Since there have been a lot of comments lately on the attachment type pages, I created a new forum for readers of the blog to talk amongst themselves more quickly, since I’m not always able to check in to approve comments. Feel free to join it and post questions — I’ll answer those as time allows.
Month: September 2015
“Fear is the Mindkiller” at Tangent Online
Dune cover art by Henrik Sahlstrom
Tangent Online has published my essay on culture wars in science fiction here. A key paragraph:
A significant chunk of the population is still guided by the sentiment that women are weak and need more protection. These people are the Baptists in a bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition that unites to give statists more and more power to meddle and regulate, with the bootleggers being political parties that use these sentiments to justify their social engineering. Every new law and regulation is an opportunity for graft and extracting campaign contributions from businesses who want to be left alone or mold the law and regulations to hurt their competitors more, and every new edict (beyond dealing with obvious externalities like pollution) decreases the total wealth and growth rate of the economy. Politicians whip up fear — fear of terrorists, illegal immigrants, “the 1%,” sexist men, authoritarian Christianists, whatever works — to gain power, and then shy away from any actual solutions so they can repeat these emotional hooks for the next election. “Fear is the Mindkiller” — make someone afraid, and you weaken their reasoning power.