The book was better

I had an argument a few days ago about a film that came out last year, of Dumas’ classic book The Three Musketeers. If you haven’t seen it… Don’t. It’s absolutely awful, and I don’t think anyone would argue much with that. It's not only not worth the price (any price), it's not worth the time taken to watch it. The argument was more over why it was terrible – specifically, over the ahistorical aspects of the film. Like airships. I was actually defending this part – I always get a little annoyed about the idea of someone defending the purity of literature and not allowing anything to get in its way. The concept of adding supernatural elements to a previously mundane story is one that goes back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Well, actually, it goes back a lot further than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the point is that Shakespeare did it in Hamlet. The number one rule of English Literature is ‘If Shakespeare did it, it’s OK’*.  And some of the most beloved tales of the English Language have come from the steady addition of fantastic elements to stories. By which I mean the King Arthur Mythos, even if he was originally a Welsh story.

Hell, whilst I’m going on with this, Dumas himself wasn’t exactly married to historical accuracy. I’m not going to try to give you a shopping list, but if memory serves, D’Artigan didn’t actually join the Musketeers until about ten years after the novel takes pace. The purpose of the storyteller, regardless of medium, is to entertain the audience. If I want to read The Three Musketeers, I have a copy. Even if I didn’t, there’s one in the library, and if it has been lent out, lost, or eaten by a tribe of hungry pigmies, the book also appears on Project Gutenberg. So I can read the original story, thank you very much. Now, that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with the adaptation of books to film. Doing so can expose stories to a wider audience, and themes can become clearer and more comprehensible to the audience than they were in the original book – but that means that what makes it worthwhile is that it is to some extent changed from the original novel.

True, there is something to be said for sticking as close as possible to the original – if you’re adapting to film a brilliant and beloved novel which is universally agreed to be a work of true genius, then there’s a good chance that whatever changes you make are going to be for the worse**. But when something’s been adapted to film as often as The Three Musketeers has, you’re going to have to come up with something better than improved graphics and new actors to make the thing interesting. That’s why you have things like Muppet Treasure Island, The Wiz and Snow White Blood Red. It’s why the last time I went to see Macbeth, Patrick Stewart was carrying automatic weaponry. So frankly, some flashy new visual effects – which have significantly less actual effect on the plot than the fact that d’Artigan didn’t actually join the musketeers for about ten years after the beginning of the novel, don’t really do much except add some much needed perceived innovation to a film which would otherwhise have been about as interesting and well attended as last time I threw a party. Plus, it let us show off the one thing that’s inarguably gotten better since the last time someone made a Musketeer film, the graphics. There is nothing sacred about the works of previous authors. They made stuff up, and you can make stuff up that you think will improve their work*****. It’s admirably like natural selection – the good stuff survives, and the bad stuff dies out (oh hey, look, I made a biologist cry).

The only other thing I could mention is the conversion from ‘fiction’ to ‘fantasy’. A lot of people who wouldn’t demand slavish devotion to the books, will complain when said book changes genre. I understand that one. I probably wouldn’t go to see a Sherlock Holmes Rom-Com. Actually, I might, but I’d be seriously iffy about the quality of the thing. I don’t think that this applies to fantasy, because fantasy doesn’t actually dictate anything about the plot. The requirement of fiction is that it is that which is not. The requirement of fantasy is that it is that which could not be. There are far more ‘fantasy’ possibilities than non-fantasy ones, and you can write literally anything under the umbrella of the fantasy genre – there are whole genres that are possible in fantasy which can’t possibly be done outside of it. Which means that fantasy is kinda stupid as a genre in the first place. Plus, unless you’re omniscient, you actually can’t tell the difference between ‘fantasy’ and ‘not-fantasy’ anyway.

I must remind myself at some point to spend much too long ranting about Tolkein’s influence on the entire fantasy genre. But I’m pretty sure that I’ve made my point on this particular line. Bye bye.

*Actually, that’s untrue. There are certain things that Shakespeare did that you can’t do today, either because it’s a product of his time, like the sexism of Taming of the Shrew, the racism of The Merchant of Venice, and the constant writing in Iambic pentameter, or because he’s Shakespeare, and has the literary talent to pull off things that would make anyone else look like a complete idiot. The addition of fantasy elements to existing tales is not in either category.

