MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

Following the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford (which I didn’t watch, no) and the subsequent reactions, I do have a few things to add.

1. I believe her.

2. I’m not sure it matters, because the (male) GOP senators have made perfectly clear that they don’t care whether she’s telling the truth or not.

If they care about anything, it’s the terrifying prospect that their entire careers could be ended by any woman who decides to accuse them of sexual misconduct no matter how long ago it may have happened. And I’m sure the rise of #MeToo and #WhyIDidntReport has made them all too aware of the fact that women are more likely to be believed these days if they do step forward – which is a change from the good old days when you could just slut-shame them into silence and men could get on with their productive lives.

Kavanaugh’s statement pretty much encapsulates all of that. He’s not just proclaiming his innocence (which would be understandable and natural, whether it’s true or not). He’s trying to rally all men everywhere to his defense with the dire warning that if we let Blasey Ford get away with this, none of us are safe. We will all become unemployable at the mere hint of an allegation. And it will be all the fault of Democrats.

3. So, to summarize Points 1 and 2, the basic message the GOP is pushing here is: (1) we don't care what Kavanaugh did in his past or who got hurt, we want him on the SCOTUS bench and that’s all we care about, (2) a man’s career is far, far more important than the trauma of any woman he has sexually victimized, and (3) if we believe Dr Blasey Ford, we have to believe all women who make such allegations, and we all know where that leads – all men will be unemployed or in prison, and you can thank the f***ing femi-Nazi Democrats for that.

All of which is hard to take seriously, given that the GOP is perfectly credulous when it comes to allegations of sexual assault/harassment against people like, say, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner and Al Franken. And honestly, the notion that all of this is a plot by Democrats to keep Kavanaugh off the bench doesn’t hold up when you remember that the number of women materializing out of nowhere to accuse Neil Gorsuch of sexual assault/harassment is [checks notes] zero.

4. The other GOP message here is, of course, “boys will be boys”. And it’s a message that at least some teenage girls are hearing loud and clear.

5. Trump has (finally) instructed the FBI to investigate, which is perhaps telling, given how Trump generally seems to think the job of the FBI is to put his personal enemies in jail. Maybe he’s hoping they’ll put Dr Blasey Ford in jail for lying to Congress? Or they’ll find out Hillary Clinton put her up to all this and put HER in jail? Or maybe he wants to know what boofing is so he can know if he’s done that yet? I don’t know.

6. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that no matter what the FBI finds, Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed, simply because that’s just how the current GOP leadership works. As long as you’re onboard with their ideology, they don't care if yr a gibbering idiot, a pathological liar who pals around with ruthless dictators, or a serial philanderer who pays his mistresses hush money and brags about being rich enough to get away with pussy-grabbing at will – so long as you get results.

I dunno. It’s hard to imagine the GOP dropping Kavanaugh now, and I’m not convinced holdouts like Flake, Murkowski and Collins will vote against him when push comes to shove. At this stage, I’m afraid the only way Kavanaugh isn’t getting confirmed is if he decides it’s not worth it and withdraws.

I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong. But, you know, given how this admin has a history of hiring the most unqualified people possible to fill job positions, I’m not optimistic.

Getting away with it,

This is dF

I started writing this post back when Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and the big concern then was (1) Trump forced him to retire because Kennedy’s son is tied to Russia somehow (which might be true but there's no hard evidence of this) and (2) Trump’s nominated replacement, Brett Kavanaugh, is a radical Trump conservative whose sole qualification for Republicans is his ability to overturn Roe v Wade and affirm the legal power of Trump to pardon himself for whatever crimes Robert Mueller eventually charges him with.

Obviously the concerns have piled on since then, thanks to Dr Christine Blasey Ford informing us what young teenage Brett used to get up to.

So, okay, a few things:

1. Roe v Wade: personally I think Kavanaugh’s political opinions may not necessarily be an indicator of how he would rule, if only because (1) it depends on the specific case brought before SCOTUS and the legal decisions that brought it to them, etc and so on, because that’s what they tend to rule on, and (2) my experience with the Supremes has been that they don’t always vote along predictable party lines (Kennedy being a case in point – he’s a staunch conservative who legalized gay marriage nationwide). So I don’t know that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would automatically spell the end of Roe v Wade. But obviously I can’t rule it out either.

2. Self pardons: Trump has been declaring loudly that he can totally pardon himself, and that sitting POTUSes can’t be indicted anyway. The thing is, he might technically be right. We don't really know for sure because it’s never really been tested. This Snopes article has a good breakdown of the legal arguments, but the upshot is that the Constitution grants the POTUS virtually unlimited power to pardon people, and there’s nothing in there that says he CAN’T pardon himself, with the exception of impeachment charges, which the Founding Fathers™ ultimately decided was the best remedy for a corrupt, criminal president. There may be a case of applying common law (i.e. you can’t be the judge at yr own trial), but there’s no guarantee any judge will rule that way, whether it’s Kavanaugh, Kennedy or anyone else on the bench.

3. Boys will be boys: All I can really say about Dr Ford’s allegations for now is that it’s helped shine a spotlight (again) on the fact that many Republican men are really, really, REALLY bad at talking about rape and sexual assault/harassment – which is especially egregious in the wake of #MeToo, which evidently convinced Republicans that the proper response to rape/sexual assault/harassment allegations is to double down on insisting it must be the victim’s fault somehow, or boys will be boys, or the perp has suffered enough and we don't want to ruin his entire life over one transgression, and we’re sure he’s sorry about it and it won't happen again – all of which basically add up to the message that the feelings of the accused man always matter more than the feelings of his female victim. (Unless the accused man is Al Franken or Anthony Weiner, in which case by all means, ruin his life and make an example of him.)

