Pixel Scroll 7/8/16 Scrolled Pixels Are All Alike; Every Unscrolled Pixel Is Unscrolled In Its Own Way

(1) BRIANNA WU’S BOSTON GLOBE OP-ED. “We can all do something to stop this cycle of violence”.

It feels obscene to stare at these videos of black Americans being killed by police. It feels obscene to ignore them. It’s also vital to honor the police who were gunned down in Dallas, and yet I worry that retaliation will cost even more black lives. I feel overwhelmed by conflicting emotions — a sense of powerlessness and an urge to somehow stop this wave of violence.

But the stakes are too high to indulge in white guilt. This isn’t about our feelings, it’s about our responsibility. As noted feminist Ijeoma Oulo said, white people have to act today, and we have to act tomorrow. We have to act like our lives depend on it, because black lives actually do.

Given the carnage in Dallas, it’s important to note that the vast majority of police are willing to give their lives to protect the communities they serve. Rather than disparage law enforcement as a profession, our anger should be levied at the political systems that continually erase the wrongdoing of the small minority of police who dishonor their badge. Police operate in the framework we the citizens have built. They act in our name, according to the laws we ask them to enforce.

(2) COMMENT ON DALLAS. If not for the title, “4GW in Dallas”, would you have guessed the author of this analysis is Vox Day?

As of November, 1024 people were killed by police in 2015, 204 of them unarmed. For all that the police almost uniformly claimed to have been fearing for their lives, only 34 police were shot and killed during the same period. The public may be collectively stupid, but they’re not incapable of recognizing that statistical imbalance or that the police are trained to lie, obfuscate, and pretend that they are in danger when they are not.

Unless and until the police give up their military-style affectations, “us vs them” mentality, and most of all, their legal unaccountability, they’re going to find themselves fighting a war against the American people. And it is a war they simply cannot win.

What happened in Dallas may be shocking, but it isn’t even remotely surprising. Many people have seen it coming; what will likely prove the most surprising aspect of this incident is how many people will remain utterly unsympathetic to the Dallas police and their bereaved families. The police may consider themselves above the law, but they are not beyond the reach of an increasingly outraged public.

(3) I’M SORRY, I’LL READ THAT AGAIN. However, the post evidently didn’t set well with a lot of his followers, so Vox wrote a follow-up characterizing his position as merely a prediction fulfilled.

In the aftermath of the Dallas police shooting, it is understandable that many Americans are shocked, scared, and upset. The post-Civil Rights Act America has not turned out to be the society they thought it was, indeed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that those terrible racist Southern segregationists were correct all along. Targeted assassinations of authority figures are not a sign of a stable, well-ordered society.

But I have neither patience nor sympathy for those who have been emailing, commenting, and Tweeting to say that they are shocked by my comments with regards to Dallas and the overly militarized US police. I have said nothing I have not said many times before. My position has not changed one iota on the subject for over a decade. I have repeatedly predicted such events would take place, nor am I alone in that, as William S. Lind repeatedly warned about it as a consequence of 4GW coming to America in his book of collected columns, On War.

(4) THE SULU REVEAL. Adam-Troy Castro makes a case for “Why George Takei, Of All People, Is Now Wrong about Hikaru Sulu”.

George is absolutely right to have his preferences, ironic as they are. And I absolutely understand why he takes it so seriously. For an actor to do his job well, the role must hijack some of his gray matter, becoming a virtual person inside the real one; a person who may be evicted when the role goes away and another one must be prepared for. Part of George Takei has been Hikaru Sulu for decades; it is likely impossible, and to a large degree undesirable, for the scrutable helmsman he imagined to be evicted, in any real way, now. This is why he famously took a genuine, personal pride in the revelations over the years that Sulu’s first name (never mentioned on the original series) was officially Hikaru, or that he had advanced in his career to become Captain in the Excelsior, or that he had a daughter who also joined Starfleet. This is why Jimmy Doohan felt violated when the screenplay of a late STAR TREK film required Scotty to do a slapstick head-bonk in the corridor. The actors know the difference between reality and fantasy, but characters that near and dear to their hearts blur that line mightily, and this is for the most part a good thing.

However, he’s wrong on this, and this is why….

(5) CANON VOLLEYED AND THUNDERED. Peter David affirms the idea of making Sulu gay, while offering a lighthearted explanation why that fits the canon.

Some fans are crying foul, including George himself, declaring that it flies in the face of Trek continuity. Well, as the guy who wrote “Demora” in which Sulu is most definitely not gay, I’m here to say:

The fans are wrong. Even, with all respect, George is wrong.

In 79 episodes and all the movies, there is simply nothing to establish that Sulu is hetero. Yes, he has a daughter. Neil Patrick Harris has kids, too, so so much for that argument. He only displayed hetero leanings in exactly one episode: “Mirror Mirror” in which he is coming on to Uhura. But that wasn’t our Sulu. That was the Sulu of the mirror universe, and if the mirror Sulu is aggressively straight, then I suppose it makes sense that our Sulu would be gay, right? He’s the opposite, after all.

(6) A FORCE FOR GOOD? Peter Grant argues against “Publishing’s scary self-delusion” at Mad Genius Club.

