What is wrong with killing children?

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about all the emotional posturing about the Connecticut public school shootings is that a fair share of it is being done by people who claim there is no God, no good, and no evil.  Some of those people also happen to be those who assert that the Earth has too many people.

So, I find myself wondering if they are knowingly striking false poses in order to hide their amoral inhumanity at a time when sensitivities are particularly acute or if they are merely intellectually incoherent.  The logical fact of the matter is that if there is no divine spark within us, if we are merely bits of stardust that happens to have congregated in one of many possible manners, then therre is nothing wrong or objectionable in rearranging the stardust a little.  What difference does it make to an atom if it now happens to be part of arrangement X instead of arrangement Y?  What difference does it make to the universe?

And if consciousness does not exist, if it is the illusion that some of the more imaginative neurophilosophers claim it to be, then how can anyone possibly object to the elimination of the nonexistent?  What tragedy can be found in the transformation from nothing to nothing?

And if there are too many people on the Earth, in the country, then is not the reduction of that excessive number to be celebrated?

And if it is good, moral, and legal to kill a child in a trans-natal abortion, how long after birth is such killing truly licit?  Would it make the deaths of the young public schoolchildren more palatable to describe them as 24th trimester post-natal abortions?

In an increasingly post-Christian pagan society, what is is wrong, precisely, with killing schoolchildren?

Homeschool or die, part 562

I imagine the latest school shooting will launch the Obama administration’s push for more useless gun control.  And yet, if they genuinely wanted to reduce the likelihood of the mass murder of schoolchildren, they would ban mass schooling.

CBS News is reporting that 27 people are dead, including 1420 students,
after a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The
gunman is among the dead.

Say what you will about homeschooling, but if your child is taught at home, he’s not going to be shot there by some disgruntled school employee, student, or parent.  And the idea that gun control laws will make any difference whatsoever with regards to this sort of thing is risible, given that it is already illegal to carry guns onto school property, to say nothing of shooting people there.

And this may be worth keeping in mind when the inevitable push for gun control begins: “The worst mass school murder in American history took place on May
18,1927 in Bath Township, Mich., when a former school board member set
off three bombs that killed 45 people.”

The modern Wormtongues of SF/F

As one of the readers at Alpha Game suggested, the discussion of retrophobia in the SF/F genre and its observable consequences is better suited for Vox Popoli even though it began at AG due to the intersexual-relations aspect of the matter.  So, I’m going to move it over here, where the majority of the audience interested in the topic is normally found.

As one Amazon reviewer of A Throne of Bones noted, “modern fantasy is a rather ugly place”.  That’s is true, but it’s not the real problem, being merely a logical consequence of the underlying problem of modern fantasy being an incoherent place.  In the first post on the subject, “Sexism” is a literary necessity, I observed how the structural acceptance of sexual inequality and other aspects of historical societies deemed “evil”, (technically inaccurate, but used in the absence of a better word), by the sensibilities presently infesting the literary genre are not only required for historical verisimilitude, but for literary drama as well.

I used the example of a single change to a single character in A Song of Ice and Fire would have totally eviscerate the entire series and eliminated the greater part of its plot.  Consider the consequences of changing Cersei Lannister from an oppressed woman used as a dynastic piece by her father to a strong and independent warrior woman of the sort that is presently ubiquitous in third generation fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal fiction.

  1. Cersei doesn’t marry Robert Baratheon.  She’s strong and independent like her twin, not a royal brood mare!
  2. House Lannister’s ambitions are reduced from establishing a royal line to finding a wife for Tyrion.
  3. Her children are not bastards.  Robert’s heirs have black hair.
  4. Jon Arryn isn’t murdered to keep a nonexistent secret.  Ned Stark isn’t named to replace him.
  5. Robert doesn’t have an accident coordinated by the Lannisters, who don’t dominate the court and will not benefit from his fall.
  6. Robert’s heirs being legitimate, Stannis and Renly Baratheon remain loyal.
  7. The Starks never come south and never revolt against King’s Landing.  Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Ironborn and never returns to Winterfell.  Jon Snow still goes to the Wall, but Arya remains home and learns to become a lady, not an assassin, whether she wants to or not.