**Let us take, for example, the 2011 edition of The Three Musketeers. Ignoring the fantastic elements, it was actually pretty close to Dumas’ original novel. Which is good thing, because most of the changes they did make were for the worse – the heroes were boring in pretty much every way, the fights were uninteresting and tension-free***, the level of inter-heroic conflict made my social skills look… extant, anyway.  Seriously, you had to make Athos give the whole ‘love is awesome’ speech. Bloody Athos? I know I said that I don’t mind changes to the source, but you’re throwing away a source of conflict, removing depth and complexity from a character, and not improving the film in any way above if Aramis had said it – which would have given the guy some much needed development. And the presumably conventionally attractive female turns out not to be too bad right at the end. Give me a break. In the atmosphere of Dumas’ novel, that might’ve helped create an interesting and somewhat morally ambiguous character****. In an atmosphere so black and white it makes a zebra look uniform, it’s just a stupid out of place ‘beauty equals goodness’. Plus, it was so predictable I spontaneously developed clairvoyance. I could go on, but you get the point.

***Which can be fine, or even good. Just not in a film where the entire focus is on the fight scenes. It means that everything is basically visuals. Again, not necessarily bad. I will willingly defend Avatar purely as a kind of three-hour long moving painting. The visuals, unfortunately were not those of Avatar.

****Actually, I might be wrong, but if memory serves, Milady is actually probably one of the least morally ambiguous of the characters in the entire series – beaten out only by d’Artagnan himself.

***** No, I’m not missing the word fictional up there.

Worldpride 2012

I went to London’s Worldpride parade on Saturday. There were problems with it*, but it was fun. So here's my first post on it.

There are people who think we should stop doing Pride. For two reasons: Firstly, because there are people who don’t think aces fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Personally, I’m of the opinion that, regardless of whether we technically fit (I think we do), links to LGBT can be helpful. Asexuality was recently added to the training of the Trevor Project in America. That’s a good thing, and it comes from the association.

The other thing is more interesting. There is an argument that Pride is actually a negative thing – this Onion article is a good illustration – I know it’s the same publication which published the articles ‘Ann Romney Says Husband Has Deeply Principled Side Noone Ever Sees In Pubic’ and ‘Study: Red Meat Takes Years Off Of Cow’s Life’, but that doesn’t mean that the argument isn’t seriously made. Now, asexuals have a pretty good way of avoiding that one, since one of our main concerns at this point is visibility, on the basis that an asexual surrounded by sexuals who doesn’t know what ‘asexual’ means can quite often feel broken and alone. That’s why we’re included on a suicide prevention hotline. Pride is a good thing for us to take part in because, regardless of what else you say about it, it’s pretty hard to be completely ignorant of someone who’s marching down the street blocking traffic and singing ‘Asexy and I know it’. This argument, however, is less effective for other parts of the LGBTAQA+ spectrum, as quite a lot of people do seem to know what being gay is. Indeed, this could be seen as being part of the problem. So if it’s not about raising awareness, what is Pride for?

Well first off, it’s for raising awareness. The thing that’s generally known about gay people is that they exist, and what they are. One of the big purposes of Pride is raising awareness of other things – like the tendency of some countries to have gay people beaten up, imprisoned and/or executed**. Pride exists as a protest march against that kind of thing. It’s also a giant ‘fuck you’ to the people who do that kind of thing in the first place – being proud because there are people who’d like us to be ashamed.

It’s also a symbol of respect to the people who allowed us to do that kind of thing. They worked hard so that LGBT people could just be themselves, and even though we might not be there yet, getting together and doing this kind of thing as hard as possible is to some extent a mark of respect to the people who worked and suffered so that we could.

It’s also fun. Seriously, it’s a great sense of community, with everyone getting together, marching together, talking together, standing around for an hour and a bloody half doing nothing… no, I will not let that go. And you get to meet people like you. I’ve written before about why sexuality is so important to someone’s identity, but it’s still true. And at a pride parade, you’re surrounded by people like you, who’ve been through similar experiences to you, who you can sit around with eating cake and telling stories about how silly straight people are (OK, we didn’t actually do that – though we did eat cake).

And, obviously, it’s a protest march. We do it in countries where homosexuality is legal, because it was long ago discovered that large public gatherings of gay people in countries where being gay is punishable by death, whilst effective in raising public sympathy, tend to be poorly attended –at least the second time. But it’s a way of telling people, even those that are already aware of what the issues are, that we’re not very happy about things. Everyone knows that gay marriage is illegal in this country – even if you happen to be in a church that wants to perform the ceremony for you. But it’s got a pretty good chance of being dismissed as a minority issue if we don’t have people making it clear that they do actually care about it… actually, scratch that, it’s got a pretty good chance of being dismissed as a minority issue that noone really cares about anyway, if the current government of the UK is much to go by. With international issues, too, it’s a way of putting pressure on whoever’s nearby to try and encourage countries in which homosexuality’s still illegal or stigmatised to bloody well get over it already.

