Hi, all. Leo here – it’s been a while since I did one of these. I won’t bore you with the reasons – the simple answer is that I didn’t have anything I really felt compelled to write about.
Now I do.
I present to you the Future of Mankind – a bugmen hive.
Those are of course screenshots – I don’t want to drive traffic to Twitter, and who knows if @Phoron4 will be banned any day now. Anyway, I have a few thoughts.
Hopefully the above scenario is just as repugnant to you as it is to me. However, I would like to offer some reassurance: this will not be the future.
To understand why, we need to delve a bit into philosophy for a moment. Allow me to present you with a concept:
A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.
Classic Shakespeare, but it serves to illustrate an important philosophical concept: the actual sounds we make when we speak and the symbols we write may ultimately have only arbitrary links to each other or to the ideas we are attempting to convey – but that same arbitrariness doesn’t extend to the real things language describes. Language might be a social construct, but it’s a construct built around an objective reality; a reality that our minds have to categorize in pieces, because we can’t comprehend all of it at once.
If that sounds reasonable to you, you’ve internalized the metaphysical concept of “the primacy of existence“. What this means is that you’ve accepted implicitly that the real world existed before you did, and it will continue to exist after you are gone – thus your thoughts and actions have to work within the limitations given to you by the world, and any judgments you make about the state of the world have informational content about things separate from your own consciousness.
This is the foundation of objectivity.
The other side of this coin is “the primacy of consciousness“, and it means your consciousness and perception create the reality you live in. There are no limitations imposed on us by reality, only socially-constructed limitations on our minds that prevent us from perceiving anything we want to see and making real anything we want to imagine.
This is the foundation of subjectivity.
I bring up this divide because all scientific and technological advances are based on the former philosophy – in order for Man to command Nature, he must understand the natural law. No amount of relabeling or redefining gravity – and no amount of insisting that the theory of universal gravitation is racist because Newton was white – will make water run uphill. Developing something like a pump requires the implicit, internalized assumption that water will not do so, and instead must be physically moved uphill by mechanical means.
This is the white pill I have to offer you: Wokism is completely lacking in the ideological infrastructure needed to deal with reality.
Probably the best illustration of the problem can be seen in the 1957 novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’, but it’s easy enough to explain: the hives these bugmen intend for humanity to inhabit cannot sustain themselves. They might prioritize the cities over the hinterlands, but not as part of a deliberate plan to depopulate the latter – instead they will do it out of desperation. We aren’t dealing with highly capable technocrats like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos trying to take over the world – we’re dealing with low-functioning alcoholic journalists and ancom Furries.
Anyone with the technical skills needed to make the water treatment plants function (plants that these bugmen hives cannot survive without) will very quickly run into the brick wall that is the Wokist ideologues who will be their overseers. These overseers will have all the zeal of a lifelong jihadist but will lack entirely his physical acumen. An ideological movement that cannot espouse a concrete definition of “woman” cannot make a civilization completely dependent on advanced machinery function – what remains of their minds cannot accept the reality the existence of those machines is showing them, that water cannot be made to run uphill merely by fighting against the limitations of our imaginations, or by claiming that the top of a hill identifies as the bottom.
And they aren’t going to let it go. The Woke ideology is the only path these people have to power and status – a meritocratic society would have a place for them, but only at the bottom rung of the ladder. A society where emotional blackmail and sophistry are marketable job skills is the only one where they can succeed, and they will absolutely fight to the death to keep it.
Fortunately for us, they can’t fight for shit, and their ideology is completely sterile – if we can but wrest our children away from them, they’ll starve and die, and nothing of value will be lost. Complex machinery requires a complex mind to comprehend – complex societies cannot be run by people who mindlessly chant slogans. Rockets cannot be built by mobs of people who can’t successfully grow a potato. Or as Tolkien put it: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.”
Make no mistake: the next few years will be rough. The existing cracks in the system will widen. It’s not clear that the Republic will survive – it might, but in a very different form. But all wars are wars of attrition, and as they damage the system they purport to govern they will continue to rob themselves of the very resources necessary to keep it going.
It’s going to take a while, but we will prevail. Keep the faith alive, keep your spine straight, keep calm and keep your rifle by your side.
The year was 1914, the first year of the conflict that came to be known among its contemporaries as ‘The Great War’, and ultimately came to be known to us in the modern day as World War One.
By Christmas Eve of 1914, the war had been going on for five months. Many early observers had assumed the conflict would be long over by December – all such hopes were dashed. By this time, the static trenches had already been dug, and the horrific conditions on the front lines that characterized most of The Great War had already been dug.
Pope Benedict XV went so far as to send letters to the leaders of the belligerents, begging them to respect the Christmas holiday and allow a truce of a single day – to no avail.
But while the military high command on all sides refused to consider the Pope’s plea, the actual men serving on the front lines were more amenable to spending a few hours singing carols, playing football, and sharing drinks with the men they had been shooting at only the previous day, and whom they would resume shooting at the following day.
Exactly how many men participated in the Christmas Eve cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, no one knows for sure, but most estimates put the number at over 100,000. After the various command officers found out about the fraternization after the fact, most of the enlisted who had participated were moved to other parts of the front – out of concern that they would be less willing to fight the men with whom they had shared a pickup game of soccer.
The officers who had participated were… less fortunate. Many were intentionally transferred to more dangerous posts, as punishment for allowing their men to fraternize with the enemy.
By the time December of 1915 rolled around, strict orders from high command on all sides had been given prohibiting any repeat of the 1914 Christmas truces, and numerous orders were given to units to charge at or shell enemy trenches specifically to forestall repeats. A few ceasefires managed to happen all the same.
Sporadic Christmas ceasefires continued to happen throughout the war, but never in remotely the same numbers.
As part of their upcoming album (to be released in March of 2022), Sabaton decided to immortalize this event.
This is a slightly more realistic re-enactment of the event, as shown in the 2005 film [i]Joyeaux Noel[/i].
For those of you who have been missing my prose lately, I apologize – it’s the curse of having too many options, as I find myself wanting to write about every topic under the sun and being unable to simply pick one and go for it.
“Write what you know” is a common aphorism, one that I typically don’t endorse in the modern context: many modern writers take it to mean write yourself into your work, which is ill-advised. But writing about my profession is more in line with what the phrase is supposed to mean.
With that out of the way…
Land surveying is a little-understood profession in the modern world. It’s not immediately obvious why this is the case – if you’ve ever flown cross-country in an airplane and seen the relentlessly squarish grid that the entire Midwest follows seemingly religiously, you’ve seen the results of my profession.
Aerial view to patchwork’s fields in middle Kansas state, USA, North America.
My best guess is that my profession gets little of the spotlight because there isn’t much in the way of public results from my work. If I get called on to locate an entire municipal sewer system – because they built it 50 years ago and didn’t properly record all of the alterations that have been made in the intervening period, so they literally don’t know where all of the sewer lines are – there isn’t a bridge or even a building at the end of the months of work that it would take. All that the client would have gotten 10 years ago is a few big sheets of paper, and maybe some GPS coordinates. Nowadays they might not even get paper – they might get a CAD drawing file and a PDF with the signing suveyor’s digital signature and seal attached.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with land surveying, think of it as “high-resolution mapmaking” – with the typical intent of the map being to show land ownership or physical structures on it, and their spatial relationship to that land’s boundary. If you’ve ever bought or sold a house, there was probably an ALTA (American Land Title Association) survey involved (the bank will have insisted on one), which would (hopefully) show any legal encumbrances or easements on the property. You’ve probably seen us around – on the construction site, along major highways, in your neighborhoods. Likely you’ve mistaken our Total Station instruments for large camera (lots of people do).
While there are plenty of jokes about the ‘second oldest’ profession, in truth surveying is a pretty good candidate for it – certainly we’re the oldest one requiring a professional license. Even as far back as the Babylonian Empire, you couldn’t just grab some measuring tools and call yourself a surveyor; property ownership has been regulated by one legal authority or another since at least the advent of agriculture, and deciding whose fence is how far over whose property line stopped being academic and became a problem to fight over once small-time farming became commonplace.
The tools have certainly changed over the centuries. In ancient Egypt we were called “rope-stretchers” because the rope was the tool most commonly used for measurement and layout (surveying was a big deal in Egypt because the very land most useful for farming was also prone to regular flooding, which tended to wipe out many indicators of land boundaries). We don’t use rods (literally a wooden pole, measuring 16.5 feet) or Gunter’s chains (literally a metal chain, with stakes attached, 66 feet long, divided into 100 links) anymore.
Surveyor’s chain made by Baker in the 19th century. Ropes, chains, tapes and rods have all been used for measuring distances. In about 1620, English mathematician and astronomer Edmund Gunter (1581-1626) developed this type of metal chain for determining the area of plots of land. The chain is 20 metres (66 feet) long, and is made of 100 links. Markers are placed at regular intervals.
And we don’t lead our children to each corner of our property and have them beat their hands on it in order to ensure they remember where it is anymore, either (though the “beating of the bounds” is still done in some rural areas in Wales).
But few other professions have the kind of long-term effects that mine has had. I mentioned the square grid that much of America’s landmass follows – we can thank the Public Land Survey System created in the Land Ordinance of 1785 (yes, literally a pre-Constitutional system) for that. The newly formed Confederate States of America was land-rich but cash-broke and facing significant war debts, and the normal system of apportioning land for sale was too complicated and costly to carry out in anything like the time frame they needed to stay current with their debts.
The simple answer, then, was to lay out a square grid of 6-mile by 6-mile townships, divided up each into 36 1-mile by 1-mile square sections, all across the country (yes, this really was the simple answer). Surveyors were paid to lay out all of these square section lines – 80 chains each – typically at a fee rate of 2-3 dollars per mile.
Given that this was an era before even widespread availability of rail travel, this was pretty time-consuming, and of course very dangerous: surveyor teams in this era typically went everywhere armed.
19th century surveyors in Texas
As you can imagine, the accuracy of these section layouts varied wildly, and there was plenty of fraud, but piece by piece the skeleton on which modern cities, highways, towns and subdivisions are laid out were placed.
Mine is a profession where the goal of each new generation isn’t to outdo the quality of work done by the previous generation – it’s to retrace their steps. The history of my profession is part of every job I do, every billable hour I work, in a way that simply isn’t true of most other professions. When I’m surveying the sewer network of an entire city – which I’ve actually done – I have to start with the boundary lines of the sections that the city lies in where they are, not where they would have been had the survey team working in the swamp in 1832 had modern instruments. Every road, highway, train line, canal or subdivision parcel in any part of the country covered by the PLSS was placed where it is based on where the original surveyors placed those section corners.
As with tree rings, you can even observe historical events in my work. Here in South Florida, for example, plats that predate the Great War look less like surveys and more like pencil sketches, reflecting how most of this part of the state was given over to orange groves and sugar plantations. Then from 1919 until 1927, there was a big rush of people to move here, so the drafting quality improves dramatically – measurements ceased being recorded in chains and links during this period – and then almost no new plats are recorded from 1930 until after WW2, for obvious reasons. The 1970s saw the advent of photocopying, the early examples of which haven’t survived the decades all that well, resulting in many plats that are almost illegible; this was also the era when surveying companies finally retired the last of their Gunter’s chains and began using steel and nylon measuring tapes exclusively.
The 1980s saw the earliest CAD programs becoming available, forever condemning the old drafting methods to the dustbin of history – my father owned a pen-plotter, and I was endlessly entertained as a child watching it draw his surveys. 1990s plats started to get GPS coordinates included for reference monuments and corners. The 2000s have been something of a renaissance for my profession with the advent of two new technologies: LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging – think RADAR but with a laser rangefinder) and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), and nowadays many road projects are done via LiDAR systems mounted to trucks.
Modern LiDAR systems are extremely sensitive, and can easily pick up lane lines in the road. The color gradient reflects elevation changes.
