Why I love the War Nerd.

The War Nerd is the only white guy I know of who writes about brown and black people as though they are behaving perfectly normally. He never fails to point out that white people would and have done the same in similar circumstances.

War isn’t hell– it’s only human.

What’s being done in say the DR Congo is horrifying, but it possesses a horrid brilliance. And it is perfectly, sadly human. Humans with pale skin do the same things. Destroying your neighbor’s fertility by brutalising the women to near-death and scaring the rest into the woods where they’ll die of exposure is intelligence. It is cleverness. It is human. And it is not something only ‘dirty black savages’ do.

Women make life. Without women, there’s no more humans. This is why rape continually happens in war. It is a tool– cruel, awful, and consistently effective. The women are demoralised (and often denigrated, depending on the culture). The men are rendered powerless– they could not protect their women. And of course, the raped and sundered tribe/country/province will not have new children who could revenge the wrong done.

War-rape is especially horrible because it never fails to achieve the desired effects. Physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, cultural trauma. Rape as a tool of war covers every base.

The War Nerd doesn’t get that involved in it, but he shows an understanding of what constitutes ‘normal human behavior’ that is wonderful in its rarity.

Normally, typically, regularly, we humans, regardless of coloring are awful to each other– and we seek to be more awful because IT WORKS. IT DESTROYS OUR ENEMIES.

It is so far beyond ’such and such ethnic group is more prone to violence’ Total BS. Humanity is prone to violence. That simple and that unsettling.

And this is why I read the War Nerd– he is honest about this, and always has plenty of examples of white people behaving identically to the ‘black savages’ or ‘Arab savages’, et al. Because he is willing to admit that human nature is not inherently kind and gentle. I appreciate that.

Random Scotch Review– Lagavulin 16 year

Lagavulin is a dark beautiful Islay. The first sip I took of it was all warm peat fires and standing before the hearth. Expansive and melancholy, with all the beauty of nights along the bogs, warmed only by the most carefully scrounged of fires. It is truly an excellent whisky, worthy to stand along such of its moody Islay brothers as Ardbeg and the ever dangerous Laphroaig. Beneath the dusky peat is a glorious delicate smoothness, a bit unusual for an Islay. It is a charm and a half to sip at for a sweet half hour. I recommend it by the bottle or the glass, if one finds a bar that will indulge.

The Kushiel’s Dart series sucks.

It relies on a conception of prostitution that disregards the economics of prostitution in the real world, but uses the ‘alternate history’ tack to play at verisimilitude.

It is similar to the pdf about the Companion Inara– just full of romantic assumptions that aren’t reflected in history or the present day.

Perhaps the most repulsive aspect is making the heroine a super-healing ‘natural-born masochist’, who requires ‘pain and humiliation’ to be properly sexually gratified.

The second most insulting and repulsive bit is the way that sexuality is interpreted and handled. There is no underbelly in this fairyland of hedonism with suspicious rulesets. Plus, even I know that sex isn’t love, yet it’s the foundational religious and series premise (“love as thou wilt”), which is just…baffling. Because the ONLY practical definition of love is assorted sex acts and practices (except for the sex acts and practices that are disallowed of course–’as you wilt’ comes with some very strange catches)

Deep Throat is less insulting, mostly because it isn’t played straight.

If the Kushiel’s Dart heroine was driven by a desire for blood and damage to her own flesh, and could not heal easily, that would have been an interesting story, at least. As it is, it’s kind of a Mary Sue adventure, but with sex-for-pay instead of for free, as is the usual standard. There’s no comprehension of how suffering works, even when it’s pursued as a means of pleasure.

I should write my own books about some fantasy world where rape is the vilest of crimes and yet with no sense of irony prostitution of ‘natural masochists’ is considered teh awesum. And of course we never find out if anyone ever fakes it or fakes it in others for personal gain. But that is just one small example of there being no underbelly to this series.

One of the reasons sex-positivity tires me out is stuff like this, where the writer tries to put a religious-y coat of paint on hedonism, dress it in quasi-sacred garb. But practically speaking, love’s not solely or even primarily sex (and it is problematic to associate it with sex for pay primarily on top of that), and it’s kind of irritating to be presented with an agenda disguised as a fantasy series.

