Joerg -- I'm not American either, but I think it very unlikely they'd cancel the elections. The bit of SF that goes through my mind is Professor de la Paz in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ saying that it's necessary to be elected today in the same way it was once necessary to obtain the mandate of Heaven or be crowned by the Pope. The characters are, of course, elected, but the election is held on computers which are under their control -- the votes are never counted by anyone independent. When that's so easy, why cancel an election?
Jerry Pournelle posted some excellent clear-eyed stuff against the Iraq invasion on his blog just before it happened.
To the tune of Queen's "We are the Champions"
I look at these things
my heart at my feet
The standard's not high
that we fail to meet.
Life's simple mostly
Right's right and wrong's wrong,
Grey areas we can discuss endlessly,
But isn't one:
We
are the bad guys,
my friends;
We've gone in fighting to these ends.
We
are the bad guys
We
are the bad guys
We don't care for losers
For we are the bad guys:
No amends.
Now we know they're no boyscouts,
We're quite justified
We must never back down from our claims
Or they'll think that we lied.
We take pictures of torture
We take hostages too
And if you complain very much at this stuff
We might just take you!
We
are the bad guys
my friends.
We made these choices for these ends.
We
are the bad guys.
We
are the bad guys.
Spit on the losers
For we are the bad guys:
No amends.
I think that's right, that covers the historical cases pretty well (Pisistratus as well as those he cites), and yes, things are looking bleak -- not beyond hope, but bleak.
Sasha's grandparents are Unitarians, and we had his naming ceremony in their church. I typed their church magazine for years, and occasionally put pieces of my poetry in as fillers. I approved strongly of their position on gay marriage. Yet never before have I actually felt tempted to walk in and sign up.
Maybe Texas's idiocy will result in a huge boom in Unitarian membership.
It's true in Dhalgren too about being able to remember fiddling with the thing you wrote but not writing it. It could have been in the notebook all along. I frequently think "Where did that come from?" in just that way.
"An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face ... You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard."
George Orwell, _The Lion and the Unicorn_, 1940, on the democratic virtues of hypocrisy.
No argument on your main point, and it's not certainly not official Christian doctrine, but there was a debate about whether fairies and merpeople had souls, ended pretty emphatically by Aquinas saying that if someone presented him with either, he'd then deal with the soul issue.
Those people who believed that the Angevins were descended from Melusine, the daughter of Satan, (or who just didn't like them and wanted ammunition for abuse) certainly threw their supposedly questionable soul status at them during the twelfth century.
(Poul Anderson dealt with this soul stuff absolutely brilliantly in more than one short story collected in his fantasy collection and in _The Merman's Children_ and in _The Broken Sword_.)
What Bush means, I suspect, is that they are not, in his eyes, people. Not real people, not human in the way he is. This is a very dangerous, as well as stupid, belief to hold about anyone, because it loses the possibility of your managing to understand why they are doing what they are doing. He should go to see the fascinating documentary _The Fog of War_ and hear Robert MacNamara explaining how they managed to avert global thermonuclear war at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis by understanding the enemy.
I can imagine bumper stickers saying "I have a soul, and I vote!"
Have you seen David Mamet's _Spartan_? Because while it's a movie and not a novel, I think it meets the "political thriller for liberals" thing you two were saying was a hole in the market. Mamet, who is the person who directed _Wag the Dog_, has dealt with the weakness of thrillers since the fall of the USSR by using the Republicans as they do increasingly appear to be, as the villains. They're like people though, not like caricatures.
It'll be a long time before I forget William H. Macy's character's justification of what he's doing.
Happy Anniversary, and I love the poem. Prayer.
Yonmei: whisky, or any spirit, in hot tea *is* medicinal, if you have a cough and a sore throat. The tea (especially if sweetened) will sooth the throat, and the alcohol will numb it, suppressing the cough and the pain and allowing you to get some sleep.
My aunt swears by tea with lemon, honey, and whisky. That way you're having vitamin C as well.
The absolute best way to do this though is not to put the spirit in the tea but to have it in your other hand and take alternate sips -- that way you can get your throat numb enough to drink the tea really hot.
There's a pub in Lancaster where they think that Earl Grey tea with a cherry vodka chaser is a tolerably normal thing to order.
Oh, and whatever you do, don't mix this folk remedy with any actual medication containing paracetamol/tylenol/aceteminaphin.
Hyde, wasn't it, who committed a "youthful indiscretion" at the age of 50 and broke up someone's marriage?
I remember more Republican sex scandals than Democratic ones from the Clinton era, though the Lewinsky thing was louder and more detailed.
Hyde, Gingrich and Barr all got caught with their dicks where they shouldn't have been, yet the Republicans go on as the party of "family values" and the Democrats remain "sleazy". Looks like image and reality are out of whack. It isn't necessary to think media conspiracy or media bias, media laziness and media desire to tell the story the audience already know would do it.
Yes, well, but can you tell us about the importance of Persia in world history?
Farah's piece reminds me of the time a librarian said that my fantasy was really pretty good, had I ever thought of writing a real novel? I didn't feel insulted so much as bemused. Likewise with this. I can read _The Confessions of Max Tivoli_ *and* _Hyperion_, he's furiously barricading gates that swing open for me in both directions.
Aww, those two old guys in suits. That's so sweet. Thank you.
Oh, and Xopher, you can sing it to "Stairway to Heaven", the first four lines to the verse, the next eight to the bridge, and the couplet to the last slow bit. There are a couple of bits where it needs a little dexterity, so practice first, but I just tried it and it worked. (Yes, it's eight o'clock in the morning.)
Sasha discovered that most sonnets can be sung to that a few years ago when he was going through a phase of wanting to sing everything. Only _Kubla Khan_ defeated him.
James Warren for the Supreme Court now!
Reading what you said above about Walt Willis's Irish identify being stolen reminds me of Orson Scott Card's novella "America" (collected in _Folk of the Fringe_) where the Native Americans call the immigrant Americans "Europeans" with such success that they get most of them to go away.
It's very hard to pin down the way something smells in such a way that it withstands analysis, but that article combined with Alison's comment above smells to me as if the professional campaigners and journalists don't like the Dean people because they are not professional campaigners and aren't doing things that way.
This sounds most encouraging.
Dunsany wrote short fiction because there was a huge market for short fiction, he was undoubtedly an odd person but he admits in his autobiography that he wrote to be published -- I suspect that if he were alive he'd be writing 900 page novels in series.
I wonder what they would have been like?
I do love Dunsany.
How can Jon Courtney Grimwood say that there's no British tradition of magic realism? I live in a world that contains Dunsany stories about walking through London and seeing a sign on a shop that says "Licensed for the sale of weasels and jade ear-rings" and going in to buy a lengths of river by the ell, as if this were perfectly normal, and if that isn't magic realism, what is?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 20 |
| 2003 | 17 |
| 2002 | 9 |
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