The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Monday, June 27, 2005

Agnostics and Manichaeans


In 242 AD, the Babylonian prophet Manah proclaimed a revelation about the nature of the divine and mortal realms. In his view, various spirits created the world in the course of an unrelated power struggle, and then an evil spirit imprisoned beings from the realm of spirit within it. These beings are the spiritual portion of humanity. Manih claimed that once we humans learn the secrets of the divine, we can then ascend beyond this crude prison into the grace of the God of Light. The Manichaean is a sort of gnostic; claiming personal knowledge of the divine realm which he has attained through study and meditation.

Meanwhile there are two definitions of "atheist" depending on how one parses the Greek. One believes that there are no gods: he is athe-ist. The other counts himself outside the set of those who believe that there are gods (theists): so he is a-theist. The athe-ist is a subset of the a-theists; the other subset of a-theism, who don't believe one way or another, proclaim themselves agnostic. This one says that he does not gno, or know, whether there are gods or not. So the opposite of "agnostic" isn't "theist"; the opposite is "gnostic" - like the Manichaean.

A long time after 242 AD, as measured in this world of flesh, I posted this comment on Ace's site in reaction to Dianna the Christian: all agnostics are Manichaeans - no doubt to the amusement of the local agnostics and gnostics. I then promised to defend that statement.

From the standpoint of what Christians hold dear, agnostics and Manichaean gnostics are similar - far more similar than either are to, say, Muslims. Specifically, the agnostic and the Manichaean share against the Christian common opinions on the nature of God.

The Christian believes that God is both merciful and just. The Christian has further (in his/her holy texts) proposed a means by which God has proven His mercy and justice. The Christian further believes that God has reached out to us through history and continues to call His own during the present.

Obviously the agnostic cannot claim to share the knowledge of a Manichaean. But a Christian won't care. Christians don't think of their faith as a religion. To a Christian: religion is man reaching to God, and Christianity is God reaching to man. God is assumed. So to Christians the doubts of agnostics and certainties of Manichaeans are irrelevant. All that matters is what agnostics and Manichaeans say about God, and how such claims stack up against the claims of Christian doctrine.

A non-Christian may doubt that Christian claims are possible; he may doubt that the Christian claim about the way God chose to exert his mercy and justice is truthful; or he may, on the assumption that the Christian claim is true, doubt that this method is in fact merciful or just. The non-Christian reaction to a claim like "religion is man reaching to God; Christianity is God reaching to man" is likely one of derision. But that is also beside the point.

Having explained the Christian view, how do Manichaeans view the divine? In Dianna's words -

On its simplest level, and it is a gross over-simplification, to be a Manichean is to posit an exact equivalence between good and evil, dark and light. Dark started the conflict by invading the light. I do not believe any such thing; I am no believer, as I’ve said before. However, it is, in my not-so-humble view, literally insane to posit the notion that God (or Goddess, I am not apt to argue for a male Supreme Being) would create his equal and opposite.


Further, it unnecessarily complicates theology and the cosmos to posit a Creator who creates equal and opposite delegates of his authority, then withdraws to watch it all play out. Think about that too long, and you will arrive at a point where you think rather badly of God.


To defend the Manichaeans, they don't believe that the God of Light is omnipotent. His creation of a rival would be a contradiction of omnipotence and therefore an insanity - if they believed in omnipotent gods. Manichaeans instead believe that the God of Light, to whose party they belong, created an opponent of finite (albeit great) powers in this universe. The God of Light then identified some rules by which mortals of this universe can go back to God, rules which he will not and this adversary cannot change. There is no contradiction here.

Now, these rules of Manah involve disassociation from worldly concerns. They don't propose charity or even decency to one's neighbour. In the example of the God of Light, Manah, and Jesus, a Manichaean would probably support the dissemination of true knowledge as a worthy cause. Otherwise, by worldly standards, the gods are amoral. People should aim for the domain of the God of Light because it is the best of the alternatives. If the Manichaean god exists, then he is not good by worldly standards. The Manichaean would riposte that it doesn't matter, and that this is just how the universe behaves.

Agnostics by definition can't rule out the existence of God. A "god" to the agnostic is simply a being so powerful relative to humanity that humans cannot hope to hinder its plans. Any sufficiently mighty alien race would suffice. Such a "god", like the Manichaean god, wouldn't have to be omnipotent. And, also like the Manichaean god, this being would be unlikely to care about what was moral or even helpful to humanity, any more than we care about the bugs in our yard. Those agnostics who are not humanists could perceivably say that our duty as humans is to find out which alien being promises us the best and longest-lasting personal happiness, and to support that one.

