Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Heinlein, Fascist

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The LA Times interviews some young idiots in fandom:

As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and others. Films based on Dick’s books, good and bad, keep coming. But Heinlein’s film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950’s “Destination Moon,” culminated in 1997’s “Starship Troopers,” widely disliked by his fan base.

Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside the genre’s literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the field’s most significant writer since H.G. Wells.

“His rabid fan base is graying,” said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. “To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn’t stood the test of time,” because of characters’ windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.

“Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist,” said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. “People don’t seem to talk about him anymore. I haven’t had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time.

And you’ve obviously never had an intelligent one.

Political Commentary

Extradite The War Criminals

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Sounds fine to me:

“I think we should at least try to prove that what happened in Mexico must be sanctioned by Mexican laws and under our sovereignty,” Creel told us. “What can’t happen is that this now ends on an administrative sanction, or a resignation. No, no, no. Human lives were lost here. A decision was made to carry out an operation that brought very high risk to human lives.”

Mexico doesn’t completely understand Operation Fast and Furious, the American plan to help send assault rifles and revolvers to Mexico as a means of exposing the gun trafficking rings that operate along the border. The project lasted 18 months and allowed some 2,500 guns to be illegally sold to suspects the U.S. government knew to be front men for the cartels.

Let me explain it to them. The administration wanted to impose new gun controls, but needed an excuse to do so, so they perpetuated a lie that most of the guns entering the Mexican drug wars came from US gun shops, and then implemented a murderous policy to attempt to make it true.

I hope that Eric Holder is one of the people extradicted.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Not Wall Street

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The housing crisis was made in Washington:

Not surprisingly, politicians have not addressed the problem, even with the benefit of hindsight. The Dodd-Frank bailout bill, which was supposed to address the problems of the housing crisis/financial crisis, left Fannie and Freddie untouched. The two government-created entities are on life support after their bailouts (speaking of which, here’s a funny cartoon), so this would have been the right moment to drive a stake through their hearts. One can only wonder what damage they will do in the future.

The biggest lie that continues to be told about the 2008 financial crisis was that it was caused by “deregulation.”

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Lyndon Johnson’s Greatest Quaqmire

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The cities:

After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy. Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll. Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women. Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.

This is not a lot to show for almost fifty years of fighting poverty — not a lot of bang for the buck.

It’s worse than that. It’s a lot of destruction of lives, at a cost to the productive of trillions over the past four decades.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Our Live, Our Fortunes, And Our Sacred Honor”

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A perennial classic from Rush Limbaugh’s late father. The people currently running the country certainly have lives and fortunes, but they seem to be a little short of the “honor” stuff, sacred or otherwise.

And celebrate, amidst the hot dogs, barbecue, ice cream and fireworks, and commemorate this anniversary appropriately, with an oral reading of the document that was signed two hundred and thirty five years ago today.

[Update early afternoon (PDT)]

More thoughts from Jeff Jacoby:

If Nature and Nature’s God intended human beings to be free and equal, then the only legitimate government must be self-government. For if none of us is naturally subordinate or superior to anyone else, no one has the right to rule us without first obtaining our approval. Political power, Locke had written, stems “only from compact and agreement, and the mutual consent of those who make up the community.’’

The Declaration of Independence emphasized the point. Not only are all persons endowed by nature with the unalienable rights of equality and freedom, it avowed, but “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’’

No lawful government without consent and self-rule: It was an extraordinary doctrine for its time. . . . July 4 marks more than American independence. It commemorates the great political ideals, rooted in faith and philosophy, that vindicated that independence – and that thereby transformed the world.

But some wish to transform it back.