Hoi Logoi

And Good Riddance!

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:57:00 +0000

The Western Confucian brings up an interesting topic which, much to my surprise, I find myself on the opposite side of from him. At issue is the apparent move to omit Thomas Jefferson as a writer "influencing the nation's intellectual origins." It would appear from his tone that my ex-pat colleague is displeased at this, although I'm not entirely clear why. Yes, yes, I know, I'm no great friend of Jefferson, but this has got less to do with my inherent dislike of the fellow, and more to do with the fact that I don't look around me and see much evidence that his thought has really had...well, influence.

I recognize that we still quote the Declaration of Independence. That's not what I'm talking about. The Declaration only gets trotted out when you can't find something more definitive and compelling on which to ground your case. It is not a document of hard law - much like its author, it is full of fluffy idealism coating a crunchy and scary Jacobin center. We are talking about a man who thought the French Revolution was a good thing, and that the best metaphor for liberty was to liken it to a vampiric tree. Eek much?

Not that I'm a Federalist, either. Honestly, I wish it had been Jefferson in the duel with Hamilton rather than Burr. Also, I wish that it had ended in a tragic firearms malfunction, and happened in, oh, 1785. And while we're wishing, I want a cyborg pony.

So Put Your Hands Up!

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:52:00 +0000

The following comes courtesy of Mark Shea, with a hearty tip of the pipe.

Dante on the Internet

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:32:00 +0000

First of all, I am not referring to that godawful video game that quite literarily rapes the Divine Comedy for material in order to situate God of War in some sort of bastardized Christian mythos. I do have thoughts that wind in that direction, but that is material for another scrivening. My use for Dante in this context is more focused on a more esoteric - but, in my opinion, a more meaningful - achievement. Dante was, for all intents and purposes, the explicator of what is commonly referred to as the "fourfold method" of literary analysis. I don't believe that all works of literature have exactly four layers of meaning, or that their layers are particularly, well, meaningful; however, I do believe that looking beyond the literal is a fruitful - and sometimes an amusing - way of getting at certain truths.

Let's take the second thing in the title as our subject of study: the Internet. There is undoubtedly very little beyond the literal in much of the content out on the Web, and much of the intentional layered meaning tends to be more of a blunt instrument than Dante probably intended when he described the fourfold method. There are, however, some double meanings that may be unintentionally insightful, and downright funny. Let's take Google's latest foray into the social scene as an example. It's called Buzz, and the dictionary's first entry for the word is: "a low, vibrating, humming sound, as of bees, machinery, or people talking," which is pretty apt for the service if it does what it's supposed to do. Twitter - of which I've spoken previously - carries a similarly amusing common meaning: "to talk lightly and rapidly, especially of trivial matters; chatter."

Now, I'm not trying to say that these services are in and of themselves utterly useless or silly - merely that they are often used in a way that makes them seem so. Twitter, particularly, is a service that I enjoy, somewhat off-label, as a way to indulge in my favorite Internet activity, which is to pick fights with random strangers.

These sorts of layered meaning are cute, but they are not, per se, interesting. What I am thinking of - and what Dante will, unfortunately, be of little use with - is that class of "bleeding edge" communications styles that the Internet likes to spawn at somewhat regular intervals. They may be fads, or they may become permanent fixtures, but they say something concerning the mentality of their participants which can occasionally provide insight.

Let us take one relatively new-fangled trend: the "vlog." No, that's not a typo, just an example of the Internet's tendency to shorten forms to a monosyllabic singularity. Just as "blog" is a shortening of "weblog," "vlog" is a shortening of "video weblog." The difference is that, while a traditional - and believe me, the irony of using that word in relation to a ten-year-old phenomenon is not lost on me - blog can be composed of mixed media, it focuses primarily on text; whereas a vlog uses video as the principle medium. This means videos of varied an sundry things, to be sure, but primarily it involves the "vlogger" opining to the world in their real-life manifestation.

That may not seem overly strange - sites like Youtube have been enabling this sort of thing for years - but I find it problematic on two fronts. First, I think it threatens to undermine the principle of anonymity that has been part of the Internet zeitgeist since the early days of the Web. Second, I worry that it indulges a sort of narcissism that is not only unhealthy on the level of the individual, but also betrays a degradation in the greater social fabric.

