The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

The offending lines of code are gone, and our provider is monitoring.

Facebook is basically a machine built to grab hold of everything admirable about the open Net and do evil things with it. I note once again that several months ago I actually nuked my account there. Which was a lot of trouble, but made me immediately happier on a day-to-day basis, for a whole bunch of reasons.

I recognize that for many people its ease-of-use means that it's the thing that finally got them online and back in touch with lots of old friends. (I understand that this is the case with Chip Delany, for instance, and I'm sorry I'm not there to interact with that particular old-friend-with-whom-I've-fallen-out-of-regular-contact.) I also recognize that because of my extensive presence online and my grasp of other online resources for casual chat, photo sharing, and so forth, Facebook is a "solution to a problem I don't have." I know that this isn't true for a lot of people. I can see an analogy to Cory Doctorow's attitude toward the iPad versus mine: Cory won't touch Apple's modern mobile products because their walled-garden approach goes against all his principles of open computing, whereas for me, what they enable more than makes up for my annoyance with their bad behavior. We all make devil's bargains at some point. But for me, Facebook defines the point at which I say there is some shit I will not eat.

Doctor Science #115, Mycroft W #124 -- Thanks for the additional info about Colorado Springs. I didn't know that stuff.

Actually, the Department of Energy are the official keepers of the nukes. The Air Force just gets to fly some of them around.

Doctor Science #73 -- I figured Wilson put the headquarters of his Dominionists in Colorado Springs because that's the location of the US Air Force Academy, and the Air Force is the part of the modern US military most notably infested with scary right-wing end-times religious types in high positions.

Joel, #9 -- Thanks for the catch; misspelling fixed. That's what I get for writing a post in the last hour before an important sales presentation, when I'm supposed to be pulling together last-minute notes instead. (The presentation went fine.)

Chris Gerrib makes a good point in #31:

Leaving aside the Case of the Unnecessary Gay, Comstock isn't about "American decline." Wilson's America (now with Extra Canadian Goodness!) is rebuilding. Not only that, but Julian's eventual replacement as President (Admiral Whats-His-Face) is (albeit slowly) liberalizing the country.

Quite right. In addition, what we take away from the epilogue is that America isn't the center of the world; its condition, improving or not, is the result of its particular circumstances, not an emblem of whether there is or isn't hope for the entire human race.

Kevin Marks #24, meet Earl Cooley #5.

(Yes, that was a sentence that might mean something else in a science fiction story, why do you ask? Now go turn on your left side.)

Although honestly, it seems that Gawker writer Adrian Chen is basically a mensch, and certainly doesn't deserve to be anybody's target.

I'm with Xopher here. It seems like some of us are trying to suggest that Rowling and Meyer are equally bad writers, and that the greater fannish disdain for Meyer is an expression of some sort of deep-seated unfairness.

I think this is bullshit. For all her faults, Rowling is ten times the writer Meyer is. Yes, Rowling's writing is shot through with clichés; also, nobody in genre SF or fantasy has a greater mastery of _pace of revelation_ than she does. The techniques of which she has fantastic command just happen to be the techniques most needed by new readers of fantasy. Thus: big win. Meyer can claim no such accomplishment. If you share her fetishes, you enjoy her work, and more power to you. (I'm entirely in favor of people enjoying their fetishes.) If you don't, you don't.

Just for the record, Paul Duncanson's #16 does indeed nail the answer to my question. St. Augustine (whose name adorns a town in Florida founded in 1535) and his mother St. Monica (after whom a city in California is named), both of Berber descent, were natives of Hippo, now known as Annaba in modern Algeria. It looks like a town not without charm.

Dan MacQueen has got one but not the other. Come on, fluorosphere.

For extra credit, name two other American municipalities named for people from what is now Algeria.

Xopher, isn't that a bit like cheering for GM? Or Microsoft?

ddb, #102: "I tend, statistically, to be associated with the thoughtful and careful part of the spectrum."

Meaning no disrespect, surely you can see that statements like this can tend to inspire derision even in those not inclined to disagree on substance.

There's an old line about how top hats attract snowballs. This is the rhetorical equivalent of a top hat.

I should have said, just like Alfred the Great, Oliver Cromwell, George IV, and Ian Hislop.

Dave Bell, I have listened to Test Match Special. "Soul Limbo"!

"So Maoism is just another dynasty, whose time shall pass, from a historical perspective?"

David Cameron is just another London-based ruler, whose time shall pass, from a historical perspective. Just like Alfred the Great, Oliver Cromwell, and George IV. Ah, the timeless sameness of English history.

None of the specific differences are worth noting or thinking about, because life on the Thames is an eternal cycle, reflecting the alien mindset of the exotic English.

The nice thing about this kind of "historical perspective" is the way it spares us from having to know any specific...what's the word...history.

Albatross, while I don't always agree with heresiarch, I really think s/he's one of the last people around here that I would suggest might be using "magic word[s] to attack the argument without having to actually reason about it." Quite the contrary, heresiarch is someone who pretty consistently reasons, and pretty consistently shows his-or-her work.

And by the way, so are you. So I was surprised to see you saying that heresiarch's (b) was "hard to distinguish" from (a). I didn't find it hard to distinguish at all, nor do I think one has to agree with heresiarch on the specifics (China, history, "orientalism", etc) to see that a lot of careful reasoning is being brought to bear.

Just as a reminder, suggesting that someone's particular statement or view is racist is not the same as declaring that person to be the moral equivalent of Bull Connor or Nathan Bedford Forrest. Racism is a system of signals and cultural assumptions, and we're all tangled up in it. I do in fact agree with heresiarch that Edward Oleander's view of China as an eternal static despotism is, well, a common view that has evolved out of a set of habits-of-thought that Westerners have cultivated in themselves about various Asian and Near Eastern people, habits of thought that act to allow ourselves to feel good and moral when we do some not-so-good and not-so-moral things. (Things which, I hasten to add, I'm pretty sure Edward Oleander is as opposed to as heresiarch is.) These habits of thought are what we mean when we say "racism." It doesn't mean Edward Oleander is a nasty person who's mean to Chinese people; in fact, although I don't know Oleander, he's a close friend of a close friend of mine, and everything I've heard tells me that he's not just a good guy but a really good guy, a mensch of the first order. We're talking about habits of thought that wind up shading the way we think about culture and history, our own and others'. We ought to be able to have these conversations without people jumping out of their seats as if someone had brought an AK-47 into the room.

Believe me, I'm aware that the concept of "racism" can be deployed into a conversation in bad faith. I don't think heresiarch was doing that here.

We have it on vinyl; I doubt we've played it in twenty years. I confess, it didn't even occur to me that it might be on iTunes. Off to look...

JGreely, thanks! I didn't know that, or if I did, I forgot a long time ago.

I'm liking Safari 5; it seems at least as fast as Google Chrome, and very stable. The one Chrome feature I miss is "reopen the tab you just now accidentally closed."

A useful extension Avram didn't mention: Reload Button for Safari.

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