is it possible? Vox could be proven wrong on two major predictions within a span of two months?
inconceivable!
as i remember, you were fairly emphatic that Favre would never wear the purple.
“The Jets, once the team of one of football’s most charismatic quarterbacks, now have another one. They acquired Brett Favre from the Green Bay Packers late Wednesday night in a deal the Jets hope will ignite excitement for a team that struggles to remain in the headlines in the same city with the Giants and struggles for competitiveness in the same division as the New England Patriots.” – The New York Times, 8 Aug, 2008
ProFootballTalk adds: “Adam Schefter of NFL Network reports that, if the Jets were to trade Favre to the Vikings, the Jets would owe the Packers three first-round picks.”
So, yes, I remain entirely comfortable in my emphatic prediction that Favre will not wear the Purple in this or any other NFL season. And although I would have vastly preferred to see #4 instead of the continuation of The Tavaris Jackson Experiment, it’s completely appropriate that Favre never will. Here’s hoping the Vikes go after Pennington as a solid backup in case the Experiment reverts to form. A fourth-rounder for #4 with conditional boosters is an excellent deal for the Jets; I don’t think there’s any fear they’ll end up giving up the first-rounder. Given Chuckie’s predilection for collecting quarterbacks, I’m amazed that Tampa didn’t match or better the offer, but then, I haven’t been keeping track of the salary cap issues and it’s not difficult to imagine that adding a $12 million salary might have been problematic.
As for that other prediction, I’m not exactly the only one who isn’t sure that it’s as over as its said to be:
“Sen. Hillary Clinton told a gathering of supporters last week that she’s looking for a “strategy” for her delegates to have their voices heard and “respected” at the Democratic National Convention — and did not rule out the possibility of having her name placed into nomination at the convention alongside Sen. Barack Obama’s.” – ABC News, 6 Aug 2008
Respect is just another word for never having to say surrender.
UPDATE – I see from Football Outsiders that Spacebunny’s mother must have made it to the stockholder’s meeting after all:
“Bring him back!” – A lone woman among the shareholders
Mary Winkler–who shot her husband in the back and then refused to aid him or call 911 as he slowly bled to death for 20 minutes–walked away a free woman last year after serving a farcically brief “sentence” for her crimes…. Mary Winkler was granted supervised visits with her daughters last year. Now, sadly, she has gained back custody of the three girls….
It won’t surprise me in the least if one or more of those girls eventually elects to avenge her father’s murder. The situation certainly seems to cry out for that sort of remorseless Greek nemesis. And why shouldn’t the girls feel free to take justice into their own hands, when being female grants a license to kill in Tennessee?
The Mary Winkler case is one of the many reasons I reject the “equality before the law” argument that is often invoked to defend women’s suffrage and other equalitarian concepts. “Equality” simply does not exist; there is far less material evidence for equality than there is for God. In fact, there’s more material evidence for the existence of Zeus than there is for equality. Dr. Helen says: “I have no words to describe how unfair the justice system is towards men who are slaughtered by their wives.”
This “women walk free” concept is extraordinarily short-sighted on the part of those administering the “justice” system. They are leaving the relatives of those men with no choice but to take into their own hands the retribution that is being denied by the legal system. Such avengers should be punished, of course. I suggest a just sentence would be precisely the same punishment previously meted out to the murderess.
It’s absurd, what passes for the “mainstream media” spends most of its time covering deaths, car chases, celebrities, and missing children in strange lands because they think that’s what people want them to cover. But when they get something that is both scandalously juicy and relevant to American politics, they sweep it as far under the table as they possibly can.
I’ve gotten notes that Jay Leno joked about Edwards last night, saying something to the effect of: “The National Enquirer reports that John Edwards’ mistress is receiving $15,000 a month in hush money. No word on how much the mainstream media is getting.”
No wonder newspapers are going out of business; they’re quite literally a joke.
