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From the very opening scene, Rafe Judkins seems unapologetically focused on turning The Wheel of Time into The Wheel of Thrones. Unfortunately for Judkins – and for everyone involved – everything about The Wheel of Time is diametrically opposed to GRR Martin’s vision and tone. Jordan and Martin were friends, yes – but they have very different ideas about what fantasy should look like. The chief and most glaring problem with this series is that they already had a story – set in successive stages – and they are ignoring it, almost completely. Instead, they have changed major plot points with implications for the eventual end of the series, and have seemingly no plausible reason for doing so, aside from pure expediency.

I’ll go into the individual issues shortly, but let me give you an overview of the problems they have created. This will be done by spoilers, sorry. The book series has been done for nearly 10 years. Whatever the plot of this series is, it isn’t the Wheel of Time’s – so I’m not interested in spoilers for that, either. This is a review, from a longtime reader, so if you don’t want book (or series) spoilers – you probably want a different review. There have been major changes to the characters, geography, magic system, and various setting elements introduced which cause significant plot issues for the story down the line.

Let’s begin with Episode 1. The story goes off the rails almost immediately when, in the opening scene with the Reds, Liandrin says to the unnamed channeler; “this power – it’s meant for women, and women alone. When you touch it, you make it filthy.” The male half and the female half are separate. What men touch is not Saidar – it is Saidin. Only Saidin is tainted. The women’s half of the source, Saidar, is untainted by the Dark One. I noticed this mistake instantly. Most other readers of the series will, as well. It is the Dark One who tainted Saidin – and it is the Source which taints men, not the men who taint the source. Next, in Lan and Moraine’s conversation that I’ll refer more to later, she says that there are “rumors of four ta’veren there” in the Two Rivers. This is a particularly egregious line, as ta’veren are exceptionally rare – and the Two Rivers are exceptionally isolated. For someplace so isolated – where not even an Andoran tax collector has gone in generations, and whose only ties to the outside world are the occasional peddler – how would “rumors” get out, let alone rumors of 4 ta’veren in one small settlement? The reason Moraine goes there in EotW is because the Karatheon Cycle says that the Dragon “…will be of the ancient blood, and raised by the old blood.” It isn’t clear (even to Moraine) which “ancient blood” is being referred to, but the blood of Manetheren is old blood indeed. Indeed, Moraine is shocked to discover later (as she gets to know the Two Rivers folk) that she has multiple ta’veren on her hands. Many readers seem to be shocked to discover that four of them are ta’veren – and rightly so – because they aren’t.

ROBERT JORDAN – For ben, of course women can be ta’veren. None of the major female characters in the books is ta’veren, though. The Wheel doesn’t cast ta’veren around indiscriminately. There has to be a specific reason or need.

BRANDON SANDERSON – I’ve often gotten questions from people asking if Egwene was ta’veren. Obviously not, as Siuan would have seen the glow of it.

The current Amyrlin Seat, Siuan Sanche, has the ability to “see” ta’veren – and she doesn’t “see” Egwene or Nynaeve as such – or Elayne, for that matter. Ta’veren are made, not born, as the quote above shows. Only three ta’veren came out of the Two Rivers.

On to the opening scene in the Two Rivers; Egwene’s induction into adulthood is a mere mention in the books – she has been permitted to wear her her hair braided for the first time – and this seems to be permitted by her mother. In the series, she is being inducted into “The Women’s Circle” – which in the books, is the circle of women leaders of the village – and is a very select company of gray-haired women. That membership (at this point of time) consisted of Nynaeve al’Meara, Daise Congar, Alsbet Luhhan, Marin al’Vere, Natti Cauthon, and Neysa Ayellin – by no means a large company. Nynaeve is impossibly young, for a Wisdom – and even younger to be on the Women’s Circle, even by dint of being Wisdom. Having an even younger not-quite-apprentice Wisdom on the Women’s Circle beggars belief – or, alternatively, the show doesn’t know what the Women’s Circle is. The entire “mystical” induction sequence – the dialogue, the ceremony, being pushed off the rocks into the river, “trust the river”, the grotto (and all that seems to entail) is completely fabricated for the show and has no basis anywhere in the books. Next, there’s a line Perrin drops about Taren Ferry being full of soldiers and mercenaries headed south. Geographically, this is nonsense. The Two Rivers is isolated by terrain, as the conversation with Padan Fain and the Village Council in the books bears out. They are hemmed in by mountains, a mire, and the eponymous two rivers. The only supposed access to Ghealdan (which the panicky, uneducated villagers are afraid of providing a path through the Two Rivers) would be through an exceptionally dense (and most importantly, pathless) forest, the Forest of Shadows, that has grown up between the two mountain ranges that almost meet in the south. Taren Ferry is on the opposite side of the Two Rivers from Ghealdan, and might with great justice be called the gateway to the end of nowhere. There would be absolutely no reason for soldiers to be gathering there – and where, precisely, would they be gathering from? Taren Ferry (and even Baerlon) is 500+ miles from anywhere accessible to soldiers from even Andor – who would have no reason to head in the direction of Whitebridge, let alone into the hinterlands near Baerlon. While we’re on geography, too – there is no river through Emond’s Field. There is a small springfed creek, called the Winespring Water, which starts just outside town, is bridged by the Winespring Bridge near the Inn, and which feeds into the Mire in the southeast – but that is easily crossed. Putting a river through the middle of, or just outside of town is problematic. The Two Rivers after which the area is named are dozens of miles off in either direction – the Taren to the north, and the White River, aka the Manetherendrelle, to the south. The villagers would have to go quite a bit past Deven Ride to the south, or to Taren’s Ferry in the north to reach either of the rivers forming a natural boundary to the area – and they are quite large rivers – unforded and formidable. The geographical problems the show poses are legion, as we will soon discover.

Now we come to Moraine’s entrance. Instead of arriving during the day, and instead of claiming to be a noblewoman asking for stories, she is instantly recognized (and named) as Aes Sedai by Marin Al’Vere. The Two Rivers is exceptionally isolated. Far more isolated than the show seems to want to admit. In the books, they don’t recognize her as Aes Sedai until she and Lan are actually fighting Trollocs, and she channels in their defense -calling down lightning is pretty unmistakable. The series also completely skips over her engagement of the three young men (along with a couple others of similar age) as gophers, and her giving them small coins as payment – which, later on, allows her to track them. Egregiously missing, and egregiously replaced by Moraine in a dramatic evening entrance to the inn, is Thom Merrilin – a gleeman who was contracted by the village council to tell tales and perform for Winternight.

Other changes: Perrin is unaccountably (and seemingly unhappily) married to Laila Dearn, a possible love interest he mentioned – once – in later books. Abell Cauthon, horseman, master archer and farmer, is (for whatever reason) a womanizer and drunk – while his wife, Natti, is a drunken slattern who neglects her children and lashes out at her son – instead of solid and levelhead members of the Women’s Circle and Village Council, respectively. Also unaccountably missing are Haral Luhhan, Perrin’s blacksmith Master (Perrin is rather young at 20 to be the village’s blacksmith, although about to become a journeyman) and his wife Alsbet – also members of the Village Council and Women’s Circle, respectively. Why a random wife and drunkard parents were added to the show completely escapes me – and will cause multiple plot issues later – assuming the show lasts that long. Another thing that was added was a sexual relationship between Rand and Egwene. Now, I know that later on in the series, there is some extensive hanky panky in all directions – however, it’s pretty well established that such hanky panky would have been severely punished by pretty much everyone in the Two Rivers. In fact, there’s a story told about a similar situation in which the two participants were both treated as children for a significant time – well, here, let me quote it – and this occurs in book Five.

For that matter, he remembered when Nynaeve caught Kimry Lewin and Bar Dowtry in Bar’s father’s hayloft. Kimry had had her hair braided for five years, but when Nynaeve was through with her, Mistress Lewin had taken over. The Women’s Circle had nearly skinned poor Bar alive, and that was nothing to what they had done to Kimry over the month they thought was the shortest decent time to wait for a wedding. The joke told quietly, where it would not get to the Women’s Circle, had been that neither Bar nor Kimry had been able to sit down the whole first week they were married. Rand supposed Kimry had failed to ask permission.

The Fires of Heaven, pg. 53 – emphasis mine

Again, I’m well aware that later on in the books, there are great varieties of hanky panky going on. In the Two Rivers, however, this sort of thing is unacceptable. Adding it is gratuitous – not to mention the fact that they are depicted as getting it on in… the middle of the tavern’s common room, in front of the fire (where Moraine had just warmed her hands earlier), where literally all the guests upstairs could walk in at any time. Why? Also, the Al’Veres should have a cozy little inn, not a boisterous tavern. It’s just… perplexing? We won’t even get into the Voldemort-looking Myrddraal.

Cue the next day. There are a variety of things to hate here, too. As many, many others have mentioned – the match. Guys, there are no matches in this world – they haven’t been invented yet. In fact, a significant plot point later is the invention of matches by an “Illuminator” (Calling Aludra!)- one of a guild who have the secret to fireworks and their manufacture – whom we don’t meet until the next book, and who doesn’t create matches until a significant amount of time passes. Little details like this are what make or break adaptations of existing source material. It points to the people writing this show not actually knowing said material. Tam (and Rand) using matches here is just flat out stupid. We won’t even get into the completely inserted nonsense about Bel Tine lanterns and “guiding spirits back to us”. Also, just because it annoyed me as well – Winternight is the night before Bel Tine. It is the last night of winter, while Bel Tine heralds the coming of spring. Winternight is the celebration that the Trollocs interrupt. Fain arrives on the morning of Bel Tine in the series – while Rand and his father discuss whether they should “be there for Bel Tine tonight”. In the show, they had stayed the night in town (which they don’t typically do, being farmers) over Winternight, but had left the next morning to return to their farm. Bel Tine was a day of festival, with contests and dances and the like. Tam and Rand avoid those entirely (and they are not pictured in the show) and return to their farm. The Trolloc attack therefore occurs on Bel Tine itself.

On to Moraine and Nynaeve’s made-up conversation. The stupid “sacred grotto” makes yet another appearance – and Nynaeve’s parents are thrown under a bus to create unnecessary drama. Her mother does die when she is young – not a baby – but her father is alive well into her teens, and teaches her woodcraft – which, in addition to her link (through Saidar) to the young people, is how she tracks and finds the party after they leave the Two Rivers. There was no reason to delete her parents here – and this part of the story seems even more contrived and hackneyed as a result. We know who her parents are from the books – and she is too old to be the Dragon, and female besides – so why are we bothering with this? Maybe the showrunner is too source deaf to figure out that the Dragon is male for a reason, and we get these idiotic red herrings about female Dragons – but there is a reason in the material that the Dragon has to be male. Not to mention that the Karatheon Cycle straight up says he is. Plus, there is a made up story about Doral Barran – with the even more unbelievable accusation that Aes Sedai care about whether someone is a peasant or not. The current Amrylin seat grew up a fisherman’s daughter – and most, not few, Aes Sedai are of peasant origin. We move on to a scene with Mat and Fain. Mat is now depicted as a thief pawning stolen jewelry, in addition to the rest of his newly terrible family life. Fain is probably less creepy than he should be, although he couldn’t very well be more creepy. The following scene with the boys at their table is awkward and unnatural – as most of their scenes are. Instead of being generally happy folks, Mat and Perrin have an uncharacteristic brooding pathos that has been entirely fabricated by adding in these new elements. It completely changes the character of their interactions – and thereby, their characters. Rand is the least changed – although the decision to change around Thom and Min’s meetings with the group, to escalate the encounter with the ferryman to cause his death, and to put the army of trollocs right on their heels, instead of having the Draghkar in the skies ramp up Rand’s aggression toward Moraine and make it look unreasoning – when in the books, there is a general progression which brings him to that pass – one which takes days, even weeks, of events to bring about.

The Trollocs all look like Steppenwolf from Justice League, honestly. Not a terrible decision, but I can’t get it out of my head. When they attack, the body count seems a bit higher than in the books, but they’ve expanded Emond’s Field somewhat from the size in the books, as well. Moraine and Lan carving through the Trollocs is a pretty righteous scene, I have to admit (although a trifle extended from what it should be); it omits Lan warning the village of the impending attack – and results in Moraine tearing down the Winespring (the only brick building in the village, incidentally) to wipe out this newly beefed up attack on the village the show incorporates. There is an entire fist of Trollocs present here. Even a Halfman will retreat from an Aes Sedai and Warder (and a roused township) – and that’s what is supposed to happen at Winternight. In this version, though, at least 25 (and possibly more) villagers die, the fight goes on much longer, Moraine is randomly pegged by a thrown dagger and destroys half the village by herself, and Nynaeve is carried off by the braid in a scene right out of the Battle of Emond’s Field 10 books later – by a Trolloc who has a throwdown with Nynaeve (again with the stupid grotto!) doing her best Birgitte impression (which she seems to have been doing all along). Here I was thinking that Nynaeve would call that man-brained idiocy, and thinking with your muscles – right? Well, apparently not. There’s also Daise Congar being… whatever it is when she tells the Trolloc “you want a real feast”. Look, Congars and Coplins… they’re special – but that’s special, even for them, okay? Since Moraine destroyed the inn, now we have the conversation where we decide to leave in the middle of the village green; all in the space of 2 minutes from Rand’s entrance into town, and Perrin carting his wife’s body to the corpse piles. One thing I did appreciate, however – Moraine’s exposition at the end with the iconic “…but it was a beginning”.

So, on to Episode 2. We open with the Tide Poster Children (of the Light) – who instead of wearing just white cloaks, apparently wear all white, all the time, even in the field – and we are treated to another… fascinating departure from the source material in the form of Eamon Valda, of all people, privately burning a Tar Valon “witch” for his own amusement, and collecting her ring to add to his collection – after he cuts off her hands, of course. We then cut back to the Emond’s Fielders, who are fleeing along a riverbank. Which river? I have no idea. there are no rivers heading north and south anywhere in the middle of the Two Rivers. Both of these rivers run east and west, and bound the area in from the north and south.

From https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Rivers?file=Two_Rivers.jpg

The North Road doesn’t run along a river toward Watch Hill and Taren Ferry. The Winespring isn’t large enough for this scene to make any sense, either – and where would you go down it, anyway? It is sloppy errors like this – for purely aesthetic reasons, apparently – that make this show so maddening.

Instead of Dragkhar pressing them from above to Taren Ferry – we go directly to Shadar Logoth. For a bit about why this is extraordinary, we have to talk about distances. It is 171 miles (150 WL miles) from Emond’s Field to Baerlon – which the show completely skips past. Taren Ferry is just slightly less than halfway to Baerlon from Emond’s Field (assuming the scale in the maps are correct – and I suspect it isn’t, quite) – say, 65 WL miles or so. In Ch11, they reach Watch Hill at a gallop. It is slightly less than halfway to Taren Ferry on the map – say, 30 miles. They are about at the limit of horses (30-35 miles) at a sustained speed (which, by the way, isn’t a gallop) – therefore Moraine’s ministrations to the horses at this point makes sense. They reach Taren’s Ferry before morning (but to be fair, 60+ miles in a night isn’t exactly realistic, but we’re dealing with magic users and the first book in a series, so we’ll wing it) and the ferryman brings them across (and doesn’t die, by the way – his ferry does get sunk, but they just give him more gold). At this point in the show, Moraine should have created the fog to misdirect the Draghkar, et al – and they camp for the night, before heading for Baerlon the next morning – which seems to take a total of six days in the books. She doesn’t do that in the series. Instead, they press on for a while more, then rest at some undisclosed location – presumably in the woods northeast of Taren Ferry, approximately 15 miles away, which is the closest wooded area in the direction of Shadar Logoth. See the map of the wooded area in roughly the shape of Africa below – that’s where they’d have to get to before camping in old forest, instead of camping in the convenient wood just west of the road north of the Taren.

Western Andor, from The Great Blight

At this point in the show, they’ve covered 80 miles in a single night – and still have time to rest until morning, apparently.

During the discussion with Egwene (at which point she, too, questions the Aes Sedai overly aggressively – since the ferryman just died to no apparent purpose for additional drama) Moraine relates The Three Oaths – but with a startling omission, given what she just did in Emond’s Field; she omits the clause(s) “against Darkfriends or Shadowspawn, or” prior to “the last extreme defense of her life”, etc. If words are so important, why does she leave that part out? Again, if words are so important – why do we add the line “it’s the wind that listens to you?” You do not control the One Power. You channel the One Power – you are a conduit – you surrender. Practically all of the high drama in the next morning’s conversation is entirely fabricated – as is the Whitecloak encounter they have, instead of the one they should have had in Baerlon. There is also at least one strange issue with this encounter. Bornhald tells Moraine to see a sister at Whitebridge to heal her wound. It is hedged about, to be sure, but hardly something a Lord Captain would say in front of a Questioner – or at all. Something else worth mentioning is that Whitecloaks, on the main, wouldn’t believe in Trollocs out of the Borderlands or the Blight itself.

Now we’re into geography problems again. Whitebridge is 588 WL miles from Baerlon – as the crow flies. We do get a sort of limited travel montage, so it wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it was on the first watchthrough – but the terrain involved is not nearly as varied as it appears from that montage. There are no significant bodies or water or wastelands between the wood northeast of Taren Ferry and Hills of Absher – north of the Caemlyn road. The road itself isn’t nearly well defined enough, either, if that’s what they are traveling on several days later. It is used for a significant amount of overland traffic between Whitebridge and the mining town of Baerlon – which means wagons laden with metal and rock. As such, it’s almost certainly paved, and definitely kept in good order. Further, the huge overlook Rand is standing on, depicted in the group scene, isn’t a terrain feature anywhere between Baerlon/Taren Ferry and Whitebridge. Anyway, it’s roughly 60-65 WL miles to Taren Ferry from Emond’s Field. It’s an additional 85 WL miles to Baerlon – but approximately 120 WL miles overland to Shadar Logoth from Taren Ferry – 15 of which they covered the day after their flight from Emond’s Field to Taren Ferry. In the books, they took 6 days from the river crossing to reach Baerlon to recover the horses – but the trip down the Caemlyn road took only 3 as far as Shadar Logoth (due to the better road, and the horses having rested again). They reach Shadar Logoth on the 11th day after they leave the Two Rivers, I believe, since they spend a day in Baerlon before being chased out by a Fade. Going overland for most of that route would cut their pace significantly. We’re probably looking at well over a fortnight in that case. An overland trek to the road, and then on to Whitebridge, makes significantly less sense – and would take even more time than otherwise, not less, as the series depicts; but more about that in a minute.

The single most significant moment in the series so far (lore wise) occurs on the ride when they begin to sing a peculiar song they don’t seem to really understand – and Moraine delivers a stripped-down version of the Fall of Manetheren – the story she should have told to unite the villagers when they angrily confront Moraine about the Trollocs, instead of Rand making that confrontation alone. I must admit, that song (and the story to follow) was pretty cool – probably the coolest thing in the series for me so far. At least I get *one* thing that’s even remotely close to the story out of all this. Sadly, it may be the only thing. We are then told that they are headed for the road (east to Whitebridge, we are told, which means that they’re headed overland toward the Caemlyn road – the small track they are on can’t possibly be the Caemlyn road, as they haven’t gone nearly far enough yet, and the path isn’t nearly well-defined enough). We are not told why they would be “skirting Shadar Logoth” – it is miles north, across the Caemlyn Road. (Shadar Logoth is another 100 WL miles or so from their initial camping spot out of Taren Ferry, as the crow flies, and significantly out of the way if they are truly headed for Whitebridge.) Why they would be tooling around north of the Caemlyn road, and trapping themselves against a navigable river like the Arinelle beggars belief. Where they are supposed to “find a sister who can heal” Moraine, as Lan says, in a wilderness as complete as that which obtains near Shadar Logoth, is a complete mystery. They are above the Hills of Asbher, and hundreds of miles from any settlements whatsoever, at this point – which, I might add, makes their meetings with both the Whitecloaks and later, the sisters with Logain, that much more unlikely – vanishingly unlikely, given the geography, which we will further address shortly. When Moraine falters at last, due to the randomly added dagger wound she received Emond’s Field, a Fade catches up with them, and they ride to the city. East to the city. If you look at the map above, that means that they have passed the road, nearly hit the river, and are actually skirting around that significant bend somewhat south, in order to hit the city. They arrive at Shadar Logoth as it is turning light. The horses stop dead and refuse to go on as soon as they get a certain distance away from the walls – but just as suddenly are willing to go again when the group finishes their conversation. Convenient. The hundred foot wall has a similarly convenient narrow crack in it right where they arrive. At this point, they have covered 180 WL miles, with 350 or more to go just to Whitebridge – and are driven out of Shadar Logoth at nightfall, instead of in the middle of the night (and incidentally, Lan and Moraine leave via yet *another* conveniently narrow crack in the hundred foot walls) – and by Mashadar, not by a combination of Trollocs and Mashadar – which is the crucial combination.

Rand and Mat get out of the grating just in the nick of time, chased by Mashadar’s oil slick instead of being driven out by Trollocs on the one hand, and the tendrils of Mashadar on the other. Mashadar is a black creeping film in the show, rather than a darkly luminous mist. They push a fallen log across the river (which is unaccountably narrow, considering that this is the Arinelle – a river that is navigable by coastal vessels all the way to the Borderlands in Saldea) and make their way to a mining town in… uh, a mountainous gorge. Of which there aren’t any, to my knowledge – especially not between Shadar Logoth and Whitebridge. There aren’t any mountains between the Mountains of Mist and Kinslayer’s Dagger – not unless you’re going down to Garen’s Wall, which separates Ghealdan from Andor. I’ll be honest with you here – from this point, the show doesn’t even pretend to be The Eye of the World. It sort of pretended at the beginning, but now it doesn’t even pretend. It just throws characters in and out, topsy turvy, doing whatever they want to whomever they want, wherever they want – with no order, rhyme or reason. For example, Lan, of all people, gives a lengthy treatise on Shadar Logoth – which should be Moraine’s – because they’ve given Moraine a random dagger wound that prevents her from giving it – and is the new pretext for them having gone to the city in the first place, rather than three fists of Trollocs each ahead and behind giving them no other choice but north or south of the road. While I’m sure the conversation between Mat and Perrin is touching – it’s yet another fabrication, about a situation they contrived exclusively for the show. There are only two things that happen in Shadar Logoth that happened in the books. Mashadar spreads, and Mat takes a dagger without telling anyone. Everything else is fabrication. There is one interesting item I hadn’t noticed, however – albeit yet another fabrication. There is a whistling heard in the streets prior to Mat’s trip out to get the dagger. Fain’s whistling. In the books, you see, the Trollocs drive Fain with them as their hunter – it is he who tracks them from Emond’s Field. He doesn’t, however, run into Mordeth until after the escape of the Two Rivers folk – where Fain also makes his escape from his masters. When he encounters Mordeth, Mordeth tries to subsume him, but is unable to do so, since Fain has been changed by what was done to him to make him the hound of the shadow. In the show, Mat (alone) follows a shadowy figure to the building where he finds the chest containing the dagger – instead of surreptitiously acquiring it from Mordeth’s treasure hoard during the encounter.

