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Although I addressed Shadowin’s point back in November, now that I’m looking at this material with more attention to detail, I believe I can provide him with a more satisfactory answer to the question of Sun Tzu and the presence of religion as a factor in war-making.

Shadowin was rightly suspicious of my claim that Sun Tzu didn’t mention anything about religion, given that the Five Constant Factors of the art of war that must to be taken into account when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field are: Moral Law, Heaven, Earth, The Commander, and Method and Discipline.

This would, upon first glance, appear to conclusively demonstrate that I am wrong. However, since I am multi-lingual and happened to study an amount of Chinese history along the way, I am perhaps a little less likely to be thrown off by cultural miscommunications than the average American.

Heaven is easily dealt with, as Sun Tzu himself defines it as signifying: “night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.” In other words, “Heaven” merely means the environmental setting in which the battle takes place, it has no religious significance to the military strategist whatsoever, regardless of whether he happens to believe those settings are defined by a deity or not.

Sun Tzu clearly did not see the modification of Heaven as the general’s concern, or else he would have certainly recommended whatever actions were best indicated to achieve an ideal one, just as he did in some detail with regards to the ways in which a general might achieve a favorable Earth.

As for Moral Law, I contend that it is best translated as morale, as this is such a vital tactical concern that nearly every tactical wargame incorporates it in some measure. In Advanced Squad Leader, for example, it is one of the three primary elements, along with firepower and movement.

Translator Lionel Giles considers this possibility, “One might be tempted to render it by ‘morale’, were it not considered as an attribute of the ruler in ss. 13”, but prefers “is in harmony with his subjects”.

I understand his reasoning given the wording of I. 13 (1): “Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law?”, but I think the concept of morale encompasses the concept of being in harmony with the subjects. Leadership and morale are generally considered to be closely related matters, (in the case of ASL, the primary role of the former is to act as a modifier on the latter), so I think Giles’ distinction here is an artificial and unneccesary one.

Of course, I’m handicapped by being unable to read the original Chinese, so if anyone has any comments on this score, I’d be interested in hearing them.

Gene asks a reasonable question:

I’ve asked this before but never got an answer; Why do you pay attention to Amynda? Aren’t there many like her blogging? Aren’t many college age people similar to her in their thinking? Does she have a large readership or something?

First, Amynda is as close to the the archetype of the idiot feminist I encountered in college as I’ve ever seen on the Internet. Her blog is an intellectual open sewer of the sort one can usually only find in a Woman’s Studies program, and unlike the similar Bitch PhD, she’s still young enough and insulated enough to cling to her feelings about reality rather than accepting it for what is is and adjusting her behavior accordingly.

Furthermore, she is held up as an exemplary feminist blogger by several mainstream sources. If I were to use a less-lauded example, I would be rightly accused of addressing a marginal figure to whom no one actually pays attention. As it stands, it’s quite clear that I’m not making anything up, that these people do exist and that there are a lot of young women who actually do subscribe to this particularly noxious form of feminist ideology.

In short, if Amynda didn’t exist, I’d almost have to invent her. Ironically, she is the Strawfeminist; it would seem that like vampires, feminists are incapable of looking in the mirror.

I firmly believe in shining a cold analytical light on evil and exposing it rather than ignoring it and hoping it will go away. As Andy pointed out, widespread exposure of Amynda’s ideas will do far more damage to radical feminism than I could ever do on my own. The utter revulsion they inspire in women like Gene is actually testimony to that notion.

And you’ll note, for example, that no one even tries to quote Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris here the way they do on other blogs, now that everyone here has seen them exposed as grossly ignorant intellectual charlatans.

Amynda confirms my opinion that feminism is a form of environmental retardation:

What “we’ve always done” is rape, for those who understandably don’t want to click over and read the whole post.

Once can only assume that she doesn’t want her readers to click over and read the whole post, because if they did, those few capable of passing a fourth-grade reading comprehension test would immediately recognize that what “we’ve always done” is to carry guns, legally or otherwise. The nice thing about Amynda is that one doesn’t have to wonder if she’s evil or stupid, as she regularly demonstrates her unique ability to combine the two into a single beautiful Platonian ideal of feminism.

Those who can’t understand why I enjoy reading her probably don’t grasp the deeper appeal of Maupassant when the syphilis kicked in either.

it’s clear he wants my attention very badly….

Well, naturally. Who wouldn’t? She is as beautiful as she is brilliant.

The Coven did its part by contributing some amusing expositions on their haphazard relationship to reality and the English language:

Oh, my God. I’d looked all over the internets for one of his books, even his own website didn’t sell them at the time. I think like maybe one of his fantasy books is in a library somewhere in central Ohio, but that’s as close as I’d ever been to one. People who claim to know say his stuff is laughably awful, and I’d love to take a peek at one myself.

Apparently she didn’t looked very hard, or grasp that complicated “click on the cover” interface. Or perhaps that complicated eReader install was simply too much:

“Um, Colin? Is this computer a Windows or a Symbian?”
“It’s a Mac, Kyso. A Macintosh. Click on that one.”
Don’t you tell me what to do, Mr. Patriarchy! Your Masculinist Techno-Oppression of Women won’t last forever, you know!”
“I’m sorry. I am a worm. I am evil. Please throw rocks at me.”
You don’t deserve to have rocks thrown at you, you pathetic potential rapist!” (clicks once) “Um, I don’t think it worked, there’s this grey box now.”
“Okay, so click on Save to Disk… I mean, you can if you want….”
It’s my body and I’ll click if I want to!”

As for the quality of my fantasy novels, I’ll freely admit that the first one was rather weak, but I’ll happily match the second or the third against any of the novels nominated for the Nebula last year, except for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrill and Going Postal. Better yet, compare them with any novel written by Nebula winner Catharine Asaro…. Regardless, the worst review from any professional secular reviewer was 3 out of 5, which hardly strikes me as “laughably awful”.

And after basing most of its criticism on my theology – which seemed a little odd given that it’s a fantasy novel, but whatever – Publisher’s Weekly wrote this about The World in Shadow: “an excellent job of capturing the rarefied world of high school, and both Christian and fallen teenagers are painted with some sympathy. His chapters are headed by epigraphs ranging from the Bible to rock music to blockbuster movies, which lend the book a hip edge. The novel’s driving tension is an evil plan to stage a Columbine-like massacre at the senior prom. Some of the best (and most disturbing) writing occurs in the sections that try to imagine the inner worlds of the killers….”

Unfortunately, there are very few reviews of my novels since most SFWA reviewers are openly prejudiced against anything with a religious flavor. I have exchanged email with several well-known fantasy and science fiction reviewers in the past and was informed that they simply won’t read anything that they consider to have Christian content. That’s their right, of course, but it’s simply false to assert that the reviews are negative.

So, he writes shitty sci-fi and thinks that women are inherently unable to write sci-fi. This could explain much.

No, he writes mediocre FANTASY, thank you very much indeed, and thinks the reason that women ALMOST NEVER write HARD science fiction, (which is really not up for debate as this dearth is an occasional topic of discussion in the SFWA), is because they are extremely disinclined to specialize in the hard sciences. Even when they major and obtain advanced degrees in them, they seldom maintain their interest in the field for long.

For example, when John Scalzi and I were arguing about this topic on the Tor editors’ blog, Electrolite, he cited one female professor’s Astrophysics major as evidence of her interest in the hard sciences… but that professor is now teaching Queer theory in Indian film. (Seriously, I’m not joking.) That Astrophysics major no more makes her a hard scientist than my East Asian Studies major makes me Japanese. In short, my opinion is that the potential pool of women capable of writing hard science fiction is too small to produce the critical mass required, and as Catharine Asaro demonstrates, even those who can do it would rather write romance novels. Or, as is more likely these days, vampire and were-seal porn.

Zuzu from Feministe demonstrates her acumen with the language.

So how’s Vox’s daddy doing in prison?

Dad’s not in prison, which was sort of the point of those newspaper headlines last summer. Of course, one really can’t expect a feminist to be able to distinguish between “fugitive” and “felon”. Nouns are hard!

Marcy, on the other hand, has trouble with adjectives:

He’s a Christian Libertarian? How do you work that? I thought Ayn Rand was an atheist.

In the English language, the adjective preceding the noun is there to MODIFY it. In this case, “Christian” modifies the noun “Libertarian” in much the same way that “Social” and “Christian” are both used to modify “Democrat” and therefore distinguish the SDP from the CDU. Furthermore, Ayn Rand defined Objectivism, not libertarianism.

In practice, this means that I am a firm libertarian on most matters, but anti-abortion. I am also anti-open immigration, but that is solely on utilitarian grounds.

Amynda demonstrates the sort of thinking that by all rights should land her a regular Star & Sickle column:

Well, we’ll get around to discussing how problematic male dominance is after we’ve convinced every woman ever to avoid ever turning tables and gaining some small pleasures here and there. Men feel they can use you for sex? You should cry and give up on sex rather than use them right back and show them payback’s a bitch.

I couldn’t care less about the inherent inequality of “Ladies Nights”, but then, I’m pro-freedom and believe that men and women should be free to sell or not sell their goods and services to anyone they like, at whatever price they like.

