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31
Chrono Compendium Discussion / I Think You've Gone Too Far With The Icons, ZeaLitY
« on: August 12, 2009, 09:24:50 pm »
Maybe some temperance is in order?
32
General Discussion / A Discussion on Libertarianism
« on: August 11, 2009, 10:07:25 pm »
(Note: If you're in a hurry, the top half of this post is about fake libertarians (i.e., conservatives), and the bottom half, below the line, is about real libertarians.)
As a writer, what do you think I do when I want to procrastinate from writing? Why, I write, of course! I just write on a different topic. Somehow that makes a difference.
One topic on my mind lately is libertarianism, lowercase-L. It’s an ideology which serves to remind us that the political universe has more than one dimension to it, even though one-dimensional, spectrum politics happens to dominate the national discourse here and in many other countries. Lacking a strong organizational apparatus here and elsewhere, the libertarians are perennially a political sideshow, at best reduced to spoiler status, and at worst a nonentity altogether.
Libertarianism is a fascinating subject, but the reason it’s been on my mind lately is because I’ve noticed that one side-effect of the ongoing civil war in the Republican Party is that more conservatives are calling themselves libertarian. These are people whose ideology is such that to write them into the libertarian equation would be to render the term “libertarian” broad to the point of meaninglessness. A case in point is Peter Thiel, best known for creating PayPal, who wrote an article earlier this year lamenting that:
That got a lot of play on the blogs, and is still getting around now: I just saw it on sci-fi website io9.com yesterday. When I read the article, which culminates in Thiel’s renunciation of democracy and his assertion that libertarians must flee society and live either on the Internet, in space, or on the ocean, it struck me that this person isn’t a libertarian at all—not in the way that I understand libertarianism. His rant was that of an ideological laissez-faire capitalist.
There’s another word for people like that: Ferengi.
It was Thiel’s comment about female suffrage that hit the point home. When I read that, I immediately thought of how Ferengi society doesn’t even allow females to wear clothes, let alone wield any kind of meaningful power. I actually said to myself, aloud, “(That son of a bitch.) He’s a fucking Ferengi!”
Thiel, contrary to his rhetoric, is not particularly interested in freedoms and self-determination. He’s just another sour grapes Objectivist who wants more power and money for himself, and sees the public as an antagonist—especially when it comes to demographic groups outside his own. He’s nothing new, and in my personal opinion he poses no threat. The only thing that changed as a result of the article is my comfort level with using PayPal, since I have no interest in profiting people like him. (I’ll have to look into it more to see what his current financial relationship with the company is.)
Here’s why he got to write that opinion piece:
It wasn’t all that long ago that BioShock came out. The political backdrop of this game was an oversimplified counterstroke against Objectivist ideals, which had the effect of putting Ayn Rand back in the public conscious, leading to a surge in the popularity of her books, which are the centerpiece of Objectivism.
Around the same time, the Republican Congress—which had overseen the biggest government in American history—finally collapsed due to corruption and rank incompetence, and the Bush administration found that most of his supporters were fair-weather friends who no longer wished to be associated with what they saw as a failed president. I smirk to this day at all those right-wingers who insist—insist!—that Bush was not a “true” conservative, seeing as how he was exactly a true conservative—a traditionalist ideologue who worked hard to preserve the existing social and economic order—and was supported as such in the first five years of his presidency. But of course nobody wants to admit that their ideology is a failure. It was not conservatism that had failed, the conservatives demanded: It was the Republicans who had failed conservatism!
Well, you can connect the dots fro mhere: Objectivism, which had always been popular among the corporate wing of the conservative movement, enjoyed a resurgence throughout the conservative movement, and all of these opinion articles and talking heads started cropping up in the media claiming that the Republican Party had lost power because it had strayed from the principles of capitalism and had instead embraced “statism”—a term used exclusively by right-wingers, to describe people like me who favor a strong central government and high public spending. This meme picked up steam as the economy broke down and the incoming Democrats chose to spend their way out of oblivion. The argument became that Republicans had become too much like Democrats, and that America’s political system had shut out the real conservatives entirely. Ayn Rand got even more play in the news, and a new fad sprang into being: the short-lived “Going Galt” movement, whereby prominent conservative industrialists urged one another to follow the lead of John Galt (from Rand’s book) and abandon society, and, in so doing, demonstrate that they were the real workers, the real earners, the real people who made society function, and that everyone else was just dead weight.
Not surprisingly, that little revolution never caught on, and Objectivism per se has crested as a media point of interest and has slowly been fading from the news. But the odyssey of conservatism continues. The factions of conservatism want to reform the Republican Party, or escape from it altogether, and the corporate conservatives are doing all that they can to win these fights and achieve dominance—or at least retain their considerable power under the previous order.
One outcome of their efforts has been the revival of the label of libertarianism among conservatives, which is why I have led you on this little contemporary political history walk. You may have noticed over the past two years or so that the number of people who identify themselves as Republican has gone way down. What are those people now calling themselves instead? A great many of them have flocked to the label of “libertarian.” Isn’t that neat! By their logic, it turns out that “true conservatism” is actually libertarianism.
You’ll have to forgive my eye rolling, since all of these newly awakened “libertarians” still monolithically vote Republican, and still believe in the principles of conservatism. All they did was change the title of their beliefs to something more palatable. They’ll be Republicans again as soon as that party’s fortunes are on the rise, but for now they’re bold, noble-minded independents who stand on principle and just want to get America back to its libertarian foundations. Ugh…
These people are not the ones who interest me. They’re opportunistic right-wingers: bitter capitalists, greedy corporatists, racists, rich snobs, and those who buy into the notion of small government without comprehending the implications of it—and often hold contradictory views on their preferred role of government!
Real libertarianism—the genuine article—is much more fascinating, and that’s what’s been in my mind lately. So, everything up to this point was simply my account of why the subject has been on my mind. How’s that for verbosity? Now I can finally get on to the actual subject of libertarianism…
Real libertarianism, in my view, is obsolete. I don’t mean that there aren’t people who still believe in it: I mean that it simply doesn’t work in a populous, prosperous, developed, and stable nation that has come to expect a certain material quality of life. Libertarians oppose a large, intrusive government, and yet what does such a thing consist of?
On one hand, there is the “large” aspect of it. Most of the size of government comes from the staffing required to operate the government’s numerous programs. The question is what would happen to America if we ended these programs. I looked hard for an authoritative list of all the government’s funding outlays, and the best I could find was this website, a private website whose information is several years out of date. If anyone has a better source, I’d like to see it for myself, but for the time being this list provides a good point of reference. You don’t have to read very far down the alphabetized list to see objectionable items—Item No. 8 is $41 million for abstinence education—but the vast majority of these items are conspicuous precisely because they are not objectionable. Can anyone really look at that list and object to the principle of most of these items? No doubt there are inefficiencies that result in money wastage, but that’s a very different argument than the one which contends these programs should most be canceled outright.
The thing about libertarians is that they can object, usually on the assumption that whatever purpose a government program serves is either extraneous or can be better performed by people and businesses acting on their own volition. The reality is that this is not true: Much of what the government does is not going to be done by private businesses who are constrained by the profit motive, or by individuals who are constrained by a lack of capital, and would be sorely missed if the government closed up shop. Some of what the government does would be undertaken by private interests, with results that would often be inconsistent or disturbing. It’s not a coincidence that the size of the government has expanded in conjunction with our quality of life. A massive contraction in government spending would result very quickly in breakdowns all across society, because our collective quality of life, and our stability as a nation, depends in large part on those very programs. Libertarians disagree, or would agree that our way of life depends on government as it exists now, but would disagree that our current way of life is beneficial to us as a society.
That last bit is a very troublesome problem indeed, because there are way too many people alive for us to revert to an earlier, lower quality of life, and espousing an anti-government ideology without accounting for this is a huge omission that cannot be similarly overlooked in practice.