The only difference between the cosmologies of Manichaeans and agnostics is that the Manichees thought that they had found a few such beings. (And since they stuck their necks out, they all got defeated and - following Galilean astronomy - proven wrong. But that's a postscript.)

Christians on the other hand deeply believe that the Cosmic Gardener has taken a fancy to the cockroaches therein, and cares more about them than he cares about, say, the bluebottle flies. They are entitled to this belief, but it is vanishingly improbable.


posted by Zimri on 19:15 | link |

Friday, June 24, 2005

Interregnal fanfic


For the "dark ages" of the Firefly-to-Serenity arc, there is an opening for fan fiction. This post includes spoilers. But IMO these spoilers are necessary background for Firefly fans.

I think, if the comics aren't handling 'em, that these intervening never-written episodes should re-introduce the Reavers.

Firefly fans met the Reavers in episodes #1 and #3 of the series, but didn't see them again in the following eleven. The series didn't suggest that the Reavers had any place of particular strength; they were just fringe savages. But that leads one to question how it occurred to these bandits to become "Reavers" rather than the simple pirates of, say, "Out of Gas" or "Our Mrs Reynolds"; and how such madmen and savages could operate a ship.

Serenity doesn't civilise the Reavers any. But it does explain them a bit better. As a result I'm not worried about the question of how they can manage a ship or a raiding plan. The movie assumes that Reavers are based in a specific territory. Contra a lot of critics who should know better, a base means a community; and a community means people specialising in this or that task. Reavers may be Sand People or orcs; but not all orcs are mindless grunts, even in Tolkien.

I'm more concerned about the introduction of a "Reaver Territory" as a subset of "outer space". This was not part of the DVD series.

The new episodes would explain this. Given that Patience's Whitefall was in Reaver strike distance, and that the movie subsequently mentions in passing that Whitefall has acquired a Mal-friendly population - one such episode would drop by Whitefall.


posted by Zimri on 17:45 | link |

Serenity


There's a movie spinoff of the Firefly TV series. It is called Serenity like the series pilot, and it is set a little after half a year following the series cutoff point, "Objects In Space". Last night I got to see it.

Personally, I liked it; but if I hadn't been such a Firefly fan I probably wouldn't have.

I'm going to try to avoid spoilers, but I will have to spoil the setup.

First, watch the series. You should do that anyway. I've seen the three unaired episodes three times each, the others four and the pilot, five times. Trust me on this one. It's good. But while the series prepares much of the movie's background, it does not do enough.

Inara is off the boat, as presaged by the series. The Shepherd is off the boat too, which is more surprising. From the crew, everyone else is here; but outside the crew, there are no "name" characters (the two Hands of Blue, YoSafBridge, Niska etc).

The captain Mal Reynolds is no longer endowed with the golden heart he'd gradually come to reveal during the series. He's reverted to the Mal of midway through the pilot episode; who acts callous, gets short-tempered with the crew, and attempts to sell out unwanted passengers. As in the pilot, this allows for maximum conflict and drama among the cast. Unfortunately this also makes Mal unlikeable - especially since Mal takes it to an extreme; and the movie doesn't do as well as the pilot in counterbalancing it. With such an ambiguous lead character, I have my doubts that the non-Firefly-fan viewer can know which side to support - which is important for newbies.

The exposition scenes required to make of this a movie in its own right do work better than those inserted into "The Train Job" to make of that a season premiere. Ignoring such exposition, "The Train Job" made for a fine episode in the series. I suspect the case is similar for the movie.

This movie instead plays like a season finale to a show that has lost four or five episodes toward the end. These episodes would seem to involve a dark and lean time which has cost everyone weight, especially the ship's mechanic; and further has broken the captain's heart. We may have had intimations of this in "The Message" and "Heart of Gold", which between them slew two people dear to the captain and drove a third off the ship.

I do not expect the movie to sell well in the theatres. It will do much better in DVD sales, where owners of the "Firefly" DVD set will have to buy it.


posted by Zimri on 17:15 | link |

Thursday, June 23, 2005

What's the matter with CT?


Connecticut voted for Clinton, twice. Clinton promised his base to install more Leftists to the Supreme Court, and delivered on it with both Ginsburg and Breyer.

Ginsburg and Breyer turned a 3-4 consensus against that eminent-domain decision into a 5-4 majority for it.

We can argue over whether Repub moderates like Bush Sr and Dole would have chosen more Souters in their place. The point is that Connecticut asked for more Souters whereas redder states like Texas did not. Now CT has got what it voted for - the abandonment of their property to their local government.

So whether this was a good or a bad decision, don't come cryin' to me.


posted by Zimri on 13:50 | link |

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Nu ma, nu ma, nu ma iei


So after much searching, here's a link to the Dragostea Din Tei video. It's not to be quite as soulful as Gary Brolsma's effort - for that, Google "Numa Numa Guy" - but it does have more music in it and even more than the radio cut.

