The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Zed:

In Christopher Buckley's Thank You for Smoking, our hero is the spokesman for a thinly fictionalized Tobacco Institute. At one point, he makes some public pledge about buying ads to discourage underage smoking. So he instructs the same ad agency they use for everything else to do a campaign but "it's got to gobble."

They came up with the slogan "Everything your parents tell you about smoking is true."

I've always imagined a similar process generated Tobacco is whacko... if you're a teen.

But I'm at a loss to explain that anti-drug ad.

Currently rereading The Forever War, first time reading Haldeman's preferred text. Still a good book. Recently finished Timescape, which was good on several levels, and which made me think James Hogan was ripping it off with Thrice Upon a Time... until I looked up that that came out in 1980, too.

Here's a good take on that Salon review.

There's no reason you couldn't include a comments link in the RSS template.

Thanks -- as someone doing much of my blog reading through bloglines these days, I appreciate it.

Here's a surprise. Seems Halliburton expects to profit big from a Mars mission.

It's not that it was homoerotic. It's that it didn't go to pains to avoid any possible accusation of homoeroticism, which, in the modern U.S. political climate, is a bold choice.

Having been some decades (egads) since I read Assignment in Eternity, the reference in the link name would have sailed entirely over my head if I weren't reading Heinlein in Dimension...

I'll note that I said I enjoyed "The Matrix Reloaded", precisely for its chopsocky action. I was commenting primarily on my astonishment at what some people read into it, that I don't consider to be there. Maybe the Wachowski Bros. are as surprised as I am, and my comment of "[the movie] hopes the audience will confuse special effects with sophistication" isn't fair. But my guess is that they're hoping for that reaction.

And I'm making no claim that PKD had brilliant answers to philosophical and epistemological questions, but I do think he offered many interesting things in their consideration.

And certainly nowhere did I claim that written sf holds any formal intellectual superiority to action movies or comics. I've found a lot of the most smart and exciting writing of the past 20 years to have been in comics. I'm still waiting for an action movie (specifically an action movie) with impressive intellectual content, but it could happen.

Who knows? Maybe the 3d movie will have twists and turns that recontextualize everything and impress me with the trilogy's ideas and how they were examined. But if I go, which I probably will, it'll be to see some more ass-kicking, not in hopes of that.

Reading Riley's profile, knowing there's an sf fan who is, in the best-case-scenario spending every day worrying about whether he'll be tortured or killed, really, really got to me, much moreso than just the knowledge that there were American POWs had.

So we've almost certainly read some of the same books -- I'd be shocked if he hadn't read Heinlein. Who knows how much else of our reading is in common. Whether we share similar values. Whether I'd like him personally if I met him, whether he's someone I'd choose to spend time with (or vice versa.) Certainly I meet people at cons with whom that's not the case.

But none of that matters. Like PNH said, he's one of the tribe, and he's in terrible danger.

Part of me is tempted to feel guilty about responding so much more to this than I had just to other humans being in danger. But ultimately I think that'd be a mistake. Tribalism is part of being human, and to deny it is counter-productive. Obviously it has a dark side, the dehumanizing of those not of the tribe, and that should and must be fought against.

Best of luck, Sgt. Riley.

Well, so much for that.

Well, sure 'nough, they're doing it.

I had been supposed to attend a meeting in San Francisco tomorrow night (concerning comedy improv, nothing to do with politics.) It's been cancelled, stated reason being that we're likely to be at war by then. I'm not clear on the connection. Maybe the organizers want to be home glued to CNN. But I think it not unlikely they expect downtown San Francisco to be impassable due to direct action.

I have a great deal of admiration for many people who have taken direct action. And I certainly sympathize with their motivations in this case. But I agree with Burke and Raimondo. Right here, right now, the consequences wolud be disastrous.

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