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Mailvox: GRR Martin and the Left

DH, one of the increasingly less token liberals here, asks about my assumption that he would enjoy George Martin’s novels:

Hey you started me thinking about why you presume that as a token liberal I would be predisposed to enjoy or not be disappointed by Martin’s ASOIAF series. What if anything is the link as you see it between leftism and Martin’s works?

  1. Martin’s world is intrinsically amoral. There is little in the way of Christian or high pagan morals in the Julian mode; even Jaime and Cersei’s incest is only noteworthy for its effect on her sons’ claims to the Iron Throne.
  2. Martin’s world is essentially secular.  While he does a credible job of creating an alternate religious system and making use of it for plot purposes in a meaningful quasi-medieval manner, there is only two characters out of the huge cast who appear to be religious in any meaningful sense.  That being said, I very much liked the sea-based religion of the Greyjoys, but even there, Martin was unable to convey the emotional aspect of a strongly held faith. It was like watching a blind man attempt to describe color.
  3. Martin’s world is entirely nihilistic. There is no point to anything except the pursuit of power, and to a lesser extent, sex and money.
  4. Martin is, as he has declared, a feminist, and although his commitment to realism prevents him from giving in too heavily to the Warrior Woman trope that presently infests fantasy, science fiction, and urban fantasy, he created the ludicrous Brienne of Tarth and the equally silly Sand Snakes as a nod to it.  I went to high school with a heavily recruited basketball star who, at 6’6″, was both taller and bigger than Brienne.  She was strong, but, (and this is what the SF/F writers always leave out), she was incredibly slow.  The main reason women cannot fight men is not because they are weaker, although they are, but because they are so much slower.
  5. The sex in ASOIAF is almost invariably perverted. Although married couples have children, and therefore presumably at least occasionally have sex, Martin is more likely to describe a sexual encounter between a dragon and a pig than a conventional one between a married couple. The absurd Reek-assisted wedding night of the Bastard of Bolton demonstrated that Martin is aiming to shock the reader in the manner that so excites leftists.
  6. As it is said, Martin never met a Stark he didn’t want to kill.  Every honorable character seems to be stupid and meet with a bad fate, while the amoral but clever survive. Like most intelligent leftists, Martin values cleverness over every other virtue.

So, amorality, secularism, nihilism, feminism, perversion, and a cleverness fetish.  Throw in sword control, abortion, and progressive taxation, and it would tick all the boxes.  Oh, and let’s not forget the cornucopia of Daddy issues!  I’m not saying they are bad books, the first three are really quite good. But there is little of traditional or civilizational value to them; about halfway through A Dance with Dragons, I found myself beginning to sympathize with the Others.  Say what you will about them being murderous and dead, but at least it is an ethic of sorts.

Defined by one’s enemies

I could not be more pleased to know that I am not on the side of chinless men without chests – and I use the term “men” in a very loose sense – such as John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton.

Fuck the NRA.
—
Wil Wheaton (@wilw) April 17, 2013

Savor the sweetness of their tears.  Savor their angry bitterness about your ability to defend yourself against their proxies with lethal force. And remember that because they will never stop being afraid, the rabbits will never stop trying to defang the wolves.

Another explosion

First the black powder bombs in Boston and now a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas:

Up to 15 people are feared dead including five volunteer firefighters after a giant explosion at a fertiliser plant wreaked devastation in the town of West, Texas, leaving hundreds with horrific injuries. The blast destroyed scores of buildings, including a nursing home and an apartment complex and blanketed the area in a cloud of toxic fumes.

The missing volunteer firefighters and a policeman were attending a blaze at the plant at about 7:50pm local time last night it suddenly exploded into a fireball – it thought to be caused by anhydrous ammonia igniting in the heat of the fire.

Sergeant W. Patrick Swanton from Waco’s police department said at least 160 people have been treated for injuries at local hospitals, but he warned that he expects the total number of deaths and injuries to rise when daylight arrives and emergency teams are able to conduct a proper search. The explosion at West Fertilizer Co. shook the ground with the strength of a small earthquake in the community of 2,800 people located about 20 miles north of Waco.

Well, I’m sure it’s all nothing a few million more immigrants won’t fix….

The sweetness of their tears

Savor the angry tears shed by the forcible disarmament fetishists at the New York Times.  Not even their constant waving of the false and bloody flag of Newton was enough to sway the American people into volunteering another step towards giving government a monopoly on gun violence.

For 45 senators, the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School is a forgotten tragedy. The toll of 270 Americans who are shot every day is not a problem requiring action. The easy access to guns on the Internet, and the inevitability of the next massacre, is not worth preventing.

