In contrast to the ending of Scrapped Princess, I found the atonement scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to be a weak representation of the material being analogized. Furthermore, it makes no sense disconnected from its Christian eschatological framework. And requires a huge suspension of disbelief to make sense of it even when it's not.

C.S. Lewis's hand-wave in this regard is "deep magic," which I think is his way of saying, "Stop asking why." I don't blame him. The Doctrine of the Atonement in the Catholic Encyclopedia covers all the arguments and analogies the dedicated church-goer of any faith has ever heard of and dismisses them one by one as "close but not quite." Ultimately, it can't do much better than the tautology it begins with:

Atonement is the Satisfaction of Christ, whereby God and the world are reconciled or made to be at one.

That sounds awfully Deepak Chopra. The saying, "Fish discover water last," resonates here. Lewis tremendously advanced the cause of Christianity by reframing it in the context of medieval legend and mythology, his areas of expertise. But I think it's necessary to look further afield, to audiences not culturally conditioned to make snap connections between the analogy and the thing being analogized.

Taking Scrapped Princess as a case in point, I can't say whether author Ichiro Sakaki and director Soichi Masui intended the metaphor to be extended this far, but Scrapped Princess frames this bedrock principle of Christian theology with a clarity and logic I've never seen before.

The Earth of Scrapped Princess (which could be viewed as a sequel to The Day the Earth Stood Still) was long ago on the losing side of a literal war in the heavens. After the surrender, the planet was stripped of its advanced technology and sealed inside a kind of global "Biosphere Two." Now called "Providence," it is ruled by a computer system that makes its will known through the "Church of Mauser."

The system maintains Providence in a permanent Middle Ages. The primary means of control is the church (an obvious nod to Rome). But there are several other subroutines running as checks and balances to this goal. Aside from the human Inquisitioners, angel-like beings known as "Peacemakers" (self-aware but cruelly stoic robots) that can trigger Armageddon and reboot the Middle Ages all over again.

Human nature being what it is, sooner or later people start getting too big for their britches, begin discovering the "old technology" (a nod to the Renaissance), and generally causing problems. And so the slate has to be wiped clean.

The other, seemingly contradictory routine is the "Providence Breaker." This independently-running program is designed to terminate the entire system when certain conditions are met, and return to the human race their free agency. It tests for these conditions by raising up a "savior" who is prophesied to destroy the world. If she dies before her sixteenth birthday, then nothing happens and the subroutine restarts.

The anime series doesn't explore all the alternative options, but the following exegesis does fit the material: a Napoleonic figure who rises precipitously to prominence and plows through church and state wouldn't trigger the Providence Breaker either. Because that would inevitably result in a repeat of the same situation, the reason for the world being in this state in the first place.

Rather, the savior has to die to save the world, literally have her blood shed to trigger the Providence Breaker. In the end, Pacifica is betrayed by her own kin, just as Mauser, the original designer of the system, originally betrayed human freedom for "the greater good." (Compare to King Hezekiah trading away future liberty for a present peace in 2 Kings 20:16-19.)

Up to that point, Pacifica has been protected by her mecha "Dragoons" (Knights Templar), and by her followers. If they are not strong and resourceful enough, she will die before her sixteenth birthday. If they are too strong, then their power will corrupt absolutely and nullify the effort. It is only on the razor's edge between these two extremes that her atonement becomes efficacious.

In the end, telling Pacifica that "you were born to destroy me," Mauser's virtual ghost leaves the final choice between peaceful tyranny and chaotic freedom up to her. When Pacifica chooses the latter, like a good deist, Mauser instructs the human race that it is now time for them to take responsibility for their own actions and their own future. And shuts itself down.

This interpretation comes to a logical conclusion and makes a clear, comprehensible point. Not that it's necessarily doctrinally correct (depending on what doctrine you adhere to), but as my old violin teacher used to say, if you're going to play the wrong note, at least play it well. That shouldn't be too much to ask of religious theologies that claim to have the power to damn or save us for all eternity.

Related posts

The catechism of Angel Beats!
Scrapped Princess
The passion of the magical girl
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Labels: anime, apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, eschatology, magic, religion, robots

We don't tend to think about where the modern conveniences of life come from until they stop coming. Earlier this year, Rocky Mountain Power was having difficulty keeping the lights on in my neighborhood. A breaker kept tripping where the overhead lines go underground.

These breakers are basically explosive bolts. They are LOUD. A mile away and it sounds like a thunderclap.

Because light and electricity move at speeds instantaneous to human senses, count the seconds between a flash of lightning and the thunderclap, divide by five, and that's how many many miles away it was.

In this case, the same thing in reverse. The lights would go out, then a few seconds later, BOOM!

They seem to have figured out the problem because it's happened only once since. (I was at work but one of my clocks doesn't have a battery backup.) Though I did get a couple of these handy units just in case.

And where does my electricity come from? Well, the company-owned net generation capacity is 10,894 megawatts from 72 generating plants, distributed over 16,500 miles of transmission lines via 900 substations.

Coal-fueled facilities - 10
Hydroelectric facilities - 41
Natural gas facilities - 7
Wind facilities - 13
Geothermal facilities - 1

And where does Rocky Mountain Power comes from? Turns out, it's a division of PacifiCorp, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Thanks Warren!

Labels: deep thoughts, science, technology

My sister Kate interviewed me for her Romance & Manga blog. As I explain in the interview, I was a "professional" translator for only about seven years, and was pretty much in perpetual starving artist mode.

I'm the PGA golfer who realizes he's never going to rank above 70 and figures he might as well save it up for the senior tour. And get a "real" job. Number 70 on the PGA tour makes around $12,000 a year. It's a move up or move out kind of thing.

For now, translation is "one of those hobbies that takes over your life." But being an otaku, that's the whole point. In any case, this is the kind of give and take forces you articulate stuff you often just think about.

Like blogging, it's thinking out loud, pontificating on a digital street corner, and it was a lot of fun.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Or start with Part IV and scroll down.

Labels: deep thoughts, japanese, language, translations

I have a fondness for movies about the end of days like, well, End of Days. The world doesn't necessarily have to end. But the devil does have to shown up to get his due. Call the genre "Miltonesque" because, as they say, Milton gave the devil all the good lines in Paradise Lost.

