(1) SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE. Malcolm F. Cross takes a deeply skeptical look at “AI, the Algorithm, and the Attention Economy” at Sin Is Beautiful.
…People using AI, even this theoretical ‘good’ kind, are shooting themselves in the foot and don’t know it.
Why? Most generative AI users are trying to participate in the attention economy – attempting to get eyes on their work, to get appreciative comments, sales, to build an audience for content that they produce.
When a generative AI user posts their image on social media, when they use it for their profile, for their website, for all the things art gets used for, they are competing for attention. And they are competing with everything else generated by AI. The same AI everyone else gets to use.
Generative AI for creating images has been big news since DALL-E’s first iteration was released in early 2021. By October 2022 it was generating two million images a day. DALL-E is only one player in the generative AI space for art. It is estimated that in August 2023, 34 million images were being generated every day across the major generative AI art tools. 15 billion pieces of art, and that was about six months ago.
Assuming you only looked at the most excellent top 0.001% of those 15 billion images, that is still a hundred and fifty thousand images to look at….
… The best the AI artist can hope for in this ideal situation is to be a brief flicker in a constant feed of content we can barely remember.
If the ideas you were trying to express mattered, you wouldn’t have needed AI to win at the attention economy – you could have expressed them with stick figures and still won.
If your ideas actually are that good, then why obscure them by using generative AI?…
(2) AI AND THE FTC. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission today announced it has launched an “Inquiry into Generative AI Investments and Partnerships”. However, apparently is the beginning of a study, not an action in response to a law violation.
…The FTC issued its orders under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which authorizes the Commission to conduct studies that allow enforcers to gain a deeper understanding of market trends and business practices. Findings stemming from such orders can help inform future Commission actions.
Companies are deploying a range of strategies in developing and using AI, including pursuing partnerships and direct investments with AI developers to get access to key technologies and inputs needed for AI development. The orders issued today were sent to companies involved in three separate multi-billion-dollar investments: Microsoft and OpenAI, Amazon and Anthropic, and Google and Anthropic. The FTC’s inquiry will help the agency deepen enforcers understanding of the investments and partnerships formed between generative AI developers and cloud service providers….
(3) TOC OF ELLISON COLLECTION. J. Michael Straczynski had announced the table of contents for Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits.
- “Repent, Harlequin,” Said the TickTockman
- I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
- The Deathbird
- Chatting with Anubis
- The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
- Jeffty is Five
- Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes
- Shatterday
- Mefisto in Onyx
- On the Downhill Side
- Paladin of the Lost Hour
- The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
- I’m Looking for Kadak
- How Interesting: A Tiny Man
- Djinn, No Chaser
- How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?
- From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet
- Eidolons All the Lies That Are My Life
- With a Preface by me.
- Foreword by Neil Gaiman
- Intro by Cassandra Khaw
Straczynski also drew attention to a Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition of the book.
(4) ANOTHER SFF FILM SHELVED. “Netflix Axes Halle Berry’s Sci-Fi Film ‘The Mothership’” reports Variety.
Netflix has scrapped the release of “The Mothership,” a science-fiction film starring Halle Berry.
The movie finished filming in 2021, but it couldn’t be completed after multiple delays in post-production, Variety has confirmed.
“The Mothership” is the latest Hollywood movie to disappear even though filming had wrapped. Since 2022, Warner Bros. has axed three movies — John Cena’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” the $90 million budgeted DC adventure “Batgirl” and the animated “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” — for the purpose of tax write-offs….
(5) LOVECRAFT’S MAIL. Bobby Derie explores “Her Letters To Lovecraft: Edith May Dowe Miniter” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.
The details of Mrs. Miniter’s long career—a career inseparable from amateur journalism after her sixteenth year—will doubtless be covered by writers well qualified to treat of them. Reared in Worcester, taught by her poet-mother and at a private school, and given to solid reading and literary attempts from early childhood onward, the erstwhile Edith May Dowe entered amateurdom in 1883 and was almost immediately famous in our small world as a fictional realist. Controversies raged over her stories—so different from the saccharine froth of the period—but very few failed to recognize her importance. After 1890 she was engaged in newspaper and magazine work in the larger outside world, though her interest in amateur matters increased rather than diminished.
