The Probability Broach: Pistols at dawn

Art of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton

The Probability Broach, chapter 20

The Continental Congress has ended. Win Bear and his friends spent enormous amounts of effort convincing the delegates to meet, so they could warn everyone about the imminent Hamiltonian invasion. Then, after all that work, they belatedly realized they forgot to come up with a plan for what to do about it.

John Jay Madison is gloating that they know all the details of his world-conquest plot, and there’s still nothing they can do to stop him. They have no borders to fortify; they can’t forbid anyone from entering the North American Confederacy, regardless of hostile intent; they can’t outlaw weapons. This anarcho-capitalist society is helpless to defend itself.

But, of course, there’s one thing they haven’t tried. The North American Confederacy has no laws, so it’s not illegal to just kill someone if you’re mad at them.

To that end, Win shoves through the crowd, intending to catch Madison and challenge him to a duel. But he screws it up:

I fixed my gaze on Madison and half a dozen others converging on him. Leaping the row of consoles, I strode along the table, not caring whose fingers I stomped… I braced myself, and raised a hand. Suddenly Madison was pushed aside. I struck the upraised arm of Oscar Burgess, who grinned. “Say your piece, so we can get it on, Bear!”

I ignored him. “Madison, my quarrel’s with you!”

Madison looked innocent. “Then why did you challenge Mr. Burgess?”

“What?”

“There are a thousand witnesses around us who saw it.”

Win accidentally challenged Oscar Burgess, the secret-police goon from his world who was also Win’s firearms instructor at the academy. As we saw in an earlier chapter, he found out about the Probability Broach and traveled through it to this world, where he made an alliance with Madison.

You can’t take a challenge back, and Burgess is gleefully eager for the chance, so Win reluctantly agrees to follow through. The two face off at a distance of twenty yards, and at a signal, they draw and fire:

I brought my gun to bear, too late. Over my front sight, Burgess’s muzzle blossomed brightly. A sharp bite in my right forearm, and I knew I was hit. He’d corrected faster than I’d counted on. I pulled the trigger once, twice, hoping to connect before he fired a second shot. I pulled the trigger once again.

The Smith & Wesson bucked and roared, spewing fire at Burgess. Two fist-size crimson gouts splashed his shirt-front, and his head exploded in a hazy red mist. His feet left the floor, he slammed against a desk and sank, blood obscenely pumping from his wounds, head smoking hideously where the upper half had vanished, mocked by the smoking Luger in his hand.

Win expects to see his arm blown off, but he only has a flesh wound. In a million-to-one coincidence (the kind that crops up nine times out of ten), Burgess’ bullet ricocheted off a brass button on his shirt cuff.

For plot purposes, I have no problem with that. What is problematic is that this supposedly civilized society still thinks a duel is the appropriate way to settle a dispute.

In our world, most countries outlawed dueling centuries ago, recognizing what a senseless waste of life it was. It makes perverse sense that an anarcho-capitalist world would revive this barbaric custom. (This casts a different light on the claim that the North American Confederacy has only a dozen murders per decade. Want to bet they don’t count deaths in duels as “murder”?)

In general, people want a legal system that’s oriented toward, you know, justice—examining the evidence, finding the truth, and delivering a fair result. This system offers none of that. Instead, the person with more combat prowess will almost always win, regardless of whether they’re in the right. People who enjoy violence and are good at inflicting it will dominate over those who value justice, truth and fairness.

This is regression to a medieval worldview, literally. Medieval societies practiced trial by combat because they believed that God would ensure the innocent always triumphed. It was obviously erroneous superstition in service of a might-makes-right philosophy.

In the moment of victory, Win suddenly hears gunshots behind him. He whirls around, too late, but the danger is already passed.

The shots came from Freeman K. Bertram, the corporate manager who was on Madison’s side. Madison himself made his getaway in the confusion, but one of his thugs was about to shoot Win in the back. Bertram had an attack of conscience and shot the thug first, saving Win’s life. But in exchange, he received a gruesome stomach wound:

“Win Bear!” Bertram whispered. I put an ear down to his face… trying not to look away. “Never shot a man before. Your friends… Ham—Hamilton House. It’s so cold! Cold!” He stopped talking and gurgled. I knew that sound. I closed his eyes, holding them until they’d stay shut by themselves.

Win thinks Bertram is dead, but his friends tell him to leave the man alone. An ambulance was already called before the duel began, and because the North American Confederacy has advanced medical technology, he’ll make a full recovery:

I looked at Lucy in disbelief. “He’ll be okay?”

“Will be if y’don’t put his eyes out.”

“You mean I’m going to have to kill Burgess all over again?”

“Are you kidding? Boy, you blew his head clean in half! Let me be the first to congrat—”

I didn’t hear the rest. I was busy puking in living color on a nationwide hookup.

This scene is a weird plus-one, minus-one.

As Smith has shown us, he’s an obsessed gun fetishist who thinks everyone should carry guns, including children, and bring them everywhere, including on airplanes. He claims the right to bear arms takes precedence over everything else, and that a politician’s position on guns sums up their entire political philosophy and personal character.

But, oddly enough, he doesn’t glamorize gun violence. He doesn’t treat it as satisfying and righteous when inflicted on the deserving, the way most right-wing keyboard warriors do. Even a hardened cop like Win vomits after killing a man, rather than coolly uttering a James Bond-style quip. (“Guess he really lost his head back there!”)

He probably wrote the scene for black comedy, but it’s still a realistic depiction of the traumatic aftereffects of violence. It’s an unusually sober interlude of realism in a book that’s otherwise so gung-ho about it.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: Wildfire skies are back

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the double whammy of extreme weather that besieged the United States this month: first fires, then floods, coming so quickly that there was scarcely a break between them.

For the second time in three years, millions of people are living under hazy skies polluted with wildfire smoke. This is the signature of climate change, as Canada’s boreal forests are growing warmer and drier, becoming increasingly susceptible to massive fires each summer. At the same time, warmer oceans turbocharge storm systems, giving rise to rainfall outside the range of what urban planners designed for. The thunderstorms that finally washed the smoke away brought flash flooding that swamped highways and buildings in the New York area.

This weather whiplash – not one kind of extreme weather, but every kind of extreme weather at once – is a foretaste of what the future is going to be like. It’s too late to prevent climate change, and so we have to start thinking about ways to design our civilization to adapt to it.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

This is weather whiplash playing out before our eyes. Global warming isn’t altering the climate along a single dimension, making it hotter without any other side effects. Instead, it makes every kind of extreme weather more likely.

New York City isn’t the only place suffering these disasters; far from it. Similar climate-change-driven catastrophes have been sweeping over every part of the nation, from the 2018 Camp Fire in California to 2024’s Hurricane Helene in the American South to the deadly Texas floods of 2025.

For those who aren’t wearing ideological blinders, these record-breaking fires and floods are like the Earth screaming at us. They’re undeniable evidence that climate change isn’t a distant future prospect, something we can leave for our descendants to worry about. It’s a crisis of the present, and millions of people who contributed to causing it are suffering the consequences.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Barbarians at the gates

The Great Wall of China

The Probability Broach, chapter 20

The Continental Congress is at a stalemate. Win and Lucy know that John Jay Madison and the Hamiltonians have kidnapped their friends, but they have no proof of it.

However, there’s a bigger plot afoot. The Hamiltonians are planning to invade the North American Confederacy with armies from Win’s world, using nuclear bombs to wipe out any resistance. The good guys have presented reams of evidence for the plot. Surely, the congressional delegates will rise as one to confront this grave threat!

Or not:

Madison smiled nastily. “As you will, sir. Permit me to make a number of salient points, though. First, accepting only for the sake of discussion that all these accusations are correct, I’m afraid there is still nothing you could do about them.”

Jenny looked startled. “Why do you say that? You saw the films!”

He nodded, grinning even more. “Which, in theory, were criminally removed from my possession. However, forget that. If I intended to import foreign soldiers, by your own arguments I’ve done nothing wrong: you are attempting to restrict immigration!” He laughed while the rest of the room buzzed in confusion.

This is an obvious point, and it just makes the good guys look stupid that it didn’t occur to any of them until now.

As we’ve seen in previous chapters, Win and his friends put a huge amount of effort into convincing Congress to meet, so they could bring the Hamiltonian threat to the assembled delegates’ attention. But after all that work, they had no plan for what the next step was supposed to be. When asked if they were advocating a declaration of war, President Jenny Smythe floundered in confusion.

What was the plan, exactly? What were they hoping to persuade Congress to do? In an anarcho-capitalist society with no borders, no standing army, and no means to create either, what defense could you raise against an invasion, even theoretically?

Madison’s next argument further demonstrates the protagonists’ hypocrisy:

Madison affected a sweeping bow. “I’m getting to the meat, sir, but another illustration first: suppose I do intend to use atomic bombs. Who in this room will be the first to move against importation or possession of arms? I remind you that, pistols or nuclear weapons, the principle involved is precisely the same!”

There was even greater commotion; it took longer for Olongo to quiet them down. “Your point, Mr. Madison?”

This is an argument I made earlier, in fact: L. Neil Smith treats nuclear weapons as unthinkable horrors, but he’s a fanatical supporter of the right to bear all other kinds of weapons. There’s no explanation in the text for why he draws this distinction. Now the villain is pointing out his own author’s inconsistency, and no one is able to muster a reply.

I can only assume that Smith couldn’t think of a principled reason to treat nukes differently from other weapons, so he was attempting a rhetorical rugpull. By putting the pro-nuclear-weapons position in the mouth of his villain, he was hoping that readers would reflexively reject it without giving it any further thought.

The Hamiltonian was beaming. “Ah. I simply want you all to remember, over the coming weeks, that this highly-principled anarchism you’re so proud of renders you helpless to deter even threats of the most desperate nature. A more rational social order will have no such problems. That is why, in the end, we will triumph.”

…Congress died with a whimper. There was nothing else it could do. Weeping openly, Jenny declared, “Individual rights are sacred. We can’t touch you, John Jay Madison, without destroying everything we believe. Perhaps, in the end, you will destroy us, but let it be said that we refrained from murdering the Confederacy ourselves… I will hear a motion to adjourn.”

Philosophical debates are standard for utopian political novels of all stripes. (I had one in mine, too.) But it was a bold choice to have a debate that the villain wins.

This book was supposed to persuade readers that anarchy is the superior choice. That was Smith’s reason for writing it. Yet the villain announces that the NAC’s system is fatally flawed… and the text, apparently, agrees that this is correct.

Despite knowing exactly what Madison’s plan is, the North American Confederacy proves helpless to defend itself. No one tries to do anything; no one even has a suggestion about what to do. An earlier passage mentioned that one-fourth of the Continental Congress is sapient apes, a group which the Hamiltonians believe should be enslaved or killed. Yet even they sit passively in the face of a looming Hamiltonian invasion.

One supposes Smith wanted this to be seen as praiseworthy. The NAC’s inhabitants are so steadfast in their devotion to individual rights, they won’t try to restrict what the villain does, even if it means their own destruction.

