I may have completely missed the point, but I think LeGuin was making a joke. She says "Anybody but" and you expect her to say "Bush", but she says "Nader" instead. The joke is funnier because a lot of people think Nader would make a very bad president, but mostly it's just the fun of being surprising.
Patrick, in re I'm increasingly convinced that the success of modern American capitalism at providing us all with niche products perfectly suited to our individual quirky selves has led us to feel, vaguely but strongly, that something's the matter when the political candidates on offer don't include options as aptly customized to our desires as our own personal Macintosh. This is a delusion, an error, and a serious threat to real democracy.
I don't hear people saying "I like the candidate, but I don't agree on a few issues, so I'm disgusted." Instead, it's more a matter of "I don't see any candidates who even come close to the political views I want".
Frex, I fairly frequently hear people say that they want candidates who'll support individual liberty and a safety net. I haven't heard of any candidate or party which favors that combination.
Lois, now that you mention it, there must be an interesting history to people feeling free to talk about what's miserable in their lives.
Here are a few pieces. I suspect that the lives of saints was a preliminary. Afaik, they weren't talking about their own deprivations and tortures, but it was an early mention of how much things could hurt.
The other and more direct things I can think of are Freudianism, the union movement, feminism,and soldiers writing about WWI. Any other suggestions, preferably with more of a chronology?
Being permitted to talk about what hurts is substantially egalitarian since a good bit of pain flows from higher status people to lower status people.
I don't think it's just the military culture. There's a pervasive idea in the general culture that prisoners (usually not distinguished from convicts) deserve whatever is done to them.
From another angle, life is what happens in the chaotic region between stasis and randomness.
Too much order, and nothing moves. Too much randomness, and nothing gets built.
What you left out in your rant against chaos is that for some people, letting anyone near the bottom (or perhaps anyone who isn't at the top) have plans and build anything is more chaos than can be endured. Okay, a lot of your rant was quite reasonably against rapid social change/breakdown, but you were calling it chaos.
Would anyone who's read all of the Golin notes be willing to summarize them? My connection is too slow for that much pdf to be worth it for me, especially if it's page after page proving that diploma mills copy each others' advertising material. Or were some of the duplicate sites all leading to the same business?
The bit at the end about diploma mills offering advice on how to sue employers that are willing to fire was chilling.
The Wall Street Journal article also had something about the blurriness of accreditation--some online universities are diploma mills, some are fully accredited, and some are in between--they require some learning, but perhaps not as much as the best, and are accredited in some states but not others.
I am horrified that it happened. I am impressed and amazed that it's been made public, and apparently without retaliation.
Debbie, thanks for mentioning respect. I've noticed for a long time that a lot of liberals use conservative and Republican as terms of abuse, and I've wondered how they expect to recruit people they're insulting. (Yes, I've noticed the same is true in reverse on the right.)
A couple of NPR commentators said that Clarke's apology didn't quite look good because he might have done it to improve his book sales. I found that outrageous--aside from the detail that his book is of enough interest that it should sell well enough on its own, I hate the suggestion that people should refrain from doing the right thing just because they have a book out, or alternatively that people who want to do the right thing shouldn't publish books.
Xopher, in re the Rohirrim being the most noble/heroic people in LOTR:
Yes, no, maybe and sort of. They're wonderful warriors, but they're ignorant of the culture of Middle Earth, and that's a major thing for Tolkien. Also, (note Faramir) Tolkien makes it clear that being a warrior is sometimes necessary but not the highest value.
There might be an intentional contrast between Theoden/Wormtongue and Denethor/the palantir. The heroic warrior is too naive to defend himself from an emotional/verbal attack, while the sophisticated city ruler overestimates how much power he can handle. No simple hierarchies in Tolkien.
I've a notion that the Rohirrim (blond and blue-eyed, but racially inferior to the black-haired Numenorians) were partly Tolkien's swipe at the Nazis, but this is only a guess.
Xopher, I can recommend Egan's _Diaspora_ as a good novel almost entirely about AIs. (I *think* there were a few biological humans in it, but if so, they were a minor part of the story.)
Yngve, I admit it, I don't read a lot outside the genre. Nonetheless, I'll deny that Lord of the Rings is built around the fear of women and foreigners. It would be a good thing if there were more women characters, but I find it hard to believe that someone who was afraid of women would write Eowyn. There's fear of such foreigners as are trying to kill you (not totally irrational--sometimes foreigners do that sort of thing), but there's also a strong theme of needing to learn to cooperate with foreigners who you'd be inclined to distrust.
