Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

National Pathos

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

This will be a short post.  Just a comment or two on the recent national scandal concerning college athletics.  The Penn State incident, resulting in a firing, death threats, a riot, and another investigation has many people scampering about wondering “how could this happen?” and “what do we do now?”

Among the questions being asked, the most relevant is “Why did no one report this?”  There were witnesses, at least one has stated sorrow at not having “done more” and a famous and otherwise well-loved coach has been dismissed as a result of inaction.

Yet the riot that occurred was not about the rapes of minors,  but over the firing of that coach. …

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Harassment

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Herman Cain is having a problem, and it won’t get any better by telling reporters that he won’t discuss it.

I don’t want to get into a big analytical thing about sexual politics here, but from the descriptions so far of what Cain did, he made an assumption that I think is all too common among men of a certain mindset.  Cain apparently made inappropriate comments to women in the context of a working situation.  I have no doubt he shrugged it off and forgot about it until it came back to bite him and probably wondered what the big deal was all through the negotiations of settlements. …

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A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Actually, just one.  I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction.  I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist.  Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it.  I don’t do that.”)  A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work. …

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Diagnostic Condemnation

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

The pundits on the Right are agreed—the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t know what they’re saying.

“They don’t have an alternative. They aren’t even sure what it is they’re protesting.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing this kind of counteroffensive nonargument since I was old enough to understand politics.  What it boils down to is this:

“My car won’t start.”

“Do you know what the trouble is?”

“I turn the key and the motor just turns over and over but it won’t catch and run.”

“You don’t seem to have any understanding what the problem is. Come back when you know what’s wrong, otherwise I can’t fix it for you.”…

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An Age of Wonder and Annoyance

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

I have two things to talk about that are related by the slenderest of threads. Bear with me.

First I’d like to say something about how marvelous is the age in which we live, at least from the perspective of someone who has now lived in a couple of “ages” since arriving on this planet in 1954.

A short while ago I had lunch. While having lunch I like to watch something, so I popped the DVD of The Right Stuff   into my player and settled back to my roast beef and movie.  While watching, it occurred to me how blase I’ve  become at this technology.…

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What’s UnAmerican About That?

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Herman Cain is the latest in a long line of political mouths calling a populist movement UnAmerican.  He says Occupy Wall Street is an assault on capitalism and that capitalism and the free market system are what have made America what it is.

Can’t argue with that, but his intended meaning is other than reality.

Setting that aside for a moment, though, it’s his statement that protests in the street are UnAmerican that I take greatest issue with.  I’ve been hearing that from more or less conservative people since I was old enough to be aware of political issues.  During the Vietnam era, the antiwar movement gained the hatred of Middle America not because they were wrong but because they were unruly, in the street, loud, and confrontational. …

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Steve Jobs: A Quality of Expectation

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

I do not own an Apple computer.  I do all my work on PCs because, well, it worked out that way.

I had an Apple.  First-generation MacIntosh, to be precise.  It didn’t last.

My partner, Donna, got interested in computers back in the early and mid-80s.  When I say “interested” I mean on the level of “hm, that looks cool, I wonder what it would be like to…”  and not on the level of “that way lies the future, we gotta have one!”  Being somewhat dense when it came to reading her enthusiasms (and separating hers from my own), by various strange avenues, she ended up getting a MacIntosh for Christmas. …

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Controversy Bullies

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

We thrive on controversy.  Say something in this country, make a statement, be declarative, and someone will get in your face and tell you you’re wrong and suddenly there’s an audience.  People choose sides, there’s shouting.  We should license controversy vendors who appear quickly to sell tickets, popcorn, and soft drinks of choice when this happens.

For a long time now there’s been a watchdog group with a website and an agenda to keep track of fraud committed against writers.  You would think this would be a noncontroversial, no-brainer—writers work on margin, are underpaid usually, and can’t afford attorneys to look out for their interests. …

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It’s Not About Sex

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

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.…

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