Commentary

Auburn and Troy, NH: ICE hazard, seek alternate routes   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ICE liberty New Hampshire on by

The towns of Auburn and Troy, New Hampshire, have set up “task force agreements” with ICE. According to the Boston Globe, they let the local police ” interrogate people suspected of being present in the country illegally and arrest those accused of violating immigration laws.” The ICE standard of “suspicion” includes looking foreign or speaking with a foreign accent. Accusation (by whom?) is an abnormally low bar for arrest; probable cause is normally required. The Troy police have made at least a dozen arrests for ICE. The towns of Colebrook and Carroll, in the northern part of the state, also have entered agreements with ICE, as have the New Hampshire State Police.
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Accentuating the positive when opposing ICE

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged Avelo ICE news on by

Recently Avelo Airlines announced it would no longer provide ICE with flights to transport abductees. CEO Andrew Levy wrote: “We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy. … The program provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.” Avelo didn’t admit that negative publicity motivated its decision, but businesses never like to say such things.
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Life continues

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged philosophy on by

The first quarter of the 21st century has ended. Statistically, I’m unlikely to see the end of the second quarter. This makes me think about the end of my life. As far as I know, I don’t have any conditions that will kill me in the near term, but I’ve probably got just a couple of decades left at most. How should I look at the unpleasant topic of death?

“When I die, the world ends.” That’s one way to think about it: that nothing matters after you’re dead. It’s bleak but tidy. However, people make out wills, think about how the people they love will get along, and so forth. We think about the future beyond our lifetimes. Science fiction writers and fans think about what the world will be like centuries or even eons in the future and hope it will be a good one. People risk their lives to promote a cause. What happens after we’re dead matters to us.
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It’s Trump or America

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged law liberty Trump on by

As 2025 comes to an end, we can review the wreckage of freedom under Donald Trump. At this point it’s clear: Support for Trump is enmity toward America. This isn’t a case of a president being terrible as usual; it’s an existential threat to what the United States stands for.

Let’s make a list, in the style of the Declaration of Independence, of the outrages he has committed.
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News sites yield to Trump 1

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Donald Trump claimed: “Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” In fact, he has no power to pardon Tina Peters, since she was convicted under state law. His claim is an illegal usurpation of power.

The news media have a long tradition of yielding to sitting presidents, and they’re doing it again.
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The Arisia code of conduct 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged fandom Massachusetts on by

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.
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Fact-free mob thinking

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology religion SanityProject on by

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.
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The American murderocracy

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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:
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Answering the “Nazi-punchers” 2

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged fandom filk liberty writing on by

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.
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The zero-sum fallacy 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged SanityProject on by

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.
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