Metaphors, questionable

I was thinking about a certain fantasy novel that attempts to provide a critique of the American welfare system. (It tries to be subtle, only...not so much). Of course, the system depicted in the book was awful beyond question. It also bore not a bit of resemblance to the actual welfare system, but rather the welfare system imagined by conservatives. It was a straw man argument on the scale of an entire novel.

And then I was thinking about hawks' attempts to paint anti-war folks as the meek, weak-kneed Neville Chamberlains to pro-war folks' brave Winston Churchills. As if it could be as simple as "You're like Neville Chamberlain, therefore you're wrong, because he was wrong."

That's the problem with metaphor, with re-imagining problems into a fantastical or hypothetical context. You get to move the goalposts. You get to make the solution obvious, and you get to make your opponents stupid. You don't actually have to rely on silly things like facts, or whether your metaphor has any validity to it once you port it over to the real world.

...I am mad about the whole Geneva Conventions thing. I am mad about the way the debate has gotten framed in terms of whether you're a Pansy-Ass Coward or a Real Man. Or, rather, I'm mad about which side is labeled as which.

There's a word for putting your own security ahead of acting with decency and respect. It's called cowardice.

(no subject)

I am attracted to shiny things, and then, perversely, compelled to study, and examine, and poke around in them. I guess that this is a pretty normal thing given the large number of academic papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it's not such a bad thing, anyway; if you're going to spend a great deal of time learning about something, why not make it something that actually fascinates you? And there's something to be said for engaging with your fandom instead of observing it passively, no matter how much stigma is placed on the ability to speak Klingon.

But Heian Japan? I couldn't pick my interests according to the things I could read about without so much difficulty? And it all comes of dragging myself out of bed one Saturday morning soon after I came to Japan, high on cold medicine, to see that historical movie I'd seen a clip of on TV. Now I find myself getting all my pretty illusions shattered by my Abe no Seimei biography, even as I'm not actually learning much of the stuff I would like to learn on account of all the obscure religion-related words. Luckily, the Onmyouji fad in Japan led to the publication of enough books on the subject that I can hope one of them will explain things for me in little words.

(Incidentally I wonder if I will ever be done with people being mean to me on account of my review of Twilight. This is what you have to expect when you badmouth a really popular book, but I didn't so much badmouth it, I thought. I had a conflicted reaction to it, which I attempted to explain. I maintain that "If a guy is creepy, violent, obsessive, and also a vampire, date him! True love, yeah!" is not so much with the good message, whatever other redeeming qualities the book may have had.)