Scientists working on the CDF and DZero experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are entering Higgs territory. On Sunday, the two groups reported at a conference in Pennsylvania that for the first time their results directly restrict the allowed mass range for the elusive Higgs boson. The results show that the CDF and DZero experiments are sensitive to Higgs signals that may show up as the two collaborations gather and analyze more data.
One of the interesting contrasts between science and atheist logic is the way the two distinctly different methods of thought regard range restriction. For the scientist, the restriction of the allowed mass ranges for the Higgs boson is interpreted as a helpful means of identifying the correct properties of the Higgs boson. While this ongoing search may eventually eliminate the possibility altogether, the basic assumption is that the boson exists and any restrictions discovered will aid them in finding it.
Atheist logic, on the other hand, interprets the restrictions on God’s perceived actions as evidence of His nonexistence. The fact that God does not [fill in the physical action of your choice] as was previously believed is logically extrapolated to the extreme in order to allow for the conclusion that God does not exist. But, as the Higgs hunt shows, this is not only an unscientific way of thinking, its assumptions are precisely the opposite of those made from a scientific perspective.
I’m not into political activist posery, as a general rule. But the decision to hold the Olympics in the People’s Republic of China is an appalling decision that stinks in the nostrils of every decent human being on the planet, particularly in light of the brutal oppression that has characterized the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
So, don’t look for any discussion of the Olympic Games here. This blog will be ignoring them and flying the flag of a free Tibet for the duration of this farce of an Olympics.
As a single childless woman, I share the fear of my readers, above, and no amount of financial preparation for a prolonged old age calms me…. [H]aving witnessed the “new old age’’ from a front-row seat, I’m haunted by the knowledge that there is no one who will care about me in the deepest and most loving sense of the word at the end of my life. No one who will advocate for me, not simply for adequate care but for the small and arguably inessential things that can make life worth living even in compromised health.
I realize that there are some men and women who really wanted very badly to get married and have children, but were unable to do so. But, in my experience, every single unmarried man and woman I know had many opportunities to marry. In every case, they elected not to do so. That’s fine on an individual level – although not necessarily so from a societal perspective – but why should anyone feel sorry for those who are now worried about experiencing the entirely predictable consequences of leading an entirely self-focused life?
If we don’t pity those who smoke like chimneys and eventually get lung cancer, a relatively far less certain outcome, then how can we possibly be expected to concern ourselves with those who are belatedly coming to realize that choosing to rely only on yourself means that you cannot reasonably depend upon anyone else? Why should anyone care One reaps what one sows; if one does not sow, one will not reap.
FH points out an insufficiency in the physics of Fight Club:
I loved your fight club blog, just want to point out a minor science issue as I guess you probably talk about fighting a lot. F=MA tells us the force needed to achieve a given acceleration at any point in time. It doesn’t apply to the impact of a blow. The general equation that most closely applies to that is E =MV2 /2 That would say V squared if I could email in superscript.
So velocity is much more important than mass in determining the kinetic energy of a punch. Even the mass behind a blow is only partly dependent on the weight of the puncher – technique like hip and torso rotation is important to ensure a decent proportion of your body weight is behind the blow. On the other hand body weight also helps the fighter passively in absorbing energy that could otherwise result in greater pain, loss of consciousness and injury.
This makes sense, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it renders F=MA totally inapplicable. Halving the speed of a strike does reduce the impact far more than halving the effective mass of the striker. It’s vastly preferable to get tapped by a big guy than take a full-force punch from a small guy. FH is also correct about the way in which body weight helps absorb energy; some time ago I wrote about the insalubrious result of trying to go toe-to-toe with a fighter of equal strength who outweighed me by 60 pounds.
MC wants to know who would win in a battle of the WND warriors:
I notice that you and Chuck Norris have articles on World Net Daily every Monday. This got me to thinking. Since I enjoy reading both, and since you guys are both martial artists, and since you broke the rule and talked about Fight Club, who do you honestly, think would win in the octagon?