H. P. Lovecraft, “Mrs. Miniter—Estimates and Recollections” (written 1934) in Collected Essays 1.380
(6) REASONS TO READ. “25th Century Five and Dime #2: You Should Be Reading Judith Merril!” says columnist David Agranoff at Amazing Stories.
…One of the reasons I started this column is to share these discoveries. Early in the process of doing the show, I discovered the book The Future is Female edited by one of our most popular guests Lisa Yaszek. A few stories into the anthology I knew I had to have her on the show. That book has a similar mission to this column. While women like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Leguin are famous now but The Future is Female as a book more importantly will introduce you to more obscure authors like Katherine Maclean and well known in her day Judith Merril. Her name was always a respected one in SF.
In that collection which collected the best of the pulp era SF ranging from the 20s to the end of the 60s was a story from the 40s by Merril that really stood out for me. “That Only a Mother.” The story of fall-out sickened children of atomic wars was a brutal and powerful stand-out. When Lisa gave us background on the story and author it was clear that JM was an important figure in the community and I needed to know more.
Since then, reading several histories from Fredrik Pohl, Damon Knight, Boucher, and Malzberg further made the point Judith Merril is an important voice in SF. Her role as a founding member of two major NYC clubs The Futurians and the Hydra club predates her publishing that began in 1948….
(7) RUBY SUNDAY MAYBE NOT GONE? RadioTimes’ Louise Griffin claims “Millie Gibson’s future on Doctor Who is still very bright”. Gibson plays Doctor Who companion Ruby Sunday.
Emotions have, understandably, been high as reports about Millie Gibson ‘being replaced’ in Doctor Who have rolled in.
First, let’s get the facts right. It’s been reported that Varada Sethu has been cast as the companion in season 15. Great news! Millie Gibson has not been “dropped” or “axed” – actually, the opposite as she’ll still be in season 15, just in a smaller role. But I think this is actually incredibly exciting….
(8) IN THE BEGINNING. He wasn’t in it, he’s just telling the story: “Sylvester McCoy reminisces about first ever Doctor Who broadcast” in RadioTimes.
Sylvester McCoy has spoken of his fond memories of Doctor Who and reflected on the sci-fi’s first ever episode….
…He said: “It’s been 60 years now. I know where I was when it first came out, partly because I know where I was when John F Kennedy was shot, which happened the day before Doctor Who was broadcast.
“The BBC had to repeat the first episode of Doctor Who the following week because no one had watched it. They were all glued to the news about the Kennedy assassination and Doctor Who got pushed out. But when Doctor Who started, we had no concept it would go on forever and ever and ever.”…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 25, 1926 — Bob Clarke. (Died 2013.) Stepping not quite outside of genre, or maybe not at all, we have Bob Clarke.
Clarke started at the age of seventeen according to the stories he tells as an uncredited assistant on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! comic strip. Ripley himself traveled the world collecting his fantastic trivia tidbits and sent them back to Clarke who drew them, captioned them and circulated them. There’s no way to prove or disprove this story.
(It’s most likely true because years later, he illustrated MAD‘s occasional “Believe It or Nuts!” parody in that style.)
Quite a few sources, briefly and without attribution, say he designed the label of the Cutty Sark bottle.
After two years with Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Clarke joined the army, where he worked for the European edition of Stars and Stripes and met his wife. Clarke remained with Stars and Stripes after being discharged as a civilian contributor, before eventually returning to America and joining the Geyer, Newell, and Ganger (GNG) advertising firm. He was among the artists there who designed the box for the children’s game Candyland.
Now to MAD Magazine. Clarke was one of the artists who took up the slack he after original MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman left MAD in an absolute rage, taking two of its three main artists Will Elder and Jack Davis, with him. He claimed working at GNG with its design needs was his best training for this endeavor —“I learned about typefaces and layouts, how to prepare comps in the styles of many artists and cartoonists.”
In his first year alone there, he illustrated twenty-four separate articles; he would eventually draw more than six hundred. Yes, six hundred. Here’s one of those illustrations from MAD magazine # 156.
And that doesn’t count myriad covers such as the one below. He was a principal artist of the magazine as it rose fast in circulation, being one of four general-purpose artists who took MAD through the late Fifties and early Sixties, arguably the best years of the magazine.
(10) OH NO! File 770 contributor Steve Vertlieb had a close call but fortunately sustained just a small injury. He explained what happened on Facebook.