But, to approach the question from a different angle: What’s the point of rights if they can’t be defended against people who would violate them? If the NAC nobly refuses to fight for its own existence, and thereby ends up being bombed into rubble and conquered, ushering in a thousand years of slavery and oppression for all their descendants… is that a good result?

There’s a lesson here about why nation-states exist, a lesson that L. Neil Smith refuses to admit even though he has his villain state it succinctly. Nation-states are the means for people to pool their resources and coordinate their efforts, to provide public goods which no individual can supply on their own, but which everyone benefits from.

Infrastructure is the classic example—roads, bridges, tunnels. Another one is collective defense. Going back to the dawn of civilization, nation-states have hired police and raised armies to enforce laws and protect their people from crime and violence. Without that capability, you’re helpless against any gang of power-hungry thugs that comes along. This could be an outside invasion from a more ruthlessly authoritarian society, or it could be a homegrown group of criminals that decides to get organized and seize power over their neighbors. Either way, it works out to the same thing.

Smith makes a big deal of how his citizens go armed to protect themselves, but two guys with guns beat one guy with a gun. Any invading force that has better organization and bigger weapons will roll right over them. The NAC’s only recourse is to just hope that no such force ever shows up.

In other words, a free society without any kind of government is an unstable equilibrium. Either pick a government that you can live with, perhaps by instituting democracy and imposing constitutional limits on its power—or refuse to do so and risk being conquered, ending up with a much worse government than you would have chosen for yourself.

Even though he thought he was writing a novel to extol the virtues of anarchy, Smith’s story demonstrates that point to perfection. If not for a convenient deus ex machina which will arrive shortly, his peaceful and prosperous North American Confederacy would have been conquered and subjugated by the first horde of barbarians that shows up at the gates.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

The Probability Broach: Dead men tell no tales

A black-and-white photograph of old tombstones

The Probability Broach, chapter 20

Even in the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, dealing with the government is an exhausting ordeal. Win Bear was up late testifying before the delegates of the Continental Congress and making a few light death threats against journalists. He rolls out of bed late the next morning, groggy and miserable. Luckily for him, there’s no need to rush:

…even after I met Lucy in Liberty Hall, things still weren’t about to “pop.” A few were eating Telecom breakfasts. The guy to our left was napping again. If I hadn’t seen his chair empty last night, I could have sworn he hadn’t moved. I ordered another glass of milk and waited, thinking about “Anarchist Standard Time.” Shortly after noon, Olongo used a brand-new gavel to hammer things back into shape.

I suppose this is meant to be comical, but again, it bears emphasizing that this meeting was called to discuss the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over their civilization—and still, very few people seem to be taking it seriously.

When the Continental Congress finally resumes, President Jenny Smythe moves to declare a state of emergency. But a delegate asks what she’s actually proposing they do—are they declaring war on Win’s world?—and she’s flummoxed. Apparently, no one on the good guys’ side had given any thought to this question until now.

Win sees his moment and rises to address the delegates. War and centralized government are foreign concepts to the North American Confederacy, but he has experience with them, so he has some ideas about how to handle this:

“Maybe I can tell you what would happen, and whatever you don’t like, you can throw out—including me, if necessary. Whatever you do like, one of you could propose formally, and we can get on with it.”

“That might be permissible, if there are no objections. Do I hear—”

“Objections?” shouted Madison. He and his entourage were just coming in. “If this person is who he claims, he has no right to address this body, not being a citizen of the Confederacy! Or, he’s a criminal impostor, to be ejected immediately! In either event—”

“Sez who, Madison?” Lucy hollered. “Call me a citizen, you’ll get a Dakota pine cone planted where it’ll germinate quick!”

“Order! Lucy, deplore as I might the way you express it, I must say I agree. We will not have guards at our borders, nor papers to establish who belongs. There are no citizens here, Mr. Madison, nor subjects, nor serfs. Lieutenant Bear, do you live and work upon this continent?”

“I guess I do now, Mr. Vice President. Say, I have a bank account in Laporte. Does that help?”

The great anthropoid smiled. “I’ve no better qualification, myself. I don’t believe anyone would challenge my right to speak in this assembly.”

Despite Smith’s best efforts, there are a few good moments in this book. This is one of them.

While many other implications of his worldview are repugnant, this is one of the better ones. Anarchy means open borders: no artificial boundary lines, no restrictions on where human beings can live, work or travel, no rights that depend on a happenstance of birth. Smith doesn’t shrink from depicting this, so I’ll give him credit for being a consistent anarchist.

This is all the more important since conservatives in our world have become rabidly anti-immigrant, possibly to the greatest extent since the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s. It’s colossally hypocritical that the people who shout the loudest about free markets and liberty are also the most vicious about expelling and terrorizing immigrants.

Win’s proposal to the Continental Congress is threefold. First, he says, they should raise money to study the Probability Broach, so they can either use it in their own defense, or prevent invaders from using it against them. He suggests that they should contact the Propertarian Party in his own world, as a friendly group who’ll be their allies. Finally, he says, they should arrest Madison and his henchmen and interrogate them until they confess what they’ve done with Win’s kidnapped friends:

“Mr. Vice President,” Madison said, “if we’re to be imprisoned, I’d like to hear the charges… and who the damaged parties are.”

“He’s got a point,” Jenny admitted. “Name the crime, name the victim—the basis for all adjudication.”

… “What about Clarissa and Ed?” I shouted.

“Did we see these people snatch ’em?” Lucy asked, joining us up front. “Any witnesses to Madison’s threats?”