It’s funny that you should ask that; it’s a little known fact that while WorldNetDaily columns are much sought after by television talking heads, laid-off print journalists, and D-List celebrities, to actually earn a headline spot on the center strip of the home page, you have to fight for it. I earned my Monday headline spot back in 2001 with a below-the-belt crane strike that jammed Bill O’Reilly’s testicles so far up his rectum that it took five blonde Fox News reporters equipped with loofahs were to extricate them; the shame of it was such that he fled WND entirely. So, you can probably imagine how intimidated I was last year when I heard a helicopter landing outside and opened the door to see the invincible Chuck Norris his own bad self standing next to Mr. Joseph Farah, wearing the same outfit he’d worn in Enter the Dragon and making a Neo-esque “come and fight” gesture.
Chuck’s Chun Kuk Do was unbelievably strong, but his flexibility has waned with the years and so the lightning-fast sokuto intended for my solar plexus only grazed my left shin. Even so, the speed of it forced me to switch from an aggressive Tiger stance to a more defensive Nekko-achi, from which I snapped a front kick that would have crushed his jaw had he not slashed down with a patented Shigawire Mustache block that severed two of my toes. Screaming in pain and fury, I leaped backward while throwing a defensive maegeri that didn’t make contact, but blinded him with a spray of blood. While Chuck rubbed at his face to clear his vision, I took advantage of his momentary blindness to attack again and broke several of his ribs with a skipping left sokuto that left a bloody footprint on his white gi.
Chuck doubled over and I stepped forward to throw a right-left combination to his head that would have finished him, but the movement turned out to be a ruse. Just as I threw the right hook, he caught my wrist, twisted his body and threw me over his shoulder, slamming me into the pavement in front of my garage. I was stunned, naturally, and my shoulder was dislocated, but I managed to roll away before he drove his heel down into my throat. Still, I was in a very precarious position and had all but given up hope of keeping the hawk on Monday’s front page. Fortunately for me, the disturbance of the air caused by my violent passage through it had slightly ruffled Joseph Farah’s exquisitely coiffed mane, so Mr. Farah immediately called time, declared the match a draw, and told us to sort it out amongst ourselves while he flipped open his solid gold satellite phone and arranged for an emergency styling right there in the driveway.
His personal hair stylist arrived in minutes, but of course it takes time and care to retouch such a detailed work of art, so after Chuck finished bandaging his ribs and Spacebunny reattached my toes with a stapler, Chuck and I realized there was only one reasonable solution for two mighty martial artists like ourselves. We borrowed Mr. Farah’s copter, flew to Ellen Ratner’s house and beat the hell out of her and her two cats.
With apologies to Neal Stephenson, who did it first and did it better.
Res pops up long enough to fire off a question:
I noticed your post about the new book. Congratulations! I hope it does well. I was just wondering, what criteria, if any do you use when deciding to use your real name on a book or other publication?
If it’s fiction, I usually use my given name. If it’s non-fiction, I usually use my pen name. This tends to keep things more or less in order.
The main reason people will feel compelled to lie about you or insult you in general is because they actively dislike you. The best way to make people actively dislike you is to publish your political opinions on the internet.
I don’t blame her in the least, although it will be a pity to lose her acerbic take on the madness of the Magic Negro and lunacies of the Left, especially given the prospects for a Democratic victory in November. The extent of my lack of concern for what people think of me and my opinions borders on the conceptual limits of human idiocy, and yet, I have to admit that there are occasionally times when I wonder why I am putting up with yet another ignorant cretin spouting yet more predictable nonsense under the mistaken assumption that he is saying something original.
Then, of course, I remember that my cruelty requires an artistic outlet and instead of being annoyed, I find myself feeling grateful that these masochistic little flies should insist on gracing my humble parlor with their presence despite it being littered with the drained husks of their predecessors. But not everyone is a predator at heart and it is unfortunate that the web Miss Lucas happens to spin is so attractive to so many unappealing intellectual insects.