This has been a week from Hell. At approximately two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, January 22nd, the proverbial “Kracken” was released onto the highway. I was driving to the post office, going North on Bustleton Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, on “a wing and a prayer,” when an elderly woman of Russian descent, driving her car going South, took a dangerous left hand turn into opposing traffic in order to gain entrance to her apartment complex.
I was on the inside lane, and so my vision was obstructed by cars to my left. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her vehicle appeared directly in front of me, less than a car length ahead. I screamed in panic, and jammed my foot on the brakes, but it was too late. I crashed into the side of her vehicle with a sickening crunch that I’ll not soon forget.
My vehicle’s airbags deployed upon impact, hitting me in the chest, and grazing my right hand which was clutched on the steering wheel. Smoke filled my car, and fluid drained onto the street all around me.
It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been seriously injured or killed. A bloody gash adorns the torn skin of my injured hand. My car was totaled. It was paid off, and running in fine condition. I’d taken it in for a four thousand mile checkup only several days earlier.
Now I’m facing an expensive search for a replacement vehicle, while literally stranded in my apartment for the better part of a week. I’m picking up a rental on Friday.
I’m grateful to be alive, yet wondering why my recent mini-stroke, or T.I.A., was followed in rapid succession with a nearly deadly car crash. I seem to be on a roll of late in health threatening catastrophies.
(11) ECHO OVERCOMES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Prepare for the cries that “wokeness is out of control.“ This despite the fact that the Marvel character’s description (female, indigenous, deaf) is pretty darn well matched by the actor’s description (female, indigenous, deaf, amputee). Echo, starring Alaqua Cox, is on Disney+ and Hulu. “Alaqua Cox Was Bullied for Being Deaf and an Amputee, Now the Marvel Star Is ‘Proud’ to Prove She ‘Can Do Anything’” in People.
Preparing to play a formidable Marvel character is a notoriously demanding process that pushes actors to the pinnacle of physical fitness.
For Alaqua Cox, who’s making history as the first Native American star to lead a Marvel series in the new Disney+ show Echo, it meant training five days a week with a stunt team to learn a slew of butt-kicking moves.
“I grew up playing different kinds of sports — I would play one-on-one basketball with my older brother — so I love doing those kinds of physical things,” the actress, who, like her character Maya Lopez, is an amputee and has been deaf all her life, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.
Cox, 26, originated the ruthless role with her breakthrough performance opposite Jeremy Renner in the series Hawkeye. Echo, who debuted in Marvel comics in 1999, is a gifted fighter with superhuman strength and a thirst for vengeance.
(12) CALLING WOLF. Sam Sykes on X. I laughed.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. 2023 Hugo Award finalist O. Westin has started a MicroSFF YouTube channel where a selection of their stories are read and presented in a simple format. For example:
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Riba.]
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Pixels… Pixels that need pixels… are the happiest pixels… in the scroll.
(1) “If the ideas you were trying to express mattered, you wouldn’t have needed AI to win at the attention economy – you could have expressed them with stick figures and still won.”
xkcd comes straightaway to mind.
(10) Yikes! I’m glad he wasn’t badly hurt.
Let’s see if I can post today – no, let’s try chrome.
(1) He’s got it dead right. All the losers (“I’ve got this great idea, you write the story and we’ll split the rewards”) are all going up against each other. Me? I’ve got things to say, and they mean something. I’ll let my readers see how they feel. (Award nominations gratefully accepted )
(4) I’ve been terrified since the last millenium that one or more of the major agribusiness firms, that grow most of our food, is going to have an MBA decide one year that the tax write-offs of not planting, say, 10% of the US cropland is worth more than the income… and the world’s plunged into famine. Given these stories of hundreds of millions spent on films that are then cancelled for tax write-offs… anyone want to argue I’m being paranoid?
(6) You’re telling me that Judy Merrill is “obscure”? Is this why we’re hearing so much about how “you don’t hear about women sf writers…” because the people saying that have no clue? Haven’t even looked?
Birthday: That long Santa comic strip… it’s the War on Christmas, right?
(10) She was at fault. ESPECIALLY if he couldn’t see her on his left, she turned into traffic. And it’s a truism that if you get hit on the side, you were at fault. That should pay for at least part of another vehicle.
Well, this is annoying. Why can I post in chrome today, but not firefox? And why did clicking the link from the jetpack notification not have the link end in …/comment-page-1/#?
This is a test.
Ok… so something on Mike’s wordpress is looking to track, and I was blocking all tracking.
I guess that’s an apology Mike. I’ve not run into this before, when 400s and 500s are server side issues, normally.
3) Djinn, No Chaser was adapted as an episode of the first season of “Tales From the Darkside” and it has a very funny visual punchline at the end.
4) Deadline had more on the cancellation of the movie, filming was finished in 2021 and in the editing process the film was not working. So there were rewrites done and numerous scenes needed to be reshot. When they went to reshoot the scenes in late 2023, they discovered a very expensive problem. The story follows a family where the father has apparently been taken by aliens and the mother (Berry) and her children try to find him and get him back. When the actors returned for the reshoots, they discovered that in the ensuing 2 years that the children had grown quite alot. (Kids tend to do that) Now the new footage shot would not match the earlier footage and they would have to reshoot everything with the kids in it (which apparently is almost all the movie). The movie was already behind schedule and way over budget and Netflix decided to throw in the towel rather than spend even more money on it.
mark:
Not always. I was hit on the side by someone zipping along, chatting on his phone (“gotta go, I just hit somebody” we could hear him say), and sailing through a red light. His air bag deployed, we were going slow enough that ours didn’t.
That was, wow, 2007. Doesn’t seem that far back. Still have residual pain. There were no witnesses, so no fault was assigned.
Hey, we’re doing this again! It’s the year 4859.
(3) That list brings back memories of reading oodles of Ellison mass market paperbacks.
(4) There oughta be a law. Grr.
(10) Eek!
(11) People who never read the comics will cry the loudest. They’d probably complain about the Silver Surfer being naked — and a surfer. After all, I saw a recent post complaining about Daredevil being blind?!
3) My favorite Ellison collection is Strange Wine (home of “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet”). It felt more mysterious, more fantastical, and less grindingly pessimistic than the others.
10) At least it sounds like you won’t have any problems with insurance. I was involved in two accidents last years and was greatly relieved to be held blameless in both of them.
(10) Steve, she was turning into Pathways? I used to live there, many years ago.
Back in August, my car was totaled when a driver rear-ended me as I was turning into my dealership, further north on Bustleton, to have the car serviced. I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt, especially after your earlier TIA. As others have noted, and as happened in my case, you should get the book value of your car back, although you may wait a while for the deductible, but it doesn’t replace the perfectly good car you already had.
(10) It’s always tough to lose a car.
(1) LinkedIn now insists on having an AI looking over my shoulder if I post. Very annoying.
(9) You didn’t mention that the issue with the cover congratulating Kennedy was made before the election, and the magazine was laid out such that by flipping it over, a cover congratulating Nixon would have been displayed in stores.
1
One of the original leading edges of generative AI imagery has been, in photography, things like Sky Replacement, where your shot with dingy and gray skies can magically have perfect sunset light, instead. I’ve never liked this idea at all, following Ansel Adams in that I can remove things from an image, but never add something that was not there. But why change the dingy sky to a brilliant one? So that more people will see it and share it. Attention economy…
(10) Wow. All the best to Steve.
All of those people complaining about “wokeness” or “SJWs” or anything like that? Precisely 0% of those people have any useful or worthwhile opinions on any topic, in any context, ever.
4) I’m not happy about it, but the additional information provided by Thomas the Red makes it seem much less egregious than some of the other cases of actually complete, or nearly complete, movies getting axed 100% for tax advantage.
11)
I think Mr. Kennedy misses the point. Casting a female, indigenous, and deaf actor in a female, indigenous, and deaf character/role isn’t “woke”.
What is “woke”* is being unable to accept an actor who does not natively possess the identity characteristics of the character they portray. There are some obvious limitations. If they started remaking** Game of Thrones next year, it would take an awful lot of work to turn Hayden Panettiere into a convincing Eddard Stark. FWIW, it’s also generally “woke” to gender/race flip a role. At least, in my experience gender/race flipping is a huge signal that the project lacks any original ideas.
Artificially constraining casting decisions based on identitarian qualities necessarily limits the talent that can be brought onto a project.
*erg. An ideologically-fluid term where that means precisely what the speaker intends and inhabits no useful meaning or context for the speaker’s interlocutor.
**please, [deity], no. Not another remake. Of anything.
@Shrinking Violet
I’m glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought of xkcd.
