The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Stephen Frug:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks...

This belongs to a whole class of predictions that seem to us (at first blush) wrong, since they are said in such a dire way (in this case, the remainder of the quotation) that, looking around, we can't reconcile the dire tone with our lives. But looked at more closely, they turn out to be right -- in this case, widespread writing really did reduce the "arts of memory" that were used to enable people to remember lots of things (including large chunks of texts) that they needed to remember before they could write it down. (Some of this was transition from no writing to writing, but much of it was from writing to print, i.e. writing to practically affordable writing.) It's just that this transition wasn't as terrible as it seemed at the time -- or, at least, that we have become accustomed to it.

As I said, I think there are a lot of prophecies like that: ones that aren't so much wrong as simply said in a tone of voice that turns out to be unwarranted. One other example that comes to mind is the various arguments by pro-slavery folks (and assorted other racists in the years between slavery and the end of Jim Crow) that ending slavery (or, mutatis mutandis, whatever racist practice/law they were defending) would lead to intermarriage, African Americans being considered equal, getting elected to high office, etc. This turned out, in its way, to be true: it's just that now we'd say thank God rather than shutter in horror as those who were predicting it did (or deny it, as their less-racist-but-still-by-contemporary-standards-racist opponents would).

But I bet people here could come up with some others...

Nor will this change after 2008.

This is the part that reduces me to despair. Because it's right. The Democratic candidates are clearly signaling that they'll continue the imperial executive, the aggressive wars, the torture...

So what do we do? We saw how third parties work out in 2000. But the Democrats sure are working hard to resurrect the Tweedledee & Tweedledum argument, however buried I thought it was.

So what do we do?

The question brings to mind something I read -- and alas, I forget the context, author, everything entirely -- about how the notion that every problem has a solution is a very typical American conceit, and (of course) wrong.

Maybe there's nothing we can do.

In which case, I guess, the thing to do is run and hide. "Government is big, we are small; we are only free when we fall through the cracks." (quoting from memory...)

Xopher @ 22: even with the reference right there, you misspelled at least two things

I knew someone would say that.

At any rate, I don't believe I did. I copied & pasted the text. Then I deliberately changed it to fit the grammar of what I was making it say.

The first thing I did was change "Publishers Weekly Occurrence" to "Publisher's Weekly Occurrence". The first is the name of a magazine; the second is an event, which belongs to the publisher -- the publisher has a weekly occurrence, which is "Asimov". I was using a different grammatical form, so I had to change the spelling.

The only other thing I did was change the first "Its" to "It's" (matching the second); in both cases it seemed like it was grammatically correct.

Anyway, there are a lot of editors here: if someone calls me on it, I'll cop to a grammatical mistake in either or both instances. But whatever it was, it wasn't a spelling mistake.

SF

Has anyone else noticed that the spelling references right above the comment box seem to take on a rather frightening amount of implied meaning? For example, reading them, I seem to hear a fragment of some obscure catechism...

Tolkien?
Minuscule.

Gandhi?
Millennium.

Delany?
Embarrassment.

Publisher's Weekly Occurrence?
Asimov.

Weird connoisseur?
Accommodate hierarchy.

Deity etiquette?
Pharaoh: Teresa.

It's Macdonald?
Nielsen Hayden

It's more?
Here.

I am currently in the middle of reading Gene Wolfe's (Tor-published) The Knight -- reading on dead-trees, a copy I legally bought, I should add. But this being Gene Wolfe, I keep wanting to flip back, and check things, thinking, "hey, didn't he mention this before...?" (I always swear he won't pull a fast one on me this time. Just like Lucy with the football, really.)

After reading this thread, it suddenly occurred to me: hey, a site with electronic copies of SF books! (I site, I should mention, I'd never heard of before.) Maybe The Knight is on there. I'd love to have a searchable copy handy as I read it.

No such luck. Thus ends my first try at finding an illegal electronic version of a text...

(PS: I have also used Amazon's search feature for this in the past, although it's a bit clumsy, and not all books have it. Still useful, though.)

Congrats, Patrick!!

No, Making Light isn’t about to become a Tor promotional vehicle, but this is the first of several Tor intertube-related projects that I’ll be mentioning in the next few weeks.