I could go on, but I will end my dissatisfactions here…

sometimes they come back

…at least, this holds true for apostate Christians, so far as I’ve seen. It does not hold true for apostates from other religions/belief systems. ‘Twould be an interesting thing to research, find out if it’s true.

For now I file it under ’suspect, but may not be able to prove true or false’.

Sometimes I wish I could be a pagan or hedonist.

It is sometimes painful to realise Christianity is the only right way to go. Everything else is so clearly wrong is practical terms, in what’s observable, that I cannot switch no matter how the allure of hedonism and paganism call. It would be nice to selfishly pursue validation in the form of twenties thrown on the fireplace for my dances and revel in other dancers assuring me that my dude was clearly inferior for not being able to handle my independent womanhood. It would be nice, sometimes, to just go bed some other for the amusement of it and again, be told by fellow hedonists that my spouse wasn’t evolved enough to appreciate and respect my needs.

But in the face of the wreckage wrought on others who believe these philosophies less ambivalently than I ever did, I have to say they are clearly wrong. Christianity doesn’t leave these strange gaps. It is difficult precisely because it goes against every selfish impulse we dumb humans have. Christianity makes lovers lane safe again for lovers.

And while I might sometimes recoil from its intensity, its fierce and brutal trueness, I will never deny this rightness. God’s there. Jesus lives. He died for me and so many others. The blood of the Lamb was sacrificed, the ultimate blood sacrament.

Sometimes I wanna take Christ’s spot, be a bigger sacrifice. But that is a selfishness as human and ordinary as the selfishness of people who live only to be attractive to as many as possible in pursuit of being attractive to all. An unattainable goal, yet one we (particularly women) are ever tormented with as a distinct possibility.

As tempting as they are, I cannot be a pagan or a hedonist. They speak the same tongue as Madison Avenue. And it’s demon-speech.

Dear Joss Whedon– Don’t take black ops so literally

The title says much of it, really. I do hope I am not the only one to notice that in Firefly and Serenity, Mr. Whedon made all of his Operatives black guys. Seemingly incompetent black guys, no less. Not to mention some more icky racial subtext from the Confederacy-aspect.

The key word is seemingly. In the Firefly ‘verse, because the heroes are all renegades from civilisation in one fashion or another (even Inara), having the Operatives supposedly be clever assassin types who keep getting flummoxed undermines the premise of their cleverness. That is to say, in the movie Serenity, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Operative getting tricked just makes him appear incompetent and stupid. But his intelligence is merely constrained by expectations that the Firefly crew would behave as ‘civilised’ (softer) folk do among the Core planets.

That subtlety is quite lost in terms of presentation. Similarly, by portraying Jubal Early as a chatty psychotic in Objects in Space, Whedon undermines his presumed and stated competence/intelligence. Although Early is not an Operative, he is serving that function.

Shepherd Book, as an inactive Operative, narrowly escapes some of this, but all three ‘Black Ops’ serve a function similar to what happened to select black guys during Reconstruction, post-Civil War. The ones who were voted in as Republicans. Or the soldiers up North who were technically free but still stuck in subservient roles during the War.

Each Operative is clever, but yet flummoxed by country folk from down South. There’s blind devotion to a white-instantiated ideal that is crushed by shocking revelation. Jubal Early, as an insane bounty hunter is a subversion of this mini-trope, but because he ends up appearing stupid, the subversion just backfires. And I will not even get into the BLACKRAPIST thing that I can only hope was accidentally tossed in.

Is this where science fiction teevee is really at? Is this all POC, especially blackfolk, can hope for? White people can be absurdly clueless about race, and yet those three roles were large parts (one recurring). These roles allowed three black male actors to not play gangsters or rappers. Instead they played roles written to showcase intelligent, dangerous, interesting guys who ended up appearing incompetent and throwaway in practice. Le sigh.

When I get to discussing the Companions, then my irate side will come out. This is just a bagatelle.

What Rudy Giuliani could teach sexworkers…

This is pretty much what I hear when pro-pornstitution sexworkers start talking about how they do the work and they are ‘Sane, Happy and Successful/Fulfilled/Empowered’.

a white man says something sensible about race and IQ

While I was on holiday with relatives, a wonderous post was posted by of all people, a Welshman. It was in many respects a sound retort to the usual round of polemic about intelligence, IQ and racial differences affecting it all thereof. I hadn’t expected it from such a quarter, but it’s a pleasure to come upon regardless.