Commentary

Oligarchy: The polite way to say “conspiracy”

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

An oligarchy is a government run by a small number of people. If a country is an oligarchy, it’s not a democracy. It might have the appearance of democracy, with elections for show, but the ruling insiders call all the shots. Some countries fit this description. Most would say that the United States doesn’t, and until recently claiming it is would have fallen under crazy conspiracy theories.

It’s getting more popular, though, to claim the USA is an oligarchy. An article in The Nation, not usually considered a fringe publication, is titled “It’s Official: America Is an Oligarchy.” Its “evidence” is that some people are very rich. Today I saw a post by Robert Reich casually taking it for granted that we’re living in an oligarchy, and a search turned up an article by him titled “How America’s oligarchy has paved the road to fascism (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 7)”. He makes it clear he understands what the word means, and he claims that the current American oligarchy emerged around 1980.
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Yet another Hugo Award scandal

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

Someone tried to buy a Hugo Award by buying a bunch of Glasgow Worldcon memberships and having them vote. Fortunately, the attempt was brain-dead stupid and the Hugo administration team caught it. Details are on File 770.

The stupidity consisted of using obviously fake names for the fake members. “These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.” 377 votes out of 3,813 were disqualified. The nominee that was being pushed did not win, and the Glasgow committee says there’s no reason to believe that the nominee was responsible for the campaign.
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Bobo the clown

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

Harvard University has long been a center of controversy. Often it’s an embarrassment to the university. But the Dean of Social Science there, somebody called Lawrence D. Bobo, has come up with a brilliant solution: Make the faculty shut up. Bobo’s babble just has to be read to be believed:

Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.

A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.

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An update on the Glasgow Worldcon code of conduct 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged convention conventions fandom science fiction on by

In an earlier post, I discussed the Code of Conduct of the Glasgow Worldcon. There have evidently been some changes since I wrote the article, perhaps in response to criticisms. My post quoted and criticized the following statement in the code: “In particular, exhibitors should not openly display sexualized images, activities, or other material, although this content may be kept out of sight and offered based on a customer’s inquiry, in keeping with the Indecent Display (Controls) Act 1981. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.”

That text isn’t currently present. Instead, there is this:
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Buffalo NASFiC code of conduct 1

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Continuing my irregular series on convention Codes of Conduct, here’s one on the North American Science Fiction Convention, coming up this month in Buffalo. Compared to some others, the problems of the NASFiC code of conduct are minor. There’s nothing like “Don’t say anything negative about anybody” or “Don’t offend anybody.”

BUFFALO in all caps means the convention, not the city.
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Bigots set rules for CRIT awards

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Not being an active gamer, I hadn’t heard about the CRIT awards before today and don’t know if they’re of any importance or just a fringe group of nuts. But they’re in the periphery of SF fandom, and I’ve made a specialty of analyzing Codes of Conduct. CRIT has the worst one I’ve seen yet.

They’re described as “an awards group dedicated to recognizing talented creators in the Tabletop Gaming space.” They were going to have an award ceremony at GenCon, a major gaming convention. They have pulled out as a result of widespread outrage at their code of conduct.
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Surgeon General wants compulsory warnings on the Web 1

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

Threats to freedom on the Internet keep popping up. The latest outrage is a proposal by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to compel social media websites to deliver a warning of “potential mental health harms.” He doesn’t claim that social media have been scientifically shown to damage mental health; rather he says “social media has not been proved safe.”

What would it take to “prove” them safe? When the burden of proof is shifted to the negative, people can make unlimited claims of possible harm, and the defenders must somehow show these arbitrary assertions are false. Murthy has even cited lack of evidence as a cause for panic.

He has asserted that the situation is an “emergency.” In other words, he wants Congress to rush the decree through without debate.

Compulsory speech is, except in limited cases, a violation of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech has to include the freedom not to speak. Americans may not be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag or to recite a prayer. Forcing website owners to say “We haven’t proven our site won’t harm your mental health” is an outrage.
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Bigotry at Vancouver Comics Arts Festival

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Canada conventions ethics fandom on by

A few weeks ago I mentioned USC’s cancelling a valedictorian’s speech because of unspecified threats. In that case, the speaker was seen as pro-Palestinian. The heckler’s veto cuts both ways. It’s been in fannish news that the Vancouver Comics Arts Festival banned artist Miriam Libicki because of unspecified dangers her presence would create. The issue was that she was Israeli and had been in the IDF in the early 2000s, long before the events kicked off by the October 7 massacre.

The resulting reaction from the fan community has thrown the convention leadership into chaos. The people chiefly responsible for the bigoted decision have left the organization, which is good. What’s left of the board has issued an apology, a confession of cowardice. It says in part:

For background, the decision to ban this individual in our previous statement stemmed from two separate incidents on the VanCAF floor that took place during our 2022 and 2024 festivals. Neither incident was instigated by the individual referenced in our previous post. Both involved activists protesting the individual’s presence in a manner that caused concern for the safety of our volunteers, staff, and exhibitors.

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The attack of the singularized plurals 2

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

English includes many nouns that end in “-um” or “-on” and are pluralized by changing the ending to “-a.” They come from Latin and Greek respectively. Examples include “medium,” “datum,” “ovum,” “criterion,” and “phenomenon.” As with everything else, the language isn’t consistent; we have museums, not musea; morons, not mora; polygons, not polyga. I wouldn’t complain if the language regularized the endings of all these words. “Bacteriums” and “phenomenons” would sound weird at first, but we could get used to it.

What’s happening instead is that people turn the plurals into singulars. With some words, like “data” and “media,” the change has been firmly established. Others are substandard but turn up often, like “a bacteria” or “a phenomena.” Recently I saw a writer friend who should know better talking about “a criteria.” This doesn’t make the words any more regular, since double-pluralizing “medias” or “datas” is still frowned upon. It leaves us with words that are the same in the singular and the plural.
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What really is a theocracy?

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

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the overbroad use of the term “Fascism” and what it really was or is. Another political designation that gets freely tossed around is “theocracy.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.” This is too broad; governments of all kinds have claimed that God guides their heads of state. Listen to traditional patriotic songs, and you’ll hear lots of claims that the leaders act under God’s guidance.
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