In this passage, Lucy strongly implies a criminal case against the Hamiltonians would fail because there were no witnesses who actually saw their friends Clarissa and Ed get kidnapped.

We previously saw that the North American Confederacy doesn’t know about fingerprints, and indeed seems to lack any real concept of forensic evidence, so this is consistent with that. But it’s bizarre, in this supposedly high-tech society, that it’s impossible to prosecute a crime unless you catch the culprit in the act.

When it appears Madison is going to get away with it, the good guys try a Hail Mary pass. Lucy invokes what passes for the NAC’s justice system, accusing Madison of kidnapping Ed and Clarissa and orchestrating the attacks on herself and Win, despite having no evidence:

Without waiting for the gavel, she took the few remaining steps. “John Jay Madison, also known as Manfred von Richthofen, I accuse you of kidnapping and attempted murder. The victims: Edward William Bear of Laporte; Clarissa MacDougall Olson of same; and Edward William Bear of the United States of America. Also, Lucille Gallegos Kropotkin of Laporte, Lesser Coprates, and Ceres Central. Select a neutral adjudicator and post bond in the amount of five thousand gold ounces per complaint. Failure to do so will be proclaimed throughout the land, and you may be ostracized and banished from Civilization. What say you, John Jay Madison?”

“Nice try.” He punched out a bank transfer and tossed it at her. “There’s more where that came from, Your Honor. I’ll see you in court… in thirty days! Somehow, I suspect you won’t be able to make it.” He continued in a whisper, “I guarantee your cocomplainants won’t.”

Smith doesn’t offer any editorial comment on this, but you could be forgiven for thinking this chapter is trying to illustrate the flaws in his own justice system.

In our world, if someone disappears under suspicious circumstances—which is certainly true here, since Ed and Clarissa disappeared from an airship en route to testify to the Continental Congress—you can file a missing persons report. The police are supposed to investigate, and if there’s evidence pointing to foul play, they can open a criminal case against the person likely to be responsible. In extreme cases, if a person is in imminent danger, they can send in a SWAT team. That’s supposed to be why the state exists: to defend people when they can’t defend themselves.

(Of course, there’s a large and necessary qualification needed for this. There’s a persistent problem of “swatting” attacks, where a malicious party reports a hostage crisis or other major crime at the address of their intended victim, hoping the police will bust down the door and start shooting without asking any questions. Tragically, this murder-by-proxy tactic sometimes succeeds. But swatting is just a special case of false accusation, and just as the remedy for false accusations isn’t to eliminate criminal courts, the remedy for swatting isn’t to eliminate SWAT teams. It’s to have well-trained police who act with discretion and restraint, not Dirty Harrys who charge in guns blazing at the slightest excuse.)

Meanwhile, in Smith’s anarcho-capitalist world, it’s your responsibility to defend yourself against attackers. That’s the point of that monologue about “the hostage kills you“. But if you can’t defend yourself, you’re out of luck. Even if you’re outnumbered and outgunned, it’s still your problem. There’s no third party that can come to the rescue. If you’re taken hostage, your only option is to try to escape on your own.

If you’re lucky enough to have friends, they can file a lawsuit against the presumed abductor. But as TPB itself shows, that’s a toothless remedy. Your friends have to have some idea of who’s responsible, and even if they do, the criminal can easily stall until any hope of rescue is gone.

Smith makes a big deal of how there are no “victimless crimes” in this society, but this chapter shows a dark implication of that principle: you can get away with anything, as long as you ensure your victims are unable to speak in their own defense. This creates a dangerous incentive for criminals to escalate. If you rob or assault someone, you’d be better off killing them, to make sure they won’t talk!

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: Mamdani’s army

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how socialist candidates are making inroads, despite the best efforts of the Democratic establishment.

Neoliberal and centrist politicians either ignored Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral race last year, or tried to dismiss it as an unrepeatable one-off event powered by his personal charisma. But we now have ample evidence that it wasn’t a fluke. In last month’s primary elections, a class of young socialist candidates endorsed by Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America romped to victory, winning three congressional primaries and a slew of state legislative races. They won because voters responded to their message, and that makes this strategy repeatable elsewhere.

Will mainstream Democrats finally recognize that socialism is no longer a dirty word? Will they join Mamdani’s bandwagon and adopt his pro-affordability, pro-working-class agenda? Or will they double down on their efforts to fight the will of their own voters?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

In an interview, Mamdani rebutted these arguments with a simple, devastating question: “What is a party if not its voters?”

The only thing a political party is—the only thing it could be—is the collective will of its voters. Democrats are the people Democratic voters choose, period. And all these candidates won in closed primaries where only registered Democrats had a say. As Mamdani said, voters got a taste of democratic socialism and decided they wanted more of it.

Carville, Harrison and the others are showing that they, like Trump and the Republicans, conceive of the party not as a big tent, but as an authoritarian hierarchy. They think voters should support whoever they’re told to by establishment gatekeepers, and they get angry and disgruntled when those voters don’t comply.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Media darling

A glowing sign reading "On Air"

The Probability Broach, chapter 20

We’re up to chapter 20 (of 24) in The Probability Broach. This chapter opens with another of L. Neil Smith’s fake quotes. This time, he puts words in the mouth of Lysander Spooner, an anarchist and abolitionist who served as president in Smith’s alternate history:

The entire concept of “law” is vain and fallacious, for what shall we have accomplished by enacting one? Those who agree with it will obey it, as they did before it existed. Those who disagree will break it, so it has no effect upon them. We have been occupied in an empty gesture of which but two consequences shall follow: those who take comfort in such things will be comforted, and those who derive perverted pleasure by enforcing their will upon others may now find positions among the police.

