The Historical Verisimilitude of Orcs

Oh, hai. Remember thing I said about David French? About how he had written the dumbest thing on the Internet? I take it back. Vox Day now holds the honor.

I picture Vox Day crying hysterically as he explains why he is not allowing girls into his He-Man Woman-Haters club. I mean, he may not have actually been crying hysterically, but I’m pretty sure he was crying and possibly crapping his pants. And it’s just funnier to imagine it that way. Try it!

I am a game designer. I am designing and producing a game that does not, and will not, have a single female character in it. This is not because I am misogynistic. This is not because I do not [want] women to play the game. This is because putting women in the game makes no sense, violates the principle of the suspension of disbelief, and will not make the game any better as a game.

There’s pretty much nothing about the Vox Day treatise that is not 1000% awesome, but this is my favorite part!!!!!:

I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.

Well, this makes perfect sense, because, on a daily basis, I run into many more orcs and trolls than I do women. What I take issue with is the idea that any given man is one orc-sighting away from transforming into Leonidas from “300.”

This is the “every man has an inner badass and one tango with a troll will unleash it” writ large. And I hate that I’m having to disabuse people of this idea again. But here goes: YOU ARE NOT A BADASS. It is not remotely realistic that you would make a good gladiator. 99.9% of men would fare POORLY in the ring. YOU ARE NOT A BADASS. YOU ARE NOT A BADASS. YOU ARE NOT A BADASS. You are just an ordinary person, living out your pathetic fantasies through a video game because you’re not BADASS enough to live them in real life.

Also, I had no idea that orcs reproduced asexually, but I’ve never read “Lord of the Rings.”

How should we think and talk about large, complex, internally riven institutions?

This is a prologue to some further thoughts and observations in the coming days/weeks. Consider the accuracy of the following two statements, in light of this and this:

1) The Catholic Church considers the use of contraception to be a flagrant violation of God’s designs and plans for human sexual flourishing; it is sinful and impermissible for practicing Catholics.

2)  The Catholic Church accepts the use of birth control as a normal and necessary part of life, but for a variety of historical and cultural reasons,  politely tolerates and indulges the habit of some members of their internal hierarchy (who, notably, have no families or sex lives of their own to manage) making claims like (1).

Obviously, how one assesses the relative truth value of these statements will depend a great deal on the background theory/approach to institutions one is currently using (which we could classify, broadly, as ‘formal’ in the first case and ‘sociological’ in the second). Also obviously, I think, each of these ways of thinking about institutions is likely appropriate for some purposes. But which ones? When–and for what purposes–should we consider institutions in these two senses? For the purposes of most political discussions and issues, we seem to tend to prefer approaches that leads us to statements like (1). When the White house announced the rule for insurance contraception coverage two years ago, they did something interesting: in citing the Guttmacher study linked above’s finding that 98% of sexually active Catholic women use contraception at some point in their lives (which led to various Catholics hilariously but erroneously attempting to claim this was erroneous read of the study; as if getting that number down to 89% would have been some sort of notable epistemic victory) they seemed to be gesturing toward a different approach to institutions; the one that might lead to conclusions more along the lines of statement (2) above.

A question only a lawyer would think to ask

Are televised college sports news programs or commercial events?

The NCAA’s legal theory, as put forth at the summary judgment hearing in the O’Bannon class action suit today, is that college football and basketball games are news events, rather than commercial events. Commercial events, NCAA lead counsel Lionel Hutz argued, charge people for admission, and license their exclusive broadcast rights to individual television networks, while news events . . .

And In Today’s Important News

If constitutional monarchy is good for anything, surely Marie-Philip Poulin will have been declared the Prime Minister of Canada before the end of the evening.

Also, for Americans inclined to ride the waaaaaambulance, well, it’s certainly true that warning or no warning to call the slashing penalty in overtime “tickey-tack” would be an insult to ticks and tacks, and it also seemed to be a make-up call based on the always-idiotic theory that if officials make some effort to enforce the rules they’re “deciding the game.” However, nonetheless let us not forget 1)the hip-check by the lineseman that nearly gave the U.S. an empty-net goal, 2)the failure by the comprehensively inept referee to call a penalty shot in overtime on what was a clean breakaway from the defensive blueline, and 3)the call only happened because American team (which in general played superbly) blew a 2-0 lead with less than 4 minutes left in regulation.

I also note that despite the outcome “momentum” is completely meaningless — the U.S. came out on fire in overtime, and without several huge saves by Szabados the game would have ended quickly.

Good Riddance, Chained CPI

Obama has gone from nominally supporting Social Security cuts attached to conditions that ensured they couldn’t pass to explicitly not supporting them, and good.