What large government is not is some huge office building full of bureaucrats who take long lunch breaks and generate paperwork for a living. I know at least as many people who work “for the government” in some fashion as who work for the private sector, and what consistently stands out to me in these public servants is the importance of the work they do, the passion they have for their field, and, not unrelatedly in my opinion, their awareness as human beings and their respect for others. I know that my observations are anecdotal and therefore not as compelling as they could be with better empirical data, but I am satisfied to my own high standards that the legend of government being inherently and hugely more wasteful than the private sector is a myth, and that government’s size is a function of our progress as a society.
Don’t get me wrong: There is definitely waste; there is waste all throughout the continuum of human endeavor. But as for the argument that government is a much worse offender…I don’t buy it. I’ve seen more waste in the corporate sector than I have from the government, including hundreds of dollars spent by Qwest over a ten-day period to diagnose and repair a faulty phone jack that had disrupted my Internet connection. Actual repair time: less than ten minutes.
I think the efficiency of a program comes down to the program itself, the people who run it, and the people they have to interact with. I think that’s true in business, and true in the government.
Then, on the other hand, there is the “intrusive” aspect of a large government. To some extent, the intrusiveness is a byproduct of all those government-funded programs I mentioned—i.e., a byproduct of the size of government. Much of it, however, is completely distinct: Here we’re talking about government legislation imposing restrictions and controls on our behavior as individuals. This is a much more compelling issue for me than that of the size of government, because this side of the topic gets into some of my favorite questions about what people are likely to do on their own initiative, and what they need to do (or not do) in order for society to remain stable. Ideally, people would be all-knowing and would exercise flawless judgment, in which case would not need any laws, but of course we are not ideal and therefore we need laws in order for society to function. More than that: We also need these laws to be widely if not universally obeyed.
The reason this stuff is so compelling for me is because I’m one of those people who lives at the end of the bell curve: I’m responsible, knowledgeable, prudent, and considerate, to a degree that many people are not—closer to the ideal. I don’t need as many laws as the next person, and the laws that I do need are not necessarily the same as those needed by the next person. When I was younger, I didn’t fully understand just how easy some things are for me when compared to others, and so my visions of a better society used me as the basic civic unit. That, obviously, was not representative of reality. My earlier visions of better societies would therefore clearly have failed.
Much of my political philosophy since then has been devoted toward building a better image of how a better society would actually work. You may notice that I talk a lot about influencing children; that’s because I’ve reached the conclusion that full-scale reeducation of adults en masse is not viable in our present society, and that forcing behavior changes in adults would usually be counterproductive.
The vast majority of my common ground with libertarianism occurs here, in these questions of how to control people in order to produce a better society, because I generally prefer to allow people (adults, anyhow) to live freely, even if they choose to live poorly as a result of their freedom. I make many exceptions, such as my severe attitude toward opposing sexism, or, less ambiguously, my support for no-brainer controls like the seatbelt law, but on the whole I think it is healthier for a society not to micromanage its denizens’ behavior.
The specific areas of our concurrence—libertarianism and myself—are mostly limited to the social realm. I rapidly depart from the libertarians on issues like taxation and environmental stewardship, the former because of my view on the importance of government spending, and the latter because of the obvious environmental ruin that has occurred in the absence of strong government controls, which now threatens to become the most serious danger to civilization, and is already on the scale of an “extinction level event” with regard to life as a whole on this planet.
Bringing these two issues back together: There is plenty of room to argue legitimately over what government should be funding and what it shouldn’t. I would volunteer that there is nothing wrong with requiring a government program to demonstrate its effectiveness. Likewise, there is plenty of room to argue about how the government should be controlling our behavior. These debates are valid. The problem with libertarianism is that, valid though the debates may be, the libertarians are bound to lose most of them, because they insist that government should be as small as possible rather than as large as necessary, and most people disagree with the ultimate conclusions of that, especially as it pertains to our way of life: We’re all enamored of the idea of some pastoral utopia, which the libertarians are quick to associate with themselves, but the romance is a veneer and the history of our human tale presents itself readily when we ponder the possibility of regressing to an earlier state of civilization.
Is it possible for libertarianism to advocate moving forward? Yes, it is, and it does: Progress through private innovation and free enterprise. However, this vision lacks the supporting structure that would make it viable. We’ve only gotten to where we are through extensive government manipulation of the human equation. Even that is a remarkable accomplishment, and many people died to win the freedoms we have today. Libertarianism proposes erasing our greatest ally: a public entity, the government, which is theoretically accountable to us in a way that corporations and wealthy individuals are not: and replacing it with what amounts to good intentions. That doesn’t work.
That’s why I said libertarianism is obsolete. There could have been a time when it would have worked, but society today is too complicated to function under a small government. This complexity is what enables us to live as well as we do. We’re not willing to give that up, and so libertarianism has faded as practical ideology.
One of my favorite bits about the subject of libertarianism is how sincere most libertarians are. (The real ones, that is; not those fake libertarians.) Many of them came into their ideology as a result of their upbringing: They grew up on a farm, or reading Heinlein (or both!). They have witnessed a dysfunctional, crime-ridden city center. They’ve gone through the hell of getting a city or a county permit. They’ve had to stand in line at the Department of Licensing (or the Department of Motor Vehicles if you’re not a Washingtonian). They pay their taxes, yet they still drive over potholes in the road and sit in traffic jams on the freeway. There’s so much in our lives which points to government incompetence. It’s easy and understandable for people to look at this and conclude that government just doesn’t work well, and shouldn’t be trusted to lord over us.
It’s one of those many occasions when the simple answer is the wrong one.
As a writer, what do you think I do when I want to procrastinate from writing? Why, I write, of course! I just write on a different topic. Somehow that makes a difference.
One topic on my mind lately is libertarianism, lowercase-L. It’s an ideology which serves to remind us that the political universe has more than one dimension to it, even though one-dimensional, spectrum politics happens to dominate the national discourse here and in many other countries. Lacking a strong organizational apparatus here and elsewhere, the libertarians are perennially a political sideshow, at best reduced to spoiler status, and at worst a nonentity altogether.
Libertarianism is a fascinating subject, but the reason it’s been on my mind lately is because I’ve noticed that one side-effect of the ongoing civil war in the Republican Party is that more conservatives are calling themselves libertarian. These are people whose ideology is such that to write them into the libertarian equation would be to render the term “libertarian” broad to the point of meaninglessness. A case in point is Peter Thiel, best known for creating PayPal, who wrote an article earlier this year lamenting that:
Quote from: Peter Thiel
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
That got a lot of play on the blogs, and is still getting around now: I just saw it on sci-fi website io9.com yesterday. When I read the article, which culminates in Thiel’s renunciation of democracy and his assertion that libertarians must flee society and live either on the Internet, in space, or on the ocean, it struck me that this person isn’t a libertarian at all—not in the way that I understand libertarianism. His rant was that of an ideological laissez-faire capitalist.
There’s another word for people like that: Ferengi.
It was Thiel’s comment about female suffrage that hit the point home. When I read that, I immediately thought of how Ferengi society doesn’t even allow females to wear clothes, let alone wield any kind of meaningful power. I actually said to myself, aloud, “(That son of a bitch.) He’s a fucking Ferengi!”
Thiel, contrary to his rhetoric, is not particularly interested in freedoms and self-determination. He’s just another sour grapes Objectivist who wants more power and money for himself, and sees the public as an antagonist—especially when it comes to demographic groups outside his own. He’s nothing new, and in my personal opinion he poses no threat. The only thing that changed as a result of the article is my comfort level with using PayPal, since I have no interest in profiting people like him. (I’ll have to look into it more to see what his current financial relationship with the company is.)
Here’s why he got to write that opinion piece:
It wasn’t all that long ago that BioShock came out. The political backdrop of this game was an oversimplified counterstroke against Objectivist ideals, which had the effect of putting Ayn Rand back in the public conscious, leading to a surge in the popularity of her books, which are the centerpiece of Objectivism.
