It won't surprise long-time readers to learn that I approve of Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchant's Association, which struck down California's ban on the sale of violent videogames to minors.  The opinion is more or less mandated by United States v. Stevens, another case we cheered.

So I won't dwell (other than to applaud it briefly) on the majority's holding that minors do have First Amendment rights, nor on the cynicism of California's attempt to end-run the First Amendment by claiming that all speech may be regulated in the name of protecting children.

I want to dwell on the concurring opinion of Justice Samuel Alito, which shows the danger posed by statutes such as California's Violent Videogame Act, and of judges who believe their opinions as art critics ought to be the law of the land.  This passage:

It is certainly true, as the Court notes, that “ ‘[l]iterature, when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.’ ”  Ante, at 11 (quoting American Amusement Machine Assn. v. Kendrick, 244 F. 3d 572, 577 (CA7 2001)).  But only an extraordinarily imaginative reader who reads a description of a killing in a literary work will experience that event as vividly as he might if he played the role of the killer in a video game. To take an example, think of a person who reads thepassage in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolni- kov  kills the old pawn broker with an  axe.  See F. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment 78 (Modern Library ed. 1950).  Compare that reader with a video-game player who creates an avatar that bears his own image; who sees a realistic image of the victim and the scene of the killing in high definition and in three dimensions; who is forced to decide whether or not to kill  the victim and decides to do so; who then pretends to grasp an axe, to raise it above the head of the victim, and then to bring it down; who hearsthe thud of the axe hitting her head and her cry of pain;who sees her split skull and feels the sensation of blood onhis face and hands.  For most people, the two experiences will not be the same.

illustrates the problem perfectly.

For those who haven't read it, spoilers follow:

Continue Reading »

As longtime readers know, we dabble in alternate history. Well, I do.  Ken's a political science major who thinks history began in 1968. But it's all wanking, as much as the long title of this post.

Still, for those who delight in this sort of wanking as much as I, here's a nifty, if deeply flawed, "counterfactual" of the Second World War with an utterly implausible (yet plausible to Hitler) thesis:

Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland’s armies had joined with Germany’s, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared.

Implausible for three reasons: First, it assumes that the Poles would, or could, have caved in to the Nazis, becoming a giant Finland as Hitler wished.  For those who appreciate such things, here's an old Polish joke that isn't derogatory to the noble people of Poland:

Q: A Polish soldier is confronted by a German soldier approaching from the west, and a Russian soldier approaching from the east. Which does he shoot first?

A: The German. Duty before pleasure.

Second, the larger work, which speaks of ways Hitler could have won the war, is flawed because it ignores its central character: Hitler. Hitler was no more capable of doing the "right" thing in war than he was of doing the "right" thing in politics.  A Hitler who could have sat back and let the Prussian General Staff dictate the course of the war to him would never have propelled the National Socialists to power in the first place, nor held power for six years before war, nor have scared the Russians so badly they'd made a deal to give Hitler a free hand, and cheap oil and minerals, while he dealt with France.

Third, the larger work ignores the singular character of Churchill, in his way as odd a man, and every bit as exceptional, as Hitler:

If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war.

"Absent Churchill" is a tall order, in that the man was on the scene.  Removing Churchill takes us from the realm of alternate history into "what if Stonewall Jackson had survived Chancellorsville?" territory: not alternate history, but The Man In The High Castle, or Doctor Who prevents the creation of the Daleks level science fiction.

Still, for those who care, this is some fantastic semi-science fictional wanking.

Via Angus, who in an alternate reality co-blogs with the Governor of North Carolina.

(Hey, I voted for his co-blogger, even if no one else did.)

1) I have read and enjoyed George R. R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire.

2) I hate and despise my fellow man.

3) It logically follows that this made me smile.

This morning I'm very sorry to see news of the passing of Joel Rosenberg — husband and father, author, gun policy expert, and activist.

As a youngster, I thoroughly enjoyed Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series. As a writer at Popehat, I grew to appreciate a frequent commenter who went by the handle Jdog — and I was delighted to discover that it was Joel. Later, I came to admire his activism on gun rights issues and his willingness to stand up against the ethos that the rules for citizens are whatever some upjumped government lackey thinks they should be. From interchanges with him after Patrick wrote about his case here, I found that he was as delightful a correspondent as he was an author.

He leaves us too soon. My thoughts are with his family.

FRODO BAGGINS: savior of Middle Earth, or just another war criminal?

IN THE MAIL: Why Cats Paint.

MARKDOWNS ON HUGO AWARD WINNING SCIENCE FICTION. I recently looked over the full list of Hugo Award novels. I'd read less than a third,  but I'm remedying that.  Having just crossed this one off the list, I can recommend it highly.

I have resisted what amounts to a dare by Patrick to geek out in front you all over the progress of the HBO series Game of Thrones, which has had two episodes now. Suffice it to say: I am rereading the series (in my iPad this time) in preparation for the 5th book in July, I am faithfully watching and enjoying the series, I am attempting to keep my dear wife (Happy Anniversary, dear) interested in it, and I am using it to think about the necessary differences between art forms. But I am reserving the more effusive geekery to other locales, so as not to embarrass Patrick. It's really the least I can do.

That said: one of the great things about this series of tubes is its ability to deliver to us not only pure geekery in its unrefined form, but geek fusion, in which different types of geekery are combined in new and exciting ways. In that spirit, via the man himself, I give you The Inn at the Crossroads, a blog that documents attempts to re-create both medieval and modern versions of the foods described in GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire series.

I am so making the hot spiced wine this weekend.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination: A graphic history of fantasy and science fiction, from the unknown poet behind Beowulf to Vernor Vinge and beyond.

I can't do this justice by describing it, and I won't steal it for reproduction here. Just click the link.

Meaning Popehat.

I can't speak for any of the other authors (remember Brian, our resident Obamican? I don't either), but for myself I've been going through rather grueling work, combined with a worse-than-usual case of seasonal affective disorder, combined with a mid-life crisis, combined with a family medical situation that demands personal attention.  Although Popehat is a very fulfilling entertainment, my involvement here is a Thing Of Mood.

It'll get better.

Anyway, I did want to share three things, in no particular order:

John Scalzi's Old Man's War is coming to the silver screen. An entirely derivative tribute to the genius 1970s novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (which was itself a perverse love letter to Robert A. Heinlein), Old Man's War was still perhaps the most entertaining science fiction novel of the past decade.  Wolfgang Petersen, who directed Das Boot before going on to mediocre American movies, is at the helm.  Here's hoping Petersen has one great work left in him, because this story will make a dynamite movie in the right hands.

I've been playing a lot of Vindictus in my free time.  Emphasis on "free". Most free-to-play games illustrate the engineer's dictate "Fast, cheap, right: Pick any two."  They're either bug-filled nightmares, disguised spyware, or tedious grindfests.  You can play Vindictus in twenty minute sessions.  It's a mildly persistent world with fully persistent characters.  It combines depth of play with an action-packed interactive combat system.  It's fun as all get out, and it doesn't leave any unsightly residue on your hard drive.

But my Vindictus time may stall tomorrow, now that I'm getting my life back, and Rift is making its debut.  I've messed with the beta for Rift since December, and the game has grown on me.  Even in beta I found it more entertaining than World of Warcraft, and I think it has the depth to last me until Guild Wars 2 releases, sometime in the next century.

I'll have a full review of Rift, when I'm in the mood.

Uproar about a publisher's plan to release versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer that don't include the words "Nigger" and "Injun".

I must confess that this passage baffles me.

Neither the expletives nor things like the graphic details of the “horses head” scene or the brief sex scene between Michael Corleone and his first wife Appolonia are essential elements of the story that Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are trying to tell in The Godfather. These items can be removed or modified for airing on broadcast television without taking away from the central themes of the story. This is not the case with either Sawyer or Finn, both books are set in a time period when racial tensions were a central part of life and are based, to a large degree, on the racially prejudices that Twain himself encountered as a child growing up in Missouri. This is especially true of Huckleberry Finn where, despite the fact that “the n-word” appears 219 times, it’s fairly obvious that Twain is condemning racial prejudice and that one of the central themes of the book is the process by which Huck discovers that the things he’d been taught by society by blacks were wrong, and that his companion him was, in fact, an heroic figure.