The question of anonymity on the Internet is a topic that tends to generate a lot of differing viewpoints. There are those who think that it undermines the writer's credibility; this is a rather common view among journalists. I was actually told this by a local journalist last year, when I refused to comment under anything but my pseudonym for an article she was writing on the then-boiling controversy involving my alma mater. Others, most notably the founder of the 4chan online message boards - a fellow who goes by the moniker "m00t" - is pretty solidly of the opinion that anonymity allows for a more frank and open flow of discussion.

I tend to fall in the middle of these viewpoints, skewing a little closer to the position articulated by m00t. I realize that it is to the advantage of some people to blog under their real identities. They are broadcasting ideas to bolster a brand that is their own selves. And that is fine.

Most people, however, have no "brand" or strictly practical reason to attach their ideas to their real names. In many situations, it can be a real encumbrance to do so. People have lost jobs and landed themselves in needless trouble because of what they post online. The only motivation I can conceive of for exposing oneself that way ties into the second problematic point I mentioned before - narcissism.

The desire for notoriety seems to be inextricable from the general democratic psyche. In the "olden days," you had to do something objectively significant to achieve fame. You could be a great humanitarian, or a statesman, or a serial killer...except that "you" couldn't do those things, because "you" involves the vast majority of the human race, and are essentially average folks. Fame was specifically tied to being exceptional in some way, good or bad; and to be exceptional is literally to be out of the normal range. Democracy, however, does not like to hear that truth told. Everybody is as good as everybody else, which means that if one man can be exceptional, then everybody can be exceptional. And, to quote Syndrome, "When everybody is super, nobody will be."

The problem is that the world doesn't work that way. The threat of a world plunged into mediocrity due to universal super-humanity is fallacious, because the world would never allow for it to happen. There aren't that many geniuses. Not everybody can be an astronaut when they grow up.

Not that the democratic mind is to be bothered with such trivialities as this. If notoriety is hard to come by under normal circumstances, then all there is left to do is lower the bar for what qualifies. Hence, you become a celebrity if enough people follow your blog; or if Conan O'Brien starts following you on Twitter; or if Stephen Colbert edits your Wikipedia page.

"Vlogging" is not a major symptom in the great social malaise. It is a small sign of worse indicators - our short social memory for greatness, and our even shorter attention span for current events. We don't need the Internet to isolate ourselves. If you keep your head down long enough, then real life will pass by as quickly and intelligibly as the mighty Twitter stream. Which is to say, too fast entirely.

Beautiful Sarcasm

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:19:00 +0000

I own a MacBook Pro and an iPod Touch, but I am by no means a Machead, as evidenced by the fact that I find the iPad to be a comically-named and slightly lame iPhone afflicted with giantism. (Spoiler alert, I am a Verizon subscriber and my next phone will probably be a Droid, unless something unspeakably shiny and affordable shows up in the interim.) Perhaps it is because of my "meh" approach to the device, I find this video hilarious:

Enjoy!

A Little Something

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:19:00 +0000

I know that there has been a call for more BSG-related writings here, and I am working on that. I still need to finish my somewhat hairbrained project to justify the possibility of AI, after all. In the meantime, I thought I'd leave you with this delectable little something I stumbled upon:

Passing It Along

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:58:00 +0000

I received a link the other day to a wonderful article by the incomparable Mr. Lichens. It is a lengthy-ish critique of Richard Dawkins - and therefore it has a special place in my heart. There are not enough people on this earth who seem to truly grasp the silliness of Dawkins, and this article does a fabulous job of elucidating it.

Let me just quote you the first paragraph of the article:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

...Never mind that it is absurd to ask a biologist about phenomenology. He's just not a subject-matter expert, regardless of how accomplished he is on an amateur level. It would be like asking a linguist his opinion on the price of tea in China. Of course, in a world where George Lakoff actually gets that sort of play time, maybe I can't expect too much.

That Amazing Two-Letter Word

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:33:00 +0000

This is an edited version of a blog post I originally wrote back in 2008. Since then, I have seen no reason to doubt the correctness of my analysis, and in fact a suggestion by a reader has led me to consider additional, related questions. As I ruminate and prepare, I offer back up this second post regarding the communications media, isolation, and modern society.

I was contemplating some of the more mundane properties of language the other day, particularly the ability to create or adopt new words into a vocabulary. Although I'm by no means well-schooled in the history of etymology, it seems to me that the technological explosion of these present times has proved a fruitful breeding ground for new words. One, however, came particularly to mind at the time as I was putzing around on Facebook.