From here, we meet a randomly fabricated darkfriend barkeep, an Aiel in a cage that Mat, not Perrin meets – and who is dead, not alive. We meet Thom in a nonexistent bar in a non-existent town, playing a guitar, not a harp. We skip the river passage, we skipped Moraine’s money which pays for it, we skip Thom’s involvement in the trip – in the escape, he’s the one who gets them better conditions on the boat; and we have skipped any necessity for them to be in Caemlyn ahead of the rest of the group. We’ve skipped Elyas, we’ve skipped Lan and Moraine’s involvement in Perrin and Egwene’s rescue from the Whitecloaks; we’ve skipped Mat’s defense of Rand from Shaine, Rand’s defense of Mat as he deteriorates (not to mention his actual channeling to escape Gode, which has the side effect of partially blinding Mat). We’ve added Tinker non-violent confrontation with Whitecloaks, and Valda in this stage of the story at all, let alone setting him up as an Aes Sedai-burning torturer. Valda is not even a Questioner, people. He is a blademaster, and a combat veteran. Jaicham Carridin is the Questioner and Inquisitor of the tale – and it is he who has the hatred of Tinkers, not Valda. Last, but certainly not least, we’ve added Logain at least 700 miles north of anywhere he could possibly be. We’ve already spoken of the fact that the Two Rivers is isolated – Ghealdan’s northern border is Garen’s Wall – a craggy mountain range (with no passes) that stretches nearly the entirety of the way from Altara to the Mountains of Mist. There are zero ways to get to Andor from Ghealdan that don’t go through Altara and Murandy. We’re talking well over a thousand miles around the mountains, and through two countries – just to get into Andor via Whitebridge, the only crossing into Western Andor. Just for giggles, too – Andor has more soldiers posted at the border to Murandy than anywhere else – perhaps excepting Cairhein, but probably not at this time of the story. Now, how are we supposed to believe that Logain got there – or that a picked guard of the King of Ghealdan, including the King himself, got there, in the hinterlands of Western Andor where there is literally nothing of interest whatsoever? Nobody has rediscovered traveling yet, my dudes. Further, while we’re on the subject of Logain – men cannot see women’s weaves. He couldn’t see Nynaeve “shining like the sun” if he were referring to her channeling. Men can tell that women are channeling. It is very subtle – they get gooseflesh when it happens- that is all. It is not a matter of degree, either. Women have to use a special sort of ter’angreal to accomplish the same thing – but they still can’t see the men’s weaves, and neither can men, with women. This may be a reference to Logain’s ability to see ta’veren – but Nynaeve is explicitly not ta’veren, per RJ, as we explained previously. It could also be a reference to Moraine telling Logain that the true Dragon will be “like the raging sun.” These attempts at misdirection harm the story, not help it. Again, Logain cannot see women channeling, so no matter how powerful she is, it is irrelevant as to what Logain sees. In addition, she is not ta’veren – so his ability to see ta’veren is not applicable either. Therefore, neither suggestion makes this encounter explainable – assuming, of course, that it is either sensical or possible for him to be in Western Andor in the first place – which it isn’t.

As to the Crown and Lion being in.. Tar Valon… which crown could that refer to? Which Lion? The White Lion is the symbol of Andor, and the proprietor of that inn, Basel Gill, is a firm supporter of the Queen of Andor – and figures very heavily in the remainder of the story – he is also the source of information about Thom Merrilin’s past, for that matter. We are then embroiled in an entirely fictitious drama concerning the Warder, Stepin, of the slain Aes Sedai Kerene (a former Captain General of the Green, and we’d assume current Captain General) – who actually died at the hands of Black Ajah while searching for the newly born Dragon 20 years earlier. The drama is high, and it shows the Warder bond clearly – but again, it is entirely fictitious, and creates a number of continuity issues – not least with the current Captain General, Adelorna Bastine, figuring so prominently in the later story.

Before I get to the character arc issues, I want to make a serious note – many folks, including the showrunner, seem to have the mistaken idea that the main characters needed to be “aged up”; but he has internal consistencies even there.

We aged up the Emond’s Field Five from the books because sometimes TV shows with a bunch of 17 year olds as leads feel more like YA and Wheel of Time isn’t YA— Rafe Judkins (@rafejudkins) August 18, 2021

Moraine, when viewing the capturing of the channeler in the opening moments of the series, says “it isn’t him” – and is chided by Lan, who says “He was born 20 years ago.” The Emond’s Field trio are all within a few weeks of 20 in either direction (all born in 978 NE)- with Nynaeve only four years older (974 NE), and Egwene two years and change behind them at 17 (981 NE) – at which age she begins to braid her hair, and is considered a woman. The prophecy referred to demands that the Dragon be born at a certain time – a time 20 years previously. While the actors look older, the characters are apparently the age they are supposed to be, given Moraine and Lan’s exposition in the series. They don’t need to be “aged up” – they are all supposed to be 20, not 17; and although Egwene is younger, she is still an adult. They all begin as adults in the novel Eye of the World – braiding her hair means that she is considered an adult by all and sundry – and she is the youngest of the group by a comfortable margin. The idea that the writers and the showrunner seem to have that they should include the female characters as possibly the Dragon seems to be the only reason for ignoring the actual ages of the main characters – which are well-documented. Any reader of the series could have told them that the three boys were very close in age – and all roughly 20 years old. The strange relationship tensions that are introduced by the changes to Egwene’s relationship with Rand and the marriage of Perrin don’t “age up” the characters – they just introduce juvenile, badly-written drama that adds nothing to the story, and remove significant elements of it.

Firstly, Perrin’s story arc will now necessarily be almost completely different from the actual plot. By giving him a wife, who he immediately kills, you now have a serious problem on a variety of levels. Most importantly, the issue with the slaying of Whitecloaks no longer has primacy as the first and most important act of violence in his young life. This act defines him throughout the entire series of books. It occurs only after he has been formally introduced to wolves as companions, to Elyas, to the Tinkers, to the concept of ravens as the Dark One’s eyes (and killers!) – to Stedding – and finally, to the Whitecloaks. Perrin slaying the Whitecloaks (and Hopper’s sacrificial defense of Perrin) is integral to his self-image throughout. It affects literally everything Perrin does throughout the books – and drives practically everything about the events which drive him, as well. Further, the decision to exclude the Luhhans from the story has significant consequences later on – notably concerning them being his hostages to the Whitecloaks, as well as once Perrin returns to the Two Rivers – but especially when Haral saves Perrin’s life in AMoL. Two very large-looming figures are gone from his life, and the substitute we are given (and who is immediately taken away) is not going to compensate. There is now no Whitecloak slaying. In fact, it is Egwene, not Perrin, who commits the only act of violence, and stabs Valda in their escape – and given his importance later on, I highly doubt his demise is imminent. Further, practically everything about Perrin’s character (as we’ve seen thus far) is going to be about Laila, not his self-horror at the connection with the wolves, and his self-image as a bestial murderer that comes from that connection.

Secondly, Mat’s story arc now revolves around a bad family life, not his own character. Abell Cauthon is now a womanizer and drunk; which I would imagine precludes him as Tam’s second-in-command from the Two Rivers, and from various other heroic exploits he performs throughout. There is also no character buildup of Mat (or Rand!) as gleeman’s apprentices – skills which figure prominently throughout the rest of the books. Mat’s juggling, sleight of hand, and knife skills come from this period – and Rand’s flute playing does as well. Compressing their interactions with Thom into a single song, a theft or two, one heart to heart talk with Rand and Mat each, and two fights gives us very little tie between these characters. Mat’s unexpected facility with the old tongue in moments of stress has also been elided – which will have consequences later as well. We’ve also completely skipped Bayle Domon, which has additional plot consequences – not least in the Last Battle. Not least, playing Mat up as the Dragon is completely, utterly, unbelievable. Even given the fact that they’ve done their absolute dead-level best to remove each and every single thing about Rand which would have given a single clue that he was the Dragon (you have noticed that, haven’t you?) – Rand’s still the Dragon. Mat has just been made pitiful, and all of the unique elements of his character have been stripped of him for expedience’s sake, and to make bloody room for all of the utter sweep swallop they’ve replaced the story with.

Thirdly, since Rand’s character arc has Mat seemingly introduced (quite ham-handedly, I might add) as the obvious choice for the Dragon – despite the fact that Rand alone looks foreign – and that we know who Mat’s parents are. Using him as the stalking horse for all of the early distrust of Moraine is problematic, as well. Look, the only reason you don’t suspect Rand to be the Dragon by now is because they’ve gone out of their way to replace each and every thing in the story that tells us he is the Dragon. When they unveil him, it’ll be a complete non-sequitur. Think about it. There’s nothing about him getting goosebumps as Moraine channels, nothing about Bela, nothing about his feverish encounter with the Whitecloaks as he deals with the consequences of channeling, no lightning bolt to escape Howal Gode. The deletion of Thom’s companionship (and Baerlon entirely) removes several important plot elements, and the fabricated element of Nynaeve’s capture by Trollocs introduces still more issues.

  • He no longer meets Min at Baerlon – or her prophetic words.
  • He no longer runs afoul of the Whitecloaks, and one Whitecloak personally and in particular, at Baerlon.
  • He no longer suffers, at Baerlon, the side effects of his first use of the One Power when he refreshes Bela to save Egwene, as he believes.
  • Nynaeve doesn’t meet up with the party at Baerlon, so doesn’t encounter Shadar Logoth – which will have plot consequences at a later date.
  • He no longer encounters a Fade at close quarters for the first time, to learn that “the look of the Eyeless is fear” – and to mark him out as one the Dark One wants especially.

The exclusion of the encounter with Mordeth (and the exclusion of Rand and Perrin from the excursion) does two things with the Shadar Logoth plotline; there is now no reason for Padan Fain/Mordeth to be able to resist the Dark One – and no specific reason for him to hate Rand and Perrin in particular. Further, there is also no longer a specific tie-in to Rand’s eventual wound with the dagger by Fain/Mordeth – or Fain/Mordeth’s eventual death at Mat’s hands.

