I didn't read Neuromancer until the twenty-first century, so maybe my view is skewed, but I doubt it was ever a good story. There is no internal logic to the matrix at all; it's just deus ex machina after deus ex machina. It would have been fine, even more fun, if it had used an internal logic unlike that of real computers; that's part of the charm of cyberpunk. But when everything is arbitrary there can be no dramatic tension.
For atmosphere Neuromancer is unparalleled. As a yarn it isn't that great.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Your hypothesis has some parallels to commentary on modern villains by YouTube movie reviewer the Critical Drinker. He concludes that writers are often forced into this kind of arc by conventions that won’t let the heroine be portrayed at a disadvantage to a male antagonist.
Is it more common to have a classic hero’s journey when the heroine faces a villainess?
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Seeing the new title of King Charles’ wife, the queen consort, on Queen Elizabeth’s death has left me a surprised and befuddled American. I would love to hear about the Church of England’s role in modern British public life from those who know about it.
The Backstory
As a child I was taught in school that King Henry VIII founded the Church of England because he wanted a divorce from his wife, which Roman Catholic doctrine would not allow. But this is misleading. What Henry sought from the pope was in modern terms an annulment; Henry’s wife Catherine was the Holy Roman Emperor’s aunt, and the pope’s political and military situation was precarious, so the pope stalled. This led Henry to claim supremacy over the church and get the English clergy to grant his annulment. The Church of England still regarded divorce per se, dissolving the valid marriage of two living spouses, to be impossible.
Fast-forward four hundred years to 1936. The new King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American in the process of divorcing her second husband. The prime ministers of the Commonwealth realms were not prepared to accept a disreputable queen, and publicly flouting the church of which Edward was in principle the head threatened to create a constitutional crisis. He decided to give up his throne and his responsibilities to marry her anyway. His brother became King George VI, and George’s daughter Elizabeth became the heiress presumptive.
Prince Charles’ Reprise
In 2002 the Church of England decided to allow the divorced to remarry in church – depending on the circumstances and the pastor. In other cases it may be possible to have a church blessing service after a civil wedding.
This is what Charles, Prince of Wales, did when he married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. His ex-wife having died, his divorce was presumably no impediment to the marriage, but her ex-husband was still living. Neither of his parents attended the civil wedding, though they did attend the blessing afterward. Queen Elizabeth acknowledged the awkwardness by announcing that Camilla was to be known as Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales while Elizabeth lived and as princess consort rather than queen afterward.
The constitutionality of this decision was disputed, and it wasn’t clear whether Charles would follow his mother’s wishes once he was king. So I was surprised when, on Queen Elizabeth’s death, references to Camilla as queen consort occasioned no commentary. It turns out that in February Elizabeth changed her mind and spared Charles the trouble.
What does this imply about the Church of England?
It’s nothing new for the powerful or influential to demand that Christian churches capitulate, and it’s hardly unprecedented for unprincipled pastors to grant those demands. It may be that Elizabeth’s piety and Charles’ sense of duty were the only things that kept him from a church wedding in the first place. But I can’t escape the impression that the Church of England has ceased to be a legitimacy-granting institution beholden to God, at least in principle, and has come to have its own legitimacy judged by how well it follows the Zeitgeist.
Representatives of the Church of England’s laity narrowly turned down a measure in 2012 that would have allowed women to become bishops; some of those voting against the measure were conservatives who opposed the change and some were progressives who thought the measure didn’t take a hard enough line against the conservatives. (The change went through in 2014.) The Archbishop of Canterbury said at the time:
“Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday … the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society.”
Where does all this leave the Church of England? I’m interested in insights from anyone who has them, but I would particularly love to hear the perspectives of English Anglicans and other members of state churches.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I know a lot of people are asking for less whitespace, but please consider adding a little more vertical space between top-level comments. It would help to visually distinguish subtopics within the weekly threads.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
One more minor bikeshed: modhatted comments have the poster's username in white on bright red, apparently regardless of theme. While this makes sense for bans and such, the median mod comment on TheMotte has a much mellower tone. I'd suggest either changing the color to the traditional green or dialing back the amount of red color, e.g., underline the username and set it in red with no background.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I would distinguish pressure to conform to the culture, which all churches experience, from conformance as a source of legitimacy. Women’s ordination sure does look like the latter, though. I don’t know the terms of the debate over the word obey, but I would be interested to learn them; I recall reading Legg’s work at one point, and he writes largely in terms of precedent.
I am pretty sure that the Anglo-Catholics (whether they remained Anglicans or swam the Tiber) made their arguments against their low church brethren in other terms than conformity.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Thanks!
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I like these changes a lot. Things are clearer and subjectively less cluttered.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I look forward to reading your post. I hope you are right.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I hadn't realized the impact of Diana's popularity! That makes a lot of sense, silly as it seems to me.
... and the husband of Queen Victoria was Prince Consort (not King Consort, though she wished to create that title for him, but it was strongly resisted by the politicians).
That's adorable! I didn't know she had wanted to call him king consort. Royal marriages do run the gamut from the sordid to the sweet.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
But since the title of "king" generally meant "ruler" and not "husband of queen", there was historically a lot of reluctance to give this title to someone who married the female monarch, particularly in the days when the husband ruled the wife.
