• Given the subject matter, I doubt there will be a single objective review of this film (pun sort of intended) since just about everyone will review the politics and not the movie.
• I think they tried to squeeze too much of the book’s plot into the screenplay, even with three films they still were pushing it, and I think several scenes will come across as unnecessarily cryptic to the uninitiated.
• I think the casting was pretty much spot on.
• I also think the shift to setting the events in the near future was inspired.  It aggressively draws the parallels between the books events and the current state of the country in a way that IMO will probably draw in those viewers who might be unfamiliar with the book’s plot.
• The movie’s a polemic, which is fine because the book was a polemic.
• Judging by the previews I saw with the film, the distributors aren’t quite sure who the audience is. (Independent film about relationships, a Christian movie about fatherhood, an agonizing look at the immolation of Mel Gibson’s movie career?)
• Those who think Ayn Rand as a Medicare recipient is somehow a critique of her philosophy are engaging in the same sort of argument that those on the right use to critique so many people who argue for higher taxes– i.e. Michael Moore is free to cut an extra check to the U.S.Treasury any time he wants.

It’s a crock through and through.

Something as simple as the Nolan Chart starts to give a example of how much more complicated political ideology actually is.  And even that is an oversimplification.  There are way too many different axes of political thought to be confined in even two dimensions; and given the nature of SF, authors are often wont to play with these sliders in worldbuilding, often in combinations that are counter-intuitive.  Here’s a couple of those axes:

conservative <—-> radical

libertarian <—-> collectivist

anarchist <—-> statist

anti-authoritarian <—–> authoritarian

No these are not synonymous.   Top down: first is the attitude toward tradition and social change in general, second is the primacy placed on individual rights in society, third is the role of government in society, and last is the level of trust placed in the elite powers controlling that society.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more that science fiction has taken a bit of a turn to the right. I’ve also seen more than a few reviews lambasting those authors for their views — which seems to matter not a whit to their sales.

So I emailed four of them — two relative newcomers and two legends — and asked why.

The legends, Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card, need no introduction. But it bears mention that Ender’s Game, Card’s best-known work, is on the Commandant of the Marine Corps recommended reading list as a treatise on what it means to be a leader. The newcomers, Lt. Col Tom Kratman (Ret.) and Larry Correia, both write for Baen.

I think its interesting, though I think the post is conflating the ideas of conservatism and the ideas of libertarianism which are not the same thing despite the occasionally overlapping Venn diagram.  I also think there’s really no “trend” insofar that there’s always been a really strong libertarian streak in SF.

However Mr.Card (hailing from the far conservative side of that Venn diagram) does give a quip worthy of William F. Buckley Jr.

“Back when I cared,” he continued, “most of the writers of my generation were so extremely leftist in their formal opinions, and so extremely elitist in their practices, that it would be difficult to discern where they actually stood on anything. It’s as if the entire Tsarist aristocracy fervently preached Bolshevism even as they oppressed their peasants. But that view is based on observations back in the mid-1980s. Since then, my only exposure to their views has been the general boycott of mine. In short,” he said, “I’m their Devil, but I have no idea who their God is anymore.”

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond in the comments says exactly my point:

SF is not a conservative literature at all, but it gets mistaken for one because libertarianism is wired deep into its DNA. In fact, it is structurally *impossible* for SF to be conservative! I have explained this in depth, with references, in my essay A Political History of SF.

The “rightward drift” is SF’s fundamental libertarianism asserting itself as left-wing gatekeepers in the establishment media become less able to suppress it. People who mistake this as a reassertion of conservatism are revealing their own confusion about the ways conservatism and libertarianism are mixed in their thinking.

I might also note that chief among my libertarian friends are a pagan SF author and a long-haired dude who makes guitars for rock bands, while every single progressive I know is pretty much part of the establishment.

Ok, I know that’s not exactly what he was trying to say.  Mr. Wonk here was just arguing that the founding document of this country is open to some measure of judicial interpretation.  Though, it almost appears here that he’s dismissing the use of any legal framework that’s open to such interpretation.  How can any system function with such ambiguity?

I think he’s actually chafing against the constraints of any legal framework at all.  The following quote I think gives a truly frightening view into the mind of Mr. Wonky Wonk Wonk (h/t):

The problem with the Nazis was that they were genocidal white supremacists with an appetite for continental hegemony. To invoke them in order to tar, by association, privatization, or “appeasement,” or socialist policies, or other policies that were not related to their murderous crimes is a noxious debate tactic that should be widely and rapidly condemned

Yeah, that was a clarification he added to a post praising the economic miracle of Nazi Keynesianism, as if their economic policy could be decoupled from their totalitarianism.  If you think that, I have this neat little book for you, and it’s a quick read.  In Mr. Wonkster’s little Fascist brain, if the Nazis just eased up on the death camps and the foreign invasions, they would have been a perfectly fine regime.   It’s like he learned his political philosophy from bad Star Trek episodes.

Needless to say, if if that’s the only thing you find objectionable about the Nazis, you may just have some problem getting the concept of a constitutionally limited government with strictly enumerated powers.

Most of the supporters of the move may be correct in the effect of the proposed rules.  In fact the problem with the FCC has very little to do with exactly what they are attempting to do, even though it is a solution still in search of a problem.  The problem is that the FCC has absolutely no jurisdiction in the area.  The idea that they should be allowed to go forward after both courts and the legislature have said they don’t have the authority just because this particular rule by executive fiat is not that objectionable is absurd and shows a political naïveté that borders on the pathological. After all, what could be wrong with letting executive power do whatever the hell it wants to do without regard to the courts or the legislature, after all we all know that when executive power is unchecked it is never ever used to impose political orthodoxy, suppress dissent and persecute dissidents. It’s not like we would ever again elect a chief executive that wasn’t all rainbow progressive smiley faces. . .

Dear Liberals: when you advocate executive power grabs like this for the sake of political expediency, you are handing the successor regime the power to do whatever it likes, and I doubt you all will be happy with that outcome. Don’t believe me? Look at all the unhappy Conservatives who gave the executive branch obscene powers when their guy was in charge.

You really don’t think this can have a bad outcome?  If the FCC has jurisdiction, how long before it starts regulating content?  You really want to see fines on bloggers for saying fuck this shit?

Simple.  What if Private Bradley Manning had not been interested in embarrassing us, and was more interested in harming us?  Would he have gone to a public website with his trove of secrets our Government had failed properly to secure?  Or would he have gone to our actual adversaries, say Iran, or China, or Venezuela, or Russia?  What would have been the result?  Well, it would not have been made public, the recipients would be all too eager to continue exploiting this hole.  This information could have leaked out of the State Department sieve for years, radically altering the results of our diplomacy with no one the wiser.

This way, at least, the U.S. is aware of everything that’s been compromised which minimizes the damage.  (Think, what good would cracking the Enigma have been in WWII if the BBC started broadcasting intercepted Nazi communications?  Not very.)

What worries me is the fact the hole was so damn large that I find it hard to believe that Private Manning was the first to think of exploiting it.

Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, “will it make things worse?” This isn’t a bad question to ask in and of itself, but we’re immured a period of change unprecedented in human history (it kicked off around the 1650s; its end is not yet in sight) and basing your policies on what you can see in your rear-view mirror leaves you open to driving over unforseen pot-holes.

I tend to see the false dilemma created by assuming that conservative policies are the only ones that fail to forsee potholes. I mean, look at all the great centralized economies of the 20th Century. But that’s neither here nor there.  What Stross would like to see is an attempt to deal with the future in a positive manner:

We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.

Ok, I can see that.  But even that paragraph starts radiating the inherent bias that gives the lie to the final clause.  All Utopias, since they ARE the solution, are synthetic monocultures that accept no dissent.  The above essentially tells us in this particular “Utopian” vision, we all must adapt to densely-packed urban living.  Those who much prefer to live in a small town or rural environment would be SOL when it comes to peruse their happiness.  But we can fix that, by controlling the population…  Ooops, now we have China.

The problem is inherent in one of Stross’ premises:

[...] we should be able to create a new golden age of utopian visions. A global civilization appears to be emerging for the first time. It’s unstable, unevenly distributed, and blindly fumbling its way forward. But we have unprecedented tools for sharing information; slowly developing theories of behavioural economics, cognitive bias, and communications that move beyond the crudely simplistic (and wrong) 19th century models of perfectly rational market actors [...]

There is the assumption that some universal global order is inevitable and in some sense desirable. It’s neither. It is not inevitable because the cultural and societal norms across the entire planet are divergent enough that a truly universal social order is only going to be possible by either making it so diffuse as to be largely irrelevant, or so powerful that it can crush the outlying populations into a thin paste. It is not desirable because you are giving your whole social order a single point of failure. With a single global order, you insure that when things finally go pear-shaped (and the one immutable rule of history is that things will) it takes down the whole planet with it. Our current series of crises are a demonstration of the principle: If Greece had bankrupted itself fifty years ago, no one would have cared.

So one answer to Stross’ final lament:

Because historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then …?

Is to say, “don’t put all your eggs in that particular basket.”

The last two decades are particularly notable, the evil Bush tax cuts for the wealthy barely shifted the bottom line.  So, all these people who are whining about people making $250K can afford these frakking tax increases, you may be right, but you aren’t going to do a damn thing about the deficit with them.

Government revenue is a function of economic growth, and that factor overwhelms any fiddling you do on tax rates.  Our complicated tax code is an exercise in social policy, not fiscal policy.  It is a means for the State to engage in social engineering by rewarding some activity and punishing other activity.  It only affects revenue in the long term by how it affects economic growth.

And you really want to put downward pressure on this economy because you think people above a certain income level can afford to feel more pain?