Fourthly, Nynaeve’s capture and escape introduces issues; the rivalry with Moraine for the Two Rivers folk (and for Lan himself) is practically gutted. Lan’s reasons for helping Rand – and his vulnerability to Nynaeve in the place he most considers home, Fal Dara – are shattered by these story changes, and replaced by a completely fabricated story involving an Aes Sedai who no longer dies at the hands of Darkfriends in New Spring, but at the hands of Logain in a place he never was. Nynaeve no longer tracks the Two Rivers folk to Baerlon, but instead tracks Lan all the way past Shadar Logoth – presumably to make her more impressive – despite the show’s having killed her parents off, especially the father who taught her to do the tracking she’s supposedly doing. Yeah, we didn’t think about that one, did we. Look, I just don’t think that the writers and showrunner are being very smart about this. You already have an entire host of strong female leads. You already have a female-controlled society, for the most part. Instead of following the story you already have, you turn Nynaeve into the same sort of “man-brained idiot” she decries through the entire book series. There is already a “hoorah Nynaeve” moment when they break out Perrin and Egwene. The sort of “mass healing” that she performs in the cave is… not a thing, either.

Egwene’s arc is in a similar mess to Rand’s. The inexplicable addition of Nynaeve’s capture and escape have introduced a weird tension over her place in life that shouldn’t exist – and the deletion of Thom and Nynaeve from the group have put several uncharacteristic outbursts in her mouth, instead of others, much like with Rand. The incident with the Whitecloaks is now all about her ability to channel, instead of Perrin’s slaying of the Whitecloaks – and the flensing scene seems far more gratuitous than the horrific bruising that occurs in the books as a result of Byar’s ministrations and Bornhald’s cold-blooded pronouncements of execution. As with the other main characters, we are being presented with an entirely different person, created by entirely different experiences. The more it continues, the more it will necessarily depart from the actual Egwene. Even the incident with breakbone fever is reharnessed from Nynaeve’s healing what she believes to be a fatal childhood disease (but which is actually a painful, but relatively harmless disease) into a pronouncement that Egwene is “unbreakable”. While this may be true, it is of a piece with the wholesale changes made to the characters.

Here’s something to think about – out of the 5 episodes I’ve watched thus far, at least 4 episodes worth of run time has been spent on sheer fabrication. If they had followed the actual story at the same pace, they could be in Caemlyn right now. They’d have 3 episodes to spend – one on the Ways, one on Fal Dara and Borderlands in general, and one on the confrontation at the Eye. What in the world are they thinking? If I was writing this show, I would have stuck to the story – introduced Moraine, Thom, and Winternight in the first episode. Moraine’s story, the leavetaking, the events of the run to Taren Ferry (and the events immediately following) the second episode. The third episode would be in Baerlon, and introduce Min, Thom as a working gleeman, the Whitecloaks as involving Rand’s post-channeling sickness, Nynaeve catching up, the encounter with the Fade and their escape. The fourth episode would be travel to Shadar Logoth, the encounter with Mordeth, the escape; their meetings with Elyas and the Tuatha’an on the one hand, then the run from the ravens to the stedding; the escapades of Thom and the boys on board Domon’s ship on the other, and Moraine’s choice – ending with Perrin’s slaying of the Whitecloaks and the boys’ escape from Whitebridge and Thom’s battle with the Fade. The fifth episode (with, I might add, a similar ‘one month later’) would bring half the party to Caemlyn – make sure you do a short madcap scene of the encounters with Gode and Shaine, interspersed with them playing/juggling for their suppers – but that’s it – the boys arrive at Basel Gill’s Crown and Lion – resulting in the meetings with Loial, Logain, and Elayne – and the rescue of Perrin and Egwene by Moraine and Lan. The sixth episode would begin with Moraine sweeping into the Crown and Lion, to be told Loial’s story, and off into the Ways… Now, did we skip over some parts of the story? Yes. Did we add in random nonsense? No. We could have met Elayne Trakand and Min, had dealings with Bayle Domon, actual character progression with Thom, no idiotic false trails with Mat’s sickness, Nynaeve’s mass healing, or bad geography with Logain et al.

Instead of this ridiculously hackneyed, trope-laden soap opera, we could have had a sweeping epic. It was already written for them. All they had to do was adapt it. Not replace it. Not re-imagine it. This isn’t Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. This is The Wheel of Thrones – and it is vastly poorer for it.

Outsourcing Privacy

In some ways, globalization isn’t a bad thing. One of my favorite experiences thus far in life has been running IRC channels/networks with a global population. On the other hand, the globalization – especially corporatization – of online social life has been a decided negative experience. Having to deal with behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Facebook just to socialize with dispersed family isn’t anything to write home about. The cognitive dissonance of massive corporations whose sole purpose is to surveil you in order to sell the products of that surveillance to advertisers also being the ones who have come to define the meaning of privacy online to an entire generation (and redefine it, for my generation backwards) is truly something to behold. I used to volunteer for an organization which sought to protect the vulnerable from cyberstalking in the earlier days of the internet. These days, the ability to stalk people has grown exponentially – and usually on the backs of platforms which have grown around the express purpose of tracking their users everywhere they go.

How did we get here? The same way we’ve arrived at most of the places we’re currently at, as Western consumers – by way of convenience. One-stop-shopping has been a plague on our habits since it was introduced, and the more it has invaded our social lives, the worse it has become. We’ve centralized everything because it is most convenient. With this centralization has come a relinquishment of control – of myriad aspects of our lives. What else we need to realize, though, is that while these corporations are indeed creepy – they aren’t the real problem. The real problem is us. We are the ones who made them behemoths. We are the ones who sacrificed quality, locality, privacy and personality on the altar of convenience. We have no one to blame but ourselves. Just like the problem came from us, the solution comes from us as well. We have to choose to act differently.

Instead of ordering from a company’s Amazon storefront – order from the company itself. Instead of looking globally for things you need – look locally. It takes more work to find, sometimes, yes – but it also provides more work to people who live near you. I just planted 4 fruit trees in my front yard. I have a paper route, where I deliver a secondhand goods paper to a variety of local businesses. While on that route, I bought the trees from a local feed store, a rake from a hardware store – and since I was delivering papers to a different hardware store at the time, picked up some gravel to fill in holes in my driveway. If you’re going for convenience, go to places that are actually convenient to you. Local places, that are on your way to wherever you are going. On the other hand, sometimes what you need is only available at big box stores – or if you order it. I broke down and went to Home Depot to get some foldable sawhorses yesterday. Where they get you is when you see that they also have red mulch on sale for 5/10$… but I digress 🙂 What I should have done was find a small business that sells foldable sawhorses – but I didn’t think of it at the time – because I’d already looked at all the hardware stores on my route, and none of them sold what I wanted. The other thing I could have done was buy the lumber and make my own sawhorses… but I’ve made a good half dozen sets over the years, and they never last – and they’re a pain to store.

In my Mancave post, I talk about how I’ve shopped local for the building supplies I needed for this project. What I haven’t done as well with is shopping specialty for my equipment. It was so much easier to just make a wishlist on Amazon, populate it, and pick up practically everything for the project from there. I’ve decided that this is the last project I’m doing that way. I’m proud that I’ve been able to support my local businesses (like Jack’s Hardware and Alexander Hardware and Supply) with the building materials, but I really could have done better with the equipment. This is getting a bit afield of the point, though. Where Home Depot is better, marginally, than Amazon, is that they rely (primarily) on having a large stock of items in a central location that you can actually look at and go to. The same thing goes for an Auto Zone, or a Harbor Freight, or other “chain” stores of that magnitude. That is supply chain thinking. Amazon has taken “supply chain thinking” and made it gargantuan – and has mostly eliminated the local option. They are supply chain in the cloud.

With places like Amazon, though, we have outsourced our privacy to gain convenience. Amazon “knows” what we want, and can “suggest” things we might also want by means of number-crunching comparisons to both our purchase history, and that of millions of other people. Facebook and Google do the same thing with our browsing history – and sell the results of that number-crunching to advertisers, to better “target” us. They’re so good at surveilling us that their platforms are also outsourced by government agencies for surveillance tasks. Not only that, they have created “sweetheart deals” with other large corporations to circumvent things like DMCA laws through AI-driven content managers like YouTube’s ContentID. ContentID scans every video uploaded to YouTube, and scans it for copyrighted content. When that content is “flagged” as something a corporation has copyrighted, YouTube forces the uploader to prove that it isn’t copyrighted – to prove a negative. The corporation on whose behalf it was “flagged” is the only court of appeal for that content. Tell me that isn’t backwards! As a church tech/sound guy, I’m in charge of our service recordings. At least two hours of my week, every week, is spent appealing obviously public domain songs that were flagged as copyrighted – because some company, somewhere, has a performance of said song copyrighted. As a result, and after spending some time talking with some others at my church, I’m working on a way to move us off of YouTube – because it has crossed the line into harassment – into cyber-stalking. Big Tech’s relentless drive to know everything about us – the price for using their “free” services – has got us almost convinced that this is normal.

This is not normal. This is not right. I’d much rather go to the expense and trouble of hosting my church’s videos myself, rather than fighting with a Google subsidiary (and her music industry sweethearts) over whether public domain music is actually in the public domain. Outsourcing privacy to Google costs too much. They don’t actually offer privacy – just a fig leaf. The prospect of ads (over which we have no control) during a church service is appalling – and that is the consequence of losing an in-house appeal to a company who has a vested interest(!) in saying that public domain music is not public domain – and there are zero legal consequences for doing so, since Google has circumvented the legal process in place for companies to enforce copyright(s) by using this system. Your privacy has been outsourced in a similar fashion to a variety of companies who have a vested interest in seeing that your private affairs don’t stay private. They have a vested interest in knowing everything about you. Not only that, but they have a vested interest in telling other companies everything they know about you – in fact, that’s their business model. Not only that – but we’ve handed these companies everything about us – because they have told us “we care about your privacy.” They do care – just not in the way we take it to mean. We trust them with our outsourced privacy – and they violate that trust each and every day.

We have nobody to blame but ourselves. Do you want your privacy back? You have to change your behavior. Stop using Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. As far as you can, use less Microsoft & Apple products. If we want the status quo to change, we have to change – because the status quo follows our behavior.

Locality – Virtually

Look, we all have told ourselves to “shop local”. We mean to do it, we really do. We don’t like how massive corporations have taken over practically every facet of our lives. We like the helpfulness of local business owners, and the idea of supporting our friends and neighbors. Then we’re on the lookout for something specialized, and… our local businesses don’t have it. This isn’t specific to small town life, either. Sometimes, we have very specific needs, and nobody even remotely nearby has what we’re looking for. So, where do we go? Amazon.

Why do we go there now? First and foremost, because Amazon has worked very hard to become uniquely ubiquitous. They have rolled a fairly large percentage of their profits, for a great many years, into diversifying – and cornering the market on online shopping. They are a video provider, book publisher, and also provide the hardware to support their various endeavors. They not only have Amazon Prime, but Prime Video, Prime Wardrobe, and Prime Music. They not only have FireTV, but the FireTV stick. They not only have Kindle, but the family of Kindle readers. They have Whole Foods, Twitch, IMdB, Amazon Music, Audible, Goodreads, Kuiper Systems, Alexa, Echo, Ring – their own appstore to compete with Google Play and Apple – and their Basics brand offers cheap(er) knockoffs of just about anything you could want – along with the real thing, of course. They also have their own logistics tail (including Maritime shipping!), warehousing, and of course, their massive online storefront – which has proceeded to incorporate a massive amount of third-party sellers. This doesn’t even count Amazon Web Services, which power a significant portion of the cloud market – about a third of it. In short, they have become ubiquitous – and not in a good way.