These are often the smartest movies about religion, even when dancing right up to (and over) the edge of camp. It's one thing to posit "evil" as a mindless Manichean force like gravity or radiation. But if the devil is going to argue his case on screen and in person, he's going to have to make sense.


Pointing to performances by Ray Wise in Reaper, Peter Stormare in Constantine, and Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, I argue that what makes them such compelling devils is that "they're bad with reasons, motivations, and no apologies."

Much in the same way that the structure of the police procedural disciplines the storytelling, tackling the big philosophical questions in an accessible, story-driven manner disciplines the dialectic. And now to the above list we can add Welsh actor Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar. Yes, that Lucifer.

The devil, you see, is on a sabbatical from hell, and has camped out at a posh nightclub in Los Angeles. There he meets Detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German), who is investigating the murder of one of his patrons. It doesn't take long for Lucifer to conclude that solving crimes is a simply brilliant way to pass the time here on Earth.

So now we have the eschatological police procedural.

Meanwhile, Mazikeen (Lesley-Ann Brandt), Lucifer's demonic chief-of-staff, and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside), a bounty-hunting angel, form an uneasy partnership in order to get Lucifer back in Hell where he belongs. Lucifer is in no mood to comply, despite discovering that he's slowly becoming mortal, an alarming fact he treats with fascinated delight.

Lucifer hearkens back to Angel (before Whedon cluttered up the cast and the storylines) and the Spike-centric episodes of Buffy. It's also the theme of Hellsing. Alucard (that's Dracula spelled backwards) joins forces with Van Helsing largely because modern evil is so boring.

It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg have creation and writing credits, from the characters they developed for the DC Comics series The Sandman. Gaiman knows his British apologists (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, to start with), or maybe he just breathed it all in growing up.

The penultimate scene in the first episode has Lucifer getting his partner shot because he doesn't want her to kill the bad guy. This echoes the conclusion of Screwtape Letters, in which death is seen by the tormenting demons as a defeat for the devil.

As far as Gaiman's Lucifer is concerned, death is a cop-out. He wants the wicked to suffer. He wants the punishment to fit the crime in the most exacting terms imaginable. After all, he explains, he doesn't perch on your shoulder exhorting you to sin. That's all the work of human free will, not him.

And yet he gets all the blame. Well, then, the sinners deserve all the punishment.

The devil as the supreme legalist also hews nicely with Mormon theology, according to which God and the Devil differ not so much in ends as means. The real question is not salvation, but the cost to the soul. And the question on Lucifer's mind is the cost to his own.

Being that this is L.A. and no preacher will get anywhere near him, hopefully the answer will come from his shrink (Rachael Harris). With some backroom coaching from Amenadiel, the result in episode 6 is a counseling session worthy of the King Follet Discourse.

When he's not debating whether the unexamined life is worth living as an actual human being, Tom Ellis plays Lucifer as Ferris Bueller on his day off from Hades. The lovable rouge, the bad boy constantly surprising himself by doing the right thing.

He and Lauren German cook up the kind of chemistry we see between Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu on Elementary, where the sparks can fly without the risk of veering into rom-com territory. When she calmly parries his seductive entreaties the first time they meet, he leans in and peevishly asks, "Did my father send you?"

There's a whole lot of theology packed into that question.

Woodside and Brandt's uneasy relationship mirrors that of the leads. They dominate the screen whenever they take over a scene. In particular, Woodside's commanding presence versus Ellis's devil-may-care attitude is a great illustration of opposites that are different sides of the same coin.

Lucifer is currently scheduled for a 13 episode run on Fox. At this point, the "morality" arc seems to be working its way towards an inexorable conclusion. While I expect Lucifer to get his wings back and not end up a literal fallen angel, I couldn't spell out how this is going to happen or what might come after that.

Even if nothing comes after that, Lucifer will still make a great one-and done, sporting a metaphysical heft too rarely seen in a prime time genre series.

Related posts

Christianity is cool
Constantine
Devil of a role
Hellsing
Lucifer (Fox NF)

Labels: anime, deep thoughts, eschatology, hellsing, miltonesque, movies, pop culture, religion, television reviews

I'm amused when neo-conservatives are criticized for running around the world imposing "American-style democracy" on foreign peoples. It's a policy memorably articulated by Rudyard Kipling about the long-forgotten Philippine-American War.

Take up the White Man's burden, No tawdry rule of kings,
    But toil of serf and sweeper, The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread,
    Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.

In September 1898, anticipating Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule" by a century, Kipling wrote to Theodore Roosevelt:

America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears.

I agree with most critiques of neo-conservative adventurism, and hew to the Prime Directive in this regard (though preferring Captain Kirk's interpretation to Captain Picard's: sometimes you do have to send the Marines to the Shores of Tripoli).

The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.

The problem with the "American-style democracy" jibe is that no neo-conservative has ever imposed "American-style democracy" on anybody. The American political system is uniquely a product of our own history, geography, and demographics.

Bottom line: the Rube Goldberg machine called the United States is too weird to impose on anybody anywhere else. Rather, what neo-conservatives have been doing is running around the world imposing European-style parliamentary democracies.

All the more troubling, these parliamentary democracies tend to be modeled on unitary states with hyper-strong central governments and little shared sovereignty or "local rule." Japan, France, and Great Britain are three notable examples.

If any political system was going to be imposed on anybody, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq would have been better off with an "Articles of Confederation" framework that made the provinces fairly independent and got them on board first.

Functioning provinces first, nation-building second. After all, learning from our mistakes with the Articles of Confederation gave us version 2.0, the current U.S. Constitution.

Even then, the anti-federalists didn't lose the ideological battle until after the Civil War. Then over the next century, the political pendulum swung too far in the other direction. As it did in Japan.

The Meiji Restoration in 1868 upset 250 years of fairly strong local rule, abruptly centralizing power without the necessary checks and balances. The temptation is understandable: to rule by decree and to right wrongs "because we know best."

Because, you know, those provincials in the provinces are just too provincial to get with the times (exactly the same attitude that brought down the Tokugawa shogunate).

