mercenaries and apples 30 January 2008
Posted by DSM in comics, faith.comments closed
Last year I started reading the science fiction webcomic Schlock Mercenary. It’s original, tightly scripted, and above all enormous fun. Since I showed up so late to the party, I got to read seven years worth of comics at once, and could see the artist-writer Howard Tayler improve greatly as the series progressed. (The art, anyway. The writing was good from the outset.)
In today’s comic, one of the characters complains about a certain situation he finds himself in, where he doesn’t agree that doing what his wife has arranged is right:
“But now that we’re married, you’ve got me playing Adam to your Eve. I can keep one commandment, ‘don’t eat the fruit’, by not eating it. Or I can keep another commandment, ‘cleave to your wive’, by eating the fruit with you, and staying with you through all of the consequences. Lots of people wonder if Adam made the right decision. I think he did, but I doubt I’m strong enough to do the same.”
Rather than explain the problem, I’ll simply quote one of my favourite novels, Perelandra, in reply. (Readers, including non-Christians — perhaps especially non-Christians — are encouraged to spot the flaws in the above themselves. There’s no reason that nonbelievers shouldn’t be able to understand Christian theology well enough to perform simple analyses under its principles.)
In the following passage, the King here was discussing what he had thought to do: he had been in danger of finding himself in a similar situation.
“And then I saw what had happened in your world, and how your Mother fell and how your Father went with her, doing her no good thereby and bringing the darkness upon all their children. And then it was before me like a thing coming towards my hand, what I should do in like case.”
“Yes,” said the King, musing. “Though a man were to be torn in two halves.. though half of him turned into earth.. the living half must still follow Maleldil. For if it also lay down and became earth what hope would there be for the whole?
But while one half lived, through it He might send life back into the other.”
[...]
“He gave me no assurance. No fixed land. Always one must throw oneself into the wave.”
Always into the wave.
then I will never sleep 28 January 2008
Posted by DSM in QOTD.comments closed
He who’s tired of Weird Al is tired of life.
(Yes, now that you mention it, lately I am finding enlightenment through meditating on random quotes as if they were Zen koans.)
not so self-assured 25 January 2008
Posted by DSM in QOTD.comments closed
“Excuse me, sirs– if he is to be sacrificed before the Dread Kaili, why is he not painted red?”
“That’s a question I’ve never been able to pluck up the courage to ask him.”
an uncomfortable absence of footnotes 22 January 2008
Posted by DSM in writing.comments closed
Consider the following story:
An astronomer who dabbles in writing once heard — and was amused to hear — that one of his nonscientific works had been cited in a particularly unusual context. He’d thought about this story from time to time and so he decided to dig up the article and turn it into a post.
Well, after a bit of work early on a Tuesday evening, he succeeded in finding it.. but it wasn’t a cite.
It was a direct lift of barely-touched sentences. Uncredited. With no quotation marks. And it’s not subtle, either: the style is so different from the surrounding material that he’d lay even money that you, dear reader, would be able to figure out which paragraph was by the astronomer.
What should the man do? In the grand scheme of things this is pretty small beer, of course. The article is several years old and has probably been read by no more than a few dozen people. Moreover, the article’s author is a relation of a former acquaintance of the astronomer, an acquaintance to whom he bears no ill will.
On the other hand, the article is in a forum where one could fairly expect the highest standards of the writers. And it’s not likely to be a mistake: the only reason the astronomer knew about the existence of the article in the first place was because the acquaintance in question told him about it, and asked him how the article’s author could get a copy of a particular book related to the subject matter. The author clearly yanked sentences from the astronomer’s article and assembled them to fit the context.
The article’s author was also doing a thesis at about the same time, and the astronomer now has grave concerns about what you’d find if you googled passages from it.
Those who have ready Dorothy Sayers’ classic Gaudy Night may recognize the dilemma the astronomer is in; and the possible consequences.
Such an astronomer would be in for a major headache.
love & words 21 January 2008
Posted by DSM in QOTD.comments closed
In most people the line between romance and grammar isn’t a fine one.
unexpected conclusion 21 January 2008
Posted by DSM in sports.comments closed
The football season didn’t quite finish the way I expected.
