Here is an article by Jim Manzi, printed in the online version of National Review. I reproduce the whole thing here, without comment. Draw your own conclusions:
Against Waterboarding [Jim Manzi]
I do not believe that the United States should have a policy of using waterboarding to extract information from captured combatants in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Let me explain why.
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The fine folks over at SfSignal asked a number of SFF-fans (or "Slans" as we call ourselves) (including professional writers–just because you write the stuff does not mean you stop reading it) the following question:
When I was fired in disgrace or quit in disgust from the weekly paper here in Fairfax (it was a simultaneous desire for severance on the part both of yours truly and the editor in chief, like two fencers who pierce each other simultaneously–as to whether I quit faster than they fired me, one would need to consult the photo finish photographer) I was out on the street begging alms that day, me and my hand-drawn sign: WILL OPINIONATE FOR FOOD.
Charitable passers-by, looking with mingled pity and contempt on my disheveled rags, the fragment of a presscard still lodged pathetically in my hatband, a five o’clock shadow on my face at four o’clock, and my wheezy breath redolent with the smell of bookdust, trembling fingers stained with ink, and red-rimmed eyes bleary from squinting at fine print, would toss a dime rattling into my tin cup, and ask me to editorialize on a topic where they had no opinion and needed one, such as bimetallism or the Caledonian war, panspermia or the Markian Hypothesis.
Naturally, they all had opinions of their own on topics of the day, sports, politics and religion, but when they did not have an opinion on Diffussionism or Cubism, or on the possibility that Magellan saw Nephilim in Patagonia, and needed a firm opinion and need it fast, I was the go-to guy.
How I long for the easy days of retirement, when I can rest from the labor of opionating, and fill my mind with a vague and warm blankness of thought, and merely agree affably that everyone has a good point, and that we should all simply get along! Oh, those days will be halcyon, and verily the pundits will bend their pens into ploughshares!
But that time is not yet. So I have an opinion the advantages and disadvantages of monotheism versus polytheism in speculative fiction.
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/04/mind-meld-gods-by-the-bushel/
"Its simply common sense."
Perhaps it is common sense to say that when the state commands and the people resist, there will be bloodshed, but at that point, it seems to me that religion drops out of the equation as a variable, unless you are saying religion has more power to resist government oppression than secular ideologies — if that is your point, I would tend to agree.
It seems to me equally common sense to say that Nazism and Communism are new fashions of barbarism, whose point was to dismantle civilized institutions, and subordinate everything from marriage to the marketplace to the state, and to undo the uniquely Christian notion (found in no other era and no other land aside from Christian ones) of separation of church and state, rendering only what is due Caesar to Caesar. When Christianity departs, so also departs civil liberties: the postchristian socialists of Europe are not known for small and unobtrusive government.
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Dirigibletrance asks whether the short story “One Bright Star to Guide Them” takes place in the same background universe, or "Evernverse" as LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS?
I don’t know, but I do not see why it could not. In general, the way to see whether or not two books might take place in the same background, (what we professionals call “The Planetary Question”) is to explain positive evidence, such as when two stories are sharing the same names and events, and to explain away possible negative evidence, such when two stories contain as clearly incompatible events or characters or laws of nature. For example, much as we would all like for Blackie DuQuesne to go to planet Lyrane IX and obtain the power of the Melasnikov ‘s Black Lensmen corps, nonetheless Blackie comes from the Skylark universe, where the Seaton’s serendipitous discovery of the cupric total conversion space-drive disproves Einsteinian Relativity, whereas the Lensman universe has Einsteinian relativity, but found that inertialess matter was not subject to the Lorenz transformation. These two cannot co-exist, so they cannot be part of the same background universe, unless the continuum occupied by Seaton and DuQuesne were reached by hyperspatial tube by the Eddorians, or the continuum occupied by Civilization reached by Fourth Dimensional Gizmo by the Skylarkers.
In this case, the question of whether “One Bright Star” exists in the Evernessverse is an interesting one: The set up of the worlds or world involved sounds similar. The themes of the stories and the laws of nature in the magic system sound the same. But to answer thoroughly would require following up obscure clues and thinking about it.
Instead, I will send Randolf Carter down into the basement to check. Maybe someone just wrote the answer down somewhere, among all those musty old papers left by my grandfather Melchizedech Faustus Wright, the arctic explorer, were stored after he died screaming in the Innsmouth insane asylum. I will stay up here in the solarium, where it is safe, watching the sunset and sipping tea. He and I will remain in communication over telephone.
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Matthew Wuertz has read the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for April-May 2009. He singles out my story for particular praise.
http://matthewwuertz.blogspot.com/2009/03/fantasy-science-fiction-aprilmay-2009.html
By far, this was my favorite story of the issue. Reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, I felt like Wright’s fantasy world was well-established and adventurous. As a Christian, I found so many symbolic meanings that at times I felt like I was reading something by Lewis. That isn’t to say that Wright himself is a Christian (I don’t really know), but if not, he seems to know much Biblical truth. There is so much darkness in this world, and many are blind, bound in promises of pleasure that only lead to misery and death. Wonderful tale. Well told!
