Macro Debaters Have Been Found

All set now for Thursday, which is gonna rule.  More details tonight, blood-alcohol level permitting.

Labor Unions, Jimmy Stewart's Yeti, and Other Animals

Whether you’re returning to school or taking a long Labor Day weekend away from the assembly line, you should watch out this weekend’s Freedom Watch, which, with its education and union themes, pits libertarian Bob Bowdon against tough public education defender Diane Ravitch — and features Lew Rockwell on the gold in Ft. Knox (an issue raised by Rep. Ron Paul earlier this week), as well as Newt Gingrich (recently lambasted by Sen. Tom Coburn) and more.

And watching Machete this weekend in honor of disgruntled migrant laborers might not be such a bad idea.  Hmmm.

Speaking of Latino culture, this video of an astonishing merengue-dancing dog was pointed out by a bespectacled, market-savvy colleague who probably wouldn’t want to be named in connection with it, though her watchful eye is appreciated.

In other animals news, this may be my favorite sentence from any article this week:

A federal judge on Friday ordered mental health treatment for Mazzola as new terms of his probation sentence after pleading guilty in 2009 to transporting a bear to Toledo and selling a skunk without a license.

On a similar historical note, I was baffled to learn that Jimmy Stewart smuggled an alleged yeti hand out of India after its theft from a Buddhist monastery.  That sort of makes him an Indiana Jones villain (though reports suggest the next Jones film, presumably set in the 1960s, will deal with the Bermuda Triangle — I say Spielberg should throw in a great white shark, an island full of dinosaurs, and some cagey space alien visitors while he’s at it, cuz who knows what they’ve got in that Triangle).

Not a Bad Way to Go

You may by now have heard the story of the Jet Blue flight attendant at a New York airport who, after being bumped on the head by luggage, unleashed an angry tirade on the P.A. system, said he was leaving the job after decades, grabbed a beer, and exited the plane down an emergency slide, causing helicopters and police to appear, apprehending him.  If a stylish exit is a crime, surely he is guilty.

The Four Fandoms

Covering all four sturdy legs of the Todd Seavey philosophical table:

•Dave Whitney recommends punk-friendly MUSIC review site MarkPrindle.com.

•Jacob Levy recommends a site about COMIC BOOKS that depict punk.

•Helen Rittelmeyer notes that one of her friends, Leah Libresco, is blogging about being an ATHEIST dating a Catholic (the reverse of Helen’s own highly-enjoyable situation, of course).

•And I should urge every LIBERTARIAN to check out my boss’s site and the linked sites thereon (to keep you occupied between the weekend broadcasts on FBN).

But to stay broad-minded (when I’m not arguing with Eric Metaxas or a public relations man for Opus Dei, as I was at a party last week), I organize debates like the one this Thursday on burlesque.  I’m even moderating this one, so join me.

Flag Day vs. Fish Day

I hope it won’t seem unpatriotic if I choose Flag Day to say that it’s been brought to my attention that this photo of the Dutch consul general looks a little like me, at least to the extent you can judge from a funny fish-eating angle.

1,001 Seaveyan Media Activities

Or rather, in this 1,001st blog entry, I hereby announce my plan to use this site henceforth for something more like one weekly essay — and, to compensate, by 2010’s end, I hope to be focused on this Top Ten Things To Do list of expanded media activities:

•TV news writer/producer (the real job, in so far as TV is real, starting April 19)
•An essay in a major upcoming conservative anthology book
•If that’s well received, a real book (or at least a pitch)
•Twitter (forgive me, with tweets daily — punk- or politics-related, lyrical, and, yes, grammatical)
•Facebook (avec moi et mes amis, le deluge — I have long avoided any electronic social networking, so don’t be fooled by that other entry with my name and the URL containing 100000229244383 on Facebook, which is not me)
•Much shorter blog entries here, except for roughly weekly long ones including the book reviews and ongoing announcements of…
•…the monthly Debates at Lolita Bar (including our rare field trips away from the bar, as on Cinco de Mayo May Day 2010, when I hope to read a Rand speech at Columbia)
•The separate monthly gatherings of the Manhattans Project, now at Langan’s (join us) — and spelled slightly differently
•Another comic book script, too long delayed (my apologies to my patient collaborator)
•And, in time, podcasts.

If all of that leaves me a burnt-out shell of a man who gets bad about returning e-mails, remember all that I’m juggling (and be grateful I don’t have kids or any normal hobbies).

Rand Prelude, 100 Cheesiest Film Quotes, plus Phantom Menace

You know, a libertarian novelist friend of mine is visiting the City, and it’s sort of amusing timing, since tomorrow sees the start of my “Month of Ayn Rand.”  The friend is arty and subtle; Rand, notoriously, was not.  My friend will probably have to spend a substantial portion of her life saying “but not like Ayn Rand.”

But as I’ll explain in more detail in February, I think people sometimes judge Rand too harshly not only philosophically but in the aesthetics department as well.  Consider, after all, the several factors she was attempting to juggle in writing Atlas Shrugged: novel as extended philosophical argument, novel as depiction of an entire economy, novel as broad array of socially-intertwined characters in (unsurprisingly, given her childhood) a rather Russian fashion, and perhaps novel as an attempt (by an awed immigrant) to capture the broad-strokes romanticism she’d seen in the Hollywood movies that drew her to America.  Atlas could have turned out a lot stiffer than it did, really.

And as a reminder that even some very fondly remembered Hollywood films are not exactly works of subtlety, here’s a video montage of “The 100 Cheesiest Film Quotes” — don’t be shocked if some of your favorite films are in there (NOTE: This is unrelated to parody lounge singer Richard Cheese’s offer of free CDs to troops, which he dubs Operation: Cheesey Freedom).

•••

You’ll see at least one scene from Attack of the Clones in there, and if the past eleven years have numbed the childhood-destroying pain of Phantom Menace enough, maybe you can take some pleasure from a series of videos wittily — but quite accurately and devastatingly — explaining why Phantom Menace was a manifestly awful film that cannot hold a candle to the simple but effective movie-making of which George Lucas was capable a decade and a half earlier.  The first installment contrasts the strong characters of the 70s/80s films with — well, the crap from the 90s/00s that we’re still bitter about.  My thanks to Paul Taylor and Scott Nybakken for pointing out the critical videos, even with all the pain and anger they bring back.

Writer and radio commentator John Hodgman poignantly admitted that he still lies awake at night sometimes trying to imagine how Menace could be fixed, even though what he’s really trying in vain to fix is his shattered childhood hopes.  One friend with whom I saw Menace on opening day cried afterwards, it was so awful.  She had used one of her “floating religious holidays” from work to see it with the proper air of reverence and was betrayed by her gods.

Comics editor Dan Raspler warned me after Phantom Menace not to hold out any hope that things would get better in the remaining two films (though I thought Revenge of the Sith was OK — unlike Kyle Smith, a professional film critic, whose first words as the credits rolled were “That sucked!”).  Dan noted that even though Anakin is supposed to be destined to become Darth Vader, Lucas never even found time in the first prequel to show Anakin having, say, a perverse fascination with evil.  As Dan warned, and he wasn’t far wrong: We’re not going to see an interesting psychological evolution — the Emperor’s just going to suck all of Anakin’s goodness out with a lightning bolt and “put it into an egg” or something.  As Dan also lamented, “Couldn’t he at least have had the kid look at Darth Maul with envy and say ‘Hey, nice boots’?”

Dan went on to watch a bootleg “improved” version of Menace once, in which fans made tweaks such as replacing Jar Jar’s stupid voice with a normal one, but to Dan’s credit, he still stood up and turned off the movie halfway through, asking his friend: Why do this to ourselves?  It’s still awful.

A New Year, a New Bar

I just discovered the bar/restaurant Fetch not far north of me in Yorkville (the less well-known name for what lies north of the Upper East Side), and I liked it.  I ate some very tasty dish involving a bowl full of hamburger, rice, string fries, and fried egg (much needed after awaking too late for lunch yesterday, sleeping until slightly after noon due to New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day karaoke that ended up lasting until 4am, during which I had the chance to do both “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and “Pretty in Pink” in front of a friend who looks enough like Molly Ringwald that Ringwald was once mistaken for her — perhaps a fitting high note on which to exit and find a new performance-based pastime).

The nice-seeming bartender at Fetch was able to converse with Mexican barbacks in Spanish and with elderly customers in English about Voltaire and Mark Twain.  The walls were festooned with cute dog photos and the promise to hang any framed photos brought in of customers’ dogs.  And they have a mission statement devoted not only to good food and a friendship-fostering environment but to perpetual promotion of customer happiness and to finding homes for stray animals.

Not that I need a mission statement to embrace a bar — I would be unnerved to learn Lolita (where I host monthly debates) or Merchants (where I host a monthly social gathering of political junkies) had mission statements, unless I wrote them — but in combination, all the above things made me feel the place was at least making a good effort.  See you in one or more of these establishments — or Dresner’s across from me on York Avenue — in the new year.

A Connecticut Christmas Menagerie

It seems like every time I visit my parents in Norwich, CT, my once-harmless hometown has some new menacing species harassing everyone’s pet cats or even dogs.

We worried about nothing of that sort when I was a kid, then came Lyme-carrying deer ticks, coyotes, a bear or two, and the recent plague of wild turkeys, plus a couple skunks, the animal my mother fears most. Recently, my parents casually mentioned keeping the cats indoors now to keep them away from the fisher cat across the road, a species of three-foot-long predator related to the marten that I’m not even sure I ever heard of before (Nybakken blames anti-hunting laws and environmentalists, usually a wise move). Here’s a fisher cat, just so you’ll be unfazed if you see this out the living room window.

And there really has been a program to reintroduce them, leading to recent pest complaints in New England, says Wiki. — though this is not quite as annoying as flying grizzly bears into my friend Holly’s mom’s neighborhood in Montana via government helicopter, which she was understandably perturbed about several years ago.

Indoors at the Seavey home, things remain fairly tranquil, though my parents’ dog Jaycie seems to be neurologically degenerating in some way that causes her to wander around until she reaches a corner and then stand staring into it.

The game-theoretical situation with the three cats is at its usual stand-off: Elder cat Meow avoids dark and lanky Pepper, but she enjoys giving objects to Pepper’s brother Salty and then watching him go berserk with them. Indeed, Salty particularly enjoys putting things in shoes, whereas Pepper enjoys dropping them into water. It is therefore crucial on any visit home to be careful when putting one’s shoes on or when raising the toilet lid.

Earthlink Lame, Space Program Debatable

Earthlink (or some subset of it) was down from shortly after noon (Eastern time) today until at least 5pm, and it may still be screwed up.  I think e-mails sent to me (at least during that time) disappeared completely.  They may still be disappearing.

For this week at least, best to use my work address at ACSH, which you can find easily enough by Googling, so I won’t post it here for the junk-mailing masses.

Not only is Earthlink “down,” so is our Lolita Bar debate moderator, Michel Evanchik, he says, at least a bit, so I say show up en masse at our debate there tomorrow (Wed., Dec. 2, 8pm) at 266 Broome St. (on whether to abolish NASA, with Greg Rehmke arguing yes and Ken Silber arguing no) and remind him how much we all appreciate his Socratic-Falstaffian efforts.

This may redound to your benefit in more ways than one, since it may improve the spiritedness of the debate and, since he’s also my webmaster, it may rouse him to remove the hidden html hacker-ads recently slipped stealthily into this site.

Yes, between my e-mail, my site, my webmaster/moderator, and other things we don’t have time to go into, things are just about shot to hell here at ToddSeavey.com.  I almost find myself wishing NASA ran Earthlink, for one thing, and that goes against my core principles.  We can discuss that tomorrow, though.

Next week, I will write at least one entry that is actually on this blog’s ostensible theme of “conservatism for punks,” though, just to make up for the lameness.  Be there.

Liberalism Disarms, Husband Kills, Soccer Mom

A note from the decidedly non-utopian real world we inhabit: I’m sure the leftward spin on this tragic story will be that a gun-toting soccer mom died by means of the same sort of weaponry she favored packing, live by the sword, die by the sword (though that expression should perhaps be reserved for stories like this one).  The sanity-ward spin, though, should be that a sheriff, by revoking her carry permit, left her disarmed, allowing her violent husband to murder her (and then, to the world’s relief, to kill himself).  Every liberal who would disarm potential victims bears some guilt in allowing such things to happen.

A Pause for Dingleberries

I didn’t quite get around to writing the entry I intended on Bernanke and Keynes having pro-market supporters, but here in the interim is a link to the fascinating Wiktionary page on the word “dingleberry,”* which has some surprising uses.

*Come to think of it, I suppose I should dedicate this lexicographical blog entry to the late William Safire.

Student with Samurai Sword Slays Intruder

I hope the left won’t react to this story with a call for a samurai sword ban to combat the “climate of sword violence” in Baltimore. We can’t know the details with certainty, but for me, all political and economic thinking basically starts with whether you recognize our right to fight intruders. That’s a right not only older than modern political philosophy but arguably a right that pre-existed homo sapiens. Dogs intuitively grasped and defended that right for us millennia before anti-gun types started concocting arguments against it. And dogs are often right.

A Seavey Bibliography I Never Made

I should have mentioned when I plugged The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging a few months ago that I’m quoted in it as calling “I don’t know” the three most important words in the language.  (And they are, you know.)

But in the interests of full disclosure, here is the list of all the books in which I am cited or at least thanked, per Amazon’s search function (seventeen books in all).

By no means are all the citations positive, I should note.  In the case of the ever so slightly negative-sounding Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy, I am apparently described as part of “the Wise Use group in the United States,” perhaps a specific organization I’ve never heard of or, since it’s from a passage about tobacco, maybe a catch-all term for people who wish taxes and fines taken from tobacco companies were put to health-enhancing uses, which is not exactly my mission either, but whatever.  Maybe it just means I think smokeless tobacco is safer than smoked tobacco, which is a perfect statement of fact (and a very important one, for public health purposes, as we often note at ACSH) but is nonetheless scandalous heresy for a surprising number of ostensibly intelligent public health types.

Without further ado, I give you Todd Seavey:

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging by The editors of the Huffington Post and Arianna Huffington (Paperback – Dec 2, 2008)

Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair (American History Through Music) by James E. Perone (Hardcover – Jan 30, 2005)

The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City by Kat Long (Paperback – Mar 1, 2009)

Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York by L.B. Deyo and David Leibowitz (Paperback – Jul 22, 2003)

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark R. Levin (Hardcover – Mar 24, 2009)

The I Hate Corporate America Reader: How Big Companies from McDonald’s to Microsoft Are Destroying Our Way of Life (The “I Hate” Series) by Clint Willis and Nate Hardcastle (Paperback – Dec 19, 2004)

What to Do When You Don’t Want to Call the Cops: or A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment (A Cato Institute book) by Joan Taylor (Hardcover – Oct 1, 1999)

Made in America: The Most Dominant Champion in UFC History by Matt Hughes and Michael Malice (Hardcover – Jan 1, 2008)

The End of Food by Paul Roberts (Hardcover – Jun 4, 2008)

Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media… by John Stossel (Hardcover – Jan 20, 2004)

Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty (Hardcover – Feb 12, 2007)

Selling the Dream: Why Advertising Is Good Business by John M. Hood (Paperback – Sep 29, 2008)

Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy by William Dinan and David Miller (Paperback – Jun 20, 2007)

Overheard in New York UPDATED: Conversations from the Streets, Stores, and Subways by S. Morgan Friedman and Michael Malice (Paperback – Feb 5, 2008)

Digital Culture: Understanding New Media by Glen Creeber and Royston Martin (Paperback – Dec 1, 2008)

State of the World 2003 by Worldwatch Institute and The Worldwatch Institute (Hardcover – Jan 2003)

Hong Kong at the Handover by Bruce Herschensohn (Textbook Binding – April 26, 2000)

Collect them all.  Let us hope I can at least continue my rate of approximately one book mention per year of my post-college life.

"Avatar" vs. "District 9”

Last night, I saw the fifteen minutes of IMAX 3D teaser footage from James Cameron’s Avatar (the full film due out in December), and I fear Cameron has a $237 million bomb on his hands.

Not that it was bad, really, but it’s aiming so high, the hype’s already so big, and the end result is really just another one of those “guys-in-loincloths fight to save the rain forest and ride dangerous beasts” movies that you expect to be rated G and see for sale from some not-quite-Disney company at the checkout counter, except it’s ostensibly on another planet (and has some Cameron-style space marines thrown in). But it feels less like an alien world and more like whatever mythical rain forest the aforementioned not-Disney movies took place in.

And despite all the advanced computer animation, the fact that the humanoids look like nine-foot blue cartoon jungle men — and the animals look pretty much like triceratops and pterodactyls — leaves one still feeling as unsurprised and unengaged as if watching a videogame. I was reminded of the depressing detachment I felt while watching the Gungans fight the Trade Federation droids in Phantom Menace ten years ago, and no comparison to Phantom Menace can be a good sign (except in constructions such as “That South Park episode with the talking otters worked far better as a sci-fi epic than Phantom Menace did!”).

I took far greater pleasure Sunday in District 9 — and even in watching the short film it sprang from. I hope it inspires more intelligent sci-fi films. I’ve heard some conservatives were annoyed by District 9 because it so openly wants us to analogize the plight of the aliens to that of poor black South Africans — but I think this movie might be a coalition-splitter in a good way. Libertarians and paleos will enjoy seeing the film criticize the way that well-meaning custodians of a subject populace inevitably become inept, authoritarian managers with little understanding of the locals, even when the locals are themselves less than noble. And the action felt far more convincing than most sci-fi. I for one look forward to the sequels.

(Mainstream conservatives probably ought to hail District 9 as subtly pro-life anyway. The scene in which alien babies are burned before hatching was probably the most disturbing filmic depiction of abortion since, well, The Suckling — and written with far greater subtlety than that ludicrous pro-choice propaganda film The Ciderhouse Rules.)

Regrettably, I was busy Thursday night and had to pass up an invitation to see the MST3K guys mock Plan 9 from Outer Space live, which would have meant I could say that all in one week I saw District 9, Plan 9, and scenes from a film that’s probably going to lose a lot more money than Plan 9 did.

Still, if treated as a mere animation-assisted amusement park ride for kids, Avatar could end up delighting people in much the same way Jurassic Park (which I also found a bit boring at the time) did. In both cases, kids may even come away with the opposite message from the one intended by the environmentalist writers: Kids may see Avatar and dream of intervening in alien ecosystems and cultures, just as you know they came away from Jurassic Park’s anti-biotech, anti-science monologues in 1993 thinking, “Aw, man, we can make realistic dinosaurs with computers! Awesome!” And so, as in the days of hypocritical Victorian readers of lurid gothic novels, culture continues its dialectical, drunkenly lurching march.

CIA/Cheney Note

I just wanna say what all my smarter readers are thinking: Cheney and the CIA were plotting to kill al Qaeda leaders?  Secretly?!  An outrage!  Thank goodness the Democrats are putting a stop to that.

Yeah, civilization’s gonna be just fine.

Let the Radicalism Begin

I know what many of you are thinking: that I’ve been too moderate, often too kind — that my blog entries have sometimes been too long, perhaps too thoughtful. Well, that ends today.

Oh, I’m not saying there won’t be the occasional longish essay, but it’s a fast-moving world, and perhaps I can accomplish more with quickly spat-out observations — like snippets of punk lyrics, if you will — several times a day. I’ll try that, anyway (though I’ll dedicate this transitional longish entry to the late Mary Lou Forbes of the Washington Times, who so often helped my co-workers with op-eds done the traditional way).

With tonight (and perhaps you) seeing both a massive Tea Party rally in Times Square against government spending (which is where I think the bulk of our ire and activism has to be focused at this juncture in history, regardless of prior philosophical allegiances and emphases) at 6:30pm — and shortly thereafter at 8pm our Debate at Lolita Bar on the related question “Is America Economically Doomed?” — today is a perfect breakpoint for this necessary stylistic transition.

(It’s not clear I’m unfairly skewing the debate crowd in a “doomed” direction by encouraging Tea Party types to join us, since reminding people about the Tea Party may also draw such people away from our debate toward Times Square, where they may well be trapped for hours, given all the security and barricades that are likely, leaving only Obama supporters to attend the debate.)

If I’ll be spouting more frequent opinions, it’s only fair I encourage more frequent comments — and that I promise not to dismiss or combat every reader comment I disagree with. None of this, by the way, means that I’ve ceased to share Daniel Radosh’s fears — which I’m glad plenty of smart people I know feel — about where this all may be headed, namely Twitter-sized bites being the default communications mode. I worry in particular that no one will ever again change his mind on any important philosophical topics if we are effectively reading essays that could fit on pieces of confetti instead of detailed analyses.

And what will the Twitter generation in turn fear as this process accelerates still more in the future? A coming age of one-word conversations? Telepathically-transmitted emoticons without language at all, as my ironically-named media studies professor friend Read Schuchardt sometimes fears? How much choppier can discourse get? Is philosophy over? Is linear thought?

In any case, recognizing where things are trending, I’m going to try to get slightly ahead of the process while retaining some of the virtues of the past, instead of being completely sidelined. Engagement over sclerosis — even while remaining, to put it mildly, a late-adapter in so many ways. As I’ve noted before, I have no cell phone, no TV reception, no social networking sites memberships or history of Meet-Ups use, no Twitter account, no Netflix account, and nothing at home faster than a dial-up Net connection, and for now at least things will stay that way (entries that post during East Coast work hours will almost invariably have been written earlier to appear during the day, I should note, so perhaps sooner or later you’ll see an obsolete prediction, but then we’ll all have a fun “Dewey Beats Truman” moment).

If all this works well enough, the stylistically-altered blog may replace many previously hinted-at plans including the long-delayed book (the planned title of which, the slogan atop this blog, may seem increasingly ironic if the times demand a more radical, mutated philosophy to go with the changing times), but we’ll just see how it goes. I’m not ruling anything out. I just want to keep things fluid and flexible — like the future itself. You can chat with me about it the old-fashioned way tonight at Lolita Bar, of course.

Ursa vs. Motti (plus Evil-Lyn, Cat People, and Blade Runner)

Excellent nerd-film romance note: Sarah Douglas (who played Kryptonian villainess Ursa, the woman who slammed Superman in the gut with a thrown manhole cover after saying “Oh, Superman” in a delightfully taunting fashion in Superman II, possibly turning a lot of young nerds into dominatrix fans in the process and maybe inspiring the career of Laurie Anderson to boot) was briefly married to the actor who played Motti, the arrogant, Force-mocking guy who got briefly choked-from-afar by Vader during that meeting on the Death Star. Pretty S&M all around, really (as is this online Japanese videogame mentioned by Memepool, by the way, in which you get to be Victorian ladies having a slapfight — something reminiscent of the great Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age about it, or maybe China Mieville, given the S&M).

Sidenote: two years ago while being interviewed by Conan O’Brien, George Lucas claimed that that character is now officially named Admiral Conan Antonio Motti. Good for Conan. That’s right up there with being that guy who was supposed to play a stormtrooper in the first movie (along with his brother) but missed the shoot and got digitally inserted twenty years later for the re-releases.

Maybe trying to be an extra in the upcoming live-action TV series would be a productive use of my time. But if so, I want my name to be something like Viceroy Spiddoon. (I also want lightnunchuks. Has anyone had lightnunchuks yet? NOTE: Ah, it appears no one will be wielding lightnunchuks legally in New York state, thanks in part to Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor.)

•••

Douglas was considered, understandably, for the role of Evil-Lyn in the Masters of the Universe movie (which was heavily influenced by Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics), but the role ended up being played by ubiquitous and eerily grey-eyed actress Meg Foster, who’s played everyone from the original Cagney at the outset of Cagney & Lacey to a brain-energy-sucking muse on Deep Space Nine, not to mention Hester Prynne in a 1979 PBS production of The Scarlet Letter that I recall making me think, “Wow, that lady has eerily grey eyes, kind of like a wolf — cool.”

I’ll take that any day over the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor — whose appeal I have never fully understood, though women all seem to think she’s astounding. Is it just because Taylor has a very tiny waist? Women just aren’t qualified to appreciate the full complexities and possibilities of the female form, alas. But then, I admit I’m not fully qualified to understand, for example, why Jimmy Smits is such a big deal. (I don’t think it’s just because he played Leia’s dad, important though that obviously is.)

•••

Likewise, I remember all the girls in my English class in high school failing to understand why Nastassja Kinski was so popular with the fellas, whereas I still regard it as something like a miracle that regular broadcast Channel 38 out of Boston used to show Cat People with the nudity intact in the scene where Kinski is strapped to the bed. The 80s was really a lot more permissive in many ways than the 00s.

If I ever claim not to understand why Nastassja Kinski is considered attractive, treat me as if I’ve just failed a Voight-Kampff Test and act appropriately. Even stoics and sociopaths should be able to pass a Voight-Kampff Test, after all. (Come to think of it, aren’t spam filters basically a daily exercise in applied Turing Tests?) Oddly enough, the Voight-Kampff Test, which ought to be a rather cold procedure, supplied us with perhaps the sexiest line in sci-fi history: Sean Young saying “Are these questions testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?” As neo-noir interrogation scenes go, right up there with the intense psycho-turnabout in Basic Instinct. The real lesson in all this: beware robotic bisexual women with no emotional reaction to roadkill.

P.S. In other nerd-film couple news, the site Newsarama noted that if Scarlett Johansson plays superheroine Black Widow in next year’s Iron Man sequel as planned, she’ll be half a Marvel-assassin household because her husband’s the guy who played Deadpool in Wolverine. That’s cool, and it’ll be even cooler if the Iron Man sequel doesn’t suck.

A Dozen Important Old Links, A Half-Dozen New Links

I mentioned last week that this blog’s been fully active for about two years. In that time, I’ve done eight “theme” months, each a month of blog entries all on a single topic. Here’s a handy table of contents of those extra-focused blog entries:

•The Month Without God

•The Month Without Buckley

•The Month of the Nerd (the first of two, about which, more below)

•The Month of Sex

•The Month of Horror

•The Month of Feminism

•The Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)

•The Month of Evolution

And coming in just a couple months, a ninth and tenth theme month: this May’s just gotta be “Month of the Nerd II” (I’d count the reasons, but we’ll wait until then), and June will be a perhaps overdue “Month of Rock n’ Roll.”

Then, too, don’t forget all my monthly Book Selections and our monthly Debates at Lolita Bar. And the autobiographical Retro-Journal — no, never forget the Retro-Journal. Nor my real job.

Some more recent links of interest, though:

•My Watchmen review last week was mentioned on Kyle Smith’s blog and in his New York Post column this past Sunday. My thanks to another movie reviewer I know, Meghan Keane, for getting me into the screening. And…

•…thanks to J.R Taylor for getting me into that bawdy PETA event mentioned in passing in my review — which makes up for taking me along to that terrible horror movie, The Unborn, by David Goyer, one of the (apparently unreliable) guys behind The Dark Knight and Dark City. Maybe The Unborn was some piece of crap script he wrote back when he was in college and dusted off after his other successes. Stinko. J.R. agreed — and he knows good genre stuff when he sees it, as shown by his blog’s reviews of stuff like this slightly un-p.c. episode of the Superman animated series.

•Speaking of un-p.c. animation, here’s a great Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1940s (the animation era that the Superman cartoon J.R. describes is imitating), defending capitalism against radical detractors, which I noted two years ago (after Alina Stefanescu and Katherine Mangu-Ward mentioned it) but mention again now because the libertarian Moving Picture Institute noted it last week — and just because the world needs it.

•If that cartoon is a bit too earnest for you, though, maybe you’d prefer this perfect parody of what Watchmen would have been like if turned into a kid-friendly animated series back in the 80s, pointed out to me by both Dan Raspler (victor in last week’s Debate at Lolita Bar) and Jacob Levy, formerly maintainer of the Phantom Stranger webpage.

•But if I could time travel and produce media from an imaginary alternate timeline, perhaps the most useful thing to do would be to create an alternate universe in which fifty years ago Ayn Rand challenged the liberal media establishment by arguing the case for capitalism against someone like Mike Wallace, the now ninety-year-old Sixty Minutes correspondent. No, wait — that actually happened, back in 1959, as pointed out to me by co-worker Jeff Stier. So things should be OK by now. Or we’ll just have to try harder and this time stay on message: property yes, government spending and regulation no (and speaking of strong capitalist women, here’s a sad bonus link: terrible news about Martha Stewart’s dog and an explosion).

The "God of the Gaps," Political-Philosophy-Style

One curse of being substantially smarter than the average person but not wanting to flaunt it — due to being genuinely kind, of course — is frequently realizing you’ve been overly generous, by too hastily assuming other people know what the hell’s going on. Contact with said other people, then, can sometimes be very disillusioning.

Take one’s fellow libertarians, for example. After being steeped in the philosophy for a couple decades, it’s easy to carelessly assume that nearly all libertarians have grappled with — and presumably seen through — the most obvious, PoliSci 101-type counterarguments to the creed they ostensibly treat as their moral and political foundation (except in so far as the deeper bedrock is, say, utilitarianism, as in my case). What have they been doing with their spare time if they haven’t confronted counterarguments, after all?

Just the other night, alas, I encountered someone who has, in essence, been a professional libertarian, so to speak, in years past yet now seems to think that the whole idea of basing a philosophy on property is thrown into doubt (apparently requiring some other “culturally”-dictated source of legal legitimacy altogether) by mere areas of inevitable ambiguity in property law (ambiguities that would exist whether a law code were libertarian or identical to the law code we have now, I should add), such as setting noise-pollution levels or deciding whether an odor is bad enough to warrant an injunction.

