In a recent discussion about, of all things, Dante’s INFERNO, video games, batgirl, and women in action films, an interesting paradox came up:

Modern women are supposed to be as violent and aggressive as men (see, for example, the popularity of Buffy, Xena, Wonder Woman, or Trinity) but are supposed to look like dewy-lipped glamour models, dressed alluringly (in either a short skirt, leather bikini, a red-white-and-blue swimsuit with high heeled boots, or skintight black leather respectively). The New Femininity portrays women with Barbie-doll looks and G.I. Joe action figure fighting skills.

By coincidence, I was reading this article over at Big Hollywood: Robert Avrech describes an encounter he has with Tuesday Weld blonde in a gunstore. She is against guns and violence, but her ex boyfriend is a stalker, and the police cannot protect her.

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Badiun proposes that, in my novel THE GOLDEN AGE, the Hortators, and the Sophotechs, formed a sort of hidden government, because they employed their considerable powers of persuasion to persuade people. I pointed out that the persuasion was non-coercive, ergo non-governmental. he replied that all governments are ultimately non-coercive, since government rests on the consent of the governed. I accused him of propounding a paradox: that law was the same as non-law. At this point, I need more space to clarify my position:

The beginning of the discussion is here.

"If government is to govern others by using coercion, i.e. strength, its own power must be derived from something else." "the government is based on the consent of the governed."

Ah, but to what, exactly, do the governed consent when they consent?

You propound a pretty paradox: that government must rest on the consent of the governed, since no government rests on force alone to compel the consent of the governed. Since government rests on the voluntary consent of the governed (you argue) ergo all consent of any body has the same moral suasion as obedience to a government: governments that do not rely on force are merely secret governments.

By that logic, the Coca Cola bottling company, General Motors, the National Rifle Association, the Democrat Party, the Roman Catholic Church, Oprah, and the New York Times are secret governments, because they can persuade so many people to adopt certain ideas and behaviors, including the consumption of cola.

Hobbes likewise propounded a paradox: he argued that if you agree to a highwayman to ransom your life, you must carry out the agreement even when the highwayman no longer has a pistol at your head, on the grounds that the agreement was a rational exchange — your life for your money. He went on to argue that even when princes acted like Highwaymen, rebellion was always illogical and immoral.

His argument suffered from the same shortcoming as yours. He drew no distinction between cases where the use of force is legitimate versus illegitimate, just as you draw no distinction between cases where the right to use force is present versus absent.

Might I suggest that the concept of ‘legitimacy’ is fundamental to this discussion?

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If you would like to read my novelette ‘Twilight of the Gods’ or peruse any of the other fine examples of scientifictional wonder appearing in the anthology FEDERATIONS, edited by John Joseph Adams, now is the time to buy! This handsome volume is on sale now, available for pre-order.

You can get it from the editor: http://www.johnjosephadams.com/federations

From Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Federations-John-Joseph-Adams/dp/1607012014/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238643922&sr=8-1

Or from Barnes & Noble:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ean=1607012014

 

(Myself, I am interested in reading that story by Many More! — Mr. More apparently contributes to a lot of anthologies, and many other commercial  ventures. I see his name all the time.)

This is not a book review. This is me wondering if I have gotten too old or too over-read to read SF books any more. The last three SF books (or SF-flavored books) I read were very well written, the product of enormous craft and talent on the part of the authors (whom any honest judge will tell you are more talented than yours truly), and yet, by the time I reached the end, I felt either indifferent, disappointed, or cheated.

Honestly, I doubt that my disappointment is due to any defect on the part of the respective authors. If I am any judge, they did just what they set out to do. But in each case, my suspension of disbelief was snapped by the intrusion of a foreign element—or, to be specific, an element that should have been there, but was not.

This kind of thing, if it is egregious, is a criticism of the author. When it is egregious, it is because the author has no idea of what human nature is like, or no intention of portraying human nature in a realistic light. The first error is a product of bad craftsmanship, the second is a decision, deliberate or not, to use art artificially rather than realistically. Such authors end up with cardboard characters, usually creatures of unrelenting depravity (see, for example, BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts) or creatures who serve merely a mechanical function, like marionettes, that move as the author means them to move,to make a point in a morality play (see, for example, ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand). (Not that I object to depraved or mechanical characters per se: my favorite villain is Blackie DuQuesne, who is hardly an intricate character study: I have no objection to artifice in art.)

When it is not egregious, it is merely an observation that the writer and the reader have two different views of human nature, and so what seems natural to one seems awkward and artificial to the other. The author has the made-up characters, or, in a science fiction book, the made-up world, act in a way that the reader thinks the characters or world could not act. But this is a subjective judgment: the next reader who picks up the book will swallow whole what the first reader upchucked.

