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Fugitive and Cloistered

By on December 31, 2009 6
detail from unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters

detail from unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters

I’m back from New York, which was fun (though, toward the end, unusually cold). Our IP session went well, and later that day Charles and I had a good time being interviewed by Darian Worden, Tennyson McCalla, and Bile of Thinking Liberty, and hanging out with them afterward. I also went with friends to see the Cloisters, which was really beautiful.

I had excellent meals at Barney Greengrass and Pastis, a pretty good meal at Evergreen, and an absolutely dreadful meal at the Heavenly Bamboo Pavilion.

Now I need to start preparing for classes and my Phoenix trip.

In other news, Robert Wicks has a great post (CHT Manuel Lora) on the lessons to be drawn from the Case of the Underpants Bomber.

In still other news, you gotta love this euphemistic description: “a fatal shooting that involved officers” (I’ll leave it to you to guess the nature of the police officers’ “involvement.”)

Best wishes to all for a happy and stateless new year!

Thinking Like a State

By on December 26, 2009 77

What solved the problem in yesterday’s terror attack? A passenger getting out of his seat to tackle the terrorist.

So what’s the government’s plan for handling such problems in the future? Putting more restrictions on passengers’ freedom to get out of their seats.

A People’s History of Pandora, Part 2

By on December 22, 2009 16

Libertarians are divided on Avatar (which I haven’t seen yet); check out Peter Suderman, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, David Kramer, and Lester Hunt.

Lester writes, inter alia:

What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices. Office Depot doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Dell Inc don’t either.

So in the comments section I responded:

I can’t think of many businesses that engage in those particular practices all on their own. But I can think of plenty of businesses that have either gotten governments to engage in those practices on their behalf (examples range from the East India Company to the United Fruit/Brands Company) or have themselves engaged in those practices on some government’s behalf (e.g. Blackwater, DynCorp).

A People’s History of Pandora

By on December 15, 2009 4

Apparently the statist Right is exercised because Avatar is an “America-hating, PC revenge fantasy,” a “thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War.” So hey, another reason to see it.

The Thin Blue Line That Protects Us From Canadian Science Fiction Writers

By on December 13, 2009 3

Peter Watts writes:

If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.

police brutality

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.

But that is not this universe.

CHT Ken MacLeod and William Grigg. Updates here. To help Watts, see PayPal and snailmail donation info here. To ensure it never happens again, smash the state.

I’m Your Venus

By on December 13, 2009 1

The full trailer for Avatar pretty much gives the story away, but that’s okay. I’m excited to see it for a couple of reasons: first, it’s a sympathetic portrayal of resistance to American military imperialism (I don’t know whether these Marines are actually American in the story or whether they’re from a United Earthforce or something, but it doesn’t matter – they clearly represent the American military); and second, this is the closest visual representation I’ve seen to the Venus novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Though this clip seems to draw at least as much from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider novels – which, coincidentally, I was introduced to on the same day as Burroughs’ Venus novels.)

Mike Kaluta's adaptation of PIRATES OF VENUS

Mike Kaluta's adaptation of PIRATES OF VENUS

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