Another in my series of posts on SFF conventions’ codes of conduct. This time I’m writing about the one for Arisia 2026. Arisia is held in Boston or Cambridge in January each year. I haven’t attended Arisia in years, but I found the code of conduct surprisingly reasonable. However, there’s another requirement which potential attendees could find burdensome.
(more…)
On several occasions I’ve mentioned that I don’t support the Salvation Army because it holds that I’m going to Hell, along with all other non-Christians, while trying to look like a secular charity. This doesn’t seem to bother many people, though. Far more people blast it for being allegedly anti-LGBTQ. They pay no attention to the shift in the church’s tone; to them it’s now and forever hostile to gays.
While I don’t like the Salvation Army, I also don’t like unjust accusations. On its website, the page titled The LGBTQ Community and the Salvation Army, the US organization says it serves the LGBTQ community, it will provide shelter to transgender people, and it does not consider sexual orientation or gender identity in its hiring practices.
(more…)
The first year of the second Trump administration isn’t over, and it’s already sunk into premeditated murder and death threats against members of Congress. If the USA were at all sane, Trump would long since have been impeached, convicted, and kicked out of the White House. Where we’ll be by the 2028 election is depressing to think about.
The US government has conducted extrajudicial killings of the crews of several boats in the name of stopping the drug trade, and recent disclosures show that survivors were slaughtered without cause on orders by Pete Hegseth:
(more…)
Social media can be hugely deceptive in judging how popular ideas are. One side can be noisy while the people who disagree feel too intimidated to dissent. An example is the self-declared “Nazi punchers.” They’re self-righteous in their advocacy of violence, and they like to distort a footnote of Karl Popper’s into a “paradox of tolerance” that says they must be intolerant to be tolerant. But we don’t routinely see news reports of assaults of this kind, which is a clue that they’re more noise than action or few in numbers. Probably both.
(more…)
Authoritarian thinking of the right and left often relies on the assumption that “your gain is my loss.” The supporters of ICE think immigrants are taking jobs away from them. If enough people are deported, they think, there will be fewer people competing for the same jobs. The left’s version is that there’s a fixed amount of wealth to go around, and if the people who make the most are taxed heavily, that’s more money for everyone else with no downside.
These are both cases of zero-sum thinking. They assume that the amount of a resource, such as jobs or spending power, is a given and that the only question is who will get it. They think that taking resources away from others means more for them. In some cases, there’s a factual underpinning to that kind of thinking. The conservation laws of physics say we can’t create matter or energy out of nothing. The amount of air and water in the world is pretty much fixed. But most of the things we rely on are the products of human effort. Many didn’t exist till someone invented them.
(more…)
I’ve registered as an attending member for the 2027 Worldcon in Montreal. Even though it’s in another country, it’s an easy day’s drive from my home. I hope that crossing the border won’t be too dangerous to consider by then, but today I’m here to talk about its code of conduct. There have been better ones and worse ones. I have concerns, but they weren’t enough to scare me out of registering. Let’s take a look, as I have with other conventions.
(more…)
Go to almost any business for a product or service, and you can expect to be told what it will cost you, or at least to get a plausible estimate. The big exception is medicine. You’re never told what anything will cost. If you press your provider, the best you’ll get is a spread of a couple of orders of magnitude. People sometimes get hit with huge charges that they weren’t prepared for.
I recently experienced a bit of this. My medical provider billed me for $630 for a routine blood test as part of an annual physical. This came as a complete surprise. I called the billing department, and the man who took my call said that I should have been billed only for the copay, with insurance covering the rest. He filed an inquiry on it, which he said might take a couple of weeks to process. This left a big question open: Do blood tests by my provider routinely cost over $600? That’s a lot, regardless of whether I’m paying for it or Medicare is. Since he was working for billing, he wasn’t able to answer that question.
(more…)
In 2024, there were some disturbing actions in science fiction/fantasy fandom against people who are from Israel or support its existence. I’ve blogged about some of them before. Vancouver Comics Arts Festival banned an artist for being Israeli. A statement by the convention berated the earlier organizers for their “ignorance” in inviting someone who had served in Israel’s armed forces in the early 2000s. The CRIT awards put a blanket exclusion on nominating anyone who supports Zionism (i.e., supports the existence of a Jewish state). Both sets of bigots got slapped down and are now being less public, but they’ve shown that the problem exists in fandom.
(more…)
Judicial Watch is pouring out the paper junk mail. I keep getting stuff from them, for reasons I don’t know. Their consistent features are deception and petulance. One of their mailings tried to look like a US census form. They demanded that I return it if I wasn’t interested, then sent a follow-up speculating on why I hadn’t.
Given how dishonest their mailings are, I wasn’t particularly worried when I got an envelope from them labelled “LEGAL NOTICE,” but I wondered what trick they were pulling. The mailing includes a “litigation support form” to return with a “yes” sticker placed on this statement: “I fully support the Litigation Efforts of Judicial Watch to EXPOSE and LEGALLY CHALLENGE the outrageous abuse of my tax dollars and to demand in a court of law that DC bureaucrats cut wasteful and fraudulent spending on evil, Marxist, racist and woke programs.” The mailing says on the inside that the form must be returned “Within the Next 72 Hours.”
(more…)
The federal government has proved to be a single point of failure for many people. They rely, mostly for reasons that aren’t their fault, on federal assistance for daily needs. With the federal shutdown, it may be shut off. Was this properly the job of the federal government in the first place? No, helping people is best done locally and voluntarily. With the Democrats and Republicans fighting it out, it has to come back to that. Thanks to the effort of many people, it is.
There are many local assistance programs which help out people who need it, and they’ve just become a lot more important. Check who’s doing it in your neighborhood, and decide what level of help you can reasonably give. I favor the New Hampshire Food Bank. It’s affiliated with Catholic Charities but keeps religion separate from its mission (unlike the Salvation Army, which I don’t recommend). Many organizations are running food drives, collecting nonperishable donations. Giving money is better, since it lets them buy in bulk, but many people like the feeling of giving stuff that someone else can eat.
Libertarians and classical liberals should be especially ready to do this. We know that the initiative of individuals is the best defense against suffocating and unreliable governmental direction of everything. By providing assistance where it’s really needed, by your own choice, you support freedom.