—Lysander Spooner
First Inaugural Address, 85 A.L.

Okay, look.

I’m not saying there’s no good argument for anarchism or its related philosophies. I believe individual freedom is generally a good thing, and we should seek to maximize it, consistent with respecting everyone else’s ability to enjoy the same right.

That being said, this is a fantastically stupid argument for anarchism. If Smith wanted to be taken seriously as a political philosopher, he fell flat on his face in the attempt.

This ignores the extremely obvious point of deterrence: the fear of being caught and punished will dissuade some people from breaking the law, even when they might otherwise be inclined to do so. There’s also the fact that people who commit serious crimes tend to be imprisoned, where their opportunities to commit further crimes are severely curtailed.

Of course, there are further replies to these points. You might argue that laws are badly designed and oppressive, punishing behavior that harms no one; that police have too much power to enforce them in excessively harsh or discriminatory ways; that most people who commit crimes don’t rationally weigh the costs and consequences; that prisons are cruel institutions that tend to make people worse rather than better. You could make all of these arguments.

What you can’t do is the thing Smith does here: just pretend that no one has ever offered any reason why laws and the justice system should exist, and then posture about how ridiculous it is that they exist anyway. It’s more than mere ignorance, it’s fundamentally dishonest.

You could construct a parallel argument for Smith’s position, like so: “L. Neil Smith says that everyone should carry firearms to protect themselves against violence, but what does that accomplish? Those who didn’t want to hurt you wouldn’t do so anyway, whether you have a gun or not. Those who wanted to hurt you will try to do so anyway, whether you have a gun or not. Therefore, guns are useless. They only give perverted pleasure to people who want to hurt others with them.”

Getting back to the main plot, Win Bear and his allies have just shown the Continental Congress the film of nuclear weapons from his world, which stuns and horrifies them:

Liberty Hall emptied in stunned silence, leaving Lucy and me behind. I’d lived all my life with a nuclear sword dangling over my head; it’s something else to be informed suddenly, to be shown, that your whole world’s slated for flaming destruction. That, or abject surrender, and Confederates didn’t strike me as the kind to lie down and spread their legs, even threatened with holocaust.

This is an incredibly gross and sexist analogy, equating willingness to have sex with passive acceptance of one’s own death. What does it say about the mindset of a person who’d write a sentence like that?

To be fair, this is Win’s internal narration, and an author doesn’t necessarily have to have the same opinions as his characters. A good writer can depict a character who’s a regressive misogynist without endorsing that view himself. But nothing in this book gives me the impression that L. Neil Smith was capable of that kind of subtlety.

My impression is that Smith held sexist views, but tried to tone them down so as not to alienate his readers (recall the earlier chapter that mentioned the availability of “hookers… organic or mechanical” but wisely said no more about it). However, there are places where it bleeds through in spite of him.

As we staggered out of the assembly hall through the portrait gallery, there were a dozen blinding flashes. I was suddenly showered with difficult questions: “Mr. Bear! Are you from another planet?” “Mr. Bear! Isn’t this whole thing an elaborate hoax?” “Mr. Bear! Is your planet radioactive?” “Mr. Bear! How do you like Confederate women?”

As Win squints and hunches against the glare, Lucy comes to his aid. She dismisses the journalists as “vermin” and says he could dismiss them by invoking his privacy rights. But she concedes it would help their cause if he answers a few questions, so he grudgingly agrees:

“Sam Hayakawa, Interplanet News. With me is ‘Win’ Bear, focus of the Seventh Continental Congress. Lieutenant Bear, may I call you Win? Would it be accurate to say you’re from another dimension?”

“I haven’t figured it out myself. I come from a place—a time, really—where history’s different, where—”

“I’m sure that’ll interest our technical-minded viewers, heh, heh. For us laymen, what’s it like to escape from a Federalist dictatorship, and win free to—”

“Now wait a minute! In the first place, I didn’t escape, I was pushed. In the second place the United States isn’t a dictatorship, it’s—”

“Win, since arriving here, you’ve left a wake of shootings behind you. We ordinarily expect perhaps a dozen murders per decade. You’ve killed that many in a month, and—”

No, just no.

As with the equally unbelievable claim that there are only a few hundred traffic deaths per year, Smith implausibly claims that violent crime is almost nonexistent in his anarcho-capitalist utopia. But the principles of this world make it impossible for anyone to know this.

How can a journalist—or anyone else—make any confident statement about how many murders there are in the North American Confederacy? There’s no agency that investigates suspicious deaths. There’s no bureau of vital statistics you can consult. There’s not even an authoritative list of the population. If a person just disappears, it’s very possible that no one would notice. The fact that murder is apparently rare might just mean that murderers are good at getting away with it—which is very likely when there are no police!

“Friend, I’m going to explain this once: I didn’t ask to be here; I didn’t ask your Hamiltonians to—”

“Well, how many people have you killed, then?”

“Nobody who didn’t have a weapon out and pointed. Until now. I’m thinking of making an exception in your—”

“Umnh, one more question, Win…”

“Call me Lieutenant Bear.”

“Erh… since your nation-state—is that correct?—has a long history of atomic warfare, do the ruins of your once-great cities really glow in the—”

“How’d your viewers like it if I took the mike and shoved it right up your—”

“This—this is S-sam Hayakawa, Inner-Interplanet News. G-goodnight!”

Tough guy Win Bear threatens to kill a journalist for asking him questions! How’s that going to play with the folks at home?