I wonder... did Brolsma see that video before practicing his eyebrow moves? His version is even funnier when one takes into account the bespectacled band member's lip-syncing.

The band (O-Zone) clearly want to be the next a-Ha, which may explain why the video rips off Take On Me.

(I know, I know; I should've posted this in early April. Well I was busy then. :^P)

Anyway when you're done with that, check out the Numa Numa Yay Parody Video courtesy of blogatrice Christiana.


posted by Zimri on 00:05 | link |

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Ave Gaiseric!


Having delivered the rant below, there will be those wondering what I think about this act of vandalism. I mean, if I don't trust the African-American caucus, then I should have some sympathy with the Grey cause in the Civil War. Right?

Actually, no. You don't earn the title "freedom fighter" if you're fighting for slavery. The Confederates were simple traitors and in many places - like Missouri, and the Irish parts of New York City - terrorists. Given that their present-day sympathisers are mostly made up of their descendents, I'm mostly sorry that it wasn't General Sherman who had run the Manhattan Project. A little gamma radiation couldn't have made that gene pool any worse.

But since the Confederacy is dead and its leaders roasting in Hell right now, taking it all out on monuments to these scoundrels will have to suffice. Since about 1999 or so I've had this fantasy about lighting sticks of dynamite on Confederate memorials in places like, say, San Antonio. Or maybe wrapping them up in heavy chains and yanking them off their pedestals through the streets. Blackface on those bastards' statues, though, is pretty funny. For starters.


posted by Zimri on 17:15 | link |

Monday, June 20, 2005

OJ Simpson's wild ride


TKS has reminded us of the 1990s, when a wealthy Black celebrity got exonerated of heinous charges. But before we take that analogy any further, we need to remember just how polarised the mid-1990s were.

Unlike the Jackson trial, the Simpson trial proved that the suspect committed the crimes of which he was accused. When the Jackson jurors viewed the evidence, they reached the proper verdict; but the Simpson jurors had treated their evidence with contempt.

We try to forget the race-baiting of the Cochran defense, the success of this defense on the jury, and the elation with which the Black population reacted to the verdict. This taught the White population a number of lessons about their country, disabusing many of us of our illusions.

Before the verdict, White conservatives held out hope that conservatism might find listeners within the Black community, and liberals assumed that Blacks were liberal. The verdict taught us that Blacks weren't liberal in their attitude toward Whites. Blacks in 1995 instead viewed the rule of law as compartmentalised, and so meaningless, as did Strom Thurmond in 1948. In a Black / White dispute, the Black population of 1995 would rally around its own, tainting both the electorate and the jury pool.

The survival instinct of Whites to the above statements, if said statements hold true, must be to limit contact with Black folk as far as legally possible, until Blacks see America as a shared enterprise. This is a time-bounded variant of the Faubus / Wallace opposition to integration, and even miscegenation. Since this was and remains unbearable to the White liberal conscience, the White reaction has been to abandon liberalism. Instead Whites ended up embracing punitive conservatism, White nationalism, denial, and/or self-hatred. The Right currently represents an alliance of the former three and the Left the latter two.

Carl Rowan, embittered Black leftist, noted the above and in 1996 predicted The Coming Race War In America. What we got instead was welfare reform, a second Clinton victory, Eminem, and Chris Rock. This sort-of enabled Whites to live with themselves, for a time.

But then Bush won, and Eminem and Rock went Left-ward. Houston had already fallen under the misrule of Mayor Lee Brown, an incompetent hack; and Brown was re-elected only through racial solidarity. In Georgia, a Black population restored the antisemitic Cynthia McKinney to her seat in the House of Representatives. Public order continues to decay in OJ's home, Los Angeles. Black conservatives have re-asserted themselves, especially through an Internet not widely available in 1995, but they have yet to reach the respect in their own community of, say, Booker T Washington or even early Chris Rock.

If another Simpson-like event occurred, we can only hope that the same pattern would not re-emerge.


posted by Zimri on 18:00 | link |

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

KotOR 3


"tharock" has an interesting post with requests for Knights of the Old Republic III. This one is, apparently, in development.

1. I kind of disagree with dragging in more KotOR I planets into II or even III. All due respect to tharock: I don't really care about Manaan in KotOR II time, any more than about Kashyyyk or Tatooine. I don't think Tatooine should have been even in the movie Episode I; and there was no real need for it in Star Wars VI either. Naboo and Alderaan would be nice, though, given that we're still in the Dantooine sector. And Taris by the time of KotOR III has had time to evolve into something rather different and worth revisiting.

