The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Alan Bostick:

The problem with Klieman's work is that it, like the prior understanding that it critiques, assumes that the purpose of the law enforcement and criminal justice systems is to contain and minimize crime.

Here in the USA, at least, the LE/CJ systems have another important, if covert, function: maintaining racial hierarchy and white privilege in post-Jim-Crow America.

The twin hysterias about law and order and the war on drugs emerged and grew at the same time as the Warren court and its successors dismantled the legal foundations of segregation. The war on drugs is fought largely in African-American communities, with devestating effect on those communities.

No attempt to reform the criminal justice system can result in genuine improvement unless it addresses the system's role in maintaining the contemporary American racial order.

Nice apology from Bezos. But where was his apology when Amazon nuked the pageranks of books with GLBT content?

"Free amusing toy...." Nothing like that ever turned up in a box of rice candy that I ever bought.

Don't be silly. You don't get Jerry Bruckheimer to direct The Man Who Was Thursday, you get Ron Howard.

I am reminded of the time late in the Soviet era when a US reporter was arrested on trumped up espionage charges (apparently in retaliation to an espionage bust in the West). After he was released, he wrote about his experience in shocking tones.

At about the same time, Ted White had been sentenced to jail time on drug charges, and was sending out his Letters from Prison to be distributed by friends in fanzine form. Ted was a lot more level-headed about his experience on being processed and confined by his jailers. And yet the factual content of his reports seemed to match very closely the factual content of the account of reporter jailed in the USSR (what was his name again? Danilof?), stripped of its fnords.

Many years ago, I lived in a group household. As such things go, it ran fairly well, which means that there were disputes aplenty but we weren't actually at each other's throats.

One fine spring, while one couple was preparing to move out of this house, another member of the household, a particularly pompous ass, was contemplating starting a vegetable garden in the back yard. One of the vegetables he was contemplating growing was zucchini.

"I wonder how many zucchini plants I should plant?" he contemplated aloud, while his two housemates were packing.

"For a household this size," said one of the departing housemate, "I'd say about six."

(Names omitted to protect the guilty.)

Disch's death is genuinely tragic, and a painful loss.

At the same time, think of the thousands upon thousands of people in the United States in straits as desperate as those of Disch's last days, and yet who do not have reputations as brilliant novelists, poets, or critics. The real tragedy of Disch's death is not that he was alone, but that he wss part of a multitude.

(I didn't buy that paperback edition of On Wings of Song; but only because I already owned the hardcover.)

From PNH's Sidelights: Jesse Helms dies, hopefully in misery and pain

That momentary chill you are feeling, that brief whiff of stale and musty air, is the restless shade of Terry Carr, haunting you for abusing "hopefully."

The Red Cross is running out of money? Boo hoo hoo.

I wonder what happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Americans donated in early 2005 for tsunami relief that was sitting in a bank account unspent?

Corrupt bastards. Don't give them any more money.

Lhude sing Goddamm

I've suffered for my music, says John Holbo. Now it's your turn.

The pic you took along the Prinsengracht looking towards the Westerkerk is the same view, taken from the same bridge, as one I took last summer and now use as my desktop.

Congress has its own power to arrest and detain people it finds in contempt:

• Apart from requesting assistance from the US Attorney to prosecute those who defy Congressional subpoenas for contempt of Congress, the sargeants-at-arms of both the House of representatives and the Senate have the lawful power to arrest and detain those who defy those subpoenas.
• 
  
• This power has been upheld again and again by the Supreme Court.
• 
  
• The power of pardon constitutionally alotted to whomever holds the office of President of the United States does not extend to civil contempt. The President has no lawful authority to compel the release of a person arrested by Congress for defying a Congressional subpoena.

Of course, if Michael Bérubé were an apahack, he would no doubt have been dropped for lacktivity by now.

It has often seemed to me that a number of elite academic bloggers (like Bérubé, Brad de Long, Henry Farrell, Belle Waring, and John Holbo) and elite policy bloggers (like Ezra Klein) have a hauntingly familiar sensibility and sense of humor in common.

It makes me wonder: do the elite colleges and post-graduate learning institutions feature courses in rhetoric informed by late-1970s APAs in science fiction fandom? The crowd I named above would have fit right into APA-50, or MISHAP, or AZAPA, or name your APA of choice.

(And why the hell doesn't Ken Josenhans have a blog? He'd be a natural.)

You people (heh) seem to be forgetting that there is more than one prequel to Lord of the Rings in print.

Gondolin with the Wind

If only the folks at Kineda.com would revise their Blogebrity badge to update automatically in the same way.

That nutshell doesn't encapsulate even the smallest bit of what's wrong with Digg. They should change the name to Rigg and have done with it.

Thanks to Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, the accusation "The election was hacked" is going to be with us for a long, long time. That's as much a threat to democracy as having a bozo in the Office of the Vice President who uses the Constitution for Kleenex.

Voting is one of the basic mechanisms of democracy. If people lose faith in the voting process, then they lose faith in the legitimacy of the winners; and legitimacy is always in doubt, there is room for the truly illegitmate to take power.

Heaven forfend that anyone ever say in public that tears are an appropriate response to stress.

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