My comment: I cannot be modest when it comes to this one. I love this story. I hope "One Bright Star to Guide Them" wins an award. It is my favorite short piece of anything I’ve done. Have any of you read it?
Let me follow up my previous post by arguing that CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C. Clarke has a Gnostic attitude toward God, and I mean one God in particular. Gnostics are not heretics of Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Shinto or Hinduism, after all, but of Christianity.
That the good guys in CHILDHOODS END look like cartoon Devils has already been mentioned in my previous post. Gnostics love the idea that good guys are bad guys, and bad are good: one Gnostic sect, for example, are Cainites, who think Cain was right to kill Abel. That the good Devils lead mankind out of their false world into the Pleroma, where we are all gods, has already been mentioned, albeit in Clarke’s book, the godhead is called ‘The Galactic Overmind’ — as if that change in terminology would fool anyone. The earth is not remade into a new world, as St. John of Patmos holds, but is destroyed by hidden fire, the arson of an abandoned prison, as Valintinus holds.
Gnostics take as their prime dogma the idea that the world as we know it is a deception, and that God is the Deceiver, that matter is evil, the human body a trap. In a science fiction setting, God cannot come onstage as a supernatural being and shown to be a liar, since science fiction properly so called stays within the bounds of the natural setting. (Any supernatural events, telepathy or reincarnation, are explained away as being psionic or superhightech in an SFF background, phenomena as subject to natural laws as biology or ballistics, not noumenal reality.) In a supernatural setting you can kill God, and throw Him into Tartarus. In a natural setting you can destroy His lies, but there is no Him.
Hence, in a natural setting the religion of the Magisterium can be shown to be false, and their evil attempts to destroy our daemons of free will by incision can be condemned. If an alethiometer is not ready to hand, maybe an alien gizmo provided by space devils will do instead.
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SPOILERS BELOW. I discuss the meaning of several books by C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells, and the books cannot be discussed without a discussion of their surprise endings. You Have Been Warned.
I am reading (but have not finished) a book by Doris T. Myers called C.S. LEWIS IN CONTEXT, where the authoress advances the argument that C.S. Lewis, in his fiction writing, addressed a central preoccupation of the European intelligentsia after the culture-wide disillusionment and loss of spiritual strength ushered in by the decimation of the Great War (World War I). That preoccupation was with language and its relation to reality. The pre-War consensus was that words had meaning, and were shaped by the ideals and ideas which these words embodied: a word was an incarnation of a real idea. The post-War consensus was that words were a side-effect of mechanical actions in the nervous system, having no meaning in and of themselves: the modernists idea is that there are no ideas, only Madison Avenue manipulations of linguistic machinery to attempt to influence your thinking machinery.
While I side with Aristotle in most things, when it comes to language, I am a Platonist. If the truths discovered by mathematics are not objective in every sense of the word—things whose reality depends not on the observer but on itself for its truth—then with word “truth” has no reality. And, if the word “truth” has no reality, than neither can the statement “the word ‘truth’ has no reality”‘have any reality.
The conclusions and opinions of C.S. Lewis in these matters can be discerned in his nonfiction essay, THE ABOLITION OF MAN, and also in his fictionalization of that essay, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH; and an acute reader will notice the way language is used in PRELENDRA and OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET, in the scenes of the temptation of the Green Lady of Venus, or the deposition of Weston by the Eldil, with accompanying translation from English into the True Speech.
Doris T. Myers also advances the proposition that Lewis represents a serious contribution to the science fiction field, augmenting mere adventure stories into tales with a serious moral point and philosophical reflection.
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A certain kind reader with my best interests are heart (whose name I withhold out of courtesy) accuses me of being pompous and proud when I condemn political correctness. I agree I am proud — and I agree that pride is a damned sin — but this does not mean political correctness is not a damned lie. I had best write him a serious, polite, and earnest reply:
* * *
Dear Kind Reader With My Best Interests at Heart, obviously you are a maroon. How long have you been stranded on the Isle of Goof, population, You?
* * *
Hmm. That seems a little harsh, even for the Internet. Maybe I can reword my salutation so as to hide my boiling, poisonous, stinging nettle-patch of ire beneath a Guy Fawkes-like mask of seeming courtesy. Remember to smile!
Trying again:
* * *
Dear Kind Reader With My Best Interests at Heart, obviously it is not being corrected that offends me, as when I make an error of grammar, or fact, or manners; it is being "corrected" as in "political correction" that offends me, as it should offend all honest men.