The reason why I suspect this is due to age or overreading is because my reaction to these three books is precisely the kind of reaction I notice in movie critics who express boredom for things still new and fresh to me. I don’t watch that many films, so old clichés are not old to me. Film critics watch films as their job, like slushpile readers at magazines, and see the same tired mistakes over and over again.

On to my non-review!

(SOME SPOILERS BELOW) 

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I saw this on Catholic and Enjoying It   a journal written by my water-brother Mark Shea (who groks were I am only an egg):

Dante’s Inferno: 

My comment: So very wrong you could not explain it, even with  charts.

Can’t socialists and libertarians agree that we should not support that form of government sometimes called Plutocracy, or Fascism, where the state power and the major industries are intertwined in incest?

The libertarian will blench in horror at the sight of populist demagogues assuming the power to fire the CEO’s of private corporations, forcing mergers, reorganizing Boards of Directors, setting or vetoing compensation and bonuses, interfering with contracts, establishing lines of production, types of goods produced, and generally usurping the rights of the owners and stockholders, and, ultimately, usurping the free choice of the customers and consumers: as when General Motors morphed into Government Motors, and the President vowed that car warranties would henceforth by underwritten and guaranteed by the taxpayers (or "tax-sheep" as the shepherds who shear them call them, or slaughter them for mutton).

The socialist will recoil from the sight of major industries, even if they pretend to be under state scrutiny, determining the course of political events: as when banks like A.I.G. contribute funds to politicians in return for political favors, bailouts, and winning the coveted status of "being too big to fail" (which means, in effect, being a permanent state subsidy). The question here is one of undue influence. In socialist theory, the means of production of certain industries (in some cases, all industries) are to be state-run for the sake of the common good. When an organization is still run on a for-profit basis, so that only the losses are socialized, and the gains are pocketed (as with the A.I.G. salary bonuses), this offends socialist theory, or should.

I admit I don’t understand how socialists think but I would think that even they would recognize that once the government is running an industry, the industry ends up running the government, if for no other reason than to prevent the taxpayers (who are now stake-holders in the industry) from suffering a loss. It end ups not being a ruler-and-ruled relationship, but a marriage of convenience: the good old boys network. The same small cadre of highly placed individuals makes the decisions both for government and industry, and neither the common good of the voters nor the wishes of the consumers, make any difference. The incentives which lure Caesar into favoring the state-run industry over any private or foreign competition also act to lure Caesar to favor the state-run industry into favoring the industry over the workers or the consumers.

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The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge has unanimously elected a new dean, Dr. Katherine Ragsdale.  Chris Johnson at the Midwest Conservative Journal has the following on Dr. Ragsdale. I reprint it here without comment:

How radically pro-abortion is Katie Rags?  This radically pro-abortion:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion – there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember – abortion is a blessing

and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You’re engaged in holy work.

Well, well. It looks as if THE GOLDEN AGE, my three-volume love-letter to Liberty, has finally attracted the attention of the Libertarians.
In Indiana.

I read this announcement on the website of the Indiana State LP:

Futurists Announce 2009 HOF Finalists

The following is the list of finalists for the 2009 Prometheus Hall of Fame award:

• Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988);
• Courtship Rite, a novel by Donald M. Kingsbury (1982);
• "As Easy as A.B.C.," a short story by Rudyard Kipling (1912);
• The Lord of the Rings, a three-volume novel by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955);
• The Once and Future King, including The Book of Merlyn, a novel by T. H. White (1977); and
• The Golden Age, a novel by John C. Wright (2002).

Well, well, I have just been interviewed for CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT by Sandra Miesel (whose name you might recognize if you read THE DA VINCI HOAX — a debunking of Dan "all descriptions of made up stuff in this novel are accurate" Brown). I am placed alongside such luminaries as Gene Wolfe, (whom we rverently refer to as ‘The Master’) Tim Powers (whom we rvently refer to as, ‘The Powers That Be’)  andMike Flynn (whom we reverently refer to as ‘The author of FALLEN ANGELS who wasn’t Jerry Pournelle or David Niven but that Other Guy. And didn’t he write a book about a blind man wrecking a river of firestars or something?’) 

Unfortunately, since I haven’t actually written anything very good or memorable yet, it is sort of embaressing to read the author of the article listing great works by Christian authors, for example, SHADOW OF THE TORTURER or DECLARE or PAST MASTER or CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWICZ and then in the next paragraph mention, "And Mr. Wright is a dirty old man who writes spanking scenes starring buxom sixteen-year-old schoolgirls. His next novel will be entitled LESBIAN SWEDISH BIKINI TEAM OF GOR, a sequel to John Norman’s famous SLAVE GIRL OF GOR. Look for it in smutty bookshops everywhere."