On the contrary, the "horse's head" scene is absolutely essential to a proper viewing of The Godfather, as it graphically conveys to the audience, early on and following a jovial family wedding, that Don Corleone's enviable family life, and Family, are built on a willingness and capacity to kill and to maim, and not just to kill and maim fellow criminals, but the innocent as well.

Khartoum (the horse) is a stand-in for every innocent person ever harmed by the Family.  I cannot think of a more succinct way to convey that in one shot than to show the bloody head of a horse, the innocent, at the feet of Jack Woltz, the guilty.  The horse's head teaches us at the beginning of the film that Don Corleone has arrogated the power of God.  He is willing to punish those who are without sin, as in Noah's flood where all of the children in the world were drowned, in order to reach those who deserve his vengeance.

The horse's head is art, essential to one of the greatest films ever made.

And yet, like Doug Mataconis, I still wouldn't show it on primetime network televison.

So some parents want their precocious children, the readers, to read one of the great American novels, and at an early age, but they don't want their kids exposed to the word "nigger," as Doug points out, two hundred nineteen times.

It is fairly obvious, at the close of Huckleberry Finn, that Mark Twain is against racial  prejudice.  I still wouldn't want to have the talk with my sister if I were to give my niece a copy of Huck Finn, in its original form, about why my niece had begun shouting the N-word at strangers.  And, like Doug, I'm white.

Which brings us round to Injun Joe.  Injun Joe is a murderer and a thief.  Is there some hidden message of racial brotherhood in the story of Injun Joe?  Or is Doug saying, implicitly, that the Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not great art, so it's ok to bowdlerize it.

Fortunately I don't have to care.  If I want to give my niece the story of Injun Joe in all his child-terrorizing, widow-murdering, gold-thieving glory, I can, subject to her mom's approval.  And other uncles and parents can give their kids the version that doesn't include a word that they'd rather not explain at the age of eight.

It isn't as though the original versions will be pulled from the market.

As Halloween is upon us, I thought I'd share this wisdom, which has kept me alive in a world teeming with serial killers, aliens that aren't interested in bringing peace to mankind, backwoods cannibals, and corpses that hunger for the flesh of the living:

1. If the sign says, "Last gas for sixty miles," it's time to buy gas.
2. Better still, turn around.  Drive to the station where the sign says, "Next to last gas for seventy miles".
3. Historic anniversaries divisible by five are overrated. If a tragedy occurred ten years ago at the house on Maple Street, mark your calendar to visit on the eleventh anniversary.
4. The psychiatrist is not your friend.
5. If it sleeps an ancient slumber, don't wake it up.
6. Don't go into the cellar.
7. Don't get into the shower.
8. Don't climb up to the attic.
9. If you have to climb up to the attic, don't enter head first.
10. I don't care how hungry you are: If a stranger offers you food, don't eat it.
11. Bullets cannot stop it.
12. Unless they're made of silver.  Good luck finding that in nine millimeter.
13. Unless bullets can stop it.  In that case, aim for the head.
14. Large black dogs are nothing but trouble.
15. Charming, urbane, vaguely European men of wealth and education are nothing but trouble.
16. Pale beautiful women with wide eyes are nothing but trouble.
17. "Do not call up that which you cannot put down."
18. If you hear a solitary bassoon playing but you're not in a concert hall, stop what you're doing immediately.  Walk out of the building slowly, get into your car, drive to the 7/11 and buy a Slurpee.  Nothing ever happens at 7/11.
19. When you meet a small, precocious child, beat it to death with a hammer.  Just in case.
20. Rural vacations in mountain cabins are overrated.  Miami is warm this time of year.
21. If science teaches us anything, it's that there are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.
22. Old, dusty books are dusty for a reason. Who are you to open them up and disturb the dust?
23. It's better to build a new house than to buy an old one. New construction keeps the economy strong.
24. But do a thorough title search on the land where you build the new house.  Just in case.
25. "Don't look back.  Something might be gaining on you."

Keep these lessons in mind, and you might live to be as old as I am.

Update: LabRat's list is better than mine: "Avoid cornfields and apple orchards at all costs."