So yeah, obviously my sympathies lie more with Dr Ford at this moment, and the conservatives defending Kavanaugh have pretty much zero credibility with me.

4. The Return Of Anita Hill: We’ve sort of been here before with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, which some fear will be a precedent for both how Dr Ford will be treated by the Senate Judiciary and Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation despite her allegations.

On the bright side, according to this article, two key differences are (1) there were no women on the Senate Judiciary committee in 1991, but there are several today, and (2) #MeToo has changed the conversation we usually have about these kinds of things (except for Republican men, of course).

On the other hand, a number of Republican women have stepped up to defend Kavanaugh (not counting those 65 high-school “friends”), and one even said that even if Ford isn’t lying, so what?:


Well, sure. Every teenage boy goes through that period where he corners a girl at a party, turns up the music so no one can hear her protest and then covering up her mouth as he tries to force her to have sex with him. Everyone knows that.

So yeah, there’s a good chance that Christine Ford is going to be the new Anita Hill in the sense that the Senators are going to do their damnedest to badger, humiliate and discredit her, and the result is likely to be that Kavanaugh gets to be the new Clarence Thomas – because it does seem as though the current stance of the GOP is: “You know what? We honestly couldn’t care less if Kavanaugh rapes every woman he meets, films them all and posts them on YouTube so long as we get a guy on the SCOTUS bench who will rule in our favor.”

I might be wrong about Kavanaugh’s chances, but to be honest I think the only way he’s not getting this job at this stage is if he drops out voluntarily.

5. For the record, even before Christine Ford came into play, I personally didn’t think Kavanaugh should be confirmed – at least not with 100,000 pages of his judicial records being withheld. The fact that they are being withheld – and by Trump’s insistence – is in itself suspicious.

Redacted,

This is dF

Burning through the to-read pile like Mario Andretti, y’all.

Invisible Planets by Ken Liu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Most of my early SF/F intake originated from either the US or UK, so for a long time now I’ve been interested in how writers in other countries approach SF/F, especially here in Asia where I live. Chinese science fiction is generating a lot of interest outside of China, thanks mainly to the success of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. This anthology – edited and translated by SF/F author Ken Liu, who also translated The Three-Body Problem and other Chinese SF works – collects 13 stories from seven contemporary Chinese SF writers (including Cixin Liu, who contributes two stories here). There are also short essays from three of the authors regarding SF in China.

What’s most notable about this collection – apart from getting an interesting glimpse into how Chinese writers approach SF, and the fact that four of the featured authors are women – is the variety. Like western SF (which has been an influence on SF in China from time to time), Chinese SF is pretty diverse, covering hard SF, alien contact, cyberpunk, Big Brother dystopias, bio-horror, post-apocalyptic robots, Gaimanesque spirit worlds, surrealist mythology and interplanetary travelogues, among others. Like many anthologies, there’s something for everyone, but not everything may be your cup of tea. Personally, the highlights for me were the contributions from Cixin Liu, Ma Boyang and Tang Fei, and a couple of the stories from Xia Jia.


Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve known about Annalee Newitz for years via her work as founding editor of io9 – between that and the rave reviews I’d read about this debut novel by her, I was keen to pick this up. The jacket synopsis sounded promising too – in the year 2144, Jack Chen is a pharmaceutical pirate who violates ultra-strict patent laws by making and distributing cheap copies of drugs to benefit poor people. When her pirated copy of pre-release Zacuity – a drug that literally helps you love your job – starts killing people, she races to find an antidote whilst on the run from two international patent enforcers – one of which is an indentured military-grade robot named Paladin that starts to develop an unexpected relationship with his partner Eliasz.

The chase plot is ostensibly a vehicle for Newitz to explore several ideas – the corporate notion of intellectual property taken to extremes (i.e. not just in terms of pharmaceuticals and sentient robots but even people who are born as corporate “property” – slaves, in other words), the emotional relationships between humans and robots (to include sex and even gender identity), and the meaning of true autonomy in such a world. Ultimately Newitz raises far more questions than answers – which is good in the sense that many of them are questions worth asking (even the uncomfortable ones), but some questions were the result of me not being able to buy into a couple of plot points, from aspects of the Eliasz/Paladin relationship to the rationale of the indenture system – to say nothing of the hackneyed “corporations are one-dimensionally evil just because” meme. Even if you frame it as a "what if" scenario rather than a predictive one, parts of her 2144 were a little unconvincing for me.

Another problem is that there are few likeable or sympathetic characters, apart from some of the robots – which may have been intentional, and if so, point made, but still. On the other hand, for the most part they’re believable characters, even if I had trouble identifying with most of them. As debut novels go, it’s pretty good and decidedly provocative – and Newitz demonstrates a gift for dialogue and pure inventiveness (I particularly love how she structures her robot-to-robot conversations), and it’s good enough that I’m likely to try her next novel. But ultimately it does come off to me as preaching to a particular choir, and people like me who aren’t full-time members might have trouble getting into it.


The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

According to legend, this short novel from Dostoevsky was not only based on his own experience with gambling addiction, but also written quickly under a strict contract so he could pay off his gambling debts. The narrator, Alexei Ivanovich, is a tutor for a Russian family living in a hotel in Germany, all of whom are living a wealthy lifestyle but massively in debt in some way or other. The head of the family, referred to only as The General, is banking on his wealthy but ill grandmother in Moscow kicking the bucket soon to pay off his debts, which will also enable him to marry a French noblewoman who will only marry him if he’s loaded.