Nobody needs a history lesson about how Amazon came to dominate the online market – and thence the brick and mortar market – but it is illustrative of just how much convenience trumps sanity in today’s world. The fact that Amazon keeps buying subsidiaries and capitalizing them isn’t the issue – the issue is that we are the reason Amazon is what it is. They keep steamrolling businesses – large as well as small – because we’ve enabled them to. Whenever we use Amazon because it is easier, we’re giving Amazon business at the expense of local companies – or even other, larger corporations. Now, this isn’t a fault of Amazon – it’s our fault. Don’t get me wrong – it’d be great if other companies invested in infrastructure proportionally – but one business advantage Amazon has is, quite simply, the fact that it doesn’t have to duplicate their logistics tail for each of its subsidiaries. The other is that we have traded convenience and price for control of the markets. It is entirely behavior driven – by our behavior. I confess that I am guilty of this as well.

Amazon does what it does well – practically unexceptionally. That isn’t the problem. That is a feature of the business model they use. Efficiency as the means of cornering the market. Of course they are efficient – and usually cheaper, to boot. The problem is that when they do so, they intentionally drive their competitors into the ground as a feature of their business model. This is free-market capitalism, true – but it only works if we are willing to assist them in so doing. We don’t have to min-max our lives like an MMO raiding guild does with their characters. No matter what the markets say, if we choose to use something a little slower, a little more expensive, and local – we should – because those local businesses are run by people with families, and employ people with families we know. We should, because we want people to work for places other than, well, Amazon – who are famously terrible employers in order to make their business model work. In other words – whenever and wherever you have a choice, choose the option that doesn’t intentionally undercut your friends and neighbors’ ability to do business. If you need hardware, wood, or tools – go to your locally owned and operated hardware store instead of a box store – or Amazon. If you need specialty goods – find a supplier that *isn’t* a box store – or Amazon. It might be someone *else’s* local business – but that’s fine! It might even be a bigger business that caters to that particular specialty – but if it keeps that business from being eaten by the Amazon machine, isn’t that all to the good?

Don’t just shop local, either – live locally. Those ties to small businesses are part of what make communities. The more we live globally, the less ties we have to where we live, and who lives there. It creates an artificial distance between people. It’s fine to have communities where you unite around a common interest – that isn’t the point. The point is that those should be ancillary to communities in your locality. Churches, schools, sports all create local communities within the places where we live. Divorcing our purchasing from those communities drives much of the reasons for living in a particular place, having common interests, and common places of employment into the background – and denudes our lives of an ontology of place. Consumerism can’t provide much in the way of commonalities. Service employers and food service are important, but manufacturing and distribution are also key elements of creating communities that aren’t migratory. If our only choices for employment boil down to which chain of big box, global franchise, or behemoth online megalith we can work for – how much stability and sense of permanence does that offer?

In a similar fashion, outsourcing our communal lives to social media corporations is a bad idea. For the same reason we should stop feeding the Amazon machine so much of our money, we should stop feeding the Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter machines our social lives. Yes, COVID-19 was bad, and the ability to use the ephemeral imitation of society that Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch offers was a virtual lifeline – but we mustn’t forget that they are ephemeral imitations – and ephemeral imitations that are only there to provide advertisers with targeted data about us, so that they can more efficiently sell us things. That is the precise and specific purpose for the existence of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, and a host of similar corporate networking and social platforms. They take what you share about yourself – and sell it to advertisers – full stop.

Here’s something else to think about. Do you remember when “cyberstalking” was a big issue? I do. I used to volunteer with a group who addressed cyberstalking (CyberAngels)- especially of women and children. Online privacy was a very big deal for a decade or more. Once all of these big corporate social media companies got into the mix, however – most of that buzz just… disappeared. The big tech empires basically do everything we used to tell people was cyberstalking. They encourage all of the behaviors we discouraged in people’s online habits. Sharing personal information, photos with clear location data, photos of children… practically every single thing we advised that people stop doing – they want you to keep doing – and use their services to do them. They then have the audacity to ask you to trust them.

How the Internet is Supposed to Be

For those of you old enough to remember when there wasn’t an internet – you probably also remember its infancy. Back in BBS days where you had to dial in to someone’s computer, or to a usenet service – then later to providers like AOL, Prodigy, or Compuserve. As the internet grew older, there were always a couple of competing philosophies – whatever the most insistent FOSS advocates remember.

There have always been the decentralized, individualist proponents – and have always been the corporations trying to centralize as much as humanly possible under their brand. AOL was a giant, comparable to Facebook today for the time and then-current userbase. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and its war with Netscape (which was often bundled with dialup giant software!) was a fascinating struggle – comparable to the modern corporate throwdowns today.

It’s no accident that Apple and Microsoft are still players. Their forays into the incipient internet were largely due to the fact that their products ran a sizable portion of the computers that all the corporations vied to capture as customers. The corporate opportunism displayed by Google, Twitter, and Amazon is nothing new. In fact, it seems to be part and parcel of internet history for companies to repeatedly (serially and in parallel) attempt to capture large swathes of the internet. The argument for distributed and decentralized internet is not that corporations shouldn’t do what corporations do – but that the construction of the internet ensures that corporate entities can’t take it over, and definitely not for long – unless we give it to them wholesale.

There might well be a danger, currently, of large corporations “owning” large channels of distribution. However, that danger is largely due to our own complaisance – and complacence. Nobody made us sign everything over to Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon. We did it ourselves. I’ll offer up a reason for this: we’ve become accustomed to handing over large chunks of our lives to big companies for convenience’s sake. We did this in the 90s, the 00s, the 10s, and we continue to do it today. The same thing happens on a smaller scale, with companies like Steam, Epic, Spotify, Adobe, or a host of others like them. Companies always try to get you into their walled gardens. That’s what they do. The cool thing about the internet is that those walled gardens last only as long as we decide to put up with them. AOL, for example, crashed and burned precisely because we were done putting up with their walled garden. Their DSL offerings had nothing to recommend them over other ISPs – and in fact, charged for services they overlaid that other ISPs offered for free. Other companies had similar problems. Where is Yahoo! these days? Compuserve?

Look familiar? It should. Facebook can buy up WhatsApp and Instagram – AOL could buy Time Warner. They’re making the same mistake, and setting up the same sort of walled garden. The CEOs of these bright new internet startups that seem to have taken over the internet are suffering from the same caretaker syndrome that the second generation of CEOs of the original startups suffered – for much the same reasons. Why did AOL crash and burn? They crashed and burned because people realized that they were paying to be manipulated and advertised to. These companies create problems that they try to sell themselves as the solution to.

We’ve never needed them. We all know that. It’s just easier to let someone else do the work, give up a little bit of privacy and control – and “use it for free”. It’s easier to use the all-in-one shop than it is to do the traveling and research things for yourself. The “swiss army knife” operating system is a lot easier to work with than any of the specialty jobs that the Linux community offers. There’s a reason that Ubuntu is the only one of them with any sort of significant market share – and even that is infinitesimal in comparison. Ubuntu can’t do everything that Windows or Apple does – and we’ve become used to the idea that it should. Some of the things that are done by Windows or MacOS aren’t things they should be doing.

That is neither here nor there – just offered as a comparison. There are, I think, three (somewhat) separate issues with the tech giants that need to be addressed. 1) Ease of use/familiarity 2) Ubiquity 3) Privacy. I’ll use Facebook as an example here.

Ease of use

While nobody will call Facebook’s interface truly user friendly, it is easy to use – and easy to seamlessly plug things into. Like any CMS, it is purposely modular, and meant to give the administrators a myriad of ways to plug in content in discrete blocks. This modular design is well-suited to Facebook’s swiss-army-knife philosophy. Grandma both can and does use this platform – and so do her grandkids. Hate it or not, it *is* easy – but no more so than any CMS.

Ubiquity

Again, hate them or not – everyone and their Grandma uses Facebook. Pretty much literally. It is the very definition of ubiquitous. It doesn’t have to be good – it just has to be everywhere. Since it is everywhere, it has what Facebook (the business, remember!) really wants – reams of data, to sell to advertisers – and an absolutely killer market share. They are, by any measure, the largest and most popular social network in the world, with over 2.7 billion users.

Privacy

We’ve grown used to everything happening “in public”. Everything. This was not always the case. Every thing in your life is now fair game for sharing. Our lives are content. We are all part of The Everscroll. Our digital lives are primarily composed of scrolling, endlessly, through other people’s lives. What they choose to share of them. What they – and we – choose to share, though, is practically everything. Why do we do this? We do this because we are incentivized to – through notifications, likes, comments – the entire social media ecosystem hamster wheel. We can talk about dopamine, about habit-forming, about a large number of things – but it all boils down to “they designed it that way, and we’re eating it up just like we eat up tabloids and reality tv.” If you didn’t eat up tabloids and reality tv before – you do now. It just comes in your endless scroll.

The Real Problem, Summarized

I remember what things were like before there was social media. Before Amazon. Before Google. It was a lot like it is now, just without nearly as many people on the internet – and way more glued to their network TVs. Soon after, Cable (and syndicated programming, let’s not forget) blew open the TV biz – and internet streaming has blown it up even more. Since that is true – why did we once again have Netflix owning practically all the streaming content? Well, we didn’t have all the other networks opening their own shops. Now that they have, what do we see now? Streaming everywhere. All the things. Streaming. Constantly. Netflix is still a powerhouse, but it doesn’t own streaming anymore. iTunes owned music content for a while. Not anymore. Why? Competition. Alternatives.

While it’s annoying that streaming is fragmented over a bunch of networks – much of the annoyance is over the fact that we have to choose now. Everyone has streaming. Everyone has platform-exclusive shows or movies. Remember what we said earlier about walled gardens? Companies always try to get you into their walled gardens. That’s what they do. While it is annoying, the fact that there is is competition is a good sign – that the corporations are going to be busy fighting each other like monsters in a Kaiju movie. In the space that leaves for thinking things over – there’s an opportunity for reflection.

What if your choice was not between which corporate behemoths to give all your personal data to – but between telling the corporate behemoths to go take a long walk with their creepy corporate surveillance culture and using community-or-family sized alternatives with a vested interest in your interest? Like I said at the beginning – there have always been two simultaneous internet cultures. Somebody made all the cool alternative stuff you used to think was cool, back before social media. Newgrounds, Strongbad, all those awesome (but mostly stupid) flash games… most of those were made by random dudes and dudettes – and were posted to communities. Those guys that used to host BBSs started making their own websites, and hosting IRC servers, building community forums. The internet of the 90s and 00s was weird – but there were so many quirky things that would get lost in today’s mindless everscroll. Virality is fleeting – and monetizing virality, more fleeting still.

We can do a bit better than IRC servers, a forum, and a website now. Of course, we can still do all of those – and many do. I’m an IRC server admin myself. You’re reading this on my personal website that I’ve maintained since 2003 – using the internet handle that I’ve used since the early-to-mid 90s. This website has changed software at least 4 times, and themes a dozen or more times – but it is just as recognizably “mine” as it was back then. If you want to grasp how identity and privacy should work – that’s a start. Further, the internet itself should work similarly. Your primary identity service should be yours. If anyone wants to know who you are, they should ask your stuff (your personal identity server) – which shares precisely as much as you wish to share, and no more. Not Facebook, not Twitter, not Amazon – and certainly not Google – you. Any “central” datastore about you should be in your hands, and no one else’s. Using other people’s services should be a matter of verification with you of your identity – just like any other identification is – not a carte blanche to share whatever they feel like with whoever they feel like – about you. No service is worth that.

