2012-06-21:

Ana, your essay makes me think of an example where POC helping out the White Hero was done right... and why is Robert E. Howard always turning out to be my go-to author for such examples?

In the Soloman Kane story "Red Shadows", Kane first meets N'Longa, a elderly African shaman who has been taken prisoner by a usurping evil chieftain who has also captured Kane. N'Longa get Kane to promise to help him since the two of them have the same enemies, and then frees both of them. Kane helps as promised, and after that, the two become friends. No "life debt" crap, just "the enemy of my enemy may be my ally," and later, "this guy is actually honorable, unlike most of the white slavers and outlaws I see, so maybe worth staying friends with". In later stories, N'Longa is a friend of Kane's, whom Kane sometimes turns to when he has a supernatural problem in Africa--though not always, because Kane is very ambivalent about N'Longa's "black magic", even if the guy is a friend--and N'Longa in his turn sometimes manipulates Kane into being N'Longa's catspaw in cleaning up certain supernatural messes. ("Hills of the Dead" comes to mind.)

Yes, N'Longa is literally a Magical Negro; however, he's not there to help the White Hero accomplish his White Hero goals. As written, N'Longa acts as if the White Hero is there to help N'Longa accomplish his aims.

2018-10-23:

The problem I have is that the "Exodus didn't happen because ancient Israelites came out of the Canaanite hills" argument seems to require the ancient Israelites to have appeared ex nihilo in those hills, with no previous existence. That really doesn't work. Highlands are nomad shepherd country, and the nomad shepherds of the ANE wandered all over the place, from the dry hinterlands of Sumer all the way to the dry hinterlands of Egypt. Maybe the hills of Israel is where they finally settled down and took up mixed herding and farming and viniculture.

Why does everyone ignore the documented Hyksos invasion and explusion when saying "there's no evidence, none whatsoever, that the Hebrews were ever in Egypt, lalalalala I can't see that part in Josephus where he explicitly identifies the Hyksos with the tribes in Exodus, lalalalala"

Even the Bible says that Abraham's people were originally nomads out of Ur (The Sumerian one? The Mitanni one? who knows, still one of the great river cities). From what we know of Mesopotamian cultures, there's a very long tradition of desert nomads (bedu) ranching sheep in the hinterlands, trading with the cities, and sometimes banding together and sacking weak cities. Or conquering them in really bad times. I see Abraham's people as one of those bedu tribes, and wouldn't be surprised if their culture was Canaanite-adjacent.

Bedu tribes drifting into Egypt during times of drought and famine is also documented in ancient Egyptian history. They were considered a nuisance on a good day, when the kingdom was strong, and a dangerous threat in bad times, when the kingdom(s) were weak. So this known circulation of peoples gets the precursors of the Hebrews, the tribes of Abraham, into Egypt. They settle for generations in the Delta, become powerful, mix culturally and religiously (the Hyksos brought quite a bit of Canaanite culture with them), until a Pharoah of the Theban Upper Kingdom decides to re-unite the Two Lands under himself. The "Shepherd-Kings" of the Lower Kingdom, the Hyksos, don't agree with this plan, but eventually lose out. War captives are enslaved as usual. The Theban nobility have no interest in sharing power with the Hyksos...

However they end up back in Canaan, by this point the people of Abraham have a mix of Canaanite and Egyptian culture, which is something we see in the Exodus and Deuteronomy accounts. The Ark is in the style of an Egyptian portable shrine, and the original tent shrine is laid out in the fashion of an Egyptian temple, not a Canaanite one. Settling in the hills of Canaan, they acquired (or re-acquired) their neighbor's culture; the great temple of Solomon is of Canaanite style, not Egyptian.

2019-11-12:

Abortions have steadily dropped over the years as affordable contraceptives have become more available. Guess where the rate of abortions goes back up? In places where contraception is restricted, unaffordable, or outright illegal.

Abortions for medical reasons will continue to be necessary, and the anti-choice position of "let the mother die rather than have a medically-necessary abortion" is one of the truly evil results of the Church's war on women's choice. Any church that takes that position and/or forces hospitals they own to follow such a policy is guilty of murder and firmly in the hands of Satan, not God.

Stop trying to tie women's hands to choose when they want children, and abortions will decline, because women who don't want children for whatever reason will use contraception, and women who want children won't. Women who don't get pregnant in the first place don't have abortions.

2019-11-18:

Someone totally misunderstood Heinlein, who invented that metaphor. Heinlein was talking about people capable of doing violence, and that not all of them are or have to be "wolves"--violent predators. The better path is that of the "sheepdog", the one who can use violence to protect those who aren't violent.

What Heinlein didn't quite get is something that another old scifi author, James Schmitz, did: all humans are feral, untamed. All humans are capable of violence if sufficiently provoked. There are no sheep, just fluffy lazy sheepdogs who haven't been annoyed (and lazy wolves who haven't had a rabbit run past). Even avowed pacifists are capable of violence, they just choose not to use violence.
(Louis L'Amour was fond of pointing that out outside his stories, too--a lot of those 'peaceful townsfolk' in the REAL Old West included Civil War veterans who took a dim view of fools shooting up the town and robbing the local bank).