Around the same time, the Republican Congress—which had overseen the biggest government in American history—finally collapsed due to corruption and rank incompetence, and the Bush administration found that most of his supporters were fair-weather friends who no longer wished to be associated with what they saw as a failed president. I smirk to this day at all those right-wingers who insist—insist!—that Bush was not a “true” conservative, seeing as how he was exactly a true conservative—a traditionalist ideologue who worked hard to preserve the existing social and economic order—and was supported as such in the first five years of his presidency. But of course nobody wants to admit that their ideology is a failure. It was not conservatism that had failed, the conservatives demanded: It was the Republicans who had failed conservatism!
Well, you can connect the dots fro mhere: Objectivism, which had always been popular among the corporate wing of the conservative movement, enjoyed a resurgence throughout the conservative movement, and all of these opinion articles and talking heads started cropping up in the media claiming that the Republican Party had lost power because it had strayed from the principles of capitalism and had instead embraced “statism”—a term used exclusively by right-wingers, to describe people like me who favor a strong central government and high public spending. This meme picked up steam as the economy broke down and the incoming Democrats chose to spend their way out of oblivion. The argument became that Republicans had become too much like Democrats, and that America’s political system had shut out the real conservatives entirely. Ayn Rand got even more play in the news, and a new fad sprang into being: the short-lived “Going Galt” movement, whereby prominent conservative industrialists urged one another to follow the lead of John Galt (from Rand’s book) and abandon society, and, in so doing, demonstrate that they were the real workers, the real earners, the real people who made society function, and that everyone else was just dead weight.
Not surprisingly, that little revolution never caught on, and Objectivism per se has crested as a media point of interest and has slowly been fading from the news. But the odyssey of conservatism continues. The factions of conservatism want to reform the Republican Party, or escape from it altogether, and the corporate conservatives are doing all that they can to win these fights and achieve dominance—or at least retain their considerable power under the previous order.
One outcome of their efforts has been the revival of the label of libertarianism among conservatives, which is why I have led you on this little contemporary political history walk. You may have noticed over the past two years or so that the number of people who identify themselves as Republican has gone way down. What are those people now calling themselves instead? A great many of them have flocked to the label of “libertarian.” Isn’t that neat! By their logic, it turns out that “true conservatism” is actually libertarianism.
You’ll have to forgive my eye rolling, since all of these newly awakened “libertarians” still monolithically vote Republican, and still believe in the principles of conservatism. All they did was change the title of their beliefs to something more palatable. They’ll be Republicans again as soon as that party’s fortunes are on the rise, but for now they’re bold, noble-minded independents who stand on principle and just want to get America back to its libertarian foundations. Ugh…
These people are not the ones who interest me. They’re opportunistic right-wingers: bitter capitalists, greedy corporatists, racists, rich snobs, and those who buy into the notion of small government without comprehending the implications of it—and often hold contradictory views on their preferred role of government!
Real libertarianism—the genuine article—is much more fascinating, and that’s what’s been in my mind lately. So, everything up to this point was simply my account of why the subject has been on my mind. How’s that for verbosity? Now I can finally get on to the actual subject of libertarianism…
Real libertarianism, in my view, is obsolete. I don’t mean that there aren’t people who still believe in it: I mean that it simply doesn’t work in a populous, prosperous, developed, and stable nation that has come to expect a certain material quality of life. Libertarians oppose a large, intrusive government, and yet what does such a thing consist of?
On one hand, there is the “large” aspect of it. Most of the size of government comes from the staffing required to operate the government’s numerous programs. The question is what would happen to America if we ended these programs. I looked hard for an authoritative list of all the government’s funding outlays, and the best I could find was this website, a private website whose information is several years out of date. If anyone has a better source, I’d like to see it for myself, but for the time being this list provides a good point of reference. You don’t have to read very far down the alphabetized list to see objectionable items—Item No. 8 is $41 million for abstinence education—but the vast majority of these items are conspicuous precisely because they are not objectionable. Can anyone really look at that list and object to the principle of most of these items? No doubt there are inefficiencies that result in money wastage, but that’s a very different argument than the one which contends these programs should most be canceled outright.
The thing about libertarians is that they can object, usually on the assumption that whatever purpose a government program serves is either extraneous or can be better performed by people and businesses acting on their own volition. The reality is that this is not true: Much of what the government does is not going to be done by private businesses who are constrained by the profit motive, or by individuals who are constrained by a lack of capital, and would be sorely missed if the government closed up shop. Some of what the government does would be undertaken by private interests, with results that would often be inconsistent or disturbing. It’s not a coincidence that the size of the government has expanded in conjunction with our quality of life. A massive contraction in government spending would result very quickly in breakdowns all across society, because our collective quality of life, and our stability as a nation, depends in large part on those very programs. Libertarians disagree, or would agree that our way of life depends on government as it exists now, but would disagree that our current way of life is beneficial to us as a society.
That last bit is a very troublesome problem indeed, because there are way too many people alive for us to revert to an earlier, lower quality of life, and espousing an anti-government ideology without accounting for this is a huge omission that cannot be similarly overlooked in practice.
What large government is not is some huge office building full of bureaucrats who take long lunch breaks and generate paperwork for a living. I know at least as many people who work “for the government” in some fashion as who work for the private sector, and what consistently stands out to me in these public servants is the importance of the work they do, the passion they have for their field, and, not unrelatedly in my opinion, their awareness as human beings and their respect for others. I know that my observations are anecdotal and therefore not as compelling as they could be with better empirical data, but I am satisfied to my own high standards that the legend of government being inherently and hugely more wasteful than the private sector is a myth, and that government’s size is a function of our progress as a society.
Don’t get me wrong: There is definitely waste; there is waste all throughout the continuum of human endeavor. But as for the argument that government is a much worse offender…I don’t buy it. I’ve seen more waste in the corporate sector than I have from the government, including hundreds of dollars spent by Qwest over a ten-day period to diagnose and repair a faulty phone jack that had disrupted my Internet connection. Actual repair time: less than ten minutes.
I think the efficiency of a program comes down to the program itself, the people who run it, and the people they have to interact with. I think that’s true in business, and true in the government.
Then, on the other hand, there is the “intrusive” aspect of a large government. To some extent, the intrusiveness is a byproduct of all those government-funded programs I mentioned—i.e., a byproduct of the size of government. Much of it, however, is completely distinct: Here we’re talking about government legislation imposing restrictions and controls on our behavior as individuals. This is a much more compelling issue for me than that of the size of government, because this side of the topic gets into some of my favorite questions about what people are likely to do on their own initiative, and what they need to do (or not do) in order for society to remain stable. Ideally, people would be all-knowing and would exercise flawless judgment, in which case would not need any laws, but of course we are not ideal and therefore we need laws in order for society to function. More than that: We also need these laws to be widely if not universally obeyed.
The reason this stuff is so compelling for me is because I’m one of those people who lives at the end of the bell curve: I’m responsible, knowledgeable, prudent, and considerate, to a degree that many people are not—closer to the ideal. I don’t need as many laws as the next person, and the laws that I do need are not necessarily the same as those needed by the next person. When I was younger, I didn’t fully understand just how easy some things are for me when compared to others, and so my visions of a better society used me as the basic civic unit. That, obviously, was not representative of reality. My earlier visions of better societies would therefore clearly have failed.
Much of my political philosophy since then has been devoted toward building a better image of how a better society would actually work. You may notice that I talk a lot about influencing children; that’s because I’ve reached the conclusion that full-scale reeducation of adults en masse is not viable in our present society, and that forcing behavior changes in adults would usually be counterproductive.
The vast majority of my common ground with libertarianism occurs here, in these questions of how to control people in order to produce a better society, because I generally prefer to allow people (adults, anyhow) to live freely, even if they choose to live poorly as a result of their freedom. I make many exceptions, such as my severe attitude toward opposing sexism, or, less ambiguously, my support for no-brainer controls like the seatbelt law, but on the whole I think it is healthier for a society not to micromanage its denizens’ behavior.
The specific areas of our concurrence—libertarianism and myself—are mostly limited to the social realm. I rapidly depart from the libertarians on issues like taxation and environmental stewardship, the former because of my view on the importance of government spending, and the latter because of the obvious environmental ruin that has occurred in the absence of strong government controls, which now threatens to become the most serious danger to civilization, and is already on the scale of an “extinction level event” with regard to life as a whole on this planet.