Regards,
Dann
A monarch’s neck should always have a noose around it. It keeps him upright. – The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
John Winkelman has declared all my views neither useful nor worthwhile, in advance of hearing them, because I object to “wokeness,” i.e, to arbitrary accusations and intolerance such as he displays. I thank him for letting me know that I should ignore anything he says.
3) “Eidolons All the Lies That Are My Life” are, of course, two stories (copiable easily from the better-formatted Saturday announcement on Facebook).
@Mark: (6) You’re telling me that Judy Merrill is “obscure”?
You presumably missed the “well known in her day” bit of the excerpt. Going by ISFDB, except for a couple shorts in the 1970s (possibly first appearing in print in 1985) she hadn’t been active since 1963, which I should point out is equally as far from 1902 as it is from today.
3) I still can’t believe that’s the cover they went with.
@mark: Yes, you’re being paranoid. A) There’s a difference between a frivolous luxury product and an essential foodstuff and B) despite the firmly held opinions of a segment of society, the people who run multimillion dollar international companies are, by and large, not stupid. Nobody is going to “plunge the world into famine”
Dann665: What is “woke”
Use of the term “woke” is immediate reason to discount whatever opinion follows, just as the use of “virtue signalling”, “politically correct”, or “PC” has always been reason to do so.
If the only argument one can make against something is “I think the person saying this is virtue signalling / trying to appease some demographic”, then the person making that argument has automatically conceded that they don’t have a legitimate rationale. If you’ve got a leg to stand on, it has to be your own — not one of the other person’s appendages.
4.) mark–you’re being paranoid. I spend enough time still reading the latest agtech research even though I’m wrapping up the agtech sf books to have a finger on things and…there’s enough venture capital going into things such as meat substitutes and vertical farming as well as microbials, drones, software, etc etc etc to keep the bean counters occupied.
It’s significant enough that agtech experts frequently cite the Gartner hype cycle about the latest and greatest stuff. Vertical farming is currently emerging from the Trough of Disillusionment, and meat substitutes are just taking the plunge into The Trough.
Furthermore, even if the bean counters made such a suggestion, national security would very quickly be brought into play to stop it. Agricultural policy is a concern of government, while movies, alas, are a lower priority.
(Now if some other folx would just get into writing about agtech…lots of sf fodder in recent research, enough that it’s hard to keep ahead of the tech.)
@JJ
I agree. If that wasn’t apparent in my response by the use of scare quotes, then I apologize for the lack of clarity.
Human communication naturally (and FBOFW) seeks shortcuts that define a shared reality. The term “woke” (along with the others you suggest) does a poor job at that task. Sadly, other words and phrases have been similarly denuded of their utility. “Fascist” is one good example where it is commonly used to mean “someone or something I oppose” rather than a person or policy that demonstrates commonality with features of an actual fascist state.
And honestly, “communist” and “socialist” are similarly abused.
Regards,
Dann
Tolerance always has limits – it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant. – Sidney Hook (1975). “Pragmatism and the tragic sense of life”
(5) This is the first in a series of four related posts involving Edith Miniter and Lovecraft. The next ones (posted on subsequent Wednesdays) will cover:
Her Letters to Lovecraft: Mrs. C. H. Calkins (corresponded with HPL about Miniter’s estate)
“Bat’s Belfry” (1926) by August Derleth (Derleth’s first published story in WEIRD TALES, a vampire story with Lovecraft and Miniter connections)
Deeper Cut: Lovecraft, Miniter, Stoker: the Dracula Revision (in-depth look at what we do and don’t know about this)
@ Dann,
On “woke”: Neil Gaiman puts it best: “And I would love to just sort of substitute– have a little thing on my computer that substitutes the word ‘woke,’ whenever it turns up, with just ‘treating other people with respect.'”
And fascism is not relative. That’s a semantic trick that the GOP and Trump are trying to play on America. We know who wants to turn the USA into a fascist state. See Heinlein’s “Revolt in 2100.”
“The Rules of the Hugos are written on the ConCom’s walls and relevant laws”
“Fascism”/”Fascist” are the ultimate political insults for progressives because we associate the terms with Mussolini and Hitler. So unless the person being called Fascist is doing the same things that Mussolini and Hitler did (are they lining partisans against the walls and shooting them? sending ethnic groups, political enemies, etc. to death camps? invading neighboring countries and ethnically cleansing them?), then the use of the term should be seen as a highly emotional claim of “he isn’t progressive enough”. To paraphrase The Incredibles, when everyone is fascist, no one is.
