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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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 World War I years were the worst in the United States’ history for freedom of speech. Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for opposing US participation in the war. Charles T. Schenck got the same for distributing petitions against the military draft, and censorship advocates today applaud Judge Holmes’ equation of his advocacy with “falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” There was also a movie that got its creator a federal prison sentence. What did this film do? It celebrated the American Revolution. That made it anti-British, at a time when Britain was our ally in the war.
If that sounds insane, it is. Under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the federal and local governments stomped on freedom of expression as never before or since, and the Supreme Court said it was fine. Still, The Spirit of ’76 is a weird case. The film was released on May 28, 1917, the month after the USA entered the war. Chicago censors made him cut some scenes depicting British atrocities. It opened in November in Los Angeles; I don’t know if it was seen anywhere during the intervening time. The Los Angeles showing included the censored scenes.
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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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Leslie Fish, one of the best-known members of the filk music community, has died. She was talented, opinionated, outgoing, and just weird (in the best sense of the word). I didn’t know her well, but I’d seen, heard, and talked with her on many occasions. Other people who knew her better will write about her, but I should give my perspective here.
She appeared on the fannish scene around 1975. With a group called the DeHorn Crew, she produced a vinyl LP called Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet. Another, Solar Sailors, came out the next year. The songs focused on Star Trek and space travel. In addition to being a fan, she was an anarcho-syndicalist, associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka the “Wobblies.” She was no fan of central economic planning, and her politics often ran in a libertarian direction.
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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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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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ICE has its claws in New Hampshire, even if not as obviously as in some other places. The secret police force has abducted people on multiple occasions. Local politicians are collaborating with ICE in exchange for a little federal money. But New Hampshire residents are pushing back. A new movement called Sanctuary Communities is forming to protest and monitor ICE’s brutal actions.
In my area is the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Community. I’m still finding out what it’s all about, but it looks interesting. It’s been around since 2017 and says its members are “working together to support people facing the threats of immigration detention and deportation.” I’ve sent an email asking to sign up for their mailing list, and I’m still waiting for a reply. Hopefully the person running the list was just away for the weekend. (Update, Nov. 18: Yay! I’m now on the mailing list!)
These groups have been targeted by a campaign of lies. New Hampshire has a law against “sanctuary cities.” It requires law enforcement in every municipality to cooperate with federal immigration officials. The MAGAs are trying to claim it bans private activity protected by the First Amendment. If it did, that would just make the law null and void. Americans’ freedom to gather information and speak out takes precedent over Trump’s wishes.
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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.
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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.
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