This comments thread is now particularly entertaining reading if you’re a connoisseur of very high arrogance-to-knowledge ratios.

Was LBJ Worse Than Bush, Nixon, Clinton, And Reagan? (Spoiler: No.)

We cocky Jacobin secular liberals are used to Damon Linker’s moderately culturally conservative concern trolling by now. I must say, however, that this is a twist I didn’t expect:

The competition for worst president since the early 1930s is pretty fierce. But for my money, Lyndon B. Johnson comes in first, winning the contest of awfulness over George W. Bush by a hair.

Wow. Obviously, Vietnam is a major black mark, but even if foreign policy was the sole criterion for evaluating presidents it’s hard to see how this could make Johnson worse than Bush, given that Iraq was just as much a fiasco but wasn’t already underway when Bush took office. But what about Johnson’s immense achievements in domestic policy? Let’s leave aside the question of what legislation Bush signed that can compare to the two most important pieces of Civil Rights legislation ever passed by the United States Congress — although we really shouldn’t! — and focus solely on the Great Society’s poverty programs. First of all, LBJ allegedly misused the BULLY PULPIT:

The same dynamic prevailed in Johnson’s case for the creation of a “Great Society,” made in a speech delivered in Michigan on May 22, 1964. Living on the far side of Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical attacks on big government, Bill Clinton’s pragmatic triangulation, and Barack Obama’s decision to reform health care using a proposal first floated by a right-wing think tank,

Apropos of nothing in particular the “ACA was a Republican plan” lie! (Remember this when the list of LBJ’s domestic achievements leaves out Medicaid altogether.) To be clear, I don’t think this was at all intentional, but if someone was writing a post specifically to bait me I’m not sure they could have done better. Suggest that Richard Russell should have run for president in 1964 giving voters a superior alternative, maybe. Anyway, back to the argument:

Johnson’s bizarrely inflated rhetoric cannot help but sound like the transcript from an alien political world.

I find the rhetoric admirable myself, but I’m the first to say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Why should economic progressives not see Great Society legislation as a substantial achievement? Here is the evidence in its entirety:

When it comes to the social welfare programs that Johnson signed into law in order to prosecute the war on poverty and realize the Great Society, they were a decidedly mixed bag. Some, like Medicare, have proven popular and enduring. Others, like the anti-poverty programs wrapped up with the Office of Economic Opportunity, were far less effective, and ended up being dismantled during the conservative resurgence they helped to inspire.

So, the evidence that the Great Society’s antipoverty programs didn’t work is that…conservatives (including the presidents Linker prefers to LBJ) wanted to dismantle them? What seems much more relevant is that the legislation LBJ signed substantially reduced poverty, progress that was stalled or reversed by the policies favored by the presidents Linker prefers to LBJ. Also note our old friend the countermobilization myth in its purest form: if liberals win major policy victories this might produce conservative opposition, so…liberals should preemptively avoid winning?

In his recent paean to Christopher Lasch’s (quite terrible) final book, Linker resists calling the combination of cultural conservatism (“[b]ut for the working class, life in post-sexual-revolution America can be far bleaker”) and skepticism towards economic reform reflected in his belief that LBJ is the worst president of the last 70 years he seems to favor “conservatism” because it’s not identical to contemporary Republican laissez-faire. Well, the label is unimportant, and Linker can choose how he wishes to describe himself. But whatever you want to call his political vision, I think I speak for most progressives when I say that it’s normatively unattractive as well as empirically deficient in many respects.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism

This commercial is getting heavy rotation during the Olympics coverage. Its social theory is that Americans live in multimillion dollar houses because they work harder than the latte-sipping denizens of various European welfare states.

Yes it’s “only” a car commercial. (I can practically see the smirk on Don Draper’s face).

The Bad Incentives of Wingnut Welfare

You may remember Naomi Schaefer Riley from such self-refuting arguments as “African-American studies is a completely worthless field; for my evidence, allow me to re-type some titles of dissertations I haven’t read.” Well, on the wingnut welfare circuit no argument is bad enough to prevent anyone from sharing her non-expertise in various fields for as long as she wishes, although you might (or might not!) lose your gig at a publication with some interest in actual journalism. So now she’s back with an argument that combines two particularly well-worn forms of reactionary pseudo-intellectualism: “why buy the milk when you can get the cow etc.” sexist ev-psych nonsense and “everything I know about the world I learned as a C+ student in Economics 101″ nonsense.

Openly heterosexual running back may prove to be locker room distraction

Per this summons, Baltimore Ravens’ star running back Ray Rice hit his girlfriend so hard that he knocked her unconscious. (She allegedly hit him first, so she’s also being charged with assault).

A video of the aftermath of what appears to have been a very one-sided altercation: