The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Hot Dog Stand:

According to texts from Velma, he is bitching mightily and he wants to go home. And his BP is slightly low.

Jane: thank you, I texted your comment straight to Velma at the hospital.

Pendrift: yes, it is.

thank you all

Charlie Stross, #2: "Engaging with the near-present in SF is hard. [...] Sparkly vampires and space dreadnoughts, those are easy."

True enough, but that's not quite the point Cory is trying to make. (Or perhaps it's not quite the point I was trying to make.) It seems to me that when SF is powerful, it isn't necessarily because it "engages with the near-present" in a direct and literal way, but rather because two important elements power one another:

* the story's imaginative element, and
* actual present-day real-world concerns.

Among the works of SF cited by Cory are Asimov's robot and Foundation stories:

Asimov's robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer's belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the "three laws" for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

I'm vigorously in favor of the kind of overtly near-future SF Charlie is talking about, and I certainly agree that it's hard to write. But I also think that there are a lot of ways for SF (and for that matter fantasy) to be "about" the actual world we live in -- and that, in fact, almost all SF and fantasy that's worth reading is in some deep sense connected to the real world and our actual lives. I can even imagine a novel about "sparkly vampires and space dreadnoughts" being such a piece of work.

I realize that this is a point that can become so gaseously generalized that it loses analytical usefulness, but I think it's an important true thing about imaginative literature anyway. When I find SF and fantasy boring, the most frequent reason is that it seems arbitrary -- it lacks enough connection to lived experience. Powerful SF and fantasy aren't just about imagination, they're about imaginative connection.

I was briefly unable to find the comments, mentioned by Abi, posted to Darren Rovell's two posts on the CNBC site. Then I realized that the geniuses who run CNBC.com have...wait for it...rendered the entire comment section in Flash.

Thus making it invisible to me by default, since like kajillions of other sensible people I run Flashblock.

If this happens to you, just click the two little Flash logos in the upper-left-hand corner of the page and the comments will appear. You'll have to do it again for each page of comments. It's worth the trouble, though, because the overwhelming majority of them consist of people schooling Rovell from a great height.

Matthew Daly, #10: "Patrick: On the contrary. The diversity of liberal expression is why we're winning. I know that we wouldn't carry the day with 300 Democratic representitives as awesome as Louise Slaughter (my most awesome and high-minded and most liberal member of the 110th Congress harumph) because there are parts of the country where 'I know you are but what am I?' is a stunning debate tactic. Just like it would be a mistake to ignore my intelligence and idealism just because playground taunts are useful tools to influence critical policy in someone else's neighborhood."

Hmm.

Wait. Matthew Daly. Isn't he the guy whose linked-from-Making-Light profile on Dreamwidth says: "We seem to spend so much energy gathering at the extremes of an issue and shouting insults over a vast and fertile middle ground, wasting both ideological resources and our energy. Thoughtful conservatives are more of a blessing to our society than ignorant liberals and I am angrier when my representatives copy the asinine antics of their rivals when they feel that it suits their short-term needs"?

And isn't he also the guy whose Making Light posting history includes such statements as: "I am concerned that we would still be waiting for desegregation or a repeal of anti-miscegenation laws if we waited for social enlightenment to come to a majority of every political structure in the nation. Justice delayed is justice denied"?

Call me kooky, but I'm basically getting the impression that Matthew Daly simply says things that sound good in a show-offy way, no matter how completely they contradict earlier observations. This holds whether he's nobly patting himself on the back for his broadmindedness toward "thoughtful conservatives", or harshly insisting that "justice delayed is justice denied." In his mind there's no contradiction, because both kinds of statements leave onlookers with a warm glow of righteousness.

Definitely, he's exactly the kind of rigorous thinker I'm going to be counting on to keep track of what's a "debate tactic" and what are "playground taunts."

Dear Matthew Daly: Being good matters. Winning does too. Because it's not just about the wonderful private perfect virtue of lovely us.

Yep, the second paragraph of comment #3 pretty much stands as a living demo of why liberals lose.