@bill–Trump isn’t doing what Hitler was doing in the late 1930s.
He’s doing what Hitler was doing in the mid 1920s.
Is it your position that we’re not allowed to point out the similarities until he’s Chancellor, excuse me, President again, cancels elections, and opens up death camps?
For fuck’s sake he’s literally been using iconic Nazi statements and phrases. Is it really worth helping him over the line, just to “own the libs”?
Don’t be so stupid.
Mark:
Uh, no. She was at fault in that case, but there’s no such truism.
I can counter this twice: We were driving (Specifically Mom was driving) to my university graduation in the leftmost lane of a long straight 3 lane street and a car came out of a side street at top speed, crossed all the lanes and hit us in the side; we nearly hit a tree on the boulevard and ended up dipped into the oncoming lane. Thankfully it hit just far enough to the front of the front side door that it didn’t injure or kill my Dad. Both cars totalled though; he lost his whole front bumper somewhere in there.
And more recently, though still most of a decade ago now, a car came off a ramp onto ice and slid right into my vehicle’s side – I saw him coming enough to shift halfway into the (empty) next lane so that what little of his brakes were still working slowed him enough to make a dent instead of a smash, and nobody was hurt, and both vehicles could drive away and needed minimal repair.
Lis Carey: My only dispute is that I think Trump is now into the late 1920s and plausibly into the early 30s, and our only hope is that either rule of law or his increasing demonstrations of senility will get him first.
@Lenora Rose–I share that hope.
@ Lenora Rose:
We haven’t even had the election yet, so I think we have plenty of time to stop Trump. And given what I’ve seen of the Trumpers, we can beat them if we all stick together and cause “good trouble” as Congressman John Lewis puts it.
Robert: I think you might, but I also stress because so many thought that for 2016.
My years of Ellison admiration can’t help but speak up: “Eidolons” and “All the Lies That Are My Life” are two separate stories.
@Lis — do you really think Trump will “open up death camps”? What has he said that indicates this? What has he done? You shouldn’t say things like this and in the same breath call someone else stupid.
“He’s literally been using iconic Nazi statements and phrases.” You are making my point for me. Fascists can be identified by doing fascist things — killing and jailing their opponents, murdering Jews, invading neighboring countries for their land, controlling the press. Saying “America First” and wanting to limit immigration doesn’t make you fascist.
“Trump is the Hitler of the 1920s.” By the mid-twenties, Hitler had already written about the extermination of the Jews. (are you saying that Trump is anti-Semitic? At a genocidal level?) He had personally fired gunshots in the Beer Hall Putsch. (Can you picture Trump at the front of an armed column? Trump has a lot of qualities, but courage on the battlefield isn’t one that comes to mind.) He had advocated for, and tried to lead, an armed revolution (Trump is running for election, just like Joe Biden).
The things that Trump may have in common with Hitler of the 1920, and this is what I’m trying to call out when people refer to Republicans as “fascist” or “Hitler”, were not the things that made Hitler the icon of fascism.
@Robert “we can beat them if we all stick together and cause “good trouble””
What John Lewis meant when he said “good trouble” was breaking the law to get what he thought was right. Are you suggesting that the Rule of Law should yield to the need to keep Trump from being reelected?
@bill:
I refer you to the many direct quotes in this Vanity Fair article. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/detention-camps-vermin-government-purge-trump-full-authoritarian
From another VF article: ““Now that he indicted me,” Trump said at a rally a day earlier of Joe Biden, who did not indict him, “we’re allowed to look at him…He did real bad things. We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled [Department of Justice] to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.””
Since lack of attendance at Worldcon in specific and conventions in general has come up elsethread, it reminded me: Anyone willing to volunteer for a bit of a brainpicking? I’ve been (very slowly) working on a lego project thing which started out as “ooo food truck with BIG SIGN yes good” and went through “hmm maybe a park” and is now at “well I have all these minifigures in various costumes, maybe something convention adjacent?” so! The Question: What, if anything, would you consider visual indicators of Thing Is Convention?
Also hiiii I am not well and will probably disappear again but I missed you all I hope you’re all doing great (Worldcon shenanigans aside)
Meredith: Wonderful to hear from you!
