Geoffrey Allan Plauché

Zack Snyder, director of 300 and Watchmen, has a new film project coming out in 2011 that may be of interest to genre-loving libertarians: the upcoming movie Sucker Punch. It may not have an overtly libertarian theme or plot, but it does appear to center around an issue that is relevant to libertarians, particularly women and libertarians interested in the time period in the US in which this film is set, the 1950s.

The premise and setting of Sucker Punch remind me of Angelina Jolie’s film Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood, written by J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame, and set in 1928. Both films depict periods in the United States in which it was all too easy to commit someone, particularly a woman, to a mental institution against her will. In Changeling, Jolie’s character is involuntarily committed to the local hospital’s psychopathic ward by a corrupt cop for political/job preservation reasons. In Sucker Punch, the main character, Baby-Doll (what’s with the name?), is involuntarily committed to a mental institution and scheduled for a barbaric lobotomy. I suppose we’ll have to wait to find out why and by whom she was committed.

So, in Sucker Punch, as in Changeling, it appears we will be presented with a story illustrating (wrongful) involuntary commitment, the unequal status of women in recent US history, a struggle for freedom and to maintain one’s sanity in an oppressive medical institution where the authorities insist you are insane. Unlike Changeling, which was a historical film, Sucker Punch will be an action fantasy.

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A few notable things I ran across recently:

1. Will Thomas of The Atlas Society (formerly known as The Objectivist Center) argues that transhumanism is compatible with Objectivism.
2. Kylie Sturgess, in her Curiouser and Curiouser column for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, interviewed Scott Sigler. I hadn’t heard of him before, but apparently he’s known as a podcaster and now also as an author of techno-thrillers.

   Sigler describes skeptics as people
    

   who were spreading the other side of the information instead of misinformation. They are out actively encouraging people to think for themselves, and what’s been interesting is that they’re not necessarily telling people “this is bunk.” They are encouraging people to think critically about things and learn how to address things when you run into them.

   He goes on to mention how, among other things, evolution is being challenged in America. But there’s a flipside to long-accepted, fairly well-established science being attacked in knee-jerk fashion by those faith-based types leery of science in general and of science that challenges their religious beliefs in particular. Sometimes science can become corrupted in politically-charged fields, and scientists lose their objectivity. I’m reminded of an old post I wrote about scientific skepticism in relation to global warming alarmism. I riffed off of Clarke’s First Law of Prediction and Asimov’s Corollary.

   But to get back to Scott Sigler, has anyone read any of his work? If so, what do you think? Do you recommend it?

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I just found out about this great website that has all of the episodes from every Star Trek tv series online for free. It’s probably not legal, so check it out while you can at WatchTrek!

Also, have a gander at this, I’m assuming photoshopped, image of a Jeffrey Tucker human action figure complete with plastic gold coins.

Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing comes word of this funny piece of flash fiction, a science fiction story disguised as a review of a set of $6,800.00 audio cables, themselves a free market wealth redistribution mechanism in disguise, designed to seduce gullible audiophiles out of their money.

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.

Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.

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Gizmodo has an interesting post about How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years. It is an excerpt from The Master Switch by Tim Wu.

Here is the money quote:

This is the essential weakness of a centralized approach to innovation: the notion that it can be a planned and systematic process, best directed by a kind of central intelligence; that it is simply of matter of assembling all the best minds and putting them to work in unison. Were it so, the future could be planned and executed in a scientific manner.

Yes, Bell Labs was great. But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a serious genetic flaw: it could not originate technologies that might, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system. In the language of innovation theory, the output of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustaining inventions; disruptive technologies, those that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business model, were simply out of the question.

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Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.