OK, maybe that was the tiniest bit soap-boxy, but it’s all true. And you might think that a lot of that has little to do with asexuality. Asexual stigma certainly exists, but I have yet to find a country in which it’s illegal. And, of course, guys who show no interest in women don’t open themselves up to any misunderstandings at all. Mostly, our work is on public opinion, so pride is an opportunity for visibility and to hand out leaflets. Though it might be nice to get rid of that bloody bit of law that lets you say that marriage totally doesn’t count if your partner refuses to have sex with you. But honestly, there’s a massive debate among ignorant people as to whether asexuals are ‘pure’ or ‘broken’***. Which rather suggests that it might be a rather good idea to get rid of as much homophobia as possible before we become public knowledge, out of enlightened self-interest, if nothing else (and yes, there are a hell of a lot of other reasons to want to get rid of homophobia). Minorities have been protecting themselves by allying with slightly smaller minorities since the dawn of time.

*Mainly the fact that 11AM and 12:30 are not the same bloody thing.

**Presumably to avoid the unfairness of the British system, where gay people are beaten up, imprisoned and/or executed completely at random, in an incredibly disorganised fashion.

***The answer is neither. 

Theology and fallacy

OK then, you know how I said that it wouldn’t be so long until my next post? Well it wasn’t. Except that I kinda forgot to post the damn thing. So I updated it a little, and here’s the thing you should’ve had several weeks ago. You should get today’s thing tomorrow.

OK then. In any theological discussion, a lot of time and effort goes towards deciding whether or not God exists. Some Catholic saint came up with five ways of proving that He did. So because I want to prove that I’m smarter than any mere world famous brilliant philosopher-saint, I came up with six. Granted, mine are all horribly flawed as actual reasons for believing, so they’re closer to logic puzzles than actual proof. But hideously flawed logic is the best kind! So, in rough order from least to most logical:

1: The argument from motion.

It is, quite obviously, totally impossible to move. Because before you can move any given distance, you must first move half that distance. But before you can move half the distance, you have to move a quarter of that distance. Following this reasoning to its logical conclusion reveals two things: Firstly, for even the most infinitesimal movement an infinite chain of actions must first be performed – one must first move a half, a quarter, and eighth, and so on. So clearly, you will never actually reach a point where you’re actually moving the desired amount – no matter how small that amount. Secondly, there is no first distance – any distance you move can be divided in half, and so if not the first action that must be performed on the infinite journey over to the fridge in the next room. So there is no first action on your journey. Since it is quite clear that it’s impossible to start something without having something to start with, that means that not only can you never get to a point where  you’ve finished your movement, you can never even begin it. But quite clearly, it is indeed possible to move. The only explanation is some kind of interference that allows us to break the strict laws of logic. But any being that is capable of breaking the laws of logic must be omnipotent – and thus, we must conclude that it is God.

OK, before I move onto the second way, I thought you might have wanted a brief account of my reaction on first seeing and advertisement for the Fifty Shades of Grey books: ‘Oh hey, that looks interesting. The title sounds good, and I have a mask just like the one on that cover. I’ll look it up on Amazon whn I get home… OK then, I’m home now. So let’s see what this series is… Oh God my eyes. Why, why?’

I don’t have anything against the books, but it would be nice if they were a bit more obvious about the subject.

2: The argument from infinity.

There are three possible explanations for the universe. Either it was created, or it is part of in infinit chain of events, or it has always exited. If it was created, this is generally considered sufficient to establish the existence of a God, thanks to Occam’s razor. If either of the other explanations are true, then the universe is infinite in four dimensions. Since it is not a complete impossibility that a being should come to exist with enough of the characteristics of God to be referred to as such, it is a logical certainty that such a being should have, at some point in the past, come to exist. Thus, whatever explanation for the Universe is chose, we end up with God.

Have you ever wondered why I write this blog. One reason is so I can randomly talk about stuff that I’m sure noone else would be interested in in speech, without forcing other people to listen to me.  So I write it all down and publish it somewhere out of the way…

That was a little depressing. Onto number 3:

3: The argument from knowledge.

Omniscience is not an impossibility – by which I mean that there is nothing that it is totally impossible to know. But if nothing is impossible to know, then were there anything that it were possible to know which was not known, then it would be possible to know that the thing which was not known was true but not known. But it is impossible to know that something is true but not known without knowing that it is true – in which case it is known. So it is a logical impossibility to know that something is true but not known, so if everything is knowable, then everything must be known. Occam’s razor says that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity, so it is clear that the simplest way of fulfilling this knowledge is by a single omniscient entity, which we may call God.

OK then, I’m kinda running out of things to say in the breaks between incredibly fallacious arguments so I’m going to have to give you number four whilst I think about what else to say.

4: The argument from omnipotence

God is defined as an omnipotent being. That means that He should be able to do anything. Which means that He should be able to create Himself from nothing. So… yeah. Not sure what more I can say.

Blast, that one wasn’t nearly long enough. I swear, these just keep getting shorter. There must be something interesting I can talk about. Hmmm… I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you about my memory problems. Seriously, I once forgot to breathe.

