Gary Farber asks:

Would you assert that a modest libel law, or copyright law, or incitement to riot law, inevitably lead to 1984? How about a law banning private nuclear weapons?

I would say that the risk from a modest libel law or copyright law is small, though not nonexistent; look at the way the DMCA has been used to justify schemes that would embed controlware in everyones' computers. State power is no less real if it consists of NSA or FBI back doors built in by an acquiescent Gateway or Dell.

If the lawmaker/law-enforcer is a monopoly government, then a law banning private nuclear weapons would worry me a little more, basically because I don't trust governments to have any control over the weaponry their citizens can keep. History shows that that power is invariably extended by degrees and abused until the citizenry is totally disarmed; the case of Great Britain in the 20th century is a particularly telling one (and its sequel in the 21st is proving just as bloody and insane as the NRA diehards predicted, with criminal gangs machine-gunning each other in the Midlands cities while law-abiding citizens are jailed for carrying pocketknives).

I would prefer the risks of private nukes to the disarmament of the civilian population. But that's not a choice anyone will actually ever have to make, because the intersection of the set of people who want nukes and the set of people who would obey or be deterred by a law against them is nil. A law against nukes would therefore be pointless, except as an assertion of the power and right to enforce other sorts of weapons bans that are harmful in themselves.

Nukes are different than handguns. Handgun bans are bad, but they're not utterly pointless; there is a significant class of criminals who would carry in the absence of a ban but don't in the presence of one. The real problem with handgun bans is that the good effects of slightly fewer bad guys carrying weapons are swamped and reversed by the bad effects of far fewer good guys carrying weapons. It's all in how the disincentives against crime shift.

An "incitement to riot" law is a huge and obvious red flag. A political culture in which that becomes entrenched would be one headed for the überstate fairly rapidly.

But much depends on who makes those laws and how they are enforced. I could live with a ban on certain sorts of heavy weapons or a Riot Act, for example, if they were a condition of my contract with my crime-insurance company, or part of the covenant of my homeowners' association. Powers that are too dangerous to grant a monopoly government could safely be delegated to security agencies and judicial associations that have active competitors, and who do not in the nature of things have universal jurisdiction.

Mr. Farber may not be aware than anarchists like myself actually envision living in a society that still has police and courts and a common legal code, but one in which no one organization has a status that is uniquely privileged under the law. There would be something that is functionally not completely unlike a "government", but it would be a virtual entity — a contract network of courts, police, and citizens. I would delegate my right to resist assaults on my life and property to the police agency that acts as my agents. That police agency would have reciprocity agreements with other police agencies; they, in turn, would contract with judicial associations to arbitrate disputes among their clients. Find a copy of The Market for Liberty for the details.

Finally, I comment on Mr. Faber's attempt to reduce the slippery-slope argument against statism to an absurdity by applying it to libertarians ("libertarianism, because it values the individual without regard for society, inevitably leads any individual who believes in it to become a sociopathic serial killer").

There are several obvious problems with this argument. First, sociopathy is a wiring defect only found in less than 1% of the general population (but including a large percentage of politicians, and that is no joke). Libertarianism cannot turn people into sociopathic serial killers because nothing (other than some odd and rare sorts of injuries to the brain) can turn people into sociopaths.

The argument also ignores a glaring asymmetry in the real-world facts. Extreme libertarians do not as a rule go on senseless killing sprees. Governments, even "good" governments, often do. In the U.S., the scarifying examples of MOVE, the Branch Davidians, and Ruby Ridge are before us even if we agree to leave warfare out of the picture and consider only the last two decades.

But more importantly, the claim that libertarianism values the individual without regard for society is damagingly false. The assumption that "valuing the individual" and "valuing society" are opposed is precisely what thoughtful libertarians reject. Our highest value is non-aggression, peacefulness — voluntary cooperation. Our message is that only when individual freedom is properly held to be the greatest good can a sane, peaceful, and truly just society flourish.

In a trenchant essay he posted on the 30th of January, Vodkapundit fulminates against people he calls "doctrinaire libertarians". While I sympathize in some respects — I too have been attacked for my pro-war position — I think there is some serious danger that Steve's arguments are throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

I'm an individualist anarchist. In most peoples' books that would qualify me as a "doctrinaire libertarian". I got reminded why recently by watching a Babylon 5 episode, the 4th-season one in which Sheridan is interrogated by an EarthGov psychologist who uses torture, isolation, and drugs, to try and break him. But more frightening than the torture is the ideology that comes out of the interrogator's mouth; the command that truth is fluid and must bend to power; the disingenuous disclaimers of any responsibility for the hell Sheridan is being put through; and beneath it all like a constant drumbeat, the seductive invitation that if Sheridan will just surrender his will to the State, his pain will end.

The interrogator is never named. Like his prototypes in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, he is a case study in the banality of evil — the true face, the night face, the real face of the State. And what is truly terrifying is that the interrogator is not a mere thug but a man with a subtle and flexible mind. There is an angle on the world from which all his lies and acts of coercion issue from a coherent moral position — but it is one that promises everyone but his masters hell on Earth, forever and ever, amen.

In this episode J. Michael Straczynski gives us a fictional depiction of a type that is all too real. Anyone who has read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon or Aleksandr Solszhenitzyn's The Gulag Archipelago knows that if anything, JMS (who clearly did his homework on the real-world techniques of brainwashing) understates the soul-destroying depths to which the ideology of statism can sink, trapping the interrogator and his victim in a machinery of coercion that will ultimately consume them both.

The moral climax of that episode comes after Sheridan says "You know, it's funny I was thinking about what you said. 'The pre-eminent truth of our age is that you cannot fight the system.' But if, as you say, truth is fluid, that the truth is subjective, then maybe you can fight the system — as long as one person refuses to be broken, refuses to bow down."

"But can you win?" the interrogator asks, almost gently. Sheridan, knowing it is likely to mean he will shortly die under torture, rasps out the bedrock libertarian reply "Every...time I...say...no!"

If I were the praying kind, I would be on my knees every day praying that if there ever comes a moment when I must confront the night face of the State, I too will meet it with that kind of courage. And that day may come. Because the hell that spawns creatures like that nameless interrogator is what waits for all of us down the road to serfdom that is paved with good intentions like "welfare" and "protecting the children" and "saving the environment" and, yes, "necessary war".

This is why I think we all ought to be grateful for "doctrinaire libertarians", even the ones more doctrinaire than me. It's their job to keep reminding all of us where that road leads. And it frightens we when anyone replies to "War is the health of the state" by saying fearfully "Let's be blunt here, kids. When foreigners are rearranging the Manhattan skyline because, in part, our women drive cars, then goddamnit its time for a healthier state." Because it's in the shadow cast by that kind of fear that creatures like the interrogator and his masters grow and flourish.

Necessity, as wiser men than me have observed, is the credo of tyrants and the excuse of slaves. It disturbs me to hear anyone talking like a slave.

I agree with you in conceding that the state is at this time the only way we have to answer the terrorist threat. The world in which Osama bin Laden would be killed by troops hired by a consortium of crime- and disaster-insurance companies rather than a government does not yet exist.