So, what was a war of five kings that spans five continents abruptly becomes a minor debate over whether Robert Baratheon’s black-haired son and heir marries Sansa Stark, a princess of Dorne, or Danerys Targaryen.  This doesn’t remove all of the drama from the book; King Robert could spurn Danerys and thus preserve the Baratheon-Targaryen rivalry and the threat of the Others still lurks north of the Wall.  It’s even possible that the novel which now focuses on the warrior woman Cersei, her lesbian lover, Brienne of Tarth, and their brave journey north of the Wall to discover the secret of the Others might not be entirely dreadful.  One could even argue that it would have a shot at being more interesting than A Dance with Dragons.

But would it be better or more interesting than the complex intrigue and drama filling the first three books?  I very much doubt it.

Now let’s turn it around and throw it out to the readers.  Can you think of a modern fantasy novel in which a single change to a single character would have had the potential to improve the story to a similar degree that the change to Cersei Lannister would alter A Song of Fire and Ice?  Alternatively, what popular SF/F works have been hamstrung by the author’s servile adherence to revisionist modern sensibilities?

What we have seen over the last thirty or forty years in the SF/F genre is metaphorically quite similar to what Tolkien portrayed at the end of The Lord of the Rings in the scouring of the Shire.  The modern Wormtongues have done their best to ruin the once beautiful land of fantasy they invaded, by rejecting the past which they hate and failing to grasp the purpose and significance of societal traditions they do not understand.  These Wormtongues are reduced to cobbling together incoherent and derivative works because their very values work against them, cutting them off from the larger part of the sources of historical conflict and drama, reducing them to coloring with crayons where their predecessors were painting with a full palette that ranged the full width and depth of the human experience.

Retrophobia in SF/F

In which I respond to a John C. Wright essay on what he terms retrophobia and how it has crippled the third generation of fantasy writers:

This theory of literary retrophobia explains why so many mediocre
writers like Terry Brooks, JK Rowling, and John Scalzi, and even
genuinely entertaining writers such as Charles Stross, exhibit such a
powerful inclination for rewriting the works of earlier, more original
writers, not only mimicking their styles, but downright strip-mining
their works for ideas, settings, and even basic plots.

For example, I enjoyed The Sword of Shannara when I was in high
school, for example.  Yes, it was a mediocre imitation of Tolkien, but
it had its moments and it was a preferable alternative to re-reading The Silmarillion for the third time.  But after struggling through The Elfstones of Shannara
and only making it about a chapter into the third book in the series, I
gave it up.  I tried again about twenty years later and didn’t even
make it that far.

The reason, I belatedly realized, was that without the benefit of
working from Tolkien’s template, Brooks simply didn’t know how to write a
fantasy tale capable of holding the reader’s interest.  He’s not a bad
writer; his Demon books weren’t bad.  But he simply didn’t have any of
the deep roots in history or myth that the great genre writers of the
past did, and the shallowness crippled the quality of his storytelling.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.  It’s not related to intersexual relations, but that’s where this got started, so that’s why I posted it there.

Top 40 political quotes for 2012

I would take exception to most of the quotes on this list compiled by the Right Wing News.  I think you could find a number of better ones in the comments on this blog alone.  Any time Herman Cain makes the top 10, you have to question the quality.  But a few of them are worth noting:

17) As government becomes bigger, it becomes more lawless. — George Will

13) As my father-in-law once said, when they talk about taxes it’s
always for teachers, firemen, and police — but when they spend your
taxes, it always seems to go to some guy in a leather chair downtown you
never heard of. — Glenn Reynolds

4) The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the
people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody
else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the
whistle, you’re the dog. — James Taranto 

God hates strength and beauty?

This post by Bruce Charlton on the evils of weightlifting strikes me as not only perverse, but downright irrelevant in the way that only the True Churchian can manage:

One of the evil signs of the times is the increased prevalence of intensive weight-training. This is part of a narcissistic, self-regarding, self-advertizing and physiologically- and psychologically-deranging package of extreme exercise regimes, extreme diets, and extreme chemical intake (especially androgen and growth hormones, but other drugs as well – continually expanding).

