Quotulatiousness

March 21, 2020

Modern Classics Summarized: Stranger In A Strange Land

Filed under: Books, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 20 Mar 2020

This book is:
10% Mike
20% stars
15% concentrated power of mars
5% water
50% cult
and 100% topics that are very adult

This video was requested by our longtime patron Joshua A. Demic!

Can you use the “product of the times” defense if the book was wildly controversial for its time? Asking for a comment section…

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up. No, seriously. We REALLY MEAN IT.

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

MERCH LINKS: https://www.redbubble.com/people/OSPY…

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
Discord: https://discord.gg/h3AqJPe

March 10, 2020

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy turns 42

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Register, Richard Speed notes a significant anniversary:

The weekend marked the 42nd anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the hugely influential BBC radio show.

42 is a significant number for fans of the innovative series by Douglas Adams so (carefully) pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, wrap yourself in a towel and join The Register for a trip back to 1978, when the BBC decided to do something quite different.

Writing in the introduction to the Pan Books’ 1985 publication of the radio scripts (which differ from the books, which differ from the television series, which differ from the film …), series producer Geoffrey Perkins described his first meeting with the author. Adams was giving a speech despite being aggressively heckled by the cast members of the Cambridge Footlights show he’d just directed.

He’d also elected to stand on a rickety chair to deliver the speech.

“Here,” recalled Perkins, “was someone prepared to stick his neck out further than most people, someone who would carry on in the face of adversity, and someone who would shortly fall off a chair.

“I was right on all three counts.”

Perkins went on to join the BBC, while Adams worked with the Monty Python team as well as contributing to Doctor Who as the 1970s went on. He pitched the idea for a science-fiction comedy radio series to radio producer Simon Brett. Brett recommended Perkins to the BBC as a potential producer and the series was given the go-ahead on 31 August 1977 (after the first episode was commissioned on 1 March 1977).

“We both owe him an enormous debt,” said Perkins of Brett.

February 21, 2020

QotD: Thought experiment

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you were hovering above Earth looking to be born randomly into any time period in human history, you’d pick now if you had any brains. And if you could pick a place, you’d pick a Western liberal democracy, and probably the United States of America (though as much as it pains me to say it, you wouldn’t be crazy to pick Canada or the U.K. or Holland). Sure, if you could pick being rich, white, and male — and didn’t really care too much about the plight of others — you might take the 1950s. But even then, your choices for food, entertainment, etc. would be terribly curtailed compared to today. If you chose to be a billionaire in 1917, you could still die from a minor infection, and good Thai food would be entirely unknown to you. You’d certainly never enjoy watching a Star Wars movie on an IMAX screen in air conditioning. In other words, while your homes would be bigger and cooler if you were a billionaire in 1917, a typical orthodontist in Peoria in 2017 is in many respects much richer than a billionaire a century earlier.

Still, that’s not the deal on offer. You have to buy an incarnation lottery ticket, and the results would be random.

I’m not big on dividing people up by abstract categories, and I certainly don’t mean them to be pejorative. But as a historical matter, being born poor, gay, black, Jewish, ugly, weird, handicapped, etc. today may certainly come with some problems or challenges, but on the whole those traits are less of a shackle or barrier than at any time in the past. The only trait where I think it might be a closer call is dumbness. All other things being equal, a not-terribly-intelligent person with a good work ethic and some decent values might have had more opportunities before machines replaced strong backs. But even here, I can think of lots of exceptions.

Jonah Goldberg, “America and the ‘Original Position'”, National Review, 2017-12-22.

January 19, 2020

QotD: Bad fiction writers often know little or no economic theory

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This poor woman has everything backward in her head. It makes it very difficult for me to believe that she can create any kind of sane or believable world. Why? Because she doesn’t understand the laws of supply and demand, which means she doesn’t understand reality.

It is clear that she comes from an academic background, since she thinks that shelves are allotted by order of “importance.”

This is a problem for me as a reader often because I run into a lot of writers like her. It’s less important in things like romance, though even there it can get weird, like when some authors assume that the best thing possible in the Regency would be being a duke AND a doctor. (Head>desk, repeat.) This is because they misunderstand the relative wealth and importance of earning a living in the professions.

But there are a ton of books in mystery that hit the wall. Those that require understanding of how the world worked. So the economics these writers write are what you expect from exquisitely maleducated people. They learned sociology and various grievance studies. So you know, factories are bad places where people are forced to work in terrible conditions — for the 21st century. None of these darlings has the slightest idea what actual conditions were like at farms in the Regency, say — and do not even get health care or counseling, and are probably totally deprived of free ice cream.

