Tag: larry niven

It has long been my private contention that the intellectual Left’s stranglehold on academia has been a boon for the science fiction community: if you’re a lyric poet, an economist who takes Hayek seriously, and/or a historian who spits at the sight of any book with ‘People’s History’ in it, and you can write, there’s a place for you somewhere in the speculative fiction field.  I mention this not for any real reason except as an intro to the aforementioned Law by Larry Niven:

Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

More specifically: this One Nation thing will not work for the same reason that the Brownbaggers didn’t work, or the Coffee Party didn’t work, or any of the other cargo-cult projects that the Left have embarked on to ‘counter’ the Tea Parties didn’t work.  It will not work because it is a cargo cult project: which is to say, it is an attempt to use the Law of Similarity by creating as many trappings of a populist movement as can be arranged, in the hopes that it will somehow attract actual populists.  In short, it is efffectively a magic spell.

And as Niven noted: if magic worked that well, society would be already using it to do things.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, I understand that they have no choice in the matter: if they tried actually building a populist movement, the Left would rapidly run up against the problem that populist sentiment right now is pretty heavily anti-government interference – which is to say, anti-Left.  So what?  It’s not my fault that there are people out there who are emotionally invested in the big-government fallacy.