Of Guys Named Seth

The screw if the Serenity were like
ex-Paladins who became Chaotic Good.

When I'm in the manic mode and focused on being productive/organized/generally Lawful Good, I think of myself in terms of a Knight or Paladin (the paladin, by the way, were to Charlemagne as the Knights of the Round Table were to King Arthur Pendragon). It's more entertaining than being a skinny white kid and, thinking back on it, being heavily into fantasy gaming and high fantasy fiction, and idolizing the Knights, of course, probably did more to underpin my personal ideas of justice and morality than any actual lesson real or imagined.

When I made (briefly) colour party in my old Army Cadet corps, I was probably a little happier than I needed to be, thanks to that fanciful association, but now I'm digressing when I really have no time to - I ought to pack.

Recently there's been a big damn stink about Seth MacFarlane (the creative, or at least marketing, genius behind the surprisingly popular Family Guy and American Dad television series), the jokes he made while he was hosting the Oscars, and the people making the stink. I'm going to try really hard not to make any of my arguments in favour of either side since they've been made to death on facebook already and I don't have that kind of time - I really ought to pack.

There's a statistic coming out of my friends who keep tabs on US statistics that apparently, one in 20 men is a rapist. Not a potential rapist (That's impossible to quantify), but has actually conducted actions that could be tried as rape in the United States.

That's a scary statistic if ever I heard one, and that's good that it scares people. It should scare people.

Men shouldn't be the ones using it. Period. It smacks of confidence games, of the guy who's going to bleed you for protection money, to keep you from getting robbed. Citing rape and your opposition to it as a way to get closer to women is a little like me citing, I dunno, a hatred of whites as a way to get closer to blacks. You don't hate men any more than I hate whites, but you do it because it works and hey, as long as you at least are getting laid...

Except you probably aren't (nor should you be). No, you're probably that guy friend everyone can trust, that perfect friend. Sort of underpins the whole raison d'etre of the system.

Now, that's a Rogue thing to do. The Paladin thing to do would be to go after the one in twenty men. Because if you've ever been to a bar you've seen it in action. If you've ever been to a house party, you've seen it in action. And boy howdy, if a five-eight, roughly-as-heavy-as-a-good-textbook guy like me can straighten someone out, your self-hating ass should do just fine.

Now, I really oughta pack, but in sum, the real point is this - the solution isn't teaching women to fear men. The solution is teaching men it's better to be Knights. I'll get into that later.