When a liar tells a truthful man that it is bad manners, as well as a lie, to tell the truth, that is not only a lie, and bad manners, it is offensive. It is offensive in and of itself, even when spoken to a placid and phlegmatic disposition who does not get offended. It is an offense against the Truth, an objective offense, even if no person suffers the subjective emotional sensation of feeling offended.
Now, you take offense at the fact I said I took offense, and so now you wish to correct my character flaws. (This is a Herculean labor on your part, akin to cleaning the Augean Stables. Good luck.)
While there is nothing wrong with helping me with my character flaws in and of itself, you put me at a disadvantage in two ways.
First, By changing the subject to talk about me, rather than talk about the topic at hand, you put me in the uncomfortable position of having to talk about myself, a topic I find dreadfully boring.
Second, I am also at a disadvantage because I only dimly guess the content of my own thoughts via first-hand immediate perception, whereas you (since you are evidently a mind-reader with 20-20 telepathy) can uncover all my hidden thoughts with the clarity of he Who Searcheth Hearts on Judgment Day. Obviously, your source of information about my character is better than mine.
I can only reply by disparaging your character. Because of all this, you and I have added a layer of low comedy to the proceedings. Here is a sum up of the dialog in which we are currently engaged:
Me (dressed like John the Baptist in a hairy shirt): "Generation of vipers! I condemn thy self-righteousness!"
You: "That comment is itself self-righteous! You are being self-righteous!"
Me (thumping my chest self-righteously): "I am not being self-righteous! YOU are being self-righteous by calling me self-righteous! It is self-righteous to call someone self-righteous!"
You: "Aha! You did it again! You just called me self-righteous! It is self-righteous to say that it is self-righteous to call someone self-righteous!"
Me (waving a bloody shirt): "Aha! But now you did it a second time! It is self-righteous to say that it is self-righteous to say that it is self-righteous to call someone self-righteous! Besides, I hate hypocrites…"
You: "But you are guilty of the very hypocrisy you condemn! That makes you a hypocrite! It is hypocrisy to accuse someone of hypocrisy when you practice hypocrisy yourself!"
Me (puffing myself up like a frog): "But you just accused me of hypocrisy! Outrageous! Only a hypocrite accuses a hypocrite of hypocrisy! It’s hypocritical! Only a Sith talks in absolutes!"
You: "I cannot believe you just accused me of hypocrisy for accusing you of hypocrisy for condemning hypocrisy! That is so self-righteous of you! And what was that about the Sith? Wasn’t that an absolute statement?"
Me (shouting you down): "Absolutely not! Gahh! It’s no use talking to you! You are not even listening to what I said!"
You: "Obviously I am listening to what you said! Anyone who heard me could tell I was listening carefully! Only if you were not listening could you say I was not listening!"
Me (sticking my fingers in my ears): "Ridiculous! Only someone who was not listening to me would say I was not listening because I said you were not listening!! If you are going to talk like that, I am simply not going to listen!!! LALALA I AM NOT LISTENING!!! As another example, Phillip Pullman is the Antichrist. Hear me, ye generation of vipers! For it is written in the Book of the Apocalypse of St. Jack: ‘Lo! And the Beast with Ten Horns Shall taketh upeth his inkhorn of ininquity to write a Children’s Book trilogy; and a trilogy shalt be the Children’s Book; verily, the number of the trilogy shall be three. And by this sign shall ye know it: behold, the Film version shall sucketh like a Hoover vacuum cleaner on hyperdrive.‘ "
You: "Wait! Who is talking about Pullman?? You are changing the subject!"
Me (changing the subject): "No, when you bring up the subject of whether or not I am changing the subject, YOU are changing the subject!"
Et cetera et ad Nauseam.
Argumentum ad hominem is an informal logical error because it does not address the merits of the argument being made. It attacks the honesty of the speaker rather than the honesty of his argument. To discover that Pythagoras is proud does not allow us to conclude that a square erected on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is unequal to the sum of the areas of squares constructed on the two remaining sides. It shifts the ground of argument to a determination of character, which is hearsay difficult to judge, rather than a consideration of evidence and reasoning, which is public and which anyone can judge.
The credibility of the speaker is only at issue when he is holding himself forth as an expert witness or an authority, when he is asking you to take him on faith, whereupon his claim to be an authority is validly open to question and cross examination. When a person is presenting an argument which asks you to subject his claims to your own candid judgment, no claim to be an authority is being made.
Therefore to say someone is pompous, proud, self-righteous, or a hypocrite neither adds credibility to his argument nor subtracts from it.
How could this be real? It looks like something from a TV show.
Well, I now see the invention of gunpowder may have been a mistake. Back to swords, everyone. Start practicing.
Someone sent me a perfectly polite and reasonable comment. I have decided to both to go postal and get medieval all over it, which, I suppose, means I am going to go get the towncrier on his comment, as a town crier is what we had in the Middle Ages instead of postmen. Hm.