5: The argument from contradiction.

Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive at the same time. As everyone knows. So we can say that either God exists, or Schrodinger’s cat is alive. That’s perfectly true, since Schrodinger’s cat is alive, so the statement is true regardless of God’s existence. But Schrodinger’s cat is dead. So we now have two completely true statements – Schrodinger’s cat is dead, and either Schrodinger’s cat is alive, or God exists. From those two statements, the conclusion is clear – God must logically exist.

Now, it would be perfectly possible to object to the use of Schrodinger’s cat in that argument. Since I wouldn’t want to make things too easy for you, you can replace ‘Schrodinger’s cat is dead and alive,’ with ‘light is a wave and a particle’, or even the lesser known cousin of ‘this statement is a lie’, ‘this statement is true’ – which is clearly both true and false simultaneously.

Back to my memory problems. I’ve actually done the ‘forgetting to breathe thing’ more than once. Though I’ve never actually quite managed to actually pass out. So the point is, you should totally forgive me for forgetting to post this. And now let’s do number six. This one gets long, and is a bit tricky to explain.

6: The argument from logic.

Let us take, ‘if, then’ statements – statements like ‘If it rains, then I’m going to wear a coat’. Clearly, if the statement is true or not is totally dependent on the ‘if’ part – if the if part isn’t true, then you can’t say anything about the statement as a whole, regardless of the truth of the ‘then’ part of the statement. For example, the statement ‘if it is green then it is a lizard’ cannot be disproved by finding something red, regardless of whether or not the red thing is a lizard. Similarly, the statement ‘if the sky is green, then the sky is green’ is absolutely true, regardless of the actual colour of the sky. Thus, the way to determine whether or not an ‘if, then’ statement is deductively true is to say ‘if the ‘if’ part is true, does the ‘then’ part necessarily follow from it?’ If it does, then the statement is necessarily true, regardless of whether or not the ‘if’ part of the statement is actually true. So let us take the statement ‘if this statement is true, then God exists.’ Following the steps outlined above, regardless of the actual truth value of the ‘if’ part of the statement, we can determine the truth value of the entire statement by saying, ‘if the ‘if’ part is true, does the ‘then’ part follow from it?’ So if the statement ‘if this statement is true then God exists’ is true (which is what is stated in the ‘if’ part of the statement), does it follow that God exists? Clearly, it does. Which means that the entire statement is true. But then it follows that the statement that the statement is true is true. Which means that the ‘if’ part of the statement (if this statement is true) is true, and that if the if part is true, then the then part follows from it. Thus, by saying ‘if this statement is true then God exists’, we can logically show that God must exist. So did I explain that one OK?

Right then. Six ways of proving that God exists. Or that logic doesn’t work. Whichever. And because I don’t like the idea of posting two things today, I’ll post the thing I was going to post today tomorrow. Or I’ll forget. It’s about 50/50 really.

Asexual pornography, and appologies for the gap.

Wow it’s  been… some time… between posts, hasn’t it. The thing I’m apparently most interesting when I talk about, or at least slightly less boring than usual. So:

One of the most apparently obvious stereotypes about asexuals is that we must have a load of free time, since we don’t spend so much time thinking about sex. I can see why you’d think that, actually. No offence, but sexual people* do come of as the teeniest bit obsessed with the whole squicky business. That’s why asexuality – and LGBTAQA+** issues are even issues in the first place. So, logically, since we don’t spend all our time thinking about spending time far too close to a load of mostly-hairless apes with an annoying tendency to ooze various liquids, and since we don’t spend massive amounts of time and energy trying to bring about such a situation about, we must have masses of spare time and energy. So just think of all the stuff we must be able to get done! Etcetera.

Unfortunately, that idea is… somewhat inaccurate. Personally, if my productivity was any lower, I’d probably progress backwards. I’d walk into a room, and things that were finished would become slowly undone. Actually, that might be a fairly awesome superpower. If nothing else, I could make cookies back into cookie dough… Anyway, because of this, there’s a fairly popular thing for asexual bloggers and so on to do, which is to write about something called ‘asexual porn’. Now, there is actually an asexual porn video on the internet somewhere. It involves cake. Delicious, delicious cake, and someone eating it. It’s funny enough that I’d like to link to it, but unfortunately I can’t find the bloody thing, and I don’t really want to delay this post much longer. The normal definition of the term, though, is the stuff that we do instead of porn. So, being me, I decided to a top-ten list, based on how much I do it, and how close it is to filling the same kind of role. So porn is pretty much exactly the same as porn, but I don’t look at it, so that doesn’t make it onto the list. Taking pills to mitigate the effects of my medical condition**** is something I do a lot, but it doesn’t really compare that closely to pornography*****, so that doesn’t make it onto the list either. So, list:

