Category: Uncategorized

Abercrombie’s inquisition

So, I finished reading Abercrombie’s The First Law series. I quite liked it despite the various criticisms I’ve mentioned in the past, but I wanted to mention something that struck me about the book’s most interesting character, the torturer of the Royal Inquisition, Sand dan Glotka. Abercrombie devotes a great deal of time and attention to Glotka and it shows. His backstory is involved and interesting, his descent from superficial hero to deeply introspective anti-hero is compelling, and he manages to come off in a sympathetic manner despite the many awful deeds he consciously elects to perform. There is only one significant problem with the character of Glotka.

The greater part of the Inquisition as portrayed in The First Law is a load of historical bollocks.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

A sound perspective

I don’t dislike Glee, in fact, I think it is a very clever way to bring back the classic 70’s variety show in an ironic, somewhat less cheesy manner. And it’s less grotesquely stupid than most television I’ve seen in the last ten years. That being said, I find Dave Grohl’s perspective to be more than a little refreshing in this age of celebrity overexposure:

“The Glee guy, what a f—ing jerk. Slash was the first one. He wanted to do Guns ‘n’ Roses and Slash is like, ‘I hate f—ing musicals. It’s worse than Grease.’ Then [Murphy’s] like, ‘Well, of course he’d say that, he’s a washed up ol’ rock star, that’s what they f—ing do.’ And then Kings of Leon say, ‘No, we don’t want to be on your show.’ And then he’s like, ‘Snotty little assholes…’ And it’s just like, Dude, maybe not everyone loves Glee. Me included.”

I very much doubt this Murphy character will ever be inclined to ask to use Psykosonik’s music on the show; let’s face it, even the more famous bands from our genre and era wouldn’t make much sense although I would definitely be intrigued in seeing what sort of epic catastrophe might result from an episode devoted to NIN, Ministry, and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. And although I like musicals myself, I don’t think I would want our music featured on that sort of soft pop show either.

Furthermore, there is no excuse for insulting Slash like that. I’m not the biggest GnR fan in the world, but there is no question that the man can play guitar.

Florida is empty

Relatively speaking, anyhow:

On Thursday, the Census Bureau revealed that 18% — or 1.6 million — of the Sunshine State’s homes are sitting vacant. That’s a rise of more than 63% over the past 10 years…. In Florida, the worst-hit county is Collier — home of Naples — with a whopping 32% of homes empty. In Sarasota County, 23% of the housing stock sits vacant, while Lee County (Cape Coral) has a 30% vacancy rate. And Miami-Dade County has a vacancy rate of about 12%.

This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, since Naples is one of the primary second-home markets in the country. No one was actually living in a lot of those houses outside of “the season” as they called it down there. But it is really bad from financial and real estate perspectives, as it indicates that a) rich people can’t afford those second homes anymore and b) the housing market is far more overstocked than the real estate statistics indicate. It’s a classic example of Austrian malinvestment in action, with the perverse incentives created by the credit expansion of the last ten years.

Mailvox: on Socrates

F1 wonders why I think poorly of Socrates:

I’m interested in your take on Socrates given that you’ve said you’re inclined to despise him. He seems to me like a man that surpasses most, in authenticity at least, and any man who can simultaneously understand him and despise him would seem to me to really be taking a bold position. He might be annoying, and even describes himself as a “gadfly”, but I think the example he gave was really something extraordinary and admirable, so why do you “tend to despise him”?

I think that to understand Socrates is to despise him. If we assume that Plato’s portrait of the Athenian philosopher is accurate and his rendering of the dialogues is a reasonable facsimile of the historical conversations that took place, we are forced to conclude that Socrates is anything but authentic or admirable in a variety of ways. He was most certainly extraordinary and his intelligence was formidable, but his philosophy is essentially evil, self-serving, and juvenile. Over the centuries, we have not only seen The Republic serve as philosophical justification for both tyranny and self-appointed elitism, but we must note that the behavior of his prize pupil, Alcibiades, is entirely in keeping with the principles Socrates taught. If one judges a philosopher by his fruits, Socrates fares very ill indeed.

I have not gone through the various dialogues with the same close attention that I paid to Euthyphro, but as I demonstrated in my critique of it, Socrates demonstrates an astonishingly dishonest willingness to apply a false equivalency in order to complete his structurally illogical argument. Despite my regular use of the Socratic method to discredit and humiliate overmatched critics, I have little regard for it as a method to determine truth because it often relies upon artificially simplifying multi-faceted concepts into a single binary question. The Socratic method is far from useless, but I see it as being a rhetorical weapon than a philosophical device. Which, naturally, raises the question of why Socrates made such heavy use of it and for what purpose.

