Gary Chartier is offering an introductory online course on anarchism under the auspices of the Molinari Institute’s Center for a Stateless Society. Check it out.
Tags: Anarchy, Left-Libertarian, Molinari/C4SS
While the upcoming John Carter of Mars film has been described as an adaptation of the first novel only, the appearance in the cast list of the character “Matai Shang, ruler of the godlike Therns” suggests otherwise, as Shang and his merry band of Therns don’t show up until the second and third novels. And the “Civil War colonel who comes into conflict with Carter” corresponds to nothing in the books whatsoever.
I fear that the faithful movie adaptation that fans have spent nearly a hundred years waiting for (admittedly treating “fans” as a collective of variable composition) is not on the way.
But wait, it gets worse. Actor interviews (see here and here) reveal that the Therns are beings like “Olympian gods” who “travel round keeping order in the Universe” (they do no such thing in the books) and that the aforementioned Matai Shang (a fairly minor character in the books – it’s his daughter Phaidor who’s important) will be “John Carter’s nemesis” and a shapeshifter who “can adapt into anything.”
Talk about missing the point! The whole idea of the Therns is that they’re false gods – they’re just ordinary human beings who have set themselves up as gods. Giving them supernatural powers of shapeshifting and starhopping defeats their literary purpose. Burroughs structured Barsoomian society so that the religion of the red and green Martians would be a hoax perpetrated by the white Martians (i.e., the Therns), the religion of the white Martians would be a hoax perpetrated by the black Martians, and the religion of the black Martians would in turn be a hoax perpetrated by their own rulers. (Burroughs, as you may have guessed by now, was not a fan of religion; see also Savage Pellucidar and The Return of Tarzan.) If the Therns are now going to have magical powers, or be aliens with more advanced technology, or whatever it is that’s being planned here, then the story that Burroughs actually wrote is evidently being fairly thoroughly jettisoned.
My enthusiasm for this movie is rapidly dropping.
Tags: Jove's Witnesses, Science Fiction
The (or a) UK Green Party has “changed [its] approach to science,” according to this story. (CHT Ken MacLeod.)
The changes look to me to be a mixed bag. There are some good things – most notably, the Greens have backed away from the idea of having scientists be legally required to swear an Oath to the Urth! On the down side, though, they’ve apparently made their peace with vivisection. (I don’t think vivisection should be banned by force of law, but I certainly favour opposing it.)
But the chief change seems to be a shift from a “regulate conventional medicine but not alternative medicine” position to a “regulate all medicine” position – a move in the direction of greater consistency, but an improvement in no other way.
A related story claims that “alternative medicine by definition is medicine that has been proven not to work, or not been proven to work. Alternative medicine that works is called ‘medicine’” – an assertion that belongs in the same category as the quondam Attorney General’s apothegm “you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.”
Hmm, I wonder what the definition of an alternative party is.
Tags: Free the Earth, Left-Libertarian
Two upcoming Alabama philosophy events (one more upcoming than the other):
Hilton Pensacola Beach Gulf Front Hotel
- The schedule for this week’s previously mentioned Auburn Philosophy Conference (Feb. 25-27) is online, along with a few of the papers. Ontology as you like it!
- The date (Sept. 24-25) and venue (Pensacola, Florida) for the Fall 2010 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society have been announced. Papers can be submitted to the regular program or the undergrad essay contest. Submission deadline: 8/16; hotel reservation deadline: 8/24.
Why, you may ask, is the Alabama Philosophical Society going to be meeting in Florida? I’ll give you a hint. (And the disparity is even worse for our undergrad majors, whom we like to take to these events.)
Tags: Boring Administrative Stuff, Left-Libertarian, Personal
Wouldn’t you know that a politician’s idea of a solution to the problem that no one’s allowed to compete with X would be to mandate that X is allowed to compete with no one?
In T. H. White’s words: Whatever is not forbidden is compulsory.
If you enjoy the Center for a Stateless Society’s commentaries (and if you’re lucky enough to be above water financially), please consider donating to the C4SS first quarter fundraiser, which looks to be falling short. Otherwise you’ll only have half as much anarchy ….
