United Also Breaks Guitars.

I try to avoid point-and-laugh articles but recent circumstances have tempted me to take the easy path, and given my distaste for United, I willingly jumped in and wallowed in it.

The problem here has a couple of aspects.  First: the whole antiquated overbooking phenomenon.  In what other venue can you buy a product, pay for it, and be denied it?  If you buy a flat screen TV and walk it out to your car, Walmart can't come up to you and take it back because they also sold it to someone else.  Maybe a better analogy is sports.  People will buy a season ticket to see their favorite team and not go to the game.  Either way, there's a finite number of seats that need to be sold for a certain date.  If the buyer doesn't show up nobody else gets that seat.  They don't sell the seat to two buyers and figure "we'll deal with it if they both show up".  If you don't go, you forfeit your seat.  Why isn't airplane seat the same? Why would they overbook in the first place?  Today, they have computerized systems tracking demand for seats that tell them on a flight-by-flight, seat-by-seat basis what the demand is and adjusting the prices moment by moment.   Sell the number of seats on the plane and then stop.   

The other aspect is that in the name of airline safety we've made the airlines immune to prosecution for this sort of insanity.  It's a violation of federal law to disobey the orders of the flight crew.  And that's totally ignoring TSA, Air Marshals and the rest of the security kabuki.  In the air, that has a certain sense to it.  Airplanes have a restricted set of conditions they can fly in (their "envelope"), and someone has to be in command.  If the pilot tells the passengers to do something, they'd generally better do it.  On the ground, overbooking the flight and telling some passengers they have to get off the airplane or they'll be bodily subdued and taken off that airplane is seriously wrong.

Yeah. "Three times is enemy action" is as much a statement about the presence of systemic failures as anything else. I have known people who work at the airlines, and no human organization is perfect, but various things I've heard and seen have led me to the position of taking any other carrier when possible. Not two weeks ago we had stupid petty decisions about leggings, and now this.

My biggest beef with them is not that they make mistakes - see my previous comment about "no organization is perfect" - it's that it's not the first time they've  done something this monumentally stupid, and past experiences show an arrogance about it, as if their employees feel no need to make up for United's cock-ups, or make good on them for their clients.

A particularly hilarious example from a while back (that actually ended up on CNN) - and worth watching even if you hate country music:

There's also a followup though at 2 million views instead of the 16 million the above video had.

Anger Leads to Hate

Vox Day notes that he's the subject of an article at the Black Gate that calls him a neo-nazi. He's more than adequately capable of defending himself, and certainly has a horde of minions that are capable of assisting him.

No, I actually want to address two other things she wrote, two underlying assumptions that show both her complete inability to understand the world, and how little self-awareness she has.

Right now, we don’t need a Jedi Master to tell us that fear leads to anger, anger to hate, and hate to suffering

It's possible that Yoda, as a character, had one bit of actual wisdom to pass on - and given how badly he fucked up in the prequel trilogy, it's certainly arguable he was anything but wise -  but this is not one of them*.

If you look at the seven deadly sins, you'll notice that many of them are rooted in things that are not only virtues, but necessary to survival. Gluttony? If you don't eat, you starve. While you can argue the paradox of the sandpile as to exactly where anger becomes wrath, every one of the seven deadly sins is something normal dialed up "to eleven" through obsessiveness.

A little bit of "pride" in one's handiwork is fine when tempered by humility, but this one, called by some the greatest of sins as it usually leads to the others, was the downfall of Walter White in "Breaking Bad."

Anger is a normal reaction to a perceived injustice against oneself. Wrath is the inability to let go, obsessing over it. It doesn't matter if it's after discovering that the perceived wrong was only that, perceived, or tearing down the rest of your life to avenge a small matter. Letting go is not necessarily forgiveness, but to everything, there is a season, and there is far more to life than pridefully, narcissistically, harboring anger and stoking it.

Then comes the main thrust.

For the past few years, the Sad and Rabid Puppies – guided by an actual neo-Nazi – have campaigned against what they perceive as the recent politicization of SFF as a genre, as though it’s humanly possible to write a story involving people that doesn’t have a political dimension; as though “political narrative” means “I disagreed with the premise or content, which makes it Wrong” and not “a narrative which contains and was written by people.”

What pisses me off about this, and to a degree about that stupid Yoda quote, are that they are bullshit. Not blatant lies, but something that almost sounds like truth, like something profound, but misleads. In the second case it is because of what I've come to call "but I was just".

For example. "But I was just telling him to move over". Oh, really? If that was all you were doing, then you could have said "Excuse me, can you move over?" and left it at that. The three sentences after that, the insults, and so forth? No, you were not "just".

