Market Anarchist Blogs

While the upcoming John Carter of Mars film has been described as an adaptation of the first novel only, the appearance in the cast list of the character “Matai Shang, ruler of the godlike Therns” suggests otherwise, as Shang and his merry band of Therns don’t show up until the second and third novels. And the “Civil War colonel who comes into conflict with Carter” corresponds to nothing in the books whatsoever.

I fear that the faithful movie adaptation that fans have spent nearly a hundred years waiting for (admittedly treating “fans” as a collective of variable composition) is not on the way.

But wait, it gets worse. Actor interviews (see here and here) reveal that the Therns are beings like “Olympian gods” who “travel round keeping order in the Universe” (they do no such thing in the books) and that the aforementioned Matai Shang (a fairly minor character in the books – it’s his daughter Phaidor who’s important) will be “John Carter’s nemesis” and a shapeshifter who “can adapt into anything.”

Talk about missing the point! The whole idea of the Therns is that they’re false gods – they’re just ordinary human beings who have set themselves up as gods. Giving them supernatural powers of shapeshifting and starhopping defeats their literary purpose. Burroughs structured Barsoomian society so that the religion of the red and green Martians would be a hoax perpetrated by the white Martians (i.e., the Therns), the religion of the white Martians would be a hoax perpetrated by the black Martians, and the religion of the black Martians would in turn be a hoax perpetrated by their own rulers. (Burroughs, as you may have guessed by now, was not a fan of religion; see also Savage Pellucidar and The Return of Tarzan.) If the Therns are now going to have magical powers, or be aliens with more advanced technology, or whatever it is that’s being planned here, then the story that Burroughs actually wrote is evidently being fairly thoroughly jettisoned.

My enthusiasm for this movie is rapidly dropping.

A lot of Babylon 5 fans aren’t crazy about the spinoff series Crusade, but I really liked it; I think it’s visually more beautiful than B5 (the effects technology had improved), plus it has two of my favourite characters, the cryptic, melancholy Galen and the lovably obnoxious Max Eilerson.

Galen and Eilerson

Frustratingly, Crusade was marred by intrusive network micromanagement, and then cancelled halfway through its first season. Here are some of TNT’s actual requests:

Can we lose the makeup on Dureena … and make her an alien by her attitude [instead]?

We’d like to have one of the characters include a sexual explorer, so when they make contact with a new race, his or her job is to go and have sex with them.

We want to see more fist-fights on the bridge.

We’d like to see an episode worked around a wrestler, since wrestling is hot right now.

We think you should give the captain a dog for a pet. [Note: as if any science-fiction show would do that!]

Rather than have the characters work their way out of the problem as depicted, we think it would be better if Captain Gideon arranges to have Dureena compromised so the antagonist will rape her, and Gideon will catch him in the act, and use this as blackmail to get the character to back off his demands.

When show-runner J. Michael Straczynski proved strangely unenthusiastic about these suggestions, the network pulled the plug. (There’s some evidence that these requests were not entirely sincere but were instead simply a way of finding an excuse for cancelling the show; if true, that makes TNT look better in one respect but worse in another.)

Sadly, there is no correct viewing order for the episodes that were produced; the network interfered so much that they completely screwed up the continuity. For example, you’ll see someone use a device in one episode and then invent the device in a later episode, or see two characters as lovers in one episode who suddenly just barely know each other in a later episode.

Because the show had already had a pilot (the Babylon 5 tv-movie A Call to Arms, which ought to be on the Crusade dvd but isn’t), Straczynski didn’t write an introductory episode but just led straight off with “Racing the Night.” When you see it, it’s obvious that it was intended to be the first episode; the characters all say introductory, expositiony things and tell each other stuff they all already know, like “When Interplanetary Expeditions heard that we needed a crack archeologist and linguist, they gave us you.”

Starship Excalibur

But then the network said they wanted some earlier episodes to introduce the characters and break the viewers into the show more gradually. So Straczynski had to go back and make some earlier episodes (including a new first episode, “War Zone,” which begins – at TNT’s insistence – with a fist fight, and in which one of the characters says “we had to make some compromises to get this show on the road,” a coded message that TNT evidently didn’t pick up on).

But the network had also mandated a uniform change for the crew halfway through; so now the supposedly earlier episodes had the characters wearing the supposedly later uniforms. The result is a complete tangle of continuity.

After the show’s cancellation, Straczynski briefly posted three unproduced Crusade scripts – “To the Ends of the Earth,” “Value Judgments,” and “End of the Line” – that revealed where the show had been headed; maddeningly, it was about to get especially good, as well as tying in more closely with two of the main plot threads from B5. When the supposedly uncopyable format in which Straczynski had posted the scripts proved all too copyable, Straczynski yanked them down, but it’s easy enough to find “pirated” versions online. (Hint.)

At any rate – and, at last, the occasion for this post – Straczysnki is finally releasing, via the Babylon 5 CafePress store, first a book titled Crusade: Behind the Scenes (available now) and later, a three-volume set ambiguously titled Crusade: What the Hell Happened (available at some time in the future). These four books together promise to fill in a lot of detail about how the show would have gone (including, but definitely not limited to, those three unproduced scripts).

The following picture appeared in Adventures of Superman #596, which by odd coincidence came out the same week as the 9/11 attacks:

• Help Noam Chomsky Find His Inner Anarchist. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-10). A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question. So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky: Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless... (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
• DAVID T. BEITO: Rand Paul is No Libertarian. Liberty & Power: Group Blog (2010-02-10). "This first advertisement for his U.S. Senate campaign ... is quite simply terrible. It not only panders to the darkest side of American conservatism but to the basest emotions of voters." Like pappy, Ron's boy Rand has chosen to emphasize absolutely the worst parts of his platform in his early campaign advertisements. Here, the current poster-boy for Chairman Ron's Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution comes out for "strong national defense," an immigration police state, and overseas legal black holes for "enemy combatants." (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
• How to split up the US. pwarden, PeteSearch (2010-02-06). As I've been digging deeper into the data I've gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I've been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in... (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
• Bear Becomes Mushroom; Trout Implicated. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-11). So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a... (Linked Friday 2010-02-12.)

So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a giant mushroom, is an image that appears, more recently, on merchandise produced by the British stationery company Paperchase.

In Thoreau’s words: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Without IP laws, what would prevent this blatant appropriation of artists’ ideas?

Oh, wait. Britain has IP laws, doesn’t it? So what’s gone wrong?

Well, apparently Paperchase has been ignoring Eloise’s complaints, and she hasn’t felt prepared to lay out the thousands in court costs needed to pursue legal remedies.

This example reveals a certain asymmetry in IP’s vaunted protection for artists; it turns out to be a lot more useful to large businesses than to individuals.

But Eloise (if she has a last name I haven’t located it) recently got some unexpected help. Yesterday Neil Gaiman mentioned the case in passing on Twitter; and Gaiman’s Twitter feed has about 1.5 million followers. Overnight a firestorm of publicity erupted, talk of a boycott was floated, and now Paperchase is running scared and whining about how “dangerous” Twitter is. (You and Ahmadinejad both, guys.)

Now admittedly the case isn’t over, but Twitter has clearly done more for Eloise in one day than IP laws have done in four months. This suggests that IP proponents have not only overestimated the effectiveness of IP laws as protection for artists, but they’ve likewise underestimated the usefulness of voluntary alternatives such as boycotts and bad publicity.

It could be objected, of course, that Gaiman is a big name with a rather fanatical following, making it difficult to generalise from this case. But an institutionalised version of this response might be able to make up in organisation what it lacks in star power. Remember the Law Merchant, which secured compliance solely through organised boycotts.

Iron Man? Watchmen? The Dark Knight? Forget ’em.

The greatest superhero movie ever is here – and it’s a DC/Marvel crossover, with cutting-edge special effects that make Avatar look like sock puppets and flashlights. I still can’t figure out how they’ve done these magnificent flying sequences. Check it out:

• Anarchists in Space. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-07). Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)
• Comment on Anarchists in Space by Roderick. Roderick, Comments for Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-08). Back in 1980, when Broach came out, perhaps Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism or Railroads and Regulation, and then follow it up with stuff from Left & Right and the early years of Libertarian Forum. If it were nowadays, Kevin Carson’s books would obviously be essential. The crucial point is this:... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)

Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually pretty sucky. But the state-capitalist culture is even suckier. (I didn’t say it was a cheerful book. But it’s a very good book.)

Related whereunto, some random items:

• There’s a book of essays titled The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I haven’t read it; but apparently Le Guin liked it and contributed an essay herself.
• L. Neil Smith semi-dedicated his anarcho-capitalist novel The Probability Broach to Le Guin and The Dispossessed. (At least that’s true of the first edition; I don’t have the revised edition handy.) He also commends Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians to Le Guin’s attention in order to nudge her toward a more favourable attitude to property. (I gotta say, that’s not the book I would have picked for that purpose.)
• I’ve long suspected that Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division, with its confrontation between a flawed but functional anarcho-capitalist society and a flawed but functional anarcho-communist society, was partly inspired by Le Guin’s book.
• One of Le Guin’s last works, The Telling, deals with Taoist-inspired communities struggling under an oppressive system variously described by reviewers as a “tightly controlled capitalist government” and a “soulless form of corporate communism.” I haven’t read it yet either.

Addendum: I remembered something else I’d intended to mention: in addition to Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division being partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its theme, I’ve wondered whether MacLeod’s earlier novel The Stone Canal might be partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its narrative structure, with one storyline being told through the odd-numbered chapters while a “flashback” background story, featuring the same viewpoint character – in both cases an anarchist scholar – runs through the even-numbered chapters (though of course other writers have done such things as well).

Two puzzles about the Bat-signal:

a) What happens if Commissioner Gordon needs to contact Batman in the daytime? Or on a night that doesn’t have low-lying clouds? I can see why the tv version installed a Batphone.

b) If I were a Gotham City villain, I’d hole up with a rocket launcher in a building near the one with the Bat-signal. Then when the signal comes on I know Batman will soon be on the neighbouring roof. I watch, I aim, boom.

I’ve been wanting to see Jeff Tucker’s interesting piece on classical liberal themes in Mark Twain in print ever since I heard him present a version of it at the 2006 ASC. Now it’s up!