Ant-Man had far too many racially offensive stereotypes and plot holes big enough to drive a movie through

So, at the drive-in, there was Ant-Man and the new Mission Impossible movie.  This isn't about the MI movie (short take: it's good if you like spy movies, and I often do), it's about Ant-Man.

In the future I honestly, seriously, sincerely think that people will study the Marvel movie campaign for it's ability to shut off people's ability to interpret and criticize media for the purposes of selling it to them.  In short, Ant-Man is awful.

In particular, and, Marvel, I wish we'd keep meeting like this, Ant-Man is racist and sexist.  Also, the plot is has a lot of holes - by which I mean inconsistencies.

So, the sexism starts and ends with Hope Pym.  It has to start and end with her, because she's the only woman in the whole damn thing.

Despite her competence, she's not the star of the movie.  Why?  Daddy issues.  Her daddy doesn't want to "lose his little girl", so he infantilizes her to keep her away from super-heroing, instead selecting a not particularly good crook to do super-heroing.  Yes, rather than trust your competent daughter who knows all the super-tech to do the job you need done, you're going to risk bring in a literal, convicted thief to quickly learn the super-tech for the job because you're a fucking moron who doesn't value women.

And when Hope Pym learns that her father is over-protective because Hope's mother, Hank's wife, died super-heroing, the whole thing with Hope being really qualified for the job just goes away.  As does literally decades of neglect, like somehow Hank being sad that his wife died somehow makes it better that he ignored his daughter for 25 years or something.

(If you're going to mention that, y'know, maybe Hope will be Wasp because of a thirty second take - that's not a very good retort.  That, in the future, there might be a non-sexist movie with Evangeline Lilly as Wasp does not alter one whit that in Ant-Man, she was an infantilized woman whose objections over being infantilized were dropped in an absurd way to allow the white man to take charge.  Also, Lilly as Wasp is whitewashing the character.  At almost every turn, the Marvel movies show that they're not nearly as socially minded as they claim to be.)

And completely preventable, too.  If Hope was on tech duty, without the physical skills required to do the heist, cool.  If Hope had been injured leading up to the heist and they needed someone else, also cool.  It could have been handled in a number of ways that didn't involve removing the character and setting the groundwork for her being Wasp (though it would have helped if she was Asian-American).

Still, that's pretty light compared to the racism which is pretty boggling.  Pro-tip: if your only Hispanic character is a criminal who is also comic relief, you're being racist.  Oh, there's another black, criminal comic relief character, too!  Hilarious!  Blacks and Hispanics are, after all, naturally criminal peoples, and they're so whacky when they're incompetent!  (Like it somehow balanced the scales, one of the whacky, incompetent crooks was Russian.  I think they put that in there to say that they were making fun of everyone, which is a tactic I've seen before, and it's stupid.  That you also make fun of white people doesn't mean that the racist caricatures aren't racist caricatures.)

I mean, the white guy is a thief for SOCIAL JUSTICE, and then teaches the blacks and Hispanics how to be better thieves!  For while blacks and Hispanics are crooks, of course, they are whackily incompetent at that and under all conditions are superior when a white man is in charge!

So, even when the heist was ongoing, every time they cut to a black or Hispanic character being comic relief, it took me out of whatever moment there was.

That's what makes the movie awful.  Even if it wasn't racist and sexist, it's one of those superhero movies where keeping your story straight seems irrelevant.  The best comics manage to do it, so they should be able to bring that kind of A game with movies.  They don't.  So rather than being an example of comic-style storytelling at its finest, it ends up being a comic-style potboiler, and not even a particularly good one.

So, when Hank Pym recruits Stephen Lange, he does it by bribing a person to tell a second person, relying on them to tell a certain third person who will then tell a very specific fourth person, who then talks to Lange about a heist.

In short, this is stupid.  This is *embarrassingly* stupid.  It doesn't show Hank as being some kind of master manipulator so much as it shows a deus ex machina, crude and unsophisticated.  Anyone with any experience with human beings knows that telling one person to tell a second person something is pretty chancy - but to imagine that one person tells a second person, who tells a third, who tells a fourth, who tells a fifth . . . and by the time it gets to the fifth person that it is in any sense recognizably what the first person says?  That is ridiculous.

And the bad guy - who's name I can't remember, as he wasn't very memorable, so I'll call him Yellowjacket - was supposed to have been driven crazy by Pym particles . . . except he wasn't ever really, well, exposed to them.  At least not moreso than a bunch of other people, including Hope, who showed no signs of violent instability.   Until he puts on the Yellowjacket armor, Yellowjacket isn't really exposed to them at all, except ringside for a few experiments on other objects.  Which is to say as close as Hope was to Yellowjacket's experiments and Lange's numerous transformations.  DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Plus, there was this bit where Hank Pym says he can't use the shrinking tech because he used it for "too long" and it's harmed him in some way . . . and Stephen didn't go, "What kind of harm are we talking about?   What kind of exposure, and what are the risks?"  Nope.  The fact that the technology does some kind of lasting harm is mentioned to keep Hank out of the game but then completely dismissed.  This is lazy writing!

I also found the character of Stephen Lange to be narratively muddled.  On one hand, he supposedly went to jail for crimes of social justice - he stole from a corporation who had cheated people to return the money.  But he's also supposed to be some kind of burglar in the more common sense of "stealing for his own gain".  Which is it?  Was he a crusading Robin Hood-style thief engaging in social banditry or merely a weak-willed crook who rips people off when they going gets tough?

Not to mention that Lange, at the start of the movie, says he's a burglar since he doesn't fight people, but by the end of the movie he's fighting up a storm.  Mind you, the character was shown to be physically capable, so I'm not arguing his ability but his desire.  His moral objections to violence simply evaporated without a trace or comment.

There were probably more, but this suggests the various ways the parts of the story didn't fit with each other.  It didn't make sense in ways that it SHOULD have made sense.

If not for the sexism and racism, this alone would have meant I wouldn't have liked the movie very much. I really expect a screenplay to hold together the basic elements in a consistent way.  I think it's one of the basic jobs of the writing and directing staff - to make sure that the important narrative elements in a story cohere intelligently.  Ant-Man failed to do this.

But the movie was racist and sexist.  1980 wants it's childishly and offensive stereotypes back.

Criticism on Authonomy's post about sense in fantasy and historical fiction

I often click links and wonder, "Do people actually consider, do they really, truly think about the things they write?" Often, I feel the answer is, emphatically, “no”. In particular, the article here has a bunch of stuff that - upon inspection - isn't very true. Sure, it gets repeated all the time by writers and people in the publishing industry, but like many things often repeated but rarely discussed there isn't too much truth to the author's claims. Apropos of this is this blog post on verisimilitude for fantasy and historical fiction. It is terrible.

For instance, the blog post says, "[T]he author of a fantasy novel filled with invented creatures and magic must ensure that these elements exist within coherent systems and are subject to perceivable rules."

Really? First, I'm going to mention a kind of writing that gets scant respect from the literary types but has created many of the most enduring characters and stories of the last hundred years: comic books. If you have a fast paced story with colorful characters, it appears that consistency, much less verisimilitude, is irrelevant. Superheroes are constantly developing new abilities to get out of situations in a non-stop barrage of deus ex machina. The only reason not to acknowledge this is pure snobbery, because superheroes are enduring and popular, many of their figures and stories having become bedrock culture of the 20th century (and certainly the 21st).

(One of my favorite cases in point is Batman's cowl. Sometimes it's cloth, except when he gets shot in the head when it is revealed to be a helmet. I would say, “Choose, dudes”, but the truth is that I – or, really, anyone else – doesn't much care.)

But, really, it doesn't stop there – it's in most fantasy. Lord of the Rings? Remember Gandalf coming back from the dead after fighting the Balrog? Yeah. There was nothing inherent in the logical structure of the narrative to suggest, much less state, that would happen. It had happened to no other character and was not thought to be something that could happen by any of the protagonists, yet it occurred: Gandalf came back from the dead.

One of my favorite examples about how consistency in fantasy is a bugbear is Dracula. How, exactly, did Dracula get his ship into England, again? He killed all the crew, sure, okay, he's a vampire, I get that, but what mystical authority allowed the ship to find its destination uncrewed? And why should Mina have a psychic connection to her attacker, allowing Van Helsing and the others to track Dracula? There is nothing inherent in previously existing vampire fiction known to Victorian audiences to make this credible or coherent. It was clearly something added solely for the purpose of allowing the humans to confront the undead, pure deus ex machina.

I could go into more details - almost all fantasy and sci-fi books do this to some extent - but the key point is that while our ability to notice out-of-place things is real, equally real is our ability to see patterns that we want to exist. A big part of the trick isn't to create a setting where everything is plausible within a rigidly constructed framework - you could go quite mad attempting that, though some writers can make it work - but that the writing does whatever it takes, by whatever means it takes, to get the audience to see a pattern even if it makes no sense to do so by giving them reasons to see things your way. We forgive Tolkien because we want Gandalf to return; we forgive Stoker because we want Dracula to lose. Consistency or verisimilitude does not really enter into it.

Additionally, due to the power of the Internet, and the rise of fanfic, the extent to which the audience is not only willing but actively engaged in finding patterns where none were created by authorial intent is evident. Just as we see patterns in the clouds, the complex narrative of a novel allows people to see a great many things that any given author never intended (and it is even easier with series, written or otherwise) - thus the large number of people who sexually obsess about Draco Malfoy or Snape, which J. K. Rowling finds strange and incomprehensible, or pretty much any slash or ship related to almost any media. Verisimilitude need not apply. Consistency be damned. We see what we want to see and I feel that a big part of a fiction writer's job is to seduce the audience into accepting their narrative. (This isn't news, it's simply suspension of disbelief and there are many tricks to making it work – verisimilitude is merely one and not even the best one, I think.)

The author then goes on to say, "Historical fiction also depends upon strict coherency." Nonsense. I mean, complete and utter nonsense, and a lot of that is because it's impossible to get "strict coherency".

History, because of its incomplete nature and our inability to understand the internal lives of the people who lived it, is a moving target. As a historian, at any given time, there are competing narratives of just about any historical subject.

To pick literally the first one that came to mind, the authorial intent of Machiavelli's The Prince. Is it a handbook of political ruthlessness or a cunning satire? To this day, the question is unresolved. Some find it absurd that Machiavelli, who spent the rest of his life as a staunch republican, suddenly became obsequious to tyranny, finding it more likely that The Prince was meant as an insult to the de Medici and Borgia (and, indeed, the central premise seems to be that Cesare Borgia got lucky, so I think this is a very strong argument).  Others, of course, think that Machiavelli's imprisonment broke him and, in order to secure a job, any job, he wrote a toadying manuscript (also a strong argument). Which is it? Who knows? Both positions have some merit and we can't ask the writer.

But if you were writing a story about Machiavelli, you'd likely choose one of two contradictory narratives, or create a third narrative. At any rate, you're going to run into a lot of people who think you're absolutely wrong no matter the depths of your research.

All of history is like this - it is a fluid narrative that changes as we change. From the idea that the "Dark Ages" was a time of technological regression (go ahead and google "Carolingian Renaissance" to start to find out what modern historians actually think of that idea), or the causes of the American Revolution, our perception of history is almost always controversial in some regard. There is no such thing as “strict coherency”. What makes perfect sense to you is likely to enrage someone else.

(And a living issue: primary education textbooks are being rejected because the historical narrative does not match what various school boards demand to be true. History is a minefield of conflicting beliefs and opinion, ranging from the very naive to the well-researched and intensely sophisticated but equally contradictory and exclusive.)

So, creating coherency must first ask, "Who's coherency?" Lacking an objective standard, how does that even make any damn sense? (Answer: it doesn't, but you've got to know something about historiography to realize how history is constantly, almost necessarily mired in controversy.)

(I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting that writers fail to do research. I'm not saying that a work should not have some internal consistency. I'm just saying that "strict coherency" is nonsense regarding historical research for a historical novel – that the standard is irrational.)

And . . . then I stopped reading the article, I admit, even though I was mostly through it. Why bother going on? What bothers me is the extent to which these oft-repeated maxims are unconsidered in, I think, the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. The idea that they even MIGHT be wrong is totally undiscussed (as opposed to, say, the way fans pick apart the media they love, or historians continue to search for truth in the mists of the past). Still, writers love repeating them to each other. I think we should stop and reconsider them, really think about them, and maybe even think about why we are encouraged to think this way.

Craig Morgan repeats tedious bullshit cliches while defending American Sniper

Once again American Sniper has appeared on too many of my feeds and made me reasonably upset.  I am including a Rolling Stone review of the movie, too, because it says a lot of things with which I agree in regards to Hollywood and war movies, generally, as well as being a very well-written piece.

(Short form: war movies suck because in order to turn a war into a film that doesn't make a person crawl out of their skin requires grave offenses to art and sense.  But for me, the money shot of the RS review is, "The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too."  I have struggled with his dilemma, myself.  War is so terrible that some balancing the horror that many soldiers experience against critiques of war, itself, that I feel are necessary to prevent future wars.  The most horrifying thing about this, for me, is that I absolutely know that warmongers use the pains of soldiers as cover for further wars - but dismissing the legitimate pain of human beings isn't something I'm good at.  So how does a person talk about the tragedy of war when the people who perpetrate and profit from the misery use the suffering of human beings as a defense . . . to further perpetrate and profit from war?  Drives me crazy.

(Blame Kai for this.  She encouraged me to ramble on.)

Seth Rogan said, "American Sniper kind of reminds me of the movie that's showing in the third act of Inglorious Basterds", which is a mock Nazi propaganda film.  Unlike Michael Moore's comments, this isn't factually in error.  It's a person's opinion and, frankly, given both the overt nationalist sentiments of American Sniper's director (anyone else remember Clint speaking to that empty chair?) and the subject matter, I don't find the comparison unlikely.

Craig Morgan took umbrage with Rogan's opinion in one of the most absolutely tedious ways imaginable.  In particular, Morgan said, "You are fortunate to enjoy the privilege and freedom of working in and living in the United States, and saying whatever you want (regardless of how ignorant the statement) thanks to people like Chris Kyle who serve in the United States military."

Bullshit.  Some assholes in the Middle East do not threaten any rights Americans possess.  They are very far away and can attack us in extremely limited ways.  To believe otherwise is to engage in conspiracy theory of the strangest magnitude.  The last time that the US military actually defended the rights of Americans - the last time they were under actual attack by an enemy - was probably the American Civil War.  Arguably World War II, but since neither Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan had the physical ability to invade the United States so I don't think they actually threatened our freedom.  Middle Eastern terrorists obviously threaten the lines of some Americans, but their ability to kill Americans has been made much easier by our invasion of several Middle Eastern countries.  Middle Eastern killers now have much more convenient access to Americans, which is why so many have been dying.

Additionally, it is easy to find people who actually do protect American rights, immediately and directly.  People like the American Civil Liberties Union.  I would, furthermore, argue that an artist as bold as Seth Rogan does a great deal to protect freedom of speech - by using it.  One of the things that keeps rights healthy is their exercise.  One of the ways laws form and dissolve is through tradition - by keeping the tradition of freedom of speech alive, through its healthy exercise, Seth Rogan is absolutely defending human rights, and more directly than a sniper in the Middle East.

Sentiments of people like Morgan are also corrosive to the very idea of freedom.  We do not owe soldiers our freedom.  We possess it as a natural right.  Read the Declaration of Independence!  It is integral to American democracy that the people possess rights, not because they are given, but because they are natural to the dignity of humans.  Because if it is true that we "owe" anyone our rights, then they can revoke them, because they own them.

It is that idea - that rights are natural and their exercise is healthy - has done more to expand freedom than all the arms that have ever existed, both here in the United States and all around the world.

Lastly, Morgan said that Rogan's words were insensitive to Chris Kyle and his family.  C'mon, dude.  You can't have a big budget movie with A-list directors and actors made, to considerable profit, and then use that as an excuse for people not to critique the movie!  If you want to live a private life, here's a pro tip: don't have your dead husband's life story made into a movie.  By so aggressively putting the story out there, it opens the door to critique.  Opens it wide.

Lena Dunham is the liberal Paris Hilton

I wasn't going to write this but when Luke O'Neil called me a liar, I decided that I had to talk about Lena fucking Dunham.

Here's the scoop, if you ain't heard.  Lena Dunham was a really creepy seven year old.  She was the kind of seven year old who peeked inside her sister's vagina, who bribed her with candy for kisses and masturbated next to her - when her sister was a year old.

Some right wing women-hating assholes saw this and said, "Holy shit, that's sexual abuse!"  Some of the brighter ones said, "Her parents were abusive in allowing that kind of behavior."

This made Dunham flip out even though, let's face it, the whole point of her various stories is that she was a not normal child.  Indeed, her entire career is predicated on saying shocking things.  Banal, yes, but often shocking.  (Shock material is almost always banal, anyway, so this isn't weird in the slightest.)  She wrote these stories that were creepy about her creepy shit when she was a kid and is somehow freaked out when people find her creepy shit creepy.

But here's the thing - those conservatives?  They have a point.  Let me put it to you another way: what conversation would we be having if George Bush, when he was seven years old, shoved his fingers up inside a one year old girl's pussy?

The idea that some people are going to find Dunham's behavior akin to sexual abuse is pretty goddamn obvious.  What is wrong for adults is usually wrong when children do it, too, after all.  Sure, we often don't treat them the same way we treat adults who have done wrong, but if you're the kind of person who figures that it's wrong when an adult masturbates next to a toddler, you're probably going to think that it's wrong when a seven year old does it.

Then, Dunham is so . . . incredibly privileged that she doesn't see this is what disturbs me.  Just the same way that her and her family are responding with the stock language of abused-but-in-denial people everywhere - that in their family it wasn't like that, don't be crazy, it made me the person I am today, all of that.  Almost no one who engages in abuse realizes that they're abusers; many abused people think that the abuse is "normal".

To a certain extent, then, so what that the people who brought this to our attention were conservatives?  Sure, it is not possible to ignore the sexist context of their behavior and beliefs, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a point.  It is possible to be both a sexist and right, after all, if only by chance.

While the people who come to Dunham's defense, like Luke O'Neil, who called me a liar because I entertain thoughts that Dunham isn't really innocent, start off saying that, y'know, hey, let's ignore the really incredible privilege that Dunham has.  She has what, then?  A bad case of affluenza?  She's been raised in such a morally challenged environment that the normal rules of human behavior somehow don't apply to her?  Because I think that's the case, definitely.  She doesn't come off like a human because she's not much of one, she's just the liberal Paris Hilton.  She's never lived in the world, so she doesn't understand it at all - but that's okay because she will never have to live in the world.  So she can just put on this "gee whiz" look and act like her behavior wasn't inappropriate, regardless of age.

Seriously.  Just imagine if George Bush had, even as a young child, admitted to masturbating next to his one year old sister - where that would go.  Seriously.  The more he tried to say that it was okay and shit, the guiltier he would sound.  The more disturbed we would get because he wouldn't seem to understand that - despite it being absurd to hold a seven year old responsible in the same way one holds an adult responsible in that situation - that it's actually pretty creepy, that it actually is a whole lot like molestation, even if it is absurd to hold a seven year old morally culpable as we would hold an adult morally culpable.

So while it's true that conservatives are using Dunham's rather shocking revelations as a mask for their sexism, it is equally true that her defenders are using her gender to mask their equally vile classism.  When this fucked up woman does something between genuinely, legitimate criticism of her actions are forbidden because she's a woman.  That's as wrong as condemning her on false pretexts, if you ask me.

So, Luke O'Neil, fuck you.  You're giving cover to your rich masters because you're too much of a fucking coward to criticize wealth and privilege when it happens to be a liberal woman doing disturbing, fucked-up things.

South Home Air in Dayton, Ohio, tried to rob me

I had my first scam artist experience here in Ohio!  It involves a company called South Home Air.

When getting our dishwasher installed, the installation man noticed that our boiler was leaking.  So we turned it off and called up someone to take a look.  The first guys who came are a local company called South Home Air, Inc.  The guys came down for a look and decided that we needed at least $1000 worth of work, but to be safe, we should replace the boiler, which had a crack in the heat exchanger.  That would be over $6000 but . . . well, if the boiler has a crack, it might be worth it, right?

I said I'd think about it.  That evening, I got two calls from the guys trying to pressure me into deciding.  This started to vex me because I generally mean it when I say, "I'll call you when I decide what to do."

We have a home warranty but we don't actually like the company.  But if the job was going to be somewhere between a grand and six grand, well, we decided it was worth the hassle to get them involved.  So I put in a service request.

This morning, South Home Air called again - despite having been told THREE TIMES NOW that I'll call them when I'm good and ready.  I told them that someone else was going to look at the unit.  They said I owed them seventy bucks.  I said that I don't like to pay for estimates so I don't want to do business with them.

A few minutes later, I got another call from different people at South Home Air.  At first, I thought there was simply a mix-up and they thought I wouldn't pay them the seventy dollars.  I told the guy on the phone that, sure, if they bill us, we'll pay, but we're not going to work with people who charge for estimates.  (The bigger problem is that I didn't KNOW they were going to charge for an estimate.  It appears the industry is in a bit of transition and contractors have started to charge for estimates, which sounds really shady to me.  It's like having someone charge you to tell you how much something costs, which I would prefer not to do.)  The guy continued to try to sell me, saying that the seventy dollar fee would be waived if we paid them a thousand or six thousand dollars.  At some point I used the word "goddamn" and he was, like, "Don't talk to me like that."  I told him, "You called me, you fucking thief, and I'll swear when I like!"  He objected to being called a thief and we argued for a bit.

After a couple of minutes, I said, "Look, it doesn't matter if it's a service call or an estimate or whatever - we're yelling at each other.  Clearly we shouldn't work together."  Then he insulted my intelligence ("I thought I was talking with an intelligent person!") and then I said I didn't want to work with him, then he gave me an insulting apology ("I'm sorry that you don't understand how this business works!") and then I hung up.

It gets worse!  Today, another guy came over to look at the boiler.  His findings?  "This pressure release valve doesn't work, so I can't tell if there are leaks in other places."

I asked about repiping.  He said that the pipes were old but in good condition and there was no sign of leakage.  I asked about the broken heat exchanger.  He said he didn't see anything broken but he couldn't be sure until they could build the pressure in the pipes.  I asked why someone would then suggest a new water heater.  He did not know.  He said that our model of boiler is "like a tank" and regaled me with a story of the sixty year old one he'd dealt with in the past.  He said that the new ones are more efficient, sure, and they'd happily install a new unit if we wanted a smaller, more efficient unit but that's not what the South Home Air guys said.

The upshot - South Home Air tried to rob me and my wife.  Fuck those guys.

My Visit to Aldi and Some Thoughts on Choices

Yesterday, the wife and I went down to the grocery store, Aldi, here in Xenia, and shopped.  For those of you who don't know, Aldi is a European-style (yea, Germany-based) chain of grocery stories which offer a greatly reduced number of items compared to the big grocery stores we're used to seeing in America.  In addition to having a smaller number of products, they have less selection in products, though they claim this gives them sufficient cost savings to give high quality goods.  Additionally, they don't bag your items - though they provide shelf space so you can - or provide bags.  To use a cart, you have to put a quarter into a gadget, though you get the quarter back when you return the cart.  This is another cost saving tool, meaning they don't have to have dudes wandering around collecting carts.  Nowadays, they market this as the greener alternative to big box supermarkets that most Americans shop at, though my understanding is the impetus is more pecuniary than environmental . . . but that's a trivial point!

For us, the upshot was, we really liked it.  The store here in Xenia has the right items, broadly speaking.  And given that the store is much smaller than a regular supermarket, we were in and out in half an hour.  Broadly speaking, we didn't feel the supposed lack of choice.  Even the big box supermarkets fail to have things I want, like spices for Asian cuisine.  Broadly, what we can't get at Aldi we can get online or by stopping, now and then, at specialty stores (like liquor stores for beer).

But this made me think about choices.  Recently, when Adrienne was at a convention up in Minneapolis, she spoke to a Danish collegue of hers, Jesper.  He'd been down at FIU and we had hung out a little, he's a nice guy.  At the conference, he mentioned he had forgotten how exhausting being in the United States was - that he had to translate everything in his head and then, surprisingly, to Adrienne and then to me, was the "number of choices".  Being an American has a lot of choices.

Jesper told a story about how he went into a burrito joint because he wanted to try this crazy American foodstuff about which he's heard, so he goes up to the counter and asked for a burrito.  He was then asked what he wanted on his burrito . . .

He had no idea.  He's Danish!  Their main exposure to burritos is, and I'm quoting Yona, who is my main source of all things Denmark, "Middle Eastern-owned fast food places that make them from store-bought components and have no real idea what they're supposed to be like."  The question drew nothing from him so he said, and I can see Jesper in my mind saying this, "A little bit of everything.  Which was not the right choice."

Everything in America is like this.  Once I started seeing it, I saw it everywhere.  Soda aisles with dozens and dozens of choices.  You want toothpaste?  There are a dozen brands and each brand has several different products!  There are forty linear feet of beer shelves at the local Kroger's . . . and that's not even a liquor store!  Americans are constantly asking other Americans what we want with that - do you want onion rings, house chips, French fries or steak fries with that?   What kind of cheese do you want on your hamburger?  It's everywhere!

And it is exhausting.  A supermarket is the precise kind of place that we hate and I'm sure part of it is all the damn choices.  And they're so identical!  How do you know which brand of toothpaste is actually better?!  Worse, most of the brands are functionally identical.

So you're in this supermarket and you're surrounded by choices and most of them are false choices.  But because there is this farcical illusion of choice, the store is goddamn enormous!  It's huge!  You can land aircraft in there, play football games!  So you wander around aisle after aisle, being forced to make false choices, searching around for the lowest price, or the price point you want, surrounded by other sullen faced people doing the same thing, trudging along, back and forth, making these same false choices.

Which is to say shopping in a store where there were many fewer choices was a great relief to me.  Jesper is right.  We have too many choices in America.

Richard Dawkins seems to be a sexist and racist asshole

I've never really liked Richard Dawkins.  At first, my dislike was merely philosophical - I think saying there probably isn't a god is wishy-washy.  The reasons he says there probably isn't a god amount to a repetition of the epistemological uncertainty into which the god of the gaps lives.  Since we can't be certain of anything, we can't be certain god doesn't really exist.

Or anything else!  So he should say, y'know, nothing exists, that it all is probably this and probably that - or we can live with the epistemological uncertainty and speak with conviction.  God does not exist any more that teapots whirling around the sun exist.

Then, when I heard him on some show or another . . . I was overwhelmed by the sense of class.  Here's a dude who is that upper crust British asshole - almost a parody.  He's everything that Monty Python has ever made fun of.  I just assume he has a stupid walk.

He is also a sexist asshole, to get to the thrust of this post.  He tweeted, recently "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."

Is it?  I'm not sure that getting raped by someone you know is better than being raped by a stranger, myself.  And I also know that date rape often includes threats of violence.  So, it was really just a stupid fucking thing to say, ignorant and nasty.

But here's the thing - why say it at all?  What would prompt a guy to, out of the blue, say something like that?

In short, it's that comic upper class English-ness.  He's an important rich white man.  He speaks with the confidence of being master of the world.  He knows his opinions are the opinions that count.  So he can dismiss anyone he wants who isn't an important rich white man.  Like, say, women.

(He also added, "If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think."  Indeed, he is endorsing nothing, but he was definitely speaking out of turn - arrogantly, hurtfully and he was wrong, to boot.  But that's something arrogant rich white men do, too - they can throw out any rationalization to make themselves feel good about the shitty thing they just did.  No one has the status - and everything about Dawkins screams that he's obsessed with status, that he really, really likes being an important rich white man - to seriously gainsay him.  He can dismiss them, as he did, and does.  Learn to think!  It is you who is clearly the problem!)

A couple years back, he told a woman who dared talk about sexism in the atheist conventions that because she wasn't being beaten up by her husband that she should shut up.  He tells other people that they should think, but he often fails to do it, himself - two wrongs don't make a right.  Beating women - beating anyone - is wrong.  But so is sexual harassment that occurs at atheist conferences.  A person who bothered to think would recognize that . . . but this is Richard Dawkins.  He's an important rich white man!  He's got TITLES!  So women who aren't beating beaten by their husbands need to shut up.

