Fake revolutionaries reveling in sewage

The New York Post observes that post-Ramis comedians now flatter the powerful rather than skewer them:

Seventies comedy had a revolutionary undertone. It had a purpose. It had substance. It not only made you laugh, it put the world to rights. It was a snowball with a rock inside it.

How does the massive group diarrhea of “Bridesmaids” do that? What does pie-bonking tell us about society?

Today’s comics have abdicated their responsibility to take down the powerful. They tiptoe around President Obama, but comedy has to be fearless.

These days they’re more at ease mocking their social inferiors than going after the high and mighty. Comfortably ensconced inside the castle that Richard Pryor and George Carlin tried to burn down, they drop water balloons on the unspeakable middle-America drones of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office.”

There’s a joke from “The Office” that’s typical of the contempt. Andy says, “I went to a little school called Cornell — ever heard of it?” It’s not a takedown from below but a sneer from above, in tune with Dwight Schrute’s pathetic insistence on his title of “assistant regional manager” when he’s merely “assistant to the regional manager,” and anyway anyone with “regional manager” in his title is a nobody by definition.

Cornell, to comedy elites and graduates of the 15 schools that outrank it, is a near-mediocre brand so lame that only a dope would brag about it. “The Office’s” first and second showrunners Greg Daniels and Michael Schur both went to Harvard, as did writer-actor B.J. Novak. Their colleague Mindy Kaling went to Dartmouth (which also unclogs its nose at the likes of Cornell).

Ramis’ death is a reminder that comedy has gotten too fat and happy, too rich and insulated, too therapeutic and self-adoring, too willing to mistake the meaninglessly crude for the spectacularly subversive.

Even comics who present themselves as the loyal opposition to the political leadership, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, expend most of their effort simply repackaging Democratic Party talking points as jokes. The ’70s hang-’em-all anarchist spirit lives on only in the margins, in a few brave outposts like “South Park.”

It’s as if today’s comedy writers are sitting respectfully, stars in their eyes, as their beloved president sits amongst them like Charming Guy with Guitar in “Animal House,” gently strumming away and singing, “I gave my love a cherry.” If some free-ranging Blutarksyite came up and smashed the guitar, they’d stand up — and pound the rebel for interrupting such a beautiful, magical moment.

Then they’d go back to cracking jokes about those pathetic losers destined for unspeakable middle-management manufacturing jobs because they only managed to get into Cornell.

What happened? My guess is that the Baby Boomers got sufficiently powerful and were too self-absorbed to accept anyone poking humor at them. And they won’t tolerate any comedian who is willing to challenge their particularly bland and all-smothering form of evil.

Plus the more liberal the comedic establishment, the less humor it tolerates. That’s why they’re limited to the One Liberal Joke: “You know this guy? He’s not as smart as we are!”

Hilarity ensues….

Blowback in Ukraine

Apparently the whole CIA Spring strategy isn’t so effective when someone is prepared for it:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Sunday that his country was “on the brink of disaster” and personally blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for bringing the two nations to the verge of war. Speaking to reporters at the Ukrainian parliament, Mr. Yatsenyuk called on the international community to rein in Mr. Putin and pressure him to remove troops from the Crimean peninsula, where a majority of residents are ethnic Russians but have Ukrainian passports.

“If President Putin wants to be the president who starts the war between two friendly and neighboring countries, he has [almost] reached this target,” Mr. Yatsenyuk said. “We are on the brink of disaster. There was no reason for the Russian Federation to invade Ukraine.”

Western diplomats doubt that the Ukrainian armed forces would be able to match up to the Russian forces already in control of the critical infrastructure and border points in the Crimea. Ukrainian leaders say that Russia has already sent an additional 6,000 troops to Crimea since tensions arose in the peninsula last week. The two countries have a military agreement that allows Moscow to base forces in the region, but Ukrainian officials accuse Moscow of violating that treaty by not informing Kiev of additional troops, and by moving forces without prior notice. Moscow says that it is in compliance of the accord.

Earlier Sunday, Ukraine’s interior minister said Russian officials had approached Ukrainian officers remaining in Crimea and offered them immediate Russian citizenship. “Across the entire territory of Crimea, Russian emissaries and military officers have invited the remaining Ukrainian interior ministry troops to take Russian citizenship and immediately receive Russian passports,” Arsen Avakov wrote on his Facebook page. “This appeal has been aimed at upper and middle officer corps troops.”

So, instead of Ukraine being independent and leaning towards Russia, the US-sponsored anti-democratic coup looks as if it will hand at least part of the nation right back to Russia. The thing is, there is no one who buys the whole “sovereign Ukraine” thing; everyone knows this is just the neocons latest project.

And meanwhile, China is sitting silently on the other side of the world, taking notes.