 Those senators, 41 Republicans and four Democrats, killed a bill on Wednesday to expand background checks for gun buyers. It was the last, best hope for meaningful legislation to reduce gun violence after a deranged man used semiautomatic weapons to kill 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Conn., 18 weeks ago. A ban on assault weapons was voted down by 60 senators; 54 voted against a limit on bullet magazines.

Patricia Maisch, who survived a mass shooting in Tucson in 2011, spoke for many in the country when she shouted from the Senate gallery: “Shame on you.”

Newtown, in the end, changed nothing; the overwhelming national consensus to tighten a ridiculously lax set of gun laws was stopped cold. That’s because the only thing that mattered to these lawmakers was a blind and unthinking fealty to the whims of the gun lobby.

The National Rifle Association once supported the expansion of background checks, but it decided this time that President Obama and gun-control advocates could not be allowed even a scintilla of a victory, no matter how sensible. That group, and others even more militant, wanted to make sure not one bill emerged from the Newtown shooting, and they got their way.

Their impotent rage oozes from every sentence in the article. It was one thing for Americans to ignore Hispanic drug dealers and black youths killing each other in their ethnic enclaves, and to spare no sympathy for white, middle-aged men shooting themselves in despair over their unemployment and divorces, but this involved cute little children, kindergarteners no less, and white ones at that!  About the only way to tug more effectively at America’s heartstrings would have been to advertise slaughtered puppies, kittens, and bunnies.

And America shed a few tears, collectively wiped at their eyes, then stood up and said: “Fuck you, we’re still not letting you take our guns, you totalitarian bastards.”

No wonder they’re upset.  Americans aren’t falling for the emotional pornography anymore. Now they’ll have no choice but to go for the brute force option and they know they aren’t assured of winning that way.  After all, there are a lot more of us than there are of them.

Molon labe.

Jesus loves you. God, probably not so much.

Comedians, gay rights activists, and “accomplished journalists” are probably not the right people to consult when you wish to contemplate Christian theology. Meanwhile, the New York Times slanders millions of Christians by falsely and absurdly misrepresenting both their faith and their attitude towards a particular group of notoriously unrepentant sinners.
The crowd laughs a little nervously when Minchin, an outspoken atheist,
begins to sing, “I love Jesus, I love Jesus.” They bought tickets to a
comedy show, not a religious revival. Minchin prompts the audience to
join him. “Who do you love?” he asks. “Sing it!” Soon the whole crowd is
singing “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” along with Minchin, in a video
that has been viewed half a million times on YouTube. 
Then Minchin changes the lyrics: “I love Jesus, I hate faggots,” he
sings. “I love Jesus, I hate faggots.” The crowd stops singing along.
Minchin looks up from his guitar, pretending not to understand what the
problem could be. 
“What happened? I just lost you there,” Minchin says. He makes a
halfhearted attempt to get the singalong going again before giving up.
“Ah, well,” he shrugs. “Maybe these are ideas best shared in churches.” 
Those ideas — loving Jesus means hating gay people — are proclaimed in
Christian churches and on Christian television and radio broadcasts. The
combined efforts of the Family Research Council, the National
Organization for Marriage, “The 700 Club,” the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops, the Westboro Baptist Church, and countless
conservative Christian activists, preachers and politicians have
succeeded in making antigay bigotry seem synonymous with Christianity. 
This can cause a lot of heartache — with sometimes devastating
consequences — for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children born
into fundamentalist or evangelical Christian families. Such was the case
for Jeff Chu, the author of “Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay
Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America.” Chu is an
accomplished journalist who recently married his male partner. But Chu’s
mother, a devout Baptist, didn’t attend her son’s wedding. She still
cries herself to sleep every night, Chu writes, tormented by the
certainty that her gay son is “lost.” 
As a child, Chu adored the song “Jesus Loves Me.” But does Jesus love
him now that he’s an openly gay adult? Chu has his doubts: “There are
still moments when I wonder whether my homosexuality is my ticket to
hell.”

Does Jesus still love Chu? Absolutely.  Does God hate those who refuse to repent of their abomination?  We have a strong Biblical basis for asserting that, given how many times we are told He hates the wicked.  It isn’t Chu’s homosexuality that is his ticket to Hell, it is his refusal to repent of his sin and his refusal to permit Jesus Christ to stand in his stead in the time of judgment.

We are all sinners. The very last thing I want is to have to stand behind my personal permanent record and be judged by it.  I want my official record, as far as God’s judgment is concerned, to be that of history’s only sinless man.  The proper question with which one should be concerned isn’t whether Jesus loves one or not, but whether God does.