He is also a racist.  He said that Cambridge has produced more Nobel laureates than the whole of the Middle East.  Should we be stunned that a prize created by a northerwestern European is mostly given out to other northwestern Europeans?  But he has the bigotry of a Englishman, including the arrogant belief that they are really the best at everything.

So, he's a pig.  There, I said it.  Fuck that racist, sexist asshole.

Why I don't like Colton Smith's pathetic excuses

I read this article about why Colton Smith isn't a very good representative of the US Army.  It mostly comes down to the justifiable perception that he's a total douche.  He's a smug, self-important asshole who is a bit of a dirty fighter, who brags about cheating to win in the cage ("if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough") and is basically a jerk.

What bothers me about him, though, is that he makes excuses for his losses before there's even a fight.  Before his fight with Carlos Diego Ferreira (which he lost in humiliating fashion in 38 seconds . . . his third straight loss, I should add), he said, "On the base, we train soldiers, and I’m a combative instructor right now. But that’s life and death stuff, that’s not sport stuff like mixed martial arts.  Missions come first, soldiers come first, then MMA was a pretty distant second. Now it’s just changed, and the Army has been very supportive of me. I took a personal leave for this fight."

I could be critical of the US military's combatives training as a waste of time.  It is.  US soldiers have guns.  There is almost no unarmed hand-to-hand fighting in combat.  Additionally, it takes years of dedicated training to learn unarmed martial arts thus almost a tiny handful of soldiers ever learn combatives.  One would be hard pressed to find a single situation where military combatives actually saved a soldier's life in combat.  I did some googling and couldn't find a case - and even if you can, it doesn't change the point, it's rare as hell.

Though I did find that the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the dudes in charge of deciding how the US Army is trained, wants to get rid of the current combatives program and replace it with a two week course.  This is an ongoing thing.  Soldiers dig martial arts, so when some soldiers get good at them, they get a few officers behind them, get some funding, create a program and then someone notices once again that unarmed combat has no place on modern battlefields and the program gets scrapped.  Combatives is merely the latest in a long line of martial arts whose usefulness has been overblown to rationalize soldiers acting like tough guys who can kill a person with their commando moves.

OK, ignoring that TRADOC wants to get rid of combatives and there is no indication that it has saved any soldier's life, what Smith is basically doing is making an excuse why it's okay for him to lose.

It's bullshit for a couple of reasons, if you ask me.  The first is that it's just some chickenshit thing to say - he is giving himself an out, an excuse to lose.  Mind you, he is losing.  Three in a row.  But he's saving lives . . . oh, wait, except that there is no proof that Army combatives have done anything of the sort, to the extent that TRADOC wants to cut the program.

Second . . . Colton Smith isn't the first guy in MMA to be in a dangerous job.  I can't think of a single policeman who said, after getting their ass kicked in 38 seconds, the third time in three fights that he's been finished (which might not happen so much if he didn't give himself so many ways out).  Before fighting Ben Askren, Karl Amoussou didn't go, "Well, if Ben whips me, it's because my police work in Paris, fighting gangs, is why will have lost.  That's important work, not like this MMA stuff."  (Note: he did lose, but not as badly as Smith makes a habit of losing.)  Mirko Crocop never used his service with Croatian anti-terrorist special police as a justification as to why he lost.  Tim Kennedy hasn't done it when he was a Green Beret sniper.  Even though those guys could legitimately say they're saving lives, or at least fighting a war.

Most MMA fighters hold a day job, even many in the UFC.  Since the kind of guys who beat up each other in a cage have that mindset all the time, many MMA fighters have jobs that are risky - cops and soldiers have populated MMA's ranks from nearly the beginning.  Smith's excuses are a slight to every person in MMA who has done their job and fought and lost and never made excuses - Smith's excuses are doubly bullshit because he made them before the fight.

After three straight losses, it was normal for a dude to get bounced from the UFC.  Especially at lightweight, which is a shark pit.  Smith was never a very good fighter and he keeps getting his ass kicked so I don't imagine he'll be with the promotion very much longer.  Still, he's a jerk.

Steroid use vs. weight cutting - let's talk hypocrisy

Today, MMAJunkie.com's Ben Fowlkes said that we have to make up our mind about steroids in MMA.  In the question about steroids, for me there's an interesting artifact that already exists inside MMA - and all combat sports that are divided into weight classes - and that's weight cutting.

The problem people have with steroids, I find, is often vague.  It's cheating.  In the sense of the term that there are rules against steroids, this is absolutely true, of course.  But let us be clear, in most jurisdictions, cutting weight is illegal.  Let's look at New Jersey, for instance!  Here's what New Jersey law says about weight cutting from the New Jersey Administrative Code 13:46-1A.3 Weighing of Boxers (which also applies to MMA as per the NJAC):

(a) Weighing of all boxers for all shows must take place not later than one o'clock on the day of the show in which said boxers are to take part.
(b) Weights must be determined by a representative of the Commissioner with the matchmaker concerned present.
(c) Opponents should be weighed in the presence of each other.
(d) Members of the press, in addition to the responsible handlers of the boxers, shall be permitted to attend the weighing of principals.
(e) All weights stripped.
(f) No boxer shall be permitted to lose more than one percent of his body weight on the day of the boxing contest in an attempt to make the weight required by his boxing contract and by N.J.A.C. 13:46-1A.3.

To me, this is pretty clear.  There are no provisions in the law for doing weight cuts on any day other than the fight, the law clearly expects weigh-ins to be on the day of the fight, though they can't be later than 1pm, and fighters have a one percent leeway.  I suspect, in practice, is that if your weight at the fight is more than one percent over the maximum weight of the class, you'd be cheating.

Regardless, in New Jersey law, weight cutting is illegal.  It's clearly, definitely and I think unambiguously cheating.  And, yet, in no MMA contest I've seen held in New Jersey has this law been followed.  Weight cutting, by which I mean cheating, is absolutely ubitquitous in MMA and boxing, everyone knows it and no one is doing anything about it.

Weight cutting is also dangerous.  People die from it.  And even when they don't die, it's brutal on your body.  It saps them of health and vigor - of strength and endurance - right before a rigorous athletic contest.

How is this permitted?  Why do we ignore this one rule that is easy to enforce and good for the fighters while freaking the fuck out whenever anyone's testosterone ratios are out of whack?

The only defense is . . . everyone does it.  Everyone does this unhealthy thing to cheat, so it's okay.  This is so legally and morally vapid that it doesn't deserve comment.

But we have a problem with steroids.  I think that all this fuss about steroid is looking for a speck in your neighbor's eye while ignoring the plank in your own.

Further thoughts on UFC 167

While we're on the subject of UFC 167 . . .

It's been a while since I've been impressed with Rory MacDonald. The last time I remember liking him was when he suplexed Nate Diaz through the mat three times. But since then?

I mean, I know that MMA guys are going to, as a group, have some tough guy nicknames. How many are called something-something assassin? But the moment I cooled on MacDonald was when he started calling himself “Ares”.

I find it hard to say that MMA fighters oughtta research their silly superhero nicknames, but Ares . . . ? Really?

The Greeks had a number of war gods . . . well, almost all of them, including Aphrodite, had a war aspect. But the least respected of the Olympians was, without a doubt, Ares. Generally, when he appeared at all in Greek mythology, it was to be humiliated. But if you were serious about war, you were probably going to be into Zeus and Athena, maybe Apollo or Hermes. Ares was a pig, brutal and stupid, a bully who ran away if people confronted him. One of his ceremonies was, and I kid you not, involved puppy killing. It's kind of hard to get into a dude whose actual religious ceremonies involved raising a puppy for a year and then killing it. What a asshole.

So, anyone so arrogant to want to call themselves literally a god and then so ignorant as to choose

Arex is going to rub me the wrong way. Then he started walking around in suits and thinking he deserved a title because he was all but crowned long before he got a title shot. He started to come off as a used car salesman, superficially nice but coated in a thin film of slime.

Which is to say, thank you, Ruthless Robbie Lawler. It is good to see you returned to top contention. ATT has been good to you, clearly, balancing your aggression with better control and technique. I totally want to see a title eliminator between Robbie Lawler and Matt Brown. I'm not sure I'd be on Lawler's side because I have something of a man crush on Matt Brown, but it would probably be a hell of a fight.

On the other side of things, I'm still pretty neutral about Johny Hendricks. Sometimes he comes off as really down-to-earth and humble. Other times? Not so much. He recently said that if GSP couldn't handle the pressure of being champion that he should retire and give up the belt.

Well, duh. This whole business with GSP people have been saying he can't quit fighting and keep the belt. It is interesting to note that at no point did GSP say that's what he intended. He said, instead, that he was having a hard time and was stepping back from fighting. Clearly, if he stays away too long, yes, he should be stripped of the belt. We should also bear in mind that Dominick Cruz was out two years and didn't have his belt taken from him. (FWIW, I'm against that. I more or less feel that any champion who doesn't fight for more than a year, whatever the cause, should have the belt taken.)

At the same time, everyone has been casting what's wrong with GSP in psychological terms, which is weird since GSP hasn't said exactly what is going on, except that it's personal. Medical issues are personal, for instance. Indeed, I strongly suspect that GSP's problem is primarily physical, that he's got a bad knee that is probably limiting his training and explosiveness in fights – which is why he's getting hit so much, lately, I think.