I have now walled mysteries, some romances and a few fantasies, because they assume people who build and run factories are “evil exploiters” and villains. (As opposed to you know not building anything and letting the peasants starve.)

I’ve walled even more of them when the villain becomes “reformed” and just gives his whole fortune away to people who probably drink it away within a week and, presumably, dies in a gutter shortly thereafter.

In science fiction and fantasy this is even more painful. You’ll have entire worlds getting paid for things, without it making any sense, since there is no galactic agreement on money, no universally agreed upon standard, nothing that makes whatever they hand you worth anything. We have entire worlds paid for things that make no sense to transport inter-world with the money existent at that time. You have “exploited” groups, that you can’t figure out why anyone would exploit or what sense it makes.

Then there is the soc jus in these worlds, which often consists of upending historic injustices by creating worse injustices and, oh, yeah, incidentally making it impossible for the economics to function and starving everyone in the world. If you’re going to do that call it Planet Venezuela already, okay?

And don’t get me started on the economics of worlds with magic, where monetizing magic is somehow either wrong or no one ever thought of doing it (because everyone in that world is born mentally impaired.)

Sarah Hoyt, “A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Supply and Demand”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-06.

January 12, 2020

Neil Peart, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was very saddened to see the news, but it explains why the band retired:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

Neil Peart, the virtuoso drummer and lyricist for Rush, died Tuesday, January 7th, in Santa Monica, California, at age 67, according to Elliot Mintz, a family spokesperson. The cause was brain cancer, which Peart had been quietly battling for three-and-a-half years. A representative for the band confirmed the news to Rolling Stone.

Peart was one of rock’s greatest drummers, with a flamboyant yet precise style that paid homage to his hero, the Who’s Keith Moon, while expanding the technical and imaginative possibilities of his instrument. He joined singer-bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson in Rush in 1974, and his musicianship and literate, philosophical lyrics — which initially drew on Ayn Rand and science fiction, and later became more personal and emotive — helped make the trio one of the classic-rock era’s essential bands. His drum fills on songs like “Tom Sawyer” were pop hooks in their own right, each one an indelible mini-composition; his lengthy drum solos, carefully constructed and packed with drama, were highlights of every Rush concert.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, Lee and Lifeson called Peart their “friend, soul brother and bandmate over 45 years,” and said he had been “incredibly brave” in his battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. “We ask that friends, fans, and media alike understandably respect the family’s need for privacy and peace at this extremely painful and difficult time,” Lee and Lifeson wrote. “Those wishing to express their condolences can choose a cancer research group or charity of their choice and make a donation in Neil Peart’s name. Rest in peace, brother.”

A rigorous autodidact, Peart was also the author of numerous books, beginning with 1996’s The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa, which chronicled a 1988 bicycle tour in Cameroon — in that memoir, he recalled an impromptu hand-drum performance that drew an entire village to watch.

Peart never stopped believing in the possibilities of rock (“a gift beyond price,” he called it in Rush’s 1980 track “The Spirit of Radio”) and despised what he saw as over-commercialization of the music industry and dumbed-down artists he saw as “panderers.” “It’s about being your own hero,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept.”

Update: At AIER Peter C. Earle pays tribute to Peart’s life and work.

The announcement of the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart came as a tremendous shock. Having only retired about four years ago, so many fans of Rush (myself included) had convinced ourselves that this was a temporary hiatus, and that in a year or two – eventually, at any rate – there would be an announcement of a new album, a short tour, or some other project. Surely musicians of their virtuosity and passion couldn’t stay away from the studio or stage for long. But now we know we were wrong, and we know why.

It was revealed that Neil had been battling a brain tumor for over three years. Characteristically, he, his family, and friends (among the closest of whom, Rush vocalist/bass player Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson) upheld his desire for privacy. I haven’t done the math as to whether Neil’s illness was likely a causative factor in the decision to retire, or whether it seems to have come along not long after the decision to retire.

[…]

In his role as the lyricist of Rush, Peart took on such topics as pernicious nationalism (“Territories”), mass hysteria (“Witch Hunt”), the division between constructive and destructive belief (“Faithless”), the fall of Communism (“Heresy”), conflict and power (“The Trees”), the horrors of totalitarian rule (“2112,” “Red Sector A”) and many allusions to individual liberty (“Tom Sawyer,” “Anthem,” “The Analog Kid,” “Finding My Way,” “Caravan”). He did so via lyrics which artfully and passionately evinced those sentiments; sentiments which early on suggested Objectivist perspectives, but over time developed into what he called “Bleeding Heart” libertarianism:

    I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into … a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.