Social networking has become fairly commonplace today, as has the terminology associated with the use of such networks. The term that strikes my fancy at the moment is "friend" - not the noun, as that has been in existence for a good while now, but rather the verb, which essentially explains an act by one individual granting another individual access to the first individual's online presence on the service. This is a process of granting what is fundamentally a security clearance, and has little to do with affection. What interests me about this neologism is its form - identical with its noun homonym - as well as its structural similarity to the preexisting verb "befriend" - and the total lack of commonality between the new and the old.

Consider first the older words. "Friend" is relatively simple at first glance, and you may even think me the slightest bit addled for claiming that it has nothing in common with the internet term - but bear with me for just a bit and I'll get to that. For the moment, consider the noun. At its simplest, it denotes one with whom you share a particular relationship, different from that you are in with the faceless masses. Your friend is someone you really know, and who knows you. There is a level of affection and intimacy that exists between two people who are friends that does not - and perhaps even ought not - exist between two people in line at the supermarket.

And how do two people become friends with each other? Quite simply, they befriend each other. The verb is one of those lovely Anglo-Saxon terms that simply tackles a concept by putting two existing words together, so that to befriend somebody means literally "to be the friend of someone." It is that "be" before the "friend" that makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the gulf of meaning between it and the neologism I brought up above. Two little letters to the word, but a whole world of difference.

When I "friend" someone on Facebook or MySpace - does anybody actually use MySpace any more? - it carries absolutely no inherent or necessary meaning. One computer asks another computer for permission to access certain data, and that is the end of what is intrinsic to the process. Independent of some alternate form of communication, it is a leap of faith on my part to presume that a given person is who they claim to be. Because the people whom I "friend" on Facebook are people I already know in real life, the "friending" process is merely a virtual extension of an existing friendship, and the social network becomes nothing more than a tool to remotely communicate and share. However, when somebody "friends" people they do not otherwise know, all they are doing is amassing a quantity of contacts for whom there is no demonstrable real-life analogue. I could create a Facebook persona named Homer McGilicuddy complete with a set of interests and statistics, and go out onto the network and acquire some quantity of these virtual (read: imaginary) friends - but the relationship is inherently empty and meaningless, because Homer does not exist outside of his profile online. Nobody can become friends with him because there is nobody to get to know. The best he can be is a notch in someone's belt - and that is a sad best.

To befriend somebody, though - now that is something significant. You must encounter the person, you must get them to share something of themselves, and you must share something of your own self. You must find those points of common interest over time. Most importantly, you must have enough care for the other person to overcome those points at which your respective personalities must inevitably clash. I do not believe that there is a single person who I count as a friend with whom I do not diverge on at least one point. Even La Principessa and I have areas where our interests and opinions are not aligned. Sure, it's messy, but that's what makes life interesting. More importantly, it has a reality and a significance beyond the ethereal confines of a server drive. The act of befriending is an act that should effect one's very essence. It ties two people together in a way that cannot be effaced by clicking some button or un-checking some box. It is about choosing to be in a very specific way.

That word again. "Be." It is an amazing little word. Within those two little letters lies ontology itself. It is about the most amazing word in the English language.

Mandate of Heaven?

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:16:00 +0000

This might upset those who believe that, for some reason, America is very special to God. From the article:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

I'm not overly concerned about America's soul in all of this, mainly because I don't believe that there's enough of a soul left to radically hurt. What does bother me is that the precedent was happily set that we can do horrible, inhuman things to other human beings, based on nothing more than the suspicion that they might, possibly, have information that we want - and by "suspicion" here, I mean a Muslim who dislikes America. Frankly, I have a survival instinct about this sort of thing. I will be insanely tolerant to people and viewpoints I don't agree with or believe are wrong, because I don't want someone being able to turn on me because of my viewpoint, and...oh, I don't know, waterboard me. You do it to someone, you can do it to anyone.

Thanks a lot, ~~Darth~~ Dick Cheney.

(Tip of the pipe to Mark Shea)

Things I May Pay Money For

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:07:00 +0000

Solaria Syndrome

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:18:00 +0000

This is an edited version of a blog post I originally wrote back in 2008. Since then, I have seen no reason to doubt the correctness of my analysis, and in fact a suggestion by a reader has led me to consider additional, related questions. As I ruminate and prepare, I offer back up this first post regarding the communications media, isolation, and modern society.

One of the most aggravating things about the Internet is that it is bursting with stuff. Lots of stuff - memes, blogs, companies, charities, games, forums...you get the point. There's so much that, as useful as it is, it can get distracting. It can suck you in, alluring in the wealth of information to be absorbed; or with the wealth of mental junk food to sap your energy. As a personal example: over the course of a week a few years back, I decided to read basically everything that Wikipedia had on string theory, quantum physics, and post-original-trilogy Star Wars novels. Yeah, I know - random. What can I say? I'm a geek and a nerd. This should not surprise you by now.

Another time, right after I made the poor economic decision to spend money to go see Superman Returns I decided to read up on canonical Superman comics and their lore. That led into absorbing information about most of the major players in the DC Comics universe - and then, the Marvel Comics universe...I was up late those nights, but it was fun. Pretty useless from a meaning-of-life perspective, but, again, I am a geek and a nerd, and none of this should be in the least surprising to any of you. Not that I wouldn't agree that there was probably something better to spend my time on.

I just can't be too down on the Internet. Without it I wouldn't have this blog and all of its adoring reader. I wouldn't have nearly as easy of a time finding things to write about, let alone sharing them once they were written. However, to be fair, I have to admit that there is a downside: the more time you spend online, the less time you spend in the "real" world - and while blogging, surfing, and message boards (not to mention the more arcane implements, such as Usenet and IRC) are diverting, fun, and enjoyable, they're no substitute for a life. If you try to make the substitution, then it will fail. You won't get outside, you won't feel the fresh air - which even at the relatively chilly temperatures of this time of year, I still value beyond all the cubic feet of indoor air I breath most of the week. There's a reason that geeks and nerds are stereotypically white and skinny (though some would use the word "atrophied").

Back in the olden days, when there wasn't even a crappy substitute for reality, people were simply shut-ins, misanthropes, or Henry David Thoreau. They found ways for good or ill to shut themselves off from society and spend all their time with themselves and whatever cats, snow globes, or stupid pond-front houses they chose in involve in their solitary existences. I point you to a little piece a bit more explicitly about this if you're interested in what I've been trying to convey.

In the grand scheme of things, I look at this tendency to treat the Internet as a habitat or a shelter to be yet another symptom of societal atomization. As the range of our individual interests collapse further and further in, we are less and less interested in the people we can see, hear, and physically interact with, mainly because sensual presence has a way of making it hard to objectify people. That's what makes abortion such an easy atrocity to live with - you don't see carnage. You don't see babies, or for the most part even the chopped up bits of baby that are the result of the "procedure." Everything is tucked away nicely out of sight. Of course, such raw objectification leads to things like this being more and more commonplace. Objectification makes everything easier to deal with: rape, murder, and theft - everything. After all, do you weep if you break a hammer? Not a bit, because that would be silly - you just go out and buy a new hammer.

But what creates the atomization? Deep down, I think it's caused by a sort of "societal law of thermodynamics"; like energy and matter, societies and people lose steam and break apart over time. Tocqueville would say that it's a consequence of a society losing its mores - those ethereal, necessary things that define, shape, and sustain our existence in communion with each other. They give everyone something to aim at that is more exalted than themselves. They are ideals that draw men out of their private caves of self-interest and into the light of a society aimed toward a common good.

Of course, once the mores are lost, the clock starts ticking. Sure, society might continue to limp along for some amount of time on the strength of its members' awareness that cooperation is dictated by mutual self-interest (the idea that each member of a group can be better off in the group than by themselves) but self-interest is also lazy, and will look for the easiest way to get what it wants. Like anything with animal urges, the human being as a specimen wants to get along with the least amount of pain possible, be it physical, mental, or social. Living in a society is great and all, but there are so many annoying people in it - they don't like the things that we like, they don't listen to the same music that we do, and they smell funny. So, we cut the real-world social interaction to a minimum, dealing with people only when it is in our interest to do so. And we try to seek out friendship over the Internet by associating with people of common interests, musical tastes, and olfactory preferences.

The problem is that those people don't really exist. Not in the real world, at any rate. They're at so much of a distance that they may as well not even be human, even. Talking to an avatar in Second Life, or some guy on a forum somewhere, you have no meaningful concept of the person you're interacting with. You see exactly what they show you, and no more - but without the delightful unpredictability of real-world interactions, which are able to serve up surprises even after years of common intercourse. You take that away, and you're just chaining yourself to the wall of a cave, talking yourself into believing that the shadows on the wall are the real deal, rather than phantasms. Of course, your unconscious mind isn't fooled, and all that you really accomplish is reinforcing a worldview in which you are the sole occupant with the sort of dignity and importance that come with being...well, real.

I could terrify you with logical conclusions, doomsday scenarios, and assorted whatnot, but instead I'm going to give you a reading assignment that encapsulates the end-game of atomization very nicely. The Naked Sun is a fantastic novel by Isaac Asimov that is set in a society - the planet Solaria - where there is a meaningful semantic distinction between "seeing" and "viewing," and physical interaction of any kind is so distasteful that far in the future they make themselves hermaphroditic just so that they can avoid the disgusting trauma of coitus. As with a lot of science fiction, it sets its story a bit too optimistically in the far future, though, I think. Asimov's Solaria lives in the minds of everyone who uses the Internet as a gauge of worth - every blogger counting hits, every denizen of MySpace or Facebook who feels good or bad based upon how many people have "friended" them, every gamer who would rather kick back and run some multiplayer Halo session rather than leave the basement and make real, meaningful relationships happen.

This syndrome of retreating from reality and hiding on the Internet, the first step on a journey to Solaria incarnated, is yet another toll of the bell mourning the slow death of this latest iteration of refined barbarism. I think I'll go make me some in-the-flesh friends before it's too late.

Why I Don't Watch the Oscars:

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:39:00 +0000

They always seem to glorify movies that are cookie cutters of something else. Cut from the same tired cloth. The whole thing is the mental commission of a self-gratifying act for the denizens of Hollywood, and they can stick it...well, yes. Oh, and if you were thinking that maybe I'm just bitter because we're talking about an "academy" that gave Chariots of Fire an Oscar over Raiders of the Lost Ark, then all I can say is this: Yes, I'm bitter, but only because the correct decision was not made. Lady Justice wept that day.

Doubt me? Watch the video below and tell me just how many of these "great" movies follow exactly this plot.

A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever -- powered by Cracked.com

Hey, Isn't That the Internet?

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:54:00 +0000

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Tech-Talch - Chatroulette

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Reform

Speechless

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:43:00 +0000

I'm going to start by giving Canada the benefit of the doubt.

We all know that the United States' northern neighbor is polite to a fault. Canada seems committed to wiping out affront as if it were St. George going out to slay the dragon...of course, if that were true, then St. George would have gone out to politely ask the dragon to stop attacking the villagers, and maybe offer it his horse as a consolation prize. And probably would have ended up being eaten, himself. But, hey, better to take the high road, right?

So, of course, if somebody was offended by the Canadian national anthem, it stands to reason that Canada would be tripping over itself to remove the offensive bits. Now, a reasonable observer might question, at this point, what the offending section of the anthem is - after all, if you've ever heard the ditty, then you'll probably agree that we aren't living in the world of heady jingoism. Well, as it turns out, the targeted verbiage is this:

True patriot love in all thy sons command

...Yup. Apparently the daughters are feeling woefully left out of the spirit of nation-loving, and somebody has heard their anguished cries and is rushing to their aid.

Now, to Canada's credit, not everyone thinks this makes sense. Being that it was proposed by the Conservative parliament, the opposition Liberals are, as you might expect, of the opinion that there are more important things to do. However, even the leader of the Liberals in parliament went on record as saying, "Anything that makes a national anthem more gender-sensitive is a good thing." I'm sorry, Mister Leader, but what does that even mean?

The title of this post is "Speechless," but let me assure you, I definitely have a speech. The title more refers to the expression I had on my face when I read this story for the first time, because of the absurdity that it presented. I'm sure that if Canada's anthem started with the line "Canadian men rock but the women suck" then we might have a basis to argue that sensitivity is called for. Just to reiterate, we are not talking about that level of...whatever bad thing it is that we are supposed to be effacing from the anthem. If a woman can feel left out of her national anthem because it uses the word "sons," then that woman did not get the point of being teased in elementary school. The fact that this whole gender-sensitivity thing is an espoused social ideal that, apparently, transcends partisan politics, is in and of itself proof to me that we have been living far to comfortably for far too long.

If this is the sort of thing we get worked up about, then we need to ask God for more tribulation in our life. Seriously.

Suspension of Anathema

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:45:00 +0000

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't like Lincoln. For whatever reason you choose to speculate upon, he waged war to achieve the supremacy of a laughable idea - specifically, that a union composed of free and independent states, once formed, could by none of those free and independent states be dissolved. Not only did he wage war to establish this absurdity, but the war he waged was a heartless one, focused on attrition because of the cynical recognition that the North could afford to kill its soldiers more than the South could afford to kill its. I could go on, but my main point is to remind you that the Illinois Ape was, in my view, a world-historical disaster.

