November 2007 Archives

Nice to see someone from the mainstream media, in this case Daniel Finkelstein of the Times, actually giving using stronger and more appropriate words than "disproportionate" in the affair of the teacher and the teddy bear in the Sudan.  Even if I'd be inclined, myself, to go a little stronger yet than even "unwarranted, outrageous, insupportable".

Alas that these are no longer the days when the Government kept some gunboats on hand to sort out any bunch of stinking barbarians that dared prey upon a citizen of The Empire On Which The Sun Never Set.

I have just encountered David Salaguinto's "Office Offline" webcomic on the MSDN blogs, and I declare it good and amusing reading.

I think this one is probably my favorite so far, probably because of its personal topicality:

It seems to me, it does, that when one looks at the examples where A is genuinely taking advantage of B, that very often B is a set of people which A can rely on to have a large number of members who are simply incapable of making good decisions.  This subset then act, as it were, as the scabs who make it possible for A to basically ignore the remainder of B thereafter; so long as there are enough dummies out there spoiling the scenario, everyone else is stuck with the baseline they establish.

Which is almost inevitable, since dumb people are a plurality in almost every group.

End oppression.  Wipe out the right to be stupid.

And now, my booklog on the last book of the Chronicles of Chaos, in which I once again submit to total fanboyism and tell you exactly how much I simply adore this series.  So, let us assume that I've already rambled on for a while about the style and the language and the allusions and the classical references and why can no-one else in this century seem to write a book that can satisfy this part of my reader's soul, and get on with talking about the book.

Mythology is all over the place, once more, coupled with more delightful - especially to me - expansion on the four (and more, combined) paradigms of reality.  Some reviewers, I have seen, criticized this book for being something of a slow, or stretched-out ending, but I must confess I didn't find it so.  As with the first book in the series, I just devoured it from cover to cover, as our fugitives escape Mavors's fleet, hide out for a while on a desert island to better learn their powers, run into another Olympian while doing a good deed, travel to Mars (oops, guess who owns that planet, and then things get really complicated with the various Olympian factions - be they the ones who merely want to solidify their rule of the Cosmos, or unmake it entirely and start over, better.

Couldn't put it down.  Want more.  There's certainly room for more, so I hope I don't hope in vain.

See my entry on Fugitives of Chaos (second book) here; my entry on Orphans of Chaos (first book) here.  And while I am linking things, let me also link you to this entry on the author's weblog, Donatism and Atheism in Fugitives of Chaos, which has some interesting things to say about the role of religion in the series and further fascinating information on Amelia Windrose's paradigm and its development.  Also recommended reading - once you've read the books.

And so, through Facebook, I am pointed at this Making Light article.

I can only recommend the Making Light article itself as slightly amusing; it's just another tedious product of the self-appointed elitist phenomenon of sneering at the petty bourgeois tendency to buy Ugly Lawn Ornaments instead of spending their money on the things the self-appointed elitists think are worthwhile; this would perhaps be more credible if they didn't embrace every ugly underclass product as "authentic" and "important" and "full of social energy" and suchlike, which is the principal differentiator between them and genuine high-culture elitists, such as my good self.

I mean, kitsch is not by any measure high culture; but it does, at least, have the redeeming feature that it tries to appeal to people's desire to beautify their lives, or to aspire - which is laudable even if the result is aesthetically horrific in my eyes - and in its kitschy way often speaks to the same values that this high-culture elitist holds.  And I'd much rather people succumb to kitsch than cacophilia.

(One might also, if I felt like citing a Wikipedia reference, hook this in to the splendidly omnicredally justificatory notion of "false consciousness", Marxist analysis, etc.  But it's a busy day.  Consider it the background reading.)

But I didn't come here tonight to talk about this.  I came to talk about this article, which I found through the former one.  Here is the single pair of sentences I agreed with in the entire article:

THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE of America was up in arms in 2002 about an exhibition in Napa, California, which included the "caganer", a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles.

Perhaps predictably, the Catholic League was offended by the presence of a defecating peasant in the holy stable.