And of course, there are plenty of historical luminaries who either were surveyors themselves or contributed significantly to it. My father – himself a surveyor – is proud of the fact that 3 of the 4 faces on Mount Rushmore were surveyors at one point in their lives (this is actually a common joke with my colleagues – “Three surveyors and the other guy”). And even Roosevelt still managed to make major contributions to the profession via the work he created for us (the Panama Canal being one example).
The other guy in the middle there.
Some things in my profession haven’t changed much. I could take a Babylonian plumb-bob and use it as-is, or take a modern one back to 2000BC and give it to a local surveyor with no instruction: there’s simply been no way to improve on the original design.
A Roman plumb-bob intended for stone masonry.
Like farming, surveying as a profession changed very little, and slowly, until the early 1950s. But technology marches ever onward, and with the advent of optical plummets – which have been common on Total Stations for at least twenty years – there is less and less need for the plumb-bob anymore. Field notes written on paper are slowly but surely being replaced by their digital counterparts. Many original section maps survive only in digital form now. A lot of small survey firms still have dumpy levels from the turn of the 20th century in use – but digital levels are slowly replacing them. Ours is hardly alone among the professions in seeing complete seismic shifts in how our work is done – doctors are facing down a future where diagnoses are done by AI, faster and more accurately than any human ever could – but the focus on history isn’t likely to ever go away.
The men who came before me are in every line I draw, every measurement I take. And when I finally get my own seal, they’ll be in every survey I stamp, too.
If you don’t use Twitter, you’re probably doing wonders for your mental health, because it’s one of the primary battlegrounds of the culture war.
“But Leo the incredibly charismatic supergenius,” I hear you cry, “How can that be, when only 1/5 of Americans have Twitter accounts, and most of them aren’t active users?”
Well, my lovely and wonderful audience, here’s the deal: oftentimes the most important battle in a war isn’t the largest battle or the most well-known one, but the one that sets the stage for the battles to follow. And social media sites like Twitter are where much of the battle over language is being fought.
Bear with me, please – this is all going to require a bit of background.
Ever wonder why cultural battles are over so quickly nowadays – regardless of who wins – and why new battles spring up immediately afterwards? When the battles of yesteryear were being fought in academia, the sheer amount of time it took to write papers and actually get people to read and respond to them kept the warfare to a dull roar. But nowadays each new battle can reach everyone likely to participate in it very quickly, massively ramping up the tempo of combat.
And I do mean combat. I realize the military veterans here will bristle at my use of the term, but there’s a real sense that these cultural battles are deciding more of the fate of the civilization you were fighting for in your service than the actual fighting you did. Don’t believe me? Consider how quickly the removal of Confederate monuments turned into the removal of decidedly non-Confederate monuments.
What makes those removals possible is the culture war.
Each time the side you’re on in the culture war loses a battle, the opposition will take some ground from you. They’ll be coming for the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials eventually – I’m guessing within 3 years. And they’ll be demanding that those monuments be replaced with ones dedicated to deceased drug dealers.
If you think I’m kidding, consider how many schools have announced that they’re considering removing the names of the Founding Fathers from their institutions – and how that would have been unthinkable for them to even admit to even 5 years ago.
One of the constants of warfare, however, is that you can judge the effectiveness of a weapon by how the enemy reacts to it. The Imperial German Army didn’t hesitate to use poison gas and flamethrowers on the Allies during the Great War, but how quickly they started caring about war crimes and the Hague Convention when the incoming Americans began deploying shotguns! (Sabaton has nothing to do with my piece today – I just love them)
In a culture war, most of the weapons are rhetorical. Ists and phobes and isms are the big ones used by the Left, and lots of them have proven very effective in advancing their agenda. ‘Racist!’ ‘Sexist!’ ‘Homophobe!’ ‘Islamophobe!’ – you should remember these. When you understand that these terms are meant to be weapons, meant to harm their enemies rather than to make accurate observations, the willingness of the Left to throw them at all and sundry – and to ignore accusations of hypocrisy when their own erstwhile allies show themselves to be among the guilty – will make more sense.
Of course, effective weapons get used more often: there was a period following WW2 when most of America’s military strategy revolved around nuclear weapons. And when a weapon gets used too often, the enemy becomes resistant – witness how much harder the Left has to work to get the public to care about accusations of racism now, compared to a few years ago. This marginal decline of effectiveness should help explain why more and more things are described as racist now than before – you have to shoot more when the enemy has better armor than he used to.
Now, if you’ve been at all abreast of transgender politics, understand that the proverbial tip of the spear for the Left is that you are a transphobic bigot if you don’t want to have sex with a transgendered person.
The actual explanation for this position re: transphobia is that if transwomen are women, the hypothetical straight man has no reason other than transphobia to distinguish between a woman with a penis and a woman with a front hole (which – I shit you not – is the actual term some organizations have been using to describe biological women).
This position is pure nonsense – what sexual organs my intended romantic partner possesses actually does make a difference when it comes to actually having sexual intercourse, even if I don’t want to have children with them. I’m not religiously opposed to sodomy, but I definitely agree with the old adage that it’s gay if the balls are touching, and that’s a bit hard to avoid when buggering a transwoman. But again, the Left doesn’t use language to convey ideas – they use language to accomplish their goals. If advancing nonsense wins the battle, then they will advance nonsense. This is very much in keeping with the idea – advanced by Marx himself – that ideological differences are merely cover for class differences (which has transmogrified to include racial differences in the neo-Marxist movement of the present).
I should take a moment to ask for some sympathy for the lesbians: they’ve been hammered (no pun intended) by the transgender activists much, much harder than the straights have – mostly because there are so few lesbians compared to straights. I expect the sex differences play a role here: trying to browbeat a straight man into taking a bearded tranny to bed is much, much harder than intimidating a petite lesbian into blowing one. And I do mean intimidating – some of these people are all-too-willing to get violent at the first sign of opposition.
All of this brings us to the new term: superstraight.
As stated, you can judge how effective a weapon is by how the enemy reacts to it. For example:
Apparently they’re allowed to invent new sexual identities on the spot, but we’re not allowed to do the same.