The Colts were supposed to meet the Patriots in the AFC championship game. It would have been a perfect matchup of good versus evil. If we defeated them — as we almost did during the regular season — balance would have been restored to the universe.
Instead, we lost to the Chargers.
I took some dark solace in the fact that the Colts fans shamefully booed the girl who won the Punt, Pass, and Kick contest for her age group– because she was wearing a Patriots jersey. I loathe the Patriots like little else, but that’s so classless I’m wincing as I write this. Anyone who did such a thing should turn in their jerseys and yield up their season tickets to a nobler fan.
The solace comes in the fact that I can now blame our loss to an inferior team on divine justice. If we seek to do God’s work and smite the forces of darkness, we owe it to Him to act with honour, so that men could see our good works and praise Him. We can’t presume that because the Patriots have clearly entered into a pact with Satan that we get a free pass because no matter what we do we’re better than they are. Virtue is absolute, not relative.
And then it looked like the final matchup would be between the Patriots and the Packers, and I think most of the world would have been rooting for Favre. We’d find out if the psychic energies of an entire planet (neighbourhood of Boston excepted) could will a team to victory or not.
But no: Eli Manning’s Giants win, and now they really are Eli Manning’s Giants, not merely the New York Giants whose quarterback is Eli Manning.
So it looks like I’ll have the chance to cheer for a Manning in the Super Bowl even if it’s not the one I figured on. The odds are on the Patriots winning, even though I was very impressed with how the Giants pushed the Patriots to the breaking point at the season-ending game.
It’s profoundly disturbing that the world’s most demonic team may complete the most perfect accomplishment in football history, but in a sense it’s a pure witness to the truth that worldly success and holiness are both very different things and strongly anticorrelated.
Here’s hoping, though. Go Giants!
mocking the Inquisitor 13 January 2008
Posted by DSM in Canada, human rights, politics.comments closed
Ezra Levant, former publisher of the Western Standard, appeared before the bizarre pseudocourt that is the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and took them to school. Video and transcripts are available at his website; his opening statement is a thing of beauty.
For those unfamiliar with the case, you may recall that a complaint was launched regarding the Western Standard’s publication of the Dread Cartoons of Blasphemy. In a nice move, Ezra (he’s one of those guys you think of by their first names; not sure why) republished the Dread Cartoons on his website the day he had to appear before the court. For the record, the image of a man in a bomb-turban remains my favourite; most of the rest are bleh, and poorly drawn to boot, although I think the “we’ve run out of virgins” one is kind of funny. (Incidentally, there’s an interesting theory that the “virgins” in question are actually “pure white grapes”. Read up on Christophe Luxenberg’s arguments about the Syriac origins of the Qur’an. I’ve probably mentioned this before. I think it’s both persuasive and hilarious, and those are the best kinds of theories.)
The free speech rights of Canadians have never been more under attack than they are now — Free Mark Steyn! — but this is also a major opportunity for us to end this ludicrous charade once and for all. As Ezra told his Inquisitor:
I have no faith in this farcical commission. But I do have faith in the justice and good sense of my fellow Albertans and Canadians. I believe that the better they understand this case, the more shocked they will be. I am here under your compulsion to answer the commission’s questions. But it is not I who am on trial: it is the freedom of all Canadians.
You may start your interrogation.
The text itself doesn’t capture the sheer scorn with which each syllable drips. There are times for courtesy, and there are times for plain anger. This is one of those times.
The only downside I see is that now that bland Inquisitor Shirlene McGovern has become a Youtube star, it’s probably less likely that we’ll get to see Steyn do likewise.. and I’d pay heavy coin to see that.
that does sound useful 11 January 2008
Posted by DSM in QOTD.comments closed
“Order right away, [and] you’ll get this convenient on/off switch.”
all the luck 9 January 2008
Posted by DSM in hockey.comments closed
So my sister and a friend wound up having dinner with Wayne Gretzky, because his meeting with the chair of the Canadian Olympic Committee had been cancelled.