But having conceded the present necessity of state action makes it more necessary, not less, that we listen to the most contrary, ornery, anti-statist libertarians we have, and to hold harder than ever to our intentions for a libertarian future. Otherwise we risk becoming too comfortable with that concession, and letting the statists seduce us further down that road to serfdom.

Does this mean we can't slam the LP for its attribution of the 9/11 attacks to American foreign policy? No, you're right; that position is not just wrong, it bespeaks a lack of moral seriousness and a kind of blinkered parochialism that cannot actually see anything outside of U.S. politics as having causal force.

But there is a big difference between observing that the LP is contingently wrong about the liberation of Iraq (true) and suggesting that our only course is to abandon our longer-term commitment to the abolition of drastic shrinking of the state (false). Beware of throwing out that baby with the bathwater. John Ashcroft is not yet a greater threat to liberty than Osama bin Laden — but that day may come yet. Only libertarian thoughts, libertarian words, libertarian deeds, and a principled libertarian opposition to the arrogance and seductions of power will prevent it.

UPDATE: Gary Farber thinks I'm making the same error I slammed John Perry Barlow for recently. But there is a large difference. Barlow was being specifically paranoid about a short-term threat which he ties to specific people he thinks are evil and has (at the very least) grossly overestimated. I have a longer-term concern about structural tendencies that are built into the nature of government, and which don't require specific evil people running things to take us to some very nasty places.

Or, to put it another way, Barlow has what is essentially a devil theory; Bush, or Cheney, or Ashcroft or someone like them is evil and wants to put us in camps next year. This is silly. I, on the other hand, don't think it much matters for the long term whether "good" or "evil" people are running the government; the premises and the process of government, and the collectivist ethos that underlies them, have a momentum of their own that grinds away at our liberty regardless. The founders of the U.S. understood this tendency and erected the Bill Of Rights as a firewall against it. The fact that in many jurisdictions U.S. law now suppresses "hate speech" and bans the possession of firearms demonstrates their failure.

The erosion of liberty which I fear is a far more gradual process than the sudden collapse into totalitarianism that Barlow envisions. But it is also more difficult to resist and counter. Because the end stages, where only evil people can adapt themselves to politics, are probably many decades away, few people can summon the concern and the will to say "Stop now, before it's too late!". There is always some short-term reason that seems good to accept the state's poisonous candy -- the new entitlement program, the next round of farm- or steel-mill subsidies, the airport metal detectors to make us "safe".

Many (though not all) of the people who can summon that will are libertarians. Which is yet another good reason to listen to them carefully, even when they're more doctrinaire than me.

(Exercise for the reader: Let's stipulate that littering laws may not lead to 1984, but can you defend the proposition that laws banning speeech and weapons don't? Discuss historical examples such as Nazi Germany and Tokugawa-period Japan. Be specific.)

InstaPundit writes: This seems to me to suggest that free downloads don't do much to cannibalize actual [book] sales.

I have more (or at least longer-term) experience with this than anyone else. Back in 1991, The New Hacker's Dictionary was the very first real book (like, with an ISBN) to be released simultaneously in print and available for free download on-line. Both of the books I've done since, The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, have also been released for free download at the same time they were in print. You can easily find all three on my website.

Of all my books, only the very first (Portable C and Unix Systems Programming, 1987) didn't get webbed. It was a decent seller, but the least successful of my books. It's now out of print, made technically obsolete by things that happened in the early 1990s. All three of my other books, the ones that got webbed, have remained continuously in print.

My four books do not a controlled experiment make, but the thirteen years of experience with simultaneous print and Web publication that I've had suggests that Web availability has boosted the sales of the print versions tremendously. And my publishers agree. Even in 1991 I didn't get resistance from MIT press, and Addison-Wesley was positively supportive of putting my most most recent one on the Web.

I'm one of a handful of technical-book writers who publishers treat like rock stars, because I have a large fan base and my name on a cover will sell a book in volumes that are exceptional for its category (for comparison my editor at AW mentions Bruce Eckel as another). I'm not certain my experience generalizes to authors who aren't rock stars. On the other hand, it's more than possible that I'm a rock star largely because I have been throwing my stuff on the Web since 1991. It's even likely — after all, I was next to an unknown when I edited The New Hacker's Dictionary.

So I don't find the InstaWife's experience very surprising. Webbing one's books seems to be really effective way to build a fan base. My impression is that people start by browsing the the on-line versions of my books, then buy the paper copy partly for convenience and partly as what marketers call an identity good.

An identity good is something people buy to express their tie to a group or category they belong to or would like to belong to. People buy The New Hacker's Dictionary because they are, or want to be, the kind of person they think should own a copy of it.

Here's the causal connection: A Web version can't be an identity good, because it doesn't sit on your bookshelf or your coffee table telling everybody (and reminding you!) who you are. But Web exposure can, I think, help turn a book with the right kind of potential into an identity good. I suspect there is now a population of psychologists and social workers who perceive the InstaWife's book as an identity good, and that (as with my stuff) that perception was either created or strongly reinforced by web exposure.

If so, this would explain why webbing her book made the auction price for the out-of-print paper version go up. The price of the paper version reflects buyers' desires to be identifiable as members of the community of readers of the book. By making softcopy available for download, the InstaWife enhanced the power of the paper version as an identity token, by making it easy for a larger population to learn the meaning of the token.

I would go so far as to predict that any book (or movie, or CD) that functions as an identity good will tend to sell more rather than less after Web exposure. All three of my in-print books happen to be identity goods rather strongly, for slightly different but overlapping populations. I suspect the InstaWife's book has this quality too. About those things which aren't identity goods, I can't say. Not enough experience.

John Perry Barlow, referring to the 2004 elections, writes:

We can't afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we'll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is.

"If they even let us have watches in the camps." This is a perfect example of a kind of left-wing rhetorical posturing that makes me want to go out and vote for conservatives I normally loathe. In this it has exactly the opposite effect from what John Perry Barlow intends.

Barlow wants to leave us with an if-this-goes-on image of a Bush-dominated future in which Barlow and his friends are hauled off to concentration camps by mirrorshaded thugs, crushing dissent as though the U.S. were pre-liberation Iraq or something.

I would love to be able to echo Charles Babbage and say that I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I find it all too comprehensible, and not in a way that's very flattering to John Perry Barlow or others like him. It's a form of posturing by anticipatory martyrdom, simultaneously demonizing Barlow's enemies and inflating his own importance.

"Oh, look at me!" it says. "I'm a brave speaker of truth to power, so brave that I'm going to say bad things about Republicans despite the fact that they will certainly throw me in the gulags as soon as they think they can get away with it." I've been around long enough to know that this is a line lefties of Barlow's and my age originally learned in order to pick up women back in those halcyon radical-chic days of forty years ago. It gets a bit old after your third decade of waiting for the Man to bust your door down.

Let's get real. Even supposing Bush were really the concretization of all those 1960s nightmares, an evil bastard backed by a cabal of goose-stepping minions, from their point of view throwing John Perry Barlow in the Lubyanka would be a ridiculous thing to do. Remember how conservatives think: from their point of view, Barlow is just another aging hippie burnout given to occasional quasi-coherent rants about that Internet thing. In their model of reality, all they'd be doing by giving him the Solzhenitzyn treatment is conferring an importance on him that he doesn't possess.