Alas, without the (implicit or explicit) consent of the governed, governing ends up a game of Whac-A-Mole. The people forever out of power may decide to shoot the people in power. Except that the people with the most guns are usually the military.

That was Japan during the 1930s. Creating "facts on the ground" that couldn't be undone by feckless politicians, middle-ranked army officers in Japan and China launched coups and started their own wars. In most cases, the government caved.

Wrote Robert Heinlein, "The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."

In the end, it's not an election or a constitution that makes the difference. It's the widely-understood rules of the game and everybody's willingness to play by them. Common law becomes the rule of law by first being common.

The United States started with Jeffersonian republicanism before moving to Hamiltonian federalism. The rule of law predated the U.S. Constitution. Key elements of the Bill of Rights had already been written into state constitutions.

Before relying on--and yielding sovereignty to--the big, people must build trust in the small. They have to "trust, but verify." Otherwise, even the most perfect democratic system will never work, no matter how, by, or on whom it is imposed.

Labels: deep thoughts, geography, history, japan, politics, social studies, ww2

. . . we're all dead, as John Maynard Keynes famously observed. And by "we," I mean "everybody." When the Sun enters its red giant phase, this planet and everything on it will be vaporized.

Don't panic: that won't happen for 7.5 billion years. The problem is, the Sun is a fusion furnace and it's slowly but certainly running out of its primary fuel, hydrogen. As it does, the core shrinks a little and heats up a little.

In turn, the Earth's orbit widens a little. It all balances out--until it doesn't. Solar luminosity has been growing about 10 percent every billion years. But once helium fusion commences, the Sun will get way too hot way too fast.

Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

Life will get uncomfortably warm long before that, in only a few hundred million years. Ironically, what will probably kill us first is the lack of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

That's right. Too little carbon dioxide. As plate tectonics slows down and the Sun heats up, continental erosion and ocean evaporation will accelerate carbonate formation, locking away more and more carbon dioxide.

So as the Sun slowly brightens, carbon dioxide is sequestered into limestone. Some 600 to 800 million years from now, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations should fall below 10 parts per million, a threshold where plants can no longer photosynthesize. This process might wipe out plants and the animals that depend on them.

Including us. Not to mention that no more green plants means no more oxygen. So forget about breathing. But hey, we've got a half-billion years to go! For once, we can definitely call it somebody's else's problem.

Labels: deep thoughts, science, space

Excerpted from "On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity" (in Heretics, first published in 1905) by G. K. Chesterton.

A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, "If you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects." I replied with a natural simplicity and wonder, "About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?"

It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all.

In the modern world solemnity is the direct enemy of sincerity. In the modern world sincerity is almost always on one side, and solemnity almost always on the other. The only answer possible to the fierce and glad attack of sincerity is the miserable answer of solemnity.

To take a thing and make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. It is, on the contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object. To use a thing in vain means to use it without use. But a joke may be exceedingly useful; it may contain the whole earthly sense, not to mention the whole heavenly sense, of a situation.

Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.

Labels: deep thoughts, law, politics, religion

Kate points out that part of the problem with "mainframe plots" (an amorphous, omniscient "big bad" as the main antagonist) is the "nothing ever glitches syndrome." The bad guy is so pure and untainted in his badness that his Machiavellian schemes unfold without a hitch.

This isn't just a problem faced by screenwriters. It's a problem that people living in the real world have difficulty coming to grips with.

One of the themes explored in Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully) was the Imperial Navy's obsession with labyrinthian war plans, exacerbated by "victory disease," an unshakable belief in their predestined triumph through sheer will.

Byzantine intricacy was a trademark of prewar Japanese naval strategy. Fleet exercises often featured exquisitely coordinated maneuvers on the part of the Imperial Navy being met with conveniently inept countermoves by the oafish Americans, who never failed to go obediently to their choreographed slaughter.

In the chapter discussing Admiral Yamamoto's final operational plan for Midway, Parshall and Tully cheekily advise the reader to "pour a rather tall glass of spirits beforehand." I kept imagining Baldrick from Blackadder intoning, "I have a cunning plan."

The simultaneous attack on the Aleutian Islands, for example, has ever since been depicted as a "diversion" because that's the only thing that makes any freaking sense in retrospect. But it really was a full-fledged operation intended to secure a military base on U.S. territory in the North Pacific.

Horse trading to get his Central Pacific strategy approved, Yamamoto agreed (it wasn't his idea) to place two of his carriers well out of reach when, in fact, "the [Aleutian] archipelago was useless for staging any offensive action larger than an occasional narwhal hunt."

Ironically, Yamamoto's chief ally in pushing through his Central Pacific strategy was--the United States. Namely, the Doolittle Raid. It's fun to imagine Jimmy Doolittle doing it for that purpose, but no conspiracy ever works as well as happenstance. Yamamoto deserves every last bit of credit.

Especially after factoring in details of the pre-war political machinations provided by Eri Hotta in Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, Admiral Yamamoto ends up looking more and more like the George McClellan of the Pacific War: the gift that kept on giving—to the other side.

Although [Civil War General] McClellan was meticulous in his planning and preparations, these characteristics may have hampered his ability to challenge aggressive opponents in a fast-moving battlefield environment. He chronically overestimated the strength of enemy units and was reluctant to apply principles of mass, frequently leaving large portions of his army unengaged at decisive points.

While Yamamoto chronically underestimated the strength of the opposing forces, the results were the same: Midway being a classic case of the inability, when it counted, to apply principles of mass. Yamamoto ended up giving Nimitz the fairest fight he could have possibly hoped for.

During war games leading up to the Battle of Midway, whenever junior officers suggested that the Americans could show up on Admiral Nagumo's flank and start attacking everything in sight ("Hulk smash!"), Yamamoto insisted that such a possibility was inconceivable.

Of course, the U.S. Navy did exactly that. And while it was throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the Japanese carriers, a beleaguered Nagumo was desperately trying stick to Yamamoto's "cunning plan," when it should have been "summarily consigned to the ash can."

WWII popularized the acronym that perfectly describes what happened at Midway (to varying degrees on both sides): SNAFU. The first two letters get right to the heart of the matter. Stuff getting AFU is "situation normal."

