Month: September 2011
Denial of Agency and Being Off Base
Recently I participated in a brief exchange on Shelfari that annoyed me. On a science fiction thread a commenter said he (or she) had recently read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and had enjoyed it even though the fictional conceit was off base. I asked why and the response was “His worldview is off-base because it is humanistic – it excludes God.”
That annoyed me. Actually, it pissed me off. The exchange ran a little while and then I suggested it be moved or abandoned. The admin allowed that it was a troublesome thread and it would be better to just stop it. …
It’s Not About Sex
Rick Santorum answered a question put to him by a serving gay soldier about what he would as president do with the new policy and Santorum did not go off-script. But he did make two mistakes that seem to be endemic in this kind of thing.
Here’s the video:
Firstly, he makes it sound like gays have been asking for “special privileges” in this. Why is this so difficult for people to understand? They have not been asking for special privileges, they have been asking for the same privileges. Of course, there’s a secondary problem in even that—we aren’t talking about privileges, but rights, and I hate it when politicians so smoothly degrade rights into privileges for the purposes of making points with constituents.…
Time For A New Photograph
Long time ago, when I was but a teen, maybe right on the cusp, just getting interested in photography, my father and I sat up one evening to watch a PBS thing about Ansel Adams. To this day I cannot find that film—it included a project of his photographing a Hispanic family living on a scrub farm, very rural, lots of kids. He was working with both 4X5 and a Hasselblad. It was a detailed film, taking the viewer through the whole process, from shutter-click to processing, to printing. It had a substantial impact on me and I would like to find that film again, but I’ve even been to the Ansel Adams Museum in San Fransisco and they profess not to know what I’m talking about. …
The Final Solution
No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.
Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis. He was convicted of killing a cop. There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony. The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.
I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty. You can’t take it back.
Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973. …
Bouchercon 2011
So I have now attended a Bouchercon.
I’ve attended so many SF conventions that they’ve become, if not normal, at least comfortable.  I pretty much know what to expect. Bouchercon, while in many ways similar to an SF convention, is different enough that I felt like a newbie and a bit like an outsider. I don’t know the players, I don’t know all the rules, and I didn’t know what to expect.
There were no costumes, no gamers, no room parties (at least not open room parties), no art show, and an absence of what I like to think of secondary and tertiary effluvia in the dealers room—that is, tables of jewelry and fake weapons and action figures and the like. …