I have somewhat more respect for Barlow myself, enough that it survived the fact that the last time I was actually face-to-face with him he was obnoxiously drunk and patronizing. He's an erratic but occasionally brilliant polemicist. But trying to imagine anybody in the inner circle of Skull & Bones (or whatever the left-wingers' hate focus is this week) taking him seriously enough to bother bagging and tagging him just makes me laugh.

And if I can't believe John Perry Barlow is enough of a threat to get gulaged by the mythical Bush stormtroopers, how seriously am I supposed to take the-Man's-coming-for-us posturing from the rank and file of the Bush-haters? Yeah, sure, the black marias are coming for all of you, all you twentysomething unemployed sysadmins and riot grrls and latte makers with your piercings and your Green Party T-shirts. As if.

There are lots of objective reasons this scenario is silly. One of many is that our institutions won't support it. I know the police in my town; they wouldn't obey orders to throw Dean voters in jail. I just got through reading a book about the force structure of today's U.S. infantry, and I can tell you that even if the second Bush administration were to complete the trashing of the posse comitatus laws that Clinton began and withdraw every damn grunt from overseas, there aren't enough troops. Even assuming 100% of them signed up to be concentration-camp guards, there wouldn't be enough of them to man the camps. And the trends are all towards a smaller, more skill-intensive military, so in the future assembling enough goons for a darkess-at-noon scenario will be harder rather than easier.

Then, of course, there's the fact that Attorney-General Ashcroft is not pushing for federalized gun control and a ban on civilian firearms. Which is the first damn thing any right-wing cabal (or any left-wing one, for that matter) would do if they were contemplating really serious dissent-crushing. Again, the trend is in the other direction — the assault-weapon ban is going to lapse, and the Bush crowd is going to let it happen. Much of the American left fools itself that civilian firearms don't matter in the political power equation, but conservatives know better.

For that matter, I am certain — because I've discussed related topics with him — that John Perry Barlow himself knows better. Which makes his willingness to posture about the Man coming to throw us in concentration camps less forgiveable than it would be in someone who's a complete moron on the subject, like (say) Michael Moore.

But what really repels me about the kind of posturing I'm nailing John Perry Barlow for isn't the objective silliness of it, it's the fact that it represents a kind of triumph of paranoid self-absorption as a political style. People in the (mainly left-wing) anti-Bush crowd snort with derision when they hear hard-right propaganda about how the Zionist Occupation Government is going to come after all true American white men with those black helicopters; why do they tolerate rhetoric that is just as narcissistic coming from their own?

Idiots. They make me want to go vote for somebody like Pat Buchanan just out of spite. Fortunately, I'm not a spiteful person, and have so far resisted this temptation.

And I don't think it's just me that sees people like John Perry Barlow actually dealing themselves out of the future when they make remarks like this. Narcissistic politics is not a luxury we can afford any more. It was OK during our holiday from history, 1992-2001, between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, but we're in serious times now. Our nation, and our civilization, are under continuing threat by terrorists who have demonstrated both the will and the ability to commit atrocities against Americans, and who loudly trumpet their intention to keep killing us.

We need people like John Perry Barlow to be in the debate about how to cope with this. That means we need people like John Perry Barlow not to trivialize and disqualify themselves with silly posturing. Please get real, people. George Bush has flaws I could list from here to Sunday, but pretending that you're all doomed victims if he's re-elected is pathological.

And deep down, you know better, too. The last two years have given us not just relatively smart people like John Perry Barlow but legions of mindless show-biz glitterati making a particularly ironic spectacle of themselves — protesting the crushing of dissent in front of huge audiences. Thereby demonstrating their own lack of contact with reality in a way that can only help the very opponents they think of as a sinister cabal. With enemies this visibly stupid and feckless, who needs friends? They'll drive the big middle of the electorate right into Republican arms.

Let's state the consequences very simply: Every time somebody like John Perry Barlow goes on in public about how the camps are waiting for us all, Karl Rove laughs and, quite rightly, figures his guy Bush is more of a lock this November. And you know what? He's right. Because if I hear much more of this crap, even I am going to vote Republican for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now using press credentials as cover. Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now protesting that this was an error.

Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this is bleakly funny. Those Iraqi employees thought, perhaps, that they could earn a nice bonus by doing with lead what Reuters does with ledes. Why not? After all, the terror network and Reuters share an important objective — the breaking and humbling of U.S. power.

Watch the aftermath closely. If (as seems not unlikely) there were Reuters stringers involved in the attack, you will probably see Reuters condemn the actions of its employees only on the general grounds that actually shooting Americans jeopardizes the customary privileges and immunities of the press, not because attacks on American troops are in any way intrinsically a bad thing. The anti-American slant of Reuters coverage will doubtless continue — in fact, any suggestion that it might have contributed to or enabled the violence of yesterday will be met with shock and indignation.

In the warped moral universe that Reuters and the BBC and much of America's own elite media inhabit, American power is so frightening and loathsome that Islamist barbarians are actually preferable to George W. Bush. They'll print with a straight face quotes by al-Qaeda apologists condemning the U.S. as a ‘rogue state’ and U.S. policies as terrorism, while refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ for Al-Hamas attacks that target Israeli children for mass murder.

Reuters stringers firing bullets at American troops makes concrete a drama that has previously been abstract. Today's war on terror is not just a war between the West and fundamentalist Islam, it is a confrontation of the healthy versus the diseased portions of the West itself. The disease is Julien Benda's trahison des clercs and all its sequelae. And Reuters, marching in step with Old Europe and the American left, is objectively on the side of the West's enemies.

UPDATE: Three Reuters employees who were alleged to have been involved in the attack have been released. This does not change my evaluation that anti-U.S., pro-terrorist bias is pervasive and deep in Reuters international coverage, sufficiently so to put them on the enemy side. As an index of this bias, consider that by editorial policy Reuters will not use the word "terrorist" to describe groups like Hamas or al-Aqsa.

Donald Sensing is dead on target in his post suggesting the U.S military re-adopt the M1911 .45ACP pistol. I've fired a Beretta 92F and it's an ugly, awkward gun that neither feels good in the hand nor inspires confidence in its stopping power. Those who have actually seen the sharp end of combat generally agree that the M1911 is a far superior weapon; even today, more than fifteen years after it was officially deprecated, many troops carry it by choice. My own carry weapon of choice is the Colt Officer's Model, a short-barrel M1911 variant.

If the M1911 design is too old to be politically viable or the single-action design is an insurmountable obstacle, then my next choice would be Glock's double-action 45ACP design, I think it's the Model 30. Glocks are very accurate, and rugged in the field. I think the lighter frame is actually a disadvantage; you don't get thrown off target as much by the recoil when you're shooting a big hunk of steel, so your second shot with a 1911 is more likely to count.

If I needed any reminder of why I'm not a conservative, the bizarre contortions that right-wingers have been putting themselves through lately in opposition to the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on gay marriage would provide one. Watching this has been almost as much fun as watching the left thrash itself to pieces in a futile attempt to stop the War on Terror.

IsntaPundit points us at Jennifer Roback Morse's analysis of the issue in National Review Online which he correctly describes as hilarious in a frightening way. It's full of bloviations about the “natural and organic‘ function of sex and how we'll all be happier if we adjust our behavior to conform to nature. It further argues that sex is not an individual activity but a social one, deriving much of its importance from the fact that it create and involves communities.

IsntaPundit acidly points out that the “natural and organic” purpose of sex is to recombine genes, and that casual ‘meaningless’ sex of the kind associated in conservative minds with gays and libertines is not just natural and organic but optimal strategy for the 50% of the population that is male. While InstaPundit is correct, he is missing some even more entertaining subtexts.

Conservatives have spent decades lambasting leftist feminists for their claim that the personal is political. They have argued that a world in which feminists and the state claim an ever-encroaching right to reinterpret sexual relationships as power relationships and intervene to ‘equalize’ them is a world slouching towards totalitarianism and the panopticon. Ahhh...but now watch the deft reverse spin as, when a conservative shibboleth is at stake, Ms. Morse suddenly argues that sexual choices are never private!

This whole business about ‘conforming to nature’ is almost funnier, in a bleak way. Exercise for the reader: chase this Google search on the phrase fascism nature organic and discover how very close Ms. Morse is sailing to the reasoning and rhetoric of classical Fascism.

These are the parts that are funny, at least if you get the kind of dark amusement I do from watching right-wingers obligingly behave like every left-wing caricature of conservatism ever cartooned. I would say that National Review Online ought to be ashamed of itself if I actually expected better from them on this issue. Hypocrites. Idiots. Ms. Morse's reactionary rant is every bit as bad as the poisonous humbug that issues from the mouths of lefties like Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky.

What's even more comical is that when you corner a conservative about the consequences of gay marriage, what you're more likely to hear than not is: “But what if the really icky people, like (gasp) polyamorists, use it as a precedent?” This is very revealing. Conservatives know that the gay lifestyle will never appeal to more than about 5% of the population — the rest of us ain't got the wiring for it. What really terrifies them is the thought that people in the 95% of the population that is normally heterosexual might get the idea that they, too, could choose plural marriage or other forms of relationship that conservatives think of as ‘unnatural’, and not suffer for it.

But the part that's really frightening is the argument that is not being made, but which seethes beneath every polished sentence of Ms. Morse's screed. One cannot read it without sensing that all this namby-pamby “natural and organic” stuff is a thin pseudo-Deist cover; what Ms. Morse really wants to do is scream “IT'S GOD'S LAW AND YOU'LL BURN IN HELL, SINNERS!“. This is the “ancient religious rage” of Margalit and Buruma's penetrating essay Occidentalism; fundamentally Ms. Morse is railing against Babylon, and in this she is at one with the hot-eyed Islamists who gave us 9/11.

I must make a point of committing an act that is technically sodomy tonight. Perhaps I should see if I can't mix with it some blasphemy against the evil authoritarian Nobodaddy-God shared by Islamists and Western conservatives like Ms. Morse. The whiny identity politics of the Queer Nation crowd turn me off, and their buddies in NAMBLA utterly revolt me — but ultimately I have something in common with the gays that I never will with Ms. Morse.

That commonality is the belief that isn't up to anybody else, feminist or conservative, to tell me and my consenting sexual partners what kind of sex is “natural” or “correct”. “Do it for the chillldren!“ is no more honest or respectable an argument against the liberty of the individual coming from Jennifer Roback Morse than it ever was from Hillary Rodham Clinton. Neither kind of moralism is more than a fig-leaf over the lust for power over others, and that is a lust I will always oppose with my words, my actions, and my weapons.

From the Telegraph:

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

This is the quote that will re-elect George W. Bush president. Because after 9/11, what Americans want is a president that will make tyrants and terrorists very, very afraid. Bush, for all his other failings, has delivered on that. As Edwin Edwards (four-term governor of Lousiana) might put it, Bush couldn't lose the election now unless he got caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

At the end of my essay What good is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin. Stupidity isn't a handicap only when solving logic problems; people with low IQs tend to have poor impulse control because they're not good at thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions.

Somebody left a comment that, if what I was reporting about group differences in average IQ is correct, the resulting behavior would be indistinguishable from racism. In particular, American blacks (with an average IQ of 85) would find themselves getting the shitty end of the stick again, this time with allegedly scientific justification.

This is an ethically troubling point. It's the main reason most people who know the relevant statistical facts about IQ distribution are either in elaborate denial or refusing to talk about what they know. But is this concern really merited, or is it a form of tendermindedness that does more harm than good?

Let's start with a strict and careful definition: A racist is a person who makes unjustified assumptions about the behavior or character of individuals based on beliefs about group racial differences.

I think racism, in this sense, is an unequivocally bad thing. I think most decent human beings would agree with me. But if we're going to define racism as a bad thing, then it has to be a behavior based on unjustified assumptions, because otherwise there could be times when the fear of an accusation of racism could prevent people from seeking or speaking the truth.

There are looser definitions abroad. Some people think it is racist merely to believe there are significant differences between racial groups. But that is an abuse of the term, because it means that believing the objective truth, without any intent to use it to prejudge individuals, can make you a racist.

It is, for example, a fact that black athletes tend to perform better in hot weather, white ones in cool weather, and oriental asians in cold weather. There is nothing mysterious about this; it has to do with surface-area-to-volume ratios in the population's typical build. Tall, long-limbed people shed heat more rapidly than stocky and short-limbed people. That's an advantage in Africa, less of one in the Caucasian homelands of Europe and Central Asia, and a disadvantage in the north Asian homeland of oriental asians.

And that's right, white men can't jump; limb length matters there, too. But whites can swim better than blacks, on average, because their bones are less dense. I don't have hard facts on how asians fit that picture, but if you are making the same guess I am (at the other extreme from blacks, that is better swimmers and worse jumpers than white people) I would bet money we're both correct. That would be consistent with the pattern of many other observed racial differences.

Sportswriter and ethicist Jon Entine has investigated the statistics of racial differences in sports extensively. Blacks, especially blacks of West African ancestry, dominate track-and-field athletics thanks apparently to their more efficient lung structure and abundance of fast-twitch muscle fiber. Whites, with proportionally shorter legs and more powerful upper bodies, still rule in wrestling and weightlifting. The bell curves overlap, but the means — and the best performances at the high end of the curve — differ.

Even within these groups, there are racially-correlated subdivisions. Within the runners, your top sprinters are likelier to be black than your top long-distance runners. Blacks have more of an advantage in burst exertion than they do in endurance. I don't have hard recent data on this as I do for the other factual claims I'm making here, but it is my impression that whites cling to a thin lead in sports that are long-haul endurance trials — marathons, bicycle racing, triathlons, and the like.

It is not ‘racism’ to notice these things. Or, to put it more precisely, if we define ‘racism’ to include noticing these things, we broaden the word until we cannot justifiably condemn ‘racism’ any more, because too much ‘racism’ is simply recognition of empirically verifiable truths. It's all there in the numbers.

Knowing about these racial-average differences in athletic performance would not justify anyone in keeping a tall, long-limbed white individual off the track team, or a stocky black person with excellent upper-body strength off the wrestling team. But they do make nonsense of the notion that every team should have a racial composition mirroring the general population. If you care about performance, your track team is going to be mostly black and your wrestling team mostly white.

In fact, trying to achieve ‘equal‘ distribution is a recipe for making disgruntled underperforming white runners and basketball players, and digruntled underperforming black wrestlers and swimmers. It's no service to either group, you get neither efficiency nor happiness out of that attempt.

Most people can follow the argument this far, but are frightened of what happens when we apply the same kind of dispassionate analysis to racial differences in various mental abilities. But the exact same logic applies. Observing that blacks have an average IQ a standard deviation below the average for whites is not in itself racist. Jumping from that observation of group differences to denying an individual black person a job because you think it means all black people are stupid would be racist.

Let's pick neurosurgery as an example. Here is a profession where IQ matters in an obvious and powerful way. If you're screening people for a job as a neurosurgeon, it would nevertheless be wrong to use the standard-deviation difference in average IQ as a reason to exclude an individual black candidate, or black candidates as a class. This would not be justified by the facts; it would be stupid and immoral. Excluding the black neurosurgeon-candidate who is sufficiently bright would be a disservice to a society that needs all the brains and talent it can get in jobs like that, regardless of skin color.

On the other hand, anyone who expects the racial composition of the entire population of neurosurgeons to be ‘balanced’ in terms of the population at large is living in a delusion. The most efficient and fair outcome would be for that population to be balanced in terms of the distribution of IQ — at each level of IQ the racial mix mirrors the frequency of that IQ level within different groups. Since that minimum IQ for competency in neurosurgery is closer to the population means for whites and asians than the mean for blacks, we can expect the fair-outcome population of neurosurgeons to be predominantly white and asian.

If you try to social-engineer a different outcome, you'll simply create a cohort of black neurosurgeons who aren't really bright enough for their jobs. This, too, would be a disservice to society (not to mention the individual patients they might harm, and the competent black neurosurgeons that would be discredited by association). It's an error far more serious than trying to social-engineer too many black wrestlers or swimmers into existence. And yet, in pursuit of a so-called equality, we make this sort of error over and over again, injuring all involved and creating resentments for racists to feed on.

I removed a comment from my blog today. This is only the second time I have done so, and the first was just cleaning up an accidental double post.

To whoever left the original comment #6 on Lessons of Libya: I won't suppress a coment for being mindless, formulaic ranting. Nor will I suppress a comment for being anonymous. But the combination of both those traits is a crash landing.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled bloggage...

Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya's dictator and long-time terrorist sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow international inspections. The NYT's December 20th article Lessons of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally hilarious.

An honest account would probably have read something like this:

When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared him silly. Realizing that the U.S. is no longer in the mood to take shit from tin-pot tyrants in khaffiyehs, and that the U.S. military could blow its way into Tripoli and give him a free dental exam in less time than it would take for an utterly impotent U.N. to pass the resolution condemning American action, he crawled to the Brits whimpering “Don't let your big brother hurt me, pleeeassseee...”

Instead, we're treated to a bunch of waffle: "To an extent that cannot be precisely measured" and "yesterday's announcement also demonstrates the value of diplomacy and United Nations sanctions". I suspect the NYT will deny as long as it can the real lesson of Libya, which is the same as the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and, for that matter, Yugoslavia. And that is this: the disarmament of rogue states has never once been accomplished by the U.N. or by diplomacy or ‘international opinion’, but is now being driven simply and solely by the fear of American military power and the will to use it.

We are in what Karl Marx would have called a world-historical moment — the first time that American hyperpuissance has defanged a dictator without actual war. All the rules will be different from now on, and Qaddafi (wily survivor that he is) has figured them out well ahead of the Western chattering classes. The most important rule is this: do not make the U.S. fear what you might become, or it will break you.

Indeed, it seems very likely to me that future historians will date the beginning of the 21st-century Pax Americana from Qaddafi's crawfishing. The U.S. is not merely maintaining its lead in economic vigor and military heft over any conceivable opposing coalition, that lead is actually increasing. Demographic trends (notably the fact that Europeans and Japanese are not breeding at replacement levels) suggest that U.S.'s relative power, in both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ terms, will continue to increase through at least 2050.

The most visible indicator of this change, aside from the collapse of awful governments in any number of Third-World pestholes, will be the marginalization of the U.N. That organization, which has never had hard power, will now lose its soft power as well. It might have been different — but France and the other nations who aimed to set the U.N. up as a geopolitical counterforce to the U.S. overplayed their hand in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq. For that effort, the capture of Saddam and Qaddafi's surrender in the face of an American-led New World Order are fatal blows. The U.N. may survive as an umbrella for international aid agencies and a few technical standards groups, but in the future it will constrain American behavior less, not more.

The ripple effects on Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. domestic politics will be significant. Even Arab News is beginning to come around to the realization that the U.S. did the Arab world a favor by deposing Saddam Hussein, and his capture significantly betters the odds that the reconstruction of Iraq will succeed. Since U.S. power has actually accomplished the peaceful disarmament of a rogue state, making political hay in Europe from a case against U.S. unilateralism is going to become steadily more difficult. And in the U.S., the antiwar opposition is increasingly marginal and demoralized as the war goes well and George Bush's re-election now looks like a near certainty.

To borrow Churchill's phrase, this is not the end of the War on Terror. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a delight; Peter Jackson's Return Of The King fully lived up to the promise of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions, Tolkien fans have reason to be vastly grateful both for Jackson's vision and the fact that Hollywood actually allowed him to make these movies as good as they are.

The marathon was also quite a geekfest. The theater was wall-to-wall with SF and fantasy fans, SCAdians, computer hackers, and the like. A very intelligent, cerebral, imaginative crowd. My kind of people, talking and meeting and mixing with each other a great deal more than your typical movie crowd does. The fact that many people showed up hours early to get good seats, and the two half-hour intermissions, helped a lot.

In a refutation of stereotypes, many of those attending were female. And attractive. And often dressed to display it in Arwen or Eowyn outfits. Had I been actually trying, I believe I would have taken home at least three phone numbers, which is a significant datum even given that I'm a lot more self-confident about the flirting thing than most geek guys.

Part of me was in anthropologist mode, contemplating the mating behaviors on display, even as I was chatting with the pretty redheaded theater student from State College, the massage therapist in the seat next to me, the blonde in the concession-stand line, and the buxom big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt who told me all about re-reading the Rings every year since she was eleven, and I'll be damned if she didn't mean that as at least a bit of a come-on. I wondered what Tolkien, Edwardian prude that he was, would have said of the human tendency to turn the appreciation of his works into a sort of pickup scene for the high-IQ crowd. That led me to consider ribald parodies like the hilarious Very Secret Diaries, which at least two of the women I chatted with obviously knew quite well and I'd bet money the other two did too.

I was also thinking, during the movies, about Liv Tyler. Long-time readers will be aware that I have warm and lusty feelings about our Liv. OK, so I will cheerfully concede that Miranda Otto is a dish and well into wouldn't-kick-her-out-of-bed territory, but her Eowyn doesn't nail the releaser circuitry in my hindbrain quite the way Tyler's Arwen does. During the first movie I found watching Arwen's lips as she spoke Elvish quite an erotic experience. (And it's not just me. My sister Lisa reported, after I mentioned this, having been startled to discover the same reaction in herself. This is amusing because I have never had any reason to doubt her report that she's normally as straight as a laser-beam.) Arwen isn't any less sexy in the third movie.

So I was well-primed to read the essay Warm Beds Are Good this morning. This is an extended and thorough consideration of sex and sexuality in Tolkien's works. Towards the end, the author makes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien's mythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their own fantasy needs. This makes sense; giving a luscious version of Arwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a crude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it's a way to make the mythos fundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather dessicated and repressed account of The romance of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings would have been.

Warm Beds Are Good fails to grapple with the most interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first place. It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen's behavior makes any sense at all.

Aragorn's end isn't that much of a mystery. He's an alpha male of a warrior culture, chock full o' testosterone and other dominance hormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog. She's a beautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility signals in all directions. If she doesn't actively smell bad, tab A fits slot B just fine from the point of view of his mating instincts.

No, the fundamental problem is Arwen's lifespan. She is supposedly something like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets Aragorn. That's an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely Disco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a normal human female's, she ought to have more mileage on her than a Liberian tramp steamer. On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is fundamentally different from a human female's, what'n'thehell is she doing with Aragorn? He shouldn't look or smell or behave right to trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to most human women.

“B-b-but...” I hear you splutter “This is fantasy!”, to which I say foo! Tolkien was very careful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology, thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps. He lectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent secondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely repudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of the lost past of our Earth, and that therefore matter, energy and life should be consistent with the forms in which we know them.

Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as though it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men both got DNA, and to ask if the freakin' biology makes any sense at all under this assumption.

And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves are not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring. That means they have to be genetically very, very similar. If there are dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior, the instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small set of genes that somehow don't interfere with that interfertility. In fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the same stock.

When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first movie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare periods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each other for life when they mate, like swans. This pattern is actually within the envelope of human variation, though uncommon — which makes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid subspecies.

This ‘swan theory’ would be consistent with Appendix A, which (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven prince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien's rather clotted chansons-de-geste style) falling for him hard right then and there, and (b) has Arwen's family apparently operating under the assumption that once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn't be mating with anyone else, noway, nohow.

One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a canonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor; first wife Miriel, second Indis). In subsequent discussion, we concluded that it wasn't possible to frame a consistent theory that fit Tolkien's facts. The sticking-point turned out to be the half-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to choose whether they will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they do so at puberty.

Since that's true, the difference between Men and Elves can't properly be genetic at all. It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit, magic, and divine interventions. This is not an area in which Tolkien (a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all. Elvish sexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any reasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so, and He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens' hormones from getting them jiggy Until It's Time.

Helluva way to run a universe, say I. Inelegant. A really craftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn't require constant divine intervention to function. It's a serious weakness in Tolkien's ficton, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like domestic cats (which didn't reach northern Europe until late Roman times) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.

Meanwhile, back in this universe, I'm kind of wishing I'd asked the buxom big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt for her phone number. Too many alpha-male horn-dog hormones, that's me. Tolkien wouldn't have understood a sexual culture in which that was even conceivable behavior for a happily married man. much less one in which the wench and wife would have then been more likely to become friends than not; his only category for it would have been debauchery. But I think his fantasy continues to work partly because it's so repressed.

Sexual love (and all the mutability of human custom that goes with it) is essentially a side issue in Tolkien's work, primarily a symbol of reward for valor (Faramir and Eowyn; Sam and Rosie; Aragorn and Arwen, for that matter). His Edwardian restraint produces a nearly blank ground on which Peter Jackson can project Liv Tyler and readers can project all their own sexual dramas and hopes, from the romance of Aragorn and Arwen to the rather weird ones like Gimli/Legolas slash fiction. Certainly that's what the women in Arwen and Eowyn costumes were doing.

And for a good laugh, there's always the Very Secret Diaries. Rather than launch into a postmodernist-sounding rant about irony and appropriation, I'll just finish by observing that all of these things modulate each other; that not only do we project our sex onto Tolkien's sex, we read Tolkien's sex differently after the Very Secret Diaries, or after seeing Liv Tyler speak Elvish, than we did before. That much, Tolkien would have had no trouble understanding.

In response to my post on The Last Samurai, one reader asked a question I should have expected: didn't the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully suppress firearms in Japan?

No. Actually, they didn't. Many American believe they did because they've vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin's book Giving Up The Gun, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully suppressed firearms in Japan, partly by promoting the cult of the sword.

But the book was wrong. Arthur Tiedemann, an eminent historian of Japan, once explained this to me personally. It seems that if you study the actual weapons inventories of daimyo houses, it turns out they maintained firearms and firearms-wielding troops from the Battle of Sekigahara clear through to the Meiji Restoration.

This was especially true of the so-called ‘outside lords’, the descendants of the survivors of the losing side at Sekigahara. Their domains were far from the capitol at Edo and the shogunate's control over them was often little more than nominal.

But to significant degree it was true everywhere. The shogunate banned firearms, the daimyos pretended to obey the ban, and the shogunate pretended to believe them. A very Japanese, face-saving compromise.

Perrin, alas, was taken in, perhaps because he wanted to be. Hoplophobes have been citing his book with approval ever since. But while it doesn't seem to have been a deliberate fraud like Michael Bellesisles's Arming America, it's just as false to fact.

Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently. By ‘surprisingly good‘ I mean that they're rather better than one might expect from their genre. Loony Toons: Back In Action, for example, could have been a mere merchandising vehicle, a repetition of clichés and tired sight gags. Instead it was a wickedly funny combination of Animaniac edginess with classic Warner Brothers wackiness. It has a few moments of true brilliance — the sequence in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" (think of melting clocks) is jaw-droppingly wonderful, sublime art.

Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World was also a surprising treat. I've read all 20 of the Aubrey/Maturin novels. The movie doesn't capture their texture and depth — that would be impossible, they are deeply literary works — but as an adventure movie that refers to the books without insulting the reader's intelligence it works quite well.

The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies are so good that hard-core fans of their respective books are still pinching themselves, wondering when they're going to wake up to the discovery that they're actually watching the usual dumbed-down Hollywood crap. (I say this as a Tolkien fan so hard-core that I was able to catch nuances of the spoken Elvish that weren't in the subtitles.)

Of course there have been dreadful turkeys where we expected better, as well. The third Matrix movie and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones leap to mind. But dreadful turkeys are part of the normal scene; what's abnormal is that New Line gave Peter Jackson the money and freedom to make Rings movies that, while rushed and not without the occasional compromise, are almost achingly good.

Think about it. When was the last time you saw a movie that (a) was a book adaptation faithful enough for the fans to cheer it, (b) got great reviews from movie critics, and (c) was boffo box office? Just counting the Rings and Potter movies and Master & Commander, we've now had five of these in relatively quick succession. Something is going on here. Can it be that Hollywood is having an attack of intelligence and taste?

(My wife Cathy suggests Saving Private Ryan as a precursor of the trend.)