Side note 1 - Okay, one exception: Yavin and not just its space station should have been in KotOR II. In KotOR I, the tomb of Naga Sadow contained a body. As everyone who's read the comics should know, Sadow's body is in Yavin and not with his ancestors on Korriban. Meanwhile back in Korriban there should be some reason why the people whom Sadow ran out on should have bothered erecting a temple in his name.

Side note 2 - how's about a real map, like in the Starflight series, but preferably 3-D as in Star Control 3? Let's clear up which planets go where, and include repair and fuel purchases.

2. I'm not too worried about getting force-sensitive NPCs up to Jedi rank if they don't want to talk. I can't get too much out of that Wookiee in KotOR I, either. That's just part of dealing with people who aren't you.

3. Yeah, Force powers! No such thing as too much.

4. I want more background on the Sith Wars too, I guess, but only if it is according to canon. See sidenote 1 to (1) above.

[skip the rest until "Finally"; there are spoilers. Suffice to say that there are questions KotOR II answers but others it doesn't, and that some questions - like how Malak lost his jaw after Dantooine yet before KotOR I - need to get answered in III.]

Finally. I'm not worried about level limit. What I want is extra points for breaking the Light Side Point scale. If this is a feature of KotOR I or II, I can't tell.

And a little less social commentary, please. I'm here to battle Sith Lords and ogle Twi'leks.


posted by Zimri on 17:25 | link |

Republican Knights


I'm not so concerned with KotOR's analogies to the modern world; they are valid enough. I'm more concerned with how its designers define good and evil, or if you like Light and Dark.

First, the good news. The game encourages diplomacy over wanton destruction. It expects the Jedi to follow the rule of law, awarding "Dark Side Points" if you put to sleep even an avowed terrorist. Some creatures really do have to get killed.

On balance, though, this is a Democrat's game, not a Republican's.

Light Side players will have to perform unconservative tasks so as to stay in the Light. The game forces you to put an end to the Republic's kolto mining installation on Manaan ("kolto" being a medical ingredient). It does not let you argue with the Sand People to restrict their raids to treaty violators. And smuggling "spice" to a shifty Rodian on Korriban doesn't earn Dark Side points; for all I know the stuff is debilitating, addictive, and slated for export to Alderaanian children.

There's xenophobia on all planets save Dantooine, but some planets' expressions of this are superior to others'. The Wookiees, given a chance, purge their planet of non-Wookiees by violence. The Sand People rob and kill their aliens. The Selkath of Manaan have built a city for its offworlders and pen them to that. And Tarisian humans restrict their aliens to the city's lower layers. But Taris is the only place where the player is invited to see such racism's deleterious effects.

I also don't see any transnational corporations in this universe other than the wicked Czerka. Or, as Nader would say, greedycorporations.

In case you didn't get the point about conserving natural resources in Taris, the designers bring it up again on Manaan; and they further endorse the protection of indigenous species on Kashyyyk. On Tatooine they endorse both.

There's also some kind of anti-war message around the location of the end-game, but I won't get into that, because that's a major spoiler.

If I were designing this game, I'd throw the game's moral relativism right back at itself.

I'd have confronted the player with Wookiees preparing to slaughter an innocent tradesman, perhaps his family too. The Sand People, doubly so. I'd leave the Selkath alone, given that they at least have the excuse that most visitors are air-breathers.

If the players want to wreck kolto production, then the price of medpaks and other such items must rise to the outer limits in Republic stores, and run out of supply in allied peoples' storage facilities. Also, the Republic's loss of cheap kolto, alongside Czerka's loss of Kashyyyk and reduction of other business enterprises, must take a hit on the Republic's costs and tax base, respectively. It should hit Light Sider characters with higher prices all around. Or, better, with an arbitrarily-determined income tax complete with a satirically incomprehensible tax form to fill out, unless you pay Czerka Corp to fill it out for you.

Maybe the above proposal is silly. But not so silly as remodelling Tusken Raiders into "Holy Warriors", yes...?


posted by Zimri on 17:20 | link |

Civil society of the Old Republic


If I haven't been blogging much of late, that's partly because I've had little to say. But equally it's because my time has been taken up playing Knights of the Old Republic on this PC.

I'd been meaning to post on one theme running through the game, though; its social analogies, and its means of interpreting same. In this post I'll handle the former.

In the game you start off high up on the urbanised planet Taris. As far as I know, Taris doesn't exist in any other LucasArts product up to now.

Those parts of Taris which you visit are overbuilt; the rich live in the towers, mutants and exiles live on the surface, and the lower classes live between them. In this respect it is exactly like Coruscant, except Coruscant is built over completely, and on Taris one hears of open land elsewhere that just happens to be too polluted to inhabit.