Bringing these two issues back together: There is plenty of room to argue legitimately over what government should be funding and what it shouldn’t. I would volunteer that there is nothing wrong with requiring a government program to demonstrate its effectiveness. Likewise, there is plenty of room to argue about how the government should be controlling our behavior. These debates are valid. The problem with libertarianism is that, valid though the debates may be, the libertarians are bound to lose most of them, because they insist that government should be as small as possible rather than as large as necessary, and most people disagree with the ultimate conclusions of that, especially as it pertains to our way of life: We’re all enamored of the idea of some pastoral utopia, which the libertarians are quick to associate with themselves, but the romance is a veneer and the history of our human tale presents itself readily when we ponder the possibility of regressing to an earlier state of civilization.
Is it possible for libertarianism to advocate moving forward? Yes, it is, and it does: Progress through private innovation and free enterprise. However, this vision lacks the supporting structure that would make it viable. We’ve only gotten to where we are through extensive government manipulation of the human equation. Even that is a remarkable accomplishment, and many people died to win the freedoms we have today. Libertarianism proposes erasing our greatest ally: a public entity, the government, which is theoretically accountable to us in a way that corporations and wealthy individuals are not: and replacing it with what amounts to good intentions. That doesn’t work.
That’s why I said libertarianism is obsolete. There could have been a time when it would have worked, but society today is too complicated to function under a small government. This complexity is what enables us to live as well as we do. We’re not willing to give that up, and so libertarianism has faded as practical ideology.
One of my favorite bits about the subject of libertarianism is how sincere most libertarians are. (The real ones, that is; not those fake libertarians.) Many of them came into their ideology as a result of their upbringing: They grew up on a farm, or reading Heinlein (or both!). They have witnessed a dysfunctional, crime-ridden city center. They’ve gone through the hell of getting a city or a county permit. They’ve had to stand in line at the Department of Licensing (or the Department of Motor Vehicles if you’re not a Washingtonian). They pay their taxes, yet they still drive over potholes in the road and sit in traffic jams on the freeway. There’s so much in our lives which points to government incompetence. It’s easy and understandable for people to look at this and conclude that government just doesn’t work well, and shouldn’t be trusted to lord over us.
It’s one of those many occasions when the simple answer is the wrong one.
33
General Discussion / Jews Are Taking Over the Compendium & Earth
« on: August 06, 2009, 12:54:00 am »
That’s right, The Mishpachah is running this town now, you foolish goyim! We already control the jewelry industry, the real estate industry, the entertainment industry, and the legal and medical professions. The housing bubble? That’s for calling us short. Your prescription drug costs? It’s all for useless sugar pills! Jon Stewart? You think he answers to America?! Ha hah! And your comfortable Levi Strauss jeans which hug your all-American bottom at this very moment? They’re JOO JEANS! That’s right: We’re all up ons. Soon we will complete the final piece of our takeover by silencing your conspiracy theorists and white supremacists, whose vocal naysaying we have inexplicably left untouched up to this point despite our having supreme global power over everything.
It is too late to run! Our hummus and couscous have already infiltrated your favorite dining establishments. Our pastrami sandwiches on rye have won the hearts and minds of your flabby American stomachs! Our gefilte fish have been held up at customs, but they plan to be across the border and in your private homes by Simchas Torah!
Don’t try to defeat us economically, because we have counted all the money and we know what you owe! Don’t try to defeat us scientifically, because it was we who squared the speed of light and we who created atomic weapons! Don’t try to defeat us by running us over with your cars, because we have ways of dealing with that! Don’t try to defeat us militarily, because every time anyone has ever tried that our ALMIGHTY ADONAI has slaughtered them, their families, their countries, and their country’s neighbors. And definitely don’t try to defeat us by tempting us with shellfish and pork products, because most of us secretly love the stuff!!
Your feeble popular music is no match for our colorful klezmer street bands and our utterly enthralling dance trance disco rhythms. Your pitiful boardgames and RPGs are no match for our world-spanning Military-Industrial-Dreidel Complex. You sail the seas; we split them in two. You buy food from the store; we make it fall from the sky. You use mountains for silly things like snowboarding and geocaching; we use them for receiving HOLY COMMANDMENTS and, if we’re lucky, for JEWBOARDING, which is like snowboarding, except it involves filet mignon, expensive automobiles, incredibly hot sex, Jacuzzis, fine wine, and lots of jewel-encrusted jewelry. Ever wonder why it’s called JEWelry? It’s because we’re the bloomin’ Michpacha, and don’t you forget it!
And let me be the first to
this topic. =D
It is too late to run! Our hummus and couscous have already infiltrated your favorite dining establishments. Our pastrami sandwiches on rye have won the hearts and minds of your flabby American stomachs! Our gefilte fish have been held up at customs, but they plan to be across the border and in your private homes by Simchas Torah!
Don’t try to defeat us economically, because we have counted all the money and we know what you owe! Don’t try to defeat us scientifically, because it was we who squared the speed of light and we who created atomic weapons! Don’t try to defeat us by running us over with your cars, because we have ways of dealing with that! Don’t try to defeat us militarily, because every time anyone has ever tried that our ALMIGHTY ADONAI has slaughtered them, their families, their countries, and their country’s neighbors. And definitely don’t try to defeat us by tempting us with shellfish and pork products, because most of us secretly love the stuff!!
Your feeble popular music is no match for our colorful klezmer street bands and our utterly enthralling dance trance disco rhythms. Your pitiful boardgames and RPGs are no match for our world-spanning Military-Industrial-Dreidel Complex. You sail the seas; we split them in two. You buy food from the store; we make it fall from the sky. You use mountains for silly things like snowboarding and geocaching; we use them for receiving HOLY COMMANDMENTS and, if we’re lucky, for JEWBOARDING, which is like snowboarding, except it involves filet mignon, expensive automobiles, incredibly hot sex, Jacuzzis, fine wine, and lots of jewel-encrusted jewelry. Ever wonder why it’s called JEWelry? It’s because we’re the bloomin’ Michpacha, and don’t you forget it!
We are The Mishpacha!
We run civilization!
Yeah we’re the Chosen Ones
Of all y’all other nations!
When you hear us chanting sh’ma,
You best reach for that kippah,
Or else it might get ugly. (Like yo’ ma!)
Todah. B’vakasha. Slichah.
We’re not asking much,
Just a trifle really,
And when you hear it said aloud
It almost sounds silly:
We don’t want your souls;
We wanna sell you bagels
For the low price of your firstborn child—
And we’ll add a sour dilly.
We inspired the Greeks!
We invented the Geeks!
We even gave you Saturday
To rest between weeks!
All we want in return
Is power and money,
And global domination
Chased with milk and honey.
Or we’ll foreclose on your houses!
And your cars and your spouses!
It’s in the Sidrei Mishnah
Under “Gentile Louses.”
Yeah the Cake was a lie,
But we’d taken off our Holy Hai
So everything’s still kosher
With the Man up above the sky.
Don’t look in that mezuzah.
It would only confuse ya.
But when you hear us chant the sh’ma
You’d better reach for that kippah!
‘Cause we’re The Mishpachah!
And, don’t you know, it’s a mitzvah
To chant the hella holy sh’ma?
Todah. B’vakasha. Slichah.
(And maybe afterwards the veahavta.)
(And the amida.)
(And an aliyah.)
(And then we’ll have oneg.)
(And nothing rhymes with oneg.)
(Maybe Walter Koenig?)
(Nah, he pronounces it wrong.)
(So it's the end of the song.)
We run civilization!
Yeah we’re the Chosen Ones
Of all y’all other nations!
When you hear us chanting sh’ma,
You best reach for that kippah,
Or else it might get ugly. (Like yo’ ma!)
Todah. B’vakasha. Slichah.
We’re not asking much,
Just a trifle really,
And when you hear it said aloud
It almost sounds silly:
We don’t want your souls;
We wanna sell you bagels
For the low price of your firstborn child—
And we’ll add a sour dilly.