I wasn’t surprised (but I was disappointed) to read this statement from Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle:

“Publishing is undeniably a force for good. But working in an industry that is inherently a service to society, we risk subscribing to the notion that this is enough. It’s not. We ought to do more—and we can—by taking advantage of our capacity as Penguin Random House to drive positive social, environmental, and cultural change, locally and globally.”

The statement was accompanied by a video message to PRH employees.

The scary thing is, Mr. Dohle undoubtedly believes his statement – yet, equally undoubtedly, it’s catastrophically wrong…..

There’s also the question of why PRH (and, by extension, other publishers) should do more.  Surely their emphasis, their focus, should be on increasing their profitability, and thereby the returns to their shareholders and investors?  The latter could then use some or all of the profits on their investments to support causes, activities and individuals  with whom they agree or are in sympathy.  For a corporation to play fast and loose with its owners’ money, in order to undertake or promote activities that have little or nothing to do with its core commercial activities, is, to put it mildly, disingenuous…..

(7) THE MAP OF LOST DISNEY ATTRACTIONS. Yahoo! Movies has a gallery of “22 Lost Disney Rides, From the Maelstrom to Mission To Mars”.

When the new Disney World attraction Frozen Ever After opened at Epcot Center recently in Orlando, eager families waited in line for up to five hours for their turn to see Anna and Elsa in the animatronic flesh. But sprinkled in amongst the jubilant throngs were some unhappy faces mourning the loss of the ride that the Frozen gang replaced: the Maelstrom, a log flume that had entertained visitors since 1988. It’s a reminder that almost every time a new ride debuts at the Happiest Place on Earth, another one twinkles out of existence. From Phantom Boats and Flying Saucers to a World of Motion and an ExtraTERRORestrial Encounter, we’ve assembled this gallery of some rides that are no longer in operation at Disney World and/or Disneyland in Anaheim.

(8) PORTRAIT COMPETITION. Nick Stathopoulos points out that critic Christopher Allan of The Australian predictably hated his entry in the annual Archibald Prize competition. (Can’t figure out why Nick’s link from FB to The Australian works, and the direct link hits a paywall, so I’ll link to him.) Nick has been a finalist several times, and anyway has a thick hide.

At least the massively oversized heads remain, like last year, in retreat. There are a few horrors, such as massive works by Abdul Abdullah, Nick Stathopoulos and Kirsty Neilson, which also reveal the nexus between size and the other bane of the Archibald, the reliance on photography. Stathopoulos’s work is suffocating in its obsessive rendering of the inert photographic image, and Neilson in her portrait of actor Garry McDonald has painstakingly rendered each hair in her sitter’s beard while failing to deal adequately with the far more important eyes.

(9) MY GOSH SUKOSHI. Another conrunner-for-profit has bit the dust, reports Nerd & Tie.

Sukoshi Con’s “Louisville Anime Weekend” was originally scheduled for July 29th-31st at the Ramada Plaza Louisville Hotel and Conference Center in Louisville, KY. With less than a month to go before the convention though, on Tuesday Sukoshi Con deleted their Facebook pages, pulled down their websites, and announced via Twitter that the event (and all future Sukoshi Con events) were cancelled.

https://twitter.com/sukoshicon/status/750419804234756096

It’s been a strange year and a half for James Carroll’s Sukoshi Con. Some of you may remember the weird saga of their Anime Southwest convention (in Denver oddly enough), where the con had to relocate hotels, multiple guests cancelled, and drama abounded — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the last year and a half, the organization has cancelled four of their eleven planned events — including last years Louisville Anime Weekend.

We’ve heard rumblings of financial issues within the convention, though they have yet to be confirmed. It’s safe to say though that none of Sukoshi Con’s events are likely to come back.

(10) TWO HERMIONES. Emma Watson posted photos of her with Noma Dumezweni on Facebook of the two Hermiones meeting at a preview of the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stageplay.

Yesterday I went to see the Cursed Child. I came in with no idea what to expect and it was AMAZING. Some things about the play were, I think, possibly even more beautiful than the films. Having seen it I felt more connected to Hermione and the stories than I have since Deathly Hallows came out, which was such a gift. Meeting Noma and seeing her on stage was like meeting my older self and have her tell me everything was going to be alright, which as you can imagine was immensely comforting (and emotional)! The cast and crew welcomed me like I was family and Noma was everything I could ever hope she would be. She’s wonderful. The music is beautiful

(11) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • July 8, 1947 – The first press reports were released on what has become known as the  Roswell UFO incident.

The sequence of events was triggered by the crash of a Project Mogul balloon near Roswell. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) public information officer Walter Haut, issued a press release stating that personnel from the field’s 509th Operations Group had recovered a “flying disc”, which had crashed on a ranch near Roswell.

The military decided to conceal the true purpose of the crashed device – nuclear test monitoring – and instead inform the public that the crash was of a weather balloon.

(12) STUNT DOUBLE BUILDINGS. “Ivan Reitman Looks Back at the Original Ghostbusters ‘ L.A. Locations”in LA Weekly.

There’s no doubt that the attitude of the original Ghostbusters is inherently New York (though you could certainly imagine the scenario at Tavern on the Green playing out that way at certain Los Angeles restaurants). The truth, however, is that only about 35 minutes of what appears on screen in Ghostbusters was filmed in Manhattan. The remaining 1 hour and 10 minutes of screen time of the beloved movie that asked “Who Ya Gonna Call?” was shot on a Burbank studio lot and at practical downtown L.A. locales, including one of the most famous movie locations of all time: the Ghostbusters firehouse.

Now, before you start thinking, Wait a minute, I’ve visited that firehouse in New York. Yes, you may have stood outside Hook & Ladder 8, that mecca of movie locations on N. Moore Street in Lower Manhattan. The interior of the Ghostbusters firehouse, however, is old Fire Station No. 23, a decommissioned firehouse located at 225 E. Fifth St. in downtown Los Angeles.

(13) THE FUNNIES. The Wizard hits the celebrity autograph line at Wizardcon in yesterday’s Wizard of Id comic strip.

And today, the Wizard got taken in the dealer’s room.

(14) NONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER. Critic Jon Jon Johnson’s review implies a play aimed at the general public mentioned the Puppies. “The Greatest Science Fiction Show (No One’s Ever Seen)” was produced for the 2016 Capitol Fringe.

The Greatest Science Fiction Show (No One’s Ever Seen) provides no shortage of giggles, paired with some heartwarming moments. Part love letter to a old-school science fiction, part middle finger to the Sad Puppies of the Hugo awards, and part affection for geek culture, Grain of Sand’s show serves as a pleasant Fringe offering to delight fans of the genre and fans of the theatre.

(15) VANDYKE REPLIES. Peter J. Enyeart ranks the Hugo-nominated novelettes on the Stormsewer LiveJournal. Number Five wrote back.

  1. “What Price Humanity” by David VanDyke Space pilots fighting a war against invading aliens wake up in a strange simulation. Well, these military SF stories start to blur together after a while, don’t they? This was very Ender’s Gamey, with stylistic hallmarks reminiscent of Brad Torgersen (I’m thinking specifically of “The Exchange Officers,” which has a female character named “Chesty;” this one has a black character named “Token” (just because it was funny in South Park doesn’t mean it will work for you, bud)). It does have a bit of twist- a twist that you can see coming an astronomical unit away. And having an infodumpy prologue to a story this length is just narrative sloth. Boo.

David VanDyke, author of “What Price Humanity,” responded in a comment.

Kudos for you noticing “Token,” which is meant as a piece of deliberately painful, somewhat underhanded satire. My son-in-law of African ancestry, who flies fighters for the U.S. military, was given that nickname in training, as the only person of color in his class.

It’s both an indication of how far our society has come (the class members were well aware of the irony and were supportive, in the usual needling manner of combat operators) and an indictment of how far we have to go (if we could find 992 Tuskeegee Airmen, why can’t we recruit more minorities into the elite strata of today’s military?).

Placing such a subtle and unexplained item in a shorter story has its risks, particularly if a reader is predisposed to believe ill of an author, especially one that happens to have been published through Castalia House, but I try to start from a position of faith in the intelligence, imagination and good will of the reader, and hope for the best.

(16) COMPUTER-ASSISTED COMICS. M. D. Jackson’s wonderful series on comic book publishing technology continues at Amazing Stories — “Why Was Early Comic Book Art so Crude? Part 5: The Digital Revolution”.

Apple’s Macintosh was immediately adopted by graphic artists. With such programs as MacPaint and MacDraw, computer assisted art and design was born. The next year saw the introduction of the very first major comic book to be produced on a computer.

First Comic’s Shatter was created by writer Peter B. Gillis and artist Mike Saenz. Shatter was the story of a cop named Sadr al-Din Morales. The storyline of the comic was much in-line with works like Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and Gibson’s Neuromancer. Threads of the story, such as distrust of corporations, the Film Noir feel of the project, and especially the artwork, would place it firmly in the genre of ‘cyberpunk.’

More importantly, the comic title, however much of a gimmick it may have started out as, showed that the potential for computer assisted comic book art was real. Using MacPaint and a mouse (this was before the invention of the tablet and stylus interface) artist Mike Saenz created each image as well as the lettering. The resulting pages were printed on a dot-matrix printer and then colored in a traditional way, but only because at the time the Macintosh was strictly a black and white machine.

(17) THE ARABELLA TRAILER. David D. Levine’s new novel, unveiled in a one-minute video.

Since Newton witnessed a bubble rising from his bathtub, mankind has sought the stars. When William III of England commissioned Capt. William Kidd to command the first expedition to Mars in the late 1600s, he proved that space travel was both possible and profitable. Now, one century later, a plantation in a flourishing British colony on Mars is home to Arabella Ashby, a young woman who is perfectly content growing up in the untamed frontier. But days spent working on complex automata with her father or stalking her brother Michael with her Martian nanny is not the proper behavior of an English lady. That is something her mother plans to remedy with a move to an exotic world Arabella has never seen: London, England. However, when events transpire that threaten her home on Mars, Arabella decides that sometimes doing the right thing is far more important than behaving as expected. She disguises herself as a boy and joins the crew of the Diana, a ship serving the Mars Trading Company, where she meets a mysterious captain who is intrigued by her knack with clockwork creations. Now Arabella just has to weather the naval war currently raging between Britain and France, learn how to sail, and deal with a mutinous crew…if she hopes to save her family remaining on Mars. Arabella of Mars, the debut novel by Hugo-winning author David D. Levine offers adventure, romance, political intrigue, and Napoleon in space!

