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Float Time

By on January 15, 2010 2

boat floating in water but appearing to float in airA lot of Randians seem to think that the phrase and concept “floating abstraction” is specific to Rand; but in fact the term “floating abstraction” (or, more commonly, “free-floating abstraction”), often (though not always) meaning something actually fairly close to what Rand meant by it, is quite common in Continental and leftist thought, showing up in Marxist, feminist, phenomenological, and postmodernist discourse.

I don’t know whether this is a coincidence or whether there was influence – or, if so, in which direction. It would be interesting to know which came first, but I’m not sure how old either version is. The oldest use I could find online for “free-floating abstraction” was from Kathleen Nott in 1969 (but I didn’t search at much length); Rand was already using “floating abstraction” at least as early as 1961 (in For the New Intellectual) and probably earlier. (It’s also in Branden’s Principles lectures (as transcribed in The Vision of Ayn Rand), the earliest version of which was recorded in 1958, but I don’t know which year the text in Vision comes from; and Atlas Shrugged seems to be working toward the concept in Galt’s reference to “the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream.”)

Dreams of Flying

By on January 13, 2010 0

Check out the original screenplay of Avatar (CHT AICN), with deleted scenes, including an opening on Earth. (I wonder whether the latter scene was cut to avoid excessive parallels with the bar fight in Star Trek?) Some of these scenes were actually filmed and so may show up as dvd extras.

Life on Mars

By on January 12, 2010 33

Arizona or Barsoom?I’m back from the Phoenix conference (schedule here) – my first ISIL event since the glorious 1997 Rome conference. It was a good conference, and I enjoyed the chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones (as well as meeting folks in person that I’d previously known only online, whichever category that falls under). Plus I got to do my left-libertarian shtick.

Flying in, I caught a glimpse of a canal flowing through the reddish desert and was irresistibly reminded of my days on Mars. (Oh wait, I’m not supposed to talk about that ….)

Nathaniel BrandenThe keynote event of the conference was an award for Nathaniel Branden, coinciding with the long-awaited release of his original NBI lectures in print form. I’ll have more to say about Branden’s session in a future post, but for now I’ll just note that when I asked him about the claim in Jennifer Burns’ Rand bio that Leonard Peikoff was the originator of Rand’s thesis that Kant was the most evil force in history, Branden replied: “I don’t remember [when and how she formed that idea], but [Burns’ claim] sounds very implausible to me; Rand was a grand master at determining who were the good and evil people in history – she didn’t require any pipsqueak assistance.”

Sky Harbor AirportBeing in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area was a bit frustrating, since it’s one of my hometowns but the all-day schedule meant we never got out of the hotel to see anything. (I had to fly back before the Taliesin tour, since classes start this week.) Still, there weren’t any sessions I would want to have missed; and at least I could see Camelback and Papago from my hotel window. (We also had a good meal at the Golden Buddha – better Chinese food than one can find in Auburn, anyway.)

Incidentally, I think it’s cool and edgy for Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport to feature, as a decoration, a plane crashing into the terminal.

Belated Austro-Athenian Plug

By on January 5, 2010 11

This news is nearly a year old now, but Geoff Plauché’s excellent dissertation is online. It combines Aristotelean eudaimonism, Austrian praxeology, dialectical libertarianism, Ayn Rand, New Left anti-corporatism, and free-market anarchism. (So, nothing that would interest any readers of this blog ….)

The Weakest Link

By on January 4, 2010 13

fearsome battle droidsIn the Star Wars movies, an entire enormous imperial military mechanism can always be destroyed or brought to a standstill simply by targeting some relatively small but apparently crucial component – a shield generator, a droid control ship, an exhaust vent on the Death Star.

I’d like to think this was George Lucas’s deliberate satire on the rigidity and inefficiency of centralised bureaucratic systems – though I have a sneaking fear that it may just have been lazy storytelling instead.

In any case, Darian Worden points us to yet another real-world example:

On Sunday, January 3, thousands of airline travelers were delayed after an unknown person walked the wrong way through an exit at Newark Liberty International Airport. Continental Airlines, the largest user of the affected terminal, was still behind schedule on Monday morning. … Most Americans depend daily on the functioning of a multitude of networks, from transportation to electricity. The Newark shutdown shows that something as minor as passing the wrong way through a door (from the “public” area to the “sterile” area) can cause a cascade of failures as flights are delayed, connecting flights are missed, and important business and personal meetings are disrupted.

I remember a similar incident at the Atlanta airport four years ago as I was waiting for my flight to Prague; someone went up the down-only stairway to retrieve something they’d left behind, and the folks in charge responded by shutting down most of the airport – though thankfully not the international terminal, so I didn’t miss my flight. (That incident probably did play a role, however, in our leaving late and my nearly missing my connection in Zurich; I’ve spent a total of fifteen minutes in Switzerland, and all of it running.)

Remember how one Christmas light burning out always made the entire string go dark? Notice how they don’t make ’em like that any more?

So why do governments design systems that can be jammed so easily? Well, because they’re a monopoly, so they can externalise the costs of this crap onto everybody else. Just try doing the same thing under free competition.

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