2019-11-22:

Critical Race Theory and intersectionality aren't ideologies, they're sociology theories and terms. It's like calling "quantum mechanics" a "political ideology". Bwuh?

"Radical feminism", which is to say, the intolerant extremists in feminism whose views are remarkably congruent with the religious right except that "straight white male" is replaced with "lesbian white woman" in the power hierarchy (both groups hate transgender people, bisexuals, queer POCs, "pornography", women who don't perform gender correctly, and freedom of speech), is used by the religious right to demonize all feminism the way ISIS and the Taliban get used to demonize all of Islam.

2019-11-20:

You know what I loathe about this asinine censorbot? It takes away my freedom of speech. I am not free to write in my native language as I intend--with or without consequences. I don't get to choose the consequences of my speech. I am forced not to write certain words, for no obvious reason. I am being trained to be inoffensive, to never be emphatic or angry, to always use euphemisms, because I have no other choice. I stand convicted by the pre-crime unit of using language, and therefore cannot be allowed to use it freely, because apparently one wrong word will end the world in flames.

And Fred keeps using this dystopian garbage-forum, so he must support and endorse it. Fred, you are a contemptible hypocrite; you write about the anti-Christian theology and behavior of the religious right, while tacitly supporting an even more insidious form of oppression. I am losing all respect for you and your opinions.

2019-11-30:

I remember my mother, who knew some Russian emigres, telling me what they told her about Russian attitudes. Soviet Russians were very bigoted, with a definite social hierarchy--"Great Russians" (natives of the original Russia) were at the top, while White Russians (natives of Belarus) were considered almost as good, while all the other ethnicities in the rest of the Soviet Union were considered a bunch of barbarians and were second-class citizens at best. People outside the Soviet Union were, of course, beneath contempt. Except maybe for East Germans, who were respected and feared. The Soviets never forgot the carnage of WWII, and feared the possibility of the Germanies reuniting.

2019-12-17:

Problem with Evangelicalism is it's Every-Man-For-Himself with NO institutional memory or experience, just Spontaneous Individualism. A Gospel of Personal Salvation and ONLY Personal Salvation, everything else Is All Gonna Burn. And since they have no institutional experience, they keep reinventing the wheel over and over. I remember Evangelicals arguing theological points that the historic churches made a decision on CENTURIES ago, repeating the Same Old Mistakes that the RCC settled when years AD had three digits. If you're always Reinventing the Wheel (or returning to the Altar Call), how can you ever grow beyond that?

I've noticed that. And the atheists who came out of Evangelicalism tend to assume that the Evangelical level of theology is all Christianity has, and argue their "gotcha" points against Evangelical theology, while those of us who are familiar with older theologies are like, "You know the Catholic Church and the Jewish Rabbis both came up with comprehensive answers to that over a millenia ago, right?"

2019-12-16:

For me, it was a powerful scene about consent, and doing things to people "for their own good", and the appropriate response to people who condescendingly decide that consent doesn't matter if they "know better". Illidan chose every step of his path, and became what he is by his choices and suffering and descent into evil and recovery. His running theme through the expansion (once he's actually back and not dead from being an old raid boss) is that there is no relying on divinely-appointed fate or special destiny to defeat evil, just us working together to defeat the powers of evil.

"Our destiny was never in fate's hands".

Also, if you're not familiar with the game context, the light being that was trying to remake Illidan was the Prime Naaru Xe'ra, the next best thing to an archangel in the Warcraft universe (and worshipped as the closest thing to gods the draenei have).

2019-12-28:

That's where the DM invokes the magic of tabletop games and does what MMORPGs and videogame RPGs cannot: "My world, my history, my rules. You rooted out the ‮evals‬ trade in the Duchy, made the legal and political changes to make it stick, there is no ‮evals‬ trade in the Duchy. OTOH, those ‮selohssa‬ over the border are coming here and raiding your farmers to sell over the border, you might want to do something about that... You also realize that it's potentially an act of war. How do you want to handle this?"

Seriously, I'm still trying to figure out how to rewrite the Forgotten Realms history, because our Time of Troubles didn't follow the plan AT ALL. None of the future trouble Cyric causes will happen, because Cyric isn't a god. Nothing Fzoul Chembryl would do as Chosen of Waffling matters, because he's perma-dead. Ditto for Elminister. Bane ain't coming back, either, because an older and more experienced god of evil has stepped into that portfolio and is making sure that the Baneson has a fatal and permanent accident. Etc, etc, etc. And I can do that, because it's our campaign, not TSR/WOTC/Hasbro's.

2020-01-18:

In my youth, the "Ancient Astronauts" thing was really, really big--"Von" Daniken was at the height of his notority, his books were bestsellers, as were Berlitz's "Bermuda Triangle" and Pyramid Power, and New Age Woo-woo in general. People really wanted to believe maybe-benevolent aliens were out there, helping us, or something (the other interpretation of what ancient aliens were all about gave us the movie Stargate).

For me, it lost its luster not just from the debunkings of individual sites and items, but from the realization that the central thesis of Ancient Astronauts was that our ancestors--no, Those People's ancestors!--were too stupid to pile one rock on top of another in the simplest known configuration for creating tall structures. Oh look, racism was the true core mystery. What a surprise.