A few notable things I ran across recently:
- Will Thomas of The Atlas Society (formerly known as The Objectivist Center) argues that transhumanism is compatible with Objectivism.
- 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?
[continue reading…]
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[Warning: Some mild spoilers.]
If the making of a movie is a series of steps in a long path to the finished product, then the makers of Skyline trod boldly on the first flagstone, took a misstep on the next, stubbed their toes on the third and generally staggered off balance the rest of the way. The concept is as full of potential as one could want it to be: aliens invade, slaughter and eat the human race while a group of beautiful young people bunker down in an apartment building, fighting for their lives and arguing about what to do next. Great movies have been based on ideas no more complex than this, but the makers of those movies glided more gracefully along the rest of the production path.
Skyline, though not awful, is not a great movie, nor even a good one. It displays a respectable technical proficiency which any producer can purchase if his coffers are full. This and the aforementioned concept are its strongest points. It lacks artistry in all aspects where technical expertise cannot suffice, and suffers from that mild incoherence which results from underdeveloped and abandoned plot points.
[continue reading…]
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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.
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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.
[continue reading…]
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[Warning: Contains some spoilers, mainly in the 6th and 7th paragraphs.]
Every so often a book comes along that truly makes you appreciate writing as a subject; one that truly captures the imagery that we see and feel in our lives when we so often lack the time for reflection.
Wĭthûr Wē is such a book. Yet, such a recommendation doesn’t quite do it justice because its beautiful imagery is only a backdrop for a rich libertarian narrative and struggle of ideas.
Wĭthûr Wē is set several centuries in the future. We never learn the exact year but late in the book we discover that it must be the 28th century. Humans have colonized a small portion of the galaxy — perhaps a thousand light years across — but have yet to discover any alien civilizations. Only the three million year old Ruins on the planet Kaldis provide any proof that non-human intelligence exists, or at least existed once, in the universe.
Alistair Ashley 3nn, the main character of the tale and mouthpiece of Rothbardian philosophy, has just returned from his tour of duty on Kaldis, a human colony at war over their form of government. His experiences have obviously marked him, because those who knew him before he left remark on how different he now is, both physically and emotionally. Alistair has prepared well for his return to Aldra, his home planet, and its tightly regulated — and therefore wÄthà»ring — economy. Through a clever, and very sci-fi, technique, he smuggles instructions for making black market medicine and sells them to black market merchants. He demands gold, not the easily inflatable Aldran Credit which is nothing more than a bit of electronic information stored on a magnetic strip.
Alistair, who has disavowed the 3nn which the government tacked onto his name, was taught the principles of libertarianism by his grandfather who died while he was “off” on Kaldis. He returns angry at the atrocities he has seen and his anger only grows when he sees how much further towards serfdom his home planet has travelled in the four cycles (years) since he has been off. When his father’s home is stolen by the government in an Aldran version of eminent domain, he uses the money from his medicine sale to begin his own private rebellion. He begins by burgling the house of the politician who stole his father’s home, bitterly noting as he leaves that most people would consider Alistair the thief, and not the politician.
[continue reading…]
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A recent episode of Fox’s sci-fi show Fringe, 6955 kHz (S3, Ep06), ended with a scene that reminded me of how philosophers and statists like to pose difficult hypothetical scenarios designed to test your principles and your commitment to them. Usually these scenarios are underspecified for practical ethical decision-making and what specifics they do have are extremely improbable at best, downright unrealistic at worst. The “best” of these are carefully crafted to pump your emotions and moral intuitions. Thought experiments should be used by good philosophers to seek truth, but often these scenarios are posed by ideologues with the intention of leading you to accept whatever pet theory, principle, or policy proposal they prefer.
[continue reading…]
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This is the second of two book/movie reviews I had published in the Fall 2007 issue of Prometheus, the quarterly newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Sagramanda: A Novel of Near-Future India
By Alan Dean Foster
Hardcover, 287 pages
Pyr/Prometheus Books, 2006, $25.00
Alan Dean Foster’s Sagramanda is a far better novel than his Transformers [see my review]. While not especially libertarian, it is also far more so than his Transformers. Sagramanda is a science fiction techno-thriller set in the near-future Indian city of the novel’s title. In this, Foster’s novel follows in the footsteps of Ian MacDonald’s River of Gods and MacDonald indeed has a blurb on the back cover in praise of Foster’s novel and remarking on “the growing swell of writers realizing we may be living in the Indian Century.” As far as I can tell Foster does a good job of capturing the spirit and atmosphere of India. (My wife is Indian but she was unable to read the novel before the deadline for this issue.)
[continue reading…]
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