The purge mentality at ARI appears to be alive and well; and it seems that the doctrine of Rand’s inerrancy in matters of philosophy has been extended to include an assertion of Peikoff’s inerrancy in matters of history of science. More info here, here, and here.
David Kelley said everything that needed to be said about this sort of crap back in 1990.
Since I like what I’ve seen of Steven Moffat’s work (Doctor Who, Coupling, Sherlock), I thought I’d check out Jekyll. The two clips below are all I’ve seen so far (and probably all I’ll have time to see this week, since I leave for a Liberty Fund conference in Virginia on Thursday), but it looks promising:
(I’m pretty sure that what the second clip calls “Episode Two, Scene One” is actually Episode One, Scene Two.) If the actress in these opening scenes looks familiar, that may be because she was the star of the short-lived Bionic Woman reboot. Those who’ve seen the third episode of Sherlock may notice a similarity in characterisation between Moffat’s Hyde and Moffat’s Moriarty.
Oh okay, one more:
Fun stuff, except for Joseph Paterson’s painfully fake American accent. (I didn’t even realise he was supposed to be American until he made the crack about British people being funny.)
Novelisations tend to be kind of crappy, but I quite liked this passage (well, apart from “That burns hotter than the lava had”):
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.
The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.
You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.
You don’t even have lungs anymore.
Mechanism hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.
Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?
And you can’t, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.
You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.
Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.
Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat.
“Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right?
I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.
That burns hotter than the lava had.
“No … no, it is not possible!”
You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.
Never.
But you remember ….
You did it.
You killed her.
You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking of her, you were thinking of yourself…
It is this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith —
Because now your self is all you will ever have.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only the droids around you that you implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.
In the end, you do not even want to.
(from Matthew Stover’s novelisation of Revenge of the Sith)
Predictably, what Jesse Walker has to say about the Kochs is more interesting than what the corporate-liberal media have been saying.
Congratulations to Ross Kenyon, whose latest C4SS piece has been picked up by the Christian Science Monitor!
The debates in the comments section of my Koch post have gotten me thinking about the different ways in which vulgar libertarianism operates. I think there are three.
1) First, there’s the use of libertarian slogans as mere rhetorical covering for corporatist policies. This kind of vulgar libertarianism is standard Republican territory, and in this case “vulgar” acts as an alienating adjective (scroll halfway down); this sort of vulgar libertarianism is not libertarianism at all, any more than counterfeit money is money, a decoy duck is a duck, or a fake Rembrandt is a Rembrandt.
2) Next, there’s the mistake of thinking that libertarian principles justify various big-business-favourable features of the present economy that are actually the result of government privilege rather than market factors (or are so to a greater degree than is realised). This mistake is often made by people who sincerely advocate libertarian policies that would in fact (if we left-libertarians are right) undermine big business more than such advocates realise – and who would continue to advocate them even if they realised this. In this kind of vulgar libertarianism, “vulgar” isn’t alienating; the policies being advocated are genuinely libertarian, but those advocating them have blundered into making their product look less appealing (to ordinary people) than it actually is. In such cases vulgar libertarianism is less like a decoy duck than like a sick duck.
3) The third kind of vulgar libertarianism is a bit more complex. Here the problem is that even if one is advocating the right policies, mistaken views about the likely results of those policies can lead one into mistakes about what counts as a reasonable transitional step toward liberty. For example, suppose that I overestimate the extent to which Megacorp’s success is due to market factors rather than government privilege, and so I mistakenly predict that Megacorp will do much better in a freed market than it is doing now (whereas in fact it would do much worse) . Then I will tend to regard a policy that greatly lowers Megacorp’s tax burden without much lowering anyone else’s as a step in the right direction, and will be inclined to advocate it – whereas if I recognised the extent to which Megacorp is the beneficiary of direct and indirect subsidies at the expense of ordinary taxpayers, I might instead regard the policy as an increased subsidy. Thus conflationist beliefs lead to corporatist practice. (This would be an instance of application thickness.) By contrast with case (2), then, I end up endorsing objectively corporatist policies in addition to libertarian ones; though in contrast with case (1) the libertarian commitments remain sincere. Here the duck is so sick that it’s starting to mutate; how mutated the duck has to get before it no longer counts as a duck is a tricky question.
The boundaries among these three varieties aren’t hard and fast; perhaps they’re best thought of as regions of a spectrum, with (1) and (2) at opposite ends and (3) in the middle. Part of what I’ve been arguing in the Koch case is that it’s a mistake to infer from the Kochs’ not being at (2) that they must be at (1); I find a position closer to (3) at least as plausible a reading, especially given Charles Koch’s declaration that his recent activism is driven by a desire to see some concrete social change in his lifetime. (Admittedly, to the extent that the Kochs’ own economic interests have helped smooth their path from (2) to (3), their (3)-ness may be classified as a bit further toward (1) than would otherwise be the case.) I also find (3) a plausible diagnosis of some libertarian anti-immigration arguments.