But here's the thing, Johny, GSP owes you precisely nothing. He didn't make the decision, after all. He did what he was supposed to do – he showed up for the fight and he fought a tough fight. Just because you and Dana don't like the decision doesn't mean that GSP owes anything to you, not the least little bit. He is well past the point of needing to prove anything to anyone, given that he's the UFC's biggest draw, their winningest fighter with the longest current winning streak and is without doubt the best welterweight in the organization's history. For you to say anything about GSP is fucking arrogant bullshit that makes me hope that GSP spurns you and you take another fight and lose, slide into depression and doubt and get booted from the UFC. Then you'll take a spot in the World Series of Fighting and get knocked out in three fights in a row and retire to Texas in shame and defeat. Your lack of interest in the personal well-being of one of the greatest fighters who has ever lived is, frankly, disgusting and shameful and it makes an absolute mockery of your vocal Christianity. It makes it hard to like you, moves your confidence into arrogance and makes me wish for your defeat and, indeed, humiliation. Just saying.

Some Fnords - Government vs. Business

A fnord is, to quote Wikipedia, "typographic representation of disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a worldwide conspiracy."  There are a lot of fnords in the world, often bound up with double standards.  Let's start.

First, go look at this xkcd about women and math.   That is also the relationship of government and business to failure.  Everything else I say is elaboration.

When a business does something poorly, it is taken as simple poor choice by that particular company in that particular instance.  Even when a company makes a series of grievous mistakes, it is taken, generally, as being about that one company.  A few people like me aside, it is never taken as an indictment of the capitalist system of economics.  So, if Windows 8 sucks - and bearing in mind that Windows has a very hit and miss legacy with its software - that, at worst, indicts Microsoft.  No one ever goes, "Golly, it really sucks our business is almost entirely dependent on the whims of a capitalism.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just keep using Windows NT SP 2 without having new and dubious software constantly shoved down our throats."  Or how you've got to constantly rebuy your software because, hey, they keep changing the goddamn format to reflect "improvements", often unnecessary for the majority of users?  Seriously, how many people use all the functions in Office?  For most people, an ancient copy of Word Perfect would be identically efficient.

On the other hand, whenever the government does something wrong, a bunch of people come out of the woodwork to indict the entire system of government.  So, the launch problems with the US federal healthcare site aren't simply, y'know, that it's a big project and launch problems are common with any large, complex website, not to mention that immediately preceding the launch the government was laid off for a couple of weeks - so rather than putting the finishing touches on the site, those people were at home . . . no.  It is an indictment against the government doing anything.  Government is inherently inefficient.  It is repeated ad nauseum and, generally, by both big parties.

It goes the other way, too.  Any time a business succeeds at doing something, it is hailed as definitive proof of the capitalist way of life.  When a government succeeds, it's still a failure - so the popularity of Medicare (the most popular insurance company in the US whose administration is around 3% of its budget, as opposed to 15% for private insurance companies) is still seen as a failure.  Business, we are told, could do it better and is held back from doing it better because, I dunno, Medicare exists?  Even though Medicare is the most popular insurance company in the US with the lowest administration costs, the narrative is still that big business could do it better!  Which is what happens when you count only government's failures and only business success.

More viciously, the same is true of retirement insurance.  Even after the Great Recession when millions of elderly people saw their private equity and retirement portfolios evaporate - even then, there are a lot o people who attack federally funded retirement programs like Social Security.  Facts do not matter when discussing the efficiency of either business or government.  One is efficient, the other is not, regardless of performance.

To me, that's a fnord.  When the government succeeds, it fails.  When private business fails, it's the government's failure.  This is repeated over and over, again, and is the reason the US government nearly defaulted on its debts.

The next fnord is, once again, about the differences between government and business.  In this case, the idea that taxation limits economic development against the idea that intellectual property laws do not.

Anyone who reads the news hears, at great length, about how taxation is the bane of business.  If only we would eliminate taxation, business would take off and we would be even richer than before!  Yay!  Taxation crushes businesses, particularly small businesses, we are told, underfoot, never allowing the fresh shoots of innovation - an oft repeated word - to take root.

No one talks about how intellectual property laws do the same thing.

I realized this when reading a BBC article about the guy who invented the grill that doner kebabs - we mostly call them gyros or shawarma in the US - didn't patent it.  The article says that the grill's inventor isn't bitter . . .

Which made me pull up a bit.  Why would anyone assume that he's bitter?  It's ingrained.  Clearly, if you've built something that other people then use and don't make a bunch of money off of it, you should be bitter!  Right, Linux guys?  I bet you're all fuckin' bitter.  Anyway . . .

The article goes on to talk about the 16,000 doner kebab joints in Germany.  I couldn't help think that if the dude who had invented the vertical grill upon which those kebabs are cooked had patented it, there wouldn't be 16,000 doner kebab joints in Germany.  After all, at best, the inventor would have collected a cut from every place - creating an additional expense and limiting innovation.  And, quite possibly, the inventor could just refuse to sell the grills to anyone outside of his own business, keeping it as a special trade secret for his chain of kebab stands.

Such proprietary selfishness happens all the time.  Microsoft has worked quite hard to keep its code secret because it doesn't want people innovating off of its invention, for instance.  Just try to publish a story using Star Wars characters and see what happens.  And woe be to you if you've incorporated, even accidentally (through parallel invention), some element of a patented product belonging to a big corporation.  They will sue you right out of existence.

To me, that's a fnord . . . sorta related to the one above, actually, right?

While it is true that excessive taxation is bad, and limits the growth of business, no one wants to seem to talk about the extent to which patents and IP laws also limit business innovations - preventing entrepreneurs from experimenting with things that "belong" to another person, potentially improving them and "stealing" the market that the other person "created".  (There are so many quotes, there, because big businesses, themselves, often exploit people on their way up and continue to do so at the top.  By and large, the people who control all of those patents and IPs didn't really make very much, much less something as amorphous as a market.)

Paradoxically, limiting people's access to patents and IPs is supposed to somehow improve innovation.  That's the business and government's line, right?  This ignores the extent to which people can't innovate, either technologically or organizationally, when IPs because they can't afford to do so or are simply kept out of that market by the corporations who own the IPs.  But . . . that's real, right?

They're feeling the pinch, already, in some sciences - particularly biology.  Genetics is probably the first science to be dominated by corporations, which is why there are so many patented genes.  (Which is about as fucked up an idea as one can imagine.  It isn't like they invented them, they just found them.  It's like saying that because you found a particular species of plant in the Amazon that you therefore own all uses of that plant.  It's actually a really bizarre idea.  That the courts even partially validated patents on genes is creepy - and buys into the idea that just because someone spent money that they to have a return on their investment.  Which is equally creepy as patenting genes, to me, and also about as anti-capitalist an idea as exists.)  And as a result, biologists find themselves restricted in research opportunities because of patents.  The free exchange of ideas that once typified science is becoming dominated by corporate interests who don't care if the next guy's research is limited by existing IPs, slowing the rate of development of the field.  So long as they get their money.  It is starting to happen to other sciences, too, as research costs are externalized to universities - more and more barriers to research are being erected by a corporate need to control profit.

No one talks about that.  That's a fnord, too, and another example of how everything business does is good, by definition, and everything government does is bad, also by definition, without any reference whatsoever to external situations.

More BBC nonsense - their inability to understand what "murder" is

The BBC has a story, "Leaked report reveals Pakistan failures on Bin Laden", that says something everyone knows - a lot of people in Pakistan helped protect Bin Laden.  Duh.

But one of the things they say is, "A version of the report leaked to al-Jazeera says the killing of Bin Laden by US forces was a 'criminal act of murder' ordered by the US president."

Well, yes, when you send in your special forces into a country we are supposed to be allies with and those people then shoot an old man dead, yes, that's a criminal act of murder.  That's just fact.  It doesn't matter of it's Bin Laden or a sweet little old lady - the US President ordered troops into a country we are supposed to be allied with and they killed someone.  The designation of "enemy combatant" - even were it not a farcical term - does not give Obama the legal right to order executions in a foreign country with whom we are at peace.  What the US did is, indisputably, a criminal act of murder if you're actually bothering to go by the normal standards of international law.

(If you don't see that, do a little thought experiement and imagine how outraged people in the US would be if China send commandos into Nebraska where they then killed a murderer of Chinese people.  We wouldn't care if the guy was guilty.  It would be an intolerable violation of our sovereignty.  Everyone knows that China has no right to send soldiers into the United States to kill people, no matter who that person is, no matter if the Chinese government had designated that person an enemy of the people.  Just because Pakistan can't retaliate doesn't change the law.  It was just as illegal and immoral for us to kill Bin Laden in Pakistan as it would be for Chinese soldiers to kill an admittedly guilty person on US soil.)

The inability of newspapers to say things that are obvious and true is quite amazing.

No more MMA superfights! This is a good thing.

While I'm busy recapping my various feelings, Silva's loss means that all the nonsense around "superfights" is off. 

Mostly, superfights are a stupid idea.  If Silva wanted to fight at welterweight, he would have fought at welterweight.  If GSP wanted to fight at middleweight, he would . . . assuming either fighter could either cut the weight or gain it to meaningfully participate in the other weight class.  We will no longer be subjected to the spectacle of Anderson Silva wanting to fight GSP, while dodging Jon Jones.  We will no longer see GSP make excuses about why this isn't the time to fight Anderson Silva, where he'd probably have twenty or twenty-five pound weight disadvantage . . . which is, no doubt, the same reason why Silva wasn't so hot to fight the bigger Jon Jones.

Now that lynchpin is pulled.  Silva is no longer desireable as some sort of superfight contender.  GSP won't be dodging him, Silva won't be dodging Jones.  The fighters can fight at their own weight classes and I'm, generally, comfortable with that.

(Yes, I KNOW that boxers often fight above their weight classes.  But boxing isn't like MMA in some serious ways, in this regard.  In particular, there are several promotions that have a fair bit of credibility and because boxers have so much control over their opponents, they can sorta . . . pick and choose.  And they do.  Which has it's good points and bad points, but boxers fighting above their best weight is often akin to something that can never happen in MMA - it would be like GSP going over to Bellator and kicking Alexander Shlemenko's ass.  It changes the complexion of fighting at different weight classes entirely if that sort of thing was possible.  The UFC dominated top talent in MMA, so there's no fudging around the different promotional championships to look for different kinds of championship fights.  I'm not judging the way boxing does things, but boxers do have this privilege.  So when Manny Pacquiao goes up in weight, he decides, more or less, who he's going to fight, not the guys who run the promotion.  This is a huge difference between how fights are made in boxing and how they're made in MMA.)

So, now Silva can either focus on a rematch with Weidman or take other fights, almost certainly as a middleweight, GSP can worry about dudes like Hendricks, Ellenberger, MacDonald - he's got things to do at welterweight, which has a large talent pool.  Jon Jones can beat up more people at light heavyweight, if they can find them, or go up to heavyweight without the specter of a "superfight" looming.  Let's set about that business.

Reporting sucks today - the BBC editors and writers should be fired

I read two fairly horrible articles on BBC.com.  The first was "Big rise in new 'legal highs' - UN Drug Report" and the second was "Did our brains evolve to foolish follow celebrities?"

In the first about legal highs, the article is about the spread of designer drugs for whom no legislation exists and how the chemistry of drug designers works faster than law enforcement in criminalizing them.  The article goes on to say that this is bad because the new designer drugs are dangerous.  This is stupid in at least two ways.  One: it takes as a given that getting high, in any fashion at all, should be illegal.  Two: the facts are wrong.

Now, why should it be taken that getting high should be illegal?  It is untrue, of course.  We are allowed to get high, legally, with alchohol and nicotine (I should, perhaps, add caffiene to that list).  These things are legal and regulated and they get you high.  Alcohol, in particular, has the power to get you as fucked up as any illegal drug -- the characteristic of the high is different than, say, LSD, but you can get yourself totally wasted by alcohol to a similar extent as LSD.  While nicotine lacks that kind of potential in the way the industrialized world generally uses it (though if you're fond of a hookah, you can get pretty goddamn smashed, I should add), clearly we are not systematically opposed to intoxication.  So why should we presume all other forms of intoxication are bad?  Yet, in a totally unspoken way, the article does exactly that.

Afterward, it just says that designer drugs are unsafe.  Really?  Let's think this through.

(One of the unsafe drugs mentioned is "bath salts", which is just sloppy journalism.  Almost no one takes bath salts because the high isn't very good and the crash is quite bad.  But after that guy freaked out here in Miami had started eating a dude's face, there was a bath salts scare.  Bath salts had nothing to do with the attack, but once a good scare is started it's good for sensationalism to bring it up.  Who cares if people don't actually use bath salts?  Bath salts are bad!)

Alcohol and nicotine can kill you.  In the US, alone, the CDC says that 60,000 die every year because they drink too much.  The CDC says that cigarette smoking causes twenty percent of deaths in America, 443,000.  Fifty thousand of those deaths are from second hand smoke -- fifty thousand non-smokers die every year because of cigarettes.

In 2010, a study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs ranked how dangerous various drugs were on a scale of 1 to 100, taking into account personal harm, harm to others, costs to society.  Alcohol got a 72, the highest score - this is above heroin at 55 and crack cocaine at 54.  Tobacco was right under cocaine at 25.  Cannabis rated a 21.  Mephedrone - one of the "dangeorus" designer drugs - rated a 12.  Ecstasy rates a 9.  LSD is down at around 7 and magic mushrooms a 5.

So, most illegal drugs are safer than most legal ones.  The dangerous mephedrone, meow meow in the article, is . . . pretty goddamn safe.  Safer than cannabis.  Ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms?  Single digits.

I question the report in several serious ways.  There is no real indication that cannabis harms the user.  So why does it rate above, y'know, in the same ballpark as cocaine and amphetamines?  And how does nicotine, causing so many deaths, rate lower than alcohol?  So, far from perfect.

Yet, many of the drugs we thing are dangerous - mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy - are very . . . well, safe compared to things that are already legal.  And mephedrone, one of the drugs the reporter specifically mentions, is much safe than the legal drugs of tobacco and alcohol. 

In short: there is no reason to presume designer drugs are dangerous.  That's just pure sensationalism created out of a fairly bizarre idea that being high on anything other than booze or cigarettes is somehow worse than being high on booze and cigarettes.  It's also just plain wrong and clearly no one fact-checked the article, so it's a failure on the editorial level, too, for a newspaper that is supposed to report facts.

The second bad article is about the effects of prestige on society.  The article opines that we should not care what underwear David Beckham wears - that Beckham's social prestige makes us care more than we "should" for extraneous things like his fashion choices.

What the article fails to really address is that this isn't happenstance.  We care what underwear David Beckham wears because someone make a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to sell us Calvin Klein briefs.  Left to our own devices, most of us would never, ever learn, or care to learn, what briefs Beckham wears and care about his prestige in his area of legitimate expertise - soccer.

The use of the prestige of celebrity to sell us things is not a maladaptation to the modern world.  It is an adaptation that is being consciously, actively subverted by advertisers to sell us crap we do not need.  Without the influence of advertisers, would the prestige of celebrity be so odious?  Is it bad to hold up David Beckham in considerable prestige due to his really incredible athletic skills?  Or to hold up Beyonce for her skill as an entertainer?  But what happens is this prestige, this false authority, is being repackaged by advertisers as a means to manipulate us.  It isn't just happenstance.  Someone is doing it.

When you fail to mention something so important in an article about how prestige is used to influence us - that there are a group of people consciously manipulating this psychological reality - then you've failed as a journalist.

Then I stopped reading the news because I remembered how horrible it is, generally.

More violence in Boston -- time to repeal the Second Amendment

A cop dead.  Explosions over at MIT.

Apropos my previous post, I think simplest solution is to repeal the Second Amendment so people like the NRA and all the lousy scumbags who think their metal dicks are more important than human lives don't have a shred of law to hide behind.  Repeal it and then criminalize all guns, round up all privately held firearms and destroy them.  Then jack up the penalties for gun violence sky high and every time we come across another gun, destroy it.

The idea that all this mayhem and carnage is somehow protecting our freedoms is evil and silly.

I did not like Assassin's Creed 3

Assassin's Creed 3 stinks, I'm sad to say

I have been a fan of the Assassin's Creed games since the first one. A open world platformer/stealth game? Hell, yes. By the time AC3 came out, they had four games to figure things out, too. Which it looked like they had. AC2 was a huge improvement on AC1. The post-assassination sophomoric explication was very much cut down, the personality free Altair was replaced with the extremely likable Ezio Auditore and the lengthy fight sequences were dramatically shortened by Ezio's incredible ability to kill a person. Ezio also got a laundry list of nifty gadgets, a hidden wrist gun, dual hidden blades, a crossbow, more weapons to choose from, poisoned daggers and darts, the ability to use ziplines and gadgets to climb faster, parachutes and eventually bombs and grenades, too. He was like a Renaissance Batman. Additionally, Ezio got three games and you could see him transform from a callow, but likable youth, to a serious and mature man who accepted responsibility and taught others his arts. Ezio was a great character, fun and likable  who matured believably (in a video game sense) without the tedious monologues of AC1.

In Assassin's Creed 3, they decided to fuck that up.

First, the combat regression. In short, the AC3 protagonist, Conner, is not nearly so well armed as Ezio. First, they removed throwing knives. In the four previous AC games, the protagonists could throw knives quickly and accurately. Most foes fell after one knife hit. Conner can't throw knives. Sure, he starts out with a gun, but it is in all ways inferior to Ezio's gun – when someone was targeting Ezio with a gun, Ezio could generally shoot them before getting shot. Conner draws much slower and is likely to be shot before he can do anything (well, he can grab people to use as a human shield, and it's cool when there's someone around for it to work on, but there often isn't). I have no idea why Ezio's gun is technologically superior to Conner's, or why knife throwing is out, but it is. Sure, Conner has a bow but it's no better than Ezio's crossbow and since Conner has fewer arrows it is in some ways worse.

Additionally, when on a ledge, Conner has no ranged weapons he can use. Both Altair and Ezio could knife throw from ledges, which was useful.

In the AC2 games, they made combat shorter and more interesting than in AC1. In AC3, they regress by making combat less interesting (difficult to use ranged weapons in combat, elimination of dodges) while radically increasing the number of people you have to fight. In AC2, a guard patrol was between two and four guys, generally. In AC3, a patrol is a dozen people. It also takes Conner longer to counter-kill someone than Ezio, which means combats take longer and you're less likely to get a combo kill going because you'll be taken out of it by someone stabbing you when you're engaged.

The game will also, for no good reason, fairly often put you on the highest notoriety. The British couriers will sound the alarm even if you've got no interest in them, so you'll be minding your business and suddenly you'll be surrounded by literally thirty guys. So, there are random fights that are either extremely long and tedious or chases where 2/3rds of everyone around you is a guard, making it hard to get away.