SF Fandom is “cleaning house”

It’s a pity to see that someone who writes pretty good neo-Lovecraftian pastiches, who wrote the brilliant Accelerando, should nevertheless show himself to be so deeply and profoundly absurd with regards to politics, public relations, and simple civility:

So today Loncon 3 announced that Jonathan Ross would be toastmaster at the Hugo awards this August in London. And lo, twitter melted down in outrage for some reason.

I agree with Farah Mendlesohn (who resigned from the committee over this choice) that he’s a very bad choice for Hugo toastmaster.

My reasons for thinking this differ slightly from hers.

Regardless of Mr. Ross’s personality and track record, it is clearly the case that he has a history of scrapping with tabloid journalists, then being quoted out of context.

The problem I see is that while fandom is in the process of cleaning house, inviting him — or anyone with a controversial media profile — to be Hugo toastmaster is like rolling out a welcome mat at the Worldcon front door that says “muck-rakers welcome”. There’s a lot of muck to be raked, even before we get into Daily Mail photographers stalking cosplayers: just look at the recent SFWA fracas (plural), the Jim Frenkel/harassment scandal at Tor, and so on.

Worldcon should be safe space for fans, and inviting a high profile media personality who has been targeted by the tabloids is going to cause collateral damage, even if nothing happens, simply by making many fans feel less safe.

We’re seeing a huge explosion of anxiety on twitter right now. If Ross is toastmaster, I can predict that at least one major Hugo nominee/past winner who was planning to be there won’t be present at the ceremony, because Ross has past form for using women with weight issues as the butt of his humour. She says she doesn’t feel safe, and I believe her: I wouldn’t want to be there in her shoes (and I’m an ancient has-been who hasn’t been on the shortlist for a couple of years, now, so I’m unlikely to be in the front row). I don’t like seeing my friends mocked, so I probably won’t be there either. And this is regardless of whether the mockery would come from the toastmaster, or the tabloid journalists in the back of the audience.

The sad fact is, however well-behaved Mr. Ross is on the day, inviting him into a pulpit that has been misused in the past is sending a really bad signal. (And anyway, what happened to our community’s supposed newfound commitment to diversity? Isn’t it about time we had a toastmaster who wasn’t a white privileged male? Someone like, say, Jane Goldman?)

The amusing thing is that even AFTER the debacle was concluded and Ross declined the invitation, Stross believes it was good to have hounded him from the event:

His appointment was probably a bad move, but the way he was hounded out was, in my opinion, much worse.

Would you rather the Hugo ceremony went ahead with a toastmaster trailed by tabloid journalists looking for scandal, with half the nominees missing (either because they were afraid of the toastmaster, or out of solidarity with those who were afraid, or out of fear of the tabloid press), under a cloud of ill-tempered back-biting about privilege and contempt for minorities?

It’s better to get it out of the way right now, the same day that the bad decision was made public, than to wait.

Keep in mind that Johnathan Ross’s politics are much closer to theirs than to mine, but that didn’t prevent them from chasing him out too.  It’s no wonder most of these creepy little people live hand-to-mouth, afraid to leave their safe spaces. They are literally too stupid and frightened to go out and make a living among normal people. In the end, it’s Us vs Them. K-selection vs r-selection. Fit vs fat. The sane population vs fandom.

If you have to ask, then yeah, you’re probably on the list to be ideologically cleansed too.

So be it. I went to one SF convention once, back in 1996. Needless to say, once was more than enough. One fan came up after a panel and told me I didn’t look like an SF writer. After glancing looking around, I couldn’t disagree with him. I had to resist the urge to ask him: “why, because I’m healthy?”

Speaking of the Hugo Awards: Warbound for Best Novel!

Bush vs Clinton redux

Actually, I tend to favor the bifactional ruling party presenting the tattered remnants of the nation with a choice between Clinton II and Bush III. Nothing could better illustrate the facade of “democracy” that misleads the American electorate.

Our meritocratic society seems increasingly nepotistic and dynastic. There was a Bush or a Clinton in the White House and cabinet for 32 years straight. We’re Bill Murray stuck at 6 a.m. in Harold Ramis’s comic masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.” As Time’s Michael Crowley tweeted on Friday, “Who else is looking forward to potentially TEN more years of obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s past, present and future?”

The Clintons don’t get defeated. They get postponed.

Just as Hillary clears the Democratic field if she is healthy and runs, a major Romney donor told The Washington Post that “if Jeb Bush is in the race, he clears the field.” Jeb acknowledged in Long Island on Monday, referring to his mom’s tart comment that “if we can’t find more than two or three families to run for higher office, that’s silly,” that “it’s an issue for sure.” He added, “It’s something that, if I run, I would have to overcome that. And so will Hillary, by the way. Let’s keep the same standards for everybody.”