She was headhunted last year and is currently handling special events and special guests for a Calgary hotel at which several hockey teams stay when they’re visiting, including the Coyotes.
So now she has a great story and some signed Sidney Crosby memorabilia, whereas my old #99 lunchbox has long since been lost to the winds of time. (Yes, I know what team Crosby plays for, and no, I don’t understand how that worked either.)
Many years ago I went off to do the university-grad school-professional academic, whereas my sister had enough of studying after her time in high school and went off to the work world. Few days go by when I don’t wonder about the wisdom of that decision; she meets much cooler people.
(No offense to my colleagues intended..)
good on you, Rex 5 January 2008
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
A few months back I wrote the following, Jeopardy-style, to a graph theorist friend:
A: Hockey. And Rex Murphy.
where the question I had intended was
Q: What are the two best things about the CBC?
Well, Murphy recently addressed the Mark Steyn case — hat tip Kathy Shaidle — and he’s in classic form. It might be time to put hockey second (especially seeing how awful the Leafs are this year.)
It’s not difficult to predict where Murphy would come down, of course– despite the devastating and sharp wit for which he’s justly famous, and which tends to be associated with the political right, he’s at heart a moderate. And the good kind of moderate: no wishy-washy averaging of different views for him. Instead, he simply brings his special brand of brutal reasonableness to everything. Even when I disagree with him — on Trudeau’s greatness, for example — he respects the issues.
And as he explains, it is brutally unreasonable for a so-called human rights commission to be involved in suppressing the free speech of columnists and magazines.
Once when I was living in Toronto I was walking in front of the CBC building in the early evening and saw the man himself. I thought to introduce myself and offer a few words of fanboy praise but decided to let him be. After years of being one of only a few CBC figures willing to wander past the fences of acceptable central-Canadian (l/L)iberal-wisdom, he’s more than earned the privilege not to be disturbed by the likes of me.
happy new year! 1 January 2008
Posted by DSM in miscellanea.comments closed
Or, to put it another way: あけましておめでとうございます!
I suppose the time has come to own up to why things were so quiet here in the fall: time that I would have otherwise spent wallowing in enjoyable curmudgeonly gloom was spent studying Japanese. Long story short, I think my geek cred should be pretty well established by now, but I’m about to take it to a whole new level..
To understand the genesis of this we need to go back to the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth– and one in particular, which came on at 6:30 or 7:00 or some such hour: Robotech.
I was astonished. It was a far richer story than anything I’d seen before, and I was completely hooked. I had no defences up against that mixture of romantic angst and battles with giant robots. The background was complicated, the characters were believable, and people I liked _died_. Not temporary back-next-episode deaths, but forever-and-ever deaths. It was terrifying, and wonderful. I used to wake up early just for the chance to watch it, and even after they started playing scheduling games with it I kept getting up in the hopes it’d come back on.
And then I fell in love with the books, written by James Luceno and Brian Daley under the alias Jack McKinney. That’s a minority view, but in my opinion most of their changes were improvements.
I’d long set those memories aside. But then a few years ago, the famous net.writer Steven den Beste stopped writing on his blog USS Clueless and instead started full-time animeblogging at Chizumatic. I followed the transition — he brings a very engineering-oriented mindset to lots of things, and is always worth reading — and wound up deciding it was worth watching some to see if it was worth it. After all, Robotech had been pretty good, right?
So I took his strongest recommendation, and watched Haibane Renmei (灰羽連盟).
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better-told short story. The ending affected me more than anything I’d seen or read in a long time.. the only comparisons that come to mind are with the end of Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” and Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By”. I felt like I’d discovered a whole new category of good things I hadn’t even imagined could exist before.
That was my re-entry into the anime world. Sturgeon’s second adage famously tells us that ninety percent of everything is crud, and in the case of anime I’d push that percentage closer to three figures. But there are stories you can tell there that you simply can’t tell in any other way. Always and everywhere good writing can triumph.