Neil, through his lyrics, managed to do what so many lyricists and writers – even, perhaps especially, so many libertarian intellectuals – fail to do: make liberty neither an alien fixture, a flat slogan, or a utopian slog. It is a way of thinking and living, and one which not only doesn’t ignore, but embraces the flaws and frailty of humanity, tempering realism with hope and optimism.

January 7, 2020

Isaac Asimov at 100 … ish

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s probably the centenary year for the late Isaac Asimov, but the date is only approximately correct:

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.
US government photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In actual fact the centenary is a bit of a fudge because Asimov never knew his actual birthday and picked January 2 as a likely date, and one that allowed for an extra holiday after the Christmas festivities. He was born around the turn of the year in 1920, three years after the Russian revolution, in the Soviet town of Petrovichi, although he emigrated to the US at the age of three.

Like many Russian Jews the family moved to Brooklyn in New York, and Asimov’s father ended up running a confectionery store and newsagent. Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five and taught his sister too, and consumed the pulp science fiction magazine stocked in his father’s shop.

At the age of 15 he applied to Columbia but was rejected, ostensibly on age grounds but, as he wrote in his autobiography I, Asimov, he recounted that the university had filled its quota of Jews for the year. After multiple rejections he eventually earned his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948, serving as a civilian in the US Army in the Second World War.

An academic career beckoned and in 1949 he joined the Boston University School of Medicine as a biochemistry teacher. But by then he had already been getting science fiction short stories published for nearly ten years. In 1950 he wrote his first book and largely abandoned his teaching career, finding writing more lucrative and enjoyable.

[…]

Some thought Asimov had peaked as a science fiction writer by the mid 1960s, as he spent the next few years writing a lot of popular science books, non-fiction and school textbooks. He was even asked by Paul McCartney to write a science fiction musical for his then-band Wings, although the idea was eventually dropped.

But in the 1970s he came back into the SF fold with a series of books and short stories, winning two Hugo and two Nebula awards in the decade. He was also involved in some television and film work, having acted as a consultant on Star Trek in the 1960s.

In 1981 he was approached by a publisher to return to the Foundation series and add more to the canon. Foundation’s Edge was published the next year year, to wide acclaim. This was followed by Foundation and Earth in 1986, Prelude to Foundation in 1988, and finally Forward the Foundation, which was published in 1993, one year after Asimov’s death.

October 26, 2019

QotD: Pulp fantasy writers

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All the great fantasies, I suppose, have been written by emotionally crippled men. [Robert E.] Howard was a recluse and a man so morbidly attached to his mother that when she died he committed suicide; Lovecraft had enough phobias and eccentricities for nine; Merritt was chinless, bald and shaped like a shmoo. The trouble with Conan is that the human race never has produced and never could produce such a man, and sane writers know it; therefore the sick writers have a monopoly of him.

Damon Knight, quoted by John C. Wright, “Conan and the Critic”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2017-11-01.

October 11, 2019

QotD: Religious hysteria

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As for […] the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past.

It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country — Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva’s Zion, Smith’s Nauvoo, and a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other.

Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not — but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck.

Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening — particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.

Robert A. Heinlein, “Concerning Stories Never Written”, Revolt in 2100, 1953.

October 4, 2019

QotD: Freedom of thought

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On —”, 1940.

September 16, 2019

QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?

Filed under: Education, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?

  • Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
  • Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
  • Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
  • Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
  • As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
  • As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
  • Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.

If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?

Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.

September 11, 2019

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh discusses the genesis of Atwood’s best-known work from 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale and the new sequel published this week, The Testaments:

In a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday, Atwood insisted again, as she always has, that her book wasn’t a prediction. People who read her book in a spirit of active dread, the kind of people who dress up as Handmaids and march on legislatures, will say that, well, dystopias are created specifically so that they won’t come true. What Atwood is trying to say goes deeper than that, and contradicts it. She won’t even insist that the book was intended as a warning. “I’m not a prophet,” she pleads, while everyone around her tells her what a terrific prophet she is.

What she means, but cannot say because it would sound arrogant, is: “I’m not a prophet, dammit, I’m an artist.” If tyrannies were easy to predict and prevent by spritzing around a bit of literary bug spray, they couldn’t come about in the first place. Atwood knows better than this; she knows that tragedies of this scale never take the form that an author might anticipate. Moreover, people who read The Handmaid’s Tale as a mere tract are deaf to its satirical elements — particularly those of the epilogue, in which the story is revealed to have been unearthed by scholars in a still-more-distant future.