But Taris is otherwise unlike Coruscant. Taris is economically depressed, for a start. The "rich" here have reacted by banding together into an oligarchy. They're also all human, as are the exiles on the surface beneath them. Non-humans are forced to live in the middle layers with low-caste-but-unexiled humans as resident aliens; presumably they get exiled offworld rather than to the surface when they commit visible crimes.

Taris has the atmosphere of sullen stagnation which holds in Europe, particularly France and Germany. This part of the game plays as a critique to these nations and as a warning to capitalist multiethnic republics such as the US.

Anyway, the game sticks around Taris just slightly longer than it needs to, and then it gets off in time to go visit various worlds in the Star Wars canon. The rest of this overview contains spoilers.

.

Prospective or beginning players of this game are gone, yes?

.

Okay, the other places start with Dantooine; which by Star Wars canon is a base of the Rebellion between Episodes III and IV before the Rebels move to that Hidden Fortress [tm] on Yavin IV. This means that the game's set in the Outer Rim; that part of the galaxy which hosts the bulk of Episodes I, II, and IV. These planets include the usual suspects - Yavin (sort of), Tatooine, Alderaan (which gets only a mention here), Kashyyyk (Wookiee-world), Manaan (a new water world), and apparently Korriban (the Sith homeworld of the comic series, which I'd thought was even further out). Naboo which we know is near Tatooine goes unmentioned; and I suppose other canonical sites exist elsewhere.

Dantooine at this time is a Jedi Council forward base. There's some kind of Romeo and Juliet drama between two feuding landowners. There's also a woman who likes her droid a bit too much. If this is social satire then it is much less in-your-face than Taris.

The game's backdrop is a war between the Republic and Darth Malak's "Sith" armada. Think of it as a death-match between Episode I's Republic and Episode IV's Empire.

The Republic has little impact out on the Outer Rim. It seems to have no ideals of its own, and acts here as a "United Nations" with a peacekeeping force in retreat. It gets its support from a number of factions, some assumed to be pure of heart and some less so. Given that this game has "Knights" in the title, the ally most important to the player is the Jedi Council, whose motives are pure, or at least align with the beliefs of the game designer. There's also a shadowy vigilante outfit called the Genoharadan. The latter lead you to an imprisoned terrorist who boasts of returning to Coruscant to spread propaganda at his own public trial.

The Republic is elsewhere involved more directly in shady deals, such as on Manaan. Their actions there have disturbed the seafloor environment, causing the locals to rise up in unreasoning fanaticism - although said locals don't understand why. Here we have a Near East analogy with a touch of radical environmentalism.

As for the Sith, they actually do believe in something: Social Darwinism. They are monolithic in tactics and strategy, although there is infighting over who exactly gets to be in charge.

There's also a multinational corporation called "Czerka" doing business with both sides. The Czerka run extraction operations on Kashyyyk where they enslave Wookiees, in an amalgam of United Fruit and King Leopold's Congo.

Multinationals and the Near East collide on Tatooine. Czerka runs a mining outfit on that desert world, I guess so as to make that analogy even more obvious. At any rate the Sand People claim, despite that the place is already a fried wasteland, that the mining is hurting their planet; and so they have raised up "Holy Warriors" (and yes, that's actually what the game calls them).

The social commentary in this game is not subtle, and far more insidious than that of the Star Wars series. I'll get into why that is so, soon -


posted by Zimri on 17:15 | link |

Monday, June 13, 2005

Sugar land


Roger Simon has a post on Khuzestan (h/t Reynolds). This place is a satrapy of Iran on its border with southern Iraqi Mesopotamia. Apparently it is now culturally and linguistically Arabic, and dissatisfied with life in Khamanei's Persian empire.

Simon's first reaction to mention of Khuzestan is, "Where?" This is as good an opportunity as any for an 'Irâqi-history brain dump (c.f. Zaydism); so here follows what I know of the place -

Non-Muslim historians of Islam's beginnings actually do (or should) have a working knowledge of Khuzistan. This is due to the vicissitudes of document preservation; not much survives of the era, but one such survival is an eastern-Aramaic Nestorian chronicle which dealt with Khuzistan (of all places) covering 540-650s AD. Ignazio Guidi discovered this thing in 1889, and Alphonse Mingana translated it into French in Sources Syriaques. For Mingana, it was notable as a witness to Islamic doctrine written at latest under 'Abd al-Mâlik's caliphate (c. 690 AD). For my part, I kept getting it confused with the western Syriac "Maronite Chronicle", which deals with events from around 659-662 AD in Syria and on behalf of the Nestorians' rivals in Aramaic-speaking Christianity. When I first heard of a Khuzistan Syriac chronicle, my reaction was similar to Simon's: "where the hell is that?" Khuzistan was just as marginal in the 640s AD, but during this time it happened to lie on the Arabs' eastward line of march.

