Commentary

Robert J. Sawyer grovels to China

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged China fandom science fiction on by

Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer has been the least controversial of the Chengdu Worldcon’s three Guests of Honor. He’s Canadian and isn’t under the same pressures or motivations as Chinese author Cixin Liu and Russian Sergei Lukianenko. However, he’s shown that just a guest spot and airfare are enough to buy off any principles he might have had.

I’m not expecting him to denounce the treatment of the Uyghurs or censorship in Hong Kong while he’s there. That would be stupid. But he didn’t have to say the things he said.
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Making every word a minefield

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged California language on by

A few months ago, an office at the University of Southern California declared that the word “field” is racist. They “explained” this absurdity as follows:

This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the memo reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”

That is, many slaves have worked in fields, therefore the word “field” is racist. But as Metatron has pointed out on YouTube, slaves have been made to work in houses, so the word “house” must be racist by the same standard. Self-appointed or university-appointed arbiters of language have similarly declared other words, such as “master,” racist. The Firefox browser, which I’m using to write this, now has a “primary password,” “formerly known as master password.”
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Words derived from authors

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged language usage on by

This post is inspired by an online discussion of how the word “Orwellian” should be used. One person argued it should refer only to authoritarian dictatorships. I disagreed. That got me thinking of other words based on authors’ names, such as “Kafkaesque,” “Machiavellian,” and “Dickensian.” How broadly or narrowly should we use those words? Is there any basis for agreement?

The subject here is words that are reminiscent of something in the author’s work. Adjectives that denote the author’s ideas directly, such as “Jeffersonian,” “Marxist,” and “Freudian” are easier to deal with; they should refer to something the author has said, or they’re being used incorrectly. But words that indicate reminiscences are trickier. Any writer worth becoming an adjective writes about more than one thing and approaches them from more than one angle.
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A look into the cancel culture mind 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ethics Internet on by

We’ve all run into the vicious nastiness which pervades the Internet. If you make public posts, there’s a good chance you’ve been its target, if only from occasional potshots. Sometimes it’s seriously painful. Anyone who’s had a loved one die of COVID needs to think carefully before mentioning the fact publicly.

An Atlantic article by Kaitlin Tiffany, “How Telling People to Die Became Normal”, looks at the kind of people who try to increase other people’s pain. Referring to a Facebook group dedicated to this kind of malice, she writes:
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Hachette v. Internet Archive

This entry was posted in Commentary Publishing and tagged books copyright law libraries preservation on by

The legal battle over the Internet Archive’s Open Library has drawn passionate responses from people involved in the creation, publication, and distribution of books. As I’m writing this, the court of the Southern District of New York has ruled that putting unauthorized digitized versions of copyrighted books on the open Internet is a violation of copyright, and the Internet Archive is appealing the decision.

Publishers Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins argued that distributing books through the Open Library violated their copyrights. The Internet Archive has declared its appeal is “a necessary fight if we want library collections to survive in the digital age.” SFWA has stated that the Open Library “is not library lending, but direct infringement of authors’ copyrights.” The debate pits the rights of authors and publishers against the aims of preservation.
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China Worldcon is selling “tickets” and merchandising mascot

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged China conventions science fiction on by

There isn’t much news I can find about the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, which is the site of next month’s Worldcon. The Zaha Hadid Architects website describes it as “under construction” and shows only drawings of it. However, my search turned up information on how memberships and related merchandise are being sold. I refer you to this article by Steve Davidson on the Amazing Stories website. It links to a File 770 article which I’d overlooked.

The news is that the Chengdu Worldcon is selling “tickets” through what is described as “a Ticketmaster-style service.” As Davidson notes, fan-run conventions don’t sell tickets; they sell memberships. The difference is that members have the opportunity to participate in large and small ways. Most aren’t listed on the program, but they can help with setup and breakdown, ask questions at panels, talk with pros at kaffeeklatsches, join discussions in the con suite, sing in the filksings, etc. That’s different from conventions such as the big comic cons, where the emphasis is more on hearing speakers in large halls, buying merchandise, getting photos and autographs, and so on. Both are legitimate activities, but trying to mix the models always turns out badly.
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What is a “conspiracy theory”?

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged language usage vocabulary writing on by

A conspiracy theory, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.” Alternatively, it’s “a theory asserting that a secret of great importance is being kept from the public”; the idea presumably is that insiders have conspired to keep the truth hidden.

Dictionary.com takes a similar approach: “a theory that rejects the standard explanation for an event and instead credits a covert group or organization with carrying out a secret plot” or “a belief that a particular unexplained event was caused by such a covert group.” In all these cases, a conspiracy theory requires a conspiracy to make something happen or to keep something hidden. The cabal has to be hidden and the conspirators powerful; an accusation that some people got together to plan a crime doesn’t count as a conspiracy theory unless the perpetrators are extremely rich or powerful.
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A word that will live in infamy

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged usage vocabulary on by

Today’s post on word misuse is a tricky one to write. The word is “infamous,” and the difficulty is that I can’t tell what people even mean when they misuse it. Merriam-Webster’s main definition is “having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil.” The additional definitions are closely related: “causing or bringing infamy” and “convicted of an offense bringing infamy.” If you call a person infamous, you’re saying that person is rotten, vile, and contemptible. If you call an act infamous, you’re condemning it.

People seem to toss the word around just to add emphasis, with no specific meaning. I just saw a link on YouTube to a short referring to a statement attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” as “infamous.” I suppose someone might condemn Oppenheimer for saying that, though I don’t know why, but the video doesn’t do that.
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Kafka’s Mastodon

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship Internet mastodon on by

I run the Filk News account on Mastodon, providing information about concerts, filksings, and other items of interest for the filk music community. Normally I don’t write much about filk here, but the story has relevance to anyone who uses Mastodon to distribute or gather information or just to connect with friends.

The first part of the story is in my earlier post, “The petty tyrants of Mastodon.” You may want to read it first if you haven’t already. Since then I’ve gotten no satisfaction from indieweb.social and found it necessary to move Filk News to liberal.city, which I think will be a better home for it. (Another post which I made, “The impending strangulation of Mastodon,” reflected a user error on my part, so I’ve removed it from public view.)

As I said in “Petty Tyrants,” my personal account is on Liberdon, which is included on a “Tier 0 Blocklist”. It simply lists domains to block without giving reasons. When I noticed trouble interacting with Indieweb from Liberdon, I reported the issue to Indieweb’s admin, Tim Chambers. He said he had changed Liberdon’s status from “blocked” to the less restrictive “silenced” while looking into the issue.
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Another confusing term: “Critical Race Theory” 1

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Since I’ve done several pieces on terms that get misused or should be avoided, I’d like to look at one of the most controversial of all: “Critical Race Theory” or CRT. Its meaning in political activism is different from what it means in academic circles, and I’m not convinced either one is very self-consistent. I did a Web search for a piece that discussed the theory without the popular controversies, but search engines don’t make them easy to find. Many of the articles I found didn’t look trustworthy. I wrote a whole post on an article that I didn’t find very satisfactory and scheduled it for posting; then I found an entry in dictionary.com which is far better. So I’m dumping most of what I wrote before and starting over.

The article notes: “Critical Race Theory is a complex body of thought that encompasses multiple disciplines, and its concepts and conclusions are interpreted in different ways. Even the words in its name are subject to debate as to what they mean or imply in the term itself or in general.” That says you won’t find one characterization everyone agrees on, even outside the fierce political controversies.
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