As for what all this has to do with gambling, part of it is related to Alexei Ivanovich being in love with the General’s stepdaughter Polina, who has debts of her own. She sends Alexei to the local casino to earn some money for her, and having never gambled before, he eventually gets hooked. There’s more to it than that, but I wouldn’t want to give away the big surprise in the story.

I have to admit this turned out to be a different novel than I was expecting – in a good way. What I thought might be a miserable road-to-ruin cautionary tale of gambling addiction turned out to be more of a satirical comedy of fiscal responsibility. For all Alexei’s manic behavior towards Polina and his eventual obsession with gambling, he’s arguably the most level-headed person in the story compared to almost everyone else, who are so obsessed with wealth and nobility that they’ll rack up massive debts to achieve both. I don’t know if Dostoevsky intended this to be a comedy, but it does have a mapcap quality to it. Once you work through the thicket of background/set-up to get up to speed with who everyone is and why they’re there (endnotes are your friend), it’s a strikingly entertaining story.


The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time by John Kenneth Galbraith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up partly because it was dirt cheap (as part of a charity sale), and partly because I read and liked John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash of 1929 a few years back. This is Galbraith’s final book before he passed away in 2006 – a 62-page essay that is essentially a summary of his previously stated views on economic life circa 2004. In essence, Galbraith maintains that proper capitalism has long been replaced by a market economy in which corporate bureaucracies rule with power that is not held in check by sufficient regulation, consumer sovereignty or even the actual owners, and that most of the tenets of what politicians, Wall Street and the business press routinely laud as free-market capitalism – the invisible hand, market forces, the clear division between the private and public sector, etc – amount to a revered mythology that is nowhere close to reality. Galbraith describes this as “innocent fraud” – with tongue planted firmly in cheek, as he notes the degree of “innocence" regarding certain practices varies.

Obviously, what you make of this will likely depend in part on your current political affiliation and the degree to which you subscribe to the very mythology Galbraith criticizes. Personally – and as someone who (1) knows very little about economics and (2) considers himself more or less a centrist – I think he’s not wrong, for the most part. Hindsight goes a long way here – Galbraith wrote this just after Enron happened but before the 2008 economic meltdown, the root cause of which seems to retroactively validate a lot of Galbraith’s criticisms.

Where the book goes wrong – and the reason I’m not giving it more stars – is that Galbraith’s whimsically staccato writing style makes it a lot harder to read than is arguably necessary, even for a Harvard intellectual. Also, Galbraith offers little to back up most of his observations – it’s as though he felt his own career, experience and reputation as an economist to be all the empirical evidence you need that he’s right. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong, necessarily – but if you’re going to declare “conventional wisdom” a fraud (innocent or otherwise), it’s usually advisable to provide evidence to back your case.


The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is third instalment of the Binti series, and the first thing I should say is that I’m impressed that overall story arc didn’t follow the path I expected. The original novella (which I loved) seemed like a set-up to follow Binti and her alien enemy-turned-friend Okwu as they studied far-out science at Oozma Uni. Instead, the series has focused on Binti’s struggle to understand her increasingly complicated identity, and how difficult it is to cling to cultural traditions whilst simultaneously trying to move beyond them – which is far more interesting.

The Night Masquerade takes place where Home left off, as Binti – transformed by her experience in the desert – rushes home to her family, who are in danger as the ancient war between the Earth-based Khoush and the Meduse (Okwu’s people) threatens to reignite, with Binti’s tribe (the Himba) caught in the crossfire.

The resulting story is both fascinating and somewhat frustrating – one key plot twist just seemed too obvious a thing for the characters to have overlooked, while another key plot twist was not only predictable but came off as a little contrived to me. Which might not count against it except that the first two books didn’t have that particular issue, so it’s a little disappointing in that regard. That said, warts and all, it’s still an exciting, page-turning finale to an excellent character-driven series.


The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novella was initially written as an audio book, then later released as a print/e-book, rather than the other way round. I read the e-book version, and on the one hand I can sort of tell it was initially written to be heard rather than read – the narrative skews towards dialogue over action and doesn’t spend a lot of time on description. On the other hand, Scalzi’s books almost always tend to be dialogue-driven, so I’m not sure I would have guessed it started life as an audio book if I hadn’t already known that.

Apart from the format experiment, this is also something of a departure for Scalzi as he tries his hand at urban fantasy/police procedural with a weird but interesting premise: people who are killed by other people – intentionally or otherwise – come back to life unharmed (or at least in the condition they were in a few hours before they were killed), although 999 times out 1,000 they stay dead. One eventual result of this new reality is the creation of an agency that employs ‘dispatchers’ – agents authorized by the govt to humanely kill critically injured or ill people in order to save them.

Scalzi explores this concept via Tony Valdez, a dispatcher roped into a police investigation when one of his fellow dispatchers goes missing. The mystery itself is interesting – can you get away with murder in a world where your victim won't stay dead? – but so is the background world and the societal consequences that result in such a world. Scalzi leaves a lot of potential ground uncovered and doesn’t dig too deeply – mainly due to the length and audio-format limitations, I presume – but he does manage to cover quite a bit of ground within those limitations, such as the ethics of dispatching and the return of duelling. In any case, it’s an entertaining and thought-provoking story, and it’s a world I hope Scalzi returns to one day, because there’s a lot to play with here.

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I shall return,

This is dF

Picking up the pace again. Isn’t that exciting?