While Charlton points to the drugs as a useful red herring, it is clear that his argument is actually directed against all weightlifting and intentional body improvement.  If he lifted regularly himself, he’d know that the difference between a smoothly sculpted quasi-swimmer’s physique and a bulked-up bull’s physique is mostly in the amount of weight one lifts, not the time spent in the weight room and/or pool.  It would be interesting to know if he similarly objects to swimming and jogging, which can take up even more time than lifting does.  And while it cannot be denied that vanity plays a part in the pastime, he’s missing the personal challenge aspect that is much more important.  It’s not vanity that causes the lifter to go for that one more rep when his muscles are burning as if they’re on fire and his energy is rapidly dropping to zero, it is the desire to master the weakness of the body.

More importantly, he is spurning the manifold benefits of the discipline involved, discipline that is so obviously lacking in modern society.  It is simply ludicrous that in a post-Christian West, where a ludicrous percentage of the population has lapsed completely into gluttony and sloth, waddling from one sugar distribution point to another like addicts seeking their next fix, Charlton’s criticism is focused on one of the only elements of the population successfully resisting this decline into mindless obesity.

Who is giving into the flesh, the man who is ruled by his desires or the man who mercilessly tames them?  Indeed, the routine Charlton describes is more akin to those regarded as the holiest of men throughout most of the Christian era, the ascetics who mortified their flesh.  I am not saying weightlifting is akin to holiness; its purpose is not the glorification of God, after all, but neither is it the “rooted, habitual sin” he claims it to be.

Possibly influenced by the Greek ideal, Paul writes the following in 1 Thessalonians 5:23: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Chris.”   Because weightlifting strengthens and preserves the body, because it strengthens one’s ability to tame one’s bodily desires and temptations,  it is not only compatible with a Christian life, it is advisable.


Moreover, weightlifting provides more than strength and self-discipline.  I always appreciated the sign over the mirror in the free weight room at the Northwest Fitness Center in Fridley, which said something to this effect:

This place is for the weak, that they may become strong.  This place is for the strong, that they may become humble.

The iron knows no mercy.  The iron strips away pretensions.  The iron reveals character.  This is not the hallmark of evil. 

All that being said, I think Charlton’s position is born more from ignorance than fundamental wrongheadedness.  No man who is so sound on the weaseling and treacherous  mendacity of Rowan Williams can be totally misguided.

It seems I was wrong

You don’t have to buy the hardcover from Marcher Lord.  Apparently you can also purchase the hardcover from Amazon.  Or, for that matter, from Barnes & Noble. It seems the official page count turned out to be 854 pages, not 852.

I couldn’t help but be a little amused by the first one-star review.  Reader Beware! “I was sorely disappointed to find profanity, and vulgarity and a few
other things I found objectionable. If you are into Christian fiction,
this is not the book for you.”

The charge isn’t entirely accurate, however.  While there is a fair amount of vulgarity, there is no profanity in the original Latin sense of the term.

The unnecessary decline of Nokia

This is a fascinating essay on the disastrous, and ongoing, collapse of Nokia.  It’s intriguing to see how giving the wrong guy the power to make decisions at the wrong time can prove brutally catastrophic.  Imagine, for example, if Nokia, rather than Google, had embraced Android back in 2005.

This is not complex stuff. If your company has a strategy built on three pillars, and all three are working – congratulations! You are in the rare position of succeeding in all you do, please do promote your head of strategy and give your CEO a big bonus, you may even have a young Steve Jobs in your organization. Your company is grabbing massive market share, you make huge profits and you are growing beyond your wildest dreams. Congratulations, enjoy this, it won’t last forever.

If you have two of your three pillars working in your strategy, but one is failing, then you quietly shift away from the one failing part, you emphasize the two that are strong, and focus there. You don’t fire your strategy guy, he got it more right than wrong, and you celebrate your CEO. You then quietly, behind the scenes, do a ‘recalibration’ of your strategy, where you find a new third leg to replace the failing one, but you do this quietly, behind the scenes. Because most of your strategy is succeeding, its full steam ahead. The CEO is doing a good but not stellar job, keep him, but don’t give him any big bonuses for this performance. This, by the way, is kind of typical of most companies, part of the strategy is working but not all. This company should be profitable and growing. But its likely only to be growing at the pace of the industry, ie it would be holding its own roughly, in market share.