We inspired the Greeks!
We invented the Geeks!
We even gave you Saturday
To rest between weeks!
All we want in return
Is power and money,
And global domination
Chased with milk and honey.
Or we’ll foreclose on your houses!
And your cars and your spouses!
It’s in the Sidrei Mishnah
Under “Gentile Louses.”
Yeah the Cake was a lie,
But we’d taken off our Holy Hai
So everything’s still kosher
With the Man up above the sky.
Don’t look in that mezuzah.
It would only confuse ya.
But when you hear us chant the sh’ma
You’d better reach for that kippah!
‘Cause we’re The Mishpachah!
And, don’t you know, it’s a mitzvah
To chant the hella holy sh’ma?
Todah. B’vakasha. Slichah.
(And maybe afterwards the veahavta.)
(And the amida.)
(And an aliyah.)
(And then we’ll have oneg.)
(And nothing rhymes with oneg.)
(Maybe Walter Koenig?)
(Nah, he pronounces it wrong.)
(So it's the end of the song.)
And let me be the first to
this topic. =D
34
Polling / Did You Like Radical Dreamers?
« on: June 23, 2009, 07:47:31 am »
I am very curious as to whether people who have played this obscure game actually enjoyed it. If you've played it, please please please fill out the poll and then come in here and offer some explanation as to why you liked it or didn't like it.
I'm curious because it's such a different game than Trigger and Cross, and I want to know whether people consider it a worthy Chrono game. For instance, would you prefer that future Chrono games from Square Enix took more cues from Radical Dreamer's darker, quieter tone and its more mature attitude? Or is that definitely something you'd be against?
All opinions are welcome, and please feel free to disagree with each other. I'm more interested in taking the pulse of the community than in identifying the majority opinion.
(Note: Mainly my poll refers to the primary scenario of Radical Dreamers: "Le Tresor Interdit." Some of the other scenarios were wildly different in tone, but they're not as central to my question.)
I'm curious because it's such a different game than Trigger and Cross, and I want to know whether people consider it a worthy Chrono game. For instance, would you prefer that future Chrono games from Square Enix took more cues from Radical Dreamer's darker, quieter tone and its more mature attitude? Or is that definitely something you'd be against?
All opinions are welcome, and please feel free to disagree with each other. I'm more interested in taking the pulse of the community than in identifying the majority opinion.
(Note: Mainly my poll refers to the primary scenario of Radical Dreamers: "Le Tresor Interdit." Some of the other scenarios were wildly different in tone, but they're not as central to my question.)
35
General Discussion / Does Anyone Play EVE?
« on: May 25, 2009, 07:50:38 pm »
I've been invited to join, but I'm notoriously selective with how I spend my time, and to be honest most of the game just doesn't look all that fun. But then someone linked me to the blog of a pirate group leader, who made the game sound like it might have some appeal after all.
I'm still skeptical, though. If you play it, what makes it fun for you? If you know anything about me, what do you think might make it fun for me?
I'm still skeptical, though. If you play it, what makes it fun for you? If you know anything about me, what do you think might make it fun for me?
36
General Discussion / The "Post Outrageous Stuff In Other Languages And Don't Translate It!" Thread!
« on: May 10, 2009, 11:46:23 pm »
I don't know how this topic can possibly be a good idea, but that's exactly what Einstein said before he won the Nobel Prize for zombie erotica, so I'll begin:
تتفوق الإناث على الذكور ، وإرادة الله ، وهذا هو السبب الذكور تمرير القوانين القمعية لتأمين السلطة الهشة. ما خائفة قليلا الأولاد.
That goes right to left, you infidels!
تتفوق الإناث على الذكور ، وإرادة الله ، وهذا هو السبب الذكور تمرير القوانين القمعية لتأمين السلطة الهشة. ما خائفة قليلا الأولاد.
That goes right to left, you infidels!
37
General Discussion / PAX 2009 -- A Compendium Posse?
« on: May 10, 2009, 03:01:25 pm »
Given the disproportionate number of Compendiumites who live in Washington, I think we should get together at PAX this year (September 4 - 6, Fri-Sun), at least for lunch, if nothing else. I've been trying to talk ZeaLitY into attending; he seems persuadable, but he'd be that much more likely to take the plunge if he knew there would be many of us going.
So, where do you stand?
Edit: Everything you need to know:
http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/
Registration (@ $50 for all three days):
http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/registration.php
So, where do you stand?
Edit: Everything you need to know:
http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/
Registration (@ $50 for all three days):
http://www.pennyarcadeexpo.com/registration.php
38
General Discussion / The Thread for Writers
« on: March 26, 2009, 08:01:02 pm »
I noticed in another thread that we have some writers in the crowd. That raises the questions of how many of you other Compendiumites are writers too. This thread is for you! What are you writing? What are you not writing? How long have you been writing? What are some of the things you have written? What kinds of writing do you like to do? And, of course, the most important question of all: Fountain Pen, or Quill with Inkwell? (Or, for you heretics, “computer keyboard.”)
I suppose I can go first. I'm protective of my work and loath to talk about it to a general audience, especially my big works, but, in the hopes that it would stir a hearty discussion and persuade others to open up their passions similarly, I'll be forthcoming:
I see stories everywhere. I love stories. If you were to ask me why, I still wouldn't be able to tell you entirely, even after all these years, but I can say that the great stories are my most prized possessions in all the world. That's probably why I am such an unrelenting critic on the matter: I hate to see their potential go to waste, and, let's face it, to waste is where most stories go.
Being a story seer is not the same thing as being a story teller. Nevertheless, because of that understandable human tendency to fixate on one's passions, I have told or wanted to tell many a story in my day. I've been a storyteller all my conscious life. My first stories were all imitative, and I took a great deal of inspiration from the children's books, films, and cartoons of the day. When some book, or show, or personal experience made an impact on me, I would feed it into my monstrously powerful imagination, and create story after story after story. Storytelling has always been my method of choice for considering matters of personal significance. Mostly it was just plain old fun, but my storytelling also served a more practical purpose for me on occasion: Whenever I got in big trouble, or had some other large frustration going on, I would typically daydream these huge, decisive speeches that would lay my tormentors on their faces and set all else aright.
I've been a writer for almost as long as I've been a storyteller, but that craft came into my life gradually. In earlier times I felt no need to “tell” stories. I was content to daydream them in real-time. Even today daydreaming is my favorite place to be, although I don't do it as often as I like. Oftentimes I'll steal a snippet here and there whenever my full concentration is not required. It's very impressive (to me) how well I can do that. Sometimes I'll be walking along completely automatically, until all of a sudden I'll “wake up” and realize that I'm in a completely different location and my walk is nearly over. Other times I'll just lie in bed and stare out into space. The shower is also a great place for daydreaming, since everything about washing up is completely familiar and easily automated. When I was a kid, my favorite place to daydream was on the swingset. It was with great dismay that I gave up swinging when I felt (at the preposterous age of twelve) that I was getting too old for it.
As I got older, I did more and more writing. At first it was still purely for myself—even the schoolwork. In grade school my writing assignments were regularly two, three, or sometimes ten times in length and scope over what was required. In fact in seventh grade I wrote a children's story for a class assignment which, by word count, was about fifty times longer than what the teacher had asked for. It was a story about a young boy who invented a flying potion to use at the school talent show, and the evil Mrs. Doomsday who was determined to stop him. Outside of school I wrote even more extensively, although all of my biggest projects had had their genesis as classroom assignments. At the age of twelve I wrote my first major story, a science fiction piece about ridiculously evil space aliens who plotted to take over the Earth by disguising one of themselves as a dog, whom my main character adopted. At the age of fourteen I wrote my first novel-length story, also a science fiction piece, about humanity's unfortunate first contact with another advanced civilization; and, while I didn't finish it, it became the longest work by far that I had written up to that point.