OK, the article writer did not actually say that, but I haven’t written any books I want my father confessor to read, either.

As if right now, I have made 700 first drafts of my latest novel.

That number is no doubt inflated. I save my work as a separate ‘draft’ when I make any change, even minor ones, in case I feel the urge to return to a previous wording of a scene. But, still, draft 01 is dated February 2006. I am not sure why this project is taking so much longer than my others. I went from first to final draft in NULL-A CONTINUUM in seven months. THE GOLDEN AGE from start to finish took only about nine months.

Please read this: http://faculty.ugf.edu/jgretch/syllabi/psy450DeRevolutione.pdf

A fascinating article by Michael Flynn, author of the FIRESTAR books, WRECK OF THE RIVER OF STARS, and, more recently, EIFELHEIM. 

In proper Aristotlean fashion, Mr. Flynn politely demolishes the persistant myth (and I mean myth in the sense of lie) that the Middle Ages were a period of scientific backwardness. This is not merely false, it is the precise opposite of truth: the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries were when logic and reason were paramount, and the foundation stones of modern science set in place. He also offers thoughts on why the Scientific Revolution occured in Europe rather than in the long-lived civilizations of China or India. Like a proper medieval schoolman, he defines his terms — a practice which ought to be revived for anyone intending any serious thought on any serious topic.

My most recent brush with the ‘meme’ that Christians burn scientists was quite accidental. I was looking up the name of an article I wrote for a Catholic newspaper (an examination of whether and how modern discoveries of the size of the universe pose a scandal to the Church) and so lazy was I, and possessed of such great faith in the Internet, I "googled" for it rather than looking in my own records. As it turned out, the article had been reprinted on the website of Richard Dawkins, global village atheist.

The comments appended to it were uniformly shocking in their sheer ignorance. Normally an ignoramus is comfortable with his ignorance, much like Sherlock Holmes dismissing the Heliocentric Theory because it was pointless for crime-detection. But these were a gaggle of geese loudly squawking about how knowledgeable and enlightened they were, how scientific and precise they were in their thoughts. They were the ‘brights’, you see.

Well, these brights were bright enough that they simply made up facts out of their own imaginations to suit themselves.

One poor soul dismissed the idea that I had ever been an atheist: he did not bother to check. It just suited him to believe it. He took it on faith. Another said the Catholic Church kept me in storage against a day when I could be trotted out onstage. (Hm. I am still awaiting my coded instructions beamed into my brain chip via Papal Satellite from my robotic Jesuit-ninja assassin-masters in the Holy Office.) A third said he read only until I referred to the Pope being a public figure speaking about Reason. The Bright was too bright to read to the end of the paragraph — we all know brights do not need to do research, or read their opposition, or anything — and too bright to read the newspapers. I was referring to the Holy Father’s Regensburg speech, (entitled Faith, Reason and the University) which was famous enough to make headlines, and get its own wikipedia page.

Another bright fumed that the Church taught the world was flat. Another said science fiction writers could not be theists. Another bright criticized me for being a science fiction elitist when it came to space opera. (Me, the founder of the world-wide New Space Princess Movement, which now contains at least 3 members, and is poised to take the scifi world by storm!) And so it went, on and on, and not a single comment I read had anything to do with the topic of the article.

I admit I was flabberghasted by the uniformly low quality of the responses. You see, I am confident that I was not the last intelligent atheist to jump their sinking ship. There must be some out there who do not make simple errors in logic, or make up facts, or substitute emotion for reasoning. But this was like tearing off the roof of roaring hell, and beholding a burning cloud of malice and illogic rise up forever —  if hell were where an intellectual god had flung the smug, loud and stupid, instead of the sinful.

I wish the brights had been bright enough to read Mr. Flynn’s article.

It behooves those who idolize science and reason to restrict themselves to scientific and reasonable conclusions on all topics, including the topic of religion, and not to single it out for some bizairre exception, as if it were toodangerous to touch, too dangerous to think about. There are rational atheists out there in the world I am sure, but they evidently don’t gather at Richard Dawkins’ website to leave comments.

(Maybe the selfish genes in which they have such touching, unquestioning faith, have programmed them not to.)

Hat tip to: m_francis 

James Franklin has a collection of links (some of them dead) in an attempt to debunk some common myths about the Middle Ages. This list is a summary of his longer essay here: The Myth of the Renaissance, where he argues that the Renaissance was a period when thought declined significantly, bring to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages.