If you have two of your three pillars in your strategy failing and only one working, then its time to do the mea culpa, announce clearly that you are in trouble, and rapidly shift away from the two failing parts but convince your investors that yes, the one good part will keep you alive, please stay with us, this will be turned around. The strategy guy who cooked up this failing mess needs to be reassigned to non-strategy work and the CEO is probably over his head, you probably need a new CEO. But if you really belive the CEO is up to the task, he or she should be a change CEO and at this stage, the existing strategy MUST BE changed, it cannot bring success to the company if two of your three legs are failing. The one succeeding part cannot sustain you for long. This kind of company is in trouble, or on the brink of trouble, it is probably bleeding market share and probably making losses. It may even be shrinking in size already.

If you have three of your pillars in your strategy failing. All three failing, you must IMMEDIATELY STOP pursuing that strategy, as every day in it, brings you closer to death, to yes, bankruptcy, to oblivion, to complete failure, to junk status as a company, to being a takeover target. If your three pillars in your strategy are failing, you must fire immediately the strategy guy and replace not just the strategy head, but your whole strategy. If every leg of your strategy fails, then yes, ANY new strategy is better. Whatever you did before is better, whatever your competitors are doing is better, anything is better than pursuing a strategy that is 100% failing. The CEO who executed a strategy where all three legs fail, is clearly incompetent, and must be fired immediately. If the Board waits, then the Board is either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO. If the Board waits in firing the CEO of a company where the whole strategy is failing – that Board must be fired instantly as well. This is elementary stuff. A company that finds its three pillars of its strategy all failing, is shrinking in size, is losing customers, is losing market share, is losing consumer and investor confidence, finds its share price rated junk, and is obviously generating increasing losses. This company is at least on the brink of bankruptcy and depending on how much cash it has on hand, it may prolong its life a little, but as long as the company pursues a 100% failing strategy – the company will kill itself.

It’s an object lesson how even the most cash-rich, market dominant company can rapidly decline.  I think it will be interesting to see if Apple or Microsoft is the first of the two 80’s giants to follow suit.  My money is on Microsoft, as long as Ballmer is running things there.

Secession fever spreads

Or, in this case, merely intensifies:

Catalonia’s push for independence from Spain received some unexpected
help this week: the Spanish minister of education proposed an attack on
the system of Catalan-only instruction in core courses in the school
curriculum. The FT reports:

Under the current “immersion” programme used in
Catalonia, all core subjects are taught in Catalan. Primary
schoolchildren study Spanish for three hours a week, similar to the time
dedicated to a foreign language, such as English. Under Mr Wert’s plans, any region that cannot satisfy the wish of
parents who want their children taught core subjects in Spanish, would
have to meet the costs of that child being educated privately.

The Education Minister’s proposition to “establish parity” between
Spanish and Catalan has predictably sparked a backlash and inspired
secessionist sentiment:

When one considers how many empires have fallen apart since the end of World War II, and that the Union of the current United States was imposed by force, it should not come as any surprise that support for secession will continue to grow throughout America as the economy worsens and the divisions between American culture and the immigrant cultures widen.

This is particularly true given that the union between Spain and Catalonia is older than the United States union, and unlike the younger unionn, was not imposed through violence.

Stay on target

I’ve been trying to keep this rant by a perceptive reviewer of A Storm of Swords in mind as I begin writing Book Two in ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT:

My third and final gripe remains roughly the same as it was with the first two books and is, in a nutshell, this: too damned long. Forget the page count; Martin’s writing is good enough to read for ten thousand pages, I mean that he’s taking too long to get to the point. This third installment of the series ends in a quick succession of highpoints. It’s meant to build interest and steam going into the fourth, which it does (frustratingly so, given the time between releases). But most of the third book, like most of the second and the first before it, are build up. Three thousand pages of build up are simply not welcome, and certainly not in the face of a projected three thousand to come. There was even a point, somewhere near page 600 of this book, where I started to question my investment. After all, do I have any assurance that the next book, or the book after, will offer any satisfaction? How long will I have to wait, exactly, for any sort of a sense of closure on anything? How good is Martin’s heart? His cholesterol count? Blood sugar? I suppose, on the bright side, that this series helps a person develop their patience and endurance. But, I’ll tell you, couple this with my doubts of Martin’s having a master plan, and you have a potential nightmare in the making. Is it still possible that he does have a direction in mind, and that book six will end up with all of the strings neatly tied in a satisfactory bow? Yes-that’s still possible. But the hope dwindles with every passing page.

In the end, I will continue. Onwards to book four, I say, and quick about it. Frankly, I may have invested too much to turn back, now, no matter what happens. But I’m punishing Martin with one star less on this novel than I’d awarded the previous two. The book has the same quality as the others in the series, and the last fifty pages or so are rather exhilarating (and the scene with Sansa building the castle in the snow is just awesome-the kind of thing Martin must have had planned for a long time), but the slight problems become large over time, sort of like Malcolm’s explanation of fractals and chaos theory in Jurassic Park, or something. Unabated, these problems will choke him all the way down to a single star by series end. I only pray it doesn’t come to that.

The guy’s subsequent review of A Feast for Crows makes for reading that is more than a little amusing, as everything he feared and worse came to pass. It made me curious enough to see if he’d bothered to read A Dance with Dragons; apparently he hasn’t because despite reviewing everything from a Rob Zombie movie to Charles Dickens novels, he didn’t review that.  But I thought it was remarkable that he anticipated the problems Martin subsequently exhibited as far back as the second book.  In his review of A Clash of Kings, he presciently wrote:

[E]ven after two gargantuan novels, it is hard to see where the series is going. It’s hard to know, not what will be the final climax, but what even could be the final climax. As a for instance, somewhere near the beginning of Star Wars, we understand that eventually it will come down to a confrontation between Skywalker and Vader. In Rocky, we know that the crux will be Rocky’s confrontation with Creed. In Thelma and Louise, we know that the final climax will be a resolution of their flight-either they’ll find a way to get back into society, or they won’t in a profound way (incarceration, death, disappearing into another country). In A Clash of Kings, there are so many major characters and so many major events all awaiting a resolution, that I can’t even precisely piece out what forms the core conflict requiring resolution. Or what event short of global annihilation could bring about such a resolution. Is there a main protagonist or antagonist? Perhaps the Houses of Stark and Lannister provide those. Or, perhaps not (what of Daenerys, for instance, or the oncoming Winter)?

The problems he perceived so early are readily grasped by comparing the number of perspectives in the various novels.  The count grew from 9 different perspectives in the first book to a combined 25 in the last two, which you may recall were originally supposed to be a single book.  What of Daenerys indeed… what of Tyrion!

Anyhow, these are excellent object lessons to keep in mind as I’m starting to roll on the second book.  I’m determined that Book Two will be better than its predecessor.  It’s not too hard to see how things can spin out of control in books of this size, especially if you don’t have a tight grasp on who should be a perspective character and who should not be.  I’ve already written scenes with one secondary character who has been newly promoted to the perspective level; I have to be careful to not to get too carried away with that.

I originally intended to go with two fewer characters than Martin, because the geographic separations meant that I’d probably need to go into more detail and devote more words to each since I didn’t have the benefit of the overlapping physical proximity that Martin did in A Game of Thrones.  However, after writing A Magic Broken, it became apparent that the dwarf required his own storyline.

A few items of business.  First, I noticed that one of the Amazon reviews mentioned the 225 errata.  Those, and a fair number more, have all been fixed now and the cleaned-up version is already up on Amazon and BN.  Marcher Lord will be sending out the new files to all of those who bought from them next week, both preorders and ebooks.  I’m told that Amazon sends out an email confirmation when you buy an ebook from them, so if you were one of the early buyers and have the original version with the errata, please send me a copy of that email confirmation and I will send you the new .mobi file.

It’s easy to tell which version you have.  If the title page on Location 2 of 13826 features a skull, that’s the original one with the errata.  If it looks like a carved Roman wall and there is an appendix at the end of the book, that is the new one.

And if anyone knows how to get in contact with Don Athos, the Amazon reviewer, let me know.  I definitely want to send him an ebook for review.