And on the guard note, apparently the colonials work with the British in chasing you. This is baffling but whatever.

So, there is more combat, it is longer and less interesting, and your weapons suck compared to Ezio's – they do less damage and take longer to use. Didn't Ubisoft learn this lesson from The Warrior Within?

Let's move on to Conner, himself. First, the simple one. He's boring. He's incredibly dull. It's like all they could think of for a Mohawk character was “noble savage”. The liveliness they introduced with Ezio vanished in AC3 and Conner's stoicism. Conner does not smile, he, nor does anyone about him has the least sense of humor.

Second, there's the racism. He is a noble savage, which is a stereotype. It's painful to watch. This is mixed up with the atrocious writing, generally, which I'll talk more about in a bit, but Conner's stereotypical noble savage motive is to save his village's land from British expansionism . . .

Which is also a complete reverse of actual history. The Indians were overwhelmingly on the British side because the Crown had started limiting intrusion into Indian lands. An English High Justice had even opined in a newspaper that he saw no reason why England's white subjects should be allowed to steal the land of England's red subjects. In the Revolutionary War, around 13,000 Indians fought for the British. Around 1200 for the colonials. The knew that the colonials were no friends of the Indians and, of course, they were not.

But Conner is just so painfully boring. Combined with that noble savage bullshit and the idiocy of proposing the colonials were better for the Indians than the English, ugh.

The writing is generally awful. One of the things I learned is that no one in colonial America is either pleasant or attractive. And the pedantry that was so awful in Assassin's Creed 1 returns in full goddamn force. Many “missions” are Conner walking around protecting some famous historical figure as they ramble on about the sad plight of rich white men.

I mean, I'm an American, but I honestly don't know what side I would have been on during the Revolutionary War. When the war started, it was not obvious that the US would become a republic and usher in a new global democratic era. But it's hard for me to have too much sympathy for the colonials. The whole “taxation without representation” business wasn't some cruel trick of the English, but a fact arising from the fact England and the Americas were two months travel time apart. The trip, in addition to being long, was dangerous. It is a bad idea to let the weather hold a government hostage.

Second, you look at the “tyranny” of the English and it's really . . . not that tyrannical. It's mostly very modest tax increases on items on paper and tea. Tea! It'd be like rebelling because the government taxed Coca-Cola!

Then there are the reasons few people talk about – particularly England's growing unease with slavery (the English would outlaw it altogether in 1820, forty-five years before America got around to it) and England's limits of colonization westward. Many immigrants came to America for land, equating Indian lands with free lands. The English court system was starting to rule in favor of the Indians. This was unacceptable.

About the worst thing the English actually did was housing troops in private dwellings without getting the consent of the owners. The English and French were doing a fair bit of fighting in the Americas and the colonies wanted protection, but barracks were in short supply. So the English quartered troops in private houses, forcing their way in.

Mind you, they paid for the soldiers being quartered. And heavy knows I'd hate it if I was told that four guys were going to move into my house and I would be responsible for feeding them, no matter how much I was paid. It would really piss me off. There are also canards of the English troops behaving badly to their landlords, but there are no specifics. I'm sure that more than one soldier seduced more than one wife or daughter, and that would also fuel my rage, but I don't think that revolution is the answer, there, more like . . . build some damn barracks.

The real reason the Revolution happened is a growing sense among Americans that they weren't English. Many of them had been there a while and the American experience was so little like the English experience that the divide between the two places grew large, particularly during the period of Salutatory Neglect. The English had unintentionally allowed the colonists to grow more attached to local government than the English government, so after the French and Indian War when the English came in and treated the Americans like subjects, when the English started to pay attention to the colonials, again, it heightened the feeling that the Americans weren't the English. But that reason is pretty hard to sum up in a game about running through trees and knifing people.

In the game, this manifests, like I said, with Conner being nattered at by various figures, pontificating in the most tasteless ways imaginable about the causes of revolution. Case in point, Conner is walking around Boston with Sam Adams, and Sam is mentioning the unjust nature of British soldiers being quartered in private homes. Conner says, basically, “Well, you keep slaves.” Then the game has the fucked up audacity to equate quartering troops with owning human beings. There is a scene with some British soldiers behaving badly to the people quartering them and Sam Adams smugly says that it proves his point about the quartering soldiers is worse than slavery.

I mean, I almost stopped playing right there that shit is so fucked up. Slaves were flogged, raped, humiliated, mutilated. They were owned. No, they did not quarter troops. They didn't have homes, after all. The idea that the struggles of a land owner being inconvenienced is the same as the savagery of chattel slavery is racist and detestable. I understand where it comes from – there has to be a justification for rebellion and the real reasons aren't, like I said, that good or defensible. But it's horrible to suggest that anything is as bad as slavery this side of genocide.

Plus there's the whole Indian thing. The idea that the colonials would be better for the Indians is farcical and obviously untrue. Sure, some Mohicans fought for the colonials, but as mercenaries. Not exactly high-minded motives, there.

For additional racism, Conner's mentor is black. So, we have an Indian and a black guy who are involved with the Revolutionary War? Like the Revolutionary War improved conditions for black people in America? It's boggling, just boggling.

The game is also not about Conner. As far as I got, the main missions were about people like Paul Revere or Sam Adams, with Conner being their ethnic sidekick as they accomplished various historical acts. While I understand how things got there, I don't know why someone didn't notice. If they wanted the game to be about Sam Adams, they should have made him a goddamn Assassin. (Which would have been wicked, come to think about it. It would have provided motivation sorely lacking in Conner.) But the supporting cast, who are actually the stars, go on at great and tedious length about everything. None of the characters are interesting or even personable.

Other gameplay issues . . . the game has a lot of tedious bits relative to other games. So in AC2, the Assassin's become capitalists. Ezio goes around buying land and businesses to get the money he needs to do what he needs to do (including buying art). But the way it's handled in that game is . . . Ezio goes up to a shop, buys it and every so often money is deposited in his account. Every so often he had to go get it. That's it.

Conner, on the other hand, has to actively take a hand in transactions. He has to manage the estate's affairs – personally selecting what is made and where it is sold, and to whom. If you don't go into their menu intensive trading interface, you don't make any money.

Well, you can by hunting. The glories of hunting. You spread bait near a snare. Animal goes into snare. You skin the animal. Exciting!

Also, something that vexes me a little bit, is the wolves. Wolves will attack you pretty much on site. That perpetrates the canard that wolves are man-eaters when, in North America, there are zero unprovoked wolf attacks. Zero, as in “none”. Gray wolves are endangered, for crying out loud!

You also go around performing a beaver holocaust. There's good money in beaver pelts and they're more or less helpless. But, c'mon! Assassin's Creed III: the Extinction!

Funniest moment for me – the man-eating black bear. I . . . laughed aloud when I heard that one. Black bears are famously cowardly.

So the game has a lot of tedious gameplay. Some of it, like the trading, is reasonably important to the game. You need to buy things to succeed in the game so you have to use their silly trading interface to make money, rather than trade being something that just arises from your estate's growth. Hunting is amusing for about ten minutes but then it's a drag.

There are some improvements over the AC2 games. Well, one improvement. The freerunning – which is the core of the game – is greatly improved. And, yet, they seem to want to use it less, there are far fewer jumping puzzles than in previous games, at least as far as I got (and since I was about halfway done when I gave up, it would be a long stretch otherwise).

Mostly what AC3 did was make me want to play AC2, Brotherhood and Revelations, again. Which is okay since those games are great.

A bit of a rant about Joss Whedon's fans vis-a-vis his Romney parody video

Okay, I admit it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is pretty cool – uneven, but some of the episodes are among the best in television (Hush, Once More, with Feeling stand out, IMO) and I liked Angel even better overall (Smile Time is among the funniest things ever put on television, and I'm counting the Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati and the Futurama's Roswell That Ends Well). But sometime around Firefly, well, it was clear there was a cult of personality going on. I don't particularly like Firefly and when people ask me why, I go, “The sexism.” Then, with near 100% reliability, Firefly fans say, “There's no sexism! Kaylee! River!” And I go, “Mal publicly and frequently sexually humiliates Inari by calling her a whore . . . and this causes her to fall in love with him. That's sexism. That isn't near the line. It's so far over the line that it can't see the line from orbit.” While this (with almost 100% reliability) gets them to concede the point, it seems to do little to dent their uncritical praise for Whedon's work. And I won't even get into Dollhouse and the whole prostitute-assassin-rape thing. Or even how embarrassingly stupid The Avengers is (though it most certainly is very stupid). I'm not saying Whedon is a talentless hack, I'm just saying he doesn't walk on water and I think much of his career is currently being sustained by the goodwill generated by Buffy that has transformed into a cult of personality. I'm sure that if almost anyone else had written a movie as bad as the Avengers, someone would have noticed.

Right here is a convenient place to show both Whedon's strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I'm not considering his acting, which is wooden, because that's not my point (and isn't the problem with the piece, anyway). The problem is that this joke is about a minute too long. Whedon spends about a minute belaboring the ways in which Romney's policies will bring about a zombie apocalypse. Except for Romney's unrestrained embrace of corporations, it was unnecessary and didn't build comedic tension but drained it due to the transparency of the humor. He essentially repeated things that are known about Romney, that are repeated by Obama's campaign ad nauseum. 

The basic premise is good. The zombie apocalypse bit is quite funny. But at two and a quarter minutes? Man, a joke has to be as good as The Aristocrats to be that long.  (I'm sure there are many versions of it on YouTube, if I recall, Bob Saget's is particularly good, but his, Gottfried's and Silverman's are all worth listening watching – or just watch all of Penn and Teller's The Aristocrats, great flick).