This piece is as trivial as it is slanderous.  It is not “antigay bigotry” to claim that unrepentant sinners who not only glory in their sin, but define themselves by it, are headed straight for the eternal incinerator, especially if Hell does not exist.  If I were to say that homosexuals are all destined to be raped by unicorns and leprechauns, no one would consider it bigotry.  This is mere rhetoric, intended to modify Christian behavior to the liking of those who hate Christianity by a transparent attempt at emotional manipulation.

Either unrepentant homosexuals are Hell-bound or they are not.  No amount of touchy-feely Churchian welcomism will change that either way.  And to the extent that the wicked are welcomed into the Church without being warned of the need to repent, the Church is failing in its Christian duty.  Homosexuality, like almost every other sin, can be forgiven. But before forgiveness can be granted, there must be repentance.

Liberals always love to cite the example of the adulterous woman spared stoning by Jesus asking who will cast the first stone.  And they always leave off the vital conclusion, where Jesus tells the woman to “go and sin no more”.

The wickedness of the homosexual community can be seen in its corrosive effect on others.  Consider this passage in light of the requirement Jesus laid upon his followers:

After Benjamin Sullivan-Knoff came out to his parents in his sophomore
year of high school, his mother begged her son not to do so publicly.
She was working as an associate pastor at a conservative church — an
Evangelical Covenant Church — and she feared she would be fired if her
son came out. A few months later she reversed herself, asked for her
son’s forgiveness and gave him her blessing to come out. “I love this
denomination,” Eva Sullivan-Knoff tells Chu, “but I love my son more.”

She loves her son more than her denomination, which is fine. But she has revealed that she is no Christian disciple, she cannot be, as per the words of Jesus Christ himself.


“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.”
– Luke 14:26

Christianity is not the easy way.  It is the hard way. We forget that at our peril. And to those Churchians and non-Christians who would attempt to argue with the points presented here, I have a single question: precisely what sins beside homosexual fornication did Jesus Christ declare a man did not need to repent in order to be saved?

The Future of the Future

John C. Wright predicts where SF/F is heading on the basis of its primary purposes:

Like all fiction, Science Fiction is an oasis of rest amid the wasteland of mundane life, a time between toil to lift our eyes to distant mountains and wonder what is beyond them, or to lift our eyes further, to the stars, and wonder.

Unlike other fiction, which contains imaginary places and events, science fiction also contains an imaginary cosmos that operates by different rules, perhaps one where men can be invisible, or fly to the moon in antigravity spheres, or suffer an invasion by hunger and superior beings from Mars. The bridge between the real cosmos and the science fictional cosmos is the speculation, either rigorous or lax, of scientific plausibility that connects them. If you have invisible man in a science fiction story, he must perhaps walk unclothed, for example, because that is a realistic extrapolation from the unrealistic premise; or if you have invaders from Mars, they must have physiology evolved by Martian conditions, they perhaps will be swiftly poisoned by the diseases their more advanced civilization long ago abolished from their sterile world, because again this is a realistic extrapolation from an unreal premise.

Fantasy also postulates a different cosmos with different rules, but the bridge that reaches to the perilous realm of Elfland from our world is one of dream-logic. If the wicked witch says love’s first kiss will wake the sleeping beauty, only the prince who did not die on the enchanted thorns hedging the haunting castle may kiss and wake her, and not Doctor McCoy with a hypospray of stimulant. Because that is the way dream logic works, or fairy tales, or myths: the arbitrary rules of Elfland can be trespassed only with draconian retaliation, and the rewards achieved by the bold or the cunning performance of the twelve terrible tasks or the answer of the riddle of the sphinx. These are the dreamlike implications of the unreal premise, based on the rules of a realm no man has seen, but which we somehow always greet with a start of recognition.

Why do we need dreams to come from a cosmos other than this one?

I propose that while somewhere, on some dark and moonless world of inky seas beneath a blood-colored sun, some Coleopterous race of pitiless logic and soulless energy toil and travail nakedly without joy, copulate without love, live without dreams and perish without regret, their corpses left to rot where they fall, or are eaten by their larvae, that these insectiod swarms are the true heirs to this cosmos, and, unlike Man, feel no discomfort at existence here. Birth is no miracle to them and death no tragedy, because they are at home here, and their emotions exactly suit and match the contours of the world.

Not Man. We are exiles.

