Archive | June, 2008

Vis-à-Vis Visas

Dangerous criminal Martha Stewart’s being denied a visa to enter Britain is insane for the obvious reasons, but the part that puzzles me is: since when do American citizens need a visa to enter Britain? Is the reference to “visa” just a reporter’s glitch?


That Other Party

The Boston Tea Party, founded by Tom Knapp (Grand Anarch of the Left-Libertarian Blogosophere) a couple of years ago in protest against the LP’s increasing drift away from radicalism, has nominated Charles Jay for president and Knapp himself for vice-president.

If Knapp were on the top of the ticket I’d definitely be interested (sorry, Brad); but judging from Jay’s website (festooned with flags and typos) I can’t get too excited about his candidacy.

Jay seems broadly libertarian, but not especially radical. (Well, he’s radical as hell by mainstream standards, of course; but those aren’t the applicable standards here.) It looks to me as though the moderates have taken over the Boston Tea Party too. Jay insists that the IRS’s reign of terror must stop, but says nothing about abolishing the IRS. He apparently rejects a free market in health care. While he opposes the Iraq War, his commitment to non-interventionism seems weak-kneed. (I couldn’t find any info about his views on immigration; all that came up on the subject was this, which tells me less about Jay’s stand on immigration than about the incompetence of his web staff.) Jay is arguably more libertarian than Barr, but there’s just not enough there to justify regarding Jay’s candidacy as a viable protest alternative to the Barr/Root ticket. (As fun as it would be to see Knapp debate Root ….)


Lines of Blood

For any libertarians who still think which side one takes on the immigration issue is a minor, optional matter – two posts on how border laws kill: here and here.


Getting Technical

One science-fiction series that’s great fun is Poul Anderson’s Technic History, comprising multiple novels and short stories.

Flandry and friend The first half of the series covers the era of the Polesotechnic League (not to be confused with the same author’s Psychotechnic League), a free-wheeling, commerce-based, mostly-libertarian interstellar civilisation in its final days. These stories tend to be light-hearted and humorous adventures with a fair bit of libertarian content; they usually star either the rascally merchant prince Nicholas van Rijn (something of a cross between Falstaff, Shylock, and H. L. Mencken) or his operative David Falkayn, and the plots sometimes turn on economic principles (see, e.g., David Friedman’s discussion of “Margin of Profit”).

The second half of the series occurs several centuries later during the period of the Terran Empire; most of the stories center on the machinations of two rival secret agents, the charming, amoral human Dominic Flandry and his equally devious alien archnemesis Aycharaych. Events in the first half of the series often lay the groundwork for developments in the second; for instance, mistakes that the Polesotechnic League makes in dealing with the reptilian Merseian race contribute to the Merseians’ becoming humanity’s deadliest foes during Flandry’s era. These stories tend to be darker and more morally ambiguous than the Polesotechnic League stories; where van Rijn lived in a relatively free galaxy prior to the rise of the Empire, Flandry lives during the swollen Empire’s declining years and is desperately attempting to postpone its inevitable collapse for as long as possible – not because the Empire is so great per se but because Flandry foresees that the succeeding Dark Ages are likely to be still worse. While the continuation of the Empire is portrayed as a worthy goal under the circumstances, the choices that Flandry has to make in pursuit of that goal – the loved ones he has to use and betray, etc. – leave him morally compromised and increasingly hollow: James Bond as a tragic figure.

In any case, my point is that these terrific stories are mostly out of print (I think I’ve got all the ones listed here, collected from various used bookstores over the years), so I’m pleased to see that Baen Books is reprinting the van Rijn stories in three volumes. Hopefully these will include all the Polesotechnic League stories (not all of which feature van Rijn), and hopefully a collection of all the Terran Empire stories (not all of which feature Flandry) will follow.


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