And even then, only inasmuch as I have to world-wearily point out that the Catholic League, like virtually all activist organizations, is about as much use as an outdoor privy on Mars where the facts are concerned, and they ought to have done their blasted homework.

Actually, I'm not even sure how much I can say about this article.  Too much material, you see.  The essential thesis would seem to be that kitsch represents a - well:

Kitsch, he argues, isn't primarily about bad taste or the vulgarities of popular devotional images: kitsch is "the absolute denial of shit". Kitsch is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It's the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency.

[...]

This sort of peace requires a stubborn engagement with the brute facts of oppression and violence - which is the very reality that the kitsch peace of Christmas wants to take us on holiday away from.

This kind of philosophy, that one can best - or only - make the world better by remaining as mired as one can in the strictures of experiential reality, or one view of experiential reality, heavy on the worst bits - seems to me to be so spectacularly wrongheaded that, truly, only the West in the latter half of the 20th century could produce it.  I fear I must return to the 19th for one more suited to my taste.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
    - Oscar Wilde

The first step in building a better world is to imagine it.  Everyone who looks at the future with awareness has some concept of what it ought to look like.  Most of those concepts don't generally include imperfection, impurity and moral indecency - in their creator's eyes, although others may well differ - because who the hell actually wants those?  They may differ on what constitutes imperfection, impurity, and moral indecency, but I submit that someone who actually wants those, defined by their own standards, to exist is suffering from some severe problems in the coherent-thinking area.

Your humble writer dreams of a future in which rationality has spread its soothing blanket around the world, liberty and order have met on good terms, and the Promethean advance of technology has made every man as wise as Athena, as rich as Croesus, and as potent as Zeus.  And, oh, yes, in which everyone would understand the previous four references.  These imagined futures differ, of course: some would like to stop the wheel of history and see the future as no more than liberal democracy, endlessly improved - perhaps with some old-style technological advance that might see the Stars and Stripes replaced one day with the Galaxy and Stripes, while their counterparts abroad probably want the Middle Kingdom to reach the stars.  Fundamentalist Christians, I'm sure, want a future in which all mankind is united in brotherhood singing Hosannas to their God and sin and death are gone forever.  A swift browse around the Internet will find you plans for a better world from socialist One World Governments to ecotopias to open-source government-by-Wiki proposals.  Even Osama bin Laden had a dream of the future, although odds are you don't like that one much.

And even the buyers of kitsch have a vision of a better world, even if it's just small, petit bourgeois dreams of a house with a nice hardwood floor, a new car in the garage, a good lawn, and sending their children to college to be better off than they were.  The kitsch is, as it were, a symbolic representation of the dream.

The next step, of course, translating the dream into experiential reality, which is usually the hard part, but there's one thing that I know for damn certain.  If you don't have the dream in the first place, it's downright impossible.  You may be able to navigate without a map, or with an incorrect map, but there's no way in hell to navigate without a destination.  You end up just, to extend the metaphor, lying in the gutter, watching the turds float by.

(There's plenty of other stuff to pick on - the writer the writer quotes appears to think that kitsch implies wanting a perfect world implies wanting ghettos and concentration camps, which is sufficiently bizarre that I can only apprehend it with difficulty - but I think this covers the main points.  Desymbolization, disabstraction, and present-time focus are memetic poison, people!  Don't let them get you!)

(Hat tip: Mr. Eugenides) Heather Mills McCartney demonstrates that there is no limit whatsoever to the depth of crazy that the human brain can descend to, as she publically proposes that we should all help stop global warming by drinking rat's milk:

The former model, who has hit the headlines with a series of tirades against her estranged husband, Sir Paul McCartney, made the comments as part of animal-rights group Viva's push to persuade people to abandon meat and dairy products, and go vegan instead.

Ms Mills, 39, unveiled the group's two new posters, in which she features, to draw a connection between the rise in global warming and dairy livestock production.

Addressing her audience - dozens of journalists and a handful of bemused tourists - she said: "There are fields of grain just miles from starving children in Africa, being shipped to Europe to feed our livestock.