Or as 19th century German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke put it more politely, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy," a maxim that Parshall and Tully quip "probably never met with a less enthusiastic audience than the Imperial Navy."

Even on fictional battlefields, the entertainment comes from seeing how a battle plan survives (or doesn't, depending on the POV) contact with the enemy. Scripted storytelling leads us to expect that just when things are going right they're going to go drastically wrong (and vise versa), hence the suspense.

The difference in the real world is that sometimes things never go right to begin with. And when they start going wrong, they don't stop going wrong. That possibility didn't occur to Admiral Yamamoto until four of his fleet carriers were sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Labels: books, deep thoughts, history, japan, mainframe, ww2

Last month, Google executive Alan Eustace made the highest sky dive ever, jumping from an altitude of 135,890 feet and breaking the sound barrier in the process. At 24 miles high, the sky above is black, the curve of the Earth is visible, and the near-vacuum and extreme temperatures requires a space suit.

And yet he was only a third of the way to the official edge of "space": 62 miles. It's another 40 miles to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). And then 100 miles on top of that to get to the ISS.

That may seem like a long way to go. It's not. The Earth's atmosphere is ridiculously thin. The diameter of the Earth is 8000 miles. A good pair of lungs will take you up another three miles. If a commercial jet aircraft--cruising at seven to eight miles--depressurizes, you'll need that emergency oxygen mask to stay alive.

If we generously define the atmosphere as ending at LEO and compare the planet to a baseball, the atmosphere would be thinner than a dime. Applying this analogy to breathable air only, the atmosphere is thinner than a sheet of paper.

Talk apples instead of baseballs, and the Earth's atmosphere is the mere skin of the fruit. This strikes me as a bad design flaw in the inhabitable planet design spec, though if the atmosphere reached any higher, nothing in LEO would stay in orbit for long.

This "skin of life" reinforces what a strange creature gravity is, simultaneously the strongest force in the universe--that can crush a star into a black hole--and the weakest. The paradox is so profound that physicists seriously theorize that gravity leaking into alternate universes saps its actual strength.

But gravity alone isn't enough to keep an atmosphere down on the farm. A small, rocky planet requires a molten core to power plate tectonics and a magnetic field.

The magnetic field forms radiation belts that deflect the solar wind around the atmosphere (the solar wind collides with the atmosphere at the poles and creates auroras).

Mars, by contrast, lacks both volcanic activity and a strong magnetic field. Gases stripped away by the solar wind aren't easily replaced. So sans the above, terraforming Mars is a lost cause.

The Saturnian moon of Titan is shielded by the magnetosphere of its mother planet. Locked in a close orbit to Saturn, tidal forces heat Titan's icy interior, creating an atmosphere denser at its surface than Earth's.

Titan's atmosphere is 98 percent nitrogen, its lakes liquid methane (-179 degree centigrade). But Titan could become beach-front property when the Sun enters its red giant phase five billion years from now and cooks the Earth to a cinder.

Though a gamma-ray burst could do us in long before then. Or a really big asteroid. Closer to home, there's always the Yellowstone Caldera.

It's a miracle we wake up every morning still breathing. The improbabilities of dying are balanced out by the improbabilities of existing in the first place. Like Dr. Who's Clara Oswald, Earth is, for the time being, the "impossible girl."

For all we know, the gods could get restless tomorrow and knock over our beautiful house of cards and play pinochle on our snouts. Which brings to mind the last scene from Cabin in the Woods:

Dana: I'm so sorry I almost shot you. I probably wouldn't have.

Marty: Hey, shh, no. I totally get it. I'm sorry I let you get attacked by a werewolf and then ended the world. [incredulous] Giant evil gods.

Dana: I wish I could have seen them.

Marty: I know. That would have been a fun weekend.

I'm with Marty. The only regret I have about the world ending one day is that I (probably) won't be there to see it. Throughout Buffy and Angel, Joss Whedon kept trying to end the world as we know it (an underlying flaw in both series). In Cabin in the Woods, the monsters take over and the world ends for good. Finally!

But to conclude on a more tuneful note:

Labels: buffy, deep thoughts, movies, science, space

In Poseidon of the East, Rokuta (whose job it is to appoint the next emperor) says, "People can scrape by without an emperor. It takes an emperor to truly destroy a kingdom, to turn it into a wasteland where nothing can survive."

To really scorch the earth, as in a nonstop Sherman's March to the Sea, the means of destruction have to be led and organized.

In the conduct of his own personal life, Rokuta is more of a libertarian with a healthy disregard for centralized authority. Even though he chooses the emperor, he afterwards denigrates him with every other breath (the feelings are mutual, though they don't let it interfere with their work).

Libertarianism of late has become a synonym for anarchy. Even accepting that premise, anarchy as a political abstraction is not the same as chaos. Kant defines anarchy as "law and freedom without force," and Webster's (Random House) offers as one definition:

a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.

In theory, of course. The typical rejoinder to the idealistic anarchist and strident libertarian is: "So do you want to live in a place like Somalia?"

It's one of the dumber strawman arguments out there. But as it turns out, somebody has answered that question for real. Peter Leeson at George Mason University analyzed the data and concluded that the average Somalian was, in fact, better off stateless.

State predation can actually reduce the welfare of the citizenry below its level under statelessness.

The data suggest that while the state of this development remains low, on nearly all of 18 key indicators that allow pre- and post-stateless welfare comparisons, Somalis are better off under anarchy than they were under government. Renewed vibrancy in critical sectors of Somalia's economy and public goods in the absence of a predatory state are responsible for this improvement.

The human proclivity to self-organize is so deeply rooted--it would have been a key trait advantaged by Darwinian selection--that it takes a real outbreak of entropy to eradicate it.

Sherman's March to the Sea lasted a little over a month, the Civil War four years. More prolonged conflicts such as China's Three Kingdoms period (220–280) and the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618–1648) can indeed turn apocalyptic in the scale of destruction. Everybody looses.

Except China and Europe are still here. Civilization can take a drubbing and bounce back pretty quickly.

During its Warring States period (1467-1573), Japan's internal political order was similar to that of the Italian city-states. The tiny amount of arable land pretty much meant that the combatants had to live where they fought when the fighting was over. So "scorched earth" was pretty much out.