Fierce: Women of the Bible and Their Stories of Violence, Mercy, Bravery, Wisdom, Sex, and Salvation by Alice Connor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those books where I was sold on the premise alone: an exploration of various females mentioned in the Bible (the famous and the not so famous) that not only puts them front and center in whichever narrative they’re a part of, but takes a closer look through a feminist filter and reveals them to be much tougher, resilient and important than traditional takes on these stories make them look. It’s all that – and it’s a lot more personal, passionate and often angrier than I imagined, as Connor is pretty fierce herself (to the point that this is easily the first Christian book I’ve read to date written by an ordained priest with lots of salty language). Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does sometimes distract from the stories she is trying to tell (or retell) and their theological message – at least if yr expecting a relatively straightforward Bible-study book, which this isn’t.

In any case, between Connor’s retellings, sweariness and feminist viewpoint, this book obviously isn’t for everyone – people of certain religious and/or political persuasions (and associated opinions about feminism and LGBT issues) probably wouldn’t make it past the first 20 pages. Personally, my two main problems with this book are (1) Connor tends to overdo it with the snarky humor and pop culture references for my taste, and (2) occasionally she pushes her luck by trying to shoehorn otherwise valid points where they don’t necessarily belong (the chapter on Asherah being a case in point). Both of these issues make it all too easy for even well-intentioned readers to misunderstand the overall point she’s trying to make. Starting an argument is great, but it’s pointless if people think you're making a completely different point from the one you're actually making. (Then again, it could just as easily be my problem, not hers, so, you know.)

That said, where the book really succeeds for me is bringing these women to life and humanizing their experience, which is (for me) an important tool for really understanding the deeper point of these stories (through which we understand God) and how they relate to us today. That in itself makes it worth reading – but as I say, it’s best to approach this with an open (and critical) mind, and a willingness to have your preconceptions challenged.

Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve become a fan of Ursula K Le Guin over the past few years, so I was keen to start on Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, which collects her first three SF novels of the Hainish cycle. This is the first – and it's also her debut novel. The premise: Rocannon is an ethnologist for the League of All Worlds surveying the various indigenous races of the planet Fomalhaut II. His team is killed and his ship destroyed when rebels who oppose the League set up a base on the unsurveyed south side of the planet. As the rebels now possess the only ansible (interstellar radio) on Fomalhaut II, Rocannon must find them so he can access the radio, warn the League and call for a rescue ship.

It sounds like a classic SF yarn, except that it reads more like a fantasy novel, due to the fact that the Angyar – the human-like aliens who aid Rocannon in his quest – are a primitive feudal society, with princes, castles, swordplay, giant flying cats (see book cover) and whatnot. There’s also a legend about a princess seeking a lost family jewel that kicks off the book. Most of the story covers Rocannon’s journey and the aliens he encounters along the way (many of them dangerous). It’s pretty good, but it does suffer in comparison to Le Guin’s later work in that it's a pretty basic adventure story. That said, it’s not dull, and even this early in her career Le Guin could deliver reasonably believable characters, particularly Rocannon. Also, credit for blurring the lines between the SF and fantasy genres instead of sticking to the rules.

Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read Tricia Sullivan twice before and was really knocked out, so I has keen to try this, even though the jacket blurb sounded a bit derivative – operative with no memory of her past chases a killer who occupies other people’s bodies. I should have known better – what Sullivan delivers here is an “angel” named Pearl with hyperdimensional wings working undercover (as a flight attendant) for a secret organization trying to make the world better through small acts of kindness. Then she meets Dr Sorle, the man responsible for hijacking her into our world, and all hell breaks loose. As does a pterosaur in a briefcase.

The resulting story is imaginative, surreal and just plain weird, with the narrative shifting to first, second and third person as required, whipping back and forth through time and hyperdimensional realities as Pearl tries to find out what happened to her and who/what she really is, and what Dr Sorle is up to – or at least the being occupying his body. Sullivan has an accessible, snappy, humorous writing style to keep things as grounded as they can be in a story this weird, but her ideas and concepts are so out there that it does take effort to keep up with her, and a few bits do seem underexplained. Also, I confess the parts with Alison the bad-ass Scottish veterinarian required somewhat more suspension of disbelief than the hyperdimensional physics – and yet Alison is such a likeable character that I didn’t mind giving her the required leeway. Occupy Me certainly isn’t for everyone, but personally I enjoyed this.

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life by James Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had several motivations for reading this: (1) my bride is also reading it for an assignment, so she’s the one who hipped me to it, (2) I’ve always been curious about the Jesuits, and (3) I just happen to follow the author on Twitter. In any case, this book is basically a summation of the practical spirituality taught by St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society Of Jesus (a.k.a. the Jesuit order), and how you can apply it to your own life. It’s also written for a mainstream audience, not just Jesuits, Catholics or Protestant Christians – in fact, according to Father Martin, you don’t have to be a Christian or even religious to understand and apply Ignatian spiritualty, and he intended to write it so that even non-believers could get something out of it.

That said, this isn’t a secular book by any stretch, so while it’s not preachy, non-believers will have to reconcile themselves with lots of talk about God and Jesus – if that’s a roadblock for you, then you're not going to get much out of this, although if nothing else you’ll learn a lot about St Ignatius and the Jesuits (and you’ll learn some good Jesuit jokes). I'd recommend it for that alone, but personally I got much more out of it in terms of spiritual guidance and development, so I’ll recommend it for that, too.