"There are 25 alternative milks available in health shops and supermarkets.

"Why do we not drink rats' milk, cats' milk or dogs' milk?"

As the aforementioned blogger puts it:

The reasons why we don't drink rats' milk are almost too obvious to bother going into - and there's a sentence I never thought I'd type - but clearly the logistics of rearing, grazing and then milking vast fields of rats do not faze this gibbering unipedal loon. Are these disease-carrying rodents to be free-range? Are the hills of Cumbria to teem and swarm with millions of filigree Siberian hamsters? (The paper goes on to quote a food scientist who labels her idea "ridiculous", which is clearly academic-speak for "barking lunacy". He is much too kind.)

Well, quite.  Sanity weeps.

Via Silmaril and James Nicoll, top page statistics from Wikipedia and "Conservapedia":

100 most frequently viewed wikipedia articles.

Conservapedia most viewed pages

Now, to me, the interesting thing is really not the comparison between the two.  (Per Kate Nepveu's comment and further comments at Crooked Timber, it seems like that might have been faked anyway, and in any case, no-one but the usual total morons think Conservapedia reflects "the average Conservative"; it reflects the embarrassing superstitionist idiots who are to "conservative" what lousy, stinking Commies are to "liberal".)

The interesting thing is the sheer quantity of fluff that shows up on that Wikipedia list, and the absence of, well, very much serious at all, which is not exactly to the credit of Wikipedia readers.  Perhaps we are doomed, after all.

And so to Plague Year, another bit of my miscellaneous SF reading, and this one also booklogged by Amy.

I liked it less than Amy, I'm afraid.  I enjoyed the science, which was enough to satisfy the bio-nanotech pedant in me, but I'm afraid it suffered in my view from writing that was, well, kind of choppy.  On a more personal reader-connecting-with-the-book level, for me it also suffered from characters who, mostly, I didn't care enough about to care about, and a sub-plot that reminded me a bit too much of those anti-government anti-military novels of the 70s and 80s in which Our Side had to be revealed as as bad or worse than Their Side is, after the Designated Crisis Situation; never a plotline I cared much for then, and I still don't.

Entertaining enough, but unlikely to go on the re-read or must-read-sequel lists any time soon, I think.

Firebowls are very good thing.

Especially when they're mine.

(Thanks, Amy!)

 So, today I was reading about war, for sundry research-related reasons, and happened across this (about four years old, I believe, but the first time I saw it) news item from Liberia:

Speaking to the press from his new Soul-Winning Evangelical Ministry in Monrovia, General Butt Naked told reporters that at the age of 11 he had a telephone call from the Devil who demanded nudity on the battlefield, acts of indecency and regular human sacrifices to ensure his protection. 'So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people -- so many I lost count. But in June last year God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be, so I stopped and became a preacher.'"

You know, I'm very much a cynic when it comes to the rest of the world, and especially when it comes to the capacity of even the relatively well-informed Westerner to really know just how fucked up the world can be outside our tidy little enclave that we call Western civilization - even when you're not such a cynic as to scrawl BARBARIAN DARKNESS over not by any means all but still decidedly large chunks of the outside world.

But sometimes the world is still far more fucked up than my cynicism can account for.

Perspective, I suppose.

And now, the next book in the Chronicles of Chaos, in which our orphan protagonists finally manage to escape from their boarding school/prison, learn more about how they, the universe, and its politics actually work, take a cruise, and SPOILER.

Well, firstly just about everything I said about Orphans of Chaos applies, only more so.  The mythology in particular flows thick and fast, and if you didn't have at least some grasp of Greek mythology in particular before reading this book, you're probably going to find yourself floundering at some point or other.

(We pause briefly while your booklogger mourns for those days when any educated person would be expected to understand such references, and then continues.)

Characterization and pacing only improves from last time (when they were no slouch) as we get to know those involved better, and the plot advances.  Absolutely excellent books, these.  Cannot recommend too highly.

And most recent in my non-fiction reading, Silent America, a book of fourteen of Bill Whittle's essays reprinted from his weblog, Eject! Eject! Eject!.