I don’t know how long I’ll continue this blog, but I tend to find myself invigorated by all the lies and the cheap shots. Perhaps, as some of my friends have suggested, I feed too much on the Dark Side of the Force, but when I see blatantly untrue things being posted about me or ludicrous things being added to my biography on Wikipedia, it just gives me the motivation to work that much harder.
UPDATE – We’re NUMBER 24! It seems someone thinks VP is the 24th most influential liberty-oriented blog on the Internet. Given the fact that this blog averages less than 5,000 daily readers, this tends to support my theory that America is simply not slavering after its missing freedom.
In case you’re interested, I’ll be doing an hour-long interview today from 4-5 EST with Jerry Hughes. There is an online stream to his show, Straight Talk, if you’d like to listen. I believe we’ll be discussing TIA.
This is an essay that appears in the new and wide-ranging SmartPop anthology, entitled You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. The anthology was edited by the brilliant media ecologist Read Mercer Schuchardt and features a forward by Chuck Palahniuk himself.
The Physics of Fight Club
There is a savage joy in violence. The secret of the success of Fight Club is its acceptance of that basic and uncomfortable truth, which is as well-known to every martial artist, gang member, and football hooligan as it is completely alien to the sedentary sort of middle-aged individuals favored by those who publish novels. For as men have known since long before the Colosseum’s sands were first soaked with blood, there is no adrenaline rush so great as the moment when two men put one another to the physical test.
Fight Club is a fascinating little book which not only embraced that truth, but in doing so, translated surprisingly well to the cinematic medium. This should probably not have been surprising, given that the author’s witch’s brew of male fury and raw but stylized violence is almost perfectly suited for that male audience which so enjoys the cinematic adventures of Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude van Damme, Jackie Chan, and a host of other aggressively oriented male leads. The combination of that visceral appeal with the brilliant casting of a ripped and shirtless Brad Pitt for the ladies all but assured Hollywood hit status.
When viewed from a technical perspective, Fight Club is nearly as absurd as any wuxia extravaganza featuring aerial acrobatics and mad dashes through the treetops, whereas from a psychological perspective, it is impressively accurate. To the combat-aware reader, the book raises the interesting question of how the author could have gotten the latter so right and the former so wrong.
Fight Club subscribes to the common conventional fiction that it is not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, but rather the size of the fight in the dog. Although in Fight Club terms, this might be better described as the size of the proverbial canine’s violent sociopathy. As with most aphorisms, there is an element of truth to this; all things being equal, the tougher individual will usually prevail. But outside of the formalized structure of the boxing ring, all things are very seldom equal.
The most basic truth of unarmed combat is that F = M x A: Force equals Mass times Acceleration. Since Force is the measurement of what is smashing into your face and is the primary variable determining exactly what the effect of that blow will be, it is very important to understand the significance of this equation. Since Mass is a function of size, this means that a larger individual will usually pack a more powerful punch than a smaller one. Usually, but not always.
Because Acceleration is just as important as Mass. Acceleration comes in two forms, the first being the speed with which the individual can deliver the blow. This can come from natural speed (given a choice, always elect to get punched by a marathon runner, not a sprinter), or from the perfected technique which is a product of training. The second form of Acceleration is the relative motion of two bodies, which is to say, if you are moving towards the puncher at the moment the punch arrives, it will hurt significantly more than if you are moving away from him.
When these elements all come together, they result in the perfect storm that is the instantaneous knockout. I once made the mistake of getting overconfident and attempted to go inside on a 6’5″, 260-pound fighter who was slow, inflexible, and therefore almost helpless at kicking range. His Mass was obviously superlative, however, and I unwisely granted him the benefit of Acceleration by moving straight in towards him at full speed. The multiplication of the two forces was such that a simple defensive jab on his part left me waking up on the concrete floor, wondering what had happened and where I was.
