Sorry, that should read the NRA’s 2nd amendment interpretation. Not the amendment itself.

What would the views of Americans be on compulsory completion of military service being a mandatory prerequisite for the existence of even a choice of legally owning a firearm and the American arms industry and resellers not knowingly, intentionally, legally catering to the needs of wannable illegal gun owners and not preserving the status quo by way of NRA proxy lobbying of the Republican party?

Also, just because someone has a clean slate criminal record when purchasing the gun by no means and in no way precludes that person from decerebrating their coworkers come next Monday with that very gun, for example. And nor does a loaded rap sheet preclude someone from purchasing from gunshows (all background check free), private owners via newspaper ads(all background check free), etc; all perfectly legally.

So, a layman watching from outside the U. S. of A might be excused for thinking that the NRA lobbies for watches over the well being of coffers of the American ‘light’ (used loosely when talking about the Barrett M90 and M95, for example) arms industry through warping of law and interpretation of law as well as loophole drilling in future gun control bills (the 2nd amendment has been dismissed by the US Supreme Court, as far as I know; the bore of rifles chambered for the .50 BMG) at the expense of people’s lives and fundamental, inalienable rights in favour of make believe ones.

True sonyad… also these Mujahadeen see death as a gift, and I don’t think they’d care if their entire region was nuked as long as they bloodied the nose of the Great Satan. I’m sure they even expected the US to react more aggressively than we did after 9/11.

Ironically enough, most of the things they hate about the West are the same things we on this site hate about it.

What is ‘catalytic fusion’?

Dakota Smith, please excuse my misgivings about channeling Mary Rosh. I am somewhat sceptical when someone trumpets me the virtues and benefits of gun toting citizenry. Especially when proxying that particular individual.

What if, say, some nuknut decided one day they wanted to turn America, and indeed the world via reciprocation, into some massive ashen Columbine, them being paranoid or having a deathwish combined with pathological homicidal tendencies or some such line of thinking?

Oops. Didn’t think about that one now, did we?

I have a different philosophy. Feel free to act on any designs you might have for your self and life and those of people around you. So long as it does not directly or otherwise even potentially render malfeasance upon the person or life of anyone I care or may care about in the future.

son of the suns said:

Imagine everyone in the world capable of producing nukes from their desktop molecular manufacturer and then anonymously teleporting it to where ever they wish.

Private weapons in private hands deters such actions, whether they be spears or nukes. If everyone in America had a nuke in their hip pocket, would potential terrorists take any action? Suppose some terrorist beamed a nuke into mid-town Manhattan and murder millions. What would happen next if everyone had a nuke? The utter obliteration of the entire Muslim world, that’s what. There are people for whom “nuke ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” would be a perfectly acceptable tactic if mid-town Manhattan were nuked.

The practical reality of no longer dealing with governments and heads-of-state would stop terrorists dead in their tracks. Would terrorists risk their own annihilation and the annihilation of anyone who shared their religion or geographic area by starting something with a people who owned personal nuclear weapons?

More guns, less crime. It scales up from any weapon you might choose, from a closed fist to fission bombs. The best way to make the world safe is to see that the free market provides small, inexpensive weapons to anyone who chooses to buy them. As long as we insist that weapons can only be entrusted to a few individuals, we breed world-wide chaos abroad and dictatorships at home.

Of course, for this socialist abomination to even take place, you have to believe that molecular manufacturing and teleportation could ever be reality. Which I don’t, and don’t think many do besides the technocults such as transhumanism, etc.

I think teleportation is unlikely, though they’ve done some successful tests with Dirac jumps: duplicating a particle’s state at a remote location. I immediately see applications in information technology: imagine the Internet made up of Dirac jump transcievers. I suspect I’ll live to see that.

Using a Dirac jump to duplicate a human being is obviously several million orders of magnitude more complicated than electric signals. Also, it’s not really teleportation, since it wouldn’t do anything to the original, it just duplicates the original’s individual particle state elsewhere. Personally, I’d like to see that happen just to see if the duplicate looks and acts like a normal human being — albeit a duplicate of an existing human being. The ethical and religious implications are really fascinating.

Remote particle state duplication, yes. True teleportation, no.