This is a marvellous book, I think.  Clear, well-reasoned, thoughts in a well-written and eloquently accessible form.  (Despite the unfortunate occasionally unresisted partisan shot, which I will admit does detract slightly from the book for those not inclined to such, which notwithstanding those I think would be interesting reading for those of all reasonable political persuasions.)  I found the essays therein spoke to me - moved me - when I first read them on his weblog, such so that I had to obtain this paper edition as a permanent addition to my library.  Most highly recommended.

(The formatting's a bit crunchy in parts in the transfer to book from web, and might have done with somewhat more stringent proofreading in parts too, but this's only the most minor of minor criticisms.)

...when it comes to sex, or so it would seem from the remains of my outsider's perspective.

The first third, who I shall call the Thumites, are in fact the stereotypical pleasure-quenching Puritans out to spoil everyone's fun.  Often for theologically dubious reasons, but whatever, it's there.  And this tendency tends to be the one that makes it as a stereotype, because the Thumites are loud and have bully pulpits.

Then there is the second third, who I shall call the Epithumetics.  The Epithumetics are obsessed with genitalia, their own and other peoples, and what they can be thrust into, and what can be thrust into them.  They also get to be a stereotype, especially in the parts of the world who make the Thumites look reasonable on all these issues, because they own the shallow end of popular culture, a plurality of "celebrities", and the behavior of the underclass of people that even non-Thumites think of as moral trash.  Also, they're loud, because if there's one thing the Epithumetics believe in as strongly as that sex ought to be had, it's that it ought to be talked about incessantly on all occasions, between friends, to strangers, on the Internet, in trashy magazines, in public schools, and on prime-time television.

But more importantly, there's group number three, and I believe - and hope - the largest, who I shall call - well, I'm postjudiced, so I'm going to call them the Psychosexually Healthy.  Unfortunately, they don't get a stereotype, partially on account of being relatively quiet about the whole thing, but can generally be characterised as preferring it that groups number one and two both would shut the hell up and go away.

I like them best.

I HAVE A COMPLETE LOGICAL PROOF OF ALL MY VIEWS
(which this bumper sticker is too small to contain)

Coming soon, wherever bumper stickers are soldwhenever we figure out how to get bumper stickers printed.  Inspired, sort of, by this.

Since the electric motors're driving the wheels anyway, someone remind me what the remaining advantage is in using a gas-burning internal combustion engine to run the generator, as opposed to, say, an external-combustion steam engine that'll burn damn near anything you can spray and/or chop up and drop into it?

If you think you have a merciless slavedriver of a boss now, just try being self-employed.

Go on.  Try it.

Ouch!

So, I finally got around to starting the Chronicles of Chaos, and its first book, Orphans of Chaos.  Now, Orphans of Chaos is a John C. Wright book, so I'm afraid I will have to beg your forgiveness for composing this review, as it were, in slavering fanboy mode.

Orphans of Chaos begins in a slowly revelatory mode, as the five teenage orphans in their mysterious, old-fashioned ("classical education") English boarding school start to realize that they're being kept there, that things are decidedly not normal, and that more is going on behind the scenes.

And then, of course, they eventually discover their Uranian ancestry, and at least a smidgen of the power-plays going on among an assortment of (mostly Classical and Greek) deities to preserve the peace, and some of their true powers, which curiously enough operate in five different modalities which - in theory at least - shouldn't all be operative in the same reality.

And then things really get interesting...

Mr. Wright's writing style is as gorgeous as ever, and the layers of allusions and references were at least as delightful to this reader as you might expect, and probably more so, as were the paradigms and the philosophy.  Essentially, it's more or less ideal for this particular reader.  As for the plot, it certainly kept me turning the pages and staying awake to read rather longer than I probably should have.

Ends abruptly, though.  Damned if I might not just pick up Fugitives of Chaos next, after all.

"Left-anarchists are still the control freaks that most leftists are, but want the control to come from local soviets or the community of the nearby rather than a distant State; right-anarchists are excessively doctrinaire libertarians who've lost all touch with human nature and why the use of non-immediate, non-defensive force is a necessary monopoly; and center/pure-anarchists are either strongman fetishists, suffer from both the former delusions simultaneously, or believe humans can interact without mutual effect, for which see crazy."