Between #superstraight and #BlueAnon, we launched a few retaliatory nuclear strikes this week. Do your part and launch more of them, and one day we will have peace.
Forget the part where this is a direct and obvious First Amendment violation, for those of you who don’t remember the 2008 election, the Citizens United case was literally about Hillary Clinton trying to use campaign financing laws to punish a group that made a video critical of her in the leadup to the ’08 Democratic Primary. This is Citizens United 2: Hillary’s Revenge. And let’s ignore how (A)(i) provides no working definition of “materially false” – and neither do any of the other 12 times this term appears in the document. And if your first reaction to my demands for a definition is “It’s obvious what ‘materially false’ means” – consider how various fact-checking organizations rate claims based on the politics of the person whose statement is being checked. If you think the Attorney General will be less transparently partisan about this – because the bill puts the AG in charge of this – than Snopes, you’re fooling yourself.
And this isn’t even the most egregious First Amendment violation in this section, much less the worst in the bill – it’s just the first one on the list. Then it gets into rewriting the FCC and FEC regulations on online communications and it becomes pretty goddamned obvious what they’re aiming for.
As for me, frankly, there isn’t much I can do about any of this. So I’m not going to sit here and seethe – my heart doesn’t need the stress. And neither should you.
What you should do, however, is make sure you remember to never trust a single thing a politician says. Not even the ones you think are on your team.
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Ever wanted to see what a Hellfire missile does to a dragon? Then maybe GATE is for you. Yes, I’m a weeb – sue me.
Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri (Gate: Thus the JSDF Fought There or simply GATE) was originally a web novel in Japanese that author and Japanese Self-Defense Force veteran Takumi Yanai began working on in 2006. It was first printed in 2010, and then later adapted into a graphic novel and then into animation in 2015.
The plot follows 33-year-old JSDF 2nd Lieutenant Itami Youji (note: family names come first in Japanese – Youji is his first name) as he is headed to an anime convention while on leave in Ginza.
Before he can go in, though, a portal opens in the middle of the city, and a Roman-esque army (replete with fantasy creatures like orcs, goblins and wyverns) begins attacking civilians. Lt. Itami kills one enemy combatant with a knife, and helps the police to safeguard the civilians inside a historic fortress still in the city while the JSDF can organize a response.
After the attack is stopped, the now-promoted 1st Lieutenant Itami (recognized and awarded for his gallantry) is ordered to join the expedition through the still-open Gate in Ginza – now secured in a concrete bunker – to find out who, exactly, is attacking Japan, and whether any of the missing civilians might have ended up on the other side. The other world – referred to in official documents as the “Special Region” – is a pretty generic fantasy land, with all the usual accoutrements: wizards, shamans, demigods, elves, catgirls, and so on; and the official mission of the JSDF expedition is to secure reparations and a peace treaty with the human-centered Empire that launched the attack on Ginza in the first place.
But while the setting is generic fantasy, the narrative is nevertheless interesting. As one might expect, the novel and the graphic novel both go into far more detail on the ‘Special Region’ and the political situation within the Empire that lead to the attack on Ginza in the first place, but the anime covers the basics.
Without spoiling too much, the pro-peace faction within the Empire is led by the Imperial princess (amusingly named Pina Co Lada) who, after seeing the JSDF in action, is horrified at how badly outclassed the Imperial army is.
On the other hand, the pro-war faction is led by her vicious elder brother (and imperial heir), named Zorzal El Caesar.
And their father Molt Sol Augustus wavers between the two positions – reluctant to keep fighting, but wary that the Japanese will become completely unstoppable if they are allowed to gain a proper foothold in the region.
Politics and plot aside, if it’s action and spectacle you’re looking for, GATE has it. Ever wonder how effective an F4 Phantom would be against a dragon? Got you covered.
An Apache gunship against a medieval army – with Ride of the Valkyries playing over a loudspeaker?Got that too.
Paratroopers dropping into a medieval city to rescue hostages? All good.
We’ve even gotten members of the Socialist Party in the Diet getting BTFO’d as they try desperately to hamstring the military operation. Red-blooded Americans will probably find this scene familiar.
When I consume media, I’m most often concerned with the story. CGI, sound design, dialogue and acting are all nice to have, but if they aren’t serving a good story, the best outcome one can hope for is a forgettable popcorn-muncher. Contrarywise, good writing will stick with the audience even if they have to forgive a small budget. GATE has great sound design – anime studios have really gotten the hang of making gunfire sound like gunfire over the last decade or so. There’s also decent animation and good voice acting, so if that’s what you like, you’ll get what you want.
And – fortunately – the story is actually pretty well-written, though admittedly the adaptation loses a bit in translation. And if you’re the sort of person who really likes seeing how well-liked American troops tend to be in the countries they’re deployed in, you’ll see a lot of the same here.
Now, while the weeb in me just likes to sit back and enjoy the show, the American in me has a few warnings to include.
Firstly, author Takumi Yanai is quite patriotic. It’s a bit strange as an American to see someone from another culture be almost as gung-ho about his patriotism as an American, but it’s definitely noticeable, at least in the details. Political conflicts with other nations are only a small part of the story, but it’s there. I won’t say Yanai-sensei is negative towards the USA, but the generic American president featured in one or two scenes (who looks remarkably like Trump, despite this being written long before he even became a candidate) doesn’t exactly come off well.
Secondly, anime tropes. All media forms have tropes – which are defined here as “a commonplace, recognizable plot element, theme, or visual cue that conveys something in the arts”, which are typically specific to both genre and culture – and this is no exception. One really obvious one in this story that would be unfamiliar to Western audiences is the ‘harem protagonist’ trope: first invented by Rumiko Takahashi for her 1987 anime Ranma1/2, the trope features a male protagonist who becomes the center of attention for the female leads (the ‘harem’) in the story despite not actively pursuing any of them, and without being the paragon of masculinity whom one might expect to be the center of feminine attention. This often includes slapstick violence between the characters – usually aimed at the man. Itami, of course, is our protagonist, and his ‘harem’ numbers at least five (including the three women on the promotional poster at the top). Now, another feature of this trope in most of its appearances is a distinct lack of sex – whether the ‘harem’ members are actively trying to get him in bed or not, it usually doesn’t happen during the runtime of the anime.