That said, I would take a gentler tone if the following were really true:

Honestly...it's almost as if someone were reading my mind, with the intent of giving me the things that I would deem the most awesome. Not only is there a book (which I wouldn't mind owning), but apparently Tim Burton is going to make a movie based upon it. Given that I have enjoyed most everything of his that I have watched, I look forward to this offering with anticipation.

The Best I Can Do

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:46:00 +0000

There are times when I am pleased to offer the produce of my brain. While I am not so delusional as to think that I am dealing with severely original thoughts, I am hopeful that they are informative to somebody. At the very least, I hope they can entertain.

However, there are times when you stand in awe of somebody else's work that you really couldn't hope to even provide a commentary. That happens a lot with me, sad to say, but this is a special case.

All I can do, at present, is point you in the direction of The American Catholic, and have you read this. Couldn't have put it better, but probably could have done worse.

Concerning Fruits and Fruit-Flies

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:02:00 +0000

People like to throw the phrase "by your fruits you shall know them" around in a sort of knowing way. Usually, I've found that the practice is to say it with allusive emphasis, in reference to a person or thing for whom you have contempt but lack the arsenal to directly attack. I find this annoying, because I am a great believer in the undeniably devastating power of this particular dictum of Christ.

Just to be clear, the fundamental point of looking at "fruits" is to look at a person's works, and those works' consequences. Are the latter good? If so, you have a good egg of a person - and, similarly, vice versa. Fruits can be institutions; they can be events such as acts of charity or the founding of a religious order; they can be people, such as the students formed by a professor or the alumni graduated from an institution.

Now, let me tell you what "fruits" are not - they are not followers or hangers-on. If the Lord had said, "By those who follow them around shall you know them," then I would think much less of His wordcraft as well as His insightfulness. And that is precisely the sense in which people mean to use the term "fruits" when they attempt to wield it like it was some sort of cudgel. This is stupid, and it annoys me.

Why? Well, firstly, because fruits are things made - and one does not make followers. Followers just sort of happen by and start, well, following. It's a thing they do, as you might surmise. Secondly, since they move largely under their own power, followers are not something you have much of a say in. They follow for their own purposes and motivations, which may align with the followee's ends or not. Truth be told, followers are more like fruit flies - attracted to real, healthy fruit, but prone to spoil the appearance of said fruit once they have hung around for a while. Plenty of good fruit has gone bad for someone or another due to these fruit flies. There were people following Jesus who were convinced that He would suddenly transform into a classical era Terminator and kick the Romans so far out of Palestine that they could never say, "We'll be back." This expectation had nothing to do with Christ's actual mission. For this reason, He was viewed by many as a failure, all while securing the most epic of wins. Does the fact that He had idiots following Him detract at all from Christ's teaching? There's no rational cause to assume so.

And yet people insist on claiming that followers are a relevant gauge of the person being followed. I cannot emphasize enough how I believe that the holding of this fallacy is the unequivocal sign of a lazy, arrogant mind. It is just this sort of mind which I have argued with before regarding Ron Paul, and run into precisely this fallacious "fruits" argument before. The argument runs, "Oh, but there are white supremacists and Truthers and Birthers and all sorts of fringe people running around after Ron Paul. There has to be something to this." I'm sure that there is - specifically, I think that there are Klansmen and Truthers and Birthers who want very much to believe that they will prosper if Ron Paul were to become president. I'm pretty sure that, given the opportunity, Klansmen will vote for Republicans more often than Democrats; this does not, however, make the Republican Party a bastion of the Klan, nor does it align the political organization with the psychotic, paranoid hate group.

If you were, say, to look at the real fruits of Rep. Paul, for example his speeches and ideas, then you might come up with something far less assailable and far more agreeable, such as this:

Of course, people who are convinced that Paul is bad are probably an especially perverted subspecies of logician - the kind of person for whom accountancy is appealing, or who likes to read lengthy passages of pseudo-British free verse. I shudder to contemplate it.

Joy Unembellished

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:08:00 +0000

A Shadow of a Puppet

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:53:00 +0000

Update: Although I am leaving it intact in the post, Mr. Shea was kind enough to email me that the passage below was from an email to him from Mr. Wright, and not from the latter's blog. Since I am that special type of person who might miss such a detail, I decided to leave my faux pax blatant, but post this apologetic correction.