Dunston vs. Priscilla; principles of contract formation, only poetically formed:

"Many virtues fructify the legal system of our nation.
Among these, jurisprudes esteem the contractual relation.
Three elements combine in one such binding obligation:
Offer, acceptance, and consideration."

Tim Worstall has some interesting and I think good ideas (note: on preliminary inspection; I haven't fully cerebrated upon them yet, so comments are welcome and don't assume I uncritically back the entire article) on possible improvements to the US health care system, based on some of the funding notions they use in the better (health-care-wise) parts of continental Europe.

Unfortunately, he's also right that it's almost certainly not going to happen in this way, and for the two reasons I would categorize this way, which may or may not be included in what he describes as "institutional pressures":

1. Socialists are nature's control freaks.  (Even left-anarchists are control freaks, they just want the control to be exercised by a local soviet or community of the nearby rather than a distant State.)  As such, anything that permits people to make their own decisions or takes things out of the scope of governmental control is per se bad, regardless of the utilitarian result.
2. An annoyingly large percentage of the medical profession, judging by the ones I read, have parlayed the desire to be of service to humanity into the desire to be a government serf.

So, the UN - via its horrifically misnamed "Institute of Advanced Studies" - is having another push at banning human reproductive cloning.  And having read the report in question, for no more than the usual reasons:

• Violation of human dignity ("because it's icky, and people are magically special").
• Because it might affect the family and sexual relations (what, like all those other things you... have totally failed to ban, starting with the Pill and moving down.).
• Because some people might be prejudiced (ooh, nice respect for the human dignity of other "non-standard" people there).
• Because of the collective dignity of humanity - religious belief that reproduction should be chancified (superstitionism), or equivalent religious belief in the sacred status of natural selection (secular superstitionism).
• Because parental choice of characteristics takes away the autonomy of the child (random selection being, you know, so much more under their control).
• Social justice (because all the world's research resources are ours to allocate as we choose, because we're naught but lousy stinking Commies at heart)
• And because it might not work well at the start and create defective clones (and in a world in which we routinely abort vast numbers of perfectly healthy fetuses for matters of human convenience, disposing of faulty cloned material at this stage is going to be such a moral issue, you fucking hypocrites).

If I had one wish granted, at this moment, it would be that all the people who think like this - the intellectual heirs of those who would have banned fire had they figured out how to organize back in the caveman days - should find themselves dying from something "humorous and lingering".  And since my humor tends to the ironic, I'll take "something that some avenue of research they banned earlier in life could have trivially cured" as that means, thank you.

Honestly, the more I read bizarre economic notions held by people on-line, the more tempted I am to give Moon and Star a bye for the time being and write instead a short about some people who implemented damnfool economic theories, went into debt to support their economy when said damnfool economic theories gutted it like a sturgeon, and were rather surprised when the bank repossessed their entire planet and sold it off at 3 in 240.

Must... resist...

creeping consolidation (n.)

The popular, if annoying, Peripheral rumor that the Empire has an ongoing policy of creating increased interdependence between itself, its satrapies and its client states, and of slowly undermining the polities that oppose integration into this world-system, in the name of expansion without the necessity for traditional Imperial takeovers.

This rumor is generally scoffed at by most Imperial citizens, although the Imperial government, curiously, has never denied (although neither has it confirmed) an agenda of creeping consolidation, despite occasional requests to do so in the Conclave of Galactic Polities, or through independent diplomatic channels.

It has been alleged by some clionomists that creeping consolidation is the inevitable course that the foreign policy of a relatively benign Great Power will take, as a response to the pressures of drift imperialism.

drift imperialism (n.)

Hypothetical tendency, in clionomy, for star nations to develop expansionist tendencies in reaction to stellar drift.

