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Is this farce, satire, or getting too close for comfort? There are certainly people out there who seem to think this way, and more than a few of them are in government.

If you’re a fan of Strong Bad, I imagine you’ve already heard about this, but just in case you haven’t…

If you haven’t heard of Strong Bad, that’s okay. Feel free to check it out anyway, if you like, or just go on with your lives, Citizens! Nothing to see here!

EDIT: It’s not over when it looks over. Keep watching.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just sit down, think really, really hard for a few minutes, and poof, we’re completely changed? We all have things about ourselves we would like to change. And sometimes, in spite of our best sustained efforts, it seems as though we’re not making any progress at all–or backsliding even.

One of the problems with life is that life, no matter how quickly it passes, still moves slowly. Even when we do manage to change, that change can come so slowly we don’t even see it. We just see that we still struggle, likely having forgotten that there may be one thing we no longer struggle with, or at least struggle less with.

Glacial change is still change. And often the change wrought by glaciers are quite significant. Just last week I learned that our favorite canyon for hiking was carved by a glacier. I’ve hiked perhaps a quarter of that canyon. It’s huge! You couldn’t really call it a small change. Slow change? Certainly! But not small by any means. It just might have looked that way when spread out over years, decades, centuries, perhaps even millenia.

I suppose, then, that I need to be patient with myself. The changes I have to undergo to be who I want to be are not small. They’re likely going to take a lot of energy to accomplish, like the energy of a massive chunk of ice scraping out a canyon. That kind of energy, applied all at once, destroys more often than it shapes. So I suppose if given the choice between slow glaciation and quick, catastrophic force, I’ll go with the glacier.

Now there’s a motto for self-motiviation: Go with the Glacier!

I was going to finish out the week with something light and non-controversial, but then I read a rather lengthy, but entirely worthwhile post by Scott Alexander (hat tip Instapundit) that engaged my mind and left me feeling uneasy–as it intended, and as it should. While not entirely dispassionate, it is one of the most fair-minded, most well-reasoned essays I’ve read in…I don’t know how long.

It’s really difficult to do this article justice short of quoting the whole darn thing, but I hope I can find a couple citations sufficient to entice you to invest the time to read it through, because it’s that good.

Yeah, I just skimmed it again, and it’s darn impossible to cover the best points without covering the other really good points without covering the awesome points, etc. So instead I’ll just give you part of the hook:

After some thought I agree with Chesterton’s point. There are a lot of people who say “I forgive you” when they mean “No harm done”, and a lot of people who say “That was unforgiveable” when they mean “That was genuinely really bad”. Whether or not forgiveness is right is a complicated topic I do not want to get in here. But since forgiveness is generally considered a virtue, and one that many want credit for having, I think it’s fair to say you only earn the right to call yourself ‘forgiving’ if you forgive things that genuinely hurt you.

To borrow Chesterton’s example, if you think divorce is a-ok, then you don’t get to “forgive” people their divorces, you merely ignore them. Someone who thinks divorce is abhorrent can “forgive” divorce. You can forgive theft, or murder, or tax evasion, or something you find abhorrent.

I mean, from a utilitarian point of view, you are still doing the correct action of not giving people grief because they’re a divorcee. You can have all the Utility Points you want. All I’m saying is that if you “forgive” something you don’t care about, you don’t earn any Virtue Points.

(by way of illustration: a billionaire who gives $100 to charity gets as many Utility Points as an impoverished pensioner who donates the same amount, but the latter gets a lot more Virtue Points)

Tolerance is definitely considered a virtue, but it suffers the same sort of dimished expectations forgiveness does.

The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Tolerance Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”

Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.

The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why not.

Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”

The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”

And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”

II.

If I had to define “tolerance” it would be something like “respect and kindness toward members of an outgroup”.

And today we have an almost unprecedented situation.

We have a lot of people – like the Emperor – boasting of being able to tolerate everyone from every outgroup they can imagine, loving the outgroup, writing long paeans to how great the outgroup is, staying up at night fretting that somebody else might not like the outgroup enough.

And we have those same people absolutely ripping into their in-groups – straight, white, male, hetero, cis, American, whatever – talking day in and day out to anyone who will listen about how terrible their in-group is, how it is responsible for all evils, how something needs to be done about it, how they’re ashamed to be associated with it at all.

This is really surprising. It’s a total reversal of everything we know about human psychology up to this point. No one did any genetic engineering. No one passed out weird glowing pills in the public schools. And yet suddenly we get an entire group of people who conspicuous love their outgroups, the outer the better, and gain status by talking about how terrible their own groups are.

What is going on here?

Alexander then goes on to explain what he believes is going on.

Read the whole thing, please. But do read the whole thing. Anything less and you miss the best point of all, in which the author engages in sufficient self-awareness that he catches himself in his own arguments, thus lending all the more weight to them. I can’t help but like this guy, and I do hope Diogenes finds his way to his door.

Update: After reading some of the comments on the link posted at Instapundit I have to shake my head at how well so many prove his thesis while completely missing it themselves. His intent was to help us recognize our intolerance and encourage us to become more tolerant, not to justify any particular ideology.

I’m currently listening to The Legend of Drizzt: Collected Stories, by R.A. Salvatore and narrated by quite a list of celebrities. The list includes Felicia Day, Dan Harmon, Greg Grunberg, Tom Felton, Danny Pudi, Sean Astin, Melissa Rauch, Ice-T, Wil Wheaton, Al Yankovic, Michael Chiklis, and David Duchovny. I only recognize maybe two-thirds of the names here, but Binging for pictures suggests I’ve seen nearly all of them somewhere before.

What is perhaps most interesting about this collection, besides the stories themselves (but I won’t review those here), is the evidence that just because someone can deliver lines convincingly as an actor does mean they are good narrators. None of them do a bad job, necessarily, but there’s a definite difference between a good reader and a good narrator. In many cases they sound like they are reading aloud. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just reading aloud can be tricky enough. Odd phrasings can trip you up, and sometimes writers craft sentences that are simply too long to be delivered smoothly and still breathe. As someone who reads aloud to his kids regularly, I know how tough it can be.

But the best narrators not only know how to read the lines smoothly, but endow the words with life beyond their mere meanings. In short, some readers sound like they’re reading the story to you. But some make it seems as though they are telling you the story. The very best make the stories come alive, while completely disappearing from the telling. Sean Astin and Wil Wheaton, for example, are quite excellent narrators. Nothing about their voices pulls you out of the story, either from stumbles with the language (no small task in reading fantasy) or from simply sounding too much like themselves. They inflect their words well, and you get pulled into the story and forget entirely that it’s being read to you.

Most of the books I listen to are read by skilled narrators, so it’s easy to take for granted that everyone who lends their voice to an audiobook will be able to do as well. I have nothing against any of the less-than-skilled readers in this group, but they offer clear evidence that narrating audiobooks is not an easy skill. I now appreciate all the more the talents of narrators like Oliver Wyman, Kate Redding, Michael Kramer, Nick Podehl, and some of the other audiobook regulars.

I’m not finished with the set yet–I’m listening to Wil Wheaton currently, and if you’re expecting “Wesley Crusher’s Story Hour”, think again; Wheaton’s perfomance ranks up there with some of the best. How he manages to do the lich-king and a black dragon without losing his voice for a week I have no idea. I admit to being highly curious how Al Yankovic will do, and whether David Duchovney will manage to not sound like David Duchovney reading abook. Ice-T was an interesting choice–one I’m glad they made. He does a credible job, though his pronouncing the ‘w’ in sword grated, and he effectively challenges what dialects we as accustomed to in our audiobook narration.

It’s a fun set of stories and, while the constantly-changing readers makes it also a interesting study in audiobook narration, I find I’m enjoying the shorter forms after a long stretch of lengthy novels that spin out over days or weeks rather than minutes. But the different readers also give me some ideas as a writer. The stories are all by the same writer, but each reader approaches them so differently I can see how it could be useful to have several different people read your work to you so that you begin to see how well the cadence of your writer fits in other people’s minds and mouths.

But most importantly, it makes quite clear that the difference between a good audiobook and a great one is the narrator. As a writer, you’re putting your words in the hands–and mouth–of someone else who can either make you sound better than you are, or worse. When the time comes for me to select a narrator I intend to choose carefully.

I saw someone’s meme-post on Facebook last night that made me think. Not in the way they wanted, however. They were trying to be funny, but I wasn’t laughing. The picture was of the back of Benedict Cumberbatch, with a caption stating something like, “I’m not being anti-social, you’re just an idiot.”

I remember the “Good Old Days” when people tried to be polite to everyone, not just the ones they like. Now you can be rude to anyone at all. All you have to do is find a reason to dismiss them. It doesn’t even have to be true, so long as you believe it enough to justify your rude treatment.

The problem is that nearly everyone finds it far too easy to decide everyone else is an idiot and can therefore treat them badly. We used to snicker to ourselves over Maxine cartoons, a little shocked at her subversive willingness to say what we might have only been thinking. Then somewhere along the road as she and others like her became more popular we seem to have forgotten that just because you can speak your thoughts aloud doesn’t mean that you should. Instead we blare them into the Internet, taking solace in the idea that we’re not really insulting anyone who doesn’t deserve it. After all, only an idiot will think we’re talking about them, right?

Even if that were true, what happens online doesn’t stay online. It bleeds over into our real lives. We see a store clerk and decide that because they didn’t respond exactly the way we thought they should that they must be an idiot. We can treat them rudely. And the clerk, in turn, sees our bad behavior and decides we are the idiot and responds in kind.