Maigret and the Headless Corpse: Inspector Maigret #47 by Georges Simenon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In which Inspector Maigret investigates the discovery of a man’s dismembered corpse in a canal. All pieces are recovered except the head, which makes identification tough. And the only lead (and a weak one at that) seems to be Madame Calas, an alcoholic who runs a nearby bistro whose husband is away on business. As is true of most of the Maigret novels I’ve read so far – but particularly the later ones in the series – the emphasis isn’t on the crime so much as various characters Maigret encounters, their psychological makeup and the situations they find themselves in. For Maigret, the real mystery isn’t whodunit but why – or rather, what makes the suspects tick, particularly Madame Calas, whose mannerisms don’t fit in the context of the case at all if she were the culprit, and yet Maigret can’t help thinking she’s involved somehow. As always, Simenon provides an entertaining read if you like yr detective stories laconic and ponderous as well as/rather than hard-boiled action-packed melodrama.

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Don't lose yr head,

This is dF

I am in Singapore, sitting on a street corner listening to “Freewill” by Rush in my headphones and trying not to play air drums to it.

When the song finishes, I get up to go back to my hotel. I pass a Jumbotron screen that is displaying Fox News. Sean Hannity is arguing with some female guest about something, but I don’t pay attention.

I take a shortcut down a side street, and when I re-emerge on the main road, I hear some kind of commotion. I look to see what’s going on and I see Hannity chasing the woman he’d been arguing with on TV. He is brandishing what looks like bright orange toy lightsabers –one in each hand – and swatting her across the back, shouting, “Insult me on MY show, will you, you liberal Commie bitch!!!”

One of the Fox News women (not sure which one, so we’ll say Laura Ingraham to keep it simple) is right behind him, apparently egging him on. They are all being chased by a stray dog who thinks they’re playing and wants Hannity to throw one of the lightsabers to play Fetch.

I get out my phone to take some pictures, because wouldn’t you? It’s hard to get a good focused picture, of course, because Hannity and the woman are running up and down the street. Also, Laura Ingraham is running interference, trying to block the lens and shouting “No pictures!” But by now a crowd has gathered and they’re all taking pics and video now.

Finally Hannity gives up, lets his guest go and tries to push his way through the crowd, presumably to get back to the studio and finish his show. The dog follows him, barking, still hoping Hannity will throw a lightsaber for him to chase. Hannity turns angrily and kicks the dog. The crowd boos him and starts to chase him down the street.

I don’t bother to follow them. I head back to my hotel and stop in the convenience store next to the lobby to buy some drinks and snacks. But it’s a small store and the line is very long.

When I fnally get back to my hotel room, I turn on the TV, open my laptop and get online, and I see that all of the pics and videos of the Hannity incident have gone viral, especially the dog-kicking scene.

Just about everyone at Fox goes on air to defend Hannity’s behavior, claiming that the lightsabers were inflatable, not plastic, so he wasn’t really hurting his guest when he was whacking her with them. They also blame the Liberal Media for making a bigger deal out of it than it is, and how it says a lot about liberal priorities that no one cared what Hannity was doing until he kicked the dog, which by the way is okay and unhurt. (Luckily this has been verified by independent news sources.)

And then I woke up.

Bonfire of the Hannities,

This is dF

The GOP has gone so far off the rails that George Will is urging conservatives to vote Democrat this November.

Which would be significant if not for the fact that George Will’s opinion doesn’t really count for anything in conservative circles anymore.

Why am I blogging about this?

Mainly because I have a soft spot for George Will. To be sure, I rarely agree with him on anything, but I do see him as one of the last of his breed – an intellectual political commentator with a journalistic approach, a well-read understanding of the issues, and a deep sense of classical party loyalty and a firm belief in what the party stands for (or at least should stand for). When I was growing up, Will was among that class of newspaper pundit who not only had a good grasp of the political issues of the day, but could put together a decent and logical argument for his opinions of them – complete with stats, studies and anecdotes to back up his point.

Again, that’s not to say he was right. But you knew where you stood with him, and you knew that he had at least put some thought into whatever point he was trying to make.

For me, I always felt his main weakness is that his worldview often seems to come more from reading about it rather than experiencing it (particularly when it comes to baseball). That comes across in his writing – typically for Will, his latest column reads like an A- answer to a essay question in a university class. If he was a liberal instead of a conservative he could contribute song lyrics to Bad Religion. Who else but Will would quote The Federalist papers and A Man For All Seasons in the same column, much less use words like “vitiate”?

But that's exactly why I doubt anyone in Trump’s MAGA base cares what George says. For one thing, many of them probably wouldn’t understand half of it. For another, the MAGA clan has openly and frequently ridiculed intellectual elitists for the sole crime of thinking they’re smarter than everyone else. The fact that Trump is POTUS (Electoral College weirdness and Vlad Putin’s cyber-troll action team notwithstanding) is strong evidence that the modern conservative movement prefers opinion leaders who eschew intellectual reasoning in favor of people who shout a lot, insult their opponents personally and blame liberals, feminists and ethnic minorities for all their problems.

Also, Will quit the GOP over Trump’s nomination. He also bad-mouthed Bill O’Reilly to his face. Both of which are virtual treason in Trumpland.

In other words, George Will is one of many classic GOP loyalists who have been left behind by refusing to compromise on principles. Indeed, that’s why he quit the GOP – it’s no longer the party he once supported. Will is from that classic school of post-Vietnam conservatism embodied by William F Buckley’s National Review (of which Will was editor for something like eight years) and the Reagan-era GOP that had a specific ideological vision of what conservative govt should be and could accomplish – but was also rooted in a spirit of bipartisan deal-based practicality necessary to a two-party system.

Thanks to the Dubya Bush era and the Tea Party movement – enabled by the bullhorns of Fox News and conservative talk radio (and eventually Twitter) – the current GOP now embodies almost none of those principles and has morphed into something completely different and horrible. The GOP is dead. Long live the Trump Party. They kept the brand, but it’s a completely different company now. Etc. 