Lest we forget, the whole purpose of this is because Win and his friends want to win the Continental Congress over and persuade them of the threat they face. Logically, outbursts like this one—or last week’s scene where Win roughed up Madison and his henchmen in full view of the delegates—should turn everyone against him. They go against everything this world is supposed to stand for.

Shouldn’t the Hamiltonians be able to make an argument like: “Our views may be unpopular, but at least we’re peaceful. This man is a savage from another world who picks fights, disrespects our customs, and assaults people for saying things he doesn’t like. He’s not one of us. Don’t listen to his lies!”

When he wrote his main character, Smith was going for a classic template, depicting him as a rough-around-the-edges macho man who’s crude but honorable and eager to unleash violence in defense of what he cares about. It’s the right-wing worldview summarized in books like Jesus and John Wayne.

But that kind of character only works in the other kind of anarchy—the violent, chaotic Mad Max world where it’s every man for himself. That character shouldn’t find a welcome in the peaceful, civilized, twelve-murders-a-decade society he wants to depict.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

The Probability Broach: Nuke the moon

A planet exploding from within

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Now that the Continental Congress has gotten past the preliminaries, they call Win Bear to the stand. But before he can do that, he comes face to face with the bad guys and their henchmen:

A bit nervous, I got up and walked slowly to the dais, detouring to approach the Hamiltonians. Sure enough, there was Oscar Burgess, sneering at me. I glanced at the SecPol agent. “Stay out of this, slime! Madison, I want my friends back, quick, in good condition—Hold it, Kleingunther, or you won’t leave this room attached to your nuts!” I shoved Burgess back, gave Kleingunther an elbow in the eye, and snatched their leader’s lower lip, digging in with my thumb. “And Madison,” I warned, watching blood seep up around my thumbnail, “I’ve got no more scruples about initiated force than you do, So think about it, while you’ve got a chance!”

I let go, wiped my hand on Burgess’s shirt, and pointedly turned my back on them (not without a nervous qualm or two), continuing on in a widening circle of shocked silence.

This gross scene would make more sense if the Hamiltonians tried to obstruct Win from getting up to testify, and he had to shove and fight past them.

As it is, Smith is going out of his way to show his hero starting a fight, violently attacking people who’d done nothing to him. That’s supposed to be a massive no-no in this world. Logically, it should discredit his testimony in the eyes of everyone present. Imagine a prosecution witness called to testify at a trial, and just before he takes the stand, he punches the defendant!

Like many libertarians, Smith has the same hypocritical attitude as Ayn Rand. They both say initiating violence is always bad, but what they show is that it’s okay when the good guys do it.

Win tells his story: how he was a police officer on his Earth, how he discovered the Probability Broach and stumbled through it into this world, and how he’s been dodging assassination attempts ever since at the hands of the Hamiltonians. Madison gets a chance to cross-examine him, deriding his testimony as the ravings of a lunatic:

Madison came charging down the aisle. “Isn’t it true you’re a charlatan? An ordinary, third-rate commercial peeper, covering up thefts from a client whose trust you’ve also rewarded by implicating him in this fantasy of yours? Speak up! The nation must understand the depths of your depravity!”

…I struggled not to get angrier. “Mr. Vice President, in the place I come from—in my history, George Washington defeated the Whiskey Rebellion. Just as there were two George Washingtons, in your world where he was executed, and in mine where he died in bed, there are two Edward William Bears—and Madison’s perfectly aware of it. The Edward Bear in your world, a man I’ve come to regard as a brother, is a detective in Laporte. I met him—”

“Just a moment,” Madison interrupted. “If there are two of you, why not simply produce this superfluous Edward Bear for us?”

“Because, you son of a bitch, he’s one of the people you kidnapped aboard the San Francisco Palace!”

Denying Win’s story as a madman’s delusions would be a clever move, except the scientists have already presented proof that the Probability Broach exists.

It would have worked better, story-wise, if the bad guys had been able to suppress the scientists’ testimony. That way, it would just be Win’s word against Madison’s. The delegates would have been justifiably skeptical of Win’s wild story about parallel universes, and it would have made sense when the Continental Congress voted to do nothing about the Hamiltonian threat, which is what’s shortly going to happen.

For their piece de resistance, the good guys show the military films Win and Ed stole from Madison’s house:

Past midnight, when I was beyond feeling tired, they showed more film—sixteen millimeter, this time. Before Madison could finish screaming protestations, the Seventh Continental Congress sat, stricken by a horror they’d never imagined possible.

The old films were grainy, scratched with age and many reproductions: over a large industrial city, a single B-29, a steel cylinder dropping from its belly. A flash, smoke billowing 50,000 feet, forming the poisonous mushroom of death. Then Nagasaki.

Then bigger, better bombs, fission giving way to fusion, kilotons to megadeaths. Years passed: Japanese cities, Pacific islands, Nevada, the Sahara, the Negev. Finally that hideous night in my world when the Soviets delivered their ultimatum to China, a last “humane” demonstration: a searing flash in the dark that left a jagged crack from pole to pole, visible across the surface of the moon. The Chinese surrendered the next morning.

With this scene, we’ve taken a swerve into alternate history.

Until now, we’ve been led to believe that the world Win Bear comes from is our world, either in the present (of the book) or the very near future. L. Neil Smith’s argument is that Win’s reality—an oppressive, bureaucracy-choked dystopia with arbitrary laws enforced by ruthless secret police—is where we’re headed if we don’t embrace his vision of anarcho-capitalism.

But now, late in the book, we get conclusive proof that Win’s world isn’t our world at all, and never was. Needless to say, in our timeline, the Soviets never nuked the Moon.