As a point of historical trivia, Khuzistan exists where the Biblical kingdom of Elam once existed. Elam was not marginal back when Babylon and Assyria were the Great Kingdoms of the Bronze and early Iron Ages. If it were still called "Elam" - or better, retained the Elamite language - the place would be an anthropologists' Mecca, so to speak. But after Ashurbanipal destroyed the Elamite kingdom c. 640 BC, the land of Elam became a frontier, and important mostly when said frontier was in dispute. When there was no dispute, the Aramaeans and Arabs cared about it only as a sugar (huzayé / khuz) plantation, hence its name. This status was not interrupted until the twentieth-century AD mass production of oil.

The Khuzistan chronicle still hasn't been translated fully into English; but it does exist in Syriac (obviously) and in translation in French, Latin, and Arabic. Mingana's seminal 1917 article "The Transmission of the Koran" (The Origins of the Koran, Ibn Warraq, pp. 97-113) has excerpts of it, and Robert G Hoyland's 1997 overview Seeing Islam as Others Saw It has more.

From the Chronicle, we can surmise that Beth Huzayé was a restive Persian province in 640 AD as in 500 BC and as now. In 640 AD the soon-to-be-"Khuzistanis" were Nestorian Christians, like their Mesopotamian neighbours; and spoke eastern "Syriac" (i.e. the last stage of Aramaic), again, like the Mesopotamians. The Chronicle represents the party of the Nestorian Church in the region. During the Arab incursion, Isho'yahb II of Gadala (r. 628-646 AD) was their pope, whom they title "Cathlicos", and had his seat in Mahoze.

After the battle of Ctesiphon in 637 AD, the Persians were forced into a defensive retreat from the new Arab empire. The Persian king took a look at his culturally-Semitic sugar land and decided not to defend it. From the regional perspective, as the Chronicle relates it, a Biblical plague of "the sons of Ishmael" conquered Persia, during which time "Arabs" poured into Beth Huzayé. The Arabs massacred the Christians of Mahoze and bore the city's gates back to their city of "Aqula". An Isho'yahb there, either II or III (of Adiabene: r. 649-659 AD), was obliged to move his seat from there to Karka (Hoyland p. 186).

The Chronicle tells that Aqula "named Kufa" was founded by a Sa'd bin [Abî] Waqqas. Arab accounts agree that Sa'd's city was Kufa near pre-Islamic Hira. This also suggests that the Arab grand strategy was a decentralised affair, to such an extent that the locals did not deem important the names or even existence of 'Umar and 'Uthman, despite that they had at least heard of Muhammad. (Hoyland pp. 186-7)

Kufa's role in the east cannot have postdated 650 AD. On that date, 'Uthman reorganised command of that front, reassigning its headquarters to Basra (c.f. Hinds, "The Conquest of Fars"). In addition, while we do not know what Isho'yahb II said of the Arabs who conquered Iraq and Khuzistan; Isho'yahb III viewed the Arabs as allies and patrons of Nestorian Christianity, and knew Isho'yahb II's old seat of Mahoze as the site of a subordinate bishopric from the mid 640s AD on (Hoyland p. 176). The Chronicle's Isho'yahb cannot be Isho'yahb III and so must be II.

(A further aside on the Chronicle's date of authorship: Hoyland further surmises that the Khuzistan Chronicle dates not long after 652 AD (pp. 183-5). To that I would add that the biographies of 'Umar and 'Uthman should have mattered to a centralising Marwanid ruler like 'Abd al-Malik and even to Mu'awiya before him, and that the Chronicle saw no need to distinguish between the exiled Isho'yahb II and the coddled Isho'yahb III; so it may even precede the latter's consolidation of his position.)

When Isho'yahb II left Khuzistan, the province lost its relevance to eastern Christianity. Over the centuries its inhabitants have largely abandoned the Aramaic language and the Nestorian religion. They have not however abandoned their ties to Mesopotamia. Now that the Mesopotamians are "Arabs" and Muslims (and occasionally Mandaeans), so too are the Khuzistanis.


posted by Zimri on 19:50 | link |

And all that could have been


By design, SotE is the first half of a nonexistent "Han's Rescue" movie to which the start of RotJ forms the conclusion. To this much I assent. I just think that Lucas should have designed the SotE story arc post-Gail in a different way. Maddeningly, an example of such a story arc in game form was already in development as of 1996...

So what would I have done?

