The Atlas Shrugged film trailer hath advened. Could be better, could be worse:
Pyramid Power
Congratulations to the Egyptian people for successfully ousting their dictator – and through peaceful mass resistance, too. Several libertarians have pointed out how current events are vindicating the lessons of La Boétie (if it was La Boétie); see, e.g., Sheldon Richman here and Lew Rockwell here.
In my Molinari Symposium paper I wrote:
The inadequacy of violent means for the state’s maintenance might be doubted, of course. After all, while La Boétie blithely tells us, “Resolve to serve no more, and you are once freed,” this advice might seem to run up against a collective action problem: if only a few individuals withdraw their support while most of their fellow subjects maintain their compliance, the force of the state will ordinarily be quite sufficient to bring them in line. It might thus seem as though the state could compel all by force, simply by compelling each. … But the effectiveness of collective action problems by themselves in preventing mass disobedience is probably overstated; when the public mood is strong enough, collective-action constraints seem to melt away, as for example with mass resistance to the Ceauşescu regime in Romania in 1989.
We can now add another example: the Mubarak regime in Egypt in 2011. (We should also add the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, whose overthrow helped to inspire events in Egypt.)
Of course Egypt’s not out of the woods yet. While the people have in fact been maintaining order anarchistically for the past few weeks, they are not ideologically anarchist, do not yet understand the extent of their power and potential for autonomy, and so will doubtless end up supporting the replacement of the Mubarak regime with some other state regime – and what sort of regime they will get remains to be seen. But it is to be hoped that they have learned this much: if they tire of the new regime, they know how to get rid of it.
Let’s hope the rest of the world’s governed learns the same lesson.
The Lovely Bones
I see that Jesse Byock’s 1995 article “Egil’s Bones” is now online. (See also this earlier piece.) The article helps to support the historical reliability of the Icelandic sagas by showing how an aspect of Egil’s Saga once considered fanciful – the protagonist’s skull’s invulnerability to axe-blows – may have a basis in fact.
As of 2005, Byock was seeking Egil’s grave for confirmation; I’ve heard nothing since, though the project seems to be active.
The Sign of Three
I want to mention what some may consider a spoiler for Sherlock, so I’m putting it in the comments section.
Women in the TARDIS
River Song and Amy Pond - the two most important female characters that Steven Moffat has created for DOCTOR WHO
Teresa Jusino loves the way Steven Moffat writes female characters for Doctor Who. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)
Nivair Gabriel hates the way Steven Moffat writes female characters for Doctor Who. (See here.)
Funny thing is, I’m largely in agreement with both Jusino and Gabriel; they just focus on different things. There are good and bad aspects of Moffat’s portrayal of women, and Jusino and Gabriel between them provide helpful analyses of each.
(In related news, I enjoyed Moffat’s satire on gender roles in his earlier series Coupling; but he clearly takes those roles to be largely innate whereas I take them to be largely constructed, so I actually enjoyed the humor in a somewhat different manner from what Moffat intended. It’s like the different ways one would enjoy Yes, Minister depending on whether one thought that a viable alternative to bureaucratic government was possible – laughing at foibles that one takes to be inevitable features of the human condition versus laughing at foibles in a way that can lead to discrediting and combating them.)
A Slightly Less Unknown Ideal, Part 2
Sheldon’s American Conservative article on left-libertarianism is now online.