There are grains of historical truth in this. It’s true that the Soviet Union and China didn’t always get along; at one point, they fought a violent border clash that escalated to nuclear saber-rattling.

It’s also true that detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon was something the Soviet Union contemplated as a show of scientific and military prowess, but they never attempted it, fearing the risk of the missile failing and crashing back to earth. (In fact, the U.S. also studied the feasibility of doing it, but chose not to for the same reason. One of the scientists who did some calculations for the project was a young Carl Sagan.)

Smith depicts the Continental Congress as horror-stricken, shocked into speechlessness at this revelation. For a place that hands out guns to toddlers, the North American Confederacy seems awfully squeamish about violence.

Throughout this book, Smith has told us that he loves weapons, of all kinds and varieties. He was insistent that everyone should carry means of dealing death at all times. He says it’s essential to a free society. In fact, on his archived personal webpage, he says it’s the one issue that supersedes all others:

Make no mistake: all politicians—even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership—hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it’s an X-ray machine. It’s a Vulcan mind-meld. It’s the ultimate test to which any politician—or political philosophy—can be put.

If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash—for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.

So why is this where he draws the line? Why should politicians gasp and flinch at “the average constituent” having access to nuclear weapons, but not at anything else? Why is this the one weapon he disapproves of, when all the rest are totally fine and even good in his eyes?

It can’t be that nukes have an unacceptable death toll. While nuclear war may be especially scary to contemplate, if you compare the number of people killed by nukes to the number of people killed by plain ordinary bullets, there’s no contest. Are people killed by guns less dead than people killed by nuclear bombs?

Perhaps his argument would be that guns can be used for self-defense, but nuclear weapons can’t. The crushing irony is that the defenders of nuclear weapons make the same argument!

The cold logic of deterrence is that a country armed with nukes has nothing to fear from its neighbors, because they know that any attack would invite their own annihilation. That’s the same argument Smith makes—that being armed makes us all safer, because no rational criminal would dare to molest an armed victim. Somehow, he accepts that logic in one case, but not the other.

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: Factory resetting the immune system

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how genetic engineering is giving us the power to “factory reset” the immune system.

The human immune system is a marvelously complex product of evolution, adapted to target and destroy harmful viruses and bacteria, even kinds it’s never encountered before, while leaving the body’s own cells alone. But its mechanisms of tolerance aren’t perfect, and when they fail, the result is autoimmune disease: immune cells that attack the body’s organs and tissues as if they were pathogenic invaders.

A technology that was originally designed for cancer treatment is giving us the power to fix this problem. With CRISPR and other means of genetic engineering, we can recode the immune system almost like a computer programmer fixing a software bug. If the promise of this therapy is borne out in clinical trials, we’ll be able to delete the rogue cells selectively and cure autoimmune disease without the indiscriminate carpet-bombing of immunosuppressant drugs.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

CAR-T therapy originated as a cancer treatment. Scientists extract killer T cells from a person’s body and rewrite the genes for their antigen receptors, giving them new receptors that are custom-designed to match the target we want them to attack. The modified T cells are induced to multiply and reinfused into the body, where they’ll hopefully go after the threat they didn’t “notice” before.

CAR-T is well-suited to treat blood cancers, like leukemia and lymphoma, that frequently arise from mutations in B cells. Scientists can modify T cells to target CD19, a protein expressed on the surface of B cells. This is considered an ideal target because you don’t need B cells to survive. If the therapy wipes out healthy B cells along with the cancerous ones, that’s fine, because the healthy ones will repopulate over time.

However, this leads to a natural followup question: Couldn’t this method also be used to treat autoimmune disease caused by rogue B cells?

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Whistle blowers

A silver pea whistle

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Win, Lucy and their allies at the Continental Congress have outmaneuvered the Hamiltonians by getting the delegates to vote for unlimited debate. That gives them all the time they need to present their evidence that jackbooted government thugs from Win’s world are planning an invasion, and that the Hamiltonians are in league with them.

Deejay and Oolorie, the scientists who built the Probability Broach, are demonstrating its capabilities by showing videos of Win’s world:

Resuming the Chair, Jenny called on Deejay Thorens, via Telecom, to describe the Probability Broach. A second circuit, to Emperor Norton University, allowed Ooloorie to chip in by split-screen. It was the first I’d seen of Deejay’s recordings of my world. They were depressing. The United States now looked dingy and threadbare to me. I’d forgotten already what grime, noxious fumes, and poverty in the soul of a society can do to the people who have to live there.

Even though he grew up in that dystopian place, Win has internalized the philosophy of the North American Confederacy to the point that he now finds poverty an unfamiliar and disturbing spectacle.

This highlights something I’ve noted before, which is how weirdly, implausibly egalitarian this anarcho-capitalist society is. Everything is cheap and everyone is wealthy; even an average working joe like Ed Bear can own a mansion, multiple cars, and all the drugs, guns and consumer goods he wants.

How can this be the case in a society built on law-of-the-jungle capitalism? Is there no indentured servitude in the North American Confederacy? Are there no private estates with workers locked into serfdom contract? Are there no homeless people, no shantytowns, no workhouses? Isn’t extreme inequality the point of capitalism, because it motivates people to strive?

Other libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, take the stance that in their ideal world, a tiny number of the ultra-rich would live like god-kings, while the rest of humanity would be peons. As evil as this is, at least it’s a realistic outcome of their premises.

But Smith declares himself an anarchist who loves freedom, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to depict corporate feudalism or aristocratic hierarchies. What doesn’t make sense is why those things don’t exist in a world of unbridled capitalism. He has no explanation for why they’re not there.