The movie that pushed me to think about this as a pattern, rather than a series of isolated incidents, is The Last Samurai. I'd been wanting to see this one since the first trailers six months ago, but was braced for a disappointment on the scale of Pearl Harbor. Hollywood's record on wide-screen historicals is dreadful; they tend to be laughably ahistorical — either mindless spectacles or video sermonettes for whatever form of political correctness was in vogue the week they were made. Remarkably, The Last Samurai almost completely avoids these flaws.

I said “almost completely”. The movie is not without flaws. But even the flaws are interesting. They illustrate the ways in which Hollywood's metric for a good (or at least successful) movie is changing.

Let's start with the bad stuff. First, way too much camera time that could have been better employed gets spent on emotive closeups of the lead's phiz (a misfeature The Last Samurai shares with the first two Ring movies and I am thus beginning to think of as ‘the Frodo flaw’). But this is Hollywood and it's Tom Cruise and one supposes such excess is inevitable.

Secondly, the movie is seriously anti-historical in one respect; we are supposed to believe that traditionalist Samurai would disdain the use of firearms. In fact, traditional samurai loved firearms and found them a natural extension of their traditional role as horse archers. Samurai invented rolling volley fire three decades before Gustavus Adolphus, and improved the musket designs they imported from the Portuguese so effectively that for most of the 1600s they were actually making better guns than European armorers could produce.

But, of course, today's Hollywood left thinks firearms are intrinsically eeeevil (especially firearms in the hands of anyone other than police and soldiers) so the virtuous rebel samurai had to eschew them. Besides being politically correct, this choice thickened the atmosphere of romantic doom around our heroes.

Another minor clanger in the depiction of samurai fighting: We are given scenes of samurai training to fight empty-hand and unarmored using modern martial-arts moves. In fact, in 1877 it is about a generation too early for this. Unarmed combat did not become a separate discipline with its own forms and schools until the very end of the nineteenth century. And when it did, it was based not on samurai disciplines but on peasant fighting methods from Okinawa and elsewhere that were used against samurai (this is why most exotic martial-arts weapons are actually agricultural tools).

In 1877, most samurai still would have thought unarmed-combat training a distraction from learning how to use the swords, muskets and bows that were their primary weapons systems. Only after the swords they preferred for close combat were finally banned did this attitude really change. But, hey, most moviegoers are unaware of these subtleties, so there had to be some chop-socky in the script to meet their expectations.

One other rewriting of martial history: we see samurai ceremoniously stabbing fallen opponents to death with a two-hand sword-thrust. In fact, this is not how it was done; real samurai delvered the coup de grace by decapitating their opponents, and then taking the head as a trophy.

No joke. Head-taking was such an important practice that there was a special term in Japanese for the art of properly dressing the hair on a severed head so that the little paper tag showing the deceased's name and rank would be displayed to best advantage.

While the filmmakers were willing to show samurai killing the wounded, in other important respects they softened and Westernized the behavior of these people somewhat. Algren learned, correctly, that ‘samurai’ derives from a verb meaning “to serve”, but we are misled when the rebel leader speaks of “protecting the people”. In fact, noblesse oblige was not part of the Japanese worldview; samurai served not ‘the people’ but a particular daimyo, and the daimyo served the Emperor in theory and nobody but themselves in normal practice.

Now for some of the good stuff. It begins with an amazingly strong performance by Ken Watanabe as the rebel daimyo Katsumoto. From the first moment that you see him, you believe him; there are no moments of hey-I'm-Tom-Cruise to mar his immersion in the character, for which excellent reason he actually upstages Cruise at several key points.

Through Katsumoto and the other Japanese characters, we are made to see the intertwined quests for perfection of both technique and self that was so central to the samurai warrior-mystic. Indeed, there are points at which the filmmakers have some subtle fun with the fact that Americans of our day, having successfully naturalized Japanese martial arts into our own culture, have learned to understand that path rather better than Cruise's Captain Algren does. I'm thinking especially of the point at which a bystander watching Algren lose at sword practice tells him he has "too many minds". The viewer probably knows what he is driving at even if Algren does not.

Better: the movie is properly respectful of Japanese virtues without crossing the line into supine multiculturalism. Captain Algren appreciates and accepts the best of an alien culture without renouncing his identity as a Westerner, an officer, and a gentleman. There is a telling scene after Algren has been accepted into the life of his Japanese hosts in which he takes a heavy load from Taka (the female lead), who protests that Japanese men never help with such things.

Algren replies that he is not a Japanese man. In this and other ways he refutes an already-standard knock on the movie, which is to refer to it as “Dances with Samurai”. But this movie, despite the flaws I've pointed out, is more honest and far less sentimental about the samurai than Dances With Wolves was about its Sioux. This is progress of a sort.

Algren's romance with Taka is also handled with a degree of restraint that is appropriate but surprising. We get no sexual cheap thrills; instead, we get subtle but extremely powerful eroticism, notably in the scene where Taka dresses Algren in her dead husband's armor just before the final battle.

The film is visually quite beautiful. The details of costume, weapons, armor, and the simple artifacts of Japanese village life are meticulously and correctly rendered. In fact there are a number of points at which the setting is stronger than the script and carries one through places where the plotting is a bit implausible.

This contrast is an illustration of the uneven way in which standards have risen. The Last Samurai, the Rings movies, Master & Commander, and the Harry Potter movies all have vastly better production values than (I think) they would have had even ten years ago — perhaps the huge advances in special-effects technology have created a sort of upward pressure on the quality of movies' depictions of reality. On the other hand, downright silly plot twists are still acceptable and the conventions of the star-vehicle film remain firmly in place.

One gets ahistorical howlers and (in fiction) violations of the spirit of the original work, but fewer than formerly. In all these movies, you can see where they were trimmed to fit Hollywood's marketing needs, but the trimming is done with a lot more sensitivity and taste than it used to be. Occasionally one even sees outright improvements — the moment in Peter Jackson's version of Boromir's death scene in which the fallen Gondorian hails Aragorn as his king, for example, achieves more power and poignancy than Tolkien's original.

I like this trend a lot, but I'm not sure I understand it. The Hollywood establishment is in business to make money, but the link between market demand and the quality of films has always been tenuous at best. It would be nice to think that film audiences have required filmmakers to exhibit better taste by developing better taste themselves, but in the face of all the awful schlock that still gets churned out and makes money, this is a difficult case to sustain in general.

It feels to me more as though some balance of power within the system has shifted and, for whatever reason, creative artists have gained power at the expense of the marketeers. Thus, for example, Rowling had more than somewhat to do with the casting of the Harry Potter movies, and Peter Jackson's films display a nearly obsessive concern with getting the look of Middle-Earth right that could hardly be shared by a typical studio exec.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad of the trend. I spend a lot more time in movie theaters than I use to — and that's the message Hollywood wants to hear.

The organizers of the Internet Summit in Geneva have had Dr. Paul Twomey, the president of ICANN (the organization that's chartered to administer the international domain-name system), ejected by security guards after he'd flown twenty hours to participate in the meeting.

I was not especially surprised. The organizers of the Geneva summit seem to be very much the same scum of the planet that one normally finds running these U.N. events — third-string diplomatic timeservers, addle-brained NGO moonbats, a scattering of celebrity Eurotrash, and a legion of gray apparatchiks from authoritarian Third World pestholes. It didn't astonish me that they'd use force to keep out anyone who might interfere with their plans for a government-friendly, politically-correct, censored, and very thoroughly controlled Internet.