A very scary concept, I know.

What’s amusing here is the fact that Amynda and her tuff-girl feminist sisters just can’t seem to learn from anything, not from history, not from empirical evidence, not even from personal experience.

If someone is using you, using them right back doesn’t accomplish anything, it simply gives them exactly what they’re looking for. I absolutely LOVED this sort of female thinking in my amoral, predatory days. Don’t use me, girl, don’t throw me in dat der briar patch! I mean, it was the best of all possible worlds, a sure thing plus you didn’t even have to pretend to feel guilty for not calling the next day.

The basic problem with girl logic is that it is completely concerned with how a woman feels rather than what is happening around her. This is how precisely the same behavior from two perfect strangers can either be a) sexual harassment or b) the cause for delighted phone calls to all her friends, on the sole basis of how the woman feels about the approach.

Ironically, this is almost exactly the approach recommended by Bobby Knight regarding rape. Relax and enjoy it… or rather, if you’re being raped, rape them right back and show them payback’s a bitch!

Seriously, does she have Down’s Syndrome or something? This really isn’t that complicated. Adam Smith covered it back in 1776: when the supply goes up, the price goes down… and you can ask any European man, it doesn’t get any cheaper than an American college girl.

Even in Amsterdam and Bangkok, you have to pay. Thanks to feminists and the Sexual Revolution, this may be the only regard in which America is still the land of the free.

UPDATE – It just gets better. Hannibal actually thinks he’s being clever:

You’re not following it through fully. Ensure that *only* women be able to carry handguns as well as encouraging them to do so.

I’ve used that argument on some of the pro-gun wingnuts – you’d be amazed how well it short-circuits many of their arguments.

Only if you’re arguing with yourself. A man who is prepared to rape a woman is not going to shirk at carrying a gun illegally. In fact, a lot of men who won’t rape a woman won’t shirk at carrying a gun, regardless of whether those who think they are our masters have granted permission or not.

I’ve never had a permit and neither does nearly anyone I’ve ever gone to the range with. As Nate would say, I’m just sayin’….

Anyhow, the more girls that carry guns, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Go ahead and pass that law. Then they can feel they’re carrying with Daddy Government’s okay, and men will continue to do what we’ve always done. I’ll never understand why Patriarchy-hating feminists and their hangers-on can’t see the irony of always needing to ask for permission for every individual decision.

Saint Paul of the Fraters Libertas alerts us to Nick Coleman’s latest exercise in inadvertant self-flagellation:

“When it bought the Star Tribune in 1998, McClatchy was a second-tier chain that had 10 dailies and a profit margin of 13 percent. Today, after buying its way into a far better club by using the Star Tribune for leverage, McClatchy has 32 papers and a profit margin of 26 percent.”

And the inevitable correction from the Star & Sickle:

Correction: Nick Coleman’s column incorrectly stated the McClatchy Company’s operating margins. McClatchy had an operating margin of 18.6 percent in 1998, the year it bought the Star Tribune. Its operating margin last year was 19 percent. In 1998, McClatchy’s free cash flow was 28.3 percent, as measured by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In 2005, its free cash flow was 25 percent.

Reading annual reports is hard! And to think that these stars of the mainstream who actually look down on the Internet media. I’m only surprised that he apparently managed to count the number of newspapers correctly. I would have expected him to report McClatchy owning fiver newspapers.

Silly woters… zey didn’t honestly believe zat ze Fourth Reich would give up that easily, did zey? You vill wote until you wote correctly, hein?

GERMANY is plotting to revive the dumped EU Constitution, its envoy to Britain revealed yesterday. Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger admitted that Berlin wants to keep the old constitution “to the maximum extent” He said Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to deny voters a chance to reject the Brussels masterplan — derailed in 2005 by voters in France and the Netherlands.

Mr Ischinger said: “We want to preserve significant portions of the document without a second referendum process.”

And I’d like a pony. Meanwhile, Michael Medved is rabidly attacking everyone who is observant enough to notice that exactly the same conquest-by-document process is currently underway in North America… if Germany’s Jews paid as little attention to what was going on around them as Mr. Medved does, it would certainly explain why they sat around so complacently as the physical and ideological infrastructure for the Endlosung was being erected.

I suddenly find it a little bit harder to despise Podhoretz the Younger:

Twenty years ago in Insight, I wrote the worst article of my life (and that’s saying a lot—in 27 years of published pieces, a lot of duds have come from my pen) about Denby and a piece he wrote for New York magazine about the declining quality of American movies. He was right and I was very wrong, and I’m glad to have this chance to correct the record and congratulate Denby for this one.