 

[Thanks to Steven H Silver, Michael J. Walsh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Stoic Cynic.]

105 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/8/16 Scrolled Pixels Are All Alike; Every Unscrolled Pixel Is Unscrolled In Its Own Way

  1. James Davis Nicoll: You didn’t overstep. And your post is the reason I even knew there was a story.

    I don’t think you have this problem, but there is a competitive impulse among the several of us who blog sf/fan news, and what I was aiming to do was write a comment without blurting out “Dammit, he beat me to this story!” It would have been clearer if I honestly acknowledged the competitive reaction and didn’t just come off grumpy.

  2. Kudos for you noticing “Token,” which is meant as a piece of deliberately painful, somewhat underhanded ham-handed satire.

    FTFY. I blame Swype, as usual.

  3. 6) Peter Grant is wrong as usual (well, that’s not exact news). For starters, Penguin Random House is only one part of a much larger corporate entity, namely Bertelsmann, and not the most important one either. I suspect the RTL Group makes a lot more money for them. And Bertelsmann has always been involved in a lot of charity projects, particularly via the Bertelsmann Foundation. Also Bertelsmann comes from the different corporate tradition, where social responsibility has always been a lot more important than the “shareholder value over all” attitude Grant epouses.

    I also find it interesting that both Puppy groups as well as rabid self-publishing cheerleaders are happily shooting against the three European owned of the so-called “big five” publishers (Bertelsmann Penguin Random House, Tor, which is owned by Holtzbrinck, and Hachette, which is French owned), but not against Harper Collins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Simon and Schuster.

    7) So the Snow White ride at Disney World (most misleading name ever – that ride was terrifying) and the Captain Nemo ride, both of which terrified my five-year-old self, are gone, ditto for the cable car ride and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Say it isn’t so!

    Coincidentally, a lot of these rides and worlds didn’t even exist during my one visit to Disney World in Florida in 1978. Epcot Center was still being built and while Tomorrowland was there, I only have very vague memories of it, mostly of not being allowed to go on the Space Mountain ride, which was deemed “too scary” for me. I wasn’t allowed to go on the cup and saucer ride either, because rides like that made my mother sick. Of Frontierland, all I remember is that choo-choo train ride, which is apparently gone as well.

    15) Disclaimer: I know David VanDyke and he’s a good guy. However, while nicknames like “Token” or “Chesty” may be common in (US) military culture, I don’t think either Brad Torgersen or David VanDyke have considered how such nicknames come across to readers not steeped in that culture.

  4. Stoic Cynic on July 9, 2016 at 7:09 am said:

    @Camestros Felapton
    Actually I don’t think this is Mr. Beale co-opting the arguments of the left. There are several segments on the right, particularly the hard right, that began seeing the police as an antagonist, not an ally, after Ruby Ridge and Waco. Those incidents where radicalizing catalysts to a degree. The language could have come straight out of World Net Daily (Beale Senior’s rightwing news site) circa the mid-90’s.

    Good point – but typically that argument was in terms of federal government abuse of power e.g. directed at BATF and FBI and tied up with the whole they’re-coming-for-your-guns paranoia. Now it isn’t much of a leap to go from there to VD’s position but it was a leap that in general the right tended to avoid. Rather like the pseudo-libertarian rhetoric against federal government powers while endorsing state government powers (so long as it was the right state government).

    The NRA have played a similar game with a kind of impermeable barrier between characterising federal law-enforcement as ‘jack-booted thugs’ while overtly praising local law enforcement as paragons of virtue*

    It isn’t so much the actual structure of the argument as the rhetorical thrust of it. VD pitched it in a way that many in his audience would see it as sounding left-leaning and be discombobulated by it – and that’s what was happening. A kind of trolling of his own minions.

    *[although not necessarily acting on the concerns of police forces when it comes to guns, obviously]

  5. @TYP most USian conservatives will put their gun rights defenses in terms of the need for the citizenry to be able to overthrow an oppressive government. Yet whenever someone is summarily shot by the police for a broken tail-light, or playing their music, or presenting the insurance information the officer asked for, the justification is that anyone displaying anything other than instant and complete obedience to the uniformed agent of the state justifies that person’s death, however in error the person carrying the holy police badge may be.

    I tend towards the conservative/libertarian end of the spectrum and follow the major news/opinion sites fairly closely. I can’t think of of any mainstream “USian conservatives” who have said the shooting of Philando Castile was justified in any way whatsoever. Are there any? Or is this a straw man?

  6. Pokemon Go is all sorts of issues with augmented reality suddenly becoming not sf. One of the local mass transit agencies has already felt it necessary to post a warning about being safe catching Pokemon on or near the light-rail trains.

  7. @Bill–

    What I’ve been seeing is that, though you can certainly find the ravers eager to justify Castile’s death, on Facebook and in comment threads, this particular case hasn’t attracted the justifications and defense that previous cases have from conservatives whose names people know. Including cases I considered just as unambiguous. There are some blaming it on Obama etc.–note e.g., Dan Patrick, Lt. Gov. of Texas, but in the main has felt like this case, or the fact of two in 24 hours, may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. No one wants what we see happening. We’re still a long way from agreeing on solutions, but we may finally be looking at the same problem.

    I know I’ve liked and shared commentary from people I would never have expected to, in the last few days.

  8. Bill on July 9, 2016 at 3:26 pm said:

    I tend towards the conservative/libertarian end of the spectrum and follow the major news/opinion sites fairly closely. I can’t think of of any mainstream “USian conservatives” who have said the shooting of Philando Castile was justified in any way whatsoever. Are there any? Or is this a straw man?

    Nobody notable that I’ve seen – they are either expressing concern or saying nothing at all. While saying nothing at all is itself problematic, it is an improvement on saying something appalling.

  9. @Camestros Felapton

    Agreed most of the true heat and rage was reserved for federal law enforcement.

    That’s also around the time though I started seeing articles coming from that side of the spectrum about the dangers of militarized law enforcement, the desired differences in a soldier and a cop’s mentality and threat assessment regimen, etc. Those were generally inclusive of local law enforcement, particularly swat teams, and not just federal police. (As an aside: where was the rage at the police bombing of MOVE headquarters though?)

    I think that may be where Beale was initially coming from on this. Which, for once, might even be a point of agreement (yech! Need to go wash now).

  10. (15) One would hope that futuristic militaries would come up with less-stereotypical/insulting, or at least less-juvenile, or at least less-obvious and more clever nicknames for each other. But I suppose “War never changes”, as the man said.

  11. Cora said:

    7) So the Snow White ride at Disney World (most misleading name ever – that ride was terrifying) and the Captain Nemo ride, both of which terrified my five-year-old self, are gone, ditto for the cable car ride and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Say it isn’t so!

    Snow White and Mr. Toad still exist at Disneyland, if you ever make it to Anaheim. The former is more appropriately called “Snow White’s Scary Adventures” there.

    5-year-old me empathizes with 5-year-old you.

  12. Pokemon Go is all sorts of issues with augmented reality suddenly becoming not sf. One of the local mass transit agencies has already felt it necessary to post a warning about being safe catching Pokemon on or near the light-rail trains.

    I’ve seen a few articles about that. I’ll dig them up and post them after I lean this ladder over to catch that aerodactyl…

  13. @Camestros While saying nothing at all is itself problematic,

    I can think of a couple of reasons for the NRA and similar groups not to be speaking strongly about the recent cases of blacks getting shot by police:

    1. The facts aren’t all in, and saying something now based on erroneous information is likely to get you bitten later.
    2. To advocate your political position — pro gun rights — in the wake of the death of someone like Castile is incredibly poor taste (although that has never stopped gun control advocates after any widely publicized shooting — “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”, made famous by Rahm Emanuel).
    3. As a practical matter, it may not be all that effective to connect the position of legally bearing arms to an incident in which someone got shot to death for what appears to be, legally bearing arms.

    But having said that, the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation have both made statements about current events.

  14. @Kip W.

    Smurf-Punk?

    The sky above the tavern was the color of an ancient crystal ball, clouded and spider web cracked.

    “It’s not like I’m blues-ing. It’s like my body’s developed this massive smurf deficiency”. It was a wizard voice and a wizard joke. She had thought the snow captured tracks she followed looked like Azrael’s but now she knew for sure. Gargamel!

    Smurfette’s heart hardened like the polycarbonate eye implants she looked out on the world with.

    Hell had come to smurf town once. Well, like Papa said, “What goes around, smurfs around”. The last of her kind, she was sure of that: Hell was coming to the tavern.

    She whipped her rainbowed dreads and walked in.

    😛

  15. @Bill–

    1. By “someone like Castile” you mean a legal CCW permit holder, right?

    2. The NRA has never shown any hesitation about vigorously defending widespread gun ownership with as little regulation as they can manage in the immediate aftermath of Adam Lanza killing 20 children and six adults, or Dylan Roof killing the members of an historic black church who had warmly welcomed him. Or after what’s his name shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic. Or I can go on. The NRA never worries about taste, respect, or the possibility that later-discovered facts might come back to bite them, do not, that’s not why they’re not expressingredients their outrage at the murder of this legal concealed carry gun owner who was doing nothing.

    2. Have you noticed that Rahm Emanuel is not exactly a Hero of the Left, and few if any liberals feel any stake in what pours out of his piehole? Do you feel any sense of irony in pointing to him as proof of the hypocrisy of people who either never liked him at all, or came to dislike him more and more as we became more familiar with him?

    3. If they were sincere about defending 2nd Amendment rights for all Americans, rather than just white Americans, they’d be especially outraged, and vocal, about the death of Mr. Castile, a legal CCW carrier killed for no reason except that he was legally carrying and informed the officer as he should have.

