URL upgrade

I have purchased and transferred my blog to unpopularideasclub.com. No more slumming with the .blogspot plebs. This is the last post at this address. All further content will be at my proprietary url.

Giant Ward Map

I have become frustrated with the lack of detail on the map from the Board of Alderman's website, so stitched together numerous googlemap screenshots and made this huge 3500x6000 map of St. Louis City wards.

Feel free to make use.

FULL SIZE HERE

On to Rhode Island

I won a local legacy GPT yesterday with my same countertop deck. To be honest, there were only 11 people, and the whole top 4 scooped to me, because the material prize was the same for everyone, and we'd just be playing for the byes, and I was the only one who expressed interest in possibly going to the GP.
Brief recap
Rd1 - Elves 2-0
Rd2 - UW countertop 1-2
Rd3 - doomsday 2-1
Rd4 - UGR countertop 2-0
Top 4 consisted of [2x UW countertop, elves, merfolk]

I'm still having trouble with the mirror. It feels like a coinflip who gets down counter+top first, and the only way to break out is resolving Jace. I did not add the green splash for this tournament, but I'm now convinced its critical to have comfortable chance in the mirror.

As for Rhode Island, I will definitely be flying if I do in fact end up going. Spending 40 hours in a car is not an option.

I gave in

Facebook wins.

New Phyrexia in vintage

This is based on the mass spoiler list here, which apparently has gotten some people in jail, presumably for violating non-disclosure contracts or some such legalese.


This is a pretty interesting set. New Phyrexia cards in rough order of presumed impact:

The Bitch

Ayn Rand is polarizing to say the least. Although I certainly agree with less than 100% of her ideas, one thing that irks me is the endless cheap shots thrown concerning her eccentricities.
It'd be more productive to discuss what of value she had to say to incorporate into one's own ideas. Which may indeed be nothing, but lets determine that for sure instead of being so dismissive.

I primarily admire Ayn for her championing of ruthless industrialism. "Build smokestacks to the moon" indeed. She excoriates people who deserve it. She's not afraid to completely alienate those insisting on denying uncomfortable realizations about social forces. In the course of this, she definitely split hairs and made enemies needlessly, but number of friends is not the measurement of correctness. I respect her absolute refusal of compromise, as a principle in and of itself. Of course, this is not the most effective way to achieve political goals, in a PR-centric world, but the merciless intellectual brutality is satisfying to me.

The distracting nitpicks that undermine the perception of Ayn Rand, are kind of like Hitler being vegetarian. This wasn't strictly just a personal foible; Adolf had an indirect Nazi justification for not eating meat via strengthening the health of the master race, or something to that effect. However, clearly vegetarianism was a tenuous conclusion of his ideas, not a central assumption. Anyone who brings this up in an actual debate about the ethics of eating animals, is a useless troll. 

The point is that Ayn spent too much effort finding strange little conclusions from her set of assumptions that look silly. Maybe her core ideas are right, and many of her detail conclusions are irrelevant, or perhaps not even properly derived from the core. Lets say you put forth a theory called "Addition" that states:

"Write out all the numbers you know on a line from left to right, in order, one by one. Don't leave any gaps. Then pick a number. Then pick another number. If you start at the first number, then clear your mind and count your way to the right until you've moved as many spaces as the second number. The space you are on now is the third number. The relationship between these three numbers is: First# + Second# = Third#." 

Then you write several dozen books about this theory and in one of them you say, "...and from this we conclude 8 + 1 = 9, just like 49 + 3 = 87."

Hence, maybe your theory is right, but you are bad at following its own conclusions in every instance.

Or maybe in one of your books you write "...and the most important thing to remember is that 12 + 17 = 29."

But in current public discourse, the expression 12+17=29 is universally considered quaint/silly/obscure/bizarre/impractical/etc. So maybe one of your very specific conclusions is right, but unpopular, and so roundly mocked that its not worth arguing about or even mentioning, when its easier to just try to prove the core model and let all the conclusions eventually be accepted along with it.

Ayn Rand produced a lot of valuable ideas, some of which are quite inspiring. I cannot deny the Randian influence in a lot of my own philosophy. Unfortunately, Ayn had an abrasive personality and spouted off about a lot of sideline issues that gave the enemy camp cheap ammunition. Her most important contributions rarely get a fair trial, due to the above types of abstract mistakes. She was also, to be blunt, flat wrong in enough of the genuinely important cases to matter. 