While maintaining secure borders is already a difficult prospect, considered in terms of volumes, even when only the volume of space inside star systems is considered, for long-lived star nations (2,000 years and over), the natural tendency of stars to move in relation to each other is likely to spread out the stars of a formerly compact volume.  Over the short term, this can cause either individual systems to be cut off as exclaves within neutral or even hostile territory, or an enclave of foreign territory to extend inconveniently inside a formerly secure volume.  In the long term, for those star nations capable of planning over the long term, over periods of a million years, a formerly compact sovereign volume can be spread over a significant part of the galactic arm.

In the short or long term, such involuntary alteration of the borders can pose a significant national security issue.  Even for a star nation with wormhole technology linking its systems, allowing trade to continue and ameliorating the economic dislocations of the changed distances, and for forces to be transferred quickly to such isolated worlds, the threat of a newly-isolated system being cut off by the destruction of its wormholes remains notable, especially when they cannot be easily replaced; physics requires that a wormhole superficies interferes catastrophically with a flickerwarp transit.  For those polities lacking access to wormhole technology, or eschewing the high infrastructure costs required, a star system moving beyond readily accessible distance or into hostile territory can be the economic ruin and military defeat of that system.

Consequently, the natural response to stellar drift for many polities is to endeavor to claim such worlds as enter their territorial volume or sphere of influence through stellar drift, and to extend their volume and/or sphere into such worlds and systems as surround those of their star systems drifting out of their existing volume.  Where such are indeed unclaimed, or only loosely claimed, such colonial expansion is peaceful enough (save where the system possesses native sophont life), but where polities adjoin, the inevitable clash between the security interests of the neighbors often lead to conflicts and war, especially when one polity possesses a strategic advantage over the other, such as a conflict between a Great Power and a minor polity, or between a star nation and a single-system polity.  Rare is the government that is willing to trust entirely in the benignity of a foreign power where access to the entirety of one of its systems is concerned, and likewise rare the government willing to allow such access, with full extrality in play, through its sovereign volume.

Thus, at its most benign, clionomists theorise, drift imperialism gives rise to so-called creeping consolidation; expansion by incorporating nearby polities into a hegemonic world-system dominated by a central Great Power, rather than direct annexation; although it should be noted that given the range of stellar drift, such creeping consolidation is unlikely, in the very long term, to be satisfied with a hegemony smaller than the galaxy entire.

As a language purist, I do not like this modern business habit of word extensionizationingmentage.

"Extensionizationingmentage bloats language."

Via Rachel Lucas, this Huffington Post piece concerning some kid who was driving round Albuquerque throwing golf balls at people, and made the mistake of throwing one at a meth-head, who proceeded to go get his gun and shoot the kid in the head.

They frame it as an argument for gun control as a senseless gun death.  Obviously, I don't see it as an argument for gun control, seeing as meth users generally aren't legal gun owners anyway, but I think it can hardly be described as senseless.  I think the causal chain actually makes perfect sense.  Not that I personally want to justify shooting people in the head because they throw golfballs at people, but I do derive some schadenfreude from seeing some teenage asshole sociopath irritating a bigger sociopath and getting called on it, death by stupidity style.

An argument for preventing dumb people from committing minor batteries lest they piss off people with more violence and less self-control at their disposal, now that, it is.

So, I have found on-line a copy of the original document in the University of Delaware brainwashing foofaraw.  It's just a rich vein of Marx-Hegel-Gramsci wackiness.  Let's take a look at some of the definitions up top, for while most of them are partial distortions of legitimate terms, a few are rather more interesting:

A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination.

So, explain this one to me.  I'm a white person.  Given the above definition, I am inherently racist, and as such punishable on that basis whatever I may do.  Now, assuming for a moment that I'm not one of those people who sees virtue as something objectively defined and inherently worthwhile, why exactly am I still picking my own damn cotton?

If you do the time whether or not you did the crime, all incentive to not do the crime is removed.  Maybe I'm a little cynical, here, but I suspect that providing such an obvious justification for oppressing the shit out of any minorities that come along when it's of personal advantage will not be remembered as one of the 21st century's greatest contributions to racial harmony.