    4. The complaints from gun nuts about “politicizing” deaths like Castile’s and Sterling’s would be more convincing if they weren’t equally outraged about discussing gun safety laws at any other time, as well. The interest of the NRA is not in keeping such discussion de-politicized. It’s in keeping the subject a highly politicized issue that can’t be discussed at all, because that would risk hurting the profits of their real constituency, the gun manufacturers, who just want to sell as many guns as possible without having the same responsibility any other industry has for making its products reasonably safe.

  16. @ Lurkertype:

    (15) One would hope that futuristic militaries would come up with less-stereotypical/insulting, or at least less-juvenile, or at least less-obvious and more clever nicknames for each other. But I suppose “War never changes”, as the man said.

    Weapons and tactics may change, but soldiers (as long as they’re human) will be the same, and the combination of youth, exposure to danger, and the kind of personality type that self-selects for the military will lead to a certain kind of humor.

    (One of my Army nicknames was “The Running Rabbi” and another was “The Head Heeb,” so I know somewhat whereof I speak.)

  17. @Bill

    Google is your friend. As I am not your mother, I have no obligation to scurry after cites, not google the statements of several police union spokespeople and GOP MN House members for you. And before you say that a lot of Minnesota House of Reps members aren’t mainstream, I advise you to google how elections work here.

  18. There actually are some fairly extreme conservatives who are also strongly anti-police! There used to be a whole crowd of them who hung out at Popehat, the geeky-lawyer site. Ken White, the main guy behind the site, is a moderate centrist and friend of John Scalzi, but Clark, who was the site’s second-most prolific blogger until his recent departure, is an extreme conservative and friend of VD! Despite their severe political differences, some of the things Ken and Clark had in common were: a love of SF, a love of games, a love of the first amendment that borders on fanatical (not a bad thing), and a hatred of cops who think they’re above the law (which is most cops—and, again, not a bad thing).

    Maybe it’s a lawyer thing.

    In any case, given that Clark and VD are friends, I’m not at all surprised to hear VD criticizing cops.

    Since Clark’s departure from Popehat, the site has gone from being entertaining, educational, and frequently irritating, to being mostly just entertaining and educational. At least for me. But despite the fact that Clark was my main source of irritation with the site, he also provided a decent amount of the entertainment and education. And never more so than when he was tearing some group of cops a new one! 🙂

  19. @robinareid
    Hey, Robin! I have my draft syllabus for Modern Science Fiction posted (working on website now). If you still want to share, let me know.

    @KipW: Does “Smurfpunk” fit into my “Cyberpunk, Steampunk, and Just Plain Punk” unit? Inquiring minds want to know.

    Note for no one in particular: You know that your mind has gone full-SF when you realize that your last six FB posts were “Sauron Knew How to Handle Orcs,” “The Most Targaryen Thing Ever,” “Team Stark & the Winterfell Wolves,” “B.A. in Elf Spotting,” “12% of a Healthcare Plan,” and “Trump’s Very Good Brain [pic of Abby Normal from Young Frankenstein]”!

  20. @Hal Winslow’s Old Buddy: I have my draft syllabus for Modern Science Fiction posted (working on website now). If you still want to share, let me know.

    I do, but am nowhere near that syllabus yet (I just finished grading for my Summer I five-week technical writing course, have finished the course shells for the *two* graduate seminars on Griffith’s Hild in Summer II which are the same prep but unexpected two sections due to funding initiatives during our counting base period, and still have to do my ‘academics and social media’ professionalization mini-mester stuff!). *weebles and wobbles* (Volunteered for some extra courses to pay off vet debt and tornado debt, but it’s making for a BUSY summer, on doubt about it).

    So, let me know when it’s up!

    And I’ll be glad to share the HILD syllabus which has the focus of medievalisms which is, well, contemporary fantasy set in the imagined Middle Ages (there was some great debate about the genre of HILD, especially when it was nominated for a Nebula! which it didn’t win–Ann Leckie’s book did).

  21. Corporations are legal persons. People like Peter Grant, following Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman as Bruce points out, want corporations to treat maximizing shareholder value as their only moral goal. By implication, corporations should comply only with the letter of the law as necessary to avoid reducing shareholder value. (By, say, racking up too many fines or getting a talented board thrown in jail.)

    In other words, Grant/Rand/Friedman types believe the particular type of “person” a corporation should be is: a sociopath.

  22. @lurkertype

    (15) One would hope that futuristic militaries would come up with less-stereotypical/insulting, or at least less-juvenile, or at least less-obvious and more clever nicknames for each other. But I suppose “War never changes”, as the man said.

    Indeed, one of my main issues with military SF is that so much of it assumes that the military of the far future will look just like today’s US marine corps with bigger guns. Never mind that a Roman legion did not look like a medieval army did not look like a mercenary army from the Thirty Years War did not look like the Prussian army of the 18th century. Even the idea of marines as a separate branch of the military is a very American thing – e.g. the German military has them as part of the navy.