In my high school years, I experienced a literary explosion that saw me branching out in all possible aspects of my writing—motive, structure, format, the works! I wrote (and directed) two plays for my synagogue youth group, centering on the festive holiday of Purim, where such revelries are encouraged. The first play intermingled the Purim story with Star Trek and Star Wars; the second intermingled Purim with the tale of Robin Hood. The second one was truly inspired, and totally absurd. The main character was an evil king of evil who wanted to cut down the entire Sherwood Forest to construct his evil buildings of doom, and only the Jews stood in his (evil) way. I don't want to take too much credit, but the guy who played the king co-wrote the play with me had an incredibly good time with it and went on to earn his degree in drama. This play was also a musical, and one of my favorite parts was writing those songs with my co-writer. Everyone got to be in at least one song, including the evil king, who sang this little ditty himself:
I am King LeMar, King of Evil,
Lord of Villainy, Czar of Perfidy:
I hate everything that I see!
That doesn't mean that I need glasses;
It simply means I will control the masses.
Three cheers for King LeMar!
Let's hear it for King LeMar!
Let all the Earth rejoice in me,
Your King, King Lemar.
Believe it or not, that play represented a local high point in my storyteller's star. Around the same time, I also made my first major foray from my native prosaic stamping grounds into the elegant world of poetry, conceiving of an epic-style coming-of-age story about a boy who went with his male relatives to climb the imposing mountain near their village. I imposed on myself the technical challenge of never using the letter E—except for the villain's verses, where E was the only allowable vowel (although I gave in and exempted Y). That one never got finished, although I still mean to get back to it eventually.
It was also during this time that my writing evolved beyond mere imitation and became a vessel for my own ideas. Storytelling thus became a frontier for my very development as a person. Whatever might have been buzzing inside my brain at the time, invariably wound up flopping around on a page somewhere. That's still true today.
Almost simultaneously, and not at all coincidentally, it was around this time that I got serious about nonfiction, recognizing that the storytelling component of writing is separable from its more functional applications such as communication, debate, and personal development. I began writing letters, essays, philosophical works, satire, and introspective pieces. In fact, the volume of my nonfiction writing would eventually become considerably bigger than that of my fiction! (Although I hasten to point out that my heart has always remained with the stories.)
Toward the end of high school I got the kick into tomorrow that my burning ambitions had been building toward. I narrated an online “tabletop” RPG, engineless and totally freeform. With a core cast of seven people and many more on the fringe, this story lasted more than a year, reaching its successful conclusion by the time I was already in college. The story about a person who tried to take over the world and those who played some part in supporting or resisting him. It was set in a literary environment that deliberately rejected the Western norms of hero-villain story design. By this point I had grown thoroughly uninterested both in conventional moral systems and unrealistic literary clichés. This RPG was my personal exploration of many things very important to me, and was a proving ground for a great deal of my philosophy. That many other people contributed to it was seminal in my growth as both a person and a writer. Together we produced thousands of pages of story text. After the RPG ended, I began adapting it into a novel. I reworked the storyline and made countless alterations and improvements. This is my major work to date, and the novelization continues even after nine years. (Hey, I'm no Stephen King!)
In my college years I conceived of two other novel-class works of fiction. One of them was directly inspired by Chrono Trigger and involves my personal vision of time travel adventure. The other is a sci-fi mystery that focuses on a floating civilization's struggle to understand and resolve a crisis which threatens to wipe it out of existence. Due to my focus on other projects, and also because of my difficulty in general with actualizing large works, neither story is beyond rough outline form—although the second one has a couple hundred early pages written.
Also during college I tried my hand at screenwriting. I wrote two episode-length teleplays for The Simpsons, and several “shorts.” That was invaluable experience for me, but The Simpsons was decaying badly at that point and I shortly lost any ambitions of selling scripts to the show's producers—or even writing further scripts for my own pleasure. I was convinced that original work was the way to go.
More practically, I got a job as a columnist at my college paper, where I actually got money to write incoherent, self-important screeds which I collectively titled “The Voice of Reason.” I got a lot of stuff wrong in those days, but it served to increase my exposure to politics, and connected me with many people who had good insights to share. You can see an example of my better columns here.
Not a paying job was my gig as the fiction editor at my college's literary magazine, where I learned that many people who fancy themselves as writers honestly have no business writing. I did read one awesome story, though, which was the text version of a still life painting.
After college I began keeping my online journal, which was crucial as I worked my core philosophy into a more complete form, broadened my political thinking, and asserted my identity (all from the comforts of home!). Also in those days I attempted NaNoWriMo for the first time, and, while I did cross the 50,000 word finish line that first year, I hadn't finished my story—not even close. What I did have had been rushed, so that I didn't really have the ambition to make anything more out of it. Nevertheless I was pleased that, for such a slow-drip writer, I had been able to turn out such a large quantity of words in such a short time. My triumph was not to last, alas: My subsequent attempts at NaNoWriMo all failed. I have no excuse; I can only claim insanity.
Eventually, I began trying on the short story format. Short stories had always been a terribly unnatural gait for me. When it comes to fiction, I'm much more comfortable with longer work. Even as it is, most of my short stories are envisioned as novellas. I use the short story format to give air to plots, characters, and themes that don't get much play in my big endeavors.
More recently I have become more serious about writing music. So far, my skills remain primitive enough that my ability for expression is limited, but I have improved markedly over the past year and will soon be good enough to call myself an amateur. Ultimately, I would like to use music to tell stories just as I use writing. And it'd be a major feather in my cap to be able to say to myself, “Golly, I really want to listen to my song!”
I've also been hired by a startup company to do creative writing for a game that will hopefully, someday, see the light of day. After the school paper, this marks the second time in my life I've been able to get paid for my writing: a hopeful portent!
Now we arrive back at the present day, where I put it to you, fellow writers, to share something of yourselves here, and hopefully gain some enjoyment from so doing. I'll be quite disappointed if all I attract are a few drive-by mookings, or, worse, no replies at all. Hopefully the topic is open-ended enough that we can get an actual conversation going here. (Wouldn't that be novel!)
And for those of you worried about the famous Joshalonian Ire, don't be. For this thread, I've turned off my attack beams and am storing power.
Lastly, those of you who aren't writers can participate in this thread by using it as an opportunity to “Ask a Writer,” where I or (hopefully) any number of others will respond to all your queries and puzzlements.
I suppose I can go first. I'm protective of my work and loath to talk about it to a general audience, especially my big works, but, in the hopes that it would stir a hearty discussion and persuade others to open up their passions similarly, I'll be forthcoming:
I see stories everywhere. I love stories. If you were to ask me why, I still wouldn't be able to tell you entirely, even after all these years, but I can say that the great stories are my most prized possessions in all the world. That's probably why I am such an unrelenting critic on the matter: I hate to see their potential go to waste, and, let's face it, to waste is where most stories go.
Being a story seer is not the same thing as being a story teller. Nevertheless, because of that understandable human tendency to fixate on one's passions, I have told or wanted to tell many a story in my day. I've been a storyteller all my conscious life. My first stories were all imitative, and I took a great deal of inspiration from the children's books, films, and cartoons of the day. When some book, or show, or personal experience made an impact on me, I would feed it into my monstrously powerful imagination, and create story after story after story. Storytelling has always been my method of choice for considering matters of personal significance. Mostly it was just plain old fun, but my storytelling also served a more practical purpose for me on occasion: Whenever I got in big trouble, or had some other large frustration going on, I would typically daydream these huge, decisive speeches that would lay my tormentors on their faces and set all else aright.
I've been a writer for almost as long as I've been a storyteller, but that craft came into my life gradually. In earlier times I felt no need to “tell” stories. I was content to daydream them in real-time. Even today daydreaming is my favorite place to be, although I don't do it as often as I like. Oftentimes I'll steal a snippet here and there whenever my full concentration is not required. It's very impressive (to me) how well I can do that. Sometimes I'll be walking along completely automatically, until all of a sudden I'll “wake up” and realize that I'm in a completely different location and my walk is nearly over. Other times I'll just lie in bed and stare out into space. The shower is also a great place for daydreaming, since everything about washing up is completely familiar and easily automated. When I was a kid, my favorite place to daydream was on the swingset. It was with great dismay that I gave up swinging when I felt (at the preposterous age of twelve) that I was getting too old for it.