Armies march on their stomachs, and that requires a thriving agricultural economy plus a trading surplus, because guns and swords don't grow on trees. All the more reason to shepherd your resources, even when raining down fire.

NHK's historical dramas will usually toss in a few scenes depicting the warlord inspecting the fields, dealing with unhappy farmers, supervising the construction of levees, and auditing accounts. This was what warlords spent most of their time doing, not fighting.

Only a few scenes, grant you. Cinematic anarchy (The Road Warrior) makes for better fiction than reality. Push come to shove, I'd prefer a little too much government than too little. The problem is that a "little too much" has so easily turned into "way too damned much."

Even there, what concerns me the most isn't necessarily the size of government as the distribution of government. In other words, if you think Northern European countries represent the epitome of functioning democracies, first consider their size and population distribution.

Sweden, for example, has about the same population as North Carolina. Germany has twice the population of California (biggest in Western Europe) but is smaller in area than Montana. When distributing government services, population density matters too.

The "economy of scale" is the great temptation of modern-day governance. The problem is, building big things is easy. Managing them is hard. Far more people think they have the chops to run big organizations than they actually do. At least in the private sector, those people can be fired.

When it comes to governing, small is more than "beautiful." It's the only political philosophy that will reliably work over the long term.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, deep thoughts, history, japan, nhk, politics

I noted in my review of R.I.P.D. the lazy tendency to equate "ugly" and "evil." Though in the "realistic" world of crime drama, the opposite is true. Watching Law & Order, you could be forgiven for concluding that every crime in New York City was committed by a well-coiffed Manhattanite.

And yet the stereotype stubbornly persists in the F&SF realms. One of the nice things about Frozen was having the handsome young prince be the villain. Space opera especially seems fixated on humanity's struggles with grotesque alien creatures. (That "hive mind" thing is getting old too.)

This does open the door to B-grade actioners like Species and Lifeforce that play against type by casting a fashion model as the alien villainess and giving her many opportunities to take off her clothes. Though these movies could also be read as Victorian allegories about the dangers of sex.

Darth Vader was most interesting when he was cool and wanted to "end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." Then the whole thing degraded into a mud wrestling match, reducing the moral stakes in Star Wars to white hat/black hat terms that make old westerns look sophisticated.

Compare, for example, these two quite different depictions of the devil by Ray Wise in Reaper and Peter Stormare in Constantine. Ray Wise's performance in particular is a perfect illustration of C.S. Lewis's observation that

The greatest evil . . . is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

Peter Stormare only shows up in the last ten minutes of the movie, yet appears fully realized as Constantine's thus-far invisible antagonist (though not, in fact, his real enemy).


And then there's Al Pacino playing the devil, who ever since Milton made him the biggest anti-hero in literature (with all the best lines to boot), has no doubt been dying to be played by Al Pacino. Again opposite Keanu Reeves in The Devil's Advocate.


The creepy in these scenes comes from their characters, not from the special effects department and certainly not from their appearances. Granted, we're back in rich white dude territory (so they must be bad). But at least they're bad with reasons, motivations, and no apologies.

Jagi Lamplighter points to the equally galling trend in "literary fiction fantasy" of making bad guys not really bad but misunderstood (unless they're rich white dudes). I give the silly Independence Day a wide pass because it insists that, naw, these aliens are just plain nasty.

I mean, they go around destroying all kinds of stuff without filing an Environmental Impact Statement first. The gall!

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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, miltonesque, movies, religion, television

Daniel Greenfield recently echoed thoughts similar to mine about Japan as a harbinger of things to come: "The future doesn't belong to Japan. It may not, at this rate, belong to anyone. Japan hurled itself into the future, but didn't find anything there."

As I observed earlier this year, "The year 2012 again had Japan boldly going where no man has gone before. Literally, as it turns out. Where it's going, there's nobody there. Because they died."

Greenfield make other contrary points that are pretty spot-on, such as: "Japan isn't really a technocratic wonderland." Well, it is, but in small, highly-concentrated pockets. Compared to the average American, the average Japanese lives a lower-tech life with a lower standard of living.

Except for the toilets. And the trains.

Greenfield observes that "the strain of a feudal society rapidly transitioning to the modern world is still there." I'm not sure about the "strain," though. Those feudal elements are mostly embraced without a second thought, and have only been exacerbated by recent demographic shifts.

A survey conducted on NHK's Cool Japan program, for example, found that the overwhelming majority of teens favored preserving the hierarchical language reflected by senpai-kouhai (senior-junior) relationships, that start in elementary school and continue for the rest of their lives.

That conservatism helped freeze Japan in time, that time being the cusp of the 90s when Japan was at its peak, and crippled its corporations and its culture, but also made the return of the right to power possible. It's far from certain that a conservative revolution can save Japan, but so far it has a better shot at it than we do.

According to Greenfield, one reason Japan survived the consequences of its social implosion was "because of its dislike for immigration." On top of that, "A society of the elderly may be slow to turn around, but it's less likely to drive off a cliff without understanding the consequences."

A country that still waxes nostalgic about the 250-year isolationist reign of the Tokugawa Bakufu is never going to embrace immigration as a solution for anything, nor should it. Or could it. What Michael Blowhard says about the French is equally true of the Japanese:

Hard though it is for an American to believe, the French wake up in the morning and look forward to a full day's-worth of Being French. They go through the day Being French with great relish. They re-charge at night so that they can spend the following day Being French.

The political term for this in Japanese is kokutai, or "national polity." During that Meiji Restoration, kokutai defined "the eternal, and immutable aspects of [the Japanese] polity, derived from history, tradition, and custom, and focused on the Emperor."

In other words, a system, as Colin Jones puts it, "inherently designed to keep order by protecting the old." Even if the old way of doing things isn't any older than 1868.

Labels: deep thoughts, demographics, economics, japan, japanese culture, nhk, politics

As I've noted before, I'm wary of the apocalyptic mindset. Once the province of the religious right, Matt Ridley recently documented in Wired magazine how it's been thoroughly embraced by the secular left. Doomsday economics is currently all the rage, with "fiscal cliffs" and monetary meltdowns in Europe and Japan, and the like.