Ubiquity should devolve to how ubiquitous you choose to be, not how promiscuous your social media platform chooses to be with your identity. Ease of use is no excuse for being creepy. Google, Facebook, Amazon and their ilk know too much about us, and we give it all to them by our behavior – because we do too much stuff on their sites. If you want things to change, you have to change. You have to change your behavior, your habits, and where you do things. We all whine about Walmart and Target, and talk about how we should “shop local” – but it is our shopping behavior that drove their competition into the ground – drove our neighbors into the ground, because that is who runs those local businesses competing with the big box stores. Amazon is driving all the specialty box stores into the ground – and all the specialty shops too – unless they bite the bullet and become part of “the ecosystem”.

There is a problem – we’re too centralized. It’s our problem. We created it, we perpetuate it, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves for how much of our lives Big Tech has taken over. Once we recognize that here is a problem, we have to commit to change. Pick one Big Tech company to wean off of – and start moving. There are alternatives for each and every service we have learned to not live without in these all-in-one companies. You can start somewhere.

There are alternatives.

Sometimes, however, you don’t want an alternative.

I’ll be honest with you. There’s nothing else quite like Facebook. That’s not really a bad thing, in my estimation. Facebook shouldn’t be a thing. At least not in sense of the ginormous everything-to-everyone behemoth that it has become. Facebook still has your grandma, or your kids, or your best friend from 4th grade. If you want to move off Facebook, you’re going to have to get together with those people and start making plans on how to continue keeping in contact – and having this same conversation with each of them, to fill the specific needs for your friends & family list. You might need something for birthdays and events. You might need something for groups. You might need some sort of social media hub that you can all keep in contact with. You might need chat. You might need video calling. All of those exist, all can be done – but only at the cost of work, and possibly expense on the part of your group. If you’re already doing that sort of thing, like I am, you probably have the infrastructure for doing a good portion of the above. You probably also have the know-how to help others learn how to manage their own identities, away from Big Tech. If you don’t, and you’re reading this entire article with a bit of alarm about how scathing I am about Big Tech in general, and you trusted these big companies – be aware that I am actually understating how bad the situation is, for the most part. Ask your techie family member or friend about those companies, and see what they tell you. You might be surprised to learn that the only reason they are still on Facebook is because of you – and people like you. Don’t take that the wrong way – it shows they care about you enough to use something they hate – just for you. Let it be a wake-up call for you – all of these companies are using your relationships as fodder for selling information to advertisers – and tracking your every move from the epicenter of your usage of their services. It’s what they do. The reason they exist is to target you as accurately as possible, so that someone can sell you exactly what you want.

That might be convenient – I won’t say it isn’t – but it is also dystopian to an extreme usually seen only in scifi until recently. What price does that sort of convenience actually have? If you want things to change, you have to change. You have to use these companies’ stuff less – and because they have also sucked all of your friends and family into the same black hole’s gravity well that you’re circling, you’ll have to convince them of the same thing. Not only that, but you’ll have to use the same thing(s). Preferably something that isn’t a walled garden just like the one you’re leaving – only not quite as big. How you build your communities is up to you – but build them you must – unless you want some big company to continue doing it for you – and vacuuming everything about you into their big server farms.

You can do it – but you’ll have to give up some familiar things – our goal, though, is to keep the familiar people. I’ll post more about ways to detox from surveillance capitalism and the Big Tech ecosystem next time. In conclusion: The internet has always been corporate and individual – but in structure, it has always been decentralized – no matter how many walled gardens are constructed. Those walled gardens last only as long as we decide to put up with them. Decentralized is how the internet is supposed to be.

James White Dashcam Post Archive

Recently there has been a bit of a firestorm, chiefly on Twitter, so I gather, regarding the following post by Dr. White, since removed by him. I’m posting it here for you, so that there is somewhere to link other than the site of the slightly infamous “James Ach”. He used his opportunity to make a number of rather uncharitable claims in both the title and the text of his post, so I figured it would be helpful to link somewhere other than to the site of someone who is obviously reading the material with the hermeneutic of suspicion, not of charity – and who isn’t adding bracketed commentary into the post as if the author wrote it. Sending him traffic does little good, and more than a little harm. I’m also planning on writing up something to further discussion, so stay tuned to CH.

Edit: Some have claimed that the DRC post is unedited – for those folks, note the contents of the blockquote. 579 words, 3034 characters, due to the 4 bracketed insertions within the blockquote. That is an edit. He notes the bolded portions prior to posting – but does not inform the reader that he is adding commentary – in a blockquote. The actual post was 549 words, 2843 characters. Thus, the DRC post added 30 words, 193 characters. That is why this one is here. For the author’s rendering of his own comments, see this: Ethnic Gnosticism and the Gospel

I bought a dash cam recently. Seems everyone in Russia has one (I guess you have to for insurance purposes), and I thought it would be pretty good to have to document some of the crazy things that happen while driving. So I was coming home this evening and happened to be the first car at Glendale and 35th Avenue in Phoenix. And as you will see, a young black kid, looks to be 15 years old or so, was crossing the street. Now if you watch, you will see a police SUV cross in front of me first going east. The kid then comes into the screen, and though he sort of hid it under his elbow, he plainly flips off the police vehicle. Then he is emptying the drink he is consuming as he walks out of the frame. What you can’t see is that he then simply tossed the bottle into the bush in the corner of the gas station. I happened to notice the two ladies in the car next to me had seen the same thing. We just looked at each other, put up our hands in exasperation, and shook our heads.

As I drove away I thought about that boy. There is a more than 70% chance he has never met this father. In all probabilities he has no guidance, has no example. He is filled with arrogance and disrespect for authority. He lives in a land where he is told lies every day—the lie that he cannot, through hard work and discipline, get ahead, get a good education, and succeed at life. He is lied to and told the rest of the world owes him. And the result is predictable: in his generation, that 70% number will only rise. He may well father a number of children—most of which will be murdered in the womb, padding the pockets of Planned Parenthood, and those that survive will themselves be raised without a natural family, without the God-ordained structure that is so important for teaching respect, and true manhood or womanhood.

It never crossed my mind to flip off a police car as it passed me by when I was his age. Of course, it never crossed my mind to walk around with my butt hanging out of my pants, either, as if the entire world needed to see what kind of underwear I was sporting that day. I know I would have been mighty guilty had I tossed my drink bottle into a bush—and I never would have dreamed of doing that in front of everyone like this young man did. But I had a father. And a mother. And I was taught to respect others, and myself. If I had not had those things, I still would not have acted as he, simply because times have changed, and not for the better. There was simply more restraint in my day. It surely makes me wonder what the future holds. Oh, I know—this is nothing. There are videos on line of kids like this shooting guns in the air and robbing people and doing car jackings. I know. But you need to understand: those folks didn’t get there without first finding it “fun” to strut, flip, toss, and live an attitude of disrespect.

Confessional Eschatology and Civics

I’m fairly disinterested in the political debates as a rule – and probably just as disinterested in the majority of eschatological debate, as well. However, due to recent circumstances I’m not going to get into, I thought it fitting to outline my position on these two subjects for future reference. Firstly, I want to make it absolutely clear that I consider theonomy and the requisite postmillenial eschatology to be contra-confessional. Secondly, I want to make it absolutely clear that I consider these positions to be an abuse of as well as a hindrance to a truly Covenantal apologetic.

Confessionally, it must be mentioned that the LBCF consistently and frequently mentions the “end of the world” – and treats all things related to the church; her work as well as her offices – as continuing until that time. As such, it must be granted that there is absolutely no provision for a “golden age” kingdom in or of this world prior to the end of it. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and the kingdom in which and for which we labor is identical to it. Since this is the case, we labor here as aliens and strangers, with the understanding and expectation that all things in this world will pass away. The same cannot be said for the kingdom of heaven, as this will never pass away. This kingdom, however, is not of this world, does not consist of anything we build or fashion, nor is it anything to which the so-called “dominion mandate” applies. Definitionally, the “dominion mandate” belongs to Christ, as the second Adam – and the kingdom mandate belongs to us, as the members and sum of that kingdom. Ours is not to take dominion over the earth, but to build the kingdom of heaven. Aliens and strangers are not mandated to build an earthly kingdom, but a heavenly one. We could go into more detail should it become necessary, but this will suffice for the purposes I have for this post.

It must also be mentioned that the confession clearly states that the civil, or judicial law is abrogated, along with the ceremonial law. The typical theonomist response is to use the “general equity” clause in the WCF; the LBCF’s parallel clause is much more specific, and impossible to mistake. It clearly states that the judicial laws only have a general equity of moral use, and expired together with the state of that people. Any attempt to go beyond this general moral equity is, however, covered by the next section of the confession, which prescribes our Christian liberty, within proper bounds. Another common response is to split the law into two groups, and not three; this is also explicitly denied by both confessions. They clearly state that there is a tripartite division in the law. Therefore, if you claim to be a confessionalist, you cannot subscribe to the theonomic view. It is prohibited by those same confessions. There is plenty more to say about this subject if it becomes necessary, but I believe this will be sufficient for my purposes.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the antithesis between autonomy and theonomy is being rejected, by taking this position. It must be clearly understood that what is meant by “theonomy” is somewhat different in these instances. In the case of the presuppositional method advanced by Van Til, what is in reference with “theonomy” is the same as that which is referenced by WCF/LBCF XIX, and which I address in my exposition of Romans 1-2. This is not identical to the schema of “theonomy” advanced by other, primarily Reconstructionist proponents, as outlined above. Van Til, obviously, was not a theonomist in the Reconstructionist sense, nor was he post-millenial. Thus, it can be seen that repudiating these positions on a confessional basis is neither a critique of Van Til, nor a repudiation of his apologetic. In fact, it is far from either! It is an affirmation of his emphasis on a Biblically consistent, systematic, confessional apologetic.

I consider both postmillenialism and theonomy to be foreign to the fabric of confessionally Reformed Baptist theology, and foreign to the framework of the Covenantal apologetic found therein.

For further reading, I suggest the following:

Frame: Penultimate Thoughts on Theonomy
Duncan: The Mosaic Covenant
Duncan: The Westminster Confession of Faith: A Theonomic Document?
Gordon: Critique of Theonomy: A Taxonomy
Waldron: Theonomy, A Reformed Baptist Assessment
Gaffin: Theonomy and Eschatology: Some Reflections On Postmillennialism

The Argument from Necessity

“The Reformational doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture does not mean that the Scriptures are sufficient to answer all of our questions. Rather, the doctrine means that the Scriptures are a sufficient guide to our communion with God, a guide to faith and life in the religious sense. WCF 1.6: “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.”
Theonomists often argue that it is “necessary for…man’s…life” that humans have revealed directives for statecraft. If this argument were valid, however, why would it not be equally (or more) valid to argue that it is “necessary for…man’s…life” that humans have revealed directives for medicine? Is it not the case when our loved ones die that the Scriptures have not been, in their medicinal instructions, sufficient in providing what is “necessary for…man’s…life”? Is it not the case, when a suspension bridge collapses due to no construction failure, that the Scriptures have evidently not provided adequate instruction in the field of design?” – T. David Gordon, “Critique of Theonomy: A Taxonomy,” Westminster Theological Journal 56.1

Kinism

Note 1:21ff especially. Enjoy 🙂

Ben just wrote a post about dispensationalism – clearly delineated into three general groups, then further delineated into 2 groups actually being addressed. Unfortunately, Fred Butler (of the blog Hip and Thigh) responded on Twitter:

Fred Butler

Something tells me I’m about to watch an army of strawmen burn to the ground, http://t.co/chz1EQFE . Eat your heart out Ed Young Jr.!