As for Card, it isn't exactly just wish-fulfillment or Ender's military ability wouldn't have been used the way it was.
I suspect that any fiction read with as unfriendly an eye as you're showing could be made to look bad. _Waiting for Godot_ is just pandering to people who don't want to get up and actually do something.
I believe that prejudice can just keep rolling forward on its own without input from the objects of its bigotry. Even if all fans spent some time on high culture, how long do you think it would take to get through to the likes of Farah?
There isn't anything I'd call persecution of Christians in the modern US, but there is a good bit of teasing. I didn't realize how much it faded into the background until I noticed how hostile a lot of the bumperstickers I sell are.
We're talking about "[Christian fish (no letters)] Remember when this wasn't a warning symbol?" "He's YOUR God. They're YOUR rules. YOU burn in Hell!"
The tone snuck up on me because I get most of my stickers from a supplier.
Since then, I've added some softer stuff like "God is who. Evolution is how."
In any case, I can sympathise with people who don't like getting repeatedly told that their religion is a pain, even if that religion or at least their version of it is problematic or worse for a great many people. Or do the Christians who complain of persecution always talk about the stress of having to live with those who don't agree with them rather than actual teasing?
I can see that it's a problem for the non-noisy sort of Christian to get the word out without being self-contradictory. Would "Non-proselytising
Christian" bumperstickers be over-doing it?
Some 20 years or so ago, Rare Air (a rock/scottish/jazz group) started having trouble getting permission to play in the US. They were from that well-known dicey country, Canada.
The policy of saying that people can't come in because maybe an American can do the same work (are there any American bands composed of drums, bass, and two pipers?) isn't at all recent, though I'm not at all pleased that it's getting more restrictive.
Mitch: I don't know if it's an important distinction, but I think Heinlein liked the idea of violence a whole lot better than he liked violence. Most of the violence in his stories is off-stage and/or briefly described, though I'll grant that he wasn't a very sensory or visceral writer generally.
He thought violence was sometimes necessary, but I think he preferred low-violence solutions--frex, very few people are killed in the revolution in _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_. Compare this to Doc Smith, in which huge numbers of aliens are wiped out.
Mind you, his promulgation of the idea that it's cool to talk like a cold-blooded killer doesn't strike me as a good thing, but I also can't see that it's made much practical difference.
Heinlein did an amazing job of predicting devices in _The Door into Summer_--iirc, he came up with about half a dozen that actually came into use.
Patrick, thanks for the comment about Heinlein's wide sympathies. In spite of his (more exactly Lazarus') bombast about only people who can do math being fully human, Heinlein had a considerable range of characters that he treated with respect.
Kevin, IIRC the computer/communications system in "The Machine Stops" was used for conversation, not research. What was prescient about the story was the idea of people would want to use such a system for chatter. What's amusing is that that insight was then forgotten by the whole field until it came true.
As late as _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_, Delany didn't think about how the information gets into the net. IIRC, he has it entirely as a system of accessing respectable reference works. Imho, aside from any emotional issues that gap would make it very hard to write a sequel, though perhaps it's possible to just write the second book with everything on the net being a (frequently private) point of view and pretend that there wasn't any problem with the first book.
In re "Jerry Was a Man", iirc, the clincher was Jerry singing at his trial. I suppose it's possible to see that as him expressing a desire for freedom, but I saw it as something he was trained to do and the jury members as suckers for being taken in by it.
In re whether "The Roads Must Roll" is ultimately anti-union: I should re-read it--that Protocols of the Elders of Zion argument did have a bit of a kick, and I generally believe that what's onstage in a story has more force than any theoretical statements the author or characters make.
Kevin, the US space program was certainly dependent on JFK deciding that the US could and should do better than the Soviets, but it may have been equally dependent on the existance of engineers and scientists who'd been inspired to work toward a space program, and who I assume had bent their educations in that direction.
In re "interesting failures": Does anyone want to kick "Jerry Is a Man" around? It's got plenty of good details (the explanation of why you can't have a flying horse, shyster as a profession, what is probably still one of the few respectful presentations of a rich, middle-aged, non-technical woman in science fiction), but I've never been able to make sense of the ending.
I'll agree that "The Roads Must Roll" is anti-union, but it's much more opposed to the attitude that one's job is so important that one is entitled to be in charge. It might even be opposed to the idea that society is so simple that there are easy solutions for making it work, and such solutions are so well-provable in advance that it's acceptable to cause huge amounts of damage to impose them.
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