In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, archeologists pointed to the numerous stone markers found in the coastal foothills of Japan, warning future generations not to build permanent dwellings below that elevation. Warnings that were forgotten in a generation or two. So much for learning from history. And yet Japan remains with us.

And so we gamely muddle on. As Michael Wood points out in The Story of England, many towns and cities across Europe took centuries to recover their pre-Black Death populations. And yet not only did they do so, but in the process relegated that cataclysmic event to the stuff of entertaining PBS documentaries.

Mother Nature could squash us like bugs. It's our job to scurry out of the way of her big feet like cockroaches. Which we've gotten very good at over the past 10,000 years of human civilization. If nothing else, human beings are the masters of muddling through. The Greeks will, the Japanese will. And so will the American voting public.

Regardless of what happens tomorrow. I'll just be glad when it's over. Though I can't complain too much. One advantage of living in a solidly Republican state like Utah is being spared most of the electioneering hubbub.

Only the newly-created 4th district is a close race, as it includes a big chunk of Salt Lake City and its liberal (!) enclaves. I switch the channel every time an ad from either side comes on the air. I can't imagine what it'd be like to live in a state like Ohio, where the voters are evenly split.

The local punditry has concluded that veteran Jim Matheson erred in switching from the 2nd to the 4th. He expected to run against a bland Republican newbie. Instead, Mia Love currently has even odds of riding Romney's coattails to Washington and becoming the first Republican African-Haitian-American woman in Congress. Change!

In the 3rd district, where I live, Chaffetz is leading his challenger 68 percent to 15 percent. Nobody wastes money campaigning with polls like that, for which I am very grateful.

One of my ideas for saving the Electoral College would be a quasi-parlimentary system that allocated Electoral College votes according to each House district. Winning the House would (usually but not necessarily) win the presidency. Of course, that would turn contests like Utah's 4th into scorched earth battlefields.

So, maybe not. In any case, on November 7th, the proper reaction to whatever happens on November 6th is to shrug and continue muddling through.

Labels: annoying stuff, deep thoughts, economics, environmentalism, politics

There's a rule in Hollywood that all television series must eventually make a self-referential episode where the characters end up in a "reality" show about the show, or visit the set of a television show based on the "real" characters they portray.

Seinfeld dragged out the conceit for a whole season, but Seinfeld was about Jerry Seinfeld to start with, so it was meta all along. Bones did an episode last season, though it was entirely too self-aware to be as fun or clever as it could have been.

But sometimes it totally pays off. Stargate SG-1 gets the prize for taking the concept to meta-meta land in the funniest, cleverest version ever. An alien rescued in a previous episode turns to screenwriting after getting bored and running away from the Witness Protection Program.

The television show he comes up with, Wormhole X-treme, is based on the "real" (super-duper classified) SGC, so the team is sent to Hollywood to figure out what the heck is going on.

The first smart thing the "real" Stargate does is have General Hammond point out that if any classified information about the SGC does leak out, they'll blame the television show as the source. No need for an elaborate cover-up.

Because, aside from the X-Files, which had the running joke of Mulder getting critical intel from the tabloids, the conspiracy theory as a plot driver wears awfully thin after a while.

Person of Interest is my favorite television show right now, but there's no need for government agents to go around whacking every person who figures out the existence of the "Machine." Pass out more tinfoil hats. The loonies already think they're being watched by the government anyway.

People will keep believing what they already believe (and believe it more when they're being "convinced" not to), and disbelieve what they are predisposed not to believe in.

As when a "real" spaceship descends to the set of the "fake" show. The special effects guy shrugs and says, "Yeah, okay, we'll fix it in post." And all during the shooting of the show-within-the-show, the actors complain constantly about the insufficiently "realistic" parts of the "fake" script.

It's a tribute to every geek fan who simply can't suspend belief past a certain point (like me).

But the real brilliance comes in the last five minutes, a special "making of" segment about the making of a television show that isn't even a real television show. It starts out with Christian Bocher (a real actor) breaking through a half-dozen fourth walls in less than a minute:

I'm Christian Bocher. I'm portraying the character of Raymond Gunn, who portrays the character of Dr. Levant which is based on the character Daniel Jackson portrayed by the actor, Michael Shanks. Originally portrayed by the actor James Spader, in the feature film.

And then the director (Peter DeLuise, the real director) explains to the"fake" lead actor (Michael DeLuise playing Nick Marlowe playing Colonel Danning, i.e., Colonel Jack O'Neill played by Richard Dean Anderson) that the show he's been cast in isn't a "real" show.

The bewildered man finally throws up his hands and declaims:

"How could this not be a real show?"
That's seriously up there with the sound of one hand clapping and trees falling unheard in forests, a question so deceptively deep that it deserves its own school of philosophical thought.

Labels: deep thoughts, person of interest, personal favs, technology, television reviews

During one of those free preview weekends (Cinemax, I believe), I was watching Avatar (the most expensive anime film ever made) in short bursts (until my rolled eyes made it impossible to see), and came to three realizations:

• When it comes to sermons about noble savages and the white man's burden, Dances with Wolves gets it pretty much right.
• Though Avatar is more a remake of Independence Day and The Last Samurai.
• The intelligence with which fictional cinematic wars are waged cannot exceed that of the writer and director.

Costner especially gets the scale right. Dunbar doesn't rise to the top of a huge, established feudal order (nor one that unlike any other feudal order in history is mysteriously united in purpose). Dunbar's prior training is commensurate to the task. He doesn't magically acquire skills out of whole cloth.

Costner doesn't ignore history. In the long run, the U.S. Army would not be defeated. Not even close. They would return with overwhelming force and a really bad attitude.

In glaring contrast to Dances with Wolves, Edward Zwick's ahistorical The Last Samurai demonstrates how desperately dumb Hollywood can get in its search for exotic noble savages and angsty white Americans to heroically shoulder their burdens.


I go into greater depth here, but the Battle of the Southwest was fought against a nascent democracy to preserve the feudal privileges of an aristocratic order, and was led by a man who quit the government mostly because it didn't invade Korea fast enough (they got around to it a few decades later).