It is impossible to listen to either the politicians or the corporate gatekeepers and conclude that we are living in anything that even remotely approximates a “meritocracy”. Best and brightest? Hardly. This is government by con men, rule by the most shameless.

The implosion continues

Fresh from embarrassing itself by naming Redshirts last year’s best novel, the weird little people who are running this year’s Hugo Awards have managed to chase off the biggest media figure ever to pay them any attention. Keep in mind that Jonathan Ross is basically the equivalent of the British David Letterman; he hosts one of the biggest talk shows in the country.

    I have decided to withdraw from hosting the Hugo’s @loncon3 in response to some who would rather I weren’t there. Have a lovely convention. — Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

    @wossy We accept your resignation, with regret. — Loncon 3 (@loncon3) March 1, 2014

    We regret to announce that Jonathan Ross @wossy has graciously withdrawn from his role as Master of Ceremonies for @TheHugoAwards #loncon3 — Loncon 3 (@loncon3) March 1, 2014

    @stdesjardins @tinytempest @loncon3 you mis-understood. I think I was an excellent fit. But others didn’t. Including, presumably, you — Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

    @barefootorbust no. It isn’t. Stop being afraid of what hasn’t happened . I agreed because I love sf. And because Neil Gaiman asked me. — Jonathan Ross (@wossy) March 1, 2014

    So @wossy has stepped down from hosting the Hugos at #Loncon3. Great to see that genre folk hate rudeness but are fine with cyber bullying. — Tony Lee (@mrtonylee) March 1, 2014

Yeah, that sound you hear is me chortling at the increasingly tattered remnants of the Pink SF/F world. I warned the Old Guard about the problems of the Scalzification of the genre, but did they listen? Only about ten percent of them. Now the lunacy is coming ever faster and furiouser. Well done, Steven Gould, well done indeed!

It’s all just too freaking funny.

Generation debt-slave

The unprecedented growth in student and federal debt still hasn’t been enough to boost Z1 out of credit disinflation:

Time reports that American students and grads were carrying $1.08 trillion in student loan debt at the end of 2013. This compares to just $253 billion a decade earlier. Aggregate debt grew 10% in the past year alone. By comparison, overall debt grew just 43% in the last decade and 1.6%
over the past year.’ About 70% of students graduate with some amount of
debt, and the average amount owed is $29,400.

This should finish off the housing market once and for all, barring mass Chinese immigration. That $1.08 trillion now represents 1.9 percent of total credit market debt outstanding and a whopping 8.3 percent of total household debt. Most of it is going to be defaulted, or rather, would have been had that not been made illegal by Congress and the Bush administration.

Not so stupid after all

Tina Fey’s comments about the visibility of Russia notwithstanding, it appears Sarah Palin’s foreign policy perspective was, in some ways, more perspicacious than Barack Obama’s:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Palin said then: After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.  In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now.

Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

“And given how Russia has been able to unsettle Ukraine’s pro-Western government without firing a shot, I don’t see why violence would be necessary to bring Kiev to heel,” Hounshell dismissively wrote.

That being said, the problem wasn’t Obama’s indecision, but rather the decision of the USA to support and encourage the anti-democratic revolutionaries who forced Ukraine’s democratically elected president to flee, thus handing Putin the international moral high ground and permitting him to send in Russian troops “to restore democracy” to Ukraine.

The real cost of the Obama foreign policy is that he has simply thrown away America’s second-greatest foreign policy asset; the credible claim that the USA held the moral high ground vis-a-vis its enemies. The Obama administration has never understood that even when one has overwhelming might on one’s side, the failure to establish at least a credible claim to the moral high ground means that those who might otherwise stay neutral will be forced into at least nominal opposition.

This is why Rome, in several centuries of world-spanning conquest, never fought a war that wasn’t “defensive”, and why Hitler went to the trouble of dressing dead bodies in Polish uniforms to excuse the Nazi invasion of Poland. The USA has gone from a global crusade for democracy to overthrowing multiple duly elected governments in a few short years, and this has not escaped the world’s attention.

Of course, President McCain would have been even worse, in foreign policy terms, than President Obama. Obama may have handed Putin an excuse to invade Ukraine, but at least he hasn’t started an open war with Russia… yet.

Can public schools now ban blacks?

That would appear to be one unintended legal consequence of the recent 9th Circuit Court’s decision concerning limits on the freedom of expression:

Officials at a Northern California high school acted appropriately when they ordered students wearing American flag T-shirts to turn the garments inside out during the Mexican heritage celebration Cinco de Mayo, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the officials’ concerns of racial violence outweighed students’ freedom of expression rights. Administrators feared the American-flag shirts would enflame the passions of Latino students celebrating the Mexican holiday. Live Oak High School, in the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill, had a history of problems between white and Latino students on that day.