For a start, I would have planned the SotE story arc around free agent Luke, as a runup to Han's rescue in RotJ. Luke's not tied to the Rebellion as is Leia. Unlike Leia (normally), Luke can go to stinkholes like Dagobah or Tatooine to help his training or to help rescue Han. In such a game (a first-person RPG), Luke would grow in leet Jedi skillz as he progressed. He'd also have to face the questions of whether to help the Alliance or to track down Han. By electing and succeeding at both, he could earn the prestige which convinced the Alliance to lend him Leia during the final rescue. And the engine was complete as of 1997 - it just starred a different Jedi of a later time: its game Dark Forces II, Jedi Knight won many an award back in the day.

As for places to go, Jabba didn't have to have his only base in Tatooine. If he did, then as well as Luke having naught to do but train and plot between episodes, there's a plot hole in Episode VI: the Imperials could have set up a Jedi-catching perimeter around Jabba's palace à la Cloud City. Hutts probably prefer slimy planets like Dagobah anyway, and they certainly might visit Coruscant from time to time.

I'd farm out the Bothan / Death Star 2 plot to some other writer / game designer; Lando and Leia could do duty there before meeting up with Luke later. Dash Rendar would remain a bit part, if I kept him at all. Likewise Xizor.

But then Lucas might have had to wait a whole 'nother year for the technology to mature. Impatience is truly the path to the Dark Side!

Admittedly you have to go to war with the army you have. If I really had control over this enterprise, I probably wouldn't stop there; I would have pretended the second half of RotJ didn't exist. But now we're getting into changes to the movies better handled elsewhere.

Perhaps we ought to be glad RotJ was so uneven, because if it had been perfect, SotE's failure would be complete.


posted by Zimri on 19:40 | link |

Critique of Shadows of the Empire


SotE was by Star Wars standards a failure. I feel that if a story is to be part of a saga, it should enhance the saga, not compete with it. SotE represents a detour from the Star Wars saga as defined in the trilogy (plus TPM, for that matter).

I have to get the good out of the way first. Both the book and (after some Empire Strikes Back overlap) the game start off OK, with a nice conflict between Boba and the Falcon team. It's also nice to visit the scrapyards of Ord Mantell, finally; and to see the new canyon planet of Gail. I further think a lot of the SotE soundtrack. Joel McNeely is a worthy padawan to John Williams. Actually I think JW should have lifted JM's Coruscant theme for TPM. (TPM already had a soundtrack better than 4/5 of the remaining overall epic.)

Now, the bad...

First, the two major new characters - Dash Rendar and Xizor - are redundant:

  • Dash Rendar is just Han Solo resurrected from the opening scenes of "A New Hope"... prior to the Special Edition. (As if Lando couldn't occupy that niche equally well.) Rendar has no role outside SotE, making his status as stopgap and lame clone too obvious for disbelief suspension. He also bears a moniker that is almost as ridiculous as "Han Solo".
  • Xizor has the opposite problem; he's new, interesting, and a total distraction from the established cast. We already have Darth Vader as the Emperor's right arm. Why another one?

Second, the established characters Vader and Palpatine are showing their hands before their time. At this point in the saga, Episodes IV and V have established a military empire in which the Sith role remains ambiguous. In ANH, the Senate and/or Rebellion (through Leia) still thinks that Tarkin is the one "holding Vader's leash". The Emperor's sole action, behind the stage, is to close down the Senate - but even that requires only an address to a legislature, well within the capabilities of a figurehead monarch (especially given [a] ANH's antecedents in Japanese cinema and [b] Palpatine's origins as Senate Chancellor). It is in TESB that we find that Vader takes his orders from the Emperor - and still in secret! (Episode III changes matters, slightly; but Palpatine had feigned weakness before, and now has a scarred visage and 18 years to retreat behind the cloak by the time of IV.)

  • ANH and TESB both had Vader wreak more and more havoc in the course of his service to the Empire. When Vader claimed to be Luke's father, it was at that time an open question whether Vader was telling the truth. Even if he was, it was not to repent of his own evil but to drag Luke into it. The opening salvoes of RotJ do not have Vader committing new crimes of his own, but he has assumed full responsibility for carrying out the Emperor's. Vader's reform is supposed to develop over the course of RotJ. SotE the book spoilt all that. It opened a window into Vader's mind. That is precisely what his mask in the films is supposed to prevent. It also comes dangerously close to tipping the viewer toward sympathy ahead of time.
  • The Emperor has his own progress to make in the story. Since he has no humanity in him, his progress is into something more basic: visibility. He continues to reveal himself progressively after the holograph in TESB. In RotJ, he is first heralded by Vader, then arrives entirely encloaked, and finally reveals his awful visage to Luke. (Yes, the striptease was intentional.) The book and comic describe the Emperor's visage at the start. This is premature. As with TPM, we shouldn't be seeing the Emperor outside a hologram.

Before SotE came out, the SW audience could run through IV and V and arrive at VI with these questions: whether Vader was Luke's father; whether that implied that Vader was redeemable, or, if Vader was lying, what was his real motive; and what is the true nature of the Emperor.