Not to mention that Americans never served as military advisers or arms suppliers to the Meiji government. If anybody, that honor goes to an adventurous and enterprising Scotsman, Thomas Blake Glover (a way more interesting person than any fictional character in any of these movies).

An American Civil War veteran, Captain L. L. Janes, was hired by the Meiji government, but to set up a school for "western learning" in Kumamoto.

So I suppose James Cameron came up with the ideal solution and invented his noble savages out of whole cloth, making sure the black hats were naught but black and the white hats were bluer than blue, and every conflict was absolutely unresolvable by any rational means.

But the real formula being shamelessly exploited here is the classic underdog story. Except that Rocky going up against Apollo Creed is one thing. Having the good guys win grossly mismatched military conflicts is quite another.

Read more »

Labels: deep thoughts, history, movie reviews, movies about japan, pop culture, social studies, star wars, ww2

A while back, my sister asked what I thought of two books she's using in her Business Communications course—How to Say "No" Without Feeling Guilty (U.S.) and 16 Ways to Avoid Saying "No" (Japan)"—specifically, the sociological picture they paint of Japanese society. To summarize:

Japanese culture values non-confrontation and discourages the expression of negative emotions (but more amongst insiders than outsiders; it is more acceptable to be rude to outsiders than insiders). An individual raised in Japan will make more group ("we") references, rely more on nonverbal communication (silence, eye contact or lack thereof), and experience more communication apprehension (get worried about communicating) than an individual raised in the United States.

As far as broad brushes go—which anybody painting big pictures has to use (stereotypes persist because they are useful)—I don't find much here to disagree with. But in explaining the what, the why perhaps needs more attention. It's too tautological to say that a culture is a certain way because that's the way the the culture is.

For example, generally speaking, it's true that Japan is a "high-context" culture and the United States is a "low-context" culture. Japan has maintained a common frame of reference for centuries (from 1603–1868, allowing nobody else in as a matter of national policy), while the United States has been integrating unique frames of reference for centuries.

Americans have to let the words speak for themselves because they can't automatically assume a shared context. Japanese can imply a lot more, trusting that the other person will understand what they are hinting at (which is not to say that this trust can't be highly misplaced).

Writers can play with this ambiguity and hide information from the reader. (Unfortunately, doing so also hides information from the translator.) It is grammatical in Japanese to drop subjects, and the passive voice is ubiquitous. Dialogue tags can also be a lot more vague, with the speaker being identified, for example, solely by the choice of pronoun (and I'm not refering to gender).

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—which goes in and out of favor, depending on the tides of academic political correctness—has its place. To quote Wikipedia, "Differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the language they use."

However, it can quickly degrade into a chicken-egg problem, encouraging nativist nonsense such as the Nihonjinron craze during the 1980s, which extrapolated Sapir–Whorf down to the genetic level and back up to the nationalistic level, pushing the notion of "exceptionalism" into the absurd.

Applying Occam's Razor, though, I think these approaches can overthink the whole thing. The biggest clue is that while Japanese are indeed "group oriented," they're not a bunch of extroverts who want to hang out together volubly emoting in a big Oprah-fest. It's more a collective action and safety-in-numbers thing.

The easiest way to understand Japan is that it's a country of 128 million introverts living in a country the size of California. It really is that simple. As the Wikipedia writer wittily puts it (with a bit of editing):

Under the alias of assertions of differences, expressions of nationalism in Japan, as elsewhere, borrow promiscuously from the conceptual hoards of others, and what may seem alien turns out often to be, once studied closely, merely an exotic variation on an all too familiar theme.

Considering Japan's recent feudal past—more efficiently run and deeply entrenched than medieval Europe's—and in light of an ultra-high population density, institutionalizing ways of not stepping on the toes of people who could ruin your day was a Darwinian necessity that shaped the society and the individual and the language (like those Russian foxes).

And has also resulted in a culture where the default coping mechanism is passive-aggressive behavior. Maybe that's why nerdy introverts all over the world instinctively "get it."

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Labels: deep thoughts, history, introversion, japan, japanese, social studies

As I mused previously, we human beings have a hard time believing anything we're not predisposed to believe until we are forced to believe it. By the same token, we have a hard time not believing what we used to believe—when the evidence turns against it—until we are forced to stop believing it.

This is no more true than the military doctrine of Kantai Kessen, that doomed the Japanese navy almost from the start the Pacific War (and that ironically owes a great deal to Alfred Thayer Mahan, a U.S. Navy officer and historian).

Kantai Kessen posited a winner-take-all contest between battleships that would result in uncontested command of the seas. The problem was, Nimitz declined to engage in such a contest, and the one man capable of shifting strategies with the tides of war, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was killed in 1943.

Thereafter, all Kantai Kessen achieved was the systematic destruction of the Japanese navy as scarce military resources were mustered to create one "decisive" contest after the next. This only allowed the U.S. navy to dominate each increasingly lopsided battle and eat away at conveniently concentrated Japanese assets.

Kantai Kessen reached its apotheosis during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, an engagement so one-sided that American airmen called it "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." Ten months later, in the Battle of the East China Sea, the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was destroyed in a few hours by carrier aircraft.


The Japanese military leaders couldn't stop believing in Kantai Kessen because it had proved so effective during the Russo-Japanese War.

Or at least they thought it had.

The Japanese navy did indeed crush the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, compelling the Russians to sue for peace. The brilliant Admiral Heihachiro Togo twice executed the classic naval maneuver known as "crossing the T," positioning every ship in his fleet to fire full broadsides at the enemy.

The "underdog" victory was hailed around the world (despite the fact that it began with a "sneak attack"), and the Japanese government was quick to believe its own press, conveniently forgetting that the land war going on at the same time had been anything but decisive, with the Japanese infantry taking as many casualties as the Russians.

Togo had fought an exhausted navy that sailed halfway around the world to engage them. The Japanese were fighting in their home waters and had a greater mastery of wireless telegraphy and torpedo technology. The Russian government was already weak, the loss further destabilized it, and it would fall apart a dozen years later.

Bizarrely, the victorious Japanese subsequently came away from the Treaty of Portsmouth claiming: "We was robbed!" This combination of aggrievement and overconfidence set the stage for the next forty years of accumulating disasters.