The ability of pundits and the news media in general to pretend that they are never wrong is one of the most infuriating things about reading the news. Before I quit reading the Star & Sickle, it used to drive me nuts how they would blithely make a prediction I absolutely knew would be wrong, never admit it once events failed to come to pass as foretold, then make exactly the same prediction again the next time around.

Well, I shall have to console myself with the certain knowledge that PtY will write something prodigiously ludicrous in the near future… but doggone it if he hasn’t taken all the joy out of it.

I thought Laurell K. Hamilton’s first book was pretty good. By the third, I was bored. I didn’t finish the fifth and haven’t looked at anything of hers since, as it was clear to me that her writing had degraded into bad, thinly veiled vampire porn for women.

It’s always good to know that one’s reading instincts are still sound, as Chris Byrne comments on her latest book at John Scalzi’s Whatever tend to indicate:

I read “Mistrals Kiss” a few days ago, and it is one of the worst things I’ve ever read. The entirety of the “novel” (which in reality isn’t even a short story; having perhaps five pages of material that isn’t sex scenes) takes place when the protagonist is walking from one room to another room a few minutes away; during which time she stops to have sex I beleive five times with eight different men.. or it might have been four times with six, I honestly can’t remember right now. The total time covered by the book is less than two hours. Two hours, a few hundred yards, a half dozen sex acts, 220 pages, $20.

Honestly, how can she claim anything other than hackstatus at this point?

Once an author loses his fastball, he tends to go downhill alarmingly quickly. Success actually seems to increase the odds of this happening, rather like a television show where the characters devolve into caricatures mindlessly repeating their signature phrases. Regardless of what field you’re in, it’s important to remember that today’s successes are often the seeds of tomorrow’s failures.

As you may recall, I was contemplating my next writing project a few weeks ago. I finally decided that my next project would be to convert that recent column series on Reason’s Clowns into a book. Although my intention was originally to self-publish it – and that remains the backup plan – I ended up talking about it with a publishing house. Who knows what will happen there, (if history is any guide, the chances are that they’ll end up paying me not to write it), but I was pretty pleased with the writing sample I submitted.

I’m not going to post that now, but I thought some of you might be interested in the beginning of the introduction which accompanied the submission, as it may serve to explain why I chose this as my next project rather than some of the interesting alternatives. And extra credit to anyone who FULLY groks the title of the introduction:

GET READY FOR THE THROW DOWN

“What’s your obsession with these guys?” a reader emailed to ask after my fourth column addressing the intellectual sins of the three leading New Atheists was published on WorldNetDaily, where I have been a weekly columnist since 2001. After all, the Creator God of the Universe is presumably capable of defending himself and the elephant is what it is, regardless of what I, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, or anyone else might imagine it to be based on our different experiences of it.

And while I am a believer, a non-denominational evangelical Christian to be precise, it is not my purpose in writing this book to defend God or even to argue for the truth of my particular religious faith. Instead, it is my goal to defend those who are now being misled into doubting their faith or being misguided into feeling more secure in their lack of faith on the basis of the fraudulent, error-filled writings of these three men, while simultaneously making a logical and scientific case for religion’s place in modern Western society.

I do not make this charge of fraudulence lightly, nor is my doing so a hysterical response to their disregard for what to me and millions of other individuals is the central element of human existence. Unfortunately, there is simply no more fitting description of the cerebral snake oil that Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are huckstering to the unwary reader – and the media – under the false label of science and reason. It is my firm belief that no one, not even the most purely rational, über-skeptical agnostic or card-carrying ACLU atheist, will take exception to my charge by the time they finish this book….

I don’t know how long it will take to actually complete the book, that will depend on my design load and the enthusiasm of the prospective publisher for it. But I’m sure it will be sometime this year. And I have to say, it never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to write non-fiction than fiction. Whereas 1,000 words is a pretty good day for fiction writing, I can crank out 4,000 without even breaking a sweat if I’m writing non-fiction and happen to be well-versed on the subject.

Dennis Green was fired as coach of the Arizona Cardinals on Monday after he failed to turn the downtrodden franchise into a winner in three seasons on the job.

And now, to the tune of Ice-T, we sing in honor of Ron Mexico, greatest quarterback there was, is, or ever shall be, except for Donovan McNabb, whose Eagles will never survive his injury.

COACH KILLA!

I don’t know why I’m not hired as an NFL consultant. Seriously, I could do better than two-thirds of the GMs out there. As for the Falcons, I don’t think getting rid of Mora is the answer. I haven’t followed them closely enough to have a strong opinion on the matter, but he’s not the one who drafted the Greatest Quarterback in the History of the Space-Time Continuum or acquired three first-round receivers, none of whom can catch the ball.