No, the really surprising part is that I found myself sympathizing with Dr. Twomey. ICANN's performance, while not the unmitigated disaster many of its critics like to portray, has not been glorious. Way too many deals have been done in back rooms and the organization has been far too kind to expansive trademark claims and other sorts of corporate land-grab.

Perhaps the one salutary effect of the Geneva summit is to remind us that things could easily be worse — and almost certainly will be, if the U.N. gets control.

This parody below comes to us from an artist named Howard Hallis, to whom all credit is due. I've taken the liberty of reproducing it here because the design of his website leads me to suspect that this cartoon might be replaced by something else the next time he has a fit of artistic inspiration.

This is a brilliant piece of art. While it helps to have a prior acquaintance with the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ that H.P. Lovecraft developed in now-classic horror stories of the 1920s and '30s, Hallis does a vivid and effective job of conveying the central themes and feel of the Mythos. But the truly subversive genius of this cartoon lies elsewhere...about which more after you have read it.

This is, of course, a parody of a fundamentalist Christian evangelical tract. More specifically, it is a remarkably accurate take on the style of Jack T. Chick, a pamphleteer who has occupied the scungy basement of Christian evangelism since the 1960s. Both the talking heads are recognizable, stock Chick characters — the sinful, scornful unbeliever and the saintly white-haired minister.

Some cultural-studies type ought to do a book on the way that the Cthulhu mythos has oozed forth from its pulp origins to become Western pop culture's generic Nightmare From Beyond. This parody could have been written thirty years ago — Chick goes back that far and has been remarkably, er, consistent in his output — but thirty years ago only a handful of SF and fantasy fans would have recognized Cthulhu. Nowadays ol' squid-face is all over the place; there are, ironically, plush toys.

I put it down to fantasy-role-playing games, which have reached a far larger audience than print SF or fantasy. Gamers have borrowed the Cthulhu mythos so frequently that it's a cliché — but one which, thanks to the eerie power of Lovecraft's imagery, never completely loses its power to send a chill down the spine. Even the mere names — the Necronomicon, Yog-Sothoth, the corpse-eaters of Leng, the Hounds of Tindalos, and of course dread Cthulhu himself — is to feel a vast and threatening darkness.

Hallis's parody draws on a much more specific tradition. The idea of the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu as a parody of the Campus Crusade for Christ was already live when I was in college in the 1970s. But Hallis makes their point more compactly and effectively, and therein lies the real touch of genius in this piece.

Jack T. Chick's pamphlets speak plainly the most fundamental message of Christian evangelism: believe or be damned. It's all about fear, the induced fear that if you don't get straight with God you will burn in Hell. Not for Chick the sugar-coating of talk about love or morality or becoming a better person. Writing for the lowest common denominator, he zeroes in on terror.

But so pervaded is our culture with Christian ideas and imagery that it is difficult to see how nasty and inhumane Chick and his ilk really are; even those of us who are not Christians tend to respond to the fear-mongering with a kind of numbness, reacting to Chick's ugly, drab oeuvre mainly as an offense against good taste (or a form of unintentional found humor). For the more intelligent sort of Christian, Chick is embarassing — like a slovenly relative you can't quite kick out of your house because, after all, he is family.

What is really incisive about Hallis's parody is his demonstration that very little about the Christian world-view or rhetoric has to change to make it indistinguishable from Lovecraft's nightmare. Ah, the rapture of being taken up by the Elder Gods! Worship and sacrifice are good things. Trust the preacher, he will make you fear and show you the way.

It used to be popular among a certain sort of leftist to claim that the collectivist and apocalyptic ideas in socialism made it a proper political analog of Christianity. They were arguably correct in this; where they went wrong was in considering the connection flattering to socialism rather than damning of Christianity. Hallis's parody is a starker demonstration; the fact that both the fictional cult of Cthulhu and the all-too-real religion of Christianity both depend so fundamentally on the terror of the Gods is not grounds for exonerating the former, but rather for condemning the latter.

Yup, the blizzard is big. Here in eastern Pennsylvania we've had over a foot of snow and a lot of drifting today. I shoveled my driveway. I'm going to be stiff tomorrow.

So, the latest trend to hit the business magazines is falling programmer salaries. I can't lay hands on the article just now, but it seems some CEO under pressure to outsource his programming to India had the bright idea of offering lower salaries (competitive with Indian levels, not U.S. levels) to programmers in the U.S. He got 90 applicants, even though the offer was for about half of what used to be considered normal for the positions.

A pointer to this article was posted to my favorite mailing list by a friend who is depressed about programmer salaries dropping, He wasn't un-depressed by the revelation, at the end of the article, that said CEO ended up jacking some of his salaries back up to "normal" levels to keep his best people.

There are a bunch of ways I could respond to this. One is by arguing that outsourcing programming work is a fad that will largely reverse itself once the true, hidden costs start to become apparent. Even if that weren't so, the Indian advantage would be temporary at best; as the Indian programmer's value rises, so will the price he charges. I believe these things are true. But in keeping with tradition here at Armed and Dangerous, I'm going to skip the easy, soft arguments and cut straight to the most important and contentious one of all — falling salaries are good for you.

If you're a programmer upset by falling programmer salaries, I hope you're prepared to be equally gloomy about the continuing fall in real-dollar prices of all the other labor-intensive goods you buy. Because trust me, they get cheaper the exact same way -- and somewhere out there, there are people who are pissed off and depressed because the market wouldn't support their old salaries.

But each time this happens, more people gain than lose. The money programmers aren't making is, ultimately, money some other consumer gets to keep and use for something else, because the price of the bundled goods programmmers were helping produce have dropped. The corporate cost-cutters only get to profit from this as a transient thing, until the next round of price wars. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The free market is a wonderful thing. I was going to call it the most marvellous instrument ever devised for making people wealthy and free, but that would be wrong — the free market isn't a 'device' any more than love or gravity or sunshine are devices, it's what you have naturally when nobody is using force to fuck things up.

Sometimes, when you and your friends are on the bad end of one of its efficiency-seeking changes, it's hard to remember that the market is a wonderful thing for almost everybody almost all the time. But it's worth remembering, just as it's worth remembering that free speech is a wonderful thing even when it's the Nazis or Communists exercising it.

Why is this? Because the alternatives to free speech, even when the people pushing them mean well, always turn into petty tyrannies now and become grand tyrannies in the course of time. The alternatives to markets decay into tyranny a lot faster.

I've spent a lot of time and effort since 1997 developing effective propaganda tactics for reaching the business world on behalf of the hacker community — among other things, by popularizing the term ‘open source’. If you want to grok how this is done, read my October 15 interview with a bunch of Prudential Securities investors.

Pay attention to style as well as content. This is the language you have to learn to speak to reach the people who write big checks. It's not very complicated, if you just bear in mind that these people are obsessed with two things: risk management and return on investment. As they should be — it's their job.

Thanks, all of you, for the compliments. The last thing I expected was to become a geek pinup!

Cathy Raymond