The real problem with history is not that nobody learns from it, but that we learn the wrong things. And having studiously learned them, the "facts" supporting those beliefs become almost impossible to dislodge from the collective consciousness.

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Labels: deep thoughts, history, japan, politics, ww2

On the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, NHK broadcast a fascinating look at what the Japanese government knew—or should have known—about the impending destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The surprising answer is they knew—or should have know—a lot.

Combing through the archives of Japan's signals intelligence service, NHK unearthed the original log books and taped interviews with key personnel made after the war. What becomes clear is that the analysts "on the ground" had collected all the pieces, but nobody in the chain of command put the puzzle together.

Here is what NHK found about what they knew they didn't know at the time:

• The Japanese government initiated its own atomic bomb program (promising to destroy New York), but canceled it soon afterward, concluding that it was impossible and the American project would never succeed.
• Although they couldn't read the encrypted messages, Japan's signals intelligence service identified and logged the call sign prefixes of B-29s flying out of the Marianas Islands, and could roughly predict their destinations.
• Early in 1945, they detected a new call sign prefix (tagged "V-6") being used by a curiously small air wing comprised of only a handful of planes. These planes flew a large number of training missions from Tinian Island.
• The Supreme War Council was aware of the atomic bomb test in Alamogordo, New Mexico (perhaps through their Soviet contacts), but assumed it was a new kind of conventional explosive.
• On 6 August 1945, a single B-29 using a V-6 call sign was detected approaching Japan. The signals intelligence service sent this unusual information up the chain of command. No action was taken.
• That B-29 was the Enola Gay.
• A day later, the Supreme War Council announced that Hiroshima was destroyed by a small but powerful conventional bomb. When it became clear the bomb was atomic, they said it was unlikely the U.S. had more than one.
• The signals intelligence service requested permission to order evacuations if another B-29 using a V-6 call sign entered Japanese air space. Permission was never granted.
• On 9 August 1945, a B-29 using a V-6 call sign was detected approaching Kyushu. This information was sent up the chain of command. No action was taken.
• That B-29 was the Bockscar.
• At least five hours elapsed between the time the V-6 call sign was logged and Nagasaki was bombed. The Bockscar was delayed by a late rendezvous, then by cloud cover over its primary target, before diverting to Nagasaki.

A similar row of dominoes can be identified leading up to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Hence the problem with post hoc reasoning and 20/20 hindsight. The branches all lead down to the trunk. But starting at the trunk, there is no telling where a branch will end up. That is what keeps conspiracy theorists in business.

However obvious a chain of cause and effect may be, we have difficulty believing anything we're not predisposed to believe until forced by events to believe it. With good reason—evolution selects against gullibility. Knowing when to stick with the known or embrace the unknown is a core challenge of being human.

Related posts

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Labels: deep thoughts, history, japan, politics

The problem I have with LOTR is the same one I have with the Star Wars sequels, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, even Narnia: I don't care about the bad guy. His goals and motives are incomprehensible, or he goes about achieving them in the dumbest way possible, or conversely, he's omnipotent—except when he isn't for purposes of plot.

Not caring about the bad guy, it's hard to care about the conflict challenging the good guys. What would Sauron do if he got the ring? Bad things! Um, what bad things? No idea, but it'd probably be more interesting than this movie!

The first Stars Wars is instructive in this regard. Darth Vader is a cog in a machine. His ostensible superiors disrespect him to his face. We get that he's defending a fading way of life in an efficiently managed Empire where the galactic trains all run on time. (It's not clear what the rebels bring to the table as a viable political platform.)

Then Lucas got all preachy and Manichean and perversely tried to "humanize" Vader, revealing that he had no idea what motivates anybody to do anything, except that we again see a disturbingly common pattern in all these movies: bad people are really ugly.


And incredibly dim and ineffective. Rowling (more ugly) has conveniently summed up everything she doesn't understand about villainy in her own arch-villain:

That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Voldemort was steeped in that culture. He couldn't not understand it. Nobody that clueless could gather around him the best and the brightest, and then almost pull off a successful coup d'état. The great villains of history have always had a finger planted firmly on the pulse of the popular will and the governing zeitgeist.

There's a basic confusion here about the means by which people rise to power, and the ways in which they exercise it once it has corrupted them absolutely.

If anything, Voldemort is a carbon copy of Joss Whedon's first Big Bad, the "Master" from season one of Buffy. Whedon's villains improved considerably after that, reaching the epitome of cool, calculating evil in the person of Sunnydale Mayor Richard Wilkins (Harry Groener).

And the coolest, most calculating thing about Mayor Wilkins? He got elected. Compared to him, Voldemort is a cardboard cutout.

Which is not to say there aren't good uses for cardboard villains. Where would James Bond be without them? But they have short half-lives. Take the (ugly) villains of Independence Day. They serve the purpose well for two hours. Any longer and their unfathomable stupidity would become intolerable.

Similarly, the one redeeming characteristic of "Evil Angel" was that he was a two-hundred proof nihilist. But two-hundred proof nihilism gets boring fast, which is what prompts Spike's famous monologue:

We like to talk big, vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." It's just tough guy talk. Strut round with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is I like this world. You've got dog racing. Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here.

Both Buffy and Angel eventually succumbed to too many Big Bads destroying the world too many times. Though to give credit where it's due, Whedon did come up with another real bad beauty, the law firm of Wolfram & Hart. Okay, "evil lawyer" is playing to stereotypes, but good art doesn't dispense with stereotypes; it fully fleshes them out.

Destroying the world is easy and dull. Corrupting it using the kind of enlightened people who contribute to PBS and wouldn't be caught dead (or living dead) at McDonald's or Walmart and earnestly believe they're doing the right thing for the greater good (and for your own good) is a much more rewarding challenge.

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Labels: deep thoughts, harry potter, magic, movies, pop culture, religion, star wars, television

Tim Hartford succinctly sums up the scientific process (not the cargo cult it has become of late), and what intellectual exploration is actually all about. Perhaps his most important point is that we live in a world where even the most basic social and economic interactions are too complex for any "great man" (or bunch of self-styled great men) to comprehend. So a little awe and humility is in order.

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Labels: deep thoughts, medicine, science, social studies