(Liberals reading this should note that the purpose of Jon Stewart in this universe is to show that a doctrinaire liberal can actually have a sense of humor.  Don’t be a counter-example.)

NPR was wrong because they did not afford him freedom of speech. They did it in a way that was unfair. The context was he was arguing with Bill O’Reilly, saying why he should not be so virulently anti-Muslim … It reminded me so much of the case with Shirley Sherrod. They jumped so quick.

…

I think that some of this predisposition towards Fox was the reason for the gotcha. If they did not want his point of view, they should have said, ‘When your contract is over, you do not fit into our scheme of things.’ And then (he’d) go gracefully and with dignity. But to fire him in that way, and then to suggest he should see a psychiatrist, it was beneath the character and reputation of NPR.

—Jesse Jackson

If you use “teabagger” in a post, I know the following about you:

• You refer to G.W.Bush as a Fascist and our government as a Democracy, but you become obnoxiously anal and pedantic about definitions of political terms when someone calls Obama a socialist.
• You believe that it was a miscarriage of justice when this black person was fired for allegedly bigoted comments that were taken out of context, but when this black person was fired for allegedly bigoted comments that were taken out of context, he had it coming.
• You believe Anita Hill was a martyr for women’s rights and Paula Jones was opportunistic trailer trash going after someone for partisan political purposes.
• You think George Soros is a benign philanthropist doing his best to support charitably progressive causes, and the brothers Charles and David Koch are shadowy puppet-masters funneling money into American politics to further their own sinister agenda.
• You thought enacting the Patriot Act was a horrible miscarriage of civil rights, all the way up to the point it was made permanent, when it wasn’t worth complaining about anymore.
• You think Janeane Garofalo makes sense when she says that calls for a smaller federal government are a coded message meaning “we hate black people.”
• You think that Media Matters would never slant a story.
• You think Al Franken was funny, once.
• You don’t find it ironic that an allegedly anti-establishment comic is holding a political rally that’s pretty much in support of the satus quo over an insurgent political movement.
• You’ve never watched an episode of Glen Beck or listened to Rush Limbaugh but not only do you know their position on every issue of import, you regularly condemn them for those opinions.
• You never thought speculation about Trig Pailin’s maternity the least bit creepy.
• You believe dumping a trillion dollars of stimulus money into the economy is the only thing that saved us from a great depression, but you believe that taking the same amount back out of the economy by taking it from rich people will have no adverse economic impact.

Just picture a WalMart and remove every item from the shelves that has a label “made in China,” and now picture having to re-tool manufacturing to produce all that crap somewhere else.  See, we don’t need a VAT to add 50% to the price of consumer goods.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.  This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick.

Which is quite right. The dystopia in Atlas Shrugged is as frighteningly plausible as the one in 1984 and Brave New World, since it is based, in large part, on applying Soviet-classic modes of thinking to the US political system. If Rand had written a dystopia like Orwell and had Dagny Taggart broken by the system ala Winston Smith, I doubt Scalzi would have found the premise nearly as ridiculous. The problem comes when we place a set of characters into the crapsack world who know exactly what to do to fix it.

In a novel, that can work. John Galt can shut off production to the rest of the world (in an ironic echo of Stalin and Mao inducing famines through state control of agriculture) because he is RIGHT! He has the revealed knowledge that millions of people must die in order for the world to be saved from disaster.

That brings us to blog number two, which was inspired by this horrid little video:

From Shannon Love’s reaction on Chicago Boyz:

However, these kinds of thought experiments do demonstrate how absolute certitude makes it easy for anyone, no matter how humane and compassionate, to calmly rationalize the deaths of billions. At the extremities of events and the associated moral choices, the ends do definitely justify the means.

As a corollary, ideas that claim to predict extreme events with great certainty create the justifications for associated extreme acts. These types of ideas turn abstract moral thought experiments into concrete realities on which people feel compelled to act.

Notice a theme? Maybe we can make it a little more specific:

Those early members of the French Revolution who created The Declaration of the Rights of Man believed that reason could absolutely replace tradition They would never have believed their ideas could possibly lead to the Great Terror, Empire and contienent wide war.

The geneticists who created the idea of eugenics used the best available science of their day. With the imprimatur of science, eugenics became widely accepted by all educated, secular individuals across the political spectrum. It was considered “settled science”. No eugenist envisioned their idea would justify the greatest of wars and the Holocaust.

Marxists the world over who rushed to join the newly formed Communist party in 1917 sincerely believed they were contributing to a world free of want, ignorance, oppression and inequality. They did not imagine in the least that the ideas they promulgated would create totalitarian, megacidal regimes that would push humanity to the precipice of extinction more than once.

Or, to put a fine point on it, as soon as some ideology decides that an abstraction is more important than an individual human life, you have established a moral framework for mass murder on an industrial scale.  All Utopias are based on the idea of eliminating the undesirables.