Indignant Desert Birds

Sunday Morning Reading Material: Third Sunday in April 2011 – Playing the Game of Thrones to Either Win or Die edition

Posted on April 17th, 2011 by Punning Pundit

Vader? Kind of the Man.

It’s Sunday. Sundays are for getting together with your family to find out how long until they kick you out of your house. Or Sundays are for being with good friends in Las Vegas. Or Sundays are for preparing to host a hoard of nerds for a highly anticipated TV show.

This week the Eastern Seaboard of the US was wracked by storms. Also this week, Cuba celebrated the 50th anniversary of the failed US invasion of their country. Also also? The French nabbed alleged monster Laurent Gbagbo, and turned him over to those seeking justice for his alleged crimes. That’s justice, 21st century style.

I am a proud member of tribe nerd. We nerds, much like any other tribe, have our own totems, holy texts, styles, images, icons, and heroes. To a nerd, most questions have the answer “42″. Occasionally, however, the answer is 24 mph.

I am something of a clothes horse. I like to look good, and I’ll combine things in interesting ways to make that happen. I wear nice slacks when I can get away with it, and good jeans when that’s appropriate. I have a friend who will only, always, and forever wear black slacks. That’s fine. That’s just taste. My taste is manifestly not the final arbiter of all that is good and holy about fashion. I’ll pretend they are, for fun, but I do understand the difference between objective and subjective reality. Perhaps this is why I am not a New York Times columnist .

One of the weirder things about fashion is the way it’s always changing. People in the 1980s thought they looked “radical”. The first time a King of France put on a pair of high healed shoes, his entire court believed they were the most manly things ever to be donned by a manly man. It should therefore shock no one that pink was once considered a very masculine color.

It is odd that the entire media establishment would freak out about a boy wearing pink nail polish. After all: if pink used to be the color of boys, then you’d think the conservatives would love to restore traditional gender norms by bringing it back.

You know who “throws like a girl”? Everyone who hasn’t learned how to throw a ball. Each and every notional instance of gendered behavior that is rooted in anything other than society must be uprooted, and examined. That’s not to say that gender isn’t important. Rather: any professional female athlete could beat me at the sport of their choosing.

Of course, since being a woman isn’t a thing that is discriminated against any longer, feminism is an outdated, unnecessary relic. Women are welcomed with open arms into every profession, past time, and are paid the same wages and respect. Wait. Ah nuts.

Leala talks about why she believes that it matters that she’s a “girl gamer”. Given that “Fat, Ugly, or Slutty” needs to exist, I fully understand the desire to create a safe-space for women to be gamers. That’s part of what she’s arguing for, but not really all of it. I’m going to be honest: I’m not really sure I understand her argument. I think that this might be one of those cases where my own privilege is blinding me to what she’s saying. If that’s the case, I’m just going to point over to her work and shut the hell up.

Adorable Interlude.

I have long said that it’s a really weird idea to take a person’s primary investment vehicle, and make it something as enormously difficult to liquidate as real estate. It seems to me that the difficulty in cashing out this investment ought to be worth a rather large discount.

Pirates are loathsome, awful people who’s business ought to be destroyed utterly. Indeed: piracy only flourishes in places where civilization has broken down to the extend that piracy is a viable alternative to any other type of work. That’s basically always been true, as a casual perusal of Roman history will attest. Nonetheless, there is something charming about pirate recreationists. They may gloss over all the truly ugly parts of actual history, but what they leave behind is pure swashbuckling fun.

Whitewashing history in order enjoy wooden sailing ships and black powder explosions is utterly harmless and fun. Ignoring history to pretend the South left the Union for any reason other than slavery is dangerous. The entire Southern system was built on a foundation of aristocracy and class much at odds with American notions of Democracy. Those memes were defeated on the battlefield, and should have been buried forever at Appomattox. We see echoes of them every time some whackjob congressperson argues against the minimum wage.

This might be the most frightening graph I’ve ever seen.

Just so that we are 100 percent, absolutely clear about the causes of the Civil War, let’s let the Confederate Vice President speak on his own behalf.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

We can decide what parts of history we chose to remember. The State of Virginia has proclaimed that Lee and Jackson were brilliant, but the escaped slave who fought for the Union was heroic.

One of the really cool things about Massively Multiplayer Games is the way they act as natural sociology experiments. Conditions can be tweaked, and outcomes observed. An interesting game is “Eve Online”. Ever want to be a space pirate? This is your chance. It’s a wonderfully “real politic” universe where power really does seem to rule. Rock Paper Shotgun did an interesting interview with one of the in-game rulers of that game.

Speaking of places that require a bit of imagination to reach: top 10 imaginary travel destinations.

There are two basic animating ideas of how American society ought to behave. On the one side, you have the “individualist” ideas, which permeate the modern Republican party, and the founders of the Confederate nation. One of the side notes mentioned by the CS Vice President in that speech I just linked to is that any city or state which wishes to improve it’s infrastructure is and ought to be free to do so– alone. The idea that New Orleans ought to help pay for improvements to the part of the Mississippi river which lays in Arkansas is soundly rejected. The other idea is that of “commonweal”. This is the idea that we’re each tied to one another and that there is a moral responsibility to work for society. This notion was embraced by Lincoln’s Republican party. This week, President Obama offered a sirring defense.

Tax dollars. Where do they go?

One of the weirder things about the Republican plan to meddle with the Federal budget is that if congress does nothing, there will be no deficit. If all that the Republican party wanted to do was bring our budget into line, they can all go home and announce “mission accomplished”.

Obviously, Republicans want to do more than simply fix the budget. They wish to radically redraw the lines of responsibly between American citizens. It seems their utopia begins with the destruction of the commonweal. This might explain why they’re not popular in New England.

San Francisco is not an imaginary place. But it does spark the mind, and capture the soul.

if you only click one link this week:

One of the things I say over and repeatedly again about politics is “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. Everything that moves follows the path of least resistance. While there will be variations on this, we should tend to expect similar behavior from similar groups when conditions are similar. Let’s come at it from a different angle, though. F1 racing. When F1 racing wants to see certain types of of behavior from racers, they don’t merely ask racers to not engage in bad behavior. Nor do they simply ban said behavior. They’ll actually redesign the cars in order to make certain winning strategies more or less viable. Interestingly, it seems that a lot of the philosophy around this is video game inspired.

This week’s theme was Hugin and Munin- Thought, memory and reclaiming it from the hole that Orwell warned us about. In the comments below, please let me know what you hope will be your fonded memory of the first episode of the Game of Thrones.