Given the holidays, and that I am 'On The Road', there will be no podcast update today. Maybe not tomorrow... maybe not the rest of the year.

I know

I know...

You, my nonexistent readers, are grossly upset at this injustice.

Life sucks, get a fucking helmet.

The Lost Girl issue

Some of you may know of a show, one of many, about a supernaturally powerful woman and her coterie of beautiful hanger's on and her bitchy evil frenemies...

Well, that wasn't very specific, was it?

I'm talking specificially about Lost Girl, which has among its various claims to fame that its 'All Canadian' and that it is entirely non-judgemental about sexuality. Well... given that the 'heroine' is a succubus, that only makes some sense.  Not that it really is non-judgemental. I mean: you have hot straight sex and hot lesbian sex, usually on camera, but no real sign of hot gay sex, on or off camera. Not that I'm complaining... or even watching anymore... I just like pointing out how people like to bullshit themselves.

That's all a distraction, however: a reason to watch the show. (Yay for Boobies!)

The issue I take with the show isn't the mythology, which in the main is reasonably well researched for a tv show, and not appallingly adapted for 'drama'. Its not the sex, or the lack of sex or the overwhelming presence of the sex. Its not even trying to sell me another forty year old actress as a hot naked sex-pot by using soft focus lenses, or a woman as a powerhouse because, Magic.

No.

The issue, the umbrage, I have with the show, and many other recent bits of pop culture flotsam shoved at us these days is the moral landscape.

So in Lost Girl, all the supernatural gribblies of the world are all 'Fae', to include our nominally demonic heroine, the Lost Girl herself.  Fair enough.

Like ALL fae, or fairies, or shidhe, they are devided into light and dark camps, good and evil, seelie and unseelie.  Because, well, that's sorta what fae do, right? Also, mythology loves to simplify the world in to clear camps of light and dark, good and evil.  Its sort of a major, and important theme of mythology.

All well and good. Lost Girl meets the Light Fae, who are the group of fae who refuse to kill humans to feed (apparently, all Fae need to feed on humans in the Lost Girl world. Fair enough...), while the Dark Fae are the fairies who basically think of humans as cattle.  Moreever: The dark fae have to real issues with all sorts of evil behavior towards their own, kept in check mostly by fear and personal power of the various players.

Anyway: The two sides formed after a powerful fae (the blood king, I think they call him. Its the midget barkeep (SPOILER! Hah!), cast a spell forcing immutable laws on fae society. Prior to that they were just savage tribes slaughtering each other to feed even more powerful monsters.  The Dark Fae are generally portrayed as more powerful and more organized and motivated... they are kept in check by the laws that prevent them from just declaring war outright... in fact a number of sub plots involve dark fae manipulations of events to bring about war between the two sides. THe light side isn't all peaches and cream, which also doesn't offend me. I mean: They trick and enslave a human doctor into being their personal science-bitch and resident hottie-lesbian (and really: Can you blame them?), they have some pretty strict rules and seriously heavy duty punishments for infractions. On the other hand, they are trying to avoid a war and remain powerful enough to survive it if it comes, and their enemies like eating people and torture as a hobby.

So when our Lost Girl shows up on the scene, meets the various parties and players what does she do?

She sides with the light fae, right? I mean they've got a resident lesbian for her to make out with, in her obligatory love triangle involving the werewolf (like that shocks you people...), right? And she is really happy to learn how to not accidentally eat people when she has sex, which is a very light-fae attitude, right?

Silly readers, of course not. She refuses to join a side and tries to play the middle, despite the fact that almost every bad guy winds up being a dark fae.

That offends me.

Oh, if it was just this one show I'd shrug and go 'hee... tits' or something. No. It seems all these 'awesome' shows, books, and movies... all these 'riot-grrl-power' pop culture dramas always find a way for the heroine to look somehow noble for rejecting the putative good guys.

Look: There is no real third way. Life may have all sorts of shades of grey and interesting colors blurring the lines between good and evil, between light and dark, but that doesn't mean they represent some purer, more noble path that choosing good over evil.

You don't require an objective good for that to be true, either.

Ironically: They rob themselves of a chance for narrative richness, as questions of moral complexity, of moments of true drama, are stripped when the heroine's rejection of good is viewed as morally right. She never has to compromise her beliefs because she is 'right'.