We have a reader submission this week, and it's a doozy! This could very well waste your entire long weekend.  Andrew turned me on to Seventh Sense – Lone Wolf. It's an online version of the Lone Wolf choose your own adventure books of my childhood.

If you don't remember Lone Wolf, the idea of the books was to take a standard choose your own adventure & add random combat. Some pages would cause you to fight monsters or gain items or cast spells. It required some mild record keeping, and cheating was rampant ("why yes, I do still have that fireball spell!") They (and the earlier (?) Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were a revelation to me. Much better than the vanilla choose your own adventures.

This download has almost 20 books you can play. It may be the most dangerous Friday Time Waster ever. You have been warned. Thanks again Andrew! And feel to recommend Friday Time Wasters in the Hat's Forum.

Raise your child bilingual, but pick the right second language:

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction.

By 7 years old, a child who speaks the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr knows north from south from east from west, wherever he is, every moment of his life.  Because he uses these terms to describe the relations of objects to other objects.  He doesn't refer to his left hand.  He refers to his north hand, or his east hand, which could be either hand depending on which way he's facing.

While we don't know what languages the people who originally settled Australia and Polynesia spoke, a tongue like Guugu Yimithirr would be a positive boon to people migrating from Asia to, say, New Guinea, or even in stages to Hawaii.

On the other hand, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, literally, don't know left from right.  And of course epic feats of navigation have been undertaken by relatively primitive people, like the Vikings, whose languages didn't require them to develop a built-in compass.

What I quoted above is just a tidbit from a longer article by Guy Deutscher, whose book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," will be published this month.  The article is well worth your time, and I look forward to the book.

The Diary of Anne Frank is being reimagined, as a sex book for teenaged girls.

Sharon Dogar, who specialises in novels for teenagers, has written a book of fictional diaries of Peter van Pels, Anne's close friend who lived in the same building while she was hiding in Amsterdam.

The diaries, which are to be published in the autumn, include graphic accounts of Peter’s desire for Anne and intimate scenes between the two.

I've always thought that the one thing The Diary of Anne Frank lacks is a handsome romantic lead.  Ideally, in Dogar's reimagining, Peter Van Pels will turn out to be a vampire, a Jewish vampire, born at the time of Christ.  In fact, Peter, before his claiming for the children of darkness, will have had had a smoldering love affair with Judas Iscariot 2000 years ago.  Long passages in the new diary will tell of Peter's rapturous love with the doomed Judas, who is misunderstood.  In fact, Judas, a handsome, brooding presence looming over all of The Diary of Anne Frank, due to his forbidden love with Mary Magdalene, attempted to buy off Christ's executioners with thirty pieces of silver.  And so, before claiming Anne himself for a life of tragic but ever blossoming immortality, Peter explains to Anne that the entire Holocaust is founded on a lie.  The Jews, of whom Peter's mortal lover Judas was the chief, attempted to save Christ from the wicked Pontius Pilate, and have been persecuted ever since.  Especially dark, magnetic, tender yet murderous Jews like Peter Van Pels and his new bride of darkness, Anne Frank, who leave Amsterdam reborn, for Berlin.  There, the two lovers brush aside the SS and the Wehrmacht, to seize the mad Adolf Hitler.  Before draining every drop of Hitler's life essence, in the sight of his sultry mistress Eva Braun, the vampires Frank and Van Pels inform him of their immortal lives and loves, and that his entire career has been a mistake.  Hitler, drained of the precious blood but denied the vampire's gift of an immortal unlife of eternal desire, dies in an ecstasy of the blood haze, crying, "Forgive me!"  Then the two damned lovers, Van Pels and Frank, escape to a ship bound for Buenos Aires, and then to New York, where they haunt the nightclubs and the dinner parties of the high and the beautiful in an eternal unlife of longing and lust.

That's exactly what Anne Frank needs.

But I'm not the man to write it.  Nor for that matter is Sharon Dogar the woman to write it.  Anne Frank has had enough.  She was forced into hiding, murdered before her time, and transformed from a human being into a symbol.  Now she's been transformed into a piece of postmodern teen masturbation fantasy.  The only difference between Anne Frank and Mister Spock is that Frank's erotic fan fiction will be assigned a slightly higher place in the literary canon.

But if some outraged librarian wants to ban it, I won't complain.