That’s not to say there’s no mention of sex in this anime – just that none of it happens on-screen. Lots of blood and gore, not much T&A.
And thirdly, dubbing versus subtitles. I’m a proponent of the latter – most of the time, English dubs spoil things for me. Even when the localization writers and English voice actors aren’t actively sabotaging the translation (yes, this is a known and ongoing problem in the industry – some have even tacitly admitted to doing it for political reasons), a lot of the subtext can get lost by an English rewrite of the original dialogue. And, of course, subtitles avoids the “words not matching lips” problem often seen in dubbed films (this is a problem even in animation). But I’m told the dub for GATE is decent. And of course, dubbing often has knock-on effects to the rest of the audio track – sound design that might have been extremely well-done in the original may have to be replaced for the dub, and re-done by a less-skilled team. Your mileage may vary.
If you’re the sort who would prefer a graphic novel to an anime, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that an officially licensed English edition of Volume 1 is available, and can be found on Amazon. The bad news is that the licensing agreement is effectively dead, and there are no licensed editions of the remaining volumes (up to 18 at last check) available in English. Fortunately, fan translations (known as fanslations) are available – the dialogue in fan works is often clunkier than it would be in a licensed edition, but the translation is usually accurate, and in many cases fanslations are the only options available for those not literate in Nihon-go.
No, I’m not literate in Japanese – I just know a few words.
The anime can be had from a number of sources. The anime streaming service CrunchyRoll and the video game platform STEAM are two that I’m familiar with, though in my case I simply bought the Blu-Ray edition via Amazon. And there are plenty of clips of various scenes available on Youtube beyond the ones I linked above. If you want the graphic novel, Volume 1 is of course available at most outlets that sell manga, but for subsequent volumes I use MangaDex. The work is still being translated, and new chapters are released monthly.
That reminds me – there’s something else I really need to mention: um… well, there’s a concept in anime called ‘loli-con’. I’d recommend against looking it up – you won’t like what you find, but the essence is that there’s a thing occasionally found in anime and manga where female characters are depicted as being… uncomfortably young, let’s say (the male equivalent is called ‘shota-con’). This is usually done for comedic effect – juxtaposing a young or young-looking character with more mature situations.
Sometimes it’s not even that the character is underage but simply short – Uzaki Hana, for example, is a short-stacked, bubbly and extroverted 19-year-old college student who is constantly pestering her introverted male classmate Shinichi, in her titular anime Uzaki–chanwa Asobitai! (Uzaki Wants to Hang Out!) [note: “-chan” is an honorific attached to someone’s name, usually used for girls]. A poster of her (below) was used by the Red Cross to promote a blood drive in Japan, prompting outrage from (mostly Western) feminists that temporarily led to the removal of the posters. Fortunately, they were restored.
I have no idea what the text says. Yes, the skin-colored fang is part of her design. No, no one knows why.
The minor scandal involving Hana’s debut with the Red Cross became part of the culture war in the US for all that the incident took place entirely in Japan, largely due to the ongoing problem of feminists and trans-activists in the American comic-book industry, who object to any and all depictions of conventionally attractive women. “Where are her organs” was a common – and much-parodied – short-lived rallying cry against depictions of slender women, whether they were buxom or not (artist J Scott Campbell, known for his eye-candy female characters, was on the receiving end of a lot of hatred from these activists, and the “organs” question was aimed at several of his drawings). Ostensibly the claim was that these (mostly male) artists were depicting female bodies so unrealistically that they didn’t leave room for internal organs.
The text on her shirt literally translates to “super huge”.
This was met by a flood of images of cosplayers (mostly amateur models who make a living portraying fictional characters) who quite clearly had the same body type as the “unrealistic” characters they were playing. On that note, there’s a GIF of the above image – I’m not going to link it here, but it’s a rather nice one of the cosplayer bouncing in place.
When that didn’t work, the complaint shifted to Uzaki Hana’s youthful appearance combined with her sizable bust being used to promote the sexualization of children. In fairness, it’s not uncommon in anime to have female characters with busts that are rather on the mature side for their supposed age. This has long since become a trope in the industry, to the point where it’s often played for comedic effect, and the same accusations have been repeated before. However, an obvious problem is that children tend not to have these well-developed secondary sexual characteristics, so the accusations usually deflate quickly. What made the Uzaki scandal culturally relevant in the US was that it happened very shortly before the first promotional material for Netflix’s Cuties was released – quite a few of the people attacking Uzaki (and anime girls in general) as “promoting CP” found their complaints falling on deaf ears after they went to bat for the French-made film. Yes, you heard that correctly: the same people.
Anyway, CP isn’t any more legal in Japan than it is here, and despite how licentious their media appears, Japan is actually quite straight-laced, but they’re more comfortable pushing the line on juvenile sexuality than America is – at least in animation. I bring it up now because there’s a plot-significant relationship between a Japanese diplomat and a young female aristocrat that will probably come off… odd to audiences not familiar with anime tropes. Now, the graphic novel does a much better job setting this up than the anime does – she’s actually trying to charm him so as to benefit her family in the pending peace treaty with Japan, and it goes awry when her parents are killed and she has to ask him for protection – and she comes from a culture where it wouldn’t be unusual for her to already be betrothed, so at least in context it makes sense. Still, be warned.
I don’t put numbers on my reviews – I just tell you what I think about it. I like this anime, and if you liked what I wrote you’ll probably enjoy it also.
We’re entering into a new era of propaganda in 2020, and I blame 4chan.
A border conflict began between India and China in May of this year. I use the passive voice here because while I assume China was the aggressor, I don’t actually know – and I doubt anyone does. And while Indo-Chinese conflicts have happened before, I don’t think they’ve featured animated videos of the Indian PM doing battle with Chinese apps before.