What appalls me is the frequency which this meme, this narrative pattern surfaces. I didn't have to see that recent 'witch coming of age' film to know what the heroine chose at the end, its become cliche. Now: I may have been wrong about the girl-witch finding herself the first and most powerful 'evah' grey caster... in that particular case, but consider that in the trailer, and really in the film itself, no one ever tells her to 'go light'. THe dark witches want her to go dark, and are willing to manipulate her into being dark, but the light casters, and ordinary people, just want her to be 'true to herself'.

Ultimately it winds up being the same sort of thing.  Good is only really good if you aren't all judgmental and preachy about it.

That is utter rot. Nonsense.

Let me repeat Burke's famous quote for you

"All that is necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men do nothing."

Ultimately, essentially this is what we are being told that Good should do. Nothing. Good shouldn't judge, it shouldn't preach, it shouldn't uphold certain values. Good becomes a passive thing, a mere rejection of evil behaviors.  The Lost Girl can't side with the Light Fae because they do things that are, to her, morally objectionable, and she can't side with the Dark Fae because they are actually Evil, with a capital E. By choosing NO SIDE, by being all passive and You-Go-Girl pro-human, she is presenting the idea of a passive Good that is superior to the organized, restrictive Rules based small-G good of the Light Fae.

Likewise, we can only support the Girl-Witch in Beautiful Creatures good to the Light because no one ever tells her the Light is the only legitimate choice, and we fully endorse her rejecting the Dark Casters because, well, they keep telling her to 'Go Dark' all the time.

What a fucked up morality they try to present!

It is utterly divorced from reality, and simply saying it is fantasy isn't good enough. Fantasy works because it is grounded in a real world we can understand. You take a real, believable world and add magic to it. You make conscious choices about what 'real rules' don't apply.

We are born savages, barbarians... sociopaths, really. Every human being is a little monster who only cares for himself, from birth.  It takes years to teach the helpless little monsters to be reasonable, altruistic, civilized human beings.  It takes rules. It takes judgments and punishments.  It takes making black and white, good and evil, real things in a world made up of colors and greys. And even after thousands of years of practice we still sometimes get it wrong.

Worse: Civilization is a precious, fragile thing.  We assume stability, we assume progress is a part of the natural order, that the only thing we can change is the rate of progress.

Nonsense.

Civilizations die, they collapse and it takes lifetimes to start over again, and many, many cultures have never found their way out of savagery. Civilization is not assumed, it is built slowly and carefully on rules, on trust.. and yes, on Judgment.

Telling people to reject Good, because it is only less evil than Evil is corrosive, destructive and damning. Telling people that its only Good if its optional, if its non-judgmental is corrosive, destructive and damning.

We have a real shortage of responsibility in our modern society, and this sort of perverse moralizing is only making things worse.

But what do I care? I get to see two naked chicks making out on my television.

Caio.

Those Damnable Unions

As a general rule, I despise labor unions.

If you happen to be pro-union, by all means do not click away in disgust just yet, I may surprise you. Conversely, if you agree with my opening statement you too may wish to read on, rather than simply nodding in agreement and assuming that everything is jake.

The current wrangling over Boeing's 777x contract is, to my eyes, a particularly galling example of WHY I hate unions.  Boeing is a massive employer in Washington State, and where I live I scarcely go a day without meeting some new person who either works for Boeing, or has a family member who works for Boeing.  Its not just a massive employer, but a rewarding employer.  Just this week someone was telling me about a friend of theirs who got a job with Boeing some thirty or forty years ago, fresh out of the Navy and wound up becoming one of their primary electrical engineers before finally retiring, despite not having a degree when he started.

The Union is not helping the employees of Boeing, or the people of Washington by making ludicrous demands. Boeing can, and will, simply set up shop somewhere else. Pressure them hard enough, and they will move everything out of state.

Oh, maybe not this year, or the next. After all, the current political climate is pro-union to an unprecedented degree, even while the public has been souring on the concept for well over a decade. The entire debacle with the... was it South Carolina?... factory is proof of that.  No jobs were lost, or even threatened in Washington, but the new factory was in a Right to Work state where the Union had no power, can't have that!

So five thousand people wound up not getting jobs, because the government, at the behest of the Union, shut down the move. Boeing simply didn't expand. Who won?

Well... the Union won, after a fashion. A hollow victory, to be sure. They made a statement, earned a little street cred as bad motherfuckers, and that was it.  In the end all they did was delay Boeing's factory, not kill it.

So their current shenanigans are simply more of the same. Obstructionism for the sake of making a point, damn the workers, damn the business, damn the economy.

The hell of it is: in the current economic environment, the duties and purposes of a union are more necessary than they've been for a hundred years.  Not that any of our current unions are actually doing their jobs...

See: We have pushed technology to an interesting point, the point where a tiny handful of people can do the work of dozens, even hundreds.  Every few years a new job is rendered obsolete. Next on the chopping block might just be delivery men, if Amazon has its way.    Companies no longer need to employ thousands of workers, and even service work is disappearing as automation takes its place. Next up: wait staff at restaurants, replaced by the Ipad.  Movie ticket agents have already been cut in half by ticket ATMs, and I could easily see most of the rest going away as they build buildings with turnstile access and new vending machines to replace the concession stands.

Now: This is a very good thing, or rather it could be. Most people are unaware that we actually work longer and harder than our ancestors did to make our way. Our jobs are less physically demanding, perhaps, but we've created a world that seems to require a forty hour work week to just get by.  A stone age hunter spent maybe eight hours a week at his 'job', and a medieval farmer could never work, as a practical matter, longer than the sun was in the sky, where modern man can burn the midnight oil and never think twice.

There is a second aspect, a second boon to this sort of labor-free world: Anyone could, in theory, compete with established businesses. You no longer need to assembly massive infrastructures, factories or people. One guy with a vision can change the world!

Or he could.

See: while the progressive left likes to talk about the gap between rich and poor, they also like to reinforce it. They are, fundamentally, elitists who come from upper class families. They don't want to rub elbows with Joe the Plumber, they want to rule him.  There is a powerful disconnect between what they say, and what they do.

This is not, however, to say that they are entirely deliberate in placing obstacles. They have inherited a legal system that thinks putting 60 new laws on the books each and every year is far too few!

Too few?!?!?! Do me a favor, dear reader: Right now I'd like you to try and name sixty people... any sixty people you like... right now. Name sixty illegal acts, or sixty video games.  Chances are you're going to stumble and stop in the twenties. You might get to sixty, eventually. Great: You just covered...oh... 1979. Now lets try 1980 through 1999 before we move into the new millennium!

Not to belabor the point, but even one year of passing 60 new laws is too-the-fuck many laws. The primary purpose of most of these laws, or the result anyway, is protectionism for the established. They are obstacles and barriers in the path of making your own way in life. You can't start a business these days without a lawyer to guide you through the paperwork, and to protect you from litigations. And the lawyers like it that way.

So we come, at last, back to Unions.

See: You, the guy reading this, probably won't start competing with Amazon any time soon. Jeff Bezos has already paid his dues to ensure you can't afford it. Now he doesn't have to hire you to deliver his packages either, or work in his warehouses. Soon enough he won't need you to drive the trucks that bring product from the factories or boats.

I mean: He does have to hire SOME people. But since there are so very, very many of you, and so very few job openings he can pretty much make any ludicrous demands he wants of you... if you want that job. He can pay you peanuts, make you do absurd things like sing karaoke for his amusement and so forth. And he can fire you for simply not plastering a fake smile on your face every day and pretending to be grateful for the opportunity to be his personal bitch.

A little over a hundred years ago the Rockefellers (democrats and progressives from the beginning, if you like to pay attention) had all the coal mines.  And since they had all the coal mines, they decided they didn't need to pay the miners enough money to live on.

Logic fail, right there. See, in a large enough group of people you'll find some moron who is willing to work for less money than he actually needs, just so he gets SOME money... thus making sure no one can afford dinner.  The miners didn't like this, of course, so they went on strike. Now... those early, pre-union, strikers were actually wrong. Not for going on strike, but for occupying the lands and mines and preventing anyone else from getting hired, but thats a debate for another day. Anyway: Rockefeller hired the Pinkertons, who when in with guns. People died, and the government officially reckognized the rights of people to organize to negotiate against management.  How they managed to then align themselves, politically, with the very people who helped spur their creation is a story for another day.

Without a side trip down the rabbit hole of defining capitalism and the invisible hand... Unions served a useful and noble purpose when all the cards, politically and economically, fell with the moneyed elite, with big business.  It didn't take too long for them to become corrupt, self serving parasites prone to extortionistic behavior, but that is neither here nor there.

We've come full circle: with all the power once again falling into the hands of big business, with a decreasing need for people in jobs, a union is a vital counterweight against exploitive behavior on the side of management. A good union, rather. We DO need organized labor until the economy learns to adapt to this new world we've created.

The unions we got ain't it, but you play the cards you're dealt.

On Time and in your interwebz, stealin' your bits... its the friday podcast!

As promised I have the new Podcast here for you. Technically its a slightly older podcast that hadn't been published yet, on Iron Man, specifically Iron Man 3.

I fail at Blogging!

No, no... its okay. That's a mea culpa not some lament of the damned.  Friday I was supposed to put up a new Podcast, and behind the scenes here I've been telling the guys that I should start putting up two a week and doing daily posts, even little updates like this one. Nine days, I think it is, since my last confession.

Never mind the near total lack of effort on promoting this little slice of the web.

We shall endure.

Bear with me, I'll have a new podcast up later today. In the meantime I've got a ditch to finish digging.

The latest Podcast is up!  Hear the guys delve into deepest geekery as we talk about Warhammer 40,000 and the Battletech universe.

Happy Holidays

So today has been Thanksgiving, at least here in the United States, turkey day.

Naturally I had a steak, and a damn good one too.

What we eat isn't important, and arguably the holiday itself is irrelevant. All that matters is who you spend it with.  I spent mine with family, how about you?


Check back tomorrow for the weekly podcast, and a longer, deeper analysis of the importance of family and why it matters that you check in with them a few times a year when the stars are right.

But for today: enjoy your tryptophan comas you fat bastards

Teh Podcast.mp3

So, our second weekly podcast is up and we delve deeply into what the Internet Culture really is, what it signifies and so forth, using Eve Online as a sort of stand in for all the interwebz.

The Power of Procrastination

A friend of mine has had a leak in her basement for the last three years. For those three years she has been convinced that her house is collapsing because the foundation is cracking, that the house is sliding into the sea.  She has settled into a sort of vague sense of fatalism about the entire ordeal, using a wet-vac to suck up the water several times a day when it rains.

The other day I went out to do some odd jobs: hanging cabinets, cutting down dead trees and moving heavy objects... the sort of tasks she can't do for herself.  She expected this would be an all day affair, because each of these simple tasks were beyond her ability, but I had it all done by noon.

So I removed the offending wall. In less than an hour I had the drywall cut neatly and the insulation bagged.  It turns out the leak wasn't from a crack in her foundation at all, but a shoddy patch around a sewage pipe. A quick drive into town for quick setting concrete patch and the leak was gone.  Replacing the hole in the wall will take another couple of hours; mostly waiting for stuff to dry.

Three years of doom and gloom for a job that could be done in an afternoon for less than she probably spent on the wet-vacc to keep the water under control.  Three years of increasing certainty that she'll have to sell her house, at a loss, and move into a crappy apartment somewhere.  She spent a thousand times as long worrying about it as it took to fix it.

In my own case, Procrastination has cost me measurable amounts of money... at least three thousand dollars in the last year from one source alone. I could be more exact if I wanted. I could detail out the various ways that I've hurt myself financially over the last year, the missteps and mistakes I've made along the way. I've drug my feet between jobs, failed to follow through on timely offers. I've never had a great excuse, either: I just put it off 'just another day'.

I am not a rich man by any stretch, and I have lost thousands of dollars in this last year alone because I have procrastinated, and many countless more in all the years before.  I burned out in my career because I put off taking vacations for myself, I've put off my writing and publishing because I was afraid, denying myself a possible fall back income.

And that is the power of procrastination. It weakens us, makes us weak where we should be strong. It torments us with worries over easily fixable problems and steals money from us when we aren't looking.  It is the drunk uncle who comes by without being asked and breaks your furniture and steals your wallet.

This is a live test of our first Podcast. The topic is Ender's Game in celebration of the recent release of the movie. Spoilers abound.

So, obviously we don't have any content up yet, but that's only because I've never hosted anything online before. We do have several 'casts in the can, so to speak, and a rough plan of action, including upcoming facebook page, twitter, twitchy videos for games and more.

Unlike the healthcare exchanges I honestly do expect to have a functional web presence by this weekend, with improvements to follow as I climb the learning curve.

Welcome to Tilting at Windmills. I am your handsome, charming and witty host, John Stuart Mill and I will be frequently debating with my various literary companions a host of topics ranging from politics, culture, pop culture, movies and deep arcane geekery.

From this central hub we will be hosting our weekly podcasts, youtube videos, twitter feeds and more, along with our favorite links, blogs and other diverse amusements for your edification.