10: Learning random trivia

This might not seem so close to porn. The comparison between Steven Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ and Trixie does Texas (I think that’s right. I really don’t want to Google it) is not exactly a close one. And yeah, it’s not the closest comparison. It’s less a substitute for porn, more ‘what I do instead of it’ – when I’m bored of actually concentrating on things, and don’t want to actually think. And when I say ‘random trivia’, random is probably operative as a word – game theory, liberal philosophy, tvtropes, the Discworld Companion, Wikipedia. As a result, I have a rather vast bit of ‘random trivia that will never be useful in a million years’. And yet it’s still by far the thing I replace porn with that’s the most helpful to me. It’s on the list because the mental state is probably similar, and because I do it quite a bit.

9: Eating/Sleeping

Yeah, these are basic necessities. Porn, no matter how straight people might talk about it sometimes… isn’t. I’m one person who should know that. I’m less talking about knocking myself out every night for six hours, and fuelling myself on a thousand or so kcal a day (yeah, both of those figures are about accurate for me quite often). It’s more using them as luxury – the mindless sensual pleasure of that kind of thing, of eating fresh brownie mix rather than putting all of it in the oven. Would probably be higher up, but I don’t do it that often, to be honest.

8: Fantasising

There is no life I know to compare with that of pure imagination. I like that quote. Yeah, just indulging by wandering through completely internal stuff is pretty much an exact substitute for porn. Straight people use it too, from what I understand. The difference is, large parts of the purely self-indulgent parts of the imagination of a straight person might resemble a porn film. Mine doesn’t.

7: Being actually sociable

This is really, really low on the list, compared to where it might be, simply because of how far it is from the rest of the list. The mental state involved in being social is completely different from the mental state I imagine people have when they’re looking at porn. If it’s not, I may have to seriously reconsider how I think about straight people. And I’m not actually that sociable a person – not because I don’t like people, more because you lot are bloody scary. So why’s it on here? Basically because of one of the things I use to model sexual attraction – one of the things I sometimes say is that where most people have a sex drive, I have a romance drive. So even though there are obvious differences between sex and romance, I use romance to model people’s attitudes to sex to some extent. I was going to say that it was like using three to approximate pi, but, honestly, it’s closer to using two. But even despite the differences, and even despite the fact that I tend to actively try to avoid any kind of romanticy part of conversations, there’s still a pretty close connection between friendship and romance (though they’re certainly not the same thing, as I think I may have mentioned. Repeatedly), so it to some extent fulfils some of the same need. So I thought it deserved a place on the list, if not a high one.

6: Half listening to cartoony-things.

Cartoony things are awesome. Things like the Nostalgia critic. I’m pretty good at multitasking, and it’s a good way to release mental pressure and unwind. Cartoony things refers to the level and style of things, not their actual animatedness. So the Zero Punctuation counts. Death Note… really doesn’t. So yeah, similar reason to why I might watch porn, just not involving naked people.

5: Retail therapy

Is one of the easiest ways I have to cheer myself up is spending money. So I only really do it when I’m feeling incredibly depressed. Looking for new things, getting the best prices – something I do for pure and absolute pleasure, and no other reason. So nothing else to say, really, it’s getting pretty close to the reasons for which I think people look at porn – pure pleasure – but I only do it when I’m depressed, the quality of it is a lot different from pornography, and there’s something later on I think is a better explanation.

4: Reading romance novels.

Now we get onto the more traditional things for a list like this. This could quite easily be a top five list, actually, but I decided that it would be a top ten list, and I’m damned if I’m going to let a little thing like complete and utter impracticality change my mind. That is not my way! I tend not to read romance novels when I have a severe cold, which has led to me describing them as ‘chicken soup’ novels. Obviously, there are some pretty good exceptions to that – the most famous being Jane Austen, but the thing about romance is that it’s really, really hard to actually write well. So yeah, most romance novels are pretty meaningless fluff. And like I said, the similarities between my attitude to love and most people’s attitudes to sex means that reading romance novels is probably in some ways the closest I can get to porn. But like I said, there are some incredibly clear distinctions between ‘sex’ and ‘love’, and I don’t read romance novels that often, so this goes down to number four on the list.