I'm finding it very difficult to imagine a level of Tor promotion on ML that would bother me. I've always thought that y'all overcompensated in not doing enough casual promotion of your books, podcasts, whatever. So please: more!

Up until they started making so much noise about the FBI summer camp I thought they were going for a Mars & Mars partnership

I don't know why Rob Thomas thought she should be an FBI agent, anyway. I think her obvious career path -- both from within the story and from a story-external view -- was as an investigative reporter. She did stuff towards that anyway (on school papers), but it would have been an interesting & *different* show (how many cop shows are there anyway?). And of course she still could have looked into crimes, dealt with class, etc.

Incidentally, it's seems to me that between them Buffy & Veronica frame a new genre. (I don't know a third example, but they're good enough -- and, really, different enough -- to imply other possibilities.) The new genre is this: take *another* existing genre (fantasy/horror for Buffy, mystery/noir for Veronica) and set it in southern California with a blond teenage high-schooler as its protagonist. (Presumably the "living with a single parent" and other overlaps are optional...)

I wonder what other genres would work in this format?

The problem with the assassinate-Keith idea is twofold. First, it would have eliminated one of the best relationships on the show... watching VM & her dad interact was one of its highest points. Second, it would probably have felt forced to have a *second* murder that close to VM so soon. (Which may be equivalent to saying that there was no good way to do S2 at all, I don't know.)

IIRC Abigail Nussbaum argued that they should have skipped several years between S1 & S2 -- let additional backstory accumulate. Gone straight into deep college. I think that -- combined with a willingness to really shed old secondary characters and replace them with people more integral to the second mystery -- would have been the best way to do it.

What Ethan said about why the first season worked so well and the second didn't.

Personally I'd say seasons two and three were uneven rather than flat bad... they both had their moments. Though I wouldn't push 'em on anyone (whereas I would *strongly* urge S1).

Still, I want to also strongly second what Ethan said about the final two episodes: at the every last moment of S3, VM refound it's voice: the final two eps are as good as S1. Even if they didn't have time to run with it.

This irony reminds me of this classic cartoon, the Bob the Angry Flower sequel to Atlas Shrugged. Worth reading even if you haven't read the original.

#48: Hitchens supported Saddam in 1976 -- see here for details. That's what I was referring to. But given that he's been consistent for longer than most of the cometariat, perhaps he's not the best example. He just rubs me the wrong way.

I long thought that the perfect absurdist ending to this fuligin black comedy of a war would be to have the U.S. reinstall Saddam as the only man who could bring security to Iraq, provide a counterforce to Iran, etc etc -- all the reasons that we supported him for so long in the first place. Given that God was clearly going for a pretty straightforward black comedy script here (influenced by Dr. Strangelove, perhaps, but frankly a little more absurdist, a little less realist), it seemed the perfect ending, particularly given the spectacle of the entire US commetariat turning on a dime and praising Saddam as the right man for the right moment, and proudly pointing where they could to their long-time support for him -- back in the 80's, when he was really tough!

And we got pretty close -- Johnathan Chait, liberal hawk (sic), actually proposed this with tongue only slightly in cheek some time ago.

Of course, in an earlier move, desperate for raitings, they killed off the character. But no matter: we'll take a Saddam clone. Dress him up in the same suit, and everyone will get the parallel. (I'm thinking of how Woody Allen, the early, Bananas Woody Allen would do it here: suit the same, big false mustache the same... actor barely visible under all that garb.) Won't have precisely the dramatic punch, but close enough not to matter.

And Christopher Hitchens and Don Rumsfeld can proudly proclaim that they were for a strong man in Iraq decades before the rest of us. And hey: for once they'll be telling the truth.

Can I suggest this post by Kung Fu Monkey as wonderful reading on this topic? It might even be the first step of a General Theory of the Bush Administration.

A small taste of what the post says:

According to the Dictionary of Video Game Theory, an "exploit" is... "a case where a player knowingly uses a flaw in a game to gain an unfair advantage".
[SNIP]
[T]he Cheney Administration has discovered... the "exploit" within the United States Government. As I watched Congressmen and Senators stumble and fumble and thrash, unable to bring to heel men and women who were plainly lying to them under oath, unable to eject from public office toadies of a boot-licking expertise unseen since Versailles, it struck me. The sheer, simple elegance of it. The "exploit".