As I got older, I did more and more writing. At first it was still purely for myself—even the schoolwork. In grade school my writing assignments were regularly two, three, or sometimes ten times in length and scope over what was required. In fact in seventh grade I wrote a children's story for a class assignment which, by word count, was about fifty times longer than what the teacher had asked for. It was a story about a young boy who invented a flying potion to use at the school talent show, and the evil Mrs. Doomsday who was determined to stop him. Outside of school I wrote even more extensively, although all of my biggest projects had had their genesis as classroom assignments. At the age of twelve I wrote my first major story, a science fiction piece about ridiculously evil space aliens who plotted to take over the Earth by disguising one of themselves as a dog, whom my main character adopted. At the age of fourteen I wrote my first novel-length story, also a science fiction piece, about humanity's unfortunate first contact with another advanced civilization; and, while I didn't finish it, it became the longest work by far that I had written up to that point.
In my high school years, I experienced a literary explosion that saw me branching out in all possible aspects of my writing—motive, structure, format, the works! I wrote (and directed) two plays for my synagogue youth group, centering on the festive holiday of Purim, where such revelries are encouraged. The first play intermingled the Purim story with Star Trek and Star Wars; the second intermingled Purim with the tale of Robin Hood. The second one was truly inspired, and totally absurd. The main character was an evil king of evil who wanted to cut down the entire Sherwood Forest to construct his evil buildings of doom, and only the Jews stood in his (evil) way. I don't want to take too much credit, but the guy who played the king co-wrote the play with me had an incredibly good time with it and went on to earn his degree in drama. This play was also a musical, and one of my favorite parts was writing those songs with my co-writer. Everyone got to be in at least one song, including the evil king, who sang this little ditty himself:
I am King LeMar, King of Evil,
Lord of Villainy, Czar of Perfidy:
I hate everything that I see!
That doesn't mean that I need glasses;
It simply means I will control the masses.
Three cheers for King LeMar!
Let's hear it for King LeMar!
Let all the Earth rejoice in me,
Your King, King Lemar.
Believe it or not, that play represented a local high point in my storyteller's star. Around the same time, I also made my first major foray from my native prosaic stamping grounds into the elegant world of poetry, conceiving of an epic-style coming-of-age story about a boy who went with his male relatives to climb the imposing mountain near their village. I imposed on myself the technical challenge of never using the letter E—except for the villain's verses, where E was the only allowable vowel (although I gave in and exempted Y). That one never got finished, although I still mean to get back to it eventually.
It was also during this time that my writing evolved beyond mere imitation and became a vessel for my own ideas. Storytelling thus became a frontier for my very development as a person. Whatever might have been buzzing inside my brain at the time, invariably wound up flopping around on a page somewhere. That's still true today.
Almost simultaneously, and not at all coincidentally, it was around this time that I got serious about nonfiction, recognizing that the storytelling component of writing is separable from its more functional applications such as communication, debate, and personal development. I began writing letters, essays, philosophical works, satire, and introspective pieces. In fact, the volume of my nonfiction writing would eventually become considerably bigger than that of my fiction! (Although I hasten to point out that my heart has always remained with the stories.)
Toward the end of high school I got the kick into tomorrow that my burning ambitions had been building toward. I narrated an online “tabletop” RPG, engineless and totally freeform. With a core cast of seven people and many more on the fringe, this story lasted more than a year, reaching its successful conclusion by the time I was already in college. The story about a person who tried to take over the world and those who played some part in supporting or resisting him. It was set in a literary environment that deliberately rejected the Western norms of hero-villain story design. By this point I had grown thoroughly uninterested both in conventional moral systems and unrealistic literary clichés. This RPG was my personal exploration of many things very important to me, and was a proving ground for a great deal of my philosophy. That many other people contributed to it was seminal in my growth as both a person and a writer. Together we produced thousands of pages of story text. After the RPG ended, I began adapting it into a novel. I reworked the storyline and made countless alterations and improvements. This is my major work to date, and the novelization continues even after nine years. (Hey, I'm no Stephen King!)
In my college years I conceived of two other novel-class works of fiction. One of them was directly inspired by Chrono Trigger and involves my personal vision of time travel adventure. The other is a sci-fi mystery that focuses on a floating civilization's struggle to understand and resolve a crisis which threatens to wipe it out of existence. Due to my focus on other projects, and also because of my difficulty in general with actualizing large works, neither story is beyond rough outline form—although the second one has a couple hundred early pages written.
Also during college I tried my hand at screenwriting. I wrote two episode-length teleplays for The Simpsons, and several “shorts.” That was invaluable experience for me, but The Simpsons was decaying badly at that point and I shortly lost any ambitions of selling scripts to the show's producers—or even writing further scripts for my own pleasure. I was convinced that original work was the way to go.
More practically, I got a job as a columnist at my college paper, where I actually got money to write incoherent, self-important screeds which I collectively titled “The Voice of Reason.” I got a lot of stuff wrong in those days, but it served to increase my exposure to politics, and connected me with many people who had good insights to share. You can see an example of my better columns here.
Not a paying job was my gig as the fiction editor at my college's literary magazine, where I learned that many people who fancy themselves as writers honestly have no business writing. I did read one awesome story, though, which was the text version of a still life painting.
After college I began keeping my online journal, which was crucial as I worked my core philosophy into a more complete form, broadened my political thinking, and asserted my identity (all from the comforts of home!). Also in those days I attempted NaNoWriMo for the first time, and, while I did cross the 50,000 word finish line that first year, I hadn't finished my story—not even close. What I did have had been rushed, so that I didn't really have the ambition to make anything more out of it. Nevertheless I was pleased that, for such a slow-drip writer, I had been able to turn out such a large quantity of words in such a short time. My triumph was not to last, alas: My subsequent attempts at NaNoWriMo all failed. I have no excuse; I can only claim insanity.
Eventually, I began trying on the short story format. Short stories had always been a terribly unnatural gait for me. When it comes to fiction, I'm much more comfortable with longer work. Even as it is, most of my short stories are envisioned as novellas. I use the short story format to give air to plots, characters, and themes that don't get much play in my big endeavors.
More recently I have become more serious about writing music. So far, my skills remain primitive enough that my ability for expression is limited, but I have improved markedly over the past year and will soon be good enough to call myself an amateur. Ultimately, I would like to use music to tell stories just as I use writing. And it'd be a major feather in my cap to be able to say to myself, “Golly, I really want to listen to my song!”
I've also been hired by a startup company to do creative writing for a game that will hopefully, someday, see the light of day. After the school paper, this marks the second time in my life I've been able to get paid for my writing: a hopeful portent!
Now we arrive back at the present day, where I put it to you, fellow writers, to share something of yourselves here, and hopefully gain some enjoyment from so doing. I'll be quite disappointed if all I attract are a few drive-by mookings, or, worse, no replies at all. Hopefully the topic is open-ended enough that we can get an actual conversation going here. (Wouldn't that be novel!)
And for those of you worried about the famous Joshalonian Ire, don't be. For this thread, I've turned off my attack beams and am storing power.
Lastly, those of you who aren't writers can participate in this thread by using it as an opportunity to “Ask a Writer,” where I or (hopefully) any number of others will respond to all your queries and puzzlements.
39
Polling / Daylight Saving Time: A Different Kind of Chrono Poll
« on: March 08, 2009, 01:40:12 pm »
Today, is the first day of Daylight Saving Time in most of the US and many other places. As a freethinker and a lover of beauty, I very much favor daylight time and look forward to it during the winter months. I have a romantic appreciation for late sunsets, owing to my personal aesthetics of the universe. Likewise, I have a sense of adventure with late sunrises, which hearkens back to my days as a kid when our family vacation in the summer would begin before dawn. Simply put, I love daylight time and I wish it were kept year-round. Or better!
Now I learn that the UK is considering whether or not to impose a “double daylight” system—wherein daylight time is still used but the clock is permanently set one hour ahead. This, compared to a place with no daylight time, and accounting for time zone differences, the UK would be one hour ahead in the winter, and two hours in the summer.