Nanotechnology, on the other hand, is another matter. I think we’re poised to see some really amazing nano-machines, and there’s considerable market pressure to advance this technology. The number of circuits that can be printed on silicon chips is rapidly reaching a plateau simply because there’s only so far conventional microminiaturization can go. If you can construct the tools to make the nanobots, things just got a whole lot smaller.

Off-shoots of nanotechnology could impact almost anything. I believe that in twenty years, computers won’t look or behave anything like the clunky pieces of equipment we have now. Rather, nanotechnology will make supercomputers that can be worn on the wrist and which take signals directly from the human mind — see the work of Dr. Kevin Warwick for some really amazing and successful cybernetic implant experiments. Dr. Warwick’s work is going to revolutionize everything.

Your insight into the fact that the Republic in SW standing so long because of a heavily armed citizenry is a good one, and one I’ve never considered. But as a libertarian, I do know that whenever there is a standing army there is no populace armed in equity, and when there is no armed populace, there is need for a standing army.

I think that’s a little reverse. A standing army occurs when a government has successfully disarmed its population. It’s not that there’s a need for it in the first place, it’s that government has created the need — always to a bad outcome.

As for intergalactic governance and travel, I wouldn’t put limits on that. We need powerful new energy innovations to get the fuck out there.

Actually, I suspect that we don’t need as powerful an energy innovation as you think. As mathematical predictions about the nature of the universe have been consistently disproven by astronomic observation, mathematics has consistently had to invent whole new theorems to prop up what have always only been theories. Black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, for example, are fascinating mathematical constructs that make for elegant equations but extremely unlikely actual phenomena. They exist to shore up the Big Bang Theory, which doesn’t appear to have been that good a theory in the first place.

The more I read about plasma and the theories of some plasma physicists, the more convinced I am that they’re on the right track and that conventional astrophysics has become a playground of mathematicians who have little basis in reality. Plasma physics, for example, can account for sunspot and magnetic fields on the sun and throughout the solar system being coupled with an electric current. While this flies in the face of conventional astrophysics, the effects can be observed in a scaled-down fashion on Earth — and it’s certainly true that in any Earthly experiment, magnetic fields are accompanied by electric currents.

In short, I think it possible that the more conventional astrophysics has to populate the universe with unobservable “dark matter” and “dark energy”, ignore the obvious physical connections between high- and low-red-shift extra-galactic objects, and come up with esoteric explanations for why sunspot activity reveals cooler core temperatures in the sun in order to avoid dealing with the relationship between magnetism and electric currents, the more astrophysics is getting it wrong. Eventually people are going to start listening to plasma physicists, and a whole bunch of Nobel Prizes aren’t going to be worth the wood in their stands.

Bottom line: it may not be nearly as complex to get Out There as we think it is, and the implications of plasma physics might also make things like catalytic fusion something the market will support.

It’s going to be a very interesting century, to say the least. Provided our governments don’t succeed in getting us all bombed back to the stone age in their impossible goal of establishing control over every human being on Earth.

But as to extra-solar governments, my main assertion stands:

No central government can control even the human beings on Earth. Modern imperial Presidents may wax philosophic about “spreading democracy” and having “a new world order,” but they’re just mad dreams. Five billion people will not allow one central authority to govern them, if for no other reason than one central government cannot make good decisions about five billion individual lives.

For every human being a government helps, it harms two more, either directly or indirectly — and that assumes some amount of benevolent intent on the part of those in government, which is obviously ridiculous. Those in any level of authority in government aren’t in it to help people, they’re in it so that they can have as much personal power as possible — regardless of who gets helped or harmed.

Scale that up to the interstellar level, and you’re just looking at an impossibility. A single central authority simply cannot govern trillions — even quadrillions — of individuals spread over a galactic scale.

Suppose Coruscant comes up with laws for Tatooine governing the manufacture and sale of moisture vaporators. This takes into account that on a desert planet, the demand for water by sapients who are primarily composed of it is obviously very high. They pass laws designed to stop water monopolies and price gouging.

All very well and dandy — unless you happen to live on Kamino, which is a water planet under constant deluge of rain. How do you apply the laws of moisture vaporation to a planet where there’s practically no dry land?

This is, by the way, precisely what we see in modern America — and why those of us in “fly-over country” dislike the central government in Washington. The central government is largely dominated by urbanites who make laws for other urbanites in order to curry votes. They do so at the expense of non-urbanites who must suffer under laws that disrupt our lives.