Which is how I first started casually studying Japanese, and earlier this year I decided to make a more serious go of it. After much individual practice over the summer, I realized I needed more experience with conversation, so I took a class in the fall and it’s been going pretty well (although reading kanji is always going to be a nightmare).
This isn’t just for entertainment purposes, by the way: I’m off to Japan for a few weeks in early summer to visit the planetary group at Tōkyō Tech, thanks to the exceedingly generous offer of Prof. Nagasawa Makiko. They have some of the world’s best N-body planetary astrophysicists there, so it should be enormous fun.
Anyway, there you go. Absence explained!
free Mark Steyn! 22 December 2007
Posted by DSM in human rights, law, politics.comments closed
The recent attempt by several members of the Canadian Islamic Congress to silence the inimitable Mark Steyn — not by disproving his thesis that because of demographics Islam is on the way up, of course, but by charging him with blasphemy before the Inquisition — enrages and disturbs on every level.
I don’t mean to be metaphorical. I’m entirely serious in describing this as a blasphemy prosecution, and the misnamed human rights commissions as an Inquisition. Whether he’s convicted or not is less significant than the fact there is an official body empowered to determine whether or not he’s blasphemed.
Canada has an official belief system (half-affectionately, half-derisively called the multicult), and we’re required to make obeisance or risk punishment. Our religion doesn’t have many explicit dogmas, per se, but you can still come to understand it pretty well. In classical negative theology, you come to understand God by saying what he’s not; similarly, in our new faith, you come to understand the boundaries of Accepted Truth by what people are punished for, or threatened with punishment for.
These days, no one’s worried about being fined by the government for sympathizing with the non-Chalcedonian Christology of the Coptic Orthodox. Come to think of it, you can probably count one one hand the number of members of the various Canadian HRCs who know what I’m talking about. Questionable Trinitarian theology just isn’t something they concern themselves with, and if I tried to bring a formal heresy charge against an Egyptian friend then the Commissars would laugh.
“Settle this between yourselves,” they’d say.
They’d throw out the case like Seneca’s older brother, the Roman jurist Gallio, threw out the case against St Paul where the locals claimed that Paul “persuades men to worship God contrary to the law”. (Acts 18).
Gallio interrupted before Paul even began his defence, because he wasn’t interested in handling philosophical disputes between one group of Jews (the local synagogue) and another group of Jews and assorted Gentile hangers-on (Paul and coworkers). He was only concerned with dealing with matters involving “some misdemeanor or serious crime“.
Instead, he explained, “since it involves questions about words and names and your own law—settle the latter yourselves. I will not be a judge of such things.“
And he kicked everyone out of the courtroom.
It’s mildly astonishing that a few words from an irritated Roman proconsul two thousand years dead show more sense than a modern nation’s enlightened political structures, but there you go. Whether you view our innovations as inventing new thoughtcrimes or as broadening the traditional exceptions to free speech beyond all sense, the end result is the same: we’ve criminalized the expression of perfectly reasonable ideas, and the space in which our thought can move and play and explore grows ever smaller.
For Steyn’s argument, right or wrong, the natural battlefield is the page, not a kangaroo court.
It’s been noted — I think by the man himself — that the complainants almost always win in these cases, and so the odds aren’t good. I’m not so sure. It may be that if we cast enough light then Steyn might be found not guilty, for fear of throwing the entire HRC project into disrepute– freedom could win by losing. I’d hope so, anyway, but the many previous attacks on free speech in Canada via the Inquisitions have generally passed unremarked, in typical Canadian style.
It’s time for that to end. All those who support free speech — right, left, centre, other — must oppose the so-called “human rights” end-run around our ancient liberties in the Friendly Dictatorship.
Free Mark Steyn, to free us all.
just in time for Christmas 22 December 2007
Posted by DSM in miscellanea.comments closed
Captain Picard, because your actions are those of a thoughtful man, I’ll tell you this.
Matters more urgent caused our absence.
Now, witness the result. Outposts destroyed, expansion of the Federation everywhere.
Yes, we have indeed been negligent, Captain. But no more.
[...]
We.. are back.
