Big-Endian/Little-Endian argument - paper by Danny Cohen Reading a book I was redirected to "On holy wars and a plea for peace" paper by Danny Cohen, which covers the "holy war" between big-endians and little-endians considering byte-order.

Reaching the summary of the memory section I got confused as the author sais:


  To  the best of my knowledge only the Big-Endians of Blefuscu have
  built systems with a consistent order  which  works  across 
  chunk-boundaries, registers,   instructions   and   memories.      I
  failed  to  find  a Little-Endians' system which is totally
  consistent.


Which kind of contradicts his previous text sections covering little-endian:

e.g.


  When they add the bit order and the byte order they get:

               ...|---word2---|---word1---|---word0---|
              ....|C3,C2,C1,C0|C3,C2,C1,C0|C3,C2,C1,C0|
             .....|B31......B0|B31......B0|B31......B0|

  
  In  this regime, when word W(n) is shifted right, its LSB moves into
  the MSB of word W(n-1).
                                     4
  
  English  text  strings  are  stored  in  the  same order, with the
  first character in C0 of W0, the next in C1 of W0, and so on.
  
  This order is very consistent with itself, with the Hebrew language,
  and (more importantly) with mathematics, because significance
  increases with increasing item numbers (address).


he even lateron sais:


  The  Big-Endians struck again, and without any resistance got their
  way. The decimal number 12345678 is stored in the VAX memory in this
  order:

                       7 8  5 6  3 4  1 2
                  ...|-------long0-------|
                 ....|--word1--|--word0--|
                .....|-C1-|-C0-|-C1-|-C0-|
               ......|B15....B0|B15....B0|

  
  This ugliness cannot be hidden even by the standard Chinese trick.


How did the author get to this completely different conclusion on overall consistency? 

An answer does not have to only base on the text, but may also include other sources which might clear up how the statement is sound.
The first statement says that there is a system that consistently uses the big-endian convention for various things (instructions, registers, etc.) The second statement says that the little-endian convention is more elegant ("consistent with itself").

How are these contradictory?