Commentary 9

Random thoughts. Much of it involves history and politics.

• Friedrich von Hayek might know a thing or two about economics, but as a historian he was laughably bad. His comparison of Western European social-security economies to serfdom takes its basis from Russian serfdom, and assumes that Western serfdom arose the same way. Now, aside from that making as much sense as assuming that understanding Hawaiian ahupua'a land-gift is sufficient to an understanding of European feudalism, Russian serfs weren't actually serfs.
  
  Manorialism is a system unique to Western Europe, essentially Roman villa-slavery modified heavily by Celtic culture and the Latin Church. No such thing happened in Russia, which was Slavic-Scandinavian and had a Greek Church. No, the correct translation of what those people were, is thralls—they were Scandinavian slaves, with the protections enjoyed by Byzantine slaves (which are also those of ancient Jewish or colonial Spanish slaves). Serfs proper, on the other hand, were literal second-class citizens, only nominally unfree in the vast majority of social contexts.
  
  (PS. A certain shallow unserious dilettante, debating me, once said that serfs only had the right to use the property they owned, and so they didn't fully own it—but apparently he was unaware that by the same token, those serfs' lords didn't own any property, either. Feudal tenure is not full ownership in the Civil Law sense of the term; the lord, exactly like the serf, cannot, for instance, alienate his holdings.)
• Speaking of inappropriately generalizing from foreign lands, the strange idea (endemic to too much of the American Right) that England has much to say to us (anything more than, say, Japan or France does) is, I think, based solely on a common language. (There is also the matter of us both using common law, although we've both been bastardizing it with swaths of civil law, in different directions.)
  
  Assuming something that happens in Britain will occur in America is basically like Mexico worrying about Basque separatists. It really is long past time both sides of the Atlantic learned a lesson Hilaire Belloc recommended in 1925: Britain and America are foreign countries to each other.
• Science fiction is a fascinating genre. Aside from all the good reasons, is that in few other places do you have completely opposite brands of idiocy in close juxtaposition. I can't think of any other field where the commentary is equally divided between "I will wear a hazmat suit 24-7 lest I contract something deadly!" and "Let's all roll in medical waste!"
  
  Take, for instance, that right next to the people who say we're going to stop having manned military missions—you know, like we stopped dogfighting—you get the people who for some reason seem to think air support will cease to exist. E.g., Firefly; the battle Mal named his ship after doesn't seem to be primarily an affair of Independent anti-air destroying the Alliance's planes and drop-ships and (perhaps) ODST pods, but that's the main way you'd keep them out of that valley.
  
  Admittedly, that's not really a thing of real science fiction writers, so much as of science fiction TV. But since most people never, ever read science fiction anymore, at what point do we have to admit that TV is the real science-fiction now? The debate appears to be approaching the No True Scotsman fallacy.
• Further point against Firefly, and as I mentioned one post back, the people who wrote it seem to think that a spaceship will pretty much work like a van (and its fans think that's a good thing). I'm serious: tell me one way that the Serenity is not basically the Mystery Machine. (You all thought naming those guys "the Scoobies" was a joke, in Buffy—no, that was Whedon acknowledging his chief inspiration.)
  
  Again: if the only heavy machinery you know anything about is a car, you are not qualified to talk about spaceships. I'm not saying you need personal experience, because I haven't got any (hell, I can't even drive). I am saying you need to look up how people behave in contexts remotely comparable to what you're trying to portray, and for space travel, that means astronauts, cosmonauts, space-agency mission control, and submarine crews. It doesn't mean a bunch of hippies wandering around with a van.
  
  Which brings me to the realization that Firefly is not space opera, not really. Nope, it's a post-apocalyptic road-trip show. A bunch of people going around with a van, while being pursued by man-eating mutants and a tinpot banana-republic dictatorship: that's not SF, it's not space opera, it's freaking Barb Wire meets Judge Dredd.
• What's interesting to me is that so many people talk as if, e.g., one is an "alpha male" by leadership within society at large, or some sub-society like business. Similarly they talk as if "herd mentality" and "pack mentality" could be used interchangeably.
  
  But any married man with children is an alpha male; and arguably the only thing in human behavior we can call "pack mentality" is "I'm allowed to talk about my family that way, but you aren't". Plainly people need to take an Ethology 101 course—society is not "the pack", it is a peace treaty between packs, mostly so they don't kill each other over territory.
  
  Interestingly, that's basically the thesis of Rousseau—that the family pre-exists the social contract, its obligations a fundamental part of human nature. Why do people always misrepresent his fundamentally sound reasoning, on this as on so many topics?
• Also, given that the alternative (in our great-ape repertoire) to the nuclear-family pack, "silverback-and-harem", has a lot of non-dominant males that pursue a strategy called "roam and rape", it's no coincidence that most cultures where polygamy is very common, e.g. China or Arabia, are also cultures where women are traditionally escorted everywhere they go.
• Here's something creepy. Know what idea is becoming more and more accepted by the American right? Have some hints. Ayn Rand's "looters vs. producers". Ann Coulter's "Demonic", which borrows its thesis from "The 18 Brumaire of Louis Napoleon". The whole idea that taxation is an intrinsic evil, purely exploitative of the populace.
  
  That's right. Marxism. All those things? Oppression narratives. Hell, Rand's thing is actually about laborers being exploited by a non-laboring class—it doesn't even take the class-war to some field other than economics, the way Beauvoir or the Black Radicals did. Remember when I said Rand was a sleeper agent? Yeah, I'm starting to think I shouldn't have been kidding.
  
  The relevant Nietzsche quote is "He who fights monsters should beware lest he become a monster himself. And when you look long into the void, know that the void looks back into you."
• The interesting thing about "Ancient Aliens" is not the asinine idea that ancient peoples couldn't tie their shoes without alien help. The interesting thing is that they are so damned bad at it. I mean, adamant, the stuff Zeus's thunderbolts are made of? It's associated with diamonds. So how have these Von Däniken fanboys failed to realize they could draw an association with carbon nanotubes?
  
  Then again, I really wanna get in a fight with the "Sumerian mythology records mankind having been engineered as mine-slaves by aliens" school, because, seriously? You do not mine gold on a planet, if you can go into space: it is simply vastly easier to mine stuff like that on asteroids. As I mentioned regarding osmium and iridium, dense metals sink to the center of the body they're in, so they're a lot easier to get from a couple-kilometers-diameter asteroid than from a freaking planet.
• To reboot Star Trek, they shouldn't have rewritten timelines (best take on it, here). They should've started a new one.
  
  Pro tip: instead of the dates being given as Stardates, call the calendar something else. Then, we can use the calendar-system as an easy shorthand for which continuity we're talking about. Admittedly, that is having the second-best scifi-TV franchise ape the first-best. No, wait, third-best—second best is Stargate.