3: Admiring pretty stuff

My interest in aesthetics is probably something I’ve mentioned at least a few times, but it bears repeating, I like looking at beautiful objects. Which is basically in a way what porn is. You look at things you find beautiful – naked people of your preferred gender or genders. I look at things I find beautiful – forests, buildings, clothing, poetry, paintings, and other stuff. I sometimes spend hours looking through sites like desktop nexus, and finding pictures like this: 

Which is one of the bet things I’ve ever seen. Ever. But when it comes to looking at pictures of pretty things, there’s a better one that comes in next with:

2: Window Shopping

This is really close to the ‘retail therapy’ thing above, except without any actual monetary expenditure. It’s also really, really common – that’ why window shopping is a common term, after all. So yeah, I’ll spend ages looking through things I wish I could buy, finding the best prices, etc., and not actually buying it. A particular thing I tend to look at is clothing and fashion – which is still common, which is why ‘cloting porn’ is a famous term. One of my favourite ‘you know you’re asexual when…’ stories is that when looking through various pages of clothing, coming across a woman in a corset, a presumably attractive woman, since she was a model (I’m pretty sure it was the corset she was meant to be modelling, actually), I had one single immediate and overwhelming response. ‘I want that hat.’

To be fair, it was a really nice hat. Typically, the site wasn’t actually selling it, but that was probably a really good thing anyway, since I might’ve accidentally bought it. But yeah, spending hours looking through things like Amazon, Clockwork Couture, etc. just to look at the pictures, with no immediate intention of buying anything, is pretty much as close as an asexual can get to actual pornography. Except, of course, I put it at number 2.

 

1: Going ‘awww’ over cute stuff.

Because number one is awesome cute things. There’s an asexual teddy-bear who wears a t-shirt marked ‘the only one I sleep with’. Personally, I’m less into teddy bears, and tiny little awesome creatures – cats, hamsters, snails, rabbits, rats and awwwww. Not dogs though. For some reason, they’re just about the only animal I don’t like, for some reason. The truth is, for all that I gush about aesthetics, a cute little fluffy thing can just about produce a stronger emotional reaction in me more consistently than most refined beauty. I don’t honestly know which is more sexual, my attraction to a butterfly, or my attraction to a kitten, but I’m pretty sure that they’re quite a way from a sexual’s experience of sexual attraction. I really hope so anyway. But cute stuff is more primal, generally stronger, and less intellectual in its nature (though my appreciation of aesthetics can be pretty non-intellectual in places). And so cuteness just about beats out beauty for my top spot.

That was long. But I have to write another forty six words to reach two thousand, so I’m just going to ramble a little. Ummm… sorry I was away for so long, I’m nearly certain I won’t have such a huge gap next time.

*As a note, I have a bad habit of accidentally replacing ‘sexual’ with ‘straight’. I try to avoid doing it as much as possible, or at least to correct myself when I do it. I’m guessing you can probably work out why it’s something I do.

**69 points in Scrabble. Not quite as good as good as my favourite word, zqyjxyk, which means ‘I just won this game of scrabble’***.

***Ébópúmá means the same thing in Irish, and may actually be even harder to pronounce.

****Which reminds me that I should in fact do so around now, actually.

*****There’s an except joke there somewhere. Not a clue where, but I’m pretty sure it’s there.

Quick update (France again)

Just to say, I'm not actually entirely sure about my first post on the french elections anymore. My thoughts on austerity being the only option were based on the market's reactions to the idea, which actually seems to have been a lot less antithetic towards the idea of French Socialists than I expected. So either I was wrong (and the market seems to be acting out of character), the markets are not really expecting them to do anything really significant, or socialism was already built into the share price before the election (I personally find that most likely, but there have actually been scraps of sympathy for France's new direction). Whatever it is though, France is unlucky about the Greek elections, since they really have spooked the market. Which really isn't going to help Hollande's strategy.
Let noone say that I don't admit straight away when I think I might have been significantly wrong (at least if I remember). That said, I will still be rather surprised if Hollande actually manages to abandon austerity without market panic.
A 75% tax rate is still really stupid, though.

It's actually hard to believe that someone would seriously say something this stupid (OA)

Not really much to say about this particular post. I'll just say that I actually tend to focus a bit more on the issue of men getting raped than on the same issue for women, for two reasons: Because it gets too little attention, and because I find it a rather annoying reinforcement of gender stereotypes - men as big and strong, women as weak and delicate. Which in turn leads to the whole thing of  rape victims having being raped seeming to reflect badly on the victim. Just to make it clear, all rape is terrible, and I assign exactly the same level of heinousness to both. Oh, and I'll link you to Survivors UK, since it's a charity that deals with exactly this.  

Originally, this post was going to be a continuation of 'On Democracy'. But several people have said something to me recently which annoys me. Including two teachers, which terrifies me beyond belief. As well, a lot of people seem to assume it’s true when they're talking about the subject. So what is the statement? 'Women can't rape men.' This is a statement so complete in its idiocy and utter in its inaccuracy that it's almost beautiful. Unfortunately, it's only almost beautiful. So now you get to sit through an explanation of everything I can think of that's wrong with this statement. This is going to be a long one.

