I think Xopher was referring to the two Democrats who ran for president in the last three elections (Bill Clinton and Al Gore, that is). Rather than getting stuck in the question of whether they're "really" liberals or not, I'll just note that I'm not as worried about the Democrats forgetting that their guy "got more votes than the Republican one in each of the past three presidential elections" as I am that nobody running in those elections got more than 50% of the vote. It'd be nice to see an election system in which at least half the voters + 1 agreed on who ought to have won. Maybe there ought to be runoffs or some such thing.
I just think people ought to be more or less decent to one another, or failing that, entertaining about it. I am by temperament a promoter of coalitions and alliances, and in that persona I wince when I see potential allies grinding their heels into one another’s toes.
Amen! (So to speak.)
As I remember it, it's because one of the high-speed strips is halted and in the confusion, the woman is jostled onto one of the adjacent, still-moving strips. (There are safety interlocks built in that are supposed to shut down the whole road if something like that happens, but they don't work due to sabotage, this being the first sign of the "functionalist" uprising.)
To continue the point, since it may not be obvious enough--the liberal blind spot in this case is the failure to understand that someone else, even lots of someones, might take seriously something that liberals themselves think is laughable.
It's not that liberals "don't get" that it's good to be "associated with images of courage, swashbuckling and physicality." It's that they don't see a "Star Wars" poster as such an image, but as a piece of pop kitsch.
The first time I read a Doc Smith novel was when _First Lensman_ was nominated for the Retro-Hugo a few years ago. In spite of the clunky style and occasional piece of un-P.C.-ness, I got caught up in the thing because I kept coming across ideas and situations that showed up decades later in _Star Trek_, _Star Wars_, and _Babylon 5_. Between them, the "Skylark" and "Lensman" series gave birth to the whole "space opera" genre, and the latter surely inspired many a writer's "future history" as well. Given that the Lensman invariably discovered that deeper, more secretive and sinister plots underlay the menace(s) they'd defeated in the previous volume, there's even a sense in which the "Lensman" series may lie behind the games of altered/bent reality of A.E. Van Vogt and Philip K. Dick.
No way, of course, would I recommend Smith to someone with no interest in sf history. But for anyone else, he's worth a look.
Do you know, I must have had a premonition of what that link was because I was already humming the relevant song....
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