Yes, I see avoiding the implication that he ruled jure uxoris. That said, what would have been the implications if he had become co-ruler? It's hard for me to see how Britain would have been worse off for giving Albert or Philip more influence.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
There is truth to this, but I think it is overstated. America radically overhauled our immigration policy in the 1920s. The specifics were often silly, but one of the goals was to give time for immigrant communities to assimilate. And it worked!
That’s not to say that all the costs went away; neither did all the advantages. But even if you can’t regain all of what you lost, you can regain some of it.
It is strange how the the author glosses over the diversity of opinion among those quoted. Someone who thinks that changing the word “race” to “species” will do the trick has a very different critique from someone who thinks that neither the character’s species nor its culture should impact character creation. When Paizo¹ published Pathfinder 2 it used the term “ancestry” instead of race, but the article is wrong to say that it dropped racial ability modifiers altogether. It did change them to make playing against type less disadvantageous.
Over the years I have come to a particular view on the purpose of RPG rules: their primary function is for the gamemaster to communicate to the players how things work and what is possible within the game world; they establish a shared understanding. The GM is free to violate the rules, but he should do so selectively to preserve that shared understanding.
So if someone separates race from culture, I want to ask, “How does that fit your setting?” If it communicates the world better to the players and lets them situate their characters better within it, that’s great! Maybe your elves have several very different cultures, or your capital city has a cosmopolitan culture shared by the men, elves, and dwarves who live there. But if your elves are a reclusive people clinging tightly to their shared traditions, rules that let the player create an elf character from a dwarven culture are going to lead to confusion and frustration.
I think the article fundamentally objects to the givenness of these game mechanics for the character. That explains why the author is concerned not only with race (in either sense of the word) but also with multicultural characters or a 1976 Dragon magazine piece (!) trying to model sexual dimorphism. The player chooses the character’s race, sex, culture, background, and class, but the character only chooses the last one² or two. If you believe that real-world people are fully self-defined beings, I can see how that would rub you the wrong way.
[1] For non-gamers, Paizo is the company which publishes Pathfinder, another branch of the D&D family and a competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s current, fifth edition of D&D.
[2] I wonder how the author feels about sorcerers who inherit their powers through a bloodline, though D&D 5e leans into this less than D&D 3e did and far less than either edition of Pathfinder does.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Hey, I like my writing system to include vowels. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Those places exist, but not as conservative communities. Cities are consistently the most progressive places in their regions, so it's hard to see them as the way to work out conservative values.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Could you elaborate on the Latin America factors? I don't know the social dynamics, and I'm curious how Roman Catholic politicization has gone there.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Were they still punishing people for wrongthink by taking away their checkmarks, or had that also changed?
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I really enjoyed the B5 episode from the perspective of the telepaths, The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father. But late in the show they promised to explore the Telepath War, which would have been a fantastic opportunity, and then they didn’t deliver. I wonder if it turned out to be harder than they thought.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I have no objection to rolling back the Sexual Revolution, but it needs to apply to men as well - it takes two to tango, after all.
I’m not the GP, but yes, of course. As you point out, restraining the sexuality of one sex implies restraining the sexuality of the other. I want a world where both sexes value chastity, understood in the classic sense of sexual virtue.
It’s great that so many denizens of the manosphere (or whatever it has turned into) have come to see the effects of feminine promiscuity. It means that they have found an important piece of the puzzle. It behooves those of us who see the other pieces to help them fit it together. And some of them do get there! The former pickup artist Roosh is a famous example.
I’m not old enough to remember the years before the pill. But it’s easy to see that the relationship between marriage, sex, and children was obvious then in a way it isn’t now. The relationship was important for more reasons than pregnancy, but pregnancy was a reason that any horny doofus could see.
I keep seeing Christian kids who should know better sacrificing their principles to their libidos and calling it nuance. It’s refreshing to see secular people who notice the burns on others. It raises my hopes that they will come to see how marrying the only woman you will ever sleep with at twenty could be a joy and a blessing.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I certainly don’t know the man, and I haven’t read enough of his writing to draw broad conclusions. But I read one or two of his pieces after his conversion, and they sure pattern matched to “New Christian” for me.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Yeah, I can sympathize with that.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Some of us are déclassé enough to appreciate it; I thought the reminder that some in the UK already saw the connection was well placed. And if it introduces somebody new to The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that's great too.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
“This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
Some Python modules implemented in C have pure Python implementations for portability. Depending on your background it may be obvious, but I’d try swapping in pure Python versions wherever possible. If the segfaults stop, you know someone was taking indecent liberties with the object graph.
But mostly I’d be praying that it’s not actually a bug in the runtime.
Hieronymus
9mo ago
Do you know of any resources that make the history of Hinduism legible to a westerner? I got curious reading about Indo-European languages and then Indo-European religion. The parallels between Germanic mythology and early Vedic religion are fascinating. But the early Vedic religion has clearly been transformed and subsumed. (No cattle sacrifices in modern Hinduism!) I am curious what the different proto-Hinduisms were and how they met and fought and syncretized.
Books I've read on the history of Indo-European religion (admittedly years ago) were light on the Indo-Iranian branch.
That explains so much. I remember being excited to see PCM have a shot at moving off-site, but the number of PCM users who joined was dwarfed by the number of rdrama users who did, so the culture was very different.
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