That’s why even a planetary central government cannot function. It simply isn’t capable of coming up with laws that uniformly help everyone.

And again, that’s assuming that those in government are actually interested in anything but their own personal power, an assumption that is obviously ridiculous.

Good points Dakota. I think that the reason they bowed to the socialist Federation was fear and survival. Look at how terrorism has put fear in the heart of the weaker elements of our species with todays low tech crap like stingers/c4/suicide attacks. Imagine everyone in the world capable of producing nukes from their desktop molecular manufacturer and then anonymously teleporting it to where ever they wish.

Of course, for this socialist abomination to even take place, you have to believe that molecular manufacturing and teleportation could ever be reality. Which I don’t, and don’t think many do besides the technocults such as transhumanism, etc.

Youre insight into the fact that the Republic in SW standing so long because of a heavily armed citizenry is a good one, and one I’ve never considered. But as a libertarian, I do know that whenever there is a standing army there is no populace armed in equity, and when there is no armed populace, there is need for a standing army.

And along with a standing army comes the inevitable boredom of peacetime, a devils brew of drunken scuffles with big mouthed civilian populaces, political plots and takeover attempts, or engaging in wars in which we don’t belong for “training”. And oh how easy it is to engage in wars to “liberate” resources when you have a professional, motivated army that can quickly mobolize.

As for intergalactic governance and travel, I wouldn’t put limits on that. We need powerful new energy innovations to get the fuck out there. We need fusion or ZP or something unlike anything we have now. After we have masses of free energy to waste, truely revolutionary experiments into the nature of space/time can begin.

I’m also generally a fan of Star Wars probably more for the nostalgia than anything. I will never forget walking out of my first screening of the first movie in 1977. I turned to one of my geek friends and said, “Wow. That was way better than Logan’s Run. That’s all we really had to compare it with, as opposed to the five or six major SF movies that come out every year today.

One of the things I’ve liked about Star Wars is that Han Solo is a gun-toting free trader, and that this doesn’t turn any heads. No one bats an eyelash — not even on Coruscant — when people go around armed. Contrast this with modern American society where in major metro areas you’ll be arrested for being armed.

While I doubt that Lucas intended it as such, I suspect the reason the Republic lasted as long as it did with a small force of peacekeepers (the Jedi) had more to do with an armed populace than anything else. As Dr. John Lott proved in his seminal work: More Guns, Less Crime. Anyone who wants having a blaster deters bad guys. The only real criminal types we ever saw were bounty hunters, who were naturally real bad-asses to be able to be successful against armed victims.

So yeah, I like Star Wars. You should have seen me tutoring my daughters in Kendo at Best Buy when they were selling $75-dollar light sabres. It was the only time my older daughter wasn’t embarrassed that I was such an uber-nerd.

I just don’t buy this notion that having unlimited posessions would make a society socialist. From the perspective of long-term human history, the technologically advanced cultures on Earth today have unlimited posessions. If you transplanted someone from 1776 to modern America, they wouldn’t understand what all our bitching was about, if for no other reason that we aren’t spending from dawn to dark in back-breaking labor just to survive.

So if we had replicators and nanotechnology, I think all that means is that everyone would eat as well as they like and live in as opulant a lifestyle as they like. It wouldn’t make the world into a socialist utopia because from any objective standpoint, it’s not the amount of food, clothing, and shelter that makes a person happy. Once the necessities of life are assured, human beings are still extremely territorial. Just like in modern technological society, territorialism will manifest itself in the future.

I suspect that once every human on Earth can live as opulantly as they like, the population pressure will be staggering. There will be a huge demand to get off the planet because while replication and nanotech can manufacture a 30-bedroom mansion for everyone, there won’t be enough land on the planet to support the tens of billions who want it.

So who will go to space? The entrepeneurs who can afford it (even with replication and nanotechnology, some things are just plain expensive). They’ll recoup their costs by selling newly-found planets to the highest bidders.

And that will go on for thousands of years as humanity spreads out to habitable planets. Assuming, of course, that we don’t meet any other species whose real estate requirements are the same as ours and we get into wars over it. Fortunately, the likelihood of aliens having a physiology even remotely similar to hours is so mind-bogglingly remote that we probably have nothing to worry about.

