Steampunk annoys me. It’s not the Victoriana: I lurve me some Victoriana. It’s the airships. Always with the bloody airships! People, listen: zeppelins are just not that cool. You gotta get over it.

The world’s museums are filled with the traditional arts of innumerable peoples whose culture has been destroyed by the sinister power of our industrial civilization: peoples who have been forced to abandon their own highly developed and beautiful techniques and significant designs in order to preserve their very lives by working as hired laborers at the production or raw materials. At the same time, modern scholars, with some honorable exceptions, have as little understood the content of folklore as did the early missionaries understand what they thought of only as the “beastly devices of the heathen”; Sir J.G. Frazer, for example, whose life has been devoted to the study of all the ramifications of folk belief and popular rites, has only to say at the end of it all, in a tone of lofty superiority, that he was “led on, step by step, into surveying, as form some spectacular height, some Pisgah of the mind, a great part of the human race; I was beguiled, as by some subtle enchanter, into indicting what I cannot but regard as dark, a tragic chronicle of human error and folly, of fruitless endeavor, wasted time and blighted hopes” — words that sound much more like an indictment of modern European civilization than a criticism of any savage society!

From Reditus.

Camassia explains what I have in common with the early fascists:

They also tend to distrust large-scale economies like capitalism and socialism and have an intermittent romance with a more localist agrarian past, which the early fascists also did. They also like the idea of themselves as an entire alternative society, rather than just an actor within a society. Paxton writes that when Mussolini decided to run for office, the purists of the movement saw this as an unacceptable compromise. “Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life — an “antiparty” — capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle,” he writes.

At Front Porch Republic, taking a look at the myth of religious violence:

The moderns would hold that “religion” is a trans-cultural, trans-historical reality, a universal genus of which “Christianity,” “Hinduism,” and “Islam” are particular species. The problem is, any attempt to define this genus in such a way as to include what the moderns want to include and to exclude what they wish to exclude turns out to be contradictory. Nationalism is no less a cult than Catholicism. Including a belief in God would exclude many major “religions.” One might attempt to limit religion to the “transcendent,” but ideas such as “the nation” or “liberty” are transcendent ideas, as are all values. Hence, there is no coherent way to distinguish “religious” from “secular” violence. What counts as “religious” or “secular” in any given society always depends on the configuration of power within that society. Indeed, the demarcation of the “religious” sphere is itself an expression of secular power, a political act.

Author Marie Brennan on the Monstrous Feminine:

In the case of Alien, it’s the explicitly feminine ship environment, which then violates the boundaries of the symbolic order by turning the tables on the humans: the egg Kane encounters expels a creature both phallic and enveloping, which impregnates him with an alien larva that finally emerges by bursting from his chest, in a horrific and unnatural parody of birth. Phallic features on otherwise feminine bodies are a pretty common horror trope, actually; I could point to Medusa and her snakes, but let me appall some of you by instead bringing up Ursula in the film of The Little Mermaid. By Disney’s standards, she’s grossly sexual (”don’t underestimate the importance of body language!“), and then she’s got those octopus tentacles . . . .

And finally, traditionalist Catholic gadfly Arturo on American and Mexican masculinity:

Mexican masculinity has a lot in common with this. My two prime examples in life for how a Mexican man should behave are my father and grandfather. My father is a mechanic, a Vietnam vet, used to box, and has lots of tattoos: quite masculine to be sure. My grandfather could gut a pig as unpretentiously as most people brush their teeth. My father-in-law, a Louisiana Creole of color from a sharecropper family, can probably do the same, though it has been decades since he lived on the farm. But the odd thing about my grandfather, at least, is that he cooks. You see him sitting at the table, quietly taking small stones out of the pinto beans and placing them in a pot. Women’s work? You can tell him that if you know Spanish. He also likes to sit by my grandmother and watch soap operas with her. I have never seen someone be so tender with someone else.

Update:: One more from John Scalzi about marriage:

Six years ago, when I was giving marriage advice to others, I wrote: “Marriage is work. It never stops being work. It never should.” This is something I still think is true. Human relationships are highly entropic; you have to keep putting energy into them or they fall apart. Marriages are especially entropic because they operate at such a high level of commitment, and yet ironically I think lots of people assume that once achieved, a marriage takes care of itself.

This quote from J.R.R. Tolkein does a great job of illustrating what I was talking about in my essay about fantasy and modernity:

[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.

HT: Front Porch Republic.

Yesterday I installed Google Chrome on the last of my frequently-used computers, completing my transition away from Firefox. The reasons for this are various, but mostly it came down Firefox being slow and big, especially on my little Ubuntu netbook. As much as I’ve liked FF over the years, I just got tired of it being so greedy for memory and so slow to start up. And the fact that it occasionally pegged the CPU and froze when returning from sleep was just bonus.

This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on Firefox entirely. In particular, if I ever web development again, Firefox + Firebug remains the platform of choice. But in the meantime, I’m enjoying a browser that only takes 5% of my available memory, rather than 25%.

This is exactly the same problem that I have with “strong female characters.”

Sometimes you have an idea for a story, only to find out that someone else has already had the same idea and has done a better job with it than you probably would. In that vein, I give you The Freedom by K M Lawrence. I would feel worse about this if the story weren’t so lovely, and if I hadn’t once read an essay by Orson Scott Card where he complained about the same thing.

Eve Tushnet takes on the fact that red states have higher illegitimacy and divorce rates than blue states, and pulls out the subtext in so much of the pontificating on that fact:

The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame “red state” families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they’re really promoting abortion, ’cause it’s their fault they haven’t adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It’s not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It’s about Baptists suck.

You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.

Preach it, Eve!