These people are also failing to see that The Handmaid’s Tale is a book — researched, not merely imagined — about the past of humankind. The whole book is predicated on the observation (also made implicitly in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) that totalitarian regimes are never libertine; they all police sexuality at least as strenuously as they do trade and creative activity, and always come with puritanical, sexually homogenizing features. The novel was heavily influenced by Ceausescu’s Romania and its pro-natalist Decree 770, which abolished contraception and imposed mass gynecological inspection on women of fertile age. Europeans and students (or veterans) of the Cold War will notice this, but how many of the young folk who dress up as Handmaids at protests have any idea? (Are some of them also cosplaying on Twitter as postmodern retro-communists?)

I am curious to see what the critics make of the sequel, because the act of writing one seems a bit cynical, and yet perhaps Atwood has found some clever way of making it work. Offred’s narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale is, as I say, unearthed in a later future; it is important to the functioning of the book that we come to see her as a figure from the past, a human voice whose plea from an obscure period has been flung forward into the hands of half-comprehending and unsympathetic scholarly boobs.

August 29, 2019

QotD: Imagining a world made up only of women

Filed under: Books, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If enough women decide to mob on some unfortunate outside their group, they may well turn physically violent and the beating will not stop once the point is made. It will stop when the target of their wrath is dead or nearly dead. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.

So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.

When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.

“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.

August 2, 2019

QotD: What we mean by “civilization”

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I floated that there might have been “civilizations” between the emergence of anatomically modern humans, and ya’ll objected because no signs of dentistry, no extensive mining operations and even the crab bucket, I thought “Well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It wasn’t till yesterday morning that I stopped and went “waitaminut, Czar Nicholas’ skeleton showed signs of prolonged and horrific abscesses. We only found out how extensive the Roman mining operation in the village was when it rained for a month and roads collapsed under cars. And even with the crab bucket and no Judeo-Christian ethic, ancient Asia had a lot of very advanced, flourishing civilizations.”

Which is when the dime dropped and I realized you guys immediately translated civilization to “as good as we have or better.” Which, of course, made me giggle. Because I’d have liked you to tell a Roman, with their world-bestriding empire that they weren’t civilized. Or, before that a classical Greek.

Understand I am not imagining others before us had the internal combustion engine, or steam, or trains, or … Sure, they might have, but that’s a heck of a coincidence, since those things usually come about by an individual stroke of genius, and even when they do they often aren’t used the way we did (Romans and their mechanical toys.)

To imagine other civilizations of which we’ve forgotten every trace followed exactly the same route we did to the same place we’re at requires believing that inventing steam and the internal combustion engine and harnessing electricity is as natural to humans as dams to beavers.

Now, maybe that’s true. It would certainly make for a very good science fiction story. (Short story, I think. Too much of a punchline thing for a novel.) BUT the odds defy rationality.

I was imagining, you know “builds houses of wood or stone. Domesticated SOME animals. Has villages and cities. Might have trade over long routes. MIGHT have had wheeled vehicles.” (The last, as we know, one can have quite sophisticated civilizations without.)

Look, it’s not your fault. Since the seventies, we’ve been bombarded by crazy BS about superior aliens or superior lost civilizations. (And before that, there was a trickle of it, too, going back I think to the eighteenth century, just couched in different terms.) You’ll get stuff about how the pyramids were built of stones that floated at the sound of a certain note. (A C note, or the equivalent, I bet. “Listen, Mac, you take this stone to the top of the pyramid, I give you a C Note. A hundred Amontheps in your pocket, bucko. Buys a lot of fish and falafel.”)

Part of this, and part of the reason it intensified since the seventies were the “unilateral disarmament people.” You know, those jokers who wanted us to get rid of our own nukes and stand disarmed in front of the USSR, who would then realize we were peaceful, and not attack, and everyone would live in peace and harmony with rainbows and farting unicorns. Yes, it was a stupid and crazy idea since the continued survival of the USSR depended on plunder and conquest. But I’ll remind you our last president still believes that bag of moonshine. All of it, including the unicorn farts.

Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.

July 30, 2019

Moira Greyland discusses how she came to write The Last Closet

Filed under: Books, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tamara Wilhite discusses some of the events that prompted Moira Greyland to write about her mother, Marion Zimmer Bradley and some of the reactions from readers of the book:

The Last Closet was written by Moira Greyland. She’s the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of The Mists of Avalon and Walter Breen. It is Marion Bradley’s book from which the book title is drawn. “The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon” is equal parts autobiography and true-crime thriller with a tragic sprinkling of the history of science fiction fandom mixed in.