    And while humans, particularly young humans, will probably continue to use stupid nicknames for each other in the future, calling a black guy “token” is a very 20th/21st century US thing.

    @Petrea
    Good to know that Anaheim still has the Snow White (and retitling them as Snow White’s Scary Adventures was a good idea, because that ride is damn scary for a kid) and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I have to check if Paris has them, since that’s a bit closer for me than California.

  23. 1) The culture of police corruption punishing those who try to fight it goes back a long way. The primary difference is that now it’s a lot more overt than it used to be, and there are more people willing to believe that the problem with our law enforcement culture isn’t just “a few bad apples”. Also, I’ll note that people who use the latter term to dismiss concerns invariably seem to have forgotten the original aphorism and its implications — “One bad apple SPOILS THE WHOLE BARREL” unless you throw it out.

    6) Modern greed-capitalism suffers from a bad case of next-Tuesdayism; the focus is entirely on maximizing the profits for next Tuesday (i.e. this week, this month, this quarter) at the cost of long-term profitability. And a lot of this is because profitability has been detached from consequences at the uppermost levels. Lose a lot of money from a bad business decision, get a big bonus. Run your giant corporation bankrupt, get a bailout with taxpayer money, most of which goes into your pocket. Run it so far into the ground that even a bailout won’t fix it, collect a big bonus and move on to some other corporation run by one of your good buddies. No wonder they don’t give a shit! Why should they? It’s the little people who lose their jobs and homes and life savings.

    9) I hear that the Sukoshi organization is based in Birmingham, AL. Does anyone know whether it had any connections to a convention called OmegaCon back in 2008? They had what looked like a very successful first con, took money for memberships and dealer tables for the following year, and then the conrunners took a powder with the loot. Which sounds, from the scuttlebutt, an awful lot like what’s happened with the Sukoshi cons.

    15) A good example of what a lot of my author and editor friends call the Author’s Big Mistake. Responding in high dudgeon to a negative review is never a smart thing to do. If the review was unfounded, people will be able to figure it out for themselves; if it wasn’t, well… *coughcough* Anne Rice *coughcough*

  24. @Cora

    However, while nicknames like “Token” or “Chesty” may be common in (US) military culture, I don’t think either Brad Torgersen or David VanDyke have considered how such nicknames come across to readers not steeped in that culture.

    Personally, I don’t think that either one of them have even considered how such a nickname would have even come across to the person being called it. Van Dyke certainly doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that, you know, the guy being called it may have been doing it as “grin and bear it” was his least worst option.

  25. Re: “Token”, it would have been interesting to see a white soldier slapped with that nickname in The Military Of The Future instead of it still being the black man.

  26. @robinareid
    Sounds as if you’ve had quite the summer. Mine is actually lighter than usual (except for having to redesign 7 syllabi for myself and my minions for the coming year) because I didn’t have to do multiple sections of intensive linguistics for BLE teachers this summer.
    I’ll email you the link to the base syllabus. Note: just in case you don’t know this already (you probably do), “Post-First” Forums are the ones where you don’t get to see the other students’ answers until you post yours. I have gradually replaced most of my open-book short answer/essay exams with port-first forums, so the questions typically demand a short analytic or reflective essay supported by textual evidence. I prefer this format for many reasons, not least of which is that students get to see each others’ answers ex post facto if they wish.

  27. @snowcrash

    Personally, I don’t think that either one of them have even considered how such a nickname would have even come across to the person being called it. Van Dyke certainly doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that, you know, the guy being called it may have been doing it as “grin and bear it” was his least worst option.

    Oh, I’m pretty sure “grin and bear it” was that guy’s least worst option, since militaries usually tends to frown on hitting your fellow soldiers. As for whether they’re aware how those nicknames come across to the people being called them, if really everybody has a stupid nickname in the military, they might well be aware of that, but simply consider it a part of military culture that you have to “grin and bear”.

    I doubt anybody would have minded, if those nicknames had been used to illustrate racism, sexism and general bullying in military culture, but that’s not what the authors did. They didn’t even add something along the lines of “Everybody had a stupid nickname, that’s the army for you” and wound up having to explain the reasons behind the nicknames in blog posts/comments

    @Dawn Incognito
    .

    Re: “Token”, it would have been interesting to see a white soldier slapped with that nickname in The Military Of The Future instead of it still being the black man.

    I agree, that would have been a lot more interesting.

  28. @Cora: The US Marines ARE technically part of the Navy, but it hurts their manfeels a lot when that when that fact is pointed out. Their officer ranks are the same as the Army’s. (It hurts their manfeels even more when they’re called “The Navy’s Army”, or when you point out that all their pilots are trained by the Navy, and for some reason they’re proud that they have to get their chaplains and medical personnel from the Navy.)

    @Dawn: Indeed, even the sacred US military has gotten progressively less white since the draft ended (which was before almost all the milSf Puppies were born). A quick Google shows me that the Marines are still the whitest and malest; how they manage to be whiter than the Coast Guard is mind-boggling.

    However, there’s nothing more snigger-provoking than the actual Navy and Coast Guard rank of “Rear Admiral (Lower Half)”. (one-star)

  29. Worth noting that in The Forever War the next-gen troops call the protagonist “the Old Queer” because he’s straight. OTOH, they do it behind his back.