I reproduce here a quote from Mark Shea's blog, wherein he is citing John C. Wright's blog. However, because Shea is a special sort of person, he was not kind enough to point to a permalink, and I have not looked closely enough on Mr. Wright's blog to figure out where it was. Anyway, now that you know the patrimony of this line, let me feed it to you:

Nellie bar the door indeed. I love how these 'Just So' stories always just so happen to flatter the person telling it.

Just for the sake of contrast, I'd like to see an evolutionary sociobiologist say something along the lines of: "Being an atheist, like being a sociopath, is a defective mutation of the genes human beings use to recognize meaning in life.

Robbed of this basic faculty of human thought, atheists tend to retreat into paranoid fantasies of superiority, as if their inability to grasp reality were a result of greater, rather than less, intellectual activity.

"Consequently they tend to be bookish, and selfish, and to cut social ties to family and friends: but this crippling isolation and arrogance, ironically, allows some of them to score well on I.Q. tests, which do not, after all, measure those social skill tribes of hunter gatherers need to survive.

"The fact that no civilization and no tribe in the history of the world has been atheist, except for a very few malign Twentieth Century regimes of unparalleled savagery and bloodshed, might indicate why atheist has had no influence on the philosophy, art, culture, law or advancement of civilization since the dawn of time. Natural selection culls this unfavorable mutation, and only in the luxurious modern day, when science can keep alive even worthless and backward members of the bloodline, has it been possible to keep alive a statistically significant moiety of this evolutionary dead end.

"Sufferers of what is now called 'The Dawkins Syndrome' are generally acknowledged to be harmless irritants in their host sociieties, but, as the case of Russia and China make abundantly clear, when this dangerous 'meme' of self-centered defensive arrogance spreads to others, the result is genocidal levels of mass murder."

I really can't add to that without somehow diminishing it, so I'll leave off, now.

Giving Due

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:27:00 +0000

Update: The ever-resourceful La Principessa was able to find the bit I was looking for from Mr. Izzard. It is a lengthy and entertaining bit...the particular section I was alluding to in the post is at the very end, so patience is rewarded. I place it at the bottom of the post for convenience.

I'm not the biggest lover of the English on the face of the planet. I think that is probably pretty obvious, if you've hung around here for any length of time. But they're decent folks...or at least they've evolved into decent folks over the centuries. Sure, they're still egotistical wankers on a national level, but they've taken to leaving well enough to itself and satisfying themselves - mostly - with affairs on their own island.

Which is why I don't get why Obama has been such an ass to them since becoming president. First, there was that thing about the bust of Churchill; then there was the double chicanery relating to his visit to good Queen Bess, Mark II; and now, it would seem, we no longer have strong feelings regarding Great Britain's territorial integrity. Whoo...Barry be a busy boy.

I think it's worth noting at this point that I am too much of a Washingtonian (that's an adherent of Washington's admonitions from his farewell address, not a denizen of the District of Columbia) to give two hoots about the so-called "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom; nor do I see much of a point to the UK clinging to the Falkland Islands, except for the possibly strategic sheep purposes. (Can somebody please find me the clip where Eddie Izzard brings this up?) However, as much as I would rather that we had stayed out of World War I and not actually become so entangled in foreign affairs from then on, I have to recognize the reality of the world I live in - and in that world, having the sitting U.S. president declare that his country is "neutral" regarding the UK's claims on the islands and their surrounding water is just, well, freaking nuts.

Seriously, there are still career bureaucrats in Washington, right? Didn't a memo about this cross somebody's desk, to elicit the comment, "Hang on a sec, this might be a bad idea"? Did nobody speculate that, just maybe, the English are - and will likely remain - more significant players on the world stage than the Argentinians are ever likely to be, and that as such we might want to take a good, long look at our foot before we jam it squarely into our mouth?

I didn't understand the pissant Americans who for the last eight years have felt the need to masquerade as Canadians. It wasn't as if we had bombed the Louvre...they honestly didn't have any real bone to pick with us. Now, though? I wouldn't pack my American flag leather pants or my Uncle Sam PJs on my next trip to London. Perhaps it is the right time to invest in some Canuck-branded gear. Just in case.

(Tip of the pipe to Athos on this one.)

Godwin, Revised

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:17:00 +0000

I don't subscribe to a wholesale interpretation of Godwin's Law - or, to be more precise, the corollary of that law which states that the first person in an argument to draw a comparison to Hitler and/or the Nazi regime loses that argument. I know, I know...the law has a built-in exception for when the discussion revolves around "related" topics. However, there are topics that in fact are related, and which for entirely political and cowardly reasons are kept aloof and unapproachable. Why? Because they are secular dogma, the rejection of which must be followed by secular anathemas.

