Covetousness Is Evil

I was talking to Kemp, the fellow who did the trailer for Finding Time, and I mentioned Amanda Palmer's TED talk on "The art of asking."My daughter was within earshot and she asked in disbelief, "How do you know Amanda Palmer?" And I said, "She did the TED talk. How do you know Amanda Palmer?" And she named a band I'd never heard of that made "angsty" music.

The entire exchange had this weird vibe. Like she thought I ought not know who Amanda Palmer is, and that she thought I ought not know that my daughter knows who Amanda Palmer is. So, maybe there was something more than generational going on here.

My daughter knows my music tastes run more toward Southern Guitar Rock and away from angsty oughts alternative/punk/folk. Ms. Palmer says her music is not for everybody after all. So, I'm comfortable being part of that not-everybody.

After I saw the TED talk, I got to remembering that I'd heard about the "Kickstarter Scandal" of last fall. The TED talk was the perfect response. Someone says something nasty and snarky about what you're doing and you can articulate a response in a TED talk that more people will see than read The Newyorker.

I suspect that the Kickstarter Scandal was a faux flap caused by jealous people who didn't get a piece of the action. Or that was intentional obtuseness by people who prefer the current model of record companies, record promoters, etc. and would like to ape Microsoft's FUD strategy for fighting Linux. If you have a healthy income that comes from the status quo, any innovation that threatens to disintermediate you is a scary, scary thing. I think we saw that last year with the campaign of hate against Linda Chorney.

(The Microsoft FUD campaign against Linux was to hire the now-defunct SCO to bring a nuisance copyright-suit against various Linux vendors in hopes of scaring potential Linux customers to use Microsoft instead.)

I think Ms. Palmer's Kickstarter scandal has something to say about humanity as a species and the USA in particular. In response to the flap, Ms. Palmer issued an apology. Not the "I'm sorry" kind of apology you normally associate with the word, but the "Socrates" kind of apology that consists of a reasoned explanation of one's actions. (I certainly hope she is not about to be force-fed hemlock.)

It seems that when you run a Kickstarter campaign that grosses almost 1.2 megabucks people think you convert it into gold coins and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck. Or that somehow having that kind of responsibility turns you into Mr. Monopoly with an affinity for wearing striped pants. The Occupy Movement is somehow involved and the entire question of "the rich" paying their "fair share" comes to mind.

The Scarlet Letter that many want to sew onto Ms. Palmer's breast stands for "avarice." And they think she's earned this letter because she invites local artists on-stage to play with her. Doing so means that she is not paying union scale, nor FICA taxes, either. In her defense she said those exploited artists "like" doing it.

In her defense, I say, nobody holds a gun to anybody's head. Except the taxman.

When I was a child, evil, godless Commies had nukes aimed at us. We feared they would corrupt our precious bodily fluids. Happily, now I drink fluoridated water, those nukes are rusting in their silos, and the hammer and sickle flies over Pennsylvania avenue.

The godless aspect of Communism stems from an inherent contradiction between the Judeo-Christian ethic and Communism. When you hear people talk about redistributive economic justice, you are witnessing a violation of the 10th Commandment. Moses came down from the Mount carrying two tablets of the law and the second finished with, "Thou Shalt Not Covet."

The advocate for redistributive economic justice covets the stuff of the 1%. S/he/it need not covet it for himself/herself/itself--as much as to buy goodies for the downtrodden. This helps buy the votes of the downtrodden, so everybody wins except the 1% who are moving to Singapore. The covetousness of the Socialist is insatiable as Monty Python observed decades ago with lupins.

The 10th Commandment is why Christianity and Socialism are contradictory. Try to remember this next time you're voting for Santa Claus.

And when Moses came down from that Mount the other tablet said, "Thou Shalt Not Steal." Stealing used to be easy to understand. You take one of Moses' stone tablets and he doesn't have it any more. He'd have to laboriously carve words into a replacement. This is stealing.

But what if Moses had the law on two CDs, and you illegally copied one. He'd still be able to boot up Judaism. Would that be stealing? No, it is not stealing. It's a violation of US Copyright law. It's an amazing thing that corporations have managed to confuse the two notions.

Part of Ms. Palmer's $1.2M went into the production of CDs. If you take one of those CDs from her, she no longer possesses it. But if you make a copy from your friend, your friend still possesses the CD.

When you violate US Copyright law, you diminish a bit of scarcity from this world. Publishing companies would prefer that you fill the silence of your life with music, ebooks, and software that they sell. As these things are scarce & in demand, you are inclined to pay more. As they are not-scarce or not-in-demand, you are inclined to pay less. Therefore, your violation of US Copyright law takes bread from the mouths of publishing companies.