First, an explanation of how the male body works, since this is apparently a subject on which people are pretty much entirely ignorant. There is no really delicate or tasteful way to say this. Erections aren't to do with desire, or even necessarily with pleasure¹. That's why aces (like me) can have sex, despite the fact that I, for example, given the choice between having sex and being locked in a coffin for an equivalent amount of time, would choose the latter². Without much hesitation. And among aces, I'm by no means unique in that - or even particularly extreme. In fact, a lot of aces find out that they're ace having had sex regularly for some time (or, indeed, because of having had sex regularly for some time). All that's required for an erection is a stimulation of certain nerves. So the biological barrier that people apparently think exists? Doesn't.

Secondly, whilst we're on the topic of indelicacy, the statement reveals a startling lack of creativity. There is more than one way to rape someone. There several sex acts you could force someone to perform even if they were an eunuch, and that's without using the devices humans seem so obsessed with coming up with to make it easier. Vibrators, for example.

Similarly, there are such things as drugs. How different is forcing someone into sex through force, and forcing someone into sex by drugging them? Really? They're both rape. You can rape someone through force, through threat of force, through blackmail, through drugs, through deceit, or in a thousand other ways I haven't thought of. And the terrible thing about many of those is that the victim might actually help with their own rape - because the rapist, in a way, makes them want to be raped. Not, I hasten to add, because they want to be raped, but because they prefer it to the alternative of being beaten senseless and murdered, or whatever else the rapist is threatening. Or because they don't really know what's going on, and don't really understand that they've been raped until later.

Fourth, there seems to be an underlying assumption here that if you enjoyed it, it isn't rape. This is about as valid as the idea that it isn't rape if you yell surprise, except that noone actually believes that one*. Say you rape someone, and it actually ends up improving their lives. They achieve nirvana, and never suffer again. That makes it OK, right? No. You are still a soulless rapist**. It doesn't matter that it ended up being good for them; people have ownership of their own bodies - that's why doctors need permission for lifesaving operations. Completeness leads me to point out here that, technically, it is legal to give consent after the fact - since only the victim is allowed to prosecute someone for rape. But, just because someone enjoyed something, doesn't mean they're not going to be angry that you forced it on them. I enjoy chocolate cake, but if you hold me down and force me to eat it, even if I enjoyed the cake, I'm still going to be rather unhappy about it afterwards.

Which brings me onto my fifth point - that physical pleasure and actual enjoyment don't have to coincide. Buddhism was right all along. If I get physical pleasure from decapitating attractive women***, I might enjoy it, but it’s probably not going to be good for my long term happiness. The same is true of rape - getting physical pleasure from being raped doesn't actually mean you enjoyed it. Actually, when you think about it, that makes it worse, long term. Pain can be dealt with - I'm not belittling it, but humans are surprisingly good at dealing with pain. That's why torture is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. But if you actually enjoyed it? That can lead to lovely results like Stockholm syndrome, self loathing, and the feeling that 'my body betrayed me'. So even if the man having an erection did indicate that he was experiencing physical pleasure, that wouldn't make it not rape.

There, is of course, another way you could look at the statement, which is to assume that men are all sex-obsessed, and that there's no way a man could be raped because they always enjoy sex. This involves ignoring everyone ace or gay, everyone with hypoactive sexual desire disorder, many of those with schizoid personality disorder, and I'm sure a lot of other people. But if we do ignore them, this explains why no man in human history has ever refused an invitation to consequence-free sex. Ever. You could also look at the statement as saying that women are clearly far too weak and pathetic to force a man into anything. Even if that were true, there are these marvelous modern inventions called guns. And drugs. And blackmail. Actual physical strength isn't a barrier. I'm not going to add these to my count of problems, because they rely on the people who say that men can't be raped believing in ridiculous sexist stereotypes, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt³.

Even then, however, there are actually more problems with that statement than there are words. That's never really a good sign. It's sexist, idiotic, and belittles the suffering of thousands of people. So before you say something like that, do put in a tiny bit of research. There's a statistic (here, for example) that one in six men will be raped in their lives. I'm not sure that that's entirely accurate, but the numbers are still really high. So don't make sweeping generalisations like that about subjects you know nothing about. And when talking about rape, don't assume that it's a man raping a woman. Using he and she is fine, since English doesn't have gender neutral pronouns (although referring to a rapist as it wouldn't really worry me too much⁴), but as soon as you start to think of rape as a man forcing sex on a woman, you've gone wrong.

This post turned out rather serious, but at least I got through it without descending into inarticulate swearing. So, to counterbalance that a bit, here's a fun game for you. See if you can find the Star Trek quote in the above post. It’s from The Next Generation⁵. Next time, unless large numbers of people say something else to me that makes me question whether they have the intelligence of a retarded herring, I'll probably go on with 'On Democracy'.

