarky po-mo self-consciousness already."

And then, the Narnia films! Aside from the fact they're better than the source material, not that that's hard, somehow they managed to hit most of the highlights of the plot, and still insert expanded action sequences. Yes, Grasshopper, this comes of killing the Buddha of mainstream approval.

Now for the second issue.

I'd argue that the reason fans put up with bad work is (and I'm not the only one who's said this), they're so glad someone is actually paying attention to them. People that don't have to be embarrassed about their hobbies, are actually paying attention to our hobbies. They're making movies of The Lord of The Rings, and they've got Ian McKellen and the guy that played Agent Smith and Steve Tyler's daughter in them! A Batman movie might actually get nominated for an Oscar--Heath Ledger did not die in vain! ...Not that the academy would pay any attention if he hadn't died, of course. And hey, mainstream critics are talking seriously about a show on SciFi!

"So," they feel, "this is what it's like to sit at the cool table."

That, I think, is what this phenomenon ought to be called. "Cool table" syndrome. Think, stupid high school shows, where people try "to be something they're not" to make the "popular" people like them, before realizing they need to "be themselves." I realize no high school was ever like that, but the trope is of use (anyone uttering the word "meme" should be teleported to a dimension of pure tentacle hentai).

Us geeks, we been kicked around some. We're used to people's eyes glazing over when we talk about our hobbies (hell, I'm geeking on such a level, I can make geeks' eyes glaze over). And seeing the mundanes, the supposed beautiful people, taking an interest, makes us feel loved. This is natural...but it's a weakness, and it can hurt art, if we continue to be so easily satisfied by the attention of the mainstream. One doesn't have to be like Harry "Nothing good can come of being associated with normal people" McDougall, but one needs to remember: these are the people that watch reality TV and Martha Stewart, the people responsible for Rachel Ray having four shows to every one Alton Brown has. These people are the reason Adult Swim barely shows any anime anymore. These are the same people that'll call Farscape a puppet show, the people who stand a very real risk of letting their children see Akira. Are you going to let these Phillistines determine the shape of mass-media SF and Fantasy? Will you let them set the Abomination of Desolation within the Holy of Holies...so to speak?

Ahem. Got a bit worked up there.

But anyway, it may be nice that Battlestar Galactica attracts some cash to SciFi, but that doesn't change the fact that it's essentially a children's show, but with sex. It's nice that the Batman movies are critically acclaimed...but they're not very much like Batman. It's a historic first, but ultimately shameful, that LOTR swept the Oscars, especially when most of the shallow-pates making it seemed to think it was a story about ecology.

Nowadays, there could never be a show like Babylon 5, there could never be another movie like The Labyrinth (and no, Spiderwick doesn't count, DiTerlizzi notwithstanding); there will never be another Batman: The Animated Series. Why? Well, because we've allowed the mainstreamers to think they get to decide how our stuff gets done. They took notice of the quality of some geek stuff--like Batman:TAS--and, rather than saying, "Yes, we are, in fact, this cool; all of our stuff is this awesome," the geeks decided they liked being liked by the mundanes more than they liked their geek-stuff. So they toned down the geekiness, made the plots so simple fans of The West Wing could follow them, and banished all trace of Niven, Lovecraft or Leiber.

Why do I feel like there's actually a spiritual truth contained in this? Apparently, being "unspotted from the world" is not only necessary to salvation; it's apparently also necessary to making any really good creative work. An artist should no more allow the opinions of anyone--especially the critics and art establishment--ruin his work, than a religious person should let the opinions of worldlings keep him from holiness, or a philosopher let the opinions of Socrates-poisoning half-brights keep him from wisdom (or for that matter, than a scientist should let the opinion of his so-called "peers" in the academic establishment keep him from uncovering physical truth).

Or in other word, what we have here is a Buddha in sad need of killing.

Go Loony

Ah, that was refreshing. Now back to unrelenting negativity.

I saw The Dark Knight this summer, and, well, yes, it is much better than Batman Begins. But it is much, much worse even than The Batman, let alone Batman: The Animated Series.

I'm gonna skip the positive and get right to what my problem is. The Joker. Yes, that's right, I don't like the Clown Prince of Crime, as portrayed in this movie. I'll list my reasons, shall I?

1. The Joker is supposed to be white, his hair green. Maybe the writers/directors had a psychotic aversion to a comic book movie being a comic book movie, but even Frank Miller, who has that same neurotic tic about being taken seriously by mundanes, let the Joker be the Joker. Also, of course, it strikes me as worthy of ridicule--not to say pillory--that they can't let Mr. J be the proper color, but they let Two-Face walk around with no skin on half his face and not instantly die.

2. They seem to think the Joker is merely a force of chaos, who just wants to "watch the world burn." Only, um...he's never been portrayed that way. In "Lovers and Madmen," he's portrayed as a brilliant sociopathic criminal who is helped out of an early midlife crisis by his discovery of his one worthy foe: the Batman. In "Killing Joke," it's revealed that he was once an anxious little nobody, whose overtaxed mind was nly able to cope by the simple expedient of...laughing (or going "Looooony, as lightbulb-battered bug"). That's why he's a sociopath: when he starts to feel the negative reaction a normal person has to the idea of doing evil, he just starts laughing, and the inhibition goes away. Okay, that last bit is my interpretation, but he's been shown to be immune to the Scarecrow's gas.

Incidentally, Scarecrow's gas, slightly modified, probably could have formed the basis of the Joker's gas (which, 3. the bastards decided not to give him). Laughter, after all, is a modified defense mechanism, triggered by fear. Come on, people, are you stupid? Can't you imagine the scene: the Scarecrow, say, has hired the future Joker to help him with a job, but decides to double-cross him, and sprays him with the gas...but it doesn't work! Instead, he starts finding the hallucinations funny ("There's a bunny on the moon," a la "Lovers and Madmen"). That could have been cinematic gold.

4. The Joker likes money, folks, he's not stupid. Yes he'll burn it in a heartbeat for the greater...punchline...but no, he'd never burn it just to prove some kinda point to some nobody gangster. That would be the act of someone who believes in something, and he doesn't believe in anything: he's a Nietzschean superman (seriously, think about it--the only better contender is Luthor, although the movies never get him right, either).

Not a Joker problem, but I also didn't like the whole "give them something to believe in" (that happens to be a lie), thing, from the ending. Come on, guys, this is Bruce we're talking about! He'd be more likely to say, "You see an S on this chest, Jim? You want Hope, move to Metropolis."