Well, without even the slightest hint of fairness to the original comment, I use it as a flimsy excuse to vent about political correctness, which is something that has been bothering me of late. If my reaction seems totally disproportionate to the rather mild cause, that is it is disproportionate. I am here admittedly galloping headlong off-topic.
I am aware of that, and I do not care. In fact, I regard with particular hatred attempts to change the language to sooth the imaginary hurt feelings of various mascots of the political Left. Unless you can tell me, off the top of your head and without looking it up, the name in any Eskimo dialect for a Virginian, I suggest your concern for their concern for our names for them is illegitimate, particularly where no English speaker knows the meaning of the insult. (None, that is, but I: it refers to them as eaters of raw fish, a slight against their relative poverty).
Besides, what could be more insulting to me that to have the Eskimos refer to themselves as ‘the People’? What does that make me? A non-people?
But it would be immature to the point of insanity for me to pretend I am insulted by the mere existence of a word in their language. Likewise, here. Insult requires intent.
I ask any and all reader please to not make corrections of this type again. They offend me. They deeply offend me.
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Susan Boyle, 47, sings for Britains Got Talent. Note the reaction of the judges, the look in their eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
You never know what someone may have inside.
Meredith L. Patterson (
Back in this post, I said that I like to call myself a suffragette. I think any woman who owns a firearm should have the right to vote and own property in her own name. I might even be willing to extend the franchise to unarmed women, if they owned land, knew a trade, or owned property.
"What of unarmed men who own no land or property and do not know a trade?"
Disenfranchise them! Who wants landless, tradeless panhandlers exercising the soveriegn power of the ballot over their neighbors? And if they are gunless, they form no credible threat when the State takes away their voting rights! Ho-Hah! Non-gun-owning men should of course be allowed an exception, and be allowed to vote if they own a sword or know kung-fu. I do not want to disenfranchise my friends who are blackbelts or SCA members. Also bowhunters. I ain’t taking no vote away from Chuck Norris or Ted Nugent.
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From Nasa
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/04/14/space.hand/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
The star now spins around at the dizzying pace of seven times every second–as pulsars do–spewing energy into space that creates the "hand."
Strong magnetic fields, 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field, are thought to be involved, too. The combination drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the dying star. As the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate away their energy as X-rays.
The red light is actually a neighboring gas cloud, RCW 89. Astronomers believe that RCW 89 has been energized into glowing by the fingers of the PSR B1509-58 nebula.
The scene, which spans 150 light-years, is about 17,000 light years away, so what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago, and that light is just arriving here.
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Two comments on an ongoing discussion, one from Belriose, one from Jackaroonie:
Belriose asks: "The link on your logic that I’m missing since the beginning is why a society who doesn’t emphasize the difference between sexes leads to depravation, sexual degeneration and child murdering. You were establishing that correlation, were you not?"
At last, a question I can follow! (Keep in mind that, since I am an intellectual and a philosopher, really basic and obvious questions pass me by. I am not sure what you are asking unless you make it painfully clear. Sorry, but that is the way I’ve wired my brain to work: we call this ‘Socratic Cluelessness’.)
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Here is a quote from John Nolte, the ‘Dirty Harry’ of conservative film:
Myself, I have a similar feeling about science fiction books. My certain words or phrases which instantly earn my goodwill include Null-A, Princess, Mars, Demon-Prince, Dying Earth, Autarch, Lensman, Skylark, Tom Swift ( as in "Tom Swift and His Technoatomic Whateveroscope"), Lucky Starr and (insert name of astronomical body here), Harry Potter and (as in "Harry Potter and the Lavender Warlock"), Pirate (or, better yet, "Space Pirate"), Ranger, Patrol (or, better yet, Galactic Patrol), Women (when the context involved space-women) or better yet, Amazon, Foundation, and any adjective involving large magnitudes as Infinite, Infinity, Eternal, Eternity, Endless, Neverness.
Nearly anything can be made to sound way cool merely by putting "of Mars" after it (as in Princess of, Gods of, Warlord of, Master-Mind of, A Fighting Man of, of even Thuvia, Maid of). Likewise, nearly anything can be made to sound slightly perverted merely by putting "of Gor" after it (as in Love Slave of, Sex Slave of, Slave slave of, Sexy Love Slave of, Attractive Barbarian Girl in Skimpy Leopardskin Bikini of, Pouty Schoolgirl of, Lonley Lesbian NIght-Nurse of).
Likewise, anything with the name Fu Manchu in it, automatically sounds sinister. Try it yourself! Merely add "Fu Manchu" to your title, and see if the book does not throb with oriental meance. For example, a famous book by Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, sounds much more creepy when titled, The Wine of Fu Manchu, or even The Dandelion of Fu Manchu.
Retitling my books, then:
