An essay on his incomprehensible nonsense. I still enjoy that scene from Annie Hall, though.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Science Fiction
Why we should read it. It’s not a new thought, but it’s always a useful reminder that it helps us be prepared for the future. Of course, from that perspective, “speculative fiction” might be broader and more useful genre.
The Shuttle’s Ignominious Conclusion
Thoughts from Ed Driscoll, over at PJM. As he notes, Lileks has some reflections as well:
NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.
Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.
No signs that anyone is serious about choosing to go to Mars, other than Elon Musk. For the record, I think that it’s important that we carry Anglospheric and western values into the cosmos, and I’m pretty confident we will. I am equally confident that we won’t do it if we persist in thinking (like the Chinese) that it will be done with a Twenty-Year Plan.
I’m wondering what the thirty-somethings are thinking today. They don’t really remember a time when there wasn’t a Space Shuttle, either under development, or flying. And for most of them, Apollo is just a history that their parents lived through and told them about (as the Depression and WW II are for me). But I suspect that they, and the generation behind, will get pretty used to the idea of a real American space industry taking people into orbit, sans a government mission-control room with lots of desks. I hope that, for them, space will finally become a place instead of a program.
[Update later morning]
More lunacy and inability to read for comprehension or discern human emotions, from Mark Whittington, who fantasizes that I am “dancing on the Shuttle’s grave.”
Completely Useless
…signs.
[Update a few minutes later]
Someone had too much time on their hands: the physics of Superman.
The Core Belief Of Leftism
The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade.
Yes, he prefers a world in which everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. And as Glenn notes:
I always figure that people who feel this way do so because they think they’re better at sucking up to authority figures than at creating value on their own. And my guess is, they’re right about that.
And the president is a canonical example.
A Demonstration Of American Democracy
That was apparently the theme of Gilligan’s Island.
Irritating Little Honor Student
“John Boot” isn’t as impressed with Harry Potter as he’s supposed to be:
Why don’t kids notice that their heroes get everything handed to them on a levitating platter? Because, I guess, they think it’s really cool to imagine themselves riding a dragon as a huge building collapses all around them. A better question is why so many adults seem so intrigued by all things Harry, lining up next to eighth-graders for midnight showings. The answer is: Because as kids have gotten more and more grownup, adults have become children. Tech companies like Pixar and Google fill their offices with game rooms and cereal dispensers. Soon your office will have a 17-year-old guidance counselor on staff to advise you on how not to be so, like, ancient.
I haven’t seen one since (I think) the third one. I haven’t read any of the books. But then, I was just never into magic, except the kind provided by a sufficiently advanced technology.
[Update mid afternoon]
Some commentary on the movie patrons, from Laura Ingraham:
Unless you’ve been contacted by the film’s casting director, there is no reason for you ever to come to a movie in costume. We don’t think you’re cute. We don’t think you’re artistic. We do think you’re a nerd. And the moment you leave the protective company of the other crazy people at the cineplex, you look like a complete idiot. The robe and the wand are not working for you.
For the record, I have never been to a movie in a costume. I actually hate costumes (and Halloween, which seems to have evolved from a childrens’ holiday when I was a kid to an adult one, apparently as a result of many of my age cohorts never growing up). Of course, I have also never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I take no small measure of pride in that, after all these years. I was completely put off it by the rabid fans.
[Saturday update]
I know, I probably shouldn’t give him the traffic, but once again Mark Whittington displays his endless talent for hyperbole (and inability to actually detect people’s emotions or read their minds, despite his continuous attempts), fantasizing that I am “heaping disdain” on Harry Potter. And that I’m doing so to “pretend to be cool.”
On Being A Non-Leftist SF Writer
…like all the arts, writing is a liberal’s game. Science fiction, too, I think encourages extreme ideologies, which almost inevitably default left. It’s part of creating a world. You start thinking you could create “logical” rules for “this” world. (I tell you, if Lenin had written SF instead, we’d all be happier.) The climate in the field can best be judged by the fact that I could stand up tomorrow in the middle of a conference room full of my peers and announce I was a communist and they’d all applaud. However, if I announced I’m anti-communist, they would laugh. Some of them might laugh nervously and sympathetically but they would laugh.