It’s amazing how much smarter we would all look if we practiced manners, patience, and basic civility.

It’s no wonder that celebrities get this overblown idea of their own self-importance and genius when we regularly hide behind them to put down other people. Quite frankly, I’ve heard some pretty questionable things come out of Benedict Cumberbatch’s mouth, so I’m not sure he’s really suitable to be the go-to guy for idiot-dismissal. None of us are. Only the foolish or oblivious think everything that comes from their mouths are gems and that they never do or say anything that might qualify as idiotic.

I’ll finish up with a little Sting. It’s somewhat telling that this song was released back in 1987. Thirty years on there are few “Englishmen” left in England, let alone New York.

If “manners maketh man” as someone said,
He’s the hero of the day.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile.
Be yourself no matter what they say.

…

Modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety,
But you could end up as the only one.
Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society.
At night a candle’s brighter than the sun.

Takes more than [meme pictures] to make a man.
Takes more than a [snapchat from your phone].
Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can.
A gentleman will walk but never run.

* Edits mine to make a point

If we must force men to become feminists, then sign me up for the Camille Paglia school of feminism. While I still don’t agree with her on a lot of things, she brings more common sense to the table than most anyone else I’ve heard. Her latest editorial in Time is no exception. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

I recently read an analysis of the statue in California the governor is pushing the state’s universities to adopt. According to a post from Ann Althouse:

The statute proceeds to speak of “the accused” and “the complainant.” The accused is not permitted to use intoxication as an excuse for misperceiving the existence of affirmative consent and there can be no affirmative consent when the complainant was “incapacitated” by drinking or drugs.

What if both are drunk? The smartass answer to that question is: It depends on who’s the accused and who’s the complainant. It seems as though, beyond the gender-neutrality of the statute, there is an assumption that only women will complain. The statutory scheme would collapse if men complained too. But social conditioning and convention keep men quiet… at least so far. Perhaps in the future, they will complain defensively after a night of ambiguity.

Colleges–at the behest of militant feminists–are increasingly adopting the notion that men, when drunk, must be held responsible for their actions as though they were sober at the time, while women, when drunk, bear no responsibility for anything. Oddly enough, the notion of gender equity doesn’t seem to be raised here. Clearly the goal is “equal results”, not “equal opportunity”, and definitely not “equal responsibility.” And don’t anyone dare suggest that women who are drunk or bent on becoming so are a liability issue and should be proactively kicked out of parties. The fool who wrote such an article must be sacked.

Such nonsense is the sort of thing Paglia seems to oppose. If so, I’m with her. My only complaint (albeit small) with this article is that she doesn’t make it clear enough that the animalistic rapist-murderer is still a vast minority. The majority of men don’t do that. Replacing the glowing eyes from the frat-house window with glowing eyes in the bushes is still as much a disservice to men as the “you shouldn’t have to know how to protect yourself” message is to women. The reason those savage eyes are hiding in the bushes is because they fear the vast majority of men who would beat the crap out of them for even trying to harm a woman, even though that’s an out-dated, chivalrous notion that assumes the women want or need their help, and therefore should be stamped out.

I wish I could find it now, but not long ago I read a fairly long article outlining the details of a particular college campus sexual assault case in which a young man and young woman, both drunk at the time, met at a college party. The young woman repeatedly suggested they have sex. Eventually she escaped her friends and went to the young man’s dorm room. Several days later she had second thoughts about the whole thing and filed a complaint. What was most telling, however, as the timeline of events is revealed, is just how many college men, some only acquaintances, were trying to look out for this girl, realizing she was too drunk to make those kinds of decisions. The young man also had male friends trying to keep him out of trouble. The two connected in spite of the efforts of around half a dozen male friends. Little mention is made of the female friends trying to stop it. It was the young men who were constantly trying to be responsible, ultimately failing because the girl lied to several of them and dodged another while he was in the bathroom.

To quote Cyndi Lauper, “Girls just wanna have fun”, and responsibility is such a drag. Continuing to discourage young women from taking any responsibility for themselves is not the way to promote gender equality, and it’s far from promoting their general safety. Putting the responsibility all on men is not the answer, and as Althouse suggests, it could backfire. While the California statute is worded in a gender-neutral manner, I suspect California feminists are going to come to regret it. That, or those colleges are going to get eaten alive with lawsuits when they try to enforce that statute in the manner intended, insisting that men are always the perpetrator and women always the victim.

The funny thing is that my religion is continually mocked as being out of touch and restrictive. And yet living their religion is my boys’ (and daughter’s) best hope for ever getting through college unscathed. The only way to avoid trouble in such a paranoid, hostile, anti-male environment is for them to never drink and never have sex. You know progressivism is getting off course and out of control when it starts inadvertantly promoting religion as the only safe course.

This morning is one of those where the best thing I can do is stay away from my keyboard, so instead I’ll give you some “Piano Guys”: