A Blizzard Of Beginnings (Part 2)

 
Right then.  Let's close the shutters on the third season of Game of Thrones by paying visits to two castles, and to one frozen wasteland.  TV spoilers below, as usual.

Friday 40K: Angelic Hordes Come Forth!

Time, I think, to get back to one of my earlier armies (thirteen years and counting, though an earlier iteration of them formed my very first force back in the mid '90s).  A mere four years (give or take) since the latest Blood Angels codex was released, and I've painted one miniature the book introduced. 

 

I really do love the modelling job GW have done on this, even if the wings/jump pack combo is incredibly fiddly to fit on.  Given all the bells and whistles, though, this took an incredibly long time to paint.  It's just as well he's worth 55 points, really.

That's when he's one fifth of a full squad, of course.  Right now, he's no use to anyone. Except maybe as a needlessly ostentatious veteran sergeant for an assault squad.  Or maybe even a bargain-basement Sanguinor.  That option has its own problems, though; mainly that 275 points is an awful lot to spend on a model Chris will invariably kill on the first turn of our next game.  If you can't win, you may as well ensure your casualties are as uninteresting as possible...

Five Minus One

Turns out the Defense of Marriage Act is so obviously unconstitutional even the Supreme Court can be trusted to see it.  You know, except for the conservatives, who spent yesterday insisting that overruling congressional legislation isn't something the court should ever presume to do, exactly one day after they did exactly that.

So this week both handed racial minorities their greatest civil rights defeat since, well, civil rights became a thing, and gave the gay community an historic victory.  My brain, it is confused.

Aside from all of this further cementing my opinion that Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas are villainous hacks of the first order (anyone with an interest in logical argument and a strong stomach can learn a lot about sophistry by reading their opinions over the years, but I'd recommend moderation lest your eyeballs boil out of your face), the last forty-eight hours got me thinking again along a familiar trail - why is it liberals seem to lose so much of the time?

The common response to this question among liberals themselves is often that we just can't seem to get our act together during a fight, and spend all our time after the fight blaming each other for losing.  Both of these are major problems, I confess, but they strike me as symptoms, not cause.  The major reason things always seem to go so badly for liberals - aside from the fact that they tend to pick fights with the rich and powerful rather than the destitute and voiceless - is that trying to make the world function fairly for everybody is a much more complicated manoeuvre than trying to make the world function well for rich white guys.

Imagine you're one of the four left-of-centre Supreme Court Justices, and you figure you can maybe get Kennedy to swing on one of the two cases this week, but not both.  Where do you put your time?  Trying to get rid of a nakedly unconstitutional attempt to screw over gay people?  Or trying to save a barrier to racists said bigots have dedicated the last forty years to trying to overcome?   That's a decision I'm immensely glad I don't have to make.  My instinct is to go with protecting voting rights over guaranteeing governmental support for marriages, but that might be totally wrong.  Certainly plenty of liberals are likely to disagree with that, and everyone involved will have the best motivations in the world and radically different ideas as to how to put their ideas into practice.

All the Republicans - the only part of the American right that matters right now - needs to do is be pricks at every available opportunity.   The fact that getting a hundred people to agree on how to be nice is much harder than getting a hundred people to agree that they should keep all their money and that Mexicans are lazy tells you at a minimum of 90% of what you need to know.

The Five Worst People In America Today

I should say a little about the SCOTUS ruling yesterday - less of a ruling and more of a middle finger to Martin Luther King Jr., really - which is tough, because I'm just so depressed about it.  How did Bush vs Gore become only the second most ridiculous decision the court made this century?  How did concluding the person who sets your shifts, your hours, and your tasks at work isn't your supervisor become only the second most stupid thing Sam Alito said this June?  How did a black judge have the balls to stand up and say black people deciding what's best for black people is no less racist than white people saying what's best for black people? 

How can anyone believe in a loving God when not one of these people's faces burst into flames?

For those not in the know, there used to be a bunch of states - all of them with histories of deliberately trying to stop anyone not white from getting as far as the polling booth - who had to clear changes to their voting laws with the feds.  This is not just because of their past performace; some of these states to this day kept coming up with ideas the Justice Department had to overrule because they were so transparently aimed at keeping black and Hispanic citizens from getting to exercise their constitutional rights.  With the new decision declaring such activity bad because... something... five of the states previously covered have immediately launched new legislation aimed at screwing over any person who doesn't look like they belonged on the Mayflower unless they were scrubbing the decks.

People much smarter and with far more legal and constitutional knowledge than me are still picking over this thing trying to work out what happened.  Right now the best anyone can cobble together is that this part of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional because racism doesn't exist anymore.  You'd think all that would be needed to refute this would be to look at the states who'd prepared obviously racist legislation that they waited until the ruling to introduce to know that wasn't true, but instead the court looked at all the laws these states had passed that weren't aimed at suppression - because the VRA stopped them - and declared that clearly everything was fine.

SCJ Ginsberg pointed out that this was equivalent to throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet, presumably because she didn't think she could get away with calling it tossing out your birth control since none of your fucking led to pregnancy.

(Not for nothing, but try and imagine this court striking down the Second Amendment on the grounds that times have changed and the King of England ain't gonna head over to demand back taxes no more.)

There is zero chance this Congress will fix the issue.  There is zero chance anyone with any clout in the US media will report on this issue, at least not in any stronger terms than "Democrats say these laws are racist, Republicans disagree, logic and maths are hard so who knows".  Tens - hundreds? - of thousands of people just lost their de facto right to vote in America.  Corporations might be people, but the rural poor are landscape features.

The Republican party have faced a stark choice these last few years: embrace minorities, or disenfranchise them.  The choice they've made is obvious to anyone with access to a television screen or an internet connection.  This week, SCOTUS decided the biggest problem with that choice was that it was going to be a hard sell, legally speaking. 

Today, that is no longer the case.

Not All Arguments Are Born Equal

Since there's debate on equal marriage going on right now in the House of Lords, let me just give opponents of the idea a little bit of advice.  If you want to avoid being labelled a homophobe - this supposedly utterly hyperbolic and unfair slander pressed upon you by all those nasty knee-jerk liberals that seem to be everywhere these days - then for the love of Gods, make sure you've thought through your counter arguments before you trot them into the public domain.

"What's to stop a man marrying his son?" is not a sensible argument. "Why not let two elderly sisters get married, too?" isn't a sensible argument.  "Gay people can get married... to the opposite sex!" isn't a sensible argument. "Marriage is too important to risk, and so irrelevant that no-one should mind not getting to have it" is so baldly incoherent that it amazes me thousands of people have apparently signed up for it wholesale, though in their defence there's usually a couple of sentences in-between the two statements, most often about how gayness is the greatest threat to a child's upbringing since caramel-coated paedophiles.

Because here is the truth.  If you spout this kind of idiocy - if you decide that your role in discussing an issue of direct relevance to hundreds of thousands of citizens of this country - then you are a functionally indistinguishable from a bigot.  Because you've decided these people, who may or may not have had the chance to vote for you (recently at least) but whom you most certainly represent either way, are not worth the time it would take to consider their desires seriously.  Because a historically repressed minority is asking you to give them something the majority has taken for granted for centuries, and you decided it wasn't worth more than five minutes thought on the drive into work to come up with a reason why you weren't going to bother saying "yes".

Show me the relevant difference between a man who wants to oppress a minority, and a man who cares so little about the oppression of minorities that they spend the minimum amount of time possible coming up with a slogan that wouldn't persuade caffeine-addled woodlice so that they can get on with their day.  Show me the reasons I should give you marks because your position isn't "I hate you" but rather "I have no intention of thinking about you at all", particularly in this case, when your role in society involves precisely that.

When you tell a group of people that they're concerns are not worthy of the time you would need to understand them, you insult and belittle them.  At the absolute best, you might be able to claim you ignore and smugly wave away the concerns of every constituency.  Of course, if you do do that, then there are worse words for you than "homophobe", and everyone here knows exactly what they are.

A Blizzard Of Beginnings (Part 1)

I suppose I should get this up, before Senior Spielbergo accosts me at another wedding...

But really, what's the point?  Everyone knows what a GoT season finale is all about by now.  Something bloody and shocking and unexpected happens in episode 9, and the last slice of the season lets us know what we can expect in the following year.

That's not necessarily a bad structure, or anything.  It just makes it tough to find anything interesting to say beyond cataloguing the various plot strands and maybe engaging in a bit of extrapolation. So let's give that a go, adding in some thoughts about how well each strand has gone over the course of the year, and get some way into deciding whether these episodes - commonly and correctly considered to comprise the best season of the show so far - have done justice to the first two thirds of A Storm of Swords - commonly and correctly considered to comprise the best stretch of writing in the series so far.

(TV spoilers below).

Friday 40K: Black Right Hand

Presenting my second Dark Vengeance miniature: a Chaos Lord, with the Murder Sword in one hand and a surprisingly fleshy plasma pistol in the other.  As mentioned previously, I've painted him up in Red Corsairs colours to match the other traitor marines I've put together.

 

Here he is alongside his small but - if I say so myself - perfectly-formed warband.  They're just shy of 400 points right now, so I'll be shoring them up in the new future with some Dark Vengeance cultists.