Consequently, no one in the current party is going to listen to his plea to vote the GOP completely out of power in Congress. The truth is, the majority of Republicans like this version of the GOP. Also, as other people have mentioned before (and correctly), the GOP wasn’t exactly dragged unwillingly into Trump’s hate-fueled xenophobic universe of dumb vitriolic race-baiting conspiracy theory batshit. 

The bigger problem is this: convincing conservatives to vote against the Trump Party means convincing them to vote for Democrats. Any given poll shows that most Repubs would vote for Trump all over again even knowing what they know now because they believe Hillary would have been be far, far worse. So I don’t see any of these people taking a chance on a Demo – much less to punish a party they don’t think needs fixing.

Ironically, of course, this is one of those times I agree with Will – to a point. I do think that the only thing that can stop the GOP in its sycophantic tracks and trigger some kind of self-reassessment is having its collective ass handed to it in the mid-terms – badly. Ideally they should lose enough seats that not only make the Demos filibuster-proof but will also take Republicans a good 20 years to try and take back at least one Congressional house.

However, Will seems to think this would force a rethink of GOP leadership that will bring it back to its Reagan-era ideology. He sees a mid-term routing as shock therapy to save the patient.

Remember the scene in Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom when Indy is under the spell of Kali and Short Round snaps him out of it by burning him with a torch? Like that.

However, my personal diagnosis is that it’s too late for that. The GOP as we know it is gone, and it is not coming back. It’s now the Trump-Fox-Alt-White Party. A mid-term defeat will cause plenty of soul searching, for sure, but the result will be either doubling down or figuring out how to better package their message, not a return to classic Republicanism.

And it’s a moot point anyway, since – again – most people who consider themselves Republicans would much rather vote for this trash fire than for any Democrat.

Still, you can’t blame George for trying.

Will the circle be unbroken,

This is dF

We need to talk about DJ Trump and Jeff Bo Sessions and their zero tolerance immigration policy.

Because, damn.

1. The first thing to understand is that the legal situation and the process involved – and US immigration policy in general – is a lot more complicated than a lot of media reports make out. I recommend this Vox explainer and this NYT article for a reasonably detailed rundown of the nature and the history of the current policy.

The upshot: (1) This is an extension of a problem that’s been ongoing since at least the Bush II admin, (2) while there isn’t literally a policy instructing ICE to separate families at the border, there is a policy that treats all immigrants without papers as criminals, which is resulting in having their kids taken away (because you can’t keep yr kids with you in federal jail), and (3) the US govt isn’t set up to handle the logistics issues that this policy creates, which is a reason why they’re now looking at concentration camps tent cities. (More on that last point here.)

2. History aside, obviously it’s a monstrous policy for a couple of reasons: (1) obviously it's traumatic for the families, especially the children, and (2) it shows a distinct lack of empathy and humanity on the part of the Trump admin. They’re treating these people as (at best) statistics on a chart and (at worst) subhuman criminals who might as well be honorary members of MS-13 or whatever. It’s the kind of policy you'd expect from a guy who has been spewing rhetoric for the last few years about immigrants being terrorists, rapists, drug lords and animals.

3. Even if it’s just rhetoric to Trump, it’s practically gospel to his fan base who defend his policy as a law and order issue only – literally, if you happen to be Jeff Sessions, who can’t seem to keep a grin off his face when he talks about the admin’s current immigration crackdown. All I have to say about his Romans 13:1 crack has already been covered by Stephen Colbert. (Also, as others have pointed out, Romans 13:1 is irrelevant in a country that’s supposed to separate church and state.)

The whole law and order thing, for me, is mostly people trying to win an argument on a technicality – the law is the law, and if you don’t want to suffer the consequences, don’t break the law, what could be simpler? As if the “consequences” are justified no matter how extreme. All that says to me is these people see having yr kids taken away from you as just punishment for having the gall to take a shortcut in seeking a better life in the USA – and they’ve given no thought to what this actually involves doing to other human beings.

(I’ll add too that many people who deploy the “law and order” argument are also using it mainly because they do see immigrants as terrorists, rapists, drug lords and animals.)

4. For people whose fallback position is, “Look, like it or not, illegal immigration is a real problem and we need to fix how we deal with it," my response is this:

Yes, illegal immigration is a real problem (though not to the extremes that Trump Co claim), and the US needs to reform its policy to deal with it. The Big Question is how you deal with that problem, and the lengths (or in this case, depths) yr willing to go to “fix” it.

As it stands, our “fix” seems to require a certain amount of cruelty (see here, here and here) to carry out. And that means the people who carry it out – or support it – have to be okay with that level of cruelty. Whether cruelty is the intention or simply a consequence of zero-tolerance – or, even more cynically, an unfortunate but necessary political bargaining chip – it means these people think it’s okay to do this to illegal immigrants and their children. Trump can go on all he likes about having no choice because the law won’t let him keep families together – the prospect of separating them didn’t stop him from okaying the policy that is resulting in cruelty.

5. Also, regarding Trump’s claim that this is all the Democrats’ fault – that’s horseshit. What he’s saying is, “I wouldn’t have to do this if you’d give me an immigration reform bill that overturns the Flores Settlement, makes it harder to apply for asylum, allows indefinite detention and gives me my Wall™ money.”

Which is basically the same mentality as the average movie bad guy who takes people hostage and tells the hero, “Give me what I want and no one has to die – and if they do, it’s yr fault, not mine.”

It’s even more incredulous given that (1) the Democrats don’t control any branch of the govt, and (2) the current MO of the GOP is to slap together bills with no Demo input at all and force a vote (preferably in the middle of the night). And in any case, it’s insane to force Demos to vote for a bill they otherwise wouldn’t support simply to end Trump’s own cruel practice (which, by the way, it wouldn’t).