Meh. Secular anathemas rank up there with T. S. Eliot on the list of stuff that I don't give a bat's turd about. So, let's continue!

It should be pretty clear what the rhetoric of the Nazis was centered around: there was a master race and there were lower races; and those lower races must be exterminated so that their blood could not pollute that of the master race. Or, to put the argument in less grandiose and more abstract terms: there are varying levels of human being, some being worth more than others; human beings with a physical or mental handicap derived from a genetic disease are of very low worth; therefore, it is better if such handicapped human beings do not come into existence - and if they do, they should be compelled to leave existence as rapidly as possible. Oh, shucks...that's not very abstract, is it.

As a matter of fact, it's the very same logic that drives common behavior in the West today - the very same West that deplores Nazis. Which, of course, goes back to my thesis that - as the Nazis before us - we have lost the right to exist as a society due to the gravity of our collective crimes.

But, hey, maybe not. After all, the Nazis went after poor, defenseless Jews. But those kids with Down's syndrome...those punks had it coming, didn't they?

(Tip of the pipe to the Western Confucian)

Huh...Scary

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:53:00 +0000

I just wanted to take a moment to point something out. Let's take a look at this here clip here, from the new science fiction series Caprica:

I find this scary. There's the obvious reason that you might expect - big robots are scary - but there's another reason that you might not see coming. You see, Dr. Graystone - essentially the inventor of the Cylon - is making a very Steve Jobs-esque presentation on the Next Big Thing, which he rightly calls the creation of another race. He calls it not just intelligent, but sentient. A being. Then he goes on to detail how he plans to exploit this being, pointing out that it will not have rights.

Contemplate that for a moment while I prepare to connect the dots. This is one of the most open and least sentimentally corrupted admissions of a trait that ranks down there amongst mankind's less laudable: the proclivity to exploit. Natural resources, plants, animals, and at varying stages of history whole groups of people have been dominated, used up, and cast aside solely on the basis of their utility. We do it nowadays as well, playing politics with people's lives at home, dictating the terms by which development shall occur to our poorer neighbors abroad...we even harvest material from our own young. I refer there to the stem cell issue, the stupidity of which I have already commented on. My point in revisiting it, with the rhetorical aid of the above clip, is to point out that the attitude is a constant temptation in fallen man, and that if we want to credibly fight it when indulged by others, then we must seriously curb it in ourselves first.

Also, I would recommend being nice to your Roomba. Just in case it ends up being an honored ancestor of our future mechanical overlords.

(Incidentally, in case you were worried that I would forget to resume my speculations regarding artificial intelligence, then fear not. It is still in the works...I'm just incorporating some recently-discovered material that is helping my thought process greatly.)

To Be Filed Under "Things That Make My Day":

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:46:00 +0000

...Making Admiral Ackbar the mascot for the Ole Miss Rebels. Oh, yeah.

It's Like We're the Same Person

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:42:00 +0000

From The Deeps of Time:

It is an obvious fact that the rational character of the universe cannot be explained rationally on the basis of something irrational! This is why the Logos that is at the origin of all things remains more than ever the best hypothesis, although this is of course a hypothesis that demands that we give up a position where it is we who are in charge and that we take the risk of assuming the position of humble listeners.

Guess who? Benedict XVI, current pope.

Reason # 3,495,876 why my religion is awesome.

The Blessings of Democracy

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:58:00 +0000

Let me tell you just how right the ideals of the Enlightenment are.

All men, everywhere, are capable of being rational if given the opportunity to rule themselves. There will be equality and respect for those of differing opinions and creeds. Society will help to defend the helpless amongst the people without even being asked to. Clearly, we should spread democracy everywhe-

I'm sorry. I just needed to kick myself in the head. I wish somebody had done that to W and the neocons prior to '03.

(Tip of the pipe to the Western Confucian)

Now This, I Like

derwolfanwalt@gmail.com (Der Wolfanwalt) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:38:00 +0000

If you've followed this blog for any stretch of time, then you know that I enjoy most things steampunk. Well, I've just happened upon something else that I might very well be interested in...I think I'm going to describe it as The Decembrists on Prozac, with a dash of Flogging Molly:

Apparently they also have an album upcoming, which I have decided that I very much may want. We'll see when it comes out. This, at any rate, is the trailer for it - yes, there seems to be a trailer for an album...go fig:

There site, which I discovered thanks again to Dr. Fabre (pipe tip!) is here.