Note also, as in the carefully bent definition of "racism" found above it, the careful defining out of the traditional meaning of the term "racism".  By this definition, as the Daily Ablution rightly points out:

"were a black man, motivated by a hatred of white people, were to break into my house screaming racial abuse, kill me, and use my blood to cover the walls with slogans urging the murder of white people everywhere, this person could not correctly be deemed racist."

And, oh yes, it's a false syllogism of the first class and a petitio principii, but evidently that's not the kind of academic rigor you need for this kind of topic.

And then there's:

A NON-RACIST: A non-term.  The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called "blaming the victim").  Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it.

You got that?  There's nothing you can do.  You can be as pure as the driven snow or uncaring as the mountain where racial issues are concerned, and you're still guilty.  If you don't buy into their whole program, you're guilty.  Hell, even if you do buy into their program, you're guilty, but it's a good guilt.

Silence is consent.

Ooh, try that last one in court the next time you're up on a rape charge, why don't you?  That's got to be good for an extra few years.

Oh, and:

INTERNAUZED (sic.) RACISM: [...] (2) The behavior of one person of color towards another that stems from this psychic poisoning.  Often called "inter-racial hostility"; and (3) The acceptance by persons of color of Eurocentric values.

So, let's see.  Under (2) you are responsible for the West Indians hating the Somalis, the Indians and the Pakistanis not getting along, the Africans disdaining the Asians and vice versa, feuding between Hispanic and Black gangs, and every tribal squabble from Africa that's played out again whenever they find themselves together once more, despite not having been involved, and in many cases, despite the squabble in question having been going on for centuries before The White Man came to Africa in the first place.  Hell, if I look hard enough, I can probably find someone willing to argue this was the case before recognizable Caucasians even evolved.

Under (3) Well, if you want to capitalize on white guilt forever and carefully edit out any successful minorities to preserve your argument, this is how to do it.  Of course, interpreting this standard literally, you can't even teach this course to persons of color, inasmuch as self-hating wankery seems to be a specifically Eurocentric value these days.

...there's more.  Well, actually, there's a lot more, and I could spend pages writing about semiotic misdemeanors, bad logic, bad science, bad history, and general intellectual perversion, and their roots in the postmodern post-Marx-Hegel-Gramsci school of "analysis", but really, why bother?  Those of you who know this probably already know it, and those of you who don't and have already shrugged it off don't care, and the rest of you are probably too emotionally invested, which is the point of most of these exercises - and, frankly, that such a farrago of corrupted knowledge, intellectual perversion, cultural Marxism, nihilism, sophistry and vacuity passes muster in academia in this, the greatest civilization humanity has yet produced, renders me too disheartened to continue.

Going back to the Daily Ablution, and to lighten the end of this post, I must point out one hope on the horizon:

Although it's not immediately apparent, there is good news for guilty white folks here, and it comes from a rather unexpected source; namely, the much-anticipated rise of China to world domination. Come that glorious day, no racism will remain among white people, as they'll no longer represent the "dominant group" of the "global order". At that precise point, we will immediately be granted the cherished status of "victim" - the entire Chinese population will, of course, simultaneously become racists. Perhaps some sort of ceremony could be held to mark the event.

(Hat tip: Instapundit) A student at George Washington University has admitted drawing swastikas on her own door, university officials say.

Needy attention-seeking, or a demented sting operation against the imaginary hateful haters of hatelicious hatefulness?  You decide.

I just hope they prosecute the crap out of this idiot for hate crimes against herself.  That would be both deliciously appropriate and amusing to me, which is really all I ask of our judicial system in cases like this one.

