Category Archives: Business

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Hugo Awards

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Some thoughts on taking back SFF from the SJWs, from Brad Thorgersen, and Sarah Hoyt:

I lived in fear, unable to associate normally or make friends with anyone. It was like being spied on all the time and knowing the worst construction would be put on my actions and words, even if the actions and words were not political, even if I just forgot what the week’s hate and the week’s cause was.

I got tired. I got really tired. I know authors who walked away after one or two books because they simply couldn’t take it anymore. I know others – gentle souls – who didn’t realize they’d been blacklisted on suspicion of being – dropped voice – conservative. This was particularly true of Libertarians (and libertarians) who never thought of themselves (I still don’t) as “conservatives” and couldn’t understand it when I tried to explain it.

All this was justified, you see, because in the minds of the establishment and establishment hangers on, conservatives are creatures shown as “right wing” on movies and tv (none of whose writers would know a true conservative, much less a libertarian if one bit them in the fleshy part of the *ss [and libertarians might.] They give conservatives (which again is everyone to the right of Lenin) informed attributes never found in the real creature: conservatives, in their crazy little heads, are people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, ultra-religious in a medieval fashion or a crazy-evangelical (there are some, but not many) one.

This kind of thing isn’t the only reason I haven’t been reading much in the past few years, but it doesn’t help.

[Afternoon update]

Michael Z. Williamson: “I am not a ‘real fan’.“

Business, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Controlling The Populace

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You’re probably breaking the law right now.

…we may hope that prosecutorial discretion will save us: Just explain to the nice prosecutor that we meant no harm, and violated the law by accident, and he or she will drop the charges and tell us to be more careful next time. And sometimes things work that way. But other times, the prosecutors are out to get you for your politics, your ethnicity, or just in order to fulfill a quota, in which case you will hear that the law is the law, and that ignorance is no excuse. (Amusingly, government officials who break the law do get to plead ignorance and good intentions, under the doctrine of good faith “qualified immunity.” Just not us proles.)

I don’t find it all that amusing. The whole federal code needs to be overhauled, in accordance with the Constitution. And it does seem unconstitutional, and a violation of mens rea, to prosecute and convict people for laws that they can’t reasonably be expected to have knowledge of.