Wright identifies the intrinsic flaw in mainstream secular science fiction and fantasy. Rejecting, as it does, the fundamentally religious foundation of fantasy, (for Wright is incorrect and George MacDonald, not William Morris, is the father of fantasy), modern fantasy cannot serve its primary purpose because it cannot slake a thirst its writers do not even realize exists.  This is why there so often feels like something missing from even the best modern fantasy, why it is lifeless, soulless, and limited to portraying shades of grey in the place of the full color spectrum.

Mainstream science fiction is affected by these problems too, but to a much lesser extent because it has a different purpose. If fantasy is meant to provide the exile with dreams of home, science fiction is supposed to provide a technological vision of the future. The problem is that science is increasingly beyond the comprehension of the science fiction writer to grasp its implications, has settled many of the questions to which science fiction once proposed answers, (and often in a way that renders more abstract the various possibilities of wonder), and is increasingly written by writers who have no interest in technology and can’t explain how their television’s remote control worked, much less present a technologically credible vision of the future.  Even as less science fiction is being published, there is less and less science to be found in what purports to remain of it.

It is hard to dispute Wright’s conclusion: “So look for a growth of darker fantasies in the future as the scientific
world view slowly gives way to a world view that does not believe in
science, nor in any over-arching narrative, nor in truth, nor in beauty,
nor in virtue.”

But that is neither fantasy nor science fiction.  What we are witnessing is the lingering death of two literary genres. What we are seeing is the subsumption of fantasy and science fiction by romance and horror.

RIP Pat Summerall

One of the greats of NFL broadcasting has died at 82. Fortunately for those of us who enjoyed his voice, he lives on in Maddens, still calling games in that calm, unforgettable baritone.  I remember playing Madden 2001 after he’d retired, and shaking my head, being reminded how even in a video game, Pat Summerall was a better play-by-play man than anyone in the succeeding generation of commentators.

Explaining the gold crash

I think it is important to always take the various conspiracy theories of the gold bugs with a grain of salt.  That being said, the massive 7-sigma crash in gold prices was obviously not the result of normal supply and demand, and given the lengths that the central banks have gone to prop up the banks over the last five years, the idea that they might crash one little market  to protect the massive short interest of a few key banks barely even registers as a conspiracy theory proper.

There’s been a recent huge draw down of physical gold
at the New York COMEX and at the JP Morgan Chase depository. Look at
the physical market draw down on the charts below. It has taken a
drastic plunge…. If the inventory runs out and one cannot meet deliveries then it has to be bought on the open market. Not only that but it could cause a run up in prices that would hurt the shorts in the market.

So what to do?

The only way out of this dilemma for the market controllers would be to devise a plan that would collapse the market and trip up all the stops at the correction lows in gold of 1525 thereby setting off the stop loss orders under this important market low.  And what if the plan included a way to stop the physical market from purchasing gold under 1525 while that correction was underway? That would be brilliant.

And how can that happen?

They have to hatch a plan and carefully orchestrate it in a series of events that takes the gold market by completely by surprise and force players out of their long positions.

Read on for today’s lesson in market manipulation and allow me to relay my speculation about what transpired last week.

A successful ambush usually involves surprise. And the surprise requires a carefully orchestrated setup. So now let’s get a look at how the crash was prepared.

The FOMC minutes from the last meeting were due for release during last week. But a funny thing happened. They got released EARLIER than expected. It was all a big mistake and the FED let the SEC and the CFTC know right away that the error had occurred. And lo and behold, despite the FED’s transparency and newly crafted reputation for delivering timely and accurate reports, there happened to be some language we didn’t get updated on until the FOMC minutes were released. The notes say that several members have been discussing cutting back on the stimulus. That was strike one. It got the gold market thinking that stimulus cuts might be coming.

Strike one called by the umpire.

Surprise number two appears.

A bombshell was released from news sources. It was reported that Cyprus would have to sell 400 million Euro’s of gold as part of the bailout package of raising money for their failed banking system. Gold prices came down to 1550 on the news and the day passed by. Even though Cyprus bankers tell us the next day that they didn’t discuss selling any gold, market jitters remained with Friday just around the corner.

This was strike two.

Now we need a strike three and you’re out.

Gold is a nervous market to begin with as a lot of people have already lost a lot of money in the last six months. With Gold at 1550, all that is needed for the market to drop is to get one more push where all the stops are.  This price level was just below the 2 year low of 1525.

With the setup in place the final pitch was ready to be delivered.

The interesting thing is that the bankers knew it was going to happen.  They were all informed.  How can I say that?  Because I was told as much by one of them two weeks ago. But neither he nor I realized the full extent of it.  I just assumed he was talking about a technical drop down to support around $1500, not a crash of this magnitude.