Moira’s book includes large sections of horrifying personal stories, but she has gone to great length to document what happened. For example, her father’s repeated arrests on pedophilia charges (he died in prison) and her mother’s testimony during such trials are public record. She’s backed up everything she can from external sources.

I had the opportunity to interview Moira, and the transcript is below.

Tamara: Some of the events in the book go back forty years. What prompted you to write the book in 2017?

Moira: In 2014, a blogger named Deirdre Saoirse Moen contacted me. She was protesting Tor book’s publication of a puff piece lauding my mother, which did not mention either my father’s conviction or her court-documented collusion with him.

I only knew Deirdre as a woman from science fiction fandom who had hired me for a harp concert, and I did not realize how famous she was. My responses to her email consisted of a brief assent that my father had indeed done all that he was accused of and convicted for and more, but it also included the new for her information that my mother had been a great deal worse than my father. I also included my two poems “Mother’s Hands” and “They Did Their Best.”

Deirdre was horrified, and reported that she had lost her lunch upon reading my reply. Her blog posts about my mother and my responses were reblogged to 92 countries all over the world. There was furious controversy, mostly consisting of everyone who tried to defend my mother getting shouted down. Some people read my mother’s appallingly callous court testimony and pronounced her guilty from her own words. Other people saw themselves in my poetry, in the flatness and horror so familiar to the trauma patient. Still others recognized things in my mother’s books about incest and sexual abuse which had never quite seemed right to them.

I was astonished at the volume of response, and at the many, many, MANY letters addressed directly to me. Most of the letters included both sympathy for me and my brother, but nearly all contained reports of the letter writer’s own abuse, many containing the words “I never told anyone this before.”

I was asked to fill in the rest of my story, and I did so, in a blog post called “The Story of Moira Greyland,” hosted on the blog of Katy Faust, another child of gays and lesbians as I am. My blog post was nominated for a Hugo in 2015, and I was offered a book contract by Vox Day of Castalia House.

The only concern I had about writing my book was that my late brother Mark was having a very hard time with the unplanned public exposure. He was having flashbacks about our father, and beginning to have a lot more trouble managing his health. The reason that was so problematic for him was that we both identified our mother as being the scary, dangerous one, where our father was comparatively gentle and loving. Having to deal with his history meant that there was no even remotely good parent left for him, even as a matter of memory.

His distress predated the book, though, and I did not think that it would be relieved by my silence.

I was given a year to complete the book, and I beat my deadline. It would do no good to mention the particular kind of hell it was to tell the story, and I credit my beloved late husband with sticking by my side through the entire process. Anyone with a trauma history can imagine that all of my trauma symptoms from flashbacks to ataxia got worse. It became very clear to me while writing exactly why it was that so few people talk about their injuries.

July 18, 2019

QotD: “They might speak English, but they don’t speak Western”

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Responding to a photo of a protest sign labelled “Dumbledore wouldn’t let this happen“] I swear, it’s all you ever see from them.

But something happened to me last night, I had a kind of realization. It suddenly hit me WHY that is.

It’s because Harry Potter is literally all they collectively know.

Schools don’t teach history anymore.
They no longer teach the canon of Western literature.
They certainly don’t teach the Bible.

So Millennials literally have no points of common reference. It’s not that they all just want to look like complete morons by infantilizing their political metaphor to the level of a children’s book, it’s that they have no other choice.

They’re literally bereft of the allegorical language of the West. I’m sure there’s some Harry Potter monster analogy I could use to explain it to them, how it’s like monsters have come along and literally stolen their ability to speak, their common language, and their birthright.

They can no longer express or understand the set of references we have from our past, our most prized stories, and our culture’s religious quotations. They can’t do Shakespeare, Milton, or even Mark Twain because they’ve never learned any of these while they were being taught Indonesian multicultural dancing and given participation awards. They don’t know what happened at Hastings in 1066, at Runnymede in 1215, or even at Sarajevo in 28th June 1914, because they were being given feminist diversity training instead of learning the history of their civilization. They certainly don’t know what “the least of these” refers to or where it comes from, as a recent event with a White House staffer proved.

They’ve lost the entire allegorical language of the West. They might speak English, but they don’t speak Western. To them, it’s like a foreign, dead, alien language. A set of stories they do not know.

RPGPundit, “Harry Potter and the way Millennial Leftists Don’t Even Speak Western Anymore”, The RPGPundit, 2017-02-02.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress