Freespace

Talking with Armstrong & Getty about price controls and contracts of adhesion

I joined Armstrong & Getty this morning to talk about this interesting story where Disney is trying to enforce an arbitration clause against a guy for a tort that occurred at one of their parks, based on the terms of service contract when he signed up for Disney+. But then I stuck around to talk about how stupid price controls are. You can listen here:

Shadows of Venus

I have some new poems in Medusa’s Kitchen today.

John Varley: an appreciation

I had the opportunity to pay a little tribute to my very favorite writer, the science fiction master John Varley, in Discourse. This month also marks the 50th anniversary of his first publication, and I spend a little time examining his career and some of the elements that make his work so special: his hippie-style individualism and the smooth, precise style of his prose. Here’s an excerpt:

Varley’s fiction is marked by radical inventiveness, yet the qualities that make his work truly extraordinary are the smoothness of his prose and the realism of his characters. Together, these suspend the reader’s disbelief even through the strangest premises, in a manner that indeed resembles Heinlein, but without Heinlein’s distracting penchant for preaching about his political and social fixations. Actually, Varley’s writing more resembles that of hard-boiled detective writers like Donald Westlake….

Varley’s trademarks [are] independent, clever characters guided by common sense instead of conformity, and more likely to build rockets in their garages than to complain about others not doing so. Above all, his characters often see exploring the unknown not just as an adventure, but as a path to the authentic, individual life—one that won’t be clean or easy, but will be earned, and therefore genuine, in a way that can never be true of the unexamined life that computerized mass production makes so cheap. It’s a theme that would have been familiar to Emerson, who wrote: “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle.”

( Read the rest…)

The future of liberalism: secular or religious?

In Atlanta some weeks ago, I participated in a panel with David Wolpe, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Craig Biddle entitled “The Future of Liberalism: Religious or Secular?” Ostensibly it was about whether political liberalism (in the broad sense of that term) can be maintained on a secular basis or whether it needs religion to sustain it. But our conversation varied far from that bullseye and ended up on some classic arguments for an against the existence of God, and whether one can have spirituality without supernaturalism. The conversation wasn’t as disciplined as I would’ve preferred—but the audience seems to have really enjoyed it. You can watch here:

While obviously my perspective affects how I see this, but: I do think it was pretty obvious that both Wolpe and Hirsi Ali resorted to a variety of devices to avoid the logic of the arguments. Wolpe’s definition of “faith” was so incredibly vague as to be effectively meaningless, for example, and he frequently resorted to horse laugh, sneering, and other logical fallacies. Hirsi Ali did not dispute—but in fact conceded—that her newfound religious belief, such as it is, was a matter of “subjective choice” on her part (which seems blasphemous to me) and nobody tried to answer my point about the Second Commandment. But the point I hope really came home was that both, and especially Hirsi Ali, are reacting against the element within the atheist community that is effectively nihilistic—that offers no positive philosophical teaching about values. That’s certainly understandable. The Objectivist community has said all along that the biggest problem with the “New Atheism” is that it offers only arguments against wrong ideas, but has never proposed convincing arguments in favor of good ideas.