So, yeah – the situation is more complex than it looks, but regardless, Trump’s zero-tolerance policy is cruel political theater rooted in xenophobia and enabled by populist fear and racism that relies on denigrating the victims to sub-human status to justify it. It’s not just about the policy itself – it’s about the fact that too many people (from the Trump admin to its fan base and most if not all of the GOP) either don’t care about the consequences of that policy on real humans, or think that’s a small price to pay to achieve the fulfillment of their political ideology.

Theatre of cruelty,

This is dF

And while I was typing the last post, Samantha Bee is in trouble for calling Ivanka Trump the c-word. And naturally conservatives want TBS to fire her and cancel her show – allegedly in the name of fairness since Rosanne Barr was sacked by ABC for doing the same thing.

Also bloggable!

1. It’s not the same thing at all. Barr’s tweet was not only offensive, but also racist, which is bad enough on its own terms, and worse in the context of the times – racism is ascending in power with the aim of disenfranchising everyone who isn’t a white Christian male. Bee’s rant wasn’t racist or sexist, and didn’t contribute to Ivanka’s (or anyone’s) disenfranchisement in any way. It was just rude and offensive.

2. Assuming Bee keeps her job, it’s only a double standard if the “standard” being applied is civility and decorum. Which it’s not – we know this because (1) their favorite POTUS insults their political enemies almost daily and they love it, and (2) my Facebook/Twitter feeds are full of conservative memes about Obama being an ape, Michelle Obama being a man (and an ape), Chelsea Clinton being ugly, Rosie O’Donnell being fat, and libtards being stupid, little easily-offended snowflakes who can't take a joke.

So all this conservative handwringing about Samantha Bee is so much schadenfreude to me. They don't care about Bee’s use of the c-word – they only care who she said it about. If Bee had said it about Hillary Clinton, she’d be getting a White House invite by now.

(To be fair, too, I think a lot of liberals don’t really care about double standards either – I know plenty who loved what Bee said and think she has nothing to apologize for. Same old story – it’s truthful when I say it about yr side, and an offensive smear when you say it about my side, blah blah blah.)

4. All that aside, should Bee have said it? Probably not – partly because political discourse is toxic enough as it is, but mainly because it provided the perfect excuse for everyone to ignore the overall point Bee was trying to make regarding the insensitive obliviousness of Ivanka Trump posting a sweet photo of herself and her child when ICE is busy forcibly separating immigrant kids from their parents. Bee herself has said as much.
https://www.themarysue.com/samantha-bee-ivanka-trump-sorry-not-sorry/

5. Some sponsors are boycotting Full Frontal as a result – and, you know, fair is fair.

6. I’ve seen people claim that Trump demanding that TBS fire Bee is a clear First Amendment violation because it’s the government ordering a show off the air – which is something the 1A explicitly forbids.

Personally, I don’t agree with that evaluation (yet) because Trump doesn’t have any actual power to force TBS to cancel the show. It would only be a 1A violation if he actually succeeded in enforcing his demand with government power. For example, if he directly targets TBS with blackmail or an executive order, or has Bee or TBS’ head of programming arrested, then yes, that would be an egregious 1A violation.

If he uses the White House as a bully pulpit to actively encourage advertisers to boycott the show – or to encourage his fan base to boycott the advertisers – that’s a grey area, but I don’t know if it would pass muster in a constitutional court case.

Anyway, until any of that happens, it’s just more of Trump’s usual autocratic bluster.

To Bee or not to Bee,

This is dF

Which is not all that fast, but it’s been kind of a hectic month, see?

Fiddlehead by Cherie Priest

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the fifth and final volume in the Clockwork Century cycle, Priest’s alt-history steampunk Civil War saga (with zombies!), and it basically serves both as a standalone story and a vehicle to tie up all the loose ends from the previous books. Here, former CSA spy turned Pinkerton agent Maria Boyd is assigned to help former POTUS Abe Lincoln protect Gideon Bardsley, who has invented a computer that has calculated that the Civil War (which has been going on for over 17 years) ends well for neither side due to an ever greater threat – and someone is trying to kill him to keep this information secret. Meanwhile, arms heiress Katherine Haymes is trying to convince President Ulysses S Grant that she has developed a superweapon that can end the war once and for all – or will it?

I should mention I haven't read the whole series – I loved the first one, Boneshaker, but I felt let down by the follow-up Dreadnought, so I wasn’t in a hurry to read the rest. Fiddlehead is somewhat better, but Priest has a tendency to gum up dialog and action sequences with exposition and/or internal ponderings, and the dialog itself can get too clever (particularly a cat-and-mouse scene between Grant and Haymes as he tries to figure out what her game is). And as antagonists go, Haymes is just too one-dimensional for my taste. The actual storyline is entertaining adventure stuff, but the pacing is really uneven. For fans of the series it’s a decent ending, but for me, I don’t think I’ll try reading the episodes I’ve missed.


Journey Into Fear by Eric Ambler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read Eric Ambler twice before, and was entertained both times. This one follows the same basic template – average middle-class mild-mannered Englishman suddenly finds himself up to his neck in spy-thriller shenanigans and completely out of his depth as he struggles to comprehend his situation and what to do about it. In this case, armaments manufacturing engineer Mr Graham – in Istanbul circa 1940 to help consult the Turkish military on naval guns – is shocked to discover someone is trying to kill him. The Turkish secret police – who need him alive to compete his work – try to get him back to England safely via a steamer ship, but Graham soon discovers that he is anything but safe as some of his fellow passengers may not be who they seem to be.