Ben responded:

Ben Woodring

@Fred_Butler don’t get your hopes up.

Another contributor at CH – Justin – also responded:

Justin Mccurry

@Fred_Butler Let’s try not to poison the well

Here’s where it gets interesting. Fred’s response was quite puzzling.

Fred Butler

@Resbyterian As soon as anyone invokes “transcendental” your poisoning the well.

Really? So, for instance, when Van Til says this:

[T]his brings up the point of circular reasoning. The charge is constantly made that if matters stand thus with Christianity, it has written its own death warrant as far as intelligent men are concerned. Who wishes to make such a simple blunder in elementary logic, as to say that we believe something to be true because it is in the Bible? Our answer to this is briefly that we prefer to reason in a circle to not reasoning at all. We hold it to be true that circular reasoning is the only reasoning that is possible to finite man. […] Unless we are larger than God we cannot reason about him any other way, than by a transcendental or circular argument. The refusal to admit the necessity of circular reasoning is itself an evident token of opposition to Christianity.[1]

Is this poisoning the well, Mr. Butler?

Now, more importantly – is this poisoning the well, Mr. Butler?

Apparently, Mr. Butler, if we are to take his aforementioned statement at face value, has poisoned the well at least 8 times. Now, were I to multiply the instances where Van Til, Bahnsen, or other presup apologists use “transcendental,” this post would be quite impossibly long. Are we also to understand that the use of “transcendental” by, say, Kant, is also well-poisoning? In short, Twitter is really suited to people able to express themselves within a 140-character limit without delving into broadbrush and unfortunately inaccurate statements. Making absurd statements such as “as soon as anyone invokes ‘transcendental'” they are “poisoning the well” is not responsible tweeting. Not even remotely.

Further, note the amazing statement made by BibChr of PyroManiacs fame.

Dan Phillips

@Fred_Butler He mentions Jamin Hubner as in any way a credible source, I tune out.

Now, note that there is no reason given for why Jamin’s posts about hyper-dispensationalism (which was the reason for the link – to move the discussion of that movement out of the bounds of the current discussion) were considered to be not “credible.” This seems to be either a case of “guilt by association” – the argument being presented (which has nothing to do with Jamin’s posts – as the post itself states) is ignored because Jamin is considered to be not-credible for whatever reason. However, there is no relation of the post in question to Jamin’s series of posts on hyper-dispensationalism. In fact, during the writing of this post – as I was writing this paragraph, in fact, Dan tweeted the following:

Dan Phillips

@bkben3 @Fred_Butler That was a FAIL, not unlike beginning a study of Calvinism by recommending Dave Hunt’s probing insights

Now, how are we to understand Dan’s comments as being relevant to the content of Ben’s post? He did not cite Jamin as someone interacting with dispensationalists – but as someone interacting with *hyper* dispensationalists. As such, I don’t see what relevance there could be to the remark. Lets put this into perspective. Let’s use Dan’s remark in his comparison. Imagine that he didn’t completely ad hominem there, but was actually trying to make a valid comparison. Let’s say that Jamin is interacting with hyper-Calvinists. That doesn’t mean that anyone who links to his resources on hyper-Calvinism agrees with his conclusions on Calvinism – it means that he is being referred to for a discussion of hyper-Calvinists – right? So, without regard to what his problems are in regard to Calvinism; if his resources on hyper-Calvinism are generally accurate, does that mean they are invalidated if his resources on Calvinism are not accurate? Should we disregard anything he says on other topics due to his problem, in our little comparison, with Calvinism? That doesn’t seem to follow. For instance – let’s say that Dan Phillips is generally correct when it comes to the Gospel. When he addresses Covenant Theology, however, he starts calling it “replacement theology”, and things such as that – things which cannot be remotely accurate concerning the Covenantal position. Should we disregard every post Dan has written on the topic of the Gospel due to his inability to correctly characterize Covenant Theology? Just as with our last example, I don’t think this is the case. Nor do I think it even makes sense.

For another example: I don’t think the post series in regard to dispensationalism is even going to mention JMac-style dispensationalism. First, because it’s tiny, and second, because it’s so odd in comparison to the two major branches. I hinted at that in an earlier tweet.

Joshua Whipps

Hint: If you’re a JMac-style dispy – most likely nobody is talking about you, because you’re such a miniscule group that you’re irrelevant.

Note: I used “most likely”. This should be fairly obvious as far as meaning goes, but apparently not to Fred. It means that it’s probably not the case that anyone’s talking about you, since you’re such a tiny fraction of dispensationalism. For some reason, Fred decided to respond to this, hours later.

Fred Butler

@RazorsKiss What?! Sam Waldron wrote a book. Demar pounds us unmercifully. And let’s not forget Riddlebarger.

My response, obviously, was to point out that I used “most likely.” Perhaps not especially “nicely” – but it’s not like Fred is all sweetness and light, as a rule – so I think he’ll manage. In any case, what’s the beef here? The beef seems to be that someone they don’t like got mentioned, therefore there will be strawmen. Of what, we might ask? Of Fred and Dan’s position? As I’ve said, I don’t think Ben will even address their position, as he is dealing with the classical and progressive positions – as he states that he will. Their particular position is neither fish nor fowl. Again, however, we see the JMac types up in arms because they aren’t “in the crowd”. Well, here’s what we should be asking – which way do they want it? If we don’t address their minority view, they get upset. If it is addressed in with other dispensational views, will they complain because we don’t treat them the “best”? I don’t see where you can win with this. If, as I’m sure they would affirm, they aren’t classical or progressive dispensationalists – what is their problem if we address those views? Don’t they also believe they are wrong? If we do address their own views, would they be upset if we did? I don’t see the issue they seem to be having.

On the one hand, we’re being told that even a *mention* of a particular person in regard to a completely different subject makes someone’s material “ignorable” – but on the other hand, we are told that there will be strawmen in the series on Choosing Hats. What we are not told is why. While I (and two other Choosing Hats contributors) have an article in the first version of one of Jamin’s books – they didn’t make it into the second edition, and apart from moderating one debate for Jamin, we really don’t have much contact anymore. Ben, on the other hand, hasn’t done anything with Jamin Hubner, to my knowledge. He recommended Jamin’s work on hyper-dispensationalism because he thought it adequately dealt with a position pretty much universally considered heretical. As we’ve already established, I don’t see that even if it were true that Jamin incorrectly responded to dispensationalism, that it is the case that he incorrectly responds to hyper-dispensationalism. In fact, there has been no presentation of Jamin incorrectly responding to hyper-dispensationalism. Fred tweeted something to me earlier, but I found it to be incoherent and vague.

In closing – I want you to note a few things. First, some folks should just stay off of Twitter. They can’t frame things within 140 characters and still make sense. When you simply say “As soon as anyone invokes “transcendental” your poisoning the well” – to a presupper – you’re quite obviously not thinking clearly. Are we to imagine that Van Til was saying that the only way to argue is to poison the well? Hardly – yet this is what Fred insists upon. It’s quite obviously wrong. Secondly, it’s hardly logical to insist that the very mention of a person you dislike means that a post is problematic. This is a fallacy. I’m trying to figure out which it is, actually. Is it the genetic fallacy? If the origin of the claim is that which makes the claim itself wrong.. maybe so. But I think it’s probably the “guilt by association” fallacy. For instance: If someone said “Taxation is great” – and the response was “but Hitler liked taxation!” That is a guilt by association fallacy. In this case, Ben mentioned that he wasn’t going to address hyper-dispensationalism. This means that he isn’t even addressing that topic, does it not? At least if you happen to read English. However, he linked to someone else – on a topic he doesn’t intend to address. Does this have any bearing on the topic in question? Not in the slightest. To claim that it does is to commit a fallacy. It’s a bit odd, though – because it isn’t even the point itself that is in question – it’s that someone’s name was mentioned at all! That’s quite puzzling.

Third, don’t let friends tweet if they can’t do it without saying silly things. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad to have your view given bad press by the use of fallacious argumentation. Don’t let friends tweet irresponsibly. Especially if they are dealing with topics like “transcendental” – and making their assertions about it in 140 characters or less. Don’t do it. Just don’t.

  1. [1]A Survey of Christian Epistemology, pg 12

God and Desire

It was a bit of an eyebrow raiser – mostly due to the nonchalance of the entire affair – (albeit unsurprising, given prior statements he has made) to read Piper simply handing over 1 Tim. 2:4 to Arminianism. What’s also quite interesting is that the handoff is done with practically no exegetical attention paid to the surrounding verses, or seemingly, even an attempt to interact with the historic Reformed commentators on the subject.

Put two texts together, and see what you see.

“God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (eis epignōsin alētheias)” (1 Timothy 2:4).

“God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth (eis epignōsin alētheias)” (2 Timothy 2:25).

Now, do you see any treatment of the surrounding verses in the following discussion? I don’t. Essentially, it’s conceding the Arminian conception of the first verse – and there is no reason whatsoever to do so.

Here’s what I see:

1. Though God desires all people to be saved, he “may perhaps grant repentance.” Which I think means that God’s desire for all to be saved does not lead him to save all. God has desires that do not reach the level of volition. They are restrained by other considerations — like his wisdom, which guides him to display his glory in the fullest way. He has his reasons for why he “may perhaps grant repentance” to some sinners, and not to others.

First, what is meant by “all”? He doesn’t address the subject. In “The Potter’s Freedom”, there is an extensive treatment of this section of Scripture. Who do I want to bring to your consideration on this verse, however? Why, John Gill, of course! His commentary is amazingly thorough. I’ll post the rest of Piper’s comments, and then follow with Gill.

2. The “knowledge of the truth” is a gift of God. God “grants [i.e., gives] repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.” Without the gift of repentance, we would not know the truth. This is evidently what 1 Timothy 2:4 means also: We must be “saved and [in that way] come to a knowledge of the truth.” Saved from our blindness to the truth.

3. Therefore the truth Paul has in mind is not truth that the natural man can see. But the natural man can see a lot of truth. Tens of thousands of truths are open to the natural mind. What truth can the natural man not see? The natural man cannot see the glory of Christ in the gospel. “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

4. This is why God must “grant” what it takes to see the truth of the gospel. We are blind to it. And Satan keeps us that way. Until God “grants” repentance (metanoia) — the change of mind that can see and receive the truth of the gospel.

5. Therefore, our prayers for the unbelievers we love, and our evangelism, should be driven by this one and only hope for their salvation: “God may perhaps grant them repentance.” Since he alone has the power to overcome spiritual deadness and Satanic blindness, we lay hold in prayer and witness on the truth: “God may grant repentance.” That is our only hope.