Inside or out? Since you mention a park, maybe outside. Well, a line for something? Like a line to get in. Or A short line for a food truck (some cons have them outside the facility). And that last would give you an excuse to think up a food truck, too.
And would it make sense for your venue to have a big sign announcing the convention? Or a big sign with a rocket logo, or something else sff and iconic?
@Mike Glyer
I think I’m sticking to outside on account of that way I don’t have to worry about the structural integrity of liftable roofs or cutaway walls and the like (also, parks are easy to make pretty). I’ve been fiddling with ideas for how to set up a queue and entry desk type thingy and I’m very relieved that it was a good track to be on!
I am EXTREMELY into Big Sign ideas. I can do… limited text? I’d say? But rockets and similar iconography should be very doable.
@bill–Trump’s lawyer said in court that the President could order a SEAL team to kill a political opponent, and that he couldn’t be prosecuted for it, ever, unless he were impeached nybthe House and convicted and removed by the Senate.
Trump himself has said if elected he’ll be a dictator on day one. Sure, there was some subsequent blather about only on day one, but I hope you don’t expect us to be gullible enough to believe Trump would seize dictatorial powers, and then give them up.
And, sorry, no, we don’t have to wait for fascists to start the killing before we notice that they’re fascists, with clear fascist plans for the country. Normal politicians don’t call categories of people they don’t like “vermin.” Their followers do not march in the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
He calls the prosecutors producing real evidence of his crimes and prosecuting him Marxists, corrupt, and un-American.
He insists any vote he doesn’t win was rigged.
He was encouraging his mob to kill Mike Pence once it became clear Pence probably wasn’t going to break the law and declare him President again.
He absolutely refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He never intended to leave office, and he has made it c k ear he has no intention of abiding by the Constitution if he’s elected again.
No, we are not required to be gullible idiots and pretend he’s not saying and doing what he’s saying and doing.
As for death camps–is it your position that if he does everything else, but there are no actual death camps, Trump would still not be a fascist? Repression of free speech, everyone wanting to work for the government in any capacity has to be a member of whatever he makes of the GOP? The forced birth laws in some states now made national?
And yes, he’s been pretty clear that he’d like to round up all “Mexicans,” by which he means all Latinos, including American citizens whose families have been in the USA much longer than when his German draft-dodging grandfather or his Scottish immigrant mother got here, and deport them.
That’s what he admits to wanting now. I have no obligation to entertain fantasies about him not going further, once he believes there’s no further way for anyone to stop him.
What Lis said above.
Not to mention saying that his own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley should be executed.
@bill
No, I think of “good trouble” as “acts of resistance.” In this case, we are supporting the rule of law because it’s the right and moral thing to do against American fascism. As far as lawbreaking, would you support racism because it had been the law? Morality is the key and Trump wouldn’t know what morality is if it bit him on his ass.
Many belated sympathies to Steve Vertlieb. Hoping you’re soon healed up and in possession of a replacement car.
Re fascists: excuse me, but Franco and Mussolini were also fascists. And, of course, Godwin (of Godwin’s Law) has officially said “of course it’s alright to call actual Nazis Nazis.
And Bill, if you don’t think TFG would try to jail President Biden on Day 1, you’re missing the real world.
I apologize for the delay.
@Robert Thornton
Thank you for confirming my assertion.
To go a bit further, whenever I see that artificial re-framing of the issue, what follows is most frequently is incivility, insults, and disrespect. More often than not. 50.1%+ of the time.
That being said, we do need a phrase that we can all agree upon to describe performative activities. I see a few authors returning to Twitter/X after decamping for other places to avoid “Nazi content”. Yet now they are back and promoting their works on Twitter/X
@Lis Carey
It should be enough to simply say that Mr. Trump is, as a matter of character, insufficient to the task of being President of the United States. There are different shades of “bad”, and he is no where near Hitlerian levels. It might be easier to take that assertion more seriously if every Republican candidate for the Presidency wasn’t similarly accused of being “Hitler”.
Folks tried it with George W. Bush and George HW Bush by alleging that Prescott Bush was entwined with the Nazis. John McCain was called Hitler. Mitt Romney…Mitt doggone Romney!!…was called Hitler.
Regards,
Dann
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians. – George Lucas to the Congress March 3, 1988.
Oh, look, it’s Dann pulling his usual shtick of dropping into a thread days after the last previous comment to post some fact-free drivel in the hope that no one notices, because that means he “wins”.