I’m stating the argument much more briefly but more clearly than it was put at the time, as a service to the reader — a service more people ought to render in speaking as well, rather than rapidly tossing out half-formed ideas, as the most careless and shallow thinkers are prone to do, treating argument as a sort of performance art aimed at one-upmanship instead of truth-seeking, though alcohol consumption at parties is an understandable partial excuse for all people engaged in such conversations (whereas enjoying game-like one-upmanship for its own sake is not and tends to be something done by bullshitters and other intellectually-dishonest types, as well as people who just like hearing themselves talk, rarely the genuinely intellectually curious, a more patient lot).

•••

Of course, even the most diehard anarcho-capitalist tomes, such as David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom, have analyzed ambiguities such as noise pollution at length, so it’s not as if anarcho-capitalists are shying away from them, let alone completely unaware of them (except maybe some of the ones I bump into at parties).

Though there is a variety of ways of dealing with such ambiguities, including leaving them to decentralized common-law court decisions, there’s (a) no reason to junk the whole system because of them (anymore than Hitler’s election all by itself should persuade democracy advocates to completely abandon democracy as a source of political legitimacy, though I might argue there are other reasons) and (b) no good reason to think that such solutions as people come up with, though they may vary, will necessarily vary in ways that are richly culturally determined (or to put it another way, strongly correlated with culture) so as to alter the very basis of the law code itself (culture over property, say, or culture over pragmatic utility).

That is, just because hypothetical future Jordanian libertarians decide to deal with the ambiguities by convening an annual legislature-like council, whereas hypothetical future Irish libertarians go the common-law courts route, doesn’t necessarily mean any substantially culture-rich element has even been introduced into law (their differing choices may not have even had much to do with the ostensible moral wellsprings of the local cultures). Similarly, ornithologists engaged in counting birds in different parts of the world may pick different methods of resolving ambiguities about what counts as a newly-observed plumage pattern, but it is entirely likely that, say, the method picked in Japan will have nothing distinctively Shinto about it and that the method picked in India will have nothing distinctively Hindu about it. They may just pick arbitrarily different numbers of colors as the hurdles for distinctiveness, say.

(I’m sure it’s already the case that both Jordanian and Japanese land surveyors face occasional uncertainty about where even something as clear-cut as a land property line lies, not for political reasons but merely because surveying land can be tricky, but there’s little reason to believe you’d even be able to tell which method for resolving such disputes was used where if you read their respective instruction manuals, just as science texts of sufficient complexity sound nearly the same all over.)

•••

But people with some agenda — an axe to grind whether political, religious, or aesthetic — are usually plenty eager to pounce on any perceived ambiguity (usually with a tone suggesting they discovered the ambiguity themselves) and suggest that the solution is (surprise!) the wholesale importation of whatever philosophical cure-all they’re pushing.

The notorious “God of the gaps” leaps up to “solve” every uncertainty in science, social democracy or unlibertarian “cultural norms” lie in wait for any problem in property law not so clear-cut as to be solved in one short sentence, linguistics majors ratchet up and down their standards for terminological exactness as their own argumentative needs require, and lawyers are more than happy to see you head to court anytime you realize that you and your business partner have poorly worded one inconsequential phrase in a long contract.

So many of these problems could be avoided if people would calm down, be a bit less eager to portray themselves as poking novel holes in theories that have been battered and remained standing numerous times since before they were born, and stop thinking that if they zigzag rapidly through a conversation they’re likely to settle age-old questions in five minutes of cocktail chatter that have already been dealt with numerous times in dry, encyclopedic tomes without eureka-like resolutions (don’t act like you’re immanentizing the eschaton, as some wise and cautious conservatives like to say, when you may simply be arriving late to the conversation wired from too much coffee).

And lest it sound like I’m complaining unduly about my (genuinely beloved) fellow libertarians, who are hardly the worst offenders in all this, let me just add that I’m about ready to strangle the next liberal (though he no doubt means well too, of course) whose eyes light up as if he thinks he’s thought of one I’ve never heard before and says, smugly, “There’s one thing you’re forgetting: What about the poor?!” (Of course, these days, with everyone from Wall Streeters to Afghanis on the dole in some sense, the focus on the poor seems to be getting watered down a bit, for good or ill. Sigh.)

By contrast, I have some nice things to say about Bobby Jindal tomorrow, on the eve of his official GOP State of the Union response speech.