Let's break it down.

as though it’s humanly possible to write a story involving people that doesn’t have a political dimension

Leaving aside the assumptions of making the personal political, no-one - not Vox, not Larry, not Sarah, not Kate the Impaler, not John C Wright, have made any claim that having politics or a viewpoint is an inherently bad thing. For that matter, they would almost certainly agree with this statement, as written, in plain english. It's a reasonable sounding statement.

The devil of course, is in the details. "a political dimension" in SJW-speak means explicitly checklisting story, characters, etc. based on how they adhere to the shibboleths of the day rather than reading the story first to see if the people, characters, etc. make sense and draw you in. If you're tempted to take their denials at face value, you don't have to dig far to find articles at Tor.com and other places on how one or another commenter doesn't ever want to read books with a default binary gender, or anything by straight white men.

It's motte and bailey. They make politics primary while pretending that all they want is the reasonable position of being able to express their viewpoints - which no-one actually disagrees with. Larry, Vox, Sarah, John, etc. have all spilled enough pixels on the subject.

Of course, by conflating the reasonable with their actual position as demonstrated by their behavior, they then turn around and paint those who oppose their actual behavior as horrible, unreasonable monsters: white supremacists, neo nazis, etc.

Like I said in the intro - Vox can defend himself. What angers me here is the pure bullshit on display to facilitate the lie and the attack.

That is all for now.

* The one I'll agree with is "Do, or do not, there is no try".

Art and Communication

Over at Return of Kings there's an outstanding article on why modern art is so uninspiring. It digs into several sources, notably Tom Wolfe:

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, “to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.” I read it again. It didn’t say “something helpful” or “enriching” or even “extremely valuable.” No, the word was crucial.

In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.

Go read it.

I believe I've brought it up before but it bears repeating: I am reminded of a scene from a Baen book I read a while back - Guns of Two Space - where attending a party on earth, one of the crew goes off on the "artists" present.

Skill and craft were addressed, notably the lack thereof in many works - and I agree that more detail/work isn't always emblematic of craft (note the story of Giotto drawing a perfect circle to demonstrate his skill as an artist).

The point of "you just don't get it" - also brought up in the post - was also addressed.

Basically, if part of what art is supposed to do is communicate, that accusation is an admission that the art is FAILING to communicate, except to the very few who study all the theorems needed to unlock it.

Kids may not get all the subtexts of a bugs bunny cartoon, but they're still going to enjoy Bugs and Elmer having it out to the strains of Barber of Seville....

"No Evidence..." and Other Bullshit

First - I was wrong. I wrote that I "have yet to hear insistence that Islam had nothing to do with it." - and I hadn't - but only because I didn't dig further into the official statements by Cuomo, de Blasio, etc. We're getting responses like:

Bomb experts will analyze the device and how it was made, according to CNN senior law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes.

"It could be somebody that has grievance against the US military, possibly the Marine Corps specifically, and have nothing to do with an overseas-inspired attack like ISIS. So it still could be terrorism without being international, without being al Qaeda or ISIS or another affiliated group."

Even better, de Blasio:

During a press conference, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said that there is no evidence that the explosion in Manhattan had any terror connection

Similar statements are being made, that it's not certain it was terrorism, etc.

And it's all bullshit.

I get it, if we don't know, we don't fucking know, but then the only four words we have to say are "we don't know yet". Meanwhile, there's also no evidence it was white supremacists, the Amish Sepratist Front, or Leprechauns, but there damn well is reason to believe it had something to do with Islam.

Look, one major tell someone is bullshitting you is when they use a lot more words than are needed. They're trying to hide something, talk around something, misdirect you from something, but more importantly, obscure something like a needle in a haystack and distance you from what they're saying (it's George Carlin, worth watching). Yes, we geeks are often accused of overspeaking when trying to be precise, and very smart people of "using big words to show off" - but there is a difference, in cadence, in feel when someone is bullshitting you (Aside - the Harry Frankfurt book "On Bullshit" is worth reading, and he also has an online essay).

In the above cases we get handed a bunch of words that are - sometimes only in the barest technicality (what counts as "evidence"?) - true, but intended to sell you a lie, minimize the problem, make you believe a falsehood.

I've been told "But they don't know for sure so they can't say it was terrorism" - much like the news is trying to slam Trump for saying "bombing" before the official statement was made.  Again - bullshit. if they don't know, those are the only three words they have to say. Every extra word in those statements, especially prepared ones, has a purpose - so look, again, at what they're minimizing.

And how did Trump "know" it was a bombing? How did we figure it wasn't a radicalized Mennonite?