Just because I say this is not stealing, I don't want to give you the impression that US Copyright law is in any way illegitimate. Copyrights are mentioned in the Constitution. So some form of copyrights are legitimate intellectual property. In its current form, US Copyright law is the best law money can buy. Try to remember this next time you're voting Republican. Or Democrat.

Amanda Palmer has gone from being a musician with a record deal (from whom each violation of US Copyright law cost her money) to a musician with no record deal who encourages everyone to copy and share her tunes. But she asks her fans for help.

Only 25,000 people provided the money for Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter campaign. The people wanting to pin the scarlet letter on her chest are different people. I hold that unless you were one of the Kickstarter supporters, you have no standing to complain about how that money gets spent.

Ms. Palmer is comfortable with giving away value to her audience and asking for help. There's a sense in which she's like the waitress who quits the job where an 18% gratuity is added to every bill and taken another job where she earns tips on the basis of grace and not law.

I hopes she does well and I hope more people follow her example.

Knox's Irregulars

I've been watching a lot of Bollywood and they have no problem talking about God or gods or Allah whatsoever. They seem a lot more free about such things.

I have a friend who is a Christian. When he saw the Avengers movie, he remarked about the line when Captain America says there's only one God. And when he saw Prometheus he remarked about the cross that the girl who played Elizabeth Shaw wore. He claimed the character was a Christian and I remain skeptical. Yes, the girl wore a cross and this is the symbol of Christianity.

But I want to see something more in the depiction of a Christian or what it means to be one. Something more like this. Why, yes, that is almost the picture of a cracked pot.

In both cases, my friend made me a little sad. He's so used to any kind of faith being deprecated on the Hollywood screen and he seems like a starving man grasping at crumbs.

Now, you can find movies where faith is not just mentioned in passing, but a central part of the narrative. I don't like them much. They are often heavy handed.

I like my religion kept between the lines like they did in the Lord of the Rings or the Narnia movies. The narrative doesn't tell you about deity or our moral obligations as much as show you Frodo and Samwise doing rightly.

The word Evangelical implies some overt sharing of one's faith, and commonly Evangelicals are exhorted to witness. But this is all too rare, because Evangelicals too often preach instead. Witness means to relate one's own experiences. E.g. I witnessed the bank hold up and I saw three men wearing masks, et cetera. Preaching means to assert propositions generally on the basis of authority.

In writing, we're told "show don't tell" and that's like the Evangelicals' exhortation to witness, not preach. Thus I prefer Lord of the Rings because Tolkien is showing Christian living instead of telling it to us.

Recently, I read a novel, Knox's Irregulars. It is a military Science Fiction novel about a resistance effort against foreign invaders on another planet.

The story begins with a setup. A bunch of communist atheists with Islamic-sounding names from somewhere-i-stan in the former Soviet Union colonized a planet a few generations back and they do what socialists generally do: make a hash of it and run out of other people's money.

Meanwhile back on Earth there's a second Reformation and a bunch of Calvinists want to start a colony, but all the planets are already taken. They can get a deal on buying an undeveloped hunk of land on the planet of the communist-atheist-space-nazis. They call their colony New Geneva.

Things go well for a couple of generations as the Calvinists' work ethic creates a ton of wealth while the communist-atheist-space-nazis creates envy. As you'd expect, after a purge of the moderates in the bad guys' government, and some ethnic cleaning in their own country, they decide to invade New Geneva.

All of the place-names in New Geneva will be familiar to the student of the Reformation. Many of the characters surnames are those of old-school Princeton divines.

The hero is a young man in a mechanized suit of armor named Knox and his dad happens to be the governor of New Geneva. So, after everyone in the regular army is overrun, Knox starts a resistance movement behind enemy lines.

Now, if this were David Drake writing the story, the good guys would be Satanists and the bad guys would be Baptist Brethren. Everything is turned upside down and the Calvinists are the good guys for a change. I liked to see that change. The story even makes reference to Thermopile. The pattern of the war follows that of the ancient Greeks vs Persians: free Greeks using their wits and initiative to defeat a much larger force of enslaved Persians. So far, so good.

I liked the setup, but around midway through the story, the author had to start preaching. Not in a heavy-handed way, but it wasn't as graceful as C. S. Lewis in Narnia. His heroes are good, and his villains are evil, and we get a nice redemption story. But the preaching to witnessing ratio was off.

The story's end was suitably dramatic, but it lacked the almost pornographic aspect of good guys you really love just putting it to the bad guys you really hate. There's a pattern I've grown to expect in military science fiction that was missing here. The good guys need to have an ace in the hole, a plot device that visits wholesale destruction and mayhem upon the bad guys. In this story, the good guys and bad guys just punched each other to exhaustion. Maybe this is more realistic, but I missed the amazing technological gizmos that laid waste to massively overwhelming numbers of bad guys.

I so wanted to love this novel, but I have to admit that I only liked it a lot. 4 of 5 stars.