...and I'll leave it on that cliff-hanger, in hopes people go read it.

At this point I feel that there are so many things that Bush *needs* to be impeached for -- not needs in the sense that it'd be good to have him gone, or needs in the sense that they are clearly, unmistakably impeachable offenses, but needs in the sense that Bush's getting away with this will do grievous, probably permanent harm to the republic -- that I feel like impeaching him once would not even be sufficient. Whatever we impeached him on, it would imply that the many other crimes -- high crimes, the highest of crimes, crimes against our beloved country (not to mention so many others) -- he was skating on.

How could we not impeach him for the signing statement, by which he has openly announced his intention to wantonly disregard the very laws he was signing, attacking the very structure of our constitution?

How could we could we not impeach him for his admitted spying on American citizens in direct violation of FISA and the fourth amendment (the extent of which remains wholly unknown, although it is likely to be not simply for security, since those would have clearly been approved by the FISA court)?

How can we not impeach him for sanctioning torture, in direct violation of American law, the Geneva conventions, and the basic principles of morality?

How can we not impeach him for imprisoning American citizens without trial, in defiance of habeas corpus -- indefinitely?

How can we not impeach him for running secret prisons around the world, sending prisoners off to be tortured in other countries, picking up random civilians (many picked out randomly by bounty hunters) and holding them indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay?

And how can we not impeach him for waging an aggressive war based on false claims -- a war that has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, not to mention thousands of Americans -- a war that is surely, finally, the greatest of his many crimes?

Not to mention whatever secret crimes this most secretive administration has committed without public knowledge.

Obstruction of justice? Of course. Nixon was going to be impeached for it; Bush should be to.

But it's not enough. It leaves to many crimes -- high crimes, the highest -- unanswered.

That they were committed wounds the republic. To leave them unpunished would wound it permanently.

But how unlikely is it that he will be impeached even once?

And even if a miracle occurs and he is -- it would not be enough. It could not be enough. Not enough to restore our country to us.

At this point, I don't know what would. Or if anything can.

Just in case people don't know, Glenn Greenwald has been all over this -- first post, second post -- particularly on the issue of the media's mindless repetition of Bush's lies. Essential reading for those interested in this.

#16: It definitely wasn't just 9/11; the Salon interview PNH links to is from August, 2001.

...which leads me to wonder: has he said specifically pro-Bush stuff lately? That one clip was just about F451 not being about censorship, and didn't have any pro-Bush views that I heard. Admittedly, I watched the clip about censorship, but don't really have the heart to watch the others... damnit, when I was a kid, I *loved* Bradbury, even if it's been a number of years since I've read his work... So I might have missed something.

Tangentially related: has anyone read the sequel (!) to Dandelion Wine that just came/is coming (not sure) out? Is it any good?

72: And by the way, I think Triumph of the Will is indeed overrated. We've learned things about ourselves, as humans, which make it far less effective than it probably was in its time

I watched the entire thing for a history class some years back, and actually found it dull beyond description. I mean, even apart from knowing what its subjects really stood for & what came of their rule, etc, it was simply very hard for me to see how it would have been good propoganda. Someone in the class (the prof? another student? I don't recall) said that it was in part a language issue: the rhetoric was very effective in German, the subtitles, well, weren't. But I'm sure another part of that is what Patrick was describing.

I know this is off topic, but since it was brought up & all, I'm sort of curious if anyone else has seen it and what they thought...

28: is there really anything that can be done? In another 20 years, Disney will push for life plus 90 years, and they'll get it

I wonder if that's true. When this last came before Congress in the mid-90's, the copyleft was a long way from where it is today. There's been a lot of political work (in the sense that educating people, raising awareness, changing minds, etc. are political work) done since then.

Which is to say: in the mid-90's there wasn't really much of an anti-extension constituency, and politically, any issue on which only one side has a constituency will always go for that constituency. But now there's a group of people who feel passionately on the other side.

Doesn't mean we'll win -- I'd hate to place odds on it -- but it seems to me that it might be a lot more of a fight than last time. (And it's different than the question of getting newer, better laws passed: it's always easier to block something -- e.g. yet another extension -- than it is to put something through.)

SF

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