The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by FMguru:

I knew Krugman was One Of Us when, in the late 1990s, he started a bylined essay on globalization and trade in The Economist with a long quote from the start of SNOW CRASH (the "movies, microcode, and pizza delivery" section). He's also mentioned on several occasions how much he loved the FOUNDATION books, and the key role they played in leading him into economics.

I got my head checked
By a jumbo jet
It wasnt easy
But nothing is, no

I don't know for sure, but I'll bet Will Bunch was very sanguine during the disappearance of manufacturing jobs during the 1980s and 1990s, shaking his head at unemployed steelworkers and autoworkers (shoulda paid more attention in school! get yourself some retraining! nobody owes you a living!). He probably chuckled up his sleeve at the low, low prices he'd pay for imported goods and the corresponding rise in the value of his "symbolic-manipulator" skills. Now that his job is being rendered surplus to requirements by the same technological and policy churn, he's suddenly demanding protection and handouts in the name of fairness. The free market's all fun and games until your ox is gored.

Yeah, and Linus Torvalds should send checks to all of Microsoft's employees every time Linux's market share bumps up a notch or two!

Also:

b) In America, every big-box chain bookstore (Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc.) has several shelving units dedicated to graphic novels (both superhero and non-), along with an entire aisle of Japanese manga books. It's really rather easy to score copies of Maus or Jimmy Corrigan or Blankets or From Hell or Bone or Krazy Kat archives. Benefits of civilization, I suppose.

Fidelio - Good points. It's just that there are places where Latino immigration (legal and illegal) has had a much larger effect on the local economy and culture (the Southwest, big cities, Florida, etc.) and they are most assuredly not the places where anti-immigrant sentiment is running high - which shows that this whole thing is driven by fears and not by actual economic changes. If illegal immigrants were causing all the horrible effects that their detractors claim, the citizens of CA and NY and TX would be the loudest in demanding sweeping action. But they aren't (as Pete Wilson learned to his considerable regret).

I'm reminded of the breakdown in concern over terrorism - the people who live in rural flyover country are much more afraid of terrorism and supportive of Dear Leader's maximum efforts to protect them than the people who live in big cities, even though city-dwellers are much more likely to by victims of a terrorist attack than the citizens of Mule Neck, Arkanasas.

TNH: have there been any recent big changes in the quantity of immigrants or the permeability of the border? Why is this suddenly blowing up?

I've wondered that, too. Illegal immigration has been a constant problem for the last 30-plus years. Why is it suddenly a big deal in Spring 2006?

My guesses:
1) Conservatism is always looking for a new enemy. Gay panic has reached the limits of its ability to move voters, so they need a new bogeyman.
2) Bush's weakness. This has been a growing movement within the Republican party for more than a decade (CA Gov. Pete Wilson tried to ride it to the White House). Bush and Rove have tamped it down, because it's not in the interest of the business interests that they take their marching orders from, and because they realize that securing the Latino vote is critical to the GOP's long-term success (Pete Wilson, again). Bush/Rove could suppress the nativists when he flightsuiting around at 73% in the polls. Now he's a lame duck at 29%, and they don't have the leverage to keep the lid on.
3) There's a lot of free-floating hate-the-dark-skinned-other energy in the body politic, carefully stoked by the administration and its media since 9/11. But the great crusade against islamofascism has thrown an engine rod, and is no fun anymore, so all that energy has been searching for a new outlet.
4) The working classes have been getting squeezed economically without relief for six years now. Flat wages, offshoring, rising medical and energy prices, cuts in government programs (student loans, etc.), a lack of good jobs being created. There's a sense of getting screwed by the system (while the upper 2% award themselves federal contracts and tax cuts). It seems natural that they're hunting for a scapegoat for why The American Dream seems so out of reach - and they've found it, in the form of illegal aliens who steal jobs, drive down wages, commit crimes, and leech off the welfare system.
5) Nativism, including well-organized political movements at the national party level, is a recurring American phenomenon (KKK, "know-nothings", etc.). Maybe it's just the pendulum come swinging around again.

So take your pick.

I've been struck by how concern over illegal immigration is strongest in parts of the country (like rural Tennessee) where it has the least cultural and economic impact, and I'm also struck by how smoothly and effortlessly the various rabblerousers of the right (Malkin, especially) have turned away from rah-rahing the Iraq War and are instead flogging this immigration issue.

The collected works of Jack Chick are an eternally-renewing source of old-school anti-Catholic wingnuttery. I recommend The Death Cookie to start with, and then moving on to Are Roman Catholics Christians (the answer just might surprise you!), Man In Black, and Is There Another Christ. Primo Chick stuff, except that none of them have his classic "sinners burning in the lake of fire while a devil laughs HAW HAW" scene.

"My opinion varies dramatically from yours. I felt Underworld greatly resembled a White Wolf game run by a 13-year-old,"

So did White Wolf - they sued Sony because the plot of the movie was clearly derivative of piece of Nancy Collins-penned World of Darkness short fiction. Sony laughed at them, until WW introduced a tape of a Comic-Con panel the Underworld crew had participated in - where they talked about how much they drew on White Wolf books for mood and inspiration. The case was settled out-of-court - nobody's talking (NDAs), but it looks like WW got paid.

So yeah - the reason that the movie seemed like a cheesy World of Darkness campaign module is because it very likely DID start life as a cheesy World of Darkness campaign module.

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