Tags: Anarchy, Left-Libertarian, Molinari/C4SS
I was going to write something about CPAC and the tea parties. But then I remembered that I’d already written this last spring.
Tags: Conflation Debate, Democracy, Left and Right, Left-Libertarian
A lot of Babylon 5 fans aren’t crazy about the spinoff series Crusade, but I really liked it; I think it’s visually more beautiful than B5 (the effects technology had improved), plus it has two of my favourite characters, the cryptic, melancholy Galen and the lovably obnoxious Max Eilerson.
Galen and Eilerson
Frustratingly, Crusade was marred by intrusive network micromanagement, and then cancelled halfway through its first season. Here are some of TNT’s actual requests:
Can we lose the makeup on Dureena … and make her an alien by her attitude [instead]?
We’d like to have one of the characters include a sexual explorer, so when they make contact with a new race, his or her job is to go and have sex with them.
We want to see more fist-fights on the bridge.
We’d like to see an episode worked around a wrestler, since wrestling is hot right now.
We think you should give the captain a dog for a pet. [Note: as if any science-fiction show would do that!]
Rather than have the characters work their way out of the problem as depicted, we think it would be better if Captain Gideon arranges to have Dureena compromised so the antagonist will rape her, and Gideon will catch him in the act, and use this as blackmail to get the character to back off his demands.
When show-runner J. Michael Straczynski proved strangely unenthusiastic about these suggestions, the network pulled the plug. (There’s some evidence that these requests were not entirely sincere but were instead simply a way of finding an excuse for cancelling the show; if true, that makes TNT look better in one respect but worse in another.)
Sadly, there is no correct viewing order for the episodes that were produced; the network interfered so much that they completely screwed up the continuity. For example, you’ll see someone use a device in one episode and then invent the device in a later episode, or see two characters as lovers in one episode who suddenly just barely know each other in a later episode.
Because the show had already had a pilot (the Babylon 5 tv-movie A Call to Arms, which ought to be on the Crusade dvd but isn’t), Straczynski didn’t write an introductory episode but just led straight off with “Racing the Night.” When you see it, it’s obvious that it was intended to be the first episode; the characters all say introductory, expositiony things and tell each other stuff they all already know, like “When Interplanetary Expeditions heard that we needed a crack archeologist and linguist, they gave us you.”
Starship Excalibur
But then the network said they wanted some earlier episodes to introduce the characters and break the viewers into the show more gradually. So Straczynski had to go back and make some earlier episodes (including a new first episode, “War Zone,” which begins – at TNT’s insistence – with a fist fight, and in which one of the characters says “we had to make some compromises to get this show on the road,” a coded message that TNT evidently didn’t pick up on).
But the network had also mandated a uniform change for the crew halfway through; so now the supposedly earlier episodes had the characters wearing the supposedly later uniforms. The result is a complete tangle of continuity.
After the show’s cancellation, Straczynski briefly posted three unproduced Crusade scripts – “To the Ends of the Earth,” “Value Judgments,” and “End of the Line” – that revealed where the show had been headed; maddeningly, it was about to get especially good, as well as tying in more closely with two of the main plot threads from B5. When the supposedly uncopyable format in which Straczynski had posted the scripts proved all too copyable, Straczynski yanked them down, but it’s easy enough to find “pirated” versions online. (Hint.)
At any rate – and, at last, the occasion for this post – Straczysnki is finally releasing, via the Babylon 5 CafePress store, first a book titled Crusade: Behind the Scenes (available now) and later, a three-volume set ambiguously titled Crusade: What the Hell Happened (available at some time in the future). These four books together promise to fill in a lot of detail about how the show would have gone (including, but definitely not limited to, those three unproduced scripts).
Tags: Science Fiction
It takes the perspicacity of a Glenn Beck to detect them.
Tags: Anarchy, Lapsus Linguae, Left and Right, Left-Libertarian
The following picture appeared in Adventures of Superman #596, which by odd coincidence came out the same week as the 9/11 attacks:
Tags: Science Fiction, Terror
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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