Or lampooning the Chinese President, Xi Jinping.
Now, these Indian animations aren’t necessarily new – the first one I was aware of featured PM Modi and President Trump, from 2017 – but they’ve turned into explicitly anti-Chinese propaganda this year. One even featured President Jinping turning into Winnie the Pooh (for those who aren’t familiar, Jinping has been likened to Pooh, and is not fond of the comparison; reportedly some people have been jailed for lampooning him this way).
Now, propaganda produced by one side of a conflict to mock the other side is hardly new – one jaunty tune British soldiers were fond of singing during WW2 was a neat little song entitled “Hitler’s Only Got One Ball” (c 1939, referencing the apocryphal claim that Hitler’s military medical records list him as missing a testicle). As might be expected, the song quickly became popular amongst all Allied troops.
Domestically, the campaign website for President Trump has this amusing image on its error page.
But in the era of memes and social media, they’ve really taken on a new dimension of hilarity – even for people entirely outside the conflict itself.
Case in point, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
When the new era of conflict between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan started, the latter country’s military apparently had this ready to go.
Now, I don’t speak Azeri (which is apparently a dialect of Turkish), so I have no idea what any of the lyrics mean. The name of the song – “Atles” – means “Fire”.
Whether that refers to the noun or the verb, I couldn’t say.
The video features what are apparently Azerbaijani military personnel putting on a weapons demonstration whilst a heavy metal band performs around them. While the song is actually pretty good (I strongly suspect the Swedish power metal band Sabaton was used as inspiration), I had some issues with the visuals. Namely the fact that a lot of the equipment is quite clearly “out of the box” new, which leads me to suspect that some of what’s shown are probably mockups rather than actual military equipment.
That said, I have no idea, and I have no desire to search Azeri-language websites for the information. So… enjoy?
As to why I suspect Sabaton inspired this effort by the Azeri army… well, you can judge for yourself. This is from Sabaton’s _Great Tour_ album, featuring songs about World War One, which released in 2019 – this particular track is about the famed battle at Verdun.
I’d offer excuses for my long absence from MVAP but the truth is that I simply wasn’t inspired to write anything. But now I’m mad, and I’m going to take it out on all of you.
“Bless me Father, for I have sinned – I read a Vox.com piece today.”
Don’t do Vox, my children – their like is sinful and unclean.
The title of this Vox piece is “How Beethoven’s 5th Symphony put the classism in classical music”. And right away I can tell we’re in for a treat.
I’ll spoil the surprise for you: the author quotes nothing from Beethoven himself about the 5th Symphony in this article. Either Beethoven had nothing to say about his 5th, or – more likely – he said nothing the author could find that was in any way cancel-able about it. Or – most likely – the author did no research into Beethoven’s thoughts.
Instead, the evidence cited for “classism” in the 5th Symphony consists entirely of the following:
Concert hall dress codes and conduct rules
A comment from an unnamed 19th century concert attendee
Vox.com’s own podcast about the 5th
The opinion of some music critic I’ve never heard of and whose career pedigree goes unmentioned
The opinion of some clarinetist that – again – I’ve never heard of and whose career pedigree goes unmentioned… except for the explicit mention that he’s black
And nothing else. I listened their entire 33:51 minute podcast they made – may God forgive me – and it turns out the podcast is just the long version of this article – albeit without adding supporting evidence or better arguments – so I don’t have to deal separately with it.
Starting from the top: concert hall dress codes and conduct rules. Some concert halls have rules for their patrons, requiring formal dress and conduct during their performances. The conduct rules include a requirement to remain silent -and refrain from applause – until after the piece is concluded, so as to not distract the musicians nor interfere with other patrons who are trying to listen.
This, apparently, is considered exclusionary. Vox writers Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding avoid making the… unfortunate argument about black concert goers that I’ve seen before, and instead make the claim that the fact that these conduct rules are shared among high class concert halls suggests the rules are more about enabling privileged people (who, according to them, are exclusively rich white men) to show they belong than about respecting the music or their fellow patrons.
I wish I was kidding. This ‘argument’ deliberately disregards the perfectly reasonable explanation (that the authors themselves suggest in the podcast) such that it’s about courtesy in order to ‘REEEEE’ about white privilege, as such people are wont to do. Since they’ve already given the actual reason for these rules, I’m just going to move on.
Next, a comment from an unnamed 19th century concert attendee, who apparently endorsed the following:
“…all women shall be gagged by officers duly licensed for the purpose before they’re allowed to enter a concert room.”
This, for some reason, is taken to be an example of misogyny from classical music fans – as opposed to an observation that women were prone to talking loudly in inappropriate situations in the 1840s. As someone who has attended more than one film with my dear mother that ended with me nursing a headache after she insisted on shrieking at the characters on the screen (she does this at home as well), I’m just going to observe that stereotypes exist for a reason and move on.
Next we move to the comments from ‘classical music critic’ James Bennet II. I initially made the mistake – and if you read this before I edited the piece you may have seen my mistake – in assuming it was the same James Bennet who resigned from the New York Times after it published Senator Tom Cotton’s Op/Ed earlier this year.
It wasn’t. This Mr. Bennett does not have nearly so lofty a career as that.
Anyway, Mr. Bennet (can’t help but remember Pride & Prejudice here) is of the opinion that the fact that the classical music giants were all white men – and Beethoven’s continued popularity – serves to “convey to the other [emphasis added] that there’s not a stake in that music for them.”
Quite aside from the obvious question of where Bennet stands on the issue of cultural appropriation – classical music is quintessentially European in origin, after all – he skates around the question of whether any modern classical musician is good enough to equal Beethoven. YoYo Ma (pictured above), gets ignored, as all Progressives ignore Asian contributors to anything.
I would like to remind you, at this moment, that literally no arguments have been advanced thus far that don’t amount to “Beethoven was white, classical music giants were all white, and its mostly white people who like classical music”, and we’re nearing the end of the article.