In summary, I see Socrates as a fraudulent philosophical trickster whose false modesty and respect for the gods is no more convincing than his illegitimate logic in Euthyphro. And if there is one thing I despise more than intellectual frauds, it is false modesty. Genuine humility is a virtue, whereas false modesty is one of the crudest conceivable insults to the observer’s intelligence.

While we’re on the subject of email, HM5 responded to my post on crushing women’s dreams over at Alpha Game:

As a woman, I find this discussion very enlightening. I don’t know what sort of women you know, but you don’t appear to respect them very much. Women do, as a whole, have a deep need to be mothers; its in our dna. However, the fact that you discuss treating women like they have no clue what they want is really astonishing. Perhaps it is what most men are truly thinking. Perhaps your women respect you too much to believe that this is really the way you feel. Perhaps if they read your comments they would see some part truth and some complete misunderstandings that are so far off base as to be funny.

I responded at Alpha Game, but suffice it to say that I think women should think very carefully about their historical statements before they demand men treat their words with full equalitarian respect.

A nation of cam whores

Lest you wonder what the teachers unions would do if they were given control over school curriculums:

The U.N. just concluded a two-week feminist jamboree — the Commission on the Status of Women, which is an intergovernmental body that negotiates documents later approved by the General Assembly. The CSW attracts scores of radical feminists — including this time a woman named Diane Schneider, representing the National Education Association. At a CSW panel discussion, Schneider said that “oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education.” She also said students should not be able to “opt out” of such classes, meaning they should be forced to learn about orgasms against their parents’ wishes.

It’s an interesting situation, to be sure. On the one hand, if the NEA program worked according to plan, the USA would benefit from millions of young women who wouldn’t be educated to go into debt in order to obtain university degrees that would permit them to spend their fertile years making Powerpoint slides, but would be well-equipped to perform on the Internet instead. Which, I have to admit, would be an improvement, if not much of one. On the other hand, given the success with which the public school teachers are presently teaching most students how to read, write, and do math, one has to assume that at least half the female graduates would end up performing inadvertent clitoridectomies before graduation, the rest would end up frigid, and the boys would require Viagra just to get through a Playboy.

March Madness Day Two

Well, so much for the Bison. The third time wasn’t the charm. But Day One wasn’t a bad one for upsets, as it goes. It was nice to see Mr. Pitino sent home early.

Mailvox: on optimism

SN wonders why I am such a cheerful prophet of doom:

As Christendom falls in England and the march of the Sodomites continues unabated, it is easy to feel glum. In spite of Christianity maintaining some sort of respectability within philosophical circles, its status as a position of social and moral respectability is experiencing a precipitous decline. Hollywood, the media and the elite universities of western civilization are anti-Christian. Not to rely solely on personal anecdote, but I just had the unpleasant experience of applying to do a research PhD in Theology at [top university], only to discover while researching potential supervisors that more than half of the Theology faculty are atheists. Given Lewis’ social ostracism among the dons of his day, I suppose I should not have been surprised.

More to the point, does the decline of Christianity in the west ever get you down? We talk of Christianity’s growth among Africans and Chinese and cyclical periods of persecution that inspire a resurgence of the Church, but all evidence appears to indicate that things are going to get pretty rough. We’re heading into a Depression, the secular state is on the rise and totalitarianism lies on the horizon, if it is not here already.

How do you rise above it all, is what I am asking? What practical advice could you share with the average Christian who is trying to educate him/herself as much as possible about their Christian heritage, and as a result, is more aware of how bad the situation actually is?

You always seem clear eyed about the situation, yet optimistic. I look around, expecting to see jack boots come marching round the corner any second. Is that madness or informed paranoia?

First, it is informed paranoia. The jackboots are coming, just as they have done since they were hobnailed sandals. As to why that doesn’t get me down, well, the truth is that from time to time it does. But that probably does not show much because the emotion that the ongoing collapse of civilization primarily inspires in me is one of irritation that humanity can’t seem to learn the most elementary lessons from its own history. It’s hard to feel too sorry for an individual, a society, or a species that repeatedly insists on smashing its face into a brick wall with so little regard for what happened the last time it did that.