The second fundamental truth of unarmed combat is that evasion is everything. This is why blocks are given the same importance as strikes; indeed, the famous “wax-on, wax-off” from The Karate Kid is not only better known than any exotic attacking technique, but is genuinely part of the basic repertoire of any traditionally trained martial artist.
At the basic level, evasive options are limited. But for the trained fighter, there are a whole host of techniques at one’s disposal, including oblique movement, gap management, arrhythmic timing, destructive blocks, and simultaneous offense-defense. All of these tactics and more have been developed to allow the fighter to avoid the direct application of Force to his body; indeed, the martial arts are customarily divided into the hard style, wherein the opponent’s Force is met with Force, and the soft style, wherein one seeks to use the opponent’s Force against him.
Kali, for example, is a Philippino hard style. Its brutal destructive blocks make heavy use of the knees and elbows, so that in the place of a traditional “wax-off” block designed to deflect a blow with the forearm, the arm is flexed and the point of the elbow is used to block the incoming strike instead. The ease with which the elbow can break an ankle or a wrist makes delivering a blow nearly as dangerous as receiving a direct one; even a partial block will sting an opponent and make him very wary of attempting another attack.
Kung fu, on the other hand, is the classic soft style. By redirecting the incoming Force and allowing it to flow past him, a soft response allows the martial artist to do things he could not hope to do using only his own Force. Soft styles are particularly effective in dealing with the conventional brute force attacks of the sort seen in the Fight Club film, for while it is extremely difficult to put an opponent in a neck-breaking lock by taking the offensive, it is very easy indeed if the attacker is so obliging as to dive forward and attempt to tackle one at the waist.1
Fight Club fighting was mostly hard style, albeit of the untrained variety, which prides itself on winning through attrition and outlasting the other guy. This brings up what may be the most intriguing and dichotomous aspect of Fight Club, for while both the literary and cinematic depictions of the actual fighting were absurd in regards to the length—twenty minutes!—and nature of the fights, the author did an excellent job of describing the psychological effects of fighting on the fighter.
But first, the absurdities. Without artificial restraints, when there are no rules, most fights are concluded in a matter of seconds rather than minutes once the action begins. This is especially true when the fighters are trained, as the human body’s ability to deal out damage tends to exceed its capacity to withstand it. The image of the bloody warriors fighting to the point of exhaustion and beyond is a Hollywood cliché; in reality, the fight is usually settled as soon as one fighter’s defenses are penetrated and matters speed quickly to an end.
The popular cinematic vision of a back-and-forth battle, wherein one fighter has the advantage first, then loses it as the other fighter valiantly demonstrates his toughness by battling back, owes rather more to spo rts such as boxing and even basketball than it does to the martial arts. Fighting is a surprisingly hierarchical endeavor, as one fighter who can beat another fighter will almost always beat that other fighter, even if they are relatively evenly matched. The balance of a fight is rather like that of a snowball perched precariously on the top of a hill. It may wobble back and forth initially, but once it begins rolling downhill, it seldom stops and reverses course uphill in order to go down the other side.2
If the fights in Fight Club themselves are somewhat fantastic, the portrayal of the mental state behind them is not. The scene in the bathroom at the office was what arrested my attention and made me realize that Fight Club was truly something unusual, as it perfectly captured the alienation of the fighter from a society that thoroughly disapproves of physical violence. As for the constant measuring of every man who passes by as a potential opponent, the mental matchup that takes place every time a man crosses another man’s path is an instinctual habit in which every fighter automatically engages.
There is a silent arrogance inside every fighter, a quiet contempt for those who are afraid to do what he does and yet still dare to judge him for his blackened eyes, his bandaged hands, and the marks that remind them that not all the world is soft and fat and weak. While physics makes the fighter, what makes Fight Club fascinating is the glimpse it gives us of what lies beneath the civilized mask.
The Flamers of Fight Club
At the time that I read Fight Club, I had not heard of its author. But before I finished the first chapter, I was entirely convinced that whoever he might be, he wasn’t particularly interested in women, sexually or otherwise. And between the first page and the last, I read nothing that caused me to change my mind—rather the opposite, actually.
