More Galactica news! Those folks at Scifi.com are tricksy; check out this hidden Easter egg (or Life Day egg, or whatever the Colonial equivalent is):
Go to this page, click on “Watch a full episode & more,” then scroll down and click on “First Look” to see the first thirteen minutes of the season premiere.
Colonel Tigh seems to be channeling G’kar from Babylon 5 … while Leoben seems to be channeling Kenny from South Park. Also, the scene between Tigh and Cavill echoes the scene between Jammer and Doral in the webisodes.
Conical hat tip to Ain’t It Cool News.
Ahhh, I am so envious. I have only got the 2 second season via dvd and friends and now you get the third season in the US and I can’t even watch the first thirteen minutes because I am from Europe 🙂
I hope BG will follow the path of Babylon 5, where the 3rd Season was a major step forward and even better than 2nd and first season (although Coming of Shadows was a good ep. in Season 2). Well, from what I have seen so far, the third season will be great and a good show-off about contemporary events in iraq. 🙂
Roderick, not sure the gift here… doesn’t the full show start on Friday? Why watch 13 minutes early?
BTW how do you compare BG to B5?
In terms of libertarianism, so far BattleStar doesn’t even compare to B5. Despite the fact that JMS is a statist, the show had numerous freedom-friendly themes, including standing up to unjust authority, respecting people equally, and having compassion for others. So far, BG seems more about quasi-religious crazies, dictators and their stooges, and throwing people out of airlocks without a trial. Somehow I think BG will be like most other shows and only emphasize “freedom” when it’s freedom from evil space robots and not just freedom in general.
Since I don’t want my previous comment to start a war over which scifi series is better, I’d like to change the topic and ask Dr. Long his opinion on some of the interesting libertarian questions that B5 raises. Here are a few that come to mind:
1) Supposing that libertarians reject the Psi-Corp for the usual reasons of government inefficiency, what would a society of telepathic libertarians do to protect the privacy of people’s thoughts? Would they be “thought socialists”, simply doing nothing about telepathic invasions, or would they develop technology or something else to prevent them?
2) Dr. Long believes, like Locke, that since all people are born “free and equal” that they are entitled to the same measure of respect – that is, rights. But Vorlons and Shadows were not born free and equal with humans – they were born thousands of years ago, their races are millions of years old, and they are completely different from us. Does that mean that they have the right to just treat us however they want, the same way that we treat cows and insects? For example, Vorlons inhabit people’s minds and the Shadows kidnap people to convert them into spaceship CPUs. Might a “Vorlon libertarian” justify such activities because of their inherent superiority to us?
3) With regards to the mutualist land debate, does Captain Sheridan have any basis under libertarianism to be the absolute dictator of Babylon 5? What if some mutualist lurkers in down-below came together to claim part of Brown Sector as their own because Sheridan wasn’t directly occupying and using it? If Sheridan can break from Earth, why can’t lurkers in Brown or Grey Sector break away from him?
Stephan: Roderick, not sure the gift here… doesn’t the full show start on Friday? Why watch 13 minutes early?
Obviously you are not a Fanatic.
BTW how do you compare BG to B5?
I can’t really say which is better.
Some similarities: flawed characters, skepticism about authority (on both shows, every character, even the good ones, at some point abuses their power — and I mean not just from my libertarian standpoint, but clearly from the show’s writers’ standpoint), the willingness to suddenly kill off a favourite character or take the plot in a totally different direction.
Some differences: B5 is funnier, has more “great lines,” and I suppose has more “heart”; BSG is darker and the characters are for the most part more flawed. B5 is more uneven; at its best, insanely great, and I’d claim, better than BSG has yet been; but at its worst, much hokier and wince-inducing than BSG has yet been. BSG has better special effects (no surprise there, being a decade later; also, since it’s a lower-tech world the sfx don’t need to be as ambitious). No aliens in BSG. Straczynski had the plot of B5 worked out in detail far in advance; I suspect Moore & co. are making up BSG as they go along.
Anonymous2: Somehow I think BG will be like most other shows and only emphasize “freedom” when it’s freedom from evil space robots and not just freedom in general.
Oh, I disagree; I think BSG is quite freedom-oriented, and not just freedom from Cylons; indeed the show is much more about human-human conflict than it is about human-Cylon conflict. We’re not supposed to approve of Roslin’s tossing Leoben out the airlock. (That’s clear fro the episode, I think, but if you doubt this see Moore’s blog.) There’ve been several episodes condemning torture and referencing Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Episodes condemning martial law, etc., etc.
Supposing that libertarians reject the Psi-Corp for the usual reasons of government inefficiency, what would a society of telepathic libertarians do to protect the privacy of people’s thoughts?
Good question, to which I don’t have a clear answer. But here’s an analogy that might be helpful in thinking about it. Suppose there were a society in which everybody is blind, and suddenly a few sighted people arise. At once all sorts of things that once were private cease to be so. Should we demand that the sighted people wear blinders? That seems wrong. If other people now have to build walls, so be it.
Dr. Long believes, like Locke, that since all people are born “free and equal” that they are entitled to the same measure of respect – that is, rights. But Vorlons and Shadows were not born free and equal with humans – they were born thousands of years ago, their races are millions of years old, and they are completely different from us. Does that mean that they have the right to just treat us however they want
I think the Vorlons and Shadows are equal with us, in the relevant sense. That is, they are rational agents, and so are we. On my view it’s the fact of rational agency (and not, say, degree of intelligence or manner of thinking) that establishes equality of authority.
With regards to the mutualist land debate, does Captain Sheridan have any basis under libertarianism to be the absolute dictator of Babylon 5? What if some mutualist lurkers in down-below came together to claim part of Brown Sector as their own because Sheridan wasn’t directly occupying and using it? If Sheridan can break from Earth, why can’t lurkers in Brown or Grey Sector break away from him?
Well, B5 is a government-owned station — initially belonging to Earth govt., later to B5’s govt., and still later to the Interstellar Alliance govt. — so of course Sheridan’s title is dubious; one needn’t be a mutualist to conclude that.
A trickier question is: suppose that B5 had been built and maintained with private funds, and was Sheridan’s private property. A mutualist might say that Sheridan couldn’t legitimately own the whole thing because he couldn’t use the whole thing. On my view of rights, however, it could be possible for Sheridan to own the whole thing. So if they wanted to secede, they’d have to leave the station.
Now here’s the situation, though. As the show tells it, the people in Downbelow can’t afford to leave. So does Sheridan have the right to say “well, so long as you’re on my property, do as I say or I’ll kick you out the airlock”? On my view, no; see footnote 4 of this piece. Given the proportionality constraints on the manner of enforcing one’s rights, Sheridan would have to provide them transport to a safe place and give them reasonable notice.
At once all sorts of things that once were private cease to be so. Should we demand that the sighted people wear blinders? That seems wrong. If other people now have to build walls, so be it.
I think the only thing wrong with this analogy is that a telepath can forcibly “look inside” your mind, whereas a sighted person can only see what ambient lighting allows him to see. (On the TV show they actually show telepaths doing both activities, e.g. passively listening to someone’s thoughts and actively looking inside to see what’s going on). A better analogy would be if suddenly a few people developed X-ray vision and so could spy on anyone in any building they choose.
It sounds to me like you would reject such a thing as a “right to privacy”, since these examples with sight and telepathy seem to suggest that it cannot be reduced to the right not to be aggressed against.
Given the proportionality constraints on the manner of enforcing one’s rights, Sheridan would have to provide them transport to a safe place and give them reasonable notice.
I’ve noticed you’ve used this reasoning several times before, e.g. saying you can’t shove someone off your property at the exact moment a truck is coming, that if you landlock someone you have to provide them with an easement, you can’t shove someone off of your privately-owned airplane while it’s in the air, etc. Except for the 2nd case I can imagine using proportionality as a justification. However, a naive interpretation of property rights, specifically the traditional right of exlusion, seems to indicate that all these activities are in fact OK. Your solution is to modify the right of exclusion to be subordinate to proportionality.