Anyone clinging to Marxist theory is immediately believed to be very smart, and someone who goes against it is considered a lightweight.
Do they intentionally discriminate against Libertarians and conservatives? I don’t think so. Not the vast majority of them. The vast majority of my colleagues are decent people. They are also, like the vast majority of the human race, conformists. Most of them attended good schools and grew up in upper middle class neighborhoods (at least most of them who came into the field in the last fifteen years. Yes, there are reasons for that, which I’ll mention rapidly later, if I have time.) Their parents were taught in college about class struggle and that money was evil. They got it at home. They got it from schools. They got it from magazine articles and newspapers. The books they read growing up were infused with unconscious Marxism. OF COURSE they assume anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid or evil. And would you give a leg up to the career of someone who is evil? Would you help them?
The funny thing that always startles me a little is hearing myself addressed as a “conservative.” I’m full of wild-eyed radical ideas not proposed out loud since Thomas Jefferson talked in his sleep, and I’m a “conservative” because I am, ultimately, anti-communist. This is a through-the-looking-glass world, since the establishment is as close to soft — (and sometimes hard) — communism as someone can go without sewing hammers and sickles into all their undies.
And that’s part of the problem there too — I don’t think any of them means to discriminate against me. Some of them even like me, in a slightly bewildered way, but they don’t know what to do with me. I was born in a Latin country, I am female, and yet I don’t consider myself a victim and you truly don’t want to get me going on a-historical theories of great mother goddesses. They don’t know what to make of me, or what to do with me. I make them uncomfortable, and it’s easier to ignore me or not to have me around too much.
It’s always been a little weird, being into both folk music and science fiction, because the prevailing political attitude in both has been leftist, at least for most of my life. One does have to be a little careful of what one says in such groups. And of course, it’s always amusing to see the confoundment on some peoples’ faces in the space activist community, who read my blog and fantasize that I’m a conservative or Republican (or worse, like RAH, a “fascist”), and see me defend Barack Obama’s space policy.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those who haven’t read Darkship Thieves, for which she just won the Prometheus Award, please give me a cut
Thoughts On Southern Accents
I get no less than 3 comments a week regarding the way I talk, coming in the form of “you are not from here” or “where is that accent from” or “I like your accent”. In fact, the accent of native Hoosiers is so homogeneous that I can now hear my own accent, which is more annoying than I expected. I have never enjoyed hearing myself recorded and I really do not like hearing my own accent when I talk. It is strange.
The good news is that no one has called me a hick, redneck, hillbilly (not an insult, by the way), or moron, yet. Unfortunately, in northeastern and some mid-atlantic states (I shall not name names to protect the guilty) I have endured rather cutting and insulting comments about my accent. I was once told by a dude in a NYC diner that I “must be a bigot based solely on how I talk”. Needless to say, our conversation was cut very short. Even worse, a store clerk in a town 3 hours from my hometown once sneered at my accent and insisted that “it could not come from a place that close”. It is sad, but in some quarters of the country, a southern accent is considered dumb, ignorant, and/or backward. Luckily, NE Indiana and the Midwest so far is not part of that contingent. And, for that, I am very thankful because I plan on keeping this accent.
I hope you do, darlin’.
One thing you learn pretty quickly in the aerospace industry, because of Lyndon Johnson’s determination to use NASA as a Marshall Plan for the south (literally, in the case of Marshall Space Flight Center) is that just because someone speaks slow, doesn’t mean they are slow…
And I actually never learned growing up to be prejudiced against southern accents, in southeast Michigan. It might be because in an auto town like Flint, you grew up with a lot of people who migrated up from the south to work there. A lot of the people I went to school with were from a poorer east-side neighborhood, whose parents were from Kentucky and Tennessee, and worked in the shop. Some of them might could have had better home lives, but most were damned good people, and not afraid to work, or fix things, and would give you the shirt off their back. And I noticed that they got along with the blacks a lot better than many of the native-born. Because they knew how to.
“That’s Racist!”
Jonah Goldberg has (I know, typical for him and me and other racists) a racist column today.
The leftists’ lament: “Oh, epithet, where is thy former sting?”