[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Click here to see Doug Den Uyl’s blurb for the forthcoming anthology Anarchism/Minarchism that I edited with Tibor Machan. Click here to see an anonymous blurb for Aeon Skoble’s forthcoming book Deleting the State. Click here to see my own blurb for Crispin Sartwell’s forthcoming book Against the State. And click here for an advance preview (as opposed to, um, some other kind of preview) of Sartwell’s manuscript itself.
Thank God for that thin blue line that protects sleeping men and 82-year-old women from themselves by breaking into their houses and tasering the hell out of them. Now we can all feel a little safer.
Ask yourself: if the outfit that did this had to compete for customers with outfits that didn’t do this, how might the outcome differ?
Apropos of nothing in particular: two of my favourite music videos ever, both from one of my favourite movies ever: a song on chromatology and a song on epistemology. Damn, this movie just oozes coolness. It’s like Ayn Rand without the crazy.
Or for a change of mood, check out these haunting clips (here, here, and here) from a much darker movie, also one of my favourites. This film oozes bleak! But in a cool way.
Live-blogging tonight’s episode ….
So the Bionic Woman is a Rules Girl? How totally lame. Bring back Sarah Corvus!
At least we’re seeing some pretty stock footage of Paris.
Addendum:
Well, things just took an upturn – Leoben walked in!
Addendum 2:
Not enough Leoben! Too much boring subplot with Jaime’s kid sister!
Addendum 3:
Good, more Leoben. (Though when he hit whatsisface it looked wretchedly fake.)
Addendum 4:
Hey, whatsisface references actual obscure comic book and superhero! Geek point!
Addendum 5:
It was cool to see Leoben, but he didn’t get to do anything especially distinctive. (Ditto for appearances in previous episodes by Tyrol and Lampkin.) And there weren’t enough scenes of Paris. And they can’t seem to decide whether this spy outfit is dark/creepy/edgy or kinder/gentler/touchy/feely.
Bionic Woman is the show I watch because I can’t watch Galactica ….
Good news for Joss Whedon fans: he’s finally coming back to television, with a show titled Dollhouse, about
a young woman who is literally everybody’s fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language – even muscle memory – for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments – or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo’s burgeoning self-awareness ….
(More info here. Conical hat tip to William Gillis.)
Hmm, this plot sounds a lot like the “Lila” story in the first issue of Jack Kirby’s OMAC: One Man Army Corps:
Now that’s a disturbing image.
Lila was a robot – one of a series – who was sold purportedly as a sex toy but who was actually programmed to assassinate the buyer. She seemed to be developing the beginnings of an independent personality when OMAC, who had been romantically interested in her, found out she was a robot, freaked out, and destroyed her along with all the other robots. At least that’s how I remember it – haven’t read that comic in years.
Tonight on the news I heard this same old argument again: “If minors need parental permission to have their ears pierced, shouldn’t they have to get parental permission in order to have an abortion?”
The assumption underlying this argument is clearly that if it’s okay to require parental permission in the case of something as relatively insignificant as ear piercing, it must be even more justified to require such permission in the case of abortion – as though the case for requiring parental consent were stronger for abortion than for ear piercing.
But surely the asymmetry goes precisely the other way. I don’t know what I think about requiring parental consent for ear-piercing – I haven’t given it much thought – but clearly no great harm is done to a child when parents refuse to allow ear-piercing, and so requiring parental consent in that instance, whether justified or not, is not especially burdensome to the child. But to force an underage girl to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term can ruin her life – to say nothing of the “merely” physical pain and danger involved. In brief: preventing one’s daughter from having an abortion counts as child abuse; preventing her from getting her ears pierced does not. Hence even if requiring paternal permission in the case of ear-piercing is legitimate, requiring parental permission in the case of abortion is not.
(Of course there’s the further nasty fact that in all too many instances the father of the pregnant girl is also the father, by incestuous rape, of her foetus, in which case requiring her to get her father’s consent is especially obscene. Anti-abortion websites dismiss this argument, trumpeting the statistic that incest results in pregnancy in only about one percent of cases. Some pro-choice websites list a much higher statistic, but suppose the lower figure is correct; it seems to show an astonishing callousness to dismiss that “one percent” as a small number. If one percent of all anti-abortion activists were being thrown off Beachy Head into the English Channel and then buried, I reckon it would seem like a large enough percentage then.)