The unanimous three-judge panel said past problems gave school officials sufficient and justifiable reasons for their actions. The court said schools have wide latitude in curbing certain civil rights to ensure campus safety.

There is even less question of the connection between blacks and racial violence than American flag T-shirts and racial violence. So, now that we know “concerns of racial violence” supersede the 1st Amendment in public schools, it should be obvious that they must supersede every other Constitutional and legal stricture as well.

That’s an incantation to which everyone should learn to resort. “I’m sorry, I fear racial violence on the basis of past problems.” It’s a free legal pass to restore freedom of association.

In fact, Live Oak High could probably cite this decision in refusing to permit Hispanic students to attend school on Cinco de Mayo. Or, as is more likely the case, white students.

Wallpaper No. 2

In honor of the publication of QUANTUM MORTIS The Programmed Mind, JartStar has produced a wallpaper showing ATSV Draco approaching Bonoplane and the stricken Shiva-class cruiser in orbit around the planet. To download the full 1920×1080 picture, right click on the image and select “Save As”.

The initial reviews have been positive. Some selections:

  • Writing you a quick note to let you know how much I enjoyed The
    Programmed Mind    …. The misdirection was excellent.  I read a good deal of sci-fi and a ton
    of mystery, and this is definitely among the top books I have read.
  • I thought I knew how it was going to end, and was pleased to find out I
    was only 50 percent correct. Suffice it to say the twists were great.
    Highly recommend this as a precursor to MCID Chief Warrant Officer
    Graven Tower’s world.
  • Tight story telling. Interesting well thought-out characters… and a
    fascinating futuristic spy plot. The book fleshes out the Quantum
    Mortis world even more, and sets the stage for what appears to be a
    galaxy-sized war.
  • This book differs in subgenre from the other two
    installments currently making up the QM series; there is less explosive
    action and a bit of a Tom Clancy feel as other reviewers have noted,
    where the character and personalities of individual characters have a
    direct effect on the events that unfold. I enjoyed it more than the
    other two for that reason, though I recommend reading the entire Quantum
    Mortis series.

Also, I think this guy Tom might have written a book or something. Some people seem to think it’s all right….

    Raise the minimum wage

    Ann Coulter sees the connection between immigration and falling real wages, but she fails to see the obvious Republican strategy:

    Why were wages so high until 1968? Because that’s when Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act kicked in, bringing in about a million immigrants a year, almost 90 percent of them unskilled workers from the Third World.

    Our immigration policies massively redistribute wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. It’s a basic law of economics that when the supply goes up, the price goes down. More workers means the price of their labor plummets.

    Unfortunately, politicians spend a lot more time talking to rich employers than to working-class Americans. And the rich apparently have an insatiable appetite for cheap labor. Having artificially created a glut of low-wage workers, now Democrats want to artificially raise their wages.

    It’s win-win-win-win-win for Democrats.

    — Employees who get a higher minimum wage are grateful to the Democrats.

    — Employees who lose their jobs because of the minimum wage hike are grateful to the Democrats for generous government handouts.

    — Poor immigrants who need government benefits are grateful to the Democrats.

    — American businesses enjoying the deluge of cheap labor are grateful to the Democrats.

    — Democratic politicians guaranteed re-election by virtue of ethnic bloc voting are grateful to the Democrats.

    Do Republicans have any principles at all? Why isn’t the GOP demanding an end to this dump of unskilled workers/Democratic voters on the country?

    Democrats show how much they love the poor by importing a million more of them to America each year. But then they prevent the last batch of poor immigrants from getting decent, well-paying jobs by bringing in another million poor people the next year.

    You want a higher minimum wage? Turn off the spigot of low-wage workers pouring in to the U.S. and it will rise on its own through the iron law of supply and demand. In response to the Democrats’ minimum wage proposal, Republicans should introduce a bill ending both legal and illegal immigration until the minimum wage rises naturally to $14 an hour.

    No, in response to the Democrats’ minimum wage proposal, Republicans should introduce a bill that ends both legal and illegal immigration AND raises the minimum wage to $14 per hour. This will eliminate the incentive to businesses and families to continue importing cheap labor from south of the border. What is the point of hiring an illegal if you’ve got to pay him the same as you’d pay an American?

    And what is the point of increasing the Gross National Product when the Nation is destroyed in the process?

    However, it is interesting to see Miss Coulter finally abandon the artificial and irrelevant distinction between legal and illegal immigration that so many Republican commentators attempted to maintain for the last two decades. It doesn’t matter if they invade legally or illegally, in either case, they are here to replace the native population. Historically speaking, it didn’t matter to the Indians that the Pilgrims were here legally, or to the Romans that the Lombards weren’t breaking any laws by colonizing their northern territories.

    Legally or illegally, they were still conquered and subjected to rule by the foreign invaders before largely fading into irrelevance.