ST: TNG, “The Neutral Zone”
the falling standard 9 October 2007
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
From Jonathan Kay, on the collapse of Ezra Levant’s Western Standard, like its predecessor the Alberta Report:
All this bloodless market analysis notwithstanding, I was still upset to hear last week’s news – and not just because I felt bad for Ezra, whom I am now happy to call a friend. In many ways, Ezra and his magazine serve as metaphors for red-meat conservatism itself in this country: feisty, iconoclastic, resourceful and clever, but ultimately marginalized by an eastern Canadian intellectual establishment still beholden to the left-wing dogmas and anti-Western antipathies of Trudeau era.
To be fair, the standard-bearer of American conservatism in the U.S. is the National Review, and despite an illustrious history and enormous influence I don’t think they’ve ever turned a profit. Could an offbeat Canadian Western-focused conservative-libertarian magazine with limited audience and no large donor base really survive? It was, to quote one of my favourite Python skits, “an act of purest optimism to have posed the question in the first place.”
And of course now there’s one fewer destination for Colby Cosh’s writing, and that’s a tragedy: albeit not an uncommon one for freelance writers in general, and for him in particular. (Now less “lance”, as a friend of mine might put it.)
To take this in a different direction, Michael Novak has done his best to rehabilitate the idea of business in Catholic moral philosophy. Among other things, he emphasizes that the man who employs others in good and lawful tasks is doing an excellent and praiseworthy thing, not merely by achieving a good end (providing service to his customers) but giving his employees the opportunity to do the same and legitimately earn a living. Doing good to make it possible for others to do good is itself a good.
Honourable failure in such a task — whether it’s related to the always quixotic missions of Canadian conservatism or not — isn’t reason to celebrate, obviously.. but there’s no shame in it either.
Cheers to Levant and company for holding the banner.
and the Colts play “American football” 4 October 2007
Posted by DSM in hockey.comments closed
The Leafs losing? Bad.
Losing the first game of the regular season? Also bad.
At home? Not good at all.
When they were leading in the third? Dispiriting.
In overtime? In principle better than in regulation, but actually worse.
To the Senators? Terrible.
Having my morning sports news describe it as “Heatley’s ice hockey [emphasis mine] goal lift Senators over Maple Leafs”? Worst of all.
Ice hockey. Good grief.
s/ice\ hockey/hockey/g
reconfiguration time 3 October 2007
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
Steve Janke lays it down in a fascinating post entitled “Canada needs the NDP” (no, but seriously):
For a conservative, a liberal serves the purpose of contrasting his views and highlighting to the voter the potential futures at stake. The same goes for the liberal. An honest liberal or conservative would admit that, once in a while, the other side has a better take on an issue, or at the very least, is offering up something worth considering. But for the Liberal Party of Canada, other parties serve no purpose, because as a party without vision, the Liberal Party doesn’t require contrast. How can the other parties have a better take on the issue of the acquisition of power and money by the Liberal Party? It makes no sense when those are the only issues that matter. The Liberal Party doesn’t need opinions, all the Liberal Party needs is votes when an election happens. Best if these other parties were gone altogether in order to make the elections simple. The choice to voters: confirm the Liberal Party’s position of power or…well, nothing else, really.
I find myself agreeing with him. My Dipper friends have an almost endearing lack of connection with reality, but on their good days they can be touchingly earnest. I think his argument that Canada will be better off for having the NDP as the alternative to the Conservatives is correct.
There’s another excellent reason for conservatives to prefer having the NDP in opposition: as Janke notes, they will inevitably become more centrist, which should allow the misnamed “Conservative” party to move to the right.
My insistence on the point may be tiresome, but it’s still true for all that. The CPC made a deliberate decision to abandon many historic principles of Canadian conservatism on the grounds that more centrist goals were the only ones achievable. I disagreed with the choice at the time, and complained about it loudly at the pub.. although the narrowness of the last election suggests they may have had a point tactically. I’m still not convinced it was the right decision strategically.
Anyway, Janke offers much food for thought for observers of the Canadian political scene.
