Monthly Archives: November 2020

Book discussion: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

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Cover, The Moon Is a Harsh MistressRobert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of his most enduringly popular novels, especially among libertarians. Doing these book posts gave me an excuse to read it for the first time in many years.

I could write a dozen essays on different aspects of the novel. Can a computer “wake up”? What are the implications of Professor de la Paz’s philosophy of “rational anarchism”? Why did Mike go away at the end? For this piece, I’ll look at Lunar society, how it’s organized, and how tenable the idea is.
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Book discussion: Free to Move

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books freedom law liberty on by

Darth Vader saying: Not happy with the Empire? Then move to Another GalaxyIt’s a curious thing that the people who say you should leave the country if you don’t like it are so often the ones who favor legal barriers to doing it. Having the option is a valuable freedom, though.

We take for granted the freedom of Americans to travel from one part of the country to another, or at least we did until 2020. Now governments are imposing interstate travel restrictions in a futile attempt to contain a virus which is already on both sides of every state line. Shortly before I started writing this, I learned that if I travel six miles to Massachusetts, I now have to show a recent negative COVID-19 test or quarantine for 14 days. I don’t know how they plan to enforce it. Putting checkpoints on every road that crosses the state line would be ridiculous. Maybe they’ll pull over cars with out-of-state plates and demand test documentation. Maybe friends and family members will start standing on opposite sides of the state line to talk to each other as the police watch to make sure they don’t step over the border.

The freedom to “vote with your feet” is the topic of Ilya Somin’s book, Free to Move. Somin is probably best known for his writing in the collaborative legal blog “The Volokh Conspiracy.” He presents an argument for maximizing the freedom to relocate from one country, state, or town to another.
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Book Discussion: Brave New World 2

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged dystopia fiction science fiction on by

Brave New World coverThe early 1930s were a bad time for people who loved freedom. The Communists had taken over in Russia, as had the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis were fast gaining power in Germany. The world economy had just crashed. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his novel of what the totalitarian future might be like.

It hasn’t held its popularity as well as Orwell’s 1984, but it may be a better prediction of the future. In Huxley’s dystopia, there are no secret police or torture chambers. The police use tranquilizers rather than lethal bullets. People are punished by reassignment rather than death or prison. It works because everyone is brainwashed from birth and controlled by drugs. Organized rebellions don’t happen. The models for 1984 were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Brave New World is closer to modern China.
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Alert to writers who use Audible

This entry was posted in Writing as business and tagged Amazon Audible audiobook on by

An article on File 770 reports that Audible has been encouraging readers to return audiobooks for refunds. They can return them as much as a year later, after reading the entire book. Surely it should take less time and reading than that to decided that you hate a book and wish you hadn’t spent the money on it.

The return counts as a revoked sale. The author gets no royalties, even though the reader got a year’s worth of use out of the book.
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Book Discussion: Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

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When I started my research on The Magic Battery, I needed to find out about the Reformation in Germany. I’d picked that period because it was a time of change and technological advancement, a good background to set changes in magic against. Learning about Martin Luther was important, since I wanted to understand the ongoing conflict of ideas. At the same time, I wanted to learn about daily life in that period. It’s easy enough to get information on the emperors and electors, the wars and alliances, the states and borders. Finding out how people traveled, ate, and married took more work.

Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet turned out to be very useful for both purposes. It tells the story of Luther’s life while including lots of details about how he lived. It gives a lot of insight into how people thought in those days.
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Book discussion: Flim-Flam!

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James Randi, stage magician (“the Amazing Randi”), skeptic, and writer, died on October 20, 2020. He was someone I really admired. He took on nonsense and demolished it. He gave Penn and Teller their start. This post is about one of his books mostly so I can talk about him. The book is Flim-Flam!, published in 1982. I don’t think it’s currently in print, but used copies are easy to find.

He took apart many claims of paranormal phenomena such as astrology, fairy photography, and faith healing, using facts and logic. Sometimes this made him unpopular, but he had fun doing it.

He pointed out that even smart people (like you and me, right?) can be fooled. Scientists can be especially gullible because they aren’t used to dealing with nonsense and fakery.

Randi was famous for offering a monetary reward to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal abilities. Originally it was for $10,000, and later he increased it to a million dollars. In Flim-Flam, he wrote:

I have carried around with me ever since a check in that amount [$10,000], immediately awardable to a successful applicant. … The offer is still open, and will be during my lifetime. It is stipulated in my will that if the amount is still unclaimed and available upon my death, the same offer will be made by my estate in perpetuity.

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