Donboy #53 FTW

fidelio, #43: "the Gettysburg Address is a short and fairly minor piece"

Short, certainly. Minor: you'll get some argument on that point. Garry Wills, one of my favorite public intellectuals, won a Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln at Gettysburg, an book that argues that the Gettysburg Address was the spearpoint of Lincoln's campaign to establish that the republic's founding document was the Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truths about equality and rights and the laws of nature and nature's God, rather than the slavery-ratifying Constitution, favored tool of sixty years' worth of Southern politicians.

Wills may or may not be right, but Lincoln at Gettysburg is one of those works of compact, exhilarating argument that's pure pleasure to read from beginning to end. And you'll learn the importance of the early-19th-century rural-cemetery movement, epitomized by Mount Auburn in Boston and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a mere half block from the vast chromium-and-steel headquarters of Nielsen Hayden Enterprises! More to the point, Wills' book is a solid reminder that there were reasons people were so impressed with the Gettysburg Address; it's not just that it features a bunch of quotable lines, or that it's short enough to carve onto public walls.

Andrew: You're singing Kinks songs in a chamber choir? That is indescribably cool.

Are you going to be part of the performance on Letterman mentioned on the site you linked to?

For what it's worth, Abi's analysis (in her #68) of the late commenter "dave's" modus operandi seems spot on. There's nothing wrong with a rigorously materialistic view of the world, but if you're consistently using it as an excuse to be a jerk to others, you're no more charming than any other kind of jerk.

Life is short and there are other interesting things to talk about, including in this very thread. Best of luck to dave in his internet travels--elsewhere.

Today was the first day I found myself wishing, as I cycled in, that I was wearing gloves. I'm going to go shop for some later on.

Anyone who wants to contribute without using PayPal can send me a check made out to "Scraps Reassembly Trust." Email me at pnh@panix.com and I'll give you our street address. (Which isn't a state secret, but we try to avoid posting it to the site.) Thanks!

I believe I have fixed the problem. I'm ready to kill everyone.

Huge thanks to Eric K and to John Mark Ockerbloom. Neither of us has actually received anything from our pastel overlords yet, but we'll be patient...

Jon Singer and D Potter are one day older than the People's Republic of China?

I suddenly feel a strange birthday solidarity with them--being as I am, by some measures, one day younger than the Cuban revolution.

Ah, it's the Most Quoted Fantasy Novel of the 20th Century. Again.

dave, #128: "Abi, if I were shouting at someone in the street, maybe your harsh critique would be justified, but as I am simply typing words, then I believe I am entitled to a robust viewpoint, which, as I said, is not directed towards causing offence to anyone."

First, Abi's thoughtful and carefully-phrased #126 was hardly a "harsh critique."

Second, the question of whether one meant to offend is never entirely irrelevant, but its relevance does not completely obviate the need to deal with having offended. Most people learn this in third grade.

Third, I'm beginning to think that "I believe I am entitled to a robust viewpoint" deserves to be as immortalized as "I am aware of all Internet traditions."

(Oops, I see that Avram made the same point at shorter length in #120.)

Several people are slightly confused about the history of the term "politically correct." It didn't emerge from Leninist orthodoxy.* Rather, "politically correct" was a phrase frequently found in English translations of the Maoist cant of China's 1960s "Cultural Revolution." (Other such phrases: "Speak Bitterness Session"; "capitalist roader.")

The most crucial fact about the phrase, though, and the one that has been most consistently ignored, is that its very first uses in English, in the 1970s, were almost all satirical; it was deployed by left-wingers and feminists to mock other people of the Left who were trying too hard to be ideologically pure in all things. Or people who were being a bit too sanctimonious toward their fellow activists. A phrase often heard among American Catholics carries much the same set of associations: "More Catholic than the Pope."

Subsequently the phrase was kidnapped by right-wingers; since then, it has been used to endlessly promote the idea that left-wingers are all insane Red Guards who whip one another up with exhortations to be "politically correct." In fact, the phrase was always a wry reminder of the foolishness and stupidity of Red Guard-ism.

--

* Leninist Russians and their overseas fellow travelers would instead tend to use the phrase "ideologically sound."

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