Suddenly, a delegate rises and demands to be heard. It’s Freeman K. Bertram, the head of the Paratronics corporation, under whose auspices the Probability Broach was built (and, as we found out, he’s also on the side of the bad guys):

“The Chair recognizes Mr. F. K. Bertram.”

“Madame President, we demand this demonstration cease! Those recordings are private property, which these two individuals”—he pointed to the inset images of Deejay and Ooloorie—”are using without authorization!”

… “Is this true, Dr. Thorens?” asked Jenny, knowing perfectly well it was.

“I’m afraid so,” Deejay admitted ruefully.

Bertram shook his fist at the ‘com. “Thorens, you and your, your—specimen, are discharged! Turn those recordings over this very minute!”

This raises a couple of questions.

First of all: Bertram acts as if he can give commands to Deejay and Oolorie, or fire them at will. Can he?

This is the exact reason why academic tenure exists: so scientists and academics can challenge conventional wisdom, advocate for unpopular positions, and otherwise express their views without worrying about displeasing their bosses. At the very least, they can’t just be summarily fired; there’s a process the university has to go through. Is there any such thing as tenure in the NAC?

Second, on the same note: what about faculty unions? Once again, this is a major reason why unions exist: so workers have collective power to push back against unfair, unreasonable, or unethical demands. Does anyone in the NAC belong to a union that gives them this kind of protection? Does that even exist?

Third: are there whistleblower laws? Yet again, this is the reason why such laws exist in the real world: so people can report malfeasance committed by their employer without being punished or retaliated against. Exposing your boss’ secret villainous plot for world domination would certainly seem to fall under that heading.

Obviously, an anarchy like the NAC has no laws, period, so there wouldn’t be whistleblower laws. It apparently also doesn’t have unions, tenure or other worker protections, since no one raises those as obstacles to Bertram trying to shut down the scientists. The only reasonable conclusion is that all employment in the NAC is “at will”—the legal term for an arrangement where employees have no rights and employers can fire them at any time for any reason. But that makes it even less believable that this society is so free and so equal, when not starving depends on staying in your boss’ good graces.

“Wait a minute!” It was Olongo, out of order and towering above the rostrum. “What do you mean, private property? I’m one of your stockholders, and I want to see those recordings!”

“Mr. Vice President, with due respect, we are obligated to make decisions in the best interests of the company as a whole.”

This gives Win an idea, for once. Since nine-tenths of the NAC is represented at this meeting, that must include other Paratronics shareholders. What if they call an impromptu shareholders’ meeting to vote on releasing these records?

Ironically, this scene furnishes a neat demonstration of why private-property rights untempered by any other consideration are a bad idea when it comes to stopping unethical behavior. If Paratronics had been a privately held company, or if a majority of its stock was held by Hamiltonian conspirators, the good guys would have been screwed.

Lucy thinks this is a good idea, and tells Win to bring it to Jenny:

I crossed the great floor self-consciously, but I needn’t have worried: as the wrangling continued down front, I noticed delegates napping, several reading books or their electronic counterparts, and at least two poker games along my route to the rostrum. Someone was working a complicated 3-D crossword in his display, others were walking around, chatting, eating dinner.

As a reminder, Jenny just informed the Continental Congress that they were facing nuclear annihilation and conquest. But even with those stakes clearly laid out, some delegates couldn’t care less and aren’t paying the slightest attention to the proceedings.

Smith probably meant this as an illustration of his principle that everyone should have a right to ignore the government if they so choose. Under the circumstances, it just makes the people of his ancap utopia look stupid. A sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads, and they’re so lazy and incurious that they’re napping or playing games rather than doing anything about it. That may be a more realistic depiction of libertarianism than the author intended.

Image credit: Zephyris via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license

New reviews of The Probability Broach will go up every Friday on my Patreon page. Sign up to see new posts early and other bonus stuff!

Other posts in this series:

New on OnlySky: Cutting off the tail of climate change

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some news worth celebrating: we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario for climate change.

Several years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a range of scenarios, dubbed the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs, that set out a range of different visions for the future, depending on how much progress humanity made toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The worst of these, known as RCP8.5, painted an apocalyptic picture of a world so hot and chaotic that billions would be at risk from heat waves, coastal cities would flood, agriculture would be starved by drought, and mass migrations would spark war. Civilization would be at risk of utter collapse. That was the future we were headed toward until recently.

The good news is that this dire scenario now looks like it will never come to pass. Despite the best efforts of rich petrostates and science deniers, humanity has made solid progress toward decarbonizing the economy and replacing fossil fuels with green energy. While we waited too long to act and as a consequence have already missed the best-case scenario of a world that completely avoids climate change, there’s reason to believe that worst-case scenario is off the table as well.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

The RCP8.5 scenario represents 4°C or more of warming. As a reference point, this is roughly the same magnitude as the temperature difference between today and the last glacial maximum, when northern Europe and North America were buried under mile-thick ice sheets. Try to picture a future that’s as much hotter than the present as the present is hotter than that.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), you don’t need to use your imagination. Climate scientists have sketched a picture.

In a world with 4°C of warming, 4.7 billion people would be exposed to potentially lethal levels of heat over the course of the year. Summer temperatures in equatorial regions like the Middle East and North Africa could reach 60°C (140°F) on the hottest days. Southern Spain would become a desert. Cities like Karachi and Kolkata would become uninhabitable. As journalist David Wallace-Wells put it in a famous article: “At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”

4°C is a nightmare scenario. That’s why it should be a vast relief to hear that this isn’t the path we’re on.

Continue reading on OnlySky…