In other words, I see it more as comedic farce than tragedy because I don’t expect anything better from the mass of humanity or its arrogant, short-sighted, self-styled ruling elite. It is impossible to read history and reach any other conclusion. When I was a child, I read the Bible and marveled at the way the Israelites would willfully put themselves into danger by ignoring God’s commands, end up suffering through tremendous hardship, cry out to God and get rescued, then go on to repeat the process within a generation or three. I thought the Israelites were a remarkably stupid people and assumed that God made them His chosen people in much the same way we regard a child as being “special” today.

But the more history I read, the more I saw that the Israelites’ behavior is the normal pattern of human behavior. Man stands on the shoulders of giants and thinks himself tall, only to learn otherwise when he strides boldly forward. Perhaps that makes you cry, but it tends to make me laugh, even if it does sound a little hollow and sardonic even to me. But how can you not laugh, as atheists and pagans blithely assemble the infrastructure of the old slaughterhouse and call it progress, never imagining for a second that they will not only be its victims again, but will find themselves crying out to God for rescue from the destiny they so ardently desired.

As for the root of my optimism, it is three-fold. First is that in the grand historical scheme, I see the some of the darker elements prophesied in the Bible unfolding. This reinforces my confidence, (not that it was necessary) that this is only the first level of the game of life. The second is that I tend to live day-to-day. We can plan for tomorrow, but we can’t actually know what it will bring. And the third is that I do my best to find joy where it can be found, even if it is the bitter joy of seeing that one’s cynical take on events has once more been proven correct.

There is nothing new under the sun. We, and the generation before us, have enjoyed the lazy days of economic summer. And while it is a little hard to see the leaves turning brown and dying as winter approaches, we can steel ourselves by knowing that it is not the first one and that what our ancestors survived, we, too, can hope to survive. The prince of this world may be preparing his horsemen for another terrible ride, but God is still God and God is still good.

The shadows grow ever longer, but never forget that somewhere beyond the shadows there is light.

The land of rape and sunnis

I don’t know why anyone would be expected to intervene and attempt stopping a rapist when they’re not even permitted to defend themselves and their own property.

Gary Gunstone stalked the woman through the streets of Bideford, North Devon, just after midnight as she walked to her parents home after visiting her boyfriend. The 15-stone brute dragged her to the ground and raped her in full view of passing drivers….

‘One bizarre feature of this case is that a couple of times cars went by as he was raping her on the side of the road. He was prepared to rape her right on the pavement without any apparent concern for being detected. He made no attempt to hide what he was doing. It was just something he wanted to do there and then and he did it. It is every woman’s nightmare to be attacked in a public place by a complete stranger but you always think of it happening in some remote area, not on a pavement with cars going by. It is very unusual. Unfortunately none of the cars that passed has stopped and so he was able to go as far as he wanted to go.’

What can possibly be considered bizarre about passers-by declining to get involved in the situation, considering that their two options were a) getting hurt, and b) getting arrested? I don’t know why anyone in England should be either upset or surprised by this, as this is exactly the progressive, secular, post-Christian England that the Laborite voters in the U.K. apparently sought after the Thatcher era. It is obvious that a society where men are not permitted to defend themselves is a society where men do not defend women either. And if that society only punishes attempted rape with a sentence of 12 months, then it is one that has every reason to expect more rape attempts.

At this rate of secular progress, another 50 years will see men openly raping women in public and not even being arrested for it. Although it might earn the woman a few lashes….

75 percent

75 percent of the religious persecution around the world is directed at Christians. It is committed by the religious and irreligious alike. Meanwhile, Western liberals wring their hands about nonexistent persecution of Muslims and hunt for anti-semitic Nazis. When the militant arms of the Church of England and the Southern Baptists are openly committing murder without fear of prosecution, then perhaps they’ll have a case. Until then, they should shut up and look at what is happening around the world:

The British branch of the 64-year-old, Vatican-approved organization Aid to the Church in Need today released a report finding that a full 75 percent of religious persecution is currently being carried out against Christians. It further claims that, in two-thirds of the countries, this persecution has worsened. “For millions of Christians around the world,” the report states, “persecution, violence discrimination and suffering are a way of life as they live out their faith.”

Of course, secular society doesn’t care about Christians being persecuted, since a significant portion of it is actively and openly hoping to perform similar persecution itself. But that’s all right, because as before, the persecution will only serve to forge a stronger Church.