Quite frankly, if there are no famous black symphonists, I assume the reason is because none of the ones who do exist (if any) are good enough to be famous for their symphonies. Economist Thomas Sowell, former Congressman Allen West and Justice Clarence Thomas are all fans of classical music; clearly that suggests that nonwhites (for those not familiar, all three are black) can and do enjoy classical music and can get something out of it. Why they might be rare, I don’t care to guess, but I’ve certainly never heard of a skin color test to be able to buy a classical music album, to buy a violin or to attend a concert hall. Or, hell, to watch a Youtube video.
I don’t know or care why classical music isn’t especially popular among black people, but since there’s no barrier to entry beyond the cost of a concert hall ticket and formal clothes – and the ability to be courteous during a stage performance – I don’t imagine racism is the reason.
And finally we to the comments from clarinetist Anthony McGill. Excuse me: black clarinetist Anthony McGill, of the New Yor Philiharmonic orchestra. I didn’t bother to check out his career pedigree – as you’ll see from the next part, there was no point.
And what does he say? The article paraphrases here to indicate that he believes orchestras are alienating “new, diverse audiences” (quoting the article authors) by “not promoting any of the composers alive today that are trying to become the Beethovens of their day.”
I’d like to take a moment to observe that the racist and exclusionary classical music genre somehow has a black musician in one of the most prestigious positions in the world
For the editification of anyone not closely following the attacks upon American culture from the neo-Marxists, almost this precise argument has been previously advanced such that the continued popularity of the likes of JRR Tolkien and Robert Heinlein is preventing “new, diverse writers” from becoming as popular as they were.
Do I need to explicate the part of this argument that they are desperately trying to get us to ignore – that the giants are giants because their work was really good, and the new people complaining that they don’t have a chance are simply not that good? The giants in every genre, in every industry, stand out long after they are dead in no small part due to the fight they had to become giants in the first place. If they complained that the giants of their day were stopping them from advancing, those words haven’t reached us from the past – instead, we remember what they did to beat those giants and take their places.
That said, I’m not going to take this Progressive ‘argument’ seriously. The main modes of Prog ‘arguments’ are always the same: equivocate the meaning of words, shout “ism !” and “ist!”, engage in special pleading, and blatantly ignore the obvious; and this is no exception. All of these are present here in this piece, more or less, and honestly it gets tiresome.
Why? Because none of this is in any way sincere. They don’t actually believe any of this stuff is true in any kind of concrete way.
Many have suggested that this is all because they hate white people. Beethoven isn’t a classical giant because his music was amazing – he’s a classical giant because he was white, and you’re a Nazi/racist/misogynist/bad tipper for suggesting that’s not the reason. Robert Heinlein was white. Tolkien was white.
Or perhaps it’s because they hate men. Obviously, we’re misogynists for keeping all of the amazing, talented, stunning and brave female symphonists from achieving the heights they deserve, and all of the forgoing were men.
Or perhaps it’s because they hate Christians (ditto).
But while you’ll certainly find plenty of Progressive adherents who hate white people, men, Christians or all of the above, at the ideological level it’s not about any of those things.
What they actually hate is standards. They cannot stand being judge and found wanting – they don’t have enough emotional stability to handle it. So instead, anyone who can be said to have accomplished anything must be destroyed, so as to spare their fragile egos.
These people are actually white, Christian male supremacists. Such men have accomplished everything significant in the last 600 years, they reckon, and so everyone not the equal of such men necessarily feel inferior – according to them. That inferiority harms their self-image, and so the entire idea of accomplishment – and the people who are capable of it, and all of their works – must be destroyed.
I – admittedly this is probably by virtue of my being a white, straight agnostic man – happen to like standards. Being able to actually tell “A” from “Not-A” is how my ancestors were able to avoid accidentally poisoning themselves, after all. And in the interest of ensuring that I don’t accidentally drink gasoline – because my jihad against standards prevents me from saying it’s objectively harmful to my health to do so – I intend to sit back and play Ode to Joy at maximum volume while I enjoy my dinner.
You think I’m kidding with the above title, don’t you? I wish I was.
A mathematics PhD by the name of James Lindsay decided to play a joke on the Woke crowd. Here is the joke:
James Lindsay, however, is a person non grata for the Woke crowd, and therefore this joke at their expense could not be allowed to stand.Which… lead to them literally arguing that 2+2 can equal 5.
Some of these people are mathematicians. Or claim to be.
It shouldn’t be hard to guess why they are doing this, though.
It gets worse. Much worse.
And it keeps going.
And going.(“science-adjacent”)
Now, let me be the first to remind you that most of these tweets have few likes and less engagement.This is not a widespread or accepted belief.
The idea that there is some higher level of rationality at which the adding of two units to two units gives a result other than 4 units is Woke Academy at its worst.
Some of you may or may not remember when a Florida-based web developer named John Ekdahl tweeted out in 2017 “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”
This innocuous tweet set of a firestorm of outrage from journalists that literally lasted for days. Ekdahl was still getting replies weeks later from journalists still smarting about it. On and on and on the replies came, utterly indignant that the question had been asked. Exactly what was so outrageous about the question was unclear, but the implication seemed to be that the lack of truck-driving-relatives meant they were out-of-touch with the average American. Whether Ekdahl implied it or not, a huge swath of the media took it that way, and couldn’t resist trying to hit back at Ekdahl or else trying desperately to dismiss the significance of not knowing anyone who owned a truck.
Ekdahl and Lindsay have both managed to strike very precisely at weak points of the Left, receiving huge amounts of incoming flak for their efforts. In Ekdahl’s case, he struck (potentinally unintentionally) at the self-image of journalists as being on the side of the little guy. In Lindsay’s case, however, he struck at the Woke Academy, directly striking their incessantly rabid rage at the continued existence of objective truth in any form.
I mean, it’s easy to claim that math isn’t real when you’re bad at it.
But why are they doing this? Part of the problem is the catastrophic damage that has been done to the entire field of epistemology – the study of knowledge and how its defined. It’s a long and involved discussion that requires a lot of background to get through. In a nutshell, the target is the Aristotelian notion that our knowledge of the world is derived from our observations about it, that reality as we perceive it is a reliable guide to what is. Literally the foundation of objective knowledge itself.