Either way, it represents an obvious buying opportunity for those more interested in long-term stores of value rather than short-term investments, assuming that the link between paper prices and physical prices haven’t been severed.  So, be sure to say, “thank you, Ben,” when you take advantage of the Bernanke discount to place your next order.

Free book: HAILSTONE MOUNTAIN by Lars Walker

Lars Walker, the author of a piece about Christian Fantasy published on Intercollegiate Review last month that he assures me absolutely did not include a direct shot at A Throne of Bones, (“wannabee (christened) George R. R. Martins”), is giving away free copies of HAILSTONE MOUNTAIN today.

In the latest entry in the saga of Erling Skjalgsson, the 11th Century
Norwegian chieftain is struck by a deadly curse, and must journey north
along with his friends in order to crush it at its source. Meanwhile
Freydis, niece of the smith Lemming, is kidnapped by the servants of a
mysterious, ancient cannibalistic race who dwell in secret in the
mountains of the north. Once again the Irish priest Father Ailill
narrates a tale of struggle, faith, endurance, and supernatural peril.
Fans of H. Rider Haggard will delight in this “lost world” adventure.

He’s a Minnesotan named Lars, so you know he knows his Vikings. He’s also one of my growing list of Standout Authors. Check it out, and if you like it, don’t forget to review it.

Mailvox: ideas for a new comment system

After fixing the template here – you can now link properly to individual comments by using the link on the comment’s datestamp – Matt contemplates going where so many have gone before, and failed:

The CoCo circus and slow disaster, combined with your rejection of the alternatives, followed by all the infelicities of Blogger’s commenting system has long tempted me to try to create a better way.  I’m now professionally situated in a place where trying to design [if not necessarily implement] a better commenting system is on topic.  I understand most of the challenges in designing and maintaining such a system on the back end, but I do not have a good grasp on the needs and failure modes for the front end.

For me, the single most important thing is to avoid any registration requirement on the part of the commenters.  This is where most of the comment systems fall down. They place all their emphasis on allowing logins through Facebook, Twitter, and 10 other systems, clutter up their interfaces with micrologos, and make no effort to let people comment as they obviously prefer to comment. Back when I had the system distinguish between logged-in commenter and not logged-in commenter via color, it was obvious that between 10 and 15 percent of the commenters were logged into something.  So, most comment systems are designed to cater to the vast minority of commenters.  This is a fundamental design mistake, as it is there to serve the needs of the comment system, not those who are intended to use it.

Anyhow, here is my list of the features of an optimal comment system:

  1. No registration necessary.  Custom registration only, no use of all the other systems.
  2. Option to block or auto-spam blank, Anonymous, and blacklisted names. Note that hese are two different things, as in some circumstances it may be better to accept and auto-spam than simply block.
  3. Ability to search comments by name, URL, or IP address.
  4. Good spam-trapping.  Blogger is actually pretty good in this regard, although vastly better on VP than on AG for some reason.
  5. Checkboxes, mass select and mass delete options for managing comments.  What Blogger really misses is the ability to view by Name, which would make managing them much easier.
  6. Editable comments. They should always be editable by the blog host, with editing capabilities made available to registered commenters at the blog host’s option.
  7. Good, easy quoting system.
  8. Recognize HTML tags and buttons to provide the basics: B, I, U, strike, Link, and blockquote.  No need for spellchecks and so forth; no one ever uses them.
  9. Session recognition of commenter’s Name/URL.  Even if you don’t want to register, it is tedious to repeatedly type those in.

There are other things, to be sure, but that would be a desirable base.  I actually like the Blogger comment system as a base, but it’s lacking in a few important particulars, such as the inability to separate the permission of unregistered comments from permitting Anonymous comments.  If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to share them here.

And while we’re discussing your thoughts on the matter, I’m curious to know what sort of subjects people are finding to be of the most interest today.  I’ve been writing more about the business of fiction than I normally do, mostly because the world of publishing is changing so rapidly and I’ve been cranking out a considerable quantity of it lately, but there has also been an awful lot of excitement on the economic and current events front as well, so I don’t have a good feel for what is of particular interest these days.  And then there is the Great Rabbit Hunt and the occasional soccer game. On the other hand, I’ve been writing less about some popular subjects to which I tended to pay inordinate attention in the past, such as history, evolution, and games.

I’m not promising that I’ll pay any attention to what anyone thinks, of course, but I am curious nevertheless.  If you’re so inclined, just list your favorite three subjects for blog discussion, in your personal order of preference.