I like this idea very much! I was a big supporter of the change in 2007 to extend it by one month, and every year I live in a secret fear that our government will decide to reduce or repeal daylight time. The thought of going even farther than making daylight saving time permanent tantalizes and arouses me. Surely if any country is wise enough to adopt such a policy, the UK could be that country. But, back here in America, if anyone could pull it off, it would be Barack Obama, so I am hopeful.
I don't care much about the traditional arguments in favor of daylight time. I support it for the reasons I listed above. But I also don't care what logic a government uses to justify daylight time. If they want to talk about saving oil, then they can go right ahead. I'm all for conserving energy. ^_^
Now I learn that the UK is considering whether or not to impose a “double daylight” system—wherein daylight time is still used but the clock is permanently set one hour ahead. This, compared to a place with no daylight time, and accounting for time zone differences, the UK would be one hour ahead in the winter, and two hours in the summer.
I like this idea very much! I was a big supporter of the change in 2007 to extend it by one month, and every year I live in a secret fear that our government will decide to reduce or repeal daylight time. The thought of going even farther than making daylight saving time permanent tantalizes and arouses me. Surely if any country is wise enough to adopt such a policy, the UK could be that country. But, back here in America, if anyone could pull it off, it would be Barack Obama, so I am hopeful.
I don't care much about the traditional arguments in favor of daylight time. I support it for the reasons I listed above. But I also don't care what logic a government uses to justify daylight time. If they want to talk about saving oil, then they can go right ahead. I'm all for conserving energy. ^_^
40
General Discussion / A Life Lesson For You
« on: March 06, 2009, 01:50:11 pm »
So, I don't really post here very seriously anymore. The community got too young and the arguments got too old. But I've been back “in town” recently as a beta tester for Crimson Echoes, and now it has occurred to me that I have an insight which may actually be of some use to the younger crowd here. It's not even controversial. But it is serious.
Many of you are not active in politics. You're cynical of the flaws and corruption in our system, or you're just plain not interested. As a result, you may tend to be put off or even angered by people like feminists and environmentalists and gay rights activists, who take their causes pretty seriously and tend to get in other people's faces about it. If you're one who doesn't have that kind of passion for politics, you may well feel resentful toward those who do.
I am comfortable generalizing that most of you take society for granted and don't realize it. I am also comfortable generalizing that most of you think you are more aware than you actually are. In time, you will realize this for yourselves. Today I want to tell you something that I hope will give you a better perspective with which to think about why people get involved in politics and social issues. It's very simple, and I hope you remember it for always:
If this society is pleasantly moderate, and comfortable to live in, it is because of the passion of extremists. Only those with extreme views have the perspective to push society in one direction or another. Your way of life was created by radicals who were rebelling against a more primitive, barbaric society than the one you and I live in today. The women's rights movement, the civil rights movement for blacks, the organized labor movement...they were made up of some pretty rough people, and those were pretty rough times in our history. It used to be the comfortable, mainstream opinion that women and blacks were lesser beings and deserved to be treated as such. When people began fighting to change that, it got on everyone's nerves. That turned out to be a good thing.
In your daily life, when you see someone arguing about a social issue, and you think to yourself that they're getting too serious about it, or that their opinion is too extreme, and if you look at them dismissively or resentfully and think to yourself that society is just fine the way it is and that there's no point for these people to be so rude and crass and radical about their activism, I hope you will stop and consider for a moment that your attitude is exactly the way most people in a society have always felt when confronted with a movement for social change. The way progress happens is that a few agitators make a whole bunch of people uncomfortable enough that the rules of society change. It's not a pleasant experience, not for the agitators and not for the ordinary citizens and bystanders. But it has to be like this, because our society has a long way to go before we could ever call it “perfect.” You may not realize the injustices and evils which still exist today, but other people do, and they are fighting to change things for the better. And there's a good chance it'll get on your nerves from time to time.
Now, not every radical is pushing a cause that is in your interest. That's why it's important to be involved in politics. But everything that is in your interest was achieved by yesterday's radicals. Everything you take for granted, was once the battlefield of a social upheaval. Food for thought.
Many of you are not active in politics. You're cynical of the flaws and corruption in our system, or you're just plain not interested. As a result, you may tend to be put off or even angered by people like feminists and environmentalists and gay rights activists, who take their causes pretty seriously and tend to get in other people's faces about it. If you're one who doesn't have that kind of passion for politics, you may well feel resentful toward those who do.
I am comfortable generalizing that most of you take society for granted and don't realize it. I am also comfortable generalizing that most of you think you are more aware than you actually are. In time, you will realize this for yourselves. Today I want to tell you something that I hope will give you a better perspective with which to think about why people get involved in politics and social issues. It's very simple, and I hope you remember it for always:
If this society is pleasantly moderate, and comfortable to live in, it is because of the passion of extremists. Only those with extreme views have the perspective to push society in one direction or another. Your way of life was created by radicals who were rebelling against a more primitive, barbaric society than the one you and I live in today. The women's rights movement, the civil rights movement for blacks, the organized labor movement...they were made up of some pretty rough people, and those were pretty rough times in our history. It used to be the comfortable, mainstream opinion that women and blacks were lesser beings and deserved to be treated as such. When people began fighting to change that, it got on everyone's nerves. That turned out to be a good thing.
In your daily life, when you see someone arguing about a social issue, and you think to yourself that they're getting too serious about it, or that their opinion is too extreme, and if you look at them dismissively or resentfully and think to yourself that society is just fine the way it is and that there's no point for these people to be so rude and crass and radical about their activism, I hope you will stop and consider for a moment that your attitude is exactly the way most people in a society have always felt when confronted with a movement for social change. The way progress happens is that a few agitators make a whole bunch of people uncomfortable enough that the rules of society change. It's not a pleasant experience, not for the agitators and not for the ordinary citizens and bystanders. But it has to be like this, because our society has a long way to go before we could ever call it “perfect.” You may not realize the injustices and evils which still exist today, but other people do, and they are fighting to change things for the better. And there's a good chance it'll get on your nerves from time to time.
Now, not every radical is pushing a cause that is in your interest. That's why it's important to be involved in politics. But everything that is in your interest was achieved by yesterday's radicals. Everything you take for granted, was once the battlefield of a social upheaval. Food for thought.
41
General Discussion / Please Do Watch
« on: May 01, 2008, 04:21:05 am »
I suspect a number of you may be familiar with James Burke and his three Connections series. For those of you who are not, please do watch.
They go best in order, and if you're not sold on the first episode--which is very different from the ones that follow--reserve judgment until you've seen the second. If you're not sold on the second episode, then so be it...although I would plead that you watch the third and the fourth just to be sure.
"Amazing" is not quite the word to describe Burke's work, but it is amazing anyway. Draw your own conclusions.
They go best in order, and if you're not sold on the first episode--which is very different from the ones that follow--reserve judgment until you've seen the second. If you're not sold on the second episode, then so be it...although I would plead that you watch the third and the fourth just to be sure.
"Amazing" is not quite the word to describe Burke's work, but it is amazing anyway. Draw your own conclusions.
42
Welcome / Birthday / Seeya! Forum / Seeya!
« on: September 13, 2007, 02:16:37 am »
Fun times were had, and now I wish you all farewell. Be nice.
43
General Discussion / Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007)
« on: September 06, 2007, 03:31:57 am »
Farewell! You left the world a better place. You obstinate, imperious prima donna! We love you!
We'll miss you.
We'll miss you.
44
General Discussion / What Is A Geek?
« on: September 01, 2007, 05:57:46 am »
I'm writing an essay on this. Not for a grade; just for personal development. I'm at the point where I want to solicit other people's views. Does anybody care to share their thoughts on what a geek is? Short definitions are fine, but I'd really like to see some of the underlying support and reasoning.
45
General Discussion / On Deism
« on: August 23, 2007, 10:08:44 am »
So!
Anybody subscribe to this general theistic point of view?
Anybody subscribe to this general theistic point of view?