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Author Archive | Roderick

Hail to Our Martian, or Perhaps Simian, Overlords

By on April 7, 2009 7

Good news! She's real [Lucy Lawless as Xena Warrior Princess] Bad news! So is she [Lucy Lawless as D'Anna the Cylon]Imagine a world where Conan, Xena, and Blackadder were real people while Hitler, Mussolini, and Churchill weren’t. A world where the Battle of Helms Deep really happened but the Battle of Hastings didn’t.

Sounds like a better world than the real one – until we add in that it’s also a world in which humanity has been conquered and enslaved by some combination of Martians, Cylons, and damn dirty apes.

What world is this? According to a substantial percentage of the British public, it’s the one we live in.

So cheer up, fellow Americans – we are not alone.

Fun With Totalitarianism

By on April 7, 2009 22

Alina is blogging the top 100 books on totalitarianism, and she has asked me to suggest my own top ten. But I’m lousy at such rankings – I can never answer “what’s your favourite X?” or “what’s the greatest Y?” questions. So I decided I’d just come up with a list of ten “pretty good” books that aren’t on her list. Then I couldn’t limit myself to ten so I picked fifteen.

These are off the top of my head, so I reserve the right to add other better ones. (I cast my net fairly widely genre-wise because she did too.) Reader suggestions?

1. Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises. Mises’ analysis of the economic origins of Nazism; I’m not sure how much of it I agree with but there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

2. As We Go Marching by John Flynn. Explores parallelism between European fascism and the New Deal.

3. Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen’s thesis – that average German citizens knew about and were complicit in the Holocaust – is controversial. I don’t know whether he’s right, but it’s certainly worth reading.

4. The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff. An analysis of the rise of Nazism from an orthodox Randian position. I have a lot of problems with this book, but it does provide a useful and – apart from his uncritical reliance on Rauschning – mostly accurate record of what Nazi ideologists actually preached.

5. Marxism, Freedom and the State by Mikhail Bakunin. The Russian anarchist’s prediction that implementing Marxism would create a new ruling class rather than abolishing the class system.

6. Statism and Anarchy by Mikhail Bakunin. More of the above.

7. The Bolshevik Myth by Aleksandr Berkman. Initially sympathetic anarcho-communist visits Soviet Russia, gets bummed out.

8. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell. Initially sympathetic state-socialist visits Soviet Russia, gets bummed out

9. The New Class by Milovan Djilas. Former Yugoslav apparatchik who showed how implementing Marxism had created a new ruling class rather than abolishing the class system.

10. The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois et al. Surely too famous to require explanation here.

11. The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism by Peter Boettke. Documents Soviet Russia’s early, abortive attempt to suspend market relations entirely.

12. Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective by Kevin Carson. Not about totalitarianism per se, but studies the various informational and incentival perversities that beset hierarchical, bureaucratic command structures generally, be they governmental or corporate.

13. We the Living by Ayn Rand. This one and the next two shouldn’t require explanation.

14. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

15. Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Duplex Perplexity

By on April 5, 2009 6

I saw Duplicity, which I thought was a lot of fun. Clive Owen strikes me as being much better suited to playing James Bond – I mean the James Bond of the books – than anyone who’s actually played him. And for what it’s worth, based on her performance in this film Julia Roberts now strikes me as a viable albeit imperfect Dagny Taggart.

DuplicityThe movie also has a terrific theme song: Being Bad by bitter:sweet.

But what’s up with the reviews of that movie? I’ve seen review after review moaning not just that the plot is complicated (which it is) but that it’s a hopeless incomprehensible tangle (which it isn’t).

This review, which calls the film “inscrutable” and “too confusing for its own good,” is typical – as is this one, which calls the film “stylish but muddled,” and complains: [MILD SPOILER follows:]

the movie never does reveal, at least not with enough precision to be truly satisfying, just what Claire and Ray’s prefab conversation (which will recur at intervals throughout the movie) is all about.

Um … yes it does. It’s explained completely. Were we watching the same movie? The third enactment of the conversation contains an explicit backward reference to the second one and an explicit forward reference to the first – spelling it out loud and clear for the audience just in case there could be any doubt. [SPOILER OVER]

Admittedly the movie cuts forward and backward in time, and we often don’t fully understand what was really going on in one scene until we see a later (i.e. later for us, but earlier in internal chronology) scene. But this is not exactly some bewilderingly innovative postmodern narrative technique, and it’s a bit odd to be thrown by it. By the end of the movie there are no major puzzles left unexplained – at least to audiences that were paying attention.

But the reviews that complain about the movie being bewildering aren’t the most bewildering reviews. That prize would have to go to this one: [SERIOUS SPOILER follows – and I mean SERIOUS, as in IF YOU’RE PLANNING TO SEE THE MOVIE, STOP READING NOW:]

It’s pretty people versus ugly people. Guess who wins? … the movie boils down to this rudimentary formula: morality and success are functions of beauty.

Here I have to ask once again, in a still more incredulous tone: Were we watching the same movie? You can debate about who wins the morality points in the movie – it’s not obvious that anyone does, really – but success? The pretty people lose. That’s what that whole scene was about at the end, you know, with the two pretty people sitting there looking all depressed? Remember the end? You did stay for the whole movie, right? [SECOND SPOILER OVER]

Okay, rant over.

In the Footnotes

By on April 5, 2009 5

Often topics arise in the comments sections that are only tangentially related to the original post. In case you missed these:

My post on cultural literacy has generated a debate on feminism; my post on W’a L’ma R’t has generated two pages of debate on left-libertarianism (I’ll try to answer some more of the comments tomorrow); and the L & P version of my post on the Atlas Shrugged movie has provoked a whole new post there by William Marina on Rand’s awful awfulness.

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