*For the sake of my sanity, I'm just going to believe that's true.
**Also, that has never actually happened.
***Which, I must point out, is an example from Sandman, not from my deranged imagination.

¹ It is possible that there may be a relationship between the two for some guys. But it's an 'if', rather than an 'iff'.

² This becomes untrue, for the record, in the case of an airtight coffin - I don't like sex, but I do prefer it to death.

³ Though on reflection, I'm not entirely sure why. But I'm still going to.

⁴ Referring to the victim as 'it', on the other hand, unless they happen to be one of the few people for whom that actually is the correct pronoun, is utterly unforgivable dehumanisation, and you should never do it. Ever.
⁵ 

More on my ongoing frustration with the French Presidential elections

OK then, France decided. They’ve decided to go with the socialist. I was right on that one, and now it remains to be seen if I was right in the more significant part of my prediction. I didn’t intend to do anything else on current events, and certainly not so soon, but… oh God, I just saw Hollande on the news promising that he’d have a tax rate of 75% on the rich. No you won’t. Not if you have an ounce of sanity in your body, you won’t.

OK then, let me introduce you into a rather interesting (to me) bit of economics called the ‘laffer curve’. The laffer curve goes like this: at 0% tax revenue, obviously, you’re not going to raise any money in tax. Similarly, at 100% tax, you’re also not going to raise anything in tax (no one has any incentive to work, and noone can actually afford to pay anyone for anything, etc.). It follows that there must be some kind of theoretical maximum tax, increasing from which one is actually reducing one’s revenue*. Now, there’s not really much agreement on what, exactly, this maximum rate is – especially since it’s going to vary from time to time, and economy to economy, but the midrange tends to be about 70%.

Those of you who’re good at maths might have worked out where this is going. But I said that it was variable, didn’t I, and that there wasn’t much agreement. So there’s quite a bit of leeway, isn’t there? 75% could work, couldn’t it? Well, there’s two problems here. Firstly, the laffer curve tends to shift to the left as you get richer. The richer someone is, the more incentive they have to avoid taxes (1% is quite a bit when you’re on a five figure salary), and the more capable you are of doing so – through clever accounting, straight up leaving the country, or whatever else. The more money someone has, the less you can charge them before they just stop paying you. There is no way 75% is going to work out here.

Then there’s the reason why we don’t know where the peak of the laffer curve is – why we don’t go for the tip of the laffer curve in our tax-raising. Taxation has a bit of a distorting effect on the economy, even before you reach the maximum tax revenue, since laffer curves are just focused on immediate tax revenue. The more taxes you have, the less people can spend, and the less benefit companies get from the money they actually do earn, so the slower the economy grows and the less tax revenue you get over time, since you have less total money to take your taxes from. There are some more technical reasons why more tax is a good thing, like an increase in what’s called deadweight loss. OK, how do I explain that? It’s sort of similar to the ‘consumers have less money to spend idea. Hmmm… there’s a level of cost for something at which point it’s not actually worth it for the company to make it. Obviously. And there’s a level of cost at which an individual stops wanting to actually buy a product, because the benefit they get from buying it is less than the cost of buying it in the first place. That one’s probably pretty obvious too. In a perfectly competitive free market, a company is going to have to charge the absolute minimum level at which it’s actually worthwhile for them to make it in the first place, and anyone for whom that minimum price has them end up getting more benefit from the object than they end up losing from the amount they had to pay.

Now, when you tax someone, you effectively create a gap, meaning that the amount of money that the company has to charge for something before it’s worth it for them to make it, and the less the consumer can pay before it stops being worth it**.

Now, the economy is not perfectly competitive. But the tax thing still works, anyway. Utility is lost, and the economy suffers as a result. That’s as far as I’m willing to go in explaining that. You also don’t get jobs coming in at the rate you used to, since multinational corporations tend to avoid 75% tax rates. Basically, taxes go too high, the economy suffers for it. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of different reasons for taxation, kept to a reasonable level. I’m just not getting into them here, since they don’t really fit with the point I’m making at the moment. A 75% tax rate is a serious problem for the economy long term, and it’s not even going to be raising more money for them in the short term.

Reducing the French reliance on nuclear power is stupid too, by the way.

Hopefully, this’ll be the last economics-y current events thing I’m going to do in a while. And before I finish, I’ll make clear that there is still a chance for Europe, even if I’m entirely accurate. You see, all my predictions are based on a single premise. I’m assuming that Hollande actually is going to do what he’s said he’s going to do. If he ends up being a pathetic wishy-washy wet rag who changes basically nothing, then France will probably be fine, or at least get by with the relatively minor immediate damage that’s going to come from market panic.

So Europe’s only hope of salvation is if a politician breaks his promises. As if that would happen.

*Actually, there could, in theory, be more than one. Quiet.

**Wow I’m simplifying economics a lot today.