Attempting Honesty

It is always dangerous to claim that something about yourself is unique, because it probably isn’t. There is almost always someone who is just as adjective as you are or has done just as much gerund as you have. Nonetheless, I suspect that I might actually be unique when I name Redwall as a formative influence on my philosophy.

Millions of people have read Redwall, and nearly all of them have liked it. I found it deeply horrifying. Twenty years later, there is still no other work that has affected me as intensely. I didn’t immediately understand why, but in time I figured it out: Redwall was horrifying because its characters were dishonest. I do not mean that the characters told lies–to the contrary, telling lies was something which they sternly frowned upon–I mean that their perception of their world and the facts of their world were virtually unrelated to each other. Continue reading Attempting Honesty

How to Win at Democracy

This is probably the most important article you will ever read: it will teach you how to conquer a democracy. Not in the traditional supervillainous sense–the people you conquer probably won’t even realize what you’ve done to them–but you will rule them nonetheless. The method is very simple; it has only two steps, and everyone already knows them. They are expressed in two famous aphorisms: Continue reading How to Win at Democracy

The Wrath of Thor

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There is an episode of Dragons: Riders of Berk in which the town is plagued by lighting. The frequency of lightning strikes has suddenly increased, from being rare to being almost constant. The Berkians are Vikings; they attribute their problem to the wrath of Thor, and the story follows their blundering attempts to appease him. Eventually they realize that the iron dragon perches they had installed around town at the beginning of the episode are what is attracting the lightning. They remove these perches, and the lightning stops.

From this experience, the Berkians learn a valuable lesson: Thor disapproves of tall metal objects.

Continue reading The Wrath of Thor