My solution is to drop the traditional “right to exclude” that imagines your relationship to your property to be the same as the relationship of a king to his domain, and to replace it with the right to exclude based on interfering use. So for example, I would say that while flying the airplane you do not in fact have unlimited monarchial control over the airplane, which would seem to validate throwing people out the door, but instead a limited right to the plane insofar as you are using it to fly. That’s why if someone tries to take over the airplane and kill everyone it’s ok to throw him out the door during a struggle. But if someone just stowed away in the back, they are interfering with your use of the plane to fly very little, and so interfering with their continued life by throwing them out the door would be unjust.
The cool thing about the interfering use idea is that it explans why David Friedman’s examples with flashlights and CO2 molecules are unfounded; Friedman implicity assumes that owning a house implies total, absolute control over every aspect of the house, down to the subatomic particles making up its nuclei. In fact Friedman’s own account is a reductio ad absurdum of his view of ownership, since it implies that you can justly prohibit your neighbors from doing anything which produces light or from breathing on your front porch.
Ha ha, yeah, Ithink I”m not as much a fanatic.
Unless: I am such a fanatic that I refuse to watch the first 13 minutes on lower quality flash video on a website, but want to see it in its full glory on TV.
BTW, it pisses me off I can’t get Sci-Fi channel in HDTV. I get ABC in HD, and HBO in HD.. .why not sci fi!!!!
Maybe the scifi channel would not exist in a free market. Or television. 🙂
I’m broadly in agreement with the interfering-use approach also, but I don’t see how it helps in this case. Suppose Sheridan says, “I want to use Downbelow as storage now, which makes the presence of the lurkers an interfering use, so they have to leave; and if they don’t have enoug money to buy passage off-station, I’ll just kick them out the airlock.” I don’t see how the interfering-use approach by itself answers Sheridan, without my proportionality supplement.
Suppose Sheridan says, “I want to use Downbelow as storage now, which makes the presence of the lurkers an interfering use, so they have to leave; and if they don’t have enoug money to buy passage off-station, I’ll just kick them out the airlock.”
My point was not that proportionality is somehow not needed; rather my point was that it’s harder to reconcile proportionality with “monarchial property rights” than with the interference rights (if Sheridan is the King of his domain then some libertarians would probably conclude he can throw them out the airlock!).
On a related note, someone should write a short essay for the IR about why libertarian property rights don’t imply that Frodo should return the One Ring to Sauron. You could put it after the essay on why libertarianism implies that once you take someone onboard your space station you can’t just throw them off again. 🙂
Well, has a Monarch a property right on the country? I don’t think, you should view Sheridan as a Monarch, since he is more of a majority shareholder than a Monarch of B5.
I believe it is very difficult to argue on property rights regarding to a space-station that was built with the money of at least 2 governments, which in effect makes them a public good, thus nobody or all have property rights on this place (or according to their payment?). We can’t discuss property rights on something that was built without the fundation of property rights.
The space-station did “shift” ownership during the show to the Alliance and more personally to Sheridan, but ownership doesn’t allow murdering people in your homes, which you invited as guests! Not even in a private society would something like this be legitimate and especially not in libertarian neighbourhoods.
Ownership, however, allows to defend yourself against attacks, so if the Lurkers would try to scavange, say the Reactor, then he could throw the bunch out of the airlock 😉
Concerning The “One Ring Case”, is this true? I mean, the one ring doesn’t “kill” people, in fact, we don’t know what the ring exactly does in the hands of Sauron. It is like a gun, a weapon which might or might not kill, depending on the user (OK, it has some really wicked properties, but so do drugs). The question is, whether who would police this thing and if Sauron would file a formal complaint…
Obviously, he doesn’t care to take it for himself, but rather waits for it to come back and I never saw or read him send the Nazgul to the Elves in order to reclaim it. In fact, he rather attacked BEFORE asking for the ring.