Dislikes about Ayn:

-Too esoteric/academic. A huge chunk of her work is attacking academics on their own turf. She may be right, but she's in the wrong trench. Average people don't listen to ivory tower leftists any more than ivory tower libertarians. If theres a shoot out up in the tower, the status quo just keeps rolling along unfazed, no matter who wins.

-Minarchist. I think this is her most unimaginative failing. If Ayn had spent less time bitching about Confucianism and making up words like "psycho-aesthetics", and more time examining the logical conclusions of market forces, she would have found Objectivism should have been unyieldingly anti-statist.

-She was a philosopher and in no way an economist second. This is the primary source of both my agreement and disagreement with Ayn. I put economics as the absolute priority, and have since derived a roughly similar philosophy as a byproduct, but this means I don't care about all the philosophy that went into her economic byproduct theory. To Ayn, the philosophy is all that mattered, and thus the economics that were implied didn't have to be justified versus other economic theories directly.

-Was unreasonably critical of arbitrary cultural tendencies that could easily exist in min/anarchism without bothering anyone nor undermining liberty on a wide scale.

-I like her novels, but they are pretty pedantic. She makes her point. Over and over. I don't know if she thinks she's clever in making every character so rigidly good/evil, but I believe "shades of grey" would have made the books more literarily valuable and probably even better expressed the ideology. In terms of character development, everyone starts out either innately proud and productive, or treacherous and self-loathing, and only become more so as time goes on. More on this later.

Atlas Shrugging

Although I'm not an objectivist for reasons I will save for another post, I am undeniably part of the target audience here, so was obligated to see the new adaption Friday night. I was mainly just hoping this movie would not be painfully bad, and I'm pleased to report Paul Johansson's effort soared above my low expectations. The actors portraying Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon were quite good. The script was faithful, and managed to keep the political drama from becoming too dry. I have several complaints, some more serious than others.
-The most standout flaw was the casting and direction in regards to Fransisco. This actor barely had a pulse, let alone charisma. D'Anconio is supposed to be a Paris Hilton-esque persona. A super-rich entitled brat, constantly over-the-top and debaucherous. I wanted to see him snorting cocaine off cleavage, and being LOUD and HAPPY. Not just looking bored, posing for photos with escorts. Fransisco is supposed to be an unignorable emotional counterpoint to the so-very-serious heroes and villains with their futile striving and petty machinations. He should be an exuberant nihilist in the midst of all this self-important pathos. Instead he blended into the background.
-Not nearly enough smoking. As in none, except for a tiny bit of foreshadowing with the ($) cigarettes from Hugh Akson at the end. As I recall, Dagny is clearly depicted as a chain smoker in the novel, and most the other characters are often described lighting cigarettes.
-There wasn't enough establishment of Wesley Mouch. Some of the people I saw this with have not read the book and were only loosely familiar with the story. To them it was not clear that Reardon initially hired Mouch as his lobbyist and basically inadvertently launched Mouch's career. The movie only ever shows Mouch in the company of the evil politicians, so if you are trying to follow this story for the first time, its easy to not catch that detail. There needed to be at least one scene with Mouch ingratiating himself to Reardon, because this is important to show that Reardon's willful lack of oversight of his lackey is partly the cause of the thievery cabal's rise to power.
-John Galt's dialouge sounded really stiff and academic. Yes, I know Ayn Rand expects people to immediately respond logically to unsolicited formal, politically charged statements. But normal people approached by strangers on the street spouting philosophical rhetoric are immediately written off as crazy, and the listener's only thought would be how to end this encounter quickly and safely. The script should have kept it much more vague as to how Galt is recruiting people.
-The character of Eddie Willers had a very different attitude than in the novel. Book-Eddie is deferential and almost timid. Movie-Eddie is downright adversarial. James Taggart is far too self-conscious to tolerate being questioned by a subordinate in that way. Movie-Eddie was noticeably off-putting and killed more than one scene.

All that aside, I highly recommend Atlas Shrugged! Whether you have read anything by Ayn or not, this is a good movie in and of itself. It hits the right notes, and projected at least a glimmer of the industrial-triumphalism that makes Rand satisfying at her best. I'm very pleased this did not abjectly suck, because I was not looking forward to hearing smug potshots from the mainstream, nor libertarians succumbing to denial and bending over backwards in apologizing for it.