Bill Whittle Day!
Only posting a link, or, rather two videos.
Ash Wednesday is tomorrow. In honor of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday, for you non-francophiles) we have a festival of Bill Whittle: End of the Beginning and Free Frontier.
END OF THE BEGINNING:
There is a rather nice science fiction story hidden somewhere in this analysis, which ties the form of government roughly to the surrounding social power structure, including the basic form of the economy, either husbandmen of the Agrarian Revolution, factory hand of the Industrial Revolution, or programmer of the Information Revolution.
Whether one agrees or not with Mr. Whittle analysis of the Tea Party movement, anyone not blindly partisan must see that his description of the causes behind this cause is more convincing because more detailed, than the voices that just call them racists. True or false, there is something to think about in what Whittle says about them. The racist slur is merely a button-push. If you have not been conditioned Pavlov-style to have the correct frothy-mouth rage reaction, the button does not click, and pushing it again harder will not make it click. When a push-button slander works or when it does not work, either way, there is nothing to think about.
Myself, I know only two guys in the Tea Party movement: one of them is a guy from Japan and married an oriental wife and the other one is a Black guy. The ability to halt a movement with a one-word slander is severely limited in an era where the party no longer controls all the media.
No matter which side I was on, I would see which side I would bet on to win. You cannot beat something with nothing. You cannot beat an argument — good or bad — with a non-argument.
I say “good or bad” because the international communist movement, which was “bad” in that it had about the most illogical and most morally depraved argument one can imagine “analyzing” the causes and solutions to the discontent accompanying industrialization, won over more than half the world in one generation, and merely because, so far as I can see, no one until quite late in the game stood up to argue against them: FA Hayek and Ludwig von Mises for the economic argument, Ayn Rand for the moral argument. Marx wrote in the 1890’s, and these authors were half a century later.
FREE FRONTIER:
And for your further viewing pleasure, a topic near and dear to my heart, space exploration:
Armadillo Aerospace is funded by the guy who make DOOM, my favorite first person shooter.
I cannot behold Spaceship One without fainting like a bobbysoxer seeing Sinatra. I am reminded of the Heinlein characters like Delos D. Harriman, the man who sold the moon. Dreams do come true, sciencefictioneers. Ad Astra!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