So let us follow Paul: “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved” (Romans 10:1). And: “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

Now, although this looks, superficially, to be a complete answer – it isn’t. It’s a superficial answer. I appreciate the comments in the following points – 2-5 – but his comments on the first point are quite simply lacking, in a variety of respects. Compare Gill, starting at verse 1:

1 Timothy 2:1:

I exhort therefore, that first of all

The two principal parts of public worship, being the ministry of the word and prayer; and the apostle having insisted on the former, in the preceding chapter, in which he orders Timothy to charge some that they teach no other doctrine than that of the Gospel, gives an account of his own ministry, and call to it, and of the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to his trust, and stirs up Timothy to the faithful and diligent discharge of his work and office; now proceeds to the latter, to prayer, and exhorts unto it; either Timothy in particular, for so read the Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions, “I exhort thee”, or “desire thee”; or else the church in general; unless it should rather be thought to be a charge to Timothy to exhort, and so Beza’s Claromontane copy reads, “exhort thou therefore”: but it is commonly considered as an exhortation of the apostle’s, which he was very urgent in: it was what lay much upon his mind, and he was greatly desirous that it should be attended unto; for so the words may be read, “I exhort first of all”, or before all things; of all things he had to say, this was the chief, or it was what he would have principally and chiefly done by others: for this does not so much regard the order of time, that prayer should be made early in the morning, in the first place, before anything else is done, and particularly before preaching, which seems to have been the custom of the primitive saints, ( Acts 4:31 ) but the pre-eminence and superior excellency of it; though the words may be rendered, “I exhort, that first, the supplications of all be made”: and so may regard public prayer, the prayer of the whole church, in distinction from private prayer, or the prayer of a single person; which is expressed by different words,

supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks:

the first of these, “supplications”, signifies such petitions for things that are wanted by men, either by themselves or others; and that either for their bodies or souls, as food and raiment for the one, and discoveries of pardoning love, supplies of grace, spiritual peace, comfort for the other: and the second word, “prayers”, signifies good wishes and desires, directed and expressed to God for things that are in themselves to be wished for, and desired of God, either for ourselves or others: and the next word, “intercessions”, intends either complaints exhibited in prayer against others that have done injuries; or prayers put up for others, either for the averting of evil from them, or for the bestowing some good thing on them: and the last word, “thanksgivings”, with which requests should always be made known to God, designs that branch of prayer in which thanks are given to God for mercies received, whether temporal or spiritual: and these are to

be made for all men;

not only for all the saints, for all the churches of Christ, and, ministers of the Gospel; nor only for near relations and friends, according to the flesh; but for all the inhabitants of the country and city in which men dwell, the peace and prosperity of which are to be prayed for; yea, for enemies, and such as reproach, persecute, and despitefully use the saints, even for all sorts of men, Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, high and low, bond and free, good men and bad men: for it cannot be understood of every individual that has been, is, or shall be in the world; millions of men are dead and gone, for whom prayer is not to be made; many in hell, to whom it would be of no service; and many in heaven, who stand in no need of it; nor is prayer to be made for such who have sinned the sin unto death, ( 1 John 5:16 ) besides, giving of thanks, as well as prayers, are to be made for all men; but certainly the meaning is not, that thanks should be given for wicked men, for persecutors, and particularly for a persecuting Nero, or for heretics, and false teachers, such as Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom the apostle had delivered to Satan. But the words must be understood of men of all sorts, of every rank and quality, as the following verse shows.

(Ver. 2)

For kings, and for all that are in authority

For supreme governors, as the emperor of Rome, and kings of particular nations; and for all sub-governors, or inferior magistrates, as procurators or governors of provinces, and proconsuls, and the like; all that were in high places, and acted under the authority of those that were supreme; these are particularly mentioned, the then governors, whether supreme or subordinate, who were avowed enemies, and violent persecutors of the saints; and it might be a scruple with some of them, whether they should pray for them, and therefore the apostle enjoins it; and this in opposition to the notions and practices of the Jews, who used to curse the Heathens, and pray for none but for themselves, and those of their own nation:

that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty;

which does not merely design the end of civil government by kings and magistrates, which is to preserve the peace and quiet of the commonwealth; to protect the persons and properties of men, that they may possess their own undisturbed; and to secure to them their civil and religious rights and liberties, that they may have the free use and exercise of religion, signified by “all godliness”; and to encourage morality and virtue, expressed by “honesty”; and so is an argument for prayer, taken from the advantage of civil government: nor does this clause only point out the duty of saints to live peaceably under the government they are, and not disturb it; to mind only their religious exercises among themselves, and behave honestly and morally among men, as they generally speaking are, the quiet in the land; but also expresses the thing to be prayed for; and the sense is, that since the hearts of kings are in the hands of the Lord, and he can turn them as he pleases, prayer should be made to him for them, that he would either convert them, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth, they now persecuted; or at least so dispose their hearts and minds, that they might stop the persecution, and so saints might live peaceably under them, enjoy their religious liberty, and be encouraged in their moral conversation. The Arabic version renders it, “that they may be preserved”: that is, kings, and all in authority. It is a saying of R. Hananiah, or Ananias, the sagan of the priests[1],

“pray for the peace or safety of the kingdom (one of their commentators on it adds[2], even of the nations of the world, which is remarkable, and agrees with the exhortation of the apostle); for if there was no fear of that, men would devour one another alive.”

(Ver. 3)

For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour.

Not only to live peaceably and quietly under the government men are, since that is the ordination of God, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly, which his grace teaches; but to pray for all sorts of men, and for those who are set in the highest place of government, even though enemies and persecutors: this is good in itself, and in the sight of an omniscient God, who sees not as man seeth; and it is acceptable unto him through Jesus Christ, by whom every sacrifice of prayer or praise is so; for by God our Saviour is meant God the Father, who is the Saviour of all men, in a way of providence, and the Saviour of all the elect in a way of special grace;

(Ver. 4)

Who will have all men to be saved,…

The salvation which God wills that all men should enjoy, is not a mere possibility of salvation, or a mere putting them into a salvable state; or an offer of salvation to them; or a proposal of sufficient means of it to all in his word; but a real, certain, and actual salvation, which he has determined they shall have; and is sure from his own appointment, from the provision of Christ as a Saviour for them, from the covenant of grace, in which everything is secured necessary for it, and from the mission of Christ to effect it, and from its being effected by him: wherefore the will of God, that all men should be saved, is not a conditional will, or what depends on the will of man, or on anything to be performed by him, for then none might be saved; and if any should, it would be of him that willeth, contrary to the express words of Scripture; but it is an absolute and unconditional will respecting their salvation, and which infallibly secures it: nor is it such a will as is distinguishable into antecedent and consequent; with the former of which it is said, God wills the salvation of all men, as they are his creatures, and the work of his hands; and with the latter he wills, or not wills it, according to their future conduct and behaviour; but the will of God concerning man’s salvation is entirely one, invariable, unalterable, and unchangeable: nor is it merely his will of approbation or complacency, which expresses only what would be grateful and well pleasing, should it be, and which is not always fulfilled; but it is his ordaining, purposing, and determining will, which is never resisted, so as to be frustrated, but is always accomplished: the will of God, the sovereign and unfrustrable will of God, has the governing sway and influence in the salvation of men; it rises from it, and is according to it; and all who are saved God wills they should be saved; nor are any saved, but whom he wills they should be saved: hence by all men, whom God would have saved, cannot be meant every individual of mankind, since it is not his will that all men, in this large sense, should be saved, unless there are two contrary wills in God; for there are some who were before ordained by him unto condemnation, and are vessels of wrath fitted for destruction; and it is his will concerning some, that they should believe a lie, that they all might be damned; nor is it fact that all are saved, as they would be, if it was his will they should; for who hath resisted his will? but there is a world of ungodly men that will be condemned, and who will go into everlasting punishment: rather therefore all sorts of men, agreeably to the use of the phrase in 1Ti 2:1 are here intended, kings and peasants, rich and poor, bond and free, male and female, young and old, greater and lesser sinners; and therefore all are to be prayed for, even all sorts of men, because God will have all men, or all sorts of men, saved; and particularly the Gentiles may be designed, who are sometimes called the world, the whole world, and every creature; whom God would have saved, as well as the Jews, and therefore Heathens, and Heathen magistrates, were to be prayed for as well as Jewish ones. Moreover, the same persons God would have saved, he would have also

come to the knowledge of the truth:

of Christ, who is the truth, and to faith in him, and of all the truth of the Gospel, as it is in Jesus; not merely to a notional knowledge of it, which persons may arrive unto, and not be saved, but a spiritual and experimental knowledge of it; and all that are saved are brought to such a knowledge, which is owing to the sovereign will and good pleasure of God, who hides the knowledge of Gospel truths from the wise and prudent, and reveals them to babes: whence it appears, that it is not his will with respect to every individual of mankind; that they should thus come to the knowledge of the truth; for was it his will they should, he would, no doubt, give to every man the means of it, which he has not, nor does he; he suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, and overlooked their times of ignorance, and sent no message nor messenger to inform them of his will; he gave his word to Jacob, and his statutes unto Israel only; and the Gospel is now sent into one part of the world, and not another; and where it does come, it is hid to the most; many are given up to strong delusions to believe a lie, and few are savingly and experimentally acquainted with the truths of the Gospel; though all that are saved are brought to the knowledge of such truths as are necessary to salvation; for they are chosen to it through sanctification of the Spirit, and belief of the truth.

—–

The difference is stunning. The “quick” answer – the “put two verses together and see what you get” approach – just doesn’t work. It’s not sound, and it gets you into trouble – even if you’re John Piper. If you want to get the real answer, you have to really dig into theology proper – dig deeply into systematic and biblical theology. Otherwise, the “combination” you try to make just isn’t going to be sound. I’d also recommend to you Gill’s comments on 2 Tim. 2:25, as well. In the end, the whole difference between these two solutions is exegetical. Piper doesn’t give an exegesis of the text – Gill does. Dr. White gives an exegesis in his book, too – and comes out with the same conclusion as Gill. This should be instructive to us.

One further point to make. Job 23:13 says this: “But He is unique and who can turn Him? And what His soul desires, that He does.” God, of course, is the referent of this verse. vs. 3-12 in this same chapter all refer to God Himself. What does it say? God accomplishes all that He desires. The Hebrew word for “does” is עָשָׂה – the primary semantic domain of the term is “to do, fashion, accomplish, make” – and this is not the only place where this is said, of course. Isa 46:10 says ‘My purpose will be established, And I will accomplish all My good pleasure.’ The word for “good pleasure” is חֵפֶץ – delight, pleasure, with the further connotation of “desire”. Thus, it can be established that that which God desires, is that which is accomplished. It is no solution to assert that there is a “desire” which does not rise to the level of “volition” – as God is eternal, and thence is to be seen as eternally frustrated in His desire. This is no fitting view of God. While I appreciate the work that John Piper has done for the kingdom, and his faithfulness as a shepherd – he is simply wrong on this issue of God and desire.

  1. [1]Pirke Abot, c. 3. sect. 2.
  2. [2]Bartenora in Pirke Abot, c. 3. sect. 2.
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