One cannot really say that Fight Club has a homosexual subtext, because the concept of a literary subtext generally implies some degree of subtlety, and at the very least demands an absence of screaming obviousness flaunting itself in the reader’s face with all the discretion of a Sydney pride parade. Consider the very first scene of the book, wherein one man is thrusting a hard cylindrical object into another man’s mouth:
“That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways. With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels. . . . Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I’m wondering how clean this gun is.”
No sooner does this oral performance come to an end than the second chapter begins with the reader discovering the protagonist in the massive arms of Big Bob, in which he has apparently been finding weekly release for two years. In only a few sparse pages, by sharing the loving relationships between two different pairs of men with the reader, the author manages to introduce him to two of the classic fascinations of the homosexual community, Death and the unending Search for the Father.
Big Bob also introduces the theme of gender confusion, what with his missing testicles and bitch tits. More importantly, the basement of the support group meeting in the Trinity Episcopal church foreshadows the coming activities of the club that dare not speak its name, as pairs of men cling together “the way wrestlers stand, locked” and exchange bodily fluids. In this early case the fluid is tears, later it will be blood and sweat, and in both cases they metaphorically represent an altogether different substance.
There are other semiotic clues lurking amidst the gatherings of dying men, but perhaps the most telling symbol that can be found in the support group scene is the protagonist’s inability to perform and find the release he is seeking in the presence of a woman. Her sex defiles “the one real thing” in his life, the thing he needs, and his immediate reaction to her very being is a combination of hatred, disgust and fear. It just doesn’t get much more gay than that.
Unless of course you count the subsequent description of a slippery red penis, towering four stories over the unsuspecting heads of a movie audience. It serves as a markedly apt metaphor, both for the way in which many fans of Fight Club remain oblivious to the fact that it is a screaming, panting, writhing ode to the custom of men having sex with other men and the way in which an attachment to this custom tends to supercede all other aspects of individual self-identification.
“You Aren’t Your Name. You Aren’t Your Family.”
In Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s 1990 book chronicling his eight years dabbling in European football hooliganism, Buford describes a bizarre scene in an English nightclub wherein the drunken ruffians ripped their shirts off and jumped madly up and down to heavy industrial music while packed in tight against one another. He found this activity to be weirdly homoerotic, considering the overwhelmingly straight tendencies of the soccer thugs.
But the hooligans’ activities were always out in the open; indeed, they were often police-escorted and televised. The secretive nature of Fight Club, on the other hand, especially its First Rule, is rather more reminiscent of the notorious decree of the U.S. military: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Moreover, it would take a truly superficial reader indeed to fail to note the glaring similarities between the fight clubs gathering anonymously in dark places while trying to stay out of trouble with the police and the shady, quasi-illegal bathhouses where gay men have trolled for sex for decades.
“Because I’m Tyler Durden and you can kiss my ass, I register to fight every guy in the club that night. Fifty fights. One fight at a time. No shoes. No shirts”
But no shortage of “service.” Given that Tyler is one of the least risk-averse characters ever to inhabit a novel, one can safely conclude that there will be no condoms either in this climactic gang-bang. In a world without metaphor, surely this book would have been published as Fuck Club.
Although the motif of violence is enthralling, it is the homosexual themes that provide Fight Club with the haunting quality that truly sets it apart. Without them, and without what they appear to reveal about the author’s own sense of being an outcast from mundane straight civilization, neither the book nor the film would be as emotionally powerful as they are.
The disturbing note on which the book ends is altogether fitting, combining as it does the contempt of the fighter with the alienation of the flamer. And yet, notwithstanding the way in which these two diverse elements worked surprisingly well in producing an intriguing novel, one remains rather skeptical that this is an alchemic formula that can be expected to make something better out of the world.
To paraphrase the great English philosophers, gay men lurking in cellars distributing fluids is no basis for a civilization.