  30. Jim Henley: Worth noting that in The Forever War the next-gen troops call the protagonist “the Old Queer” because he’s straight. OTOH, they do it behind his back.

    I read that book for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it had not aged well — the whole concept of the small number of women members not being allowed to form monogamous relationships and being expected to “service” the entire rest of the platoon was just… eww.

    I mean, seriously, with technology as far along as it is in that book, they wouldn’t have developed technology to suppress sexual urges and/or arrange methods of satisfaction that didn’t require women to have sex that they did not wish to have? 🙄

  31. @JJ Eep. I had forgotten about that aspect of the book. Ick.

    Generalizing, its the sociology and the anthropology of old SF novels, even more than technology, that really shows the age of an SF novel, and not always to the book’s benefit.

    And its more insidious. Computers the size of a room are just outdated and laughable, but outdated social structures that marginalize or degrade women, minorities, etc, are far far more problematic as relics of an era. Those Nutty Nuggets don’t taste so good, now. Many of us didn’t know they tasted terrible, then.

  32. @jj

    Not how I remember it, my impression was the initial intake were roughly 50:50 and the weird bit was the random shared bunk assignments. Even Mandela thinks it is a bit stupid, commenting that it was pretty rare for both to be interested and not too tired.

    Once shipboard they tended back to monogamy as well I thought which is how his relationship with Marygay begins. Of course then the time dilation changes start kicking in.

    I’d agree it’s showing its age though.

  33. @cora

    I think the Marine equivalence is part of the wider Space is an Ocean trope. Sometimes averted though, Drake’s Slammers are definitely an armoured cavalry regiment instead. Always quite liked Zahn’s Blackcollar and Cobra insurgents as well.

  34. Jim Henley: Worth noting that in The Forever War the next-gen troops call the protagonist “the Old Queer” because he’s straight. OTOH, they do it behind his back.

    I just read L. Sprague DeCamp’s 1958 historical novel An Elephant for Aristotle which, apart from the plot implied by the title, is devoted to drawing an international cast of characters from the time of Alexander the Great, including several from places in Greece or elsewhere that homosexuality or bisexuality are either accepted, or else tolerated. However, the point-of-view character is from Thrace where it is represented that being straight is the norm, and it’s apparent that the story is couched to keep straight readers comfortable. Even with those limitations, there’s a lighthearted frankness about human variety that was decades ahead of what was being published in sf. And you need look no farther than DeCamp’s own sf novel The Glory Than Was, set in Periclean Athens, to see the stricter limitations at work.

  35. lurkertype: A quick Google shows me that the Marines are still the whitest and malest; how they manage to be whiter than the Coast Guard is mind-boggling.

    They seem to be hard at work trying to do something about that. Here in the LA area whenever I see a billboard appealing for Marine recruits, the figure is either African-American or Hispanic. And quite recently I saw a billboard with the statement: “Celebrating Hispanic Values and the Marines Who Act on Them.”

  36. Looks like one of Cameron’s last acts as PM is to authorise deployment of women in the UK’s front line combat corps. So marines, infantry and armoured regiments. With the proviso that they pass the same fitness selection tests as anyone else, which varies by corps.

    Infantry, amongst other things, have to do an eight mile march in under two hours carrying a 25kg pack. You know anyone who can do that can do whatever role they want In my opinion.

    One exception as I understand it is in the Special Forces in the UK’s equivalent to the ISA (remember them PoI fans?) called the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. They’re rumoured to have involved in the de Menezes shooting. I mention them because if you really wanted a female Bond that’s probably where you’d start looking.

    On the other hand the Army has always had loads of troops from all over the commonwealth.

  37. @John A Arkansawyer

    I had this more in mind, pity it didn’t get renewed. When the SRR was mentioned as the leads former regiment in that I at first thought they were making it up.

  38. JJ on July 10, 2016 at 4:59 am said:

    I read [The Forever War] for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it had not aged well — the whole concept of the small number of women members not being allowed to form monogamous relationships and being expected to “service” the entire rest of the platoon was just… eww.

    The book was not exactly intended to be a flattering portrayal of the military. One might even go so far as to call it a bitter satire. Even for the time, I think that suggestion is more likely to have been a dig at the military’s institutionalized sexism than an honest suggestion.

    …But I’m not sure. It has been a long time since I read it.

  39. I’m almost certain the recruits in The Forever War were fifty-fifty male/female and male-female pairs were assigned to share bunks. Sex wasn’t ordered. It’s more like the part of The Magicians where the kids are sent to Antarctica and turned into foxes. They were set up.

  40. I had a quick skim of the opening and actually there’s a line that does make it more problematic. That being they were “required by military law and custom to be promiscuous”. That does make much more eew, even with the 50:50 split.

    Much of the early military customs do seem to be mad though, like the required Fuck You Sir! Response to officers. I don’t think it was intended to be read as a good thing.

  41. That snippet in Google Books is genuinely icky. I wondered about its context. Well, now I know.

    Sixties satire was a cruel and vicious thing. And that was if you were on the same side.

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