Stylistically, too, SotE is out of place. The climax of the events between TESB and RotJ already exists - in the beginning of RotJ itself. The raid on Jabba's palace is not about the Empire or the Rebellion. It is about Luke's next-to-final exam as a Jedi, in which he must clear accounts by rescuing Han. Luke should be struggling with his (albeit indirect) guilt in bringing Han to that pass. He should be learning subterfuge. Instead Luke just bums around Tatooine and waits for Xizor and Vader to invite him to Coruscant. And why not? Dash Rendar is doing his job for him.

The subplot about the Death Star plans is also ill-placed. RotJ works perfectly well with Bothans - and the new Death Star plans - somewhere off in the sidelines without Luke's involvement. Maybe Lando Calrissian and the Falcon helped. Doesn't matter. The Bothan quest for the DS2 plans and the Skywalker quest for Han are VERY unlikely to intersect. This plotline belongs off mainline SW (that is, the Skywalker saga) and into supplemental fiction. LucasArts could even have sold an extra book and comic off it. Hell, it could have been the plot of a separate SotE game, sparing us that useless Rendar. Not to mention that the fate of the Bothans in this story arc elicits slightly less surprise than the fate of Kenny in a South Park episode.

And SotE presaged a trap of TPM: that it does not justify locations that don't matter to the track of the story; Tatooine in TPM's case and, given that Jabba does not leave his sandy lair, Coruscant in SotE's. SotE's book even flits to Rodia, which I can only assume refers to a deleted level of the game.

"Cloak of Deception", by way of contrast, also attempts to set the scene of a SW movie, in this case TPM. But it does a better job. Instead of distracting from the coming attractions with competing heroes, villains, and plot arcs, it sets the scene in such a way that TPM would naturally follow. (A more analogous pre-TPM analogue to SotE would be "Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter", which introduces a fourth leading Neimoidian - breaking the Rule of Three - and many more characters, purely as straw men for Maul. Instead of setting the scene, it shakes it. - But it too is superior to SotE, at the least in that it does not damage the stage on the way through; and is better planned and written to boot.)

Ultimately, SotE had a responsibility to preserve the audience's reception of RotJ. It did not live up to it. SotE is pointless after the failed rescue attempt at Gail.

The game's hopefully cheap enough by now that you can buy it for the opening salvos alone. Its book, like TPM's book, is shackled to the design of the plot; and as with TPM's book, the plot kills it. The trade paperback comic is, eh, a comic. But the soundtrack is still better than 4/6 or even 5/6 of the overall thing so maybe you could get that.


posted by Zimri on 19:35 | link |

Shadows of the Empire


I'd commented on Michele's site about Shadows of the Empire ("SotE"). I was acting in my occasional capacity as "troll", playing on Steve Perry's name. Way back in November of 2001 I'd posted in rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc as "Zimri" with a review of SotE. I figured it was time to collect all my thoughts in blog form, given that the "circle is now complete" and all.

SotE was a mid-1990s LucasArts venture in which George Lucas dabbled more directly into his own "Expanded Universe" than he had done beforehand.

At the time (1996), Lucas was working on re-releases of his IV-VI trilogy, ultimately preparing the way for Revenge of the Sith. As part of this he decided to fill in the space between V and VI with an "everything-but-the-movie" story arc. As with The Phantom Menace, I am not arguing that SotE was better left unmade.

Lucas figured, rightly in my view, that such an arc would be best served by a video game, with the rest (comic, book, soundtrack) buttressing this. The marketing salvo for all this further gave him practice for all that merchandising he was planning for TPM.

The plot of SotE is, by necessity, under constraint from V and VI. SotE has a beginning, where Han gets captured and his friends escape; and an ending, where Luke and friends finally locate Han's body in the latter's Tatooine digs. Meanwhile, Vader's still looking for the prime independent mover in the Han rescue, who is none other than Luke Skywalker. And Luke has to train to Jedi Master level (if not status).

Also, I suppose the Death Star II's plans need stealin'. More on that elsewhere.

SotE shares with Episode VI the same mess which Episode V left behind: that the Empire's destruction and Han's rescue are incompatible objectives. That's why Return of the Jedi had to be a two-part movie.

SotE's further problem for its audience is the problem of IV's and VI's beginning: Han's not in any condition to deliver wisecracks and to romance the ladies. This problem is particularly problem-ish for gamers, who otherwise might want to be Han.

Lucas dealt with both by means of a character who could swing between helping with Solo (the Luke arc) and helping with the Rebels (i.e. Leia). A scoundrel. A character like Lando Calrissian.


posted by Zimri on 19:30 | link |

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