But mostly it’s about perpetuating the scam that is the Woke Academy.
Unadmitted redefinitions and equivocations of terms is what the Left relies on to perpetuate itself. Admittedly it’s quite surprising to see it appear this blatantly, but we know how this works. Marxism is so inherently dishonest an ideology that Marx’s followers were forced to develop the notion of “polylogism” – the idea that people in different economic classes reason in fundamentally incompatible ways – in order to explain away the devastating rebuttals of Marxist theory that were already being published by the time WW1 rolled around, so this is nothing new.
I’ve been forced by health reasons to avoid following current events, but I seem to be on the mend. I’m going to be doing another piece later this week.
Here’s a preview: imagine someone arguing that Europeans aren’t good at sailing.
Unintended consequences (defined here pedantically as “results of an action or decision that were not part of the actor or decider’s intended effect”) are a constant in life; mostly due to the inability of human beings to see things from God’s perspective (really, we need to get on His level). And also something something butterflies, but mostly the first thing.
A related but not identical phenomenon can be called “unintended” consequences.
The intended consequence of Fidel Castro’s decision to put Che Guevara in charge of economic development in Cuba was to ensure the Cuban economy was remade in the Communist image. It didn’t have any positive consequences for the population – one decision he made I remember reading about was demolishing a million dollar fruit orchard in order to build a public soccer park, which ultimately saw almost no use at all. However, when you understand that Communists really don’t want any centers of wealth that aren’t under their exclusive control (regardless of how many people starve as a result), that consequences of that decision don’t seem so “unintentional”.
Closer to home, allowing illegal aliens to obtain driver’s and professional licenses is loudly proclaimed to be entirely about social justice – treating these nice ‘undocumented’ people as if their lawbreaking status didn’t matter (you’ll notice a common pattern with regards to the treatment of criminals) because obviously they’re uniformly wonderful people who came here to escape the unfortunate circumstances of the shitho- I mean the wonderful country they came from that has been negatively affected by American imperialism. Of course, it has a transparent ‘unintended’ purpose: increasing the social and political costs to deport them. “Oh, you can’t deport this strong, independent transperson – xir is a pillar of the local economy!” States cannot be allowed to aid in the enforcement of immigration policy in any way – as Az. governor Jan Brewer discovered in 2010 – but they can help tip the balance in favor of amnesty in any number of ways, and New Jersey is only the most recent example.
What about gun control? Well, common gun control proposals include registration requirements, increasing fees for transfer and licenses, and (a perennial favorite) massive insurance policies. Obviously no one could disagree that the intended purpose of all this is to reduce the appalling homicide rate in the US. I mean, did you know that just 13%… sorry, my editor is telling me I cannot finish that sentence without getting cancelled. Let’s try again: the ‘unintended’ consequence is ensuring that firearm ownership is financially out of reach for the unidentified demographic Mike Bloomberg told us he wanted to disarm in February of 2015.
Side note: While I appreciate Bloomberg’s honesty – genuinely, it was the thing I liked most about his abortive candidacy for President – I’m not impressed by the argument that a Constitutionally-protected right should be curtailed because some people abuse it.
A journalist asking the owner of a local pizzeria in Indiana whether they’d cater a gay wedding the day after the Obergfell ruling – and running the story nationally? Obviously the journalist didn’t have the intent of rousing a mob to enforce the new social paradigm against these people. Obviously there wasn’t an intent to cow opponents of gay marriage with threats of mob violence. It was just a public interest story – don’t ask why anyone would ever contract a pizzeria to cater a wedding, gay or not – and that journalist was totally blindsided by the family getting death and arson threats.
And let’s not get started on bakers in Colorado.
If you haven’t guessed by now, what we’re talking about here, at least at the political level, is consequences that are quite deliberately intended, even if the individuals seeking them deny it. Not quite “bait and switch”, not quite “preference falsification” – hell, not quite “dog whistle” – we all know this phenomenon, even if we don’t always recognize it.
Most teenagers will learn this one early on: really don’t like doing a particular chore? Do a consistently bad job at it and their parents will (all going well) get so exasperated with their poor performance that they stop asking them to do it.
However…
It’s been said many times that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Every advance creates an opening, every victory sows the seeds of a future defeat. Try to catch two rabbits at the same time and you’ll end up with neither. Ultimately what this means is that you cannot actually pursue the overt goals of your actions and your covert goals at the same time – even if they aren’t actively fighting each other – if there is any kind of opposition.
At the small scale, clever parents who see what their child is doing can retaliate in kind – “Oh, you need that shirt/dress clean by tomorrow? Sorry, I don’t have time to do laundry tonight; maybe you can figure out how to use the washing machine properly”.
Politically, the most obvious example is the 2016 election. The “unintended” effect of the prevailing narrative, pushed by basically every media outlet ad nauseam, of Hillary’s impending victory was supposed to be demoralizing Trump supporters into staying home. Obviously Hillary was going to win, so it was on the opposition to just learn how to accept that. Almost everything Hillary’s campaign engaged in for the final weeks of the campaign was intended to do just that, in fact.
I myself went to bed on November 8th 2016 expecting that I’d wake up to find she’d won. Imagine my shock the next morning, seeing the gleeful text message from my uncle that read “We’re making America great again!”
They discovered, to their horror, the truth of Sun Tzu’s lesson that knowing neither yourself – there were deep, systemic problems in Hillary’s candidacy that consistently went unaddressed and unacknowledged by her campaign and the media, not the least which were her own character flaws – nor the enemy – there were deep, systemic strengths to Trump’s candidacy that also were consistently unaccounted for, which ironically included things they saw as his character flaws – means you will succumb in every battle.
And finally, to address the elephant in the political arena, sometimes the overt goal is the real goal and the alleged covert goal is only projection.
That’s the Voter ID issue in a nutshell. The “Republicans are trying to suppress the black vote!” requires a certain… ironic corollary.