I also can’t imagine being able to wage war across enormous interstellar distances in the real universe. Nor be able to maintain interstellar governments. If the early North American settlers thought the Atlantic was a big insulator from Europe, try distances that take radio waves years to travel.

Furthermore, the United States (the de facto world government) can’t do a decent job of governing a few billion people on a single planet — or even a couple of hundred million on a single continent. Try governing hundred of billions or even trillions spread across thousands of light-years.

It can’t be done, no matter what the socialists may have wet dreams about.

And since you can’t have wars without government to fund them, local conflicts will pretty much peter out as one side or the other (rightly or wrongly) wins the fight.

I think the key thing to understand about Star Trek’s socialism is the simple fact that they live in a post-scarcity economy where nano-replicators can meet every need of hunger/shelter/industry/transportation by teleportation.

This one fact really justifies socialism. There’s no great imbalance like 20th century socialism with a decadent upperclass living in splendor while the peasants toil in factories or fields.

Now, in a real mantastic universe like Star Wars there is no such thing as teleportation or nano-manufacturing, so of course they’re capitalists. They also have things that we can greatly indentify with today. Corrupt corporate interests going to war for profit, master politicians playing both sides against the middle, deep religiousity(atleast for the Jedi and Sith).

I have been fan of the Empire ever since I read some fiction entitled “I, Palpatine” that tells how the greatest Sith Lord to ever live was once a humble legislator on a peaceful planet, until the love of his life and another man betrayed him with the Trade Federation.

And also, want some more insight to the power of the Empire? Did you see any women doing anything for them? Of course not, they’re raising Empire babies and doing all the things they’re good at. Not getting in the way in man’s games like politics and war. Nor naively voting the executive powers that allowed the Empire to be born…

wolfe said:

Great to see you posting Dakota…. but STAR TREK!?

Utopian socialism?

Come on, I’d have thought you’d be a Babylon 5 or Firefly man where there were at least revolts vs. authority and a realistic economy. (And in the latter case, a substantially libertarian theme).

Oh, trust me, I’m a huge Firefly fan. These days, I far prefer it to Trek and am generally disheartened that it met with such lackluster general popularity.

But see, I have not always been a Zero Aggression Principle philosopher, and you have to remember that when I got started in Fandom, there was nothing to choose from. There was Star Trek on TV and … nothing else.

Trek’s contemporaries were Lost In Space after all. It was years after I got into things that even Space: 1999 came along, and Star Wars wasn’t even a glimmer in George Lucas’ eye. Not to mention the explosion of film and TV SF that followed Star Wars.

I’ve been at this long enough to remember the beginning of Star Trek fandom, when “Trekkie” was damned near a racial slur to the general public. To be honest, I’ve given some thought to what it would take to write a book about the “early days” simply because so much has changed and so much worthy fanac has been lost. Anyone remember the Kraith series? Jaqueline Lichtenberg has it online, now — which is nice, because I only ever bought Volume One, so I never read the whole thing — still haven’t, in fact, because the later stories start to become altogether touchy-feely for my taste.

But then, it’s a big love story written by women. Interesting take on the Trek mythos, however, from a time when there was no expectation that Star Trek would ever be anything more than 79 episodes of a 1960s TV series.

Anyway, as I say, I’ve been at it long enough that when I started, there was nothing to choose from.

Also beginning in the late 1980s, I started to transition to where I am now politically and philosophically. It’s only partly due to the increased choice that I haven’t gone to cons in a long time. As my philosophy changed and as Trek “matured” (and particularly as Gene Roddenberry turned into a senile coke head with a messiah complex near the end of his life and decided that 24th-century Earth was a socialist utopia), I began to find the series increasingly irritating. It’s gotten to the point where between the last-minute technobabble and clear pro-socialism message that I have a hard time watching the franchise at all.

As I say, I’d've been really thrilled to watch Firefly on a weekly basis for five years. Jayne and Vera are an awesome combination. :D

Oh well, if it’s any consolation, one of the highlights of my life was getting going as a very young boy with my Dad to see James Doohan speak and show a film of the Tribble Episode (sorry, can’t remember the name).