...of links I meant to say something about at the time, but was prevented from doing so by the viscissitudes of the busy week:

• (Via Tim Blair) Australian man killed over water restriction dispute, a profound demonstration of what happens when you let idiots turn a technical dispute into a bloody religion.
• Fred Thompson's immigration plan (via: LGF) seems be to pretty close to exactly what I'd like to see.
• Sicko: Someone else from the UK points out that Michael Moore is a lying bastard.  Although then fails to draw what I would consider the obvious conclusion.
• Squander Two, writing on this topic, explains why the health totalitarians should stick to their own last.
• The British government coordinates its message as well as ever, again via Tim Blair.
• They may have withdrawn it now, but that the University of Delaware, which I do believe is in this country, should ever have seen its job as the ethical reeducation of its students in the fine old Chinese tradition of hsi nao is rather disturbing to me (via: LGF, here and here, respectively, and elsewhere).
• While I'm willing to accept that it's not representative, exceptional fuckwittery at the Daily Kos: let's end the War on Terror by all converting to Islam!  (Oh, yes, this would be reality-based, all right.)
• With this kind of autopatrioquerency on display, someone remind me again why "Death to Traitors" is off-limits?  (And yes, yes, I know, moral high ground, not descending to their level, and all that, but as long as bigotry, slander, and poorly veiled death threats pass unnoticed over there, I shall continue to find it hypocritical and vaguely ridiculous to condemn the ill-wishers of the ill-wishers, so to speak.)

And that will probably do for now.

Oh, reminded by the hsi nao entry.  Ladies and gentlemen of the left-blogosphere and commentariat; I and sundry other commentators are really rather tired of being dismissed with the claim that we don't agree with you because we're ignorant of, or have never studied, feminist theory/Whiteness Studies/etc.  I would like you to consider, instead, that many of us have looked into such fields, and just happen to consider that much of their basis was philosophically incoherent bullshit when Marx, Hegel and Gramsci cooked it up the first time around, and that age, specialization and further obfuscation hasn't improved it any.

While a difficult concept to grasp, I know, educating yourself on a subject still permits you to come to your own conclusions based on what you've learnt.  If it means automatic agreement, it's reeducation.

So much, I fear, for my resolve to avoid reading direct sequels directly after each other.  Thinking it was about time I returned to the Temeraire series, I found myself so caught up after Throne of Jade that there was nothing to it but to go straight on to Black Powder War, and then subsequent to that right on to Empire of Ivory without turning a hair.  So it goes, and I think one can safely take that as a testiment to just how captivating I find them.

Throne of Jade is, of course, the direct sequel to His Majesty's Dragon (my booklogging here), and sends Laurence and Temeraire off to China, it seeming that China has found out that their very, very special egg has gone astray, and being rather offended by a Celestial dragon not being treated with all the respect they think is due to a dragon who - in their society - can only be companioned by one of the Imperial family.  A well done long sea journey takes them to China, in the company of the Chinese embassy - interesting both for the travel and for the very different cultures interacting, and what I consider a particularly well-built alternate China, reflecting a very different set of arrangements between dragons and humans; their experience of which will set up interesting conflicts in the later books.

And then on to the next book in the series, Black Powder War.  This takes place very shortly after Throne of Jade finishes, beginning in Macao shortly after Laurence and Temeraire have departed China to return to England, and taking them back there by a lengthy overland route with the unexpected arrival of orders to pass through Istanbul and collect dragon eggs for which the Government has made arrangements with the Ottoman Empire.

Naturally, things go wrong with the plan.  And then they run headlong into the Napoleonic Wars trying to make it the rest of the way home, and things go even wronger with the plan, although for values of wronger with the plan that will delight the reader who is even slightly facinated by what the presence of dragons would do to warfare. 

And since Empire of Ivory is the newest of the books currently available (just last month), I shall refrain from spoiling it insofar as that once they arrive home, as one may find out from reading the sample chapter at the back of Black Powder War, things go wrongest with the plan.

So, Empire of Ivory (Amy's review here).  In view of its recent release, I shall be circumspect with regard to plot, and shall merely say to fix the above wrongest-going requires a trip to Africa, and to comment that once again we see interesting alternate cultures, and an vivid example of how access to dragons affects the nature of warfare.

But the ending! Oh, my, that hurt somewhat to read; and if you're at all sensitive to cliffhangers, for goodness sake pace yourself through these and don't finish Empire of Ivory  until the next one's in bookstores.  Trust me on this.

Excellent books, fascinating societies, and cultures, and cultural interactions, great characters - the only is