On the other side, one could say that it is even more complicated due to the relationship between the rings 🙂
True the one ring is a tool but it is tool programmed by its maker (Sauron) to behave in certain ways and it has intelligence. It subverts the will of anyone who bears it long enough making it at best a psychic leech. I think the fact the ring would try to “take over” my mind to be an inherently aggressive act and I’m therefore justified in destroying it.
The ring is programmed to obey only Sauron. Any of its magic it allows others to use is simply part of its program to get home to its true master. the fact that Sauron has proven he will use the ring to pillage and destroy justifies my keeping it from him. Since the ring cannot be safely wielded by any other person destruction is at least prudent if not entirely wise.
The ring is not an amoral weapon that anyone can pick up and use for good, bad, or indifferent purposes. It is a tool that can only be used, ultimately, to serve Sauron’s purposes and given that Sauron cannot be killed as long as the ring exists destroying it is in fact wise.
Destroy the damned thing!
The question is whether it uses intelligence to do it, or if it is rather like a drug. If it behaves like a drug, using or stimulating the natural tendencies of the character in possession of the ring, we still have to conclude that it is not a weapon per se, albeit a dangerous tool.
If we remember Frodo and his addiction to the ring, I think we can conclude that it is more of a drug than an active weapon. Indeed, the Lord of the Ring (Sauron) has no power over the tool, except when it is used and even then his influence is very limited.
Well, what if Sauron has changed and wouldn’t use the ring, but rather is forced to use violence, BECAUSE the Elves, humans and hobbits won’t give him what is rightfully his? I know that this is kindof nonesense, if you at least have read the book or read Silmarilion, but it is still an interesting thought.
Also, I think that the ring is not only programmed to serve Sauron, because Galadriel said that she could use the ring to beat Sauron, but would become (due to the addictive substance of the ring?) a female version of the Lord of the Ring.
The ring is not an amoral weapon that anyone can pick up and use for good, bad, or indifferent purposes. It is a tool that can only be used, ultimately, to serve Sauron’s purposes and given that Sauron cannot be killed as long as the ring exists destroying it is in fact wise.
Well, a gun can also exist and almost only exist to kill. But still, a gun resting on a plate doesn’t kill people. The moral problem is that the ring has properties which are obviously not natural: Magic.
How can we include the concept of magic into a libertarian moral theory which is based on property ownership and in the contrast of physical and psychical violence.
On the one side, we have the right to free expression as long as there is no physical violence or misuse against foreign property and on the other side, we have this ring, which obviously can invade and subdue free will without violating any of the principles.
Another interesting thing is, that Sauron does all his wicked evil things in Lord of the Rings WITHOUT the help of the ONE Ring. What does this say about the evil of the ring?
If the Ring is intelligent, can the people pf Middle-Earth sue the ring for damages?
Is it a living entity? I mean, it might not be intelligent, in a way that a robot is not intelligent (at least today 😉 ). It has some properties or sees some properties on which it reacts. I mean automatic doors also “know” when somebody approaches and open the door, but are they intelligent?
Another question would be, where they would sue the ring? A trial in Mordor (since it is the owner’s seat of power)? A trial in Elrond’s house, or somewhere along the way, if any of the “policing” entities (I mean the Orks) catches him?
Or would a semi-independent source (say Saruman) be called in to be the judge (may be before his oppression by Mordor is uncovered?)?
Doesn’t matter of the ring is merely intelligent. A dog or cat is intelligent but nobody sues one of them. The ring did appear to act intelligently tho, on second thought, it could be more like the parasites in Heinlein’s Puppet Masters and derives it’s intelligence from the host.
If it could be demonstraed the the ring was sapient then I suppose it could be sued but I’m not sure what the point would be.
By “intelligent” I meant what you mean by “sapient.” It was a joke, though.