Because of it's unnecessary length, furthermore, it fails as political satire. For political satire to work, it's gotta hurt. With a premise as absurd as a zombie apocalypse, you've got to strike fast or you'll lose the audience you're trying to satirize. A Romney supporter, watching this video, will be taken aback by the zombie apocalypse thing and right then, right there, in that moment of shock, is when you've got to hurt them. Whedon should have employed his best weapon, the corporate line, immediately. Otherwise, you're allowing them to recover and go, “This is just a guy repeating the same ol' Democratic line.”  Which he is.  By the time he gets to Romney's worship of corporations, they've fully recovered. He went for a grind instead of a finish and lost on points.

This is the basic pattern of much of Whedon's work – it has moments of sharp wit but it's in between all this other stuff which is not so good. Which isn't a problem for Whedon, in the sense that no writer lands the knock-out punch every swing. Even brilliant writers, like Mark Twain, have good and bad days. Whedon did give us Buffy, he did give us Angel, he certainly owes no one anything, artistically speaking. I'm just annoyed that people praise his works while seeming to willfully ignore his flaws.

How Awful is the Battleship Movie?

Battleship was worse than I thought it would be.

First, the protagonist is a fuck up aged 26 who is bullied by his brother to go into the Navy (as he is in the Navy). I thought that meant “enlisted” but at the movie's beginning he is an officer. Now . . . there are three ways to become an officer. The first is to go to the Naval Academy, the second is the Naval ROTC program and the third is to serve as an enlisted sailor for years with distinction and go to Officer's Candidate School.

The Naval Academy is a hard to get into school. Not only do you need the kind of grades and SAT scores of top Ivy League schools, you need things like a letter from your congresscritter. The NROTC program is basically a scholarship program, merit based, meaning that you need, again, a great high school career. Fuck ups do not get into either.

Then the fuck up officer fucks up and is told he's going to be kicked out of the Navy. His response is, “Oh, golly, I'm so ashamed” and not “Yay! I hated this job, it was a bad fit and I was bullied into it in the first place!” I mean, SHOCKER, a job a dude was bullied into doesn't work out.

Then they call the battleship Missouri the “greatest warship in US naval history”. That's . . . almost offensive. The greatest warship in US history is either the USS Constitution or the USS Monitor. I'd tend to say the Constitution, myself, a Revolutionary War ship that repeatedly won engagements with better armed and more numerous British warships. Considering the time, that was pretty epic. The Monitor was the victor against the CSS Merrimac in the Civil War. The battle was a technological turning point, the death of sail powered, wood hulled warships for steam powered, steel hulled ships.

The Missouri, on the other hand, was obsolete when constructed. It was just a leftover from the early 20^th century's focus on big ships. Everyone knew, militarily, real sea power was with aircraft carriers and submarines and everything else was just support for aircraft carriers and submarines. Battleships were always kind of pointless, an egotistical race for side. Easy to target, slow to maneuver, with guns that could not track small, fast ships, they were always utterly pointless. Even for the wars in which the Missouri served, it was militarily insignificant.

But then, cut to the female romantic lead, who is a physical therapist (they probably found “nurse” too cliched, but clearly did not stray far afield) talking to this dude who had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. He's got a bad attitude because, y'know, he has lost his legs and IS SURROUNDED BY CONDESCENDING IDIOTS. He is introduced in physical therapy being told by a dull eyed therapist to correct his form on his artificial legs and to focus. I know different people respond differently to motivation, but a whole hell of a lot of us, when we're tired and in pain, really, really object to people telling us what we already goddamn know.

Then the new pretty white lady therapist shows up and says he's still the same man who won the Golden Gloves and was an elite soldier. That's . . . an awful thing to say to a guy who's lost his legs. Because those are precisely the kinds of things he can't do, anymore. Your stick and move really suffers when you've got not fucking legs. And, of course, the Army puts you on 100% disability when your legs get blown off. He will never be a boxer nor soldier, again. Saying he's the same man is just wrong. And cruel. He has suffered a terrible, permanent injury that is preventing him from doing many of the things he loves.

Of course, in the end, he'll get an attitude adjustment and be okey-dokey. Because a positive attitude solves all wrongs! (I have now watched it all and I was of course right. Stupidest moment in the movie – the legless boxer submitting an alien with a reverse triangle with artificial legs.)

Then they gave us, about the aliens, “No material on the periodic table!” Except for . . . lawrencium! My soul, it aches. I mean, it's quite possible that alien materials would be hard to analyze because any really foreign compound is liable to be hard to analyze, and it could well be produced with technologies we don't know. But atoms are the same everywhere in the universe and some form of stabilized lawrencium, sure, maybe there's a stable allotrope, would be just as hard to analyze. I mean, how do you even figure out something is a stable allotrope of lawrencium? The stuff barely exists on this planet.

OHEMGEE! The Navy fired first! They sent out a warning horn, got a much more powerful one in return and then OPENED FIRE. The aliens might have been peaceful but some idiot yahoo OPENED FIRE on an ALIEN SHIP.

What the aliens were trying to say: “We come in peace. Our planet's environment has been destroyed and we're looking for a new home. We're a primarily aquatic people so you'll barely notice we're there, except for all the incredible technologies we're willing to give you in payment for part of your ocean.”

Afterward: “Fuck you guys.”

Then the cowardly academic! Of course, no academics are intelligent, well-adjusted people with lots of social skills. It's all Big Bang Theory, yep, where academics are awkward, socially inept yobs. (By the end, the Cowardly Lion finds his courage.)

A big part of the “plot” is the aliens need to coopt human communications equipment to phone home because theirs was destroyed in reentry. The idea is that a land based system fired off a command to a satellite that “boosts the signal”, apparently with sufficient intensity to break the light barrier, I dunno. I kept asking myself, “They have space ships. Why don't they just go up to the satellite, directly, and send the signal from there.” I, of course, do know the reason. The script writers are either fools or (and I think this is more likely), well, unmotivated. Some guy comes up to me and says, “So, we're making a movie based on the game Battleship.” “You mean, that double blind target finding game based on WWII sea duels?” Yeah, except instead of that, we're going to have aliens.” “Aliens?” “Aliens. We'll pay.” Not exactly the best material to work with so I'll give them a pass. Indeed, I'll give everyone in the movie a pass except the producers who pushed this through to completion. I understand that everyone else, the director, actors, CG guys, best boys, I understand all of these people need to put food on the table, they need to work. But the producers? Fuck those guys.

And let's talk length. The movie is over two hours long. Which is admittedly over two hours too long, but there's a reason action movies used to be around ninety minutes.

Then they use the Missouri. With WWII and Korean era vets that conveniently happen to be on hand. Now, Korea ended in 1952. By my reckoning, that's sixty years ago. Since enlistment age is 18, the MINIMUM age of any vet of the Missouri is SEVENTY-EIGHT.

Then they fire up the boilers of the Missouri, which is physically demanding labor in extremely hot conditions. Remember, minimum age, seventy-eight. And some of them are from WWII, meaning they're no younger than EIGHTY-FIVE. Of course, some of them will be older.

And then they do that thing that they did in the one horrible Pirates of the Caribbean movie – not that one, the OTHER one – where they drop anchor to swing a ship around by ninety degrees. Well, it would not have worked in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, that kind of sudden deceleration would either snap the chain (if you're lucky) or rip the chain through the hull of the ship or some combination of the two. When you do it with a BATTLESHIP . . . the ship would either snap in two or the capstan would be ripped out or the chain would shear through the hull, or some combination of the three.

In the denouement, of course the fuck up saves the day and he's awarded a Silver Star – which is the third highest honor a military person can get.

HELLLLLLO, the person who is responsible for saving the SPECIES would get a Congressional Medal of Honor – and then spend the next six months touring the planet while every nation on earth hands him the highest honor they can give to foreigners.

His brother, who DIED, and started the conflict by opening fire on an alien ship, got the Navy Cross, a higher honor than the guy who SAVED THE SPECIES.

They get nothing right. No thing.

I will also say that the screenwriter, at least, realized that these aliens were not military. Their weapons could not instantly destroy our ships. They had no weapons of mass destruction, no armed aircraft much less spacecraft. Our weapons could hurt their ships. Their people on the ground, while wearing powered armor, had no guns. (Lots of reasons, too, why they had powered armor, the Earth has higher gravity, maybe, and they did do a lot of heavy lifting). It's like . . .

Imagine a Spanish galleon from the 16^th century fighting a modern destroyer. The galleon would vanish under the power of the destroyer's weapons – the least powerful of the destroyer's weapons could easily sink a galleon before the galleon was in range of hitting the destroyer. Which it would never get into because it is a wind driven craft and the destroyer has diesel engine.

Now imagine that galleon up against a cargo ship with a top speed of around six miles an hour. Sure, the crew have some weapons, guns and such, but they have no armor, no training, and the galleon's guns would be able to blow holes in the cargo ship's hull – it isn't designed for war. It wouldn't necessarily be an easy fight, but it would be a winnable one for the galleon.

That's what happened in Battleship. We destroyed essentially unarmed recon ships full of civilian crew.

And so what if they don't contact their world? Will that necessarily stop additional exploration of earth? Would it stop humans? And they more less said that the aliens' world is fucked – they might not need to move but they definitely want to. Somehow, I doubt one failed recon mission will put the matter to rest. And next time, they will send a warship. It's what we'd do.