I saw Doohan in Kansas City in the mid-1970s. I don’t really remember it very well, though. I also own an extremely rare copy of an episode of The Tomorrow Show With Tom Snyder from 1976 in which Doohan, De Kelley (Dr. McCoy), Walter Koenig (Ensign Chekov), and Harlan Ellison (writer of “The City On the Edge of Forever”) all appeared. With Ellison is his full-on, “They ruined my script!!” mode, it’s probably the best hour of the Snyder program ever aired.

I did see George Takei (Captain Sulu) in Omaha, Nebraska in 1978. The dude was and is a real class act (his incredibly over-the-top performance at the recent Shatner roast notwithstanding). I wasn’t happy that he chose to air his dissatisfaction with Shatner in his auto-biography. I do not understand where the supporting cast got this “I made the show” mentality.

They need to get it straight: Shatner may be an over-bearing, scene-stealing jerk, but the original show was about Kirk, Spock, and to a lesser extent McCoy. Anyone could and occasionally did fill the other seats on the bridge, and nobody noticed anyone was missing. Bitching about how it’s all Shatner’s fault that the show never spotlighted the supporting cast is extremely misplaced and unfair. Take the paycheck and the fame and be happy that you got lucky enough to have it, because it just as easily could have been the guy the casting director saw five minutes later.

Dakota Smith

Utopian socialism?

What the kibbutz are you talking about?!

wow.. I found this interesting, based of the sole fact that they are actually decently attractice. I dont know whether the paid model theorem is factual or not, but regardless..

on a side note.. how dare they desicrate star wars..

Somebody else said:

Funny! And some nerd-man is probably making a fortune selling those “breast” plates to nerd-wanna-be slut troopers.

Actually, yes. Some guy named Rick. Forget last name.

@Dakota superb and fascinating post. Love the story of the newsclone.

I could never attend a convention in costume, not because I view it as incredibly nerdy (which it may or may not be), but because it simply doesn’t fit with my self image. It’d be like me renting a hot-air balloon and dropping rose petals on people below. Bizarre, yet reasonable as an activity, yet something I’d never do.

I certainly don’t look down upon those who do. And I played D&D, and online MMORPG’s, so I certainly can’t claim to not be a nerd!

Female had an interesting point on my blog: she suggested some of these Femtroopers were paid models to bring guys in. Probably true. I think it’s a mix between Female’s analysis and Dakota’s (that they recognize these men are prime targets). After all, people who run conventions are male, and males aren’t stupid. If a few scantily clad bimbos will bring in the media coverage, and make everyone feel good, great.

Great to see you posting Dakota…. but STAR TREK!?

Utopian socialism?

Come on, I’d have thought you’d be a Babylon 5 or Firefly man where there were at least revolts vs. authority and a realistic economy. (And in the latter case, a substantially libertarian theme).

Oh well, if it’s any consolation, one of the highlights of my life was getting going as a very young boy with my Dad to see James Doohan speak and show a film of the Tribble Episode (sorry, can’t remember the name).

Cheers,
-wolfe

Somebody else said:

Funny! And some nerd-man is probably making a fortune selling those “breast” plates to nerd-wanna-be wanna-get-a-rich-nerd-to-buy-me-things slut troopers.

Ah, better.

Funny! And some nerd-man is probably making a fortune selling those “breast” plates to nerd-wanna-be slut troopers.

Indeed.
Man invents the wheel.
Man gets bored.
Man reinvents the wheel.

Hey guys,

Mantastic article. Thank god for nerds or we would still be wiping our asses with our fingers if it were up to women.

“Uggah, you never pay any attention to me, you and that silly wheel, all my friends think you’re gay and can’t satisfy me.”

Thank god Uggah told her to stfu and make him a wooly mammoth burger.

well it’s been a lot of fun boys. but i’m of out now to socialise with my friends. But i’ll be back tomorrow. i have no doubt that you sad little kiddies will still be here.
p.s. your moron of a president never did catch Bin Laden did he.

I beg to differ, Billy. I know of several middle-aged women with the IQ of an ant. Just because she is pretty fucking stupid, that doesn’t make her young.

Stef isn’t no woman.. Appears to be dumber than the average woman.
My guess is she isn’t old enough to breed yet. Yes it’s a Girl.
So shallow and so worthless.