It’s classic Ambler – Graham swerves between incredulous indignation at the very idea that anyone would want to kill him (where his biggest fear is looking foolish for believing such nonsense) to paranoia (as he tries to figure out who he can trust) and desperation (as his well thought out, logical plans keep falling apart because he really has no idea what he’s doing). In other words, he’s no James Bond or John McClane – he’s a normal person placed in a terrifying position. The twists aren’t necessarily surprising, but they’re entertaining as hell. Of the Ambler novels I’ve read so far, this is the best of the bunch.


Faerie Apocalypse by Jason Franks

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ll be honest – I’ve never been a fan of the faerie genre as a whole, although there are a few exceptions (Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint come to mind). And I might not have tried this, except that (1) Franks’ first novel Bloody Waters was so good, and (2) this ain’t yr average fairy story. In fact, as the title implies, the whole point of the book is to set up the usual tropes of faerie fiction – the quests, the royalty, the magi, the tricksters, the endless walking, and mortal humans finding themselves in this magical alt-reality – and take an Uzi to them. Literally, in at least one case. It’s not a parody so much as an excuse to break every genre rule there is just to see what happens.

The story follows four different mortals (most of them unnamed) who enter the Lands Of The Realm for various reasons, and wreak havoc upon it, intentionally or otherwise. I won’t say any more because part of the appeal here is seeing where Franks goes with this – and it’s not where you might think. The chief criticism I have is the lack of a sympathetic main character – not a hero, which would defeat the purpose of the story, but someone who could at least offset the senselessly destructive nature of everyone else. The faerie playwright Nentril Revallo is the most likeable character here for my money, and while he plays a key role in the story, he’s still a minor character. Overall it’s rather bleak and nihilistic for my taste … and yet it has to be for the story to work, and I do appreciate what Franks is ultimately shooting for here. So if yr interested in seeing someone take a chainsaw to the whole faerie-fiction paradigm, this may be just the thing.

View all my reviews

Fractured fairy tales,

This is dF

When I first saw the Twitters light up about the “Intellectual Dark Web”, I thought they were talking about the “dark net” – the fabled part of the internet where hackers and child pornographers and 409 scammers and the like all hang out. (Not that the internet works that way, but why ruin a good metaphor?)

Turns out it’s not that. It’s a collective of pundits whose main mission in life appears to be coming up with extreme ways to make liberals hopping mad by proposing non-PC ideas and opinions: Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro, Milo Whasisname, etc and so on. Whether they really believe their own schtick or not, they’re basically “professional controversialists” (as The Guardian puts it) who make a living promoting conservative/libertarian views about race, gender, religion and other sensitive topics that appear practically designed to offend liberals.

Which is nothing new, of course. What is new is that they’ve somehow united under this “Intellectual Dark Web” concept, which is basically: intellectuals who have been oppressed and silenced by liberals and their mainstream media for the crime of saying non-PC things.

And, you know. LOL?

I don’t take them seriously, of course, for a couple of reasons:

1. As mentioned above, these people are being intentionally provocative. Or at the very least they know what they’re saying is provocative, and they seem to thrive on it. So does their fanbase, which is considerable. Which brings us to:

2. For people who have been “oppressed” and “silenced” by the liberal mainstream whatever, they sure seem to have a huge audience.

So to me, this whole IDW thing looks like market positioning where one of the selling points is “the liberals are out to silence us all!” It’s an incorporation of the Bill O’Reilly Free Speech Defense, in which criticism of speech is exactly the same as denying yr right to free speech.

It’s also from the same branch as this whole conservative victim mentality that everyone hates them, mocks them and insults them for simply speaking their mind – which happens to involve hating, mocking and insulting everyone who isn’t a Trump fan with the knowledge that every branch of govt will pretty much back them up, which I already covered here.

The latest version of this: simply wearing a MAGA hat is like being openly gay in 1950. Which just goes to show how much MAGA hat wearers know about the LGBT experience in America all the way up to (checks notes) now.

Anyway. Ha ha. No.

The “Intellectual Dark Web” is a marketing stunt and nothing more. Not a single one of these people are being denied the right to say what they want, and none of them are having trouble finding an audience to hear what they have to say, or making a living by saying it.

As for the PC liberals shouting at them for saying provocative and offensive things … well, look. When you say provocative and offensive things, they tend to provoke and offend people. It kind of goes with the territory. You can’t reasonably expect provoked and offended people to not call you on that. Because would you?

I know some IDWs say: “Of course I want a response, but I want them to debate my idea intellectually, not scream at me that I’m evil.”

Which is fair. On the other hand, there’s not a lot to debate about when when yr intellectual proposition is that women should be hanged for having abortions, or that black people chose slavery and are intellectually inferior, or that the Holocaust didn’t happen (or wasn’t as bad as the Jews make out), or that liberals should literally be arrested and tried for treason, or the way to deal with incel violence is to redistribute sex so these guys can get laid, etc and so on.

To be clear, I do think one of the problems with PC culture is that too often it’s a kneejerk response with no debate at all. I still believe that if yr against racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, you need to be prepared to articulate why, because there will always be people who don’t understand what racism is and why it’s a bad thing – and if they’re being courted by the IDW or other demagogues, it’s good to be able to effectively counter their arguments. 

Then again, it’s admittedly a pointless exercise, since the IDW has a whole alt-reality information bubble to fall back on to make its case – things that are not true but they choose to believe are true. You can’t effectively debate someone when you can’t even agree on the basic sociopolitical reality in which you live. So why waste the energy? 

I’m not going to debate you, Jerry,

This is dF