I note two of the items on Mr. Franklin’s list — the one about Medieval thinkers believing the Earth was flat, and the one about why Catholics eat fish on Fridays, I myself have encountered in the last week. The comments below are his.

Here is his list.

MYTHS ABOUT THE MIDDLE AGES

James Franklin

There are so many myths about the Middle Ages, it has to be suspected that the general level of "knowledge" about things medieval is actually negative.
Here are some of the more famous ones.

• In the Middle Ages it was believed the earth was flat.

  There’s a whole book devoted to refuting this one: J.B. Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York, 1991) (review; also `The myth of the flat earth’.)
  The facts are that the Greeks knew the earth was spherical from about 500 BC, and all but a tiny number of educated persons have known it in all times since. Thomas Aquinas gives the roundness of the earth as a standard example of a scientific truth, in Summa theologiae bk. I q. 1 art. 1.

• The scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

  This has not been found in any scholastic, nor has the allegation been found earlier than in a Protestant writer of 1638. See `Heads of pins’; further; discussion.
  Aquinas does discuss "whether several angels can be in the same place at the same time" (Summa theologiae bk. I q. 52 art. 3), but that does not quite have the farcical ring of the original.

• Medieval lords had a ius primae noctis: a legal or customary right to sexual relations with the newly-married wives of their underlings.

  There’s a whole book on this one, too: A. Boureau, The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage. In short, there’s nothing in the story.
  (The same author wrote The Myth of Pope Joan but I don’t include this myth as I don’t think it’s ever been seriously believed.)

• Some medieval Pope (unnamed, of course) instituted fasting from meat on Fridays to help the fishing industry of the Papal States.

  Mediev-l archives `Fish on Fridays’ thread.

• The alleged fragments of the True Cross would have added up to a whole forest.

  In a truly obsessive piece of scholarship, Charles Rohault de Fleury’s Memoire sur les instruments de la passion de N.-S. J.-C. (Paris, 1870) counted all the alleged fragments and showed they only added up to considerably less than one cross … more

• Vikings wore helmets with horns

  How would you know Hagar the Horrible was a Viking if he didn’t have horns? … the facts

• Chastity belts.

  A report; an article.

• An early medieval church council declared (or almost declared) that women have no souls.

  History of the error.

• "In the times of St Thomas it [woman] was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy …St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an imperfect man"

  These claims are made in the introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, one of the founding texts of feminism. Aquinas believes all humans have the same essence. Though not exactly a believer in the equality of men and women, he did not call women imperfect men. details.

• Religious taboos prevented medical dissection of bodies

  Katherine Park’s book on late medieval dissection

• The medieval burning of witches.

  Medieval canon law officially did not believe in witches. There were very occasional individual witch trials in the Middle Ages, but the persecution of witches only became a mass phenomenon from around 1500. The height of persecution was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries … article; resources.

• The feudal system.

  Depending on how strictly it is defined, the feudal system, in the sense of a hierarchical system of property-based legal obligations between lords and vassals, is a later invention. This is argued in S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (reviews). However, it is true that there was a manorial system or generalised protection racket, something like the "feudal system" of popular imagination.

• The Renaissance.

  The thesis that there was a rebirth of learning in Europe in or around the fifteenth century, after a thousand years of darkness, is too diffuse to admit of clear agreement or disagreement. Nevertheless, the claim that the "Renaissance" is almost entirely a beat-up, put about by a gang of anti-Catholic art historians, has much to be said for it. See `The Renaissance myth’.

• There’s more … and yet more …
• A book, Regine Pernoud’s Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths tackles a number at once … review.

In other news, Spiderman saves a little boy. I am not making this up. Here is the story:

The only reason why I am not a huge fan of THE MATRIX, is that, the week before I saw it, I saw another film that had much the same themes, (what if life was not what it seemed, merely a huge deception?)  only without the glaring plot-holes called DARK CITY. The contrast was too sharp for me, so the minor flaws in THE MATRIX seemed major. But despite that, I recognize it was a Way Cool movie with a look to it, a camera technique, that everyone remembers and every action film copied, including WATCHMEN.

Now I read a rather, uh, interesting take on THE MATRIX by someone called The Last Psychiatrist. His analysis: the popularity of the film was due to the daydream appeal of discovering that you, too, may secretly one day be the superman! He seems to think this is a new idea, rather than the oldest daydream in comics and science fiction. When John Carter, clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia is teleported at death to the planet Mars, and finds himself not only telepathic, but stronger than any native Martian, I am sure it is a daydream shared by every disappointed Southern planter after the Civil War, who went out West to hunt gold and fight Indians.

Here is a quote from the Last Psychiatrist: