"At which point you observe the following: the magazine (establishment, cabinet, Hollywood) rolls hard left before it dies."

I think Sarah Hoyt is on to something.

//Which is what led to the war in our little patch of heaven. And why there’s a great divorce in progress. For many years we read authors who not only held idiotic and contra-reality opinions, but also lectured us about them in the middle of otherwise okay books.  We rolled our eyes and still read them because they were the only game in town.

They’re no longer that.  There’s a choice.  Traditional numbers fall and I know ever more people making a good living from writing.  That’s fine too.

But the reaction from and what is happening in terms of traditional publishing/entertainment/etc is the mechanism I wished to talk about and also will give you insight into what to expect to come at us as things slip more and more out of their control.

You see, for years being a leftist has been a positional good.  What I mean is for years (probably more than a century) it’s been assumed that the caring, etc. man is the one who wants to subjugate humans to the whim of the state.  This is partly because it is typical of humans to trust in the man on the white horse, and the peculiar form of it in the twentieth century was the “government bureaucrat.”  Possibly because the economic and industrial conditions meant the people doing the trusting (the “intellectual class”) were educated much like government bureaucrats.

But for years, certainly before I came here in the 80s, being leftist was the mark of education and breeding.

Because any views that disagreed with the left were considered “stupid” this by definition meant to be considered smart you had to make the right (left) noises.  A lot of upper class families, and certainly most of the intellectual establishment was all but communist by the 40s and 50s. (To believe Heinlein.)

And you’d think that they’d become less leftist since the USSR fell, but they didn’t.  They went around muttering that the good guys lost, for a while, and then set about carrying on their bizarre faith, now transmuted into radical feminism, radical environmentalism, etc, before they’d gotten far away enough from the debacle that was the USSR to come up with the witty idea that real “communism has never been tried.”  (I tell you what byotchs.  We’ll try it right after we try unfettered capitalism.  If the very fettered version of the thing we had in the US lifted the entire world out of historical misery, imagine what the unfettered version would do.)

Their social signaling remained the same.  The more left you were, the “smarter” and “more educated.”  (This is true so far as more educated in these days can mean more indoctrinated.)//

The Left v. Science Fiction.


Seriously...

...this won a Nebula????

It is a fine, arresting little bit of fluff, but it is not science fiction and it isn't a story.

I used to admire the Nebulas, but if this is a winner, cancel my admiration.

When did political correctness take over science fiction?

Sarah Hoyt points out the existential "Oikophobia" of the story.

And John Wright offers this:

//The word for when a person erects in his mind a false image of a group of people, and sees them only as that image, that false stereotype, and moreover it is a despicable stereotype, one that robs them not just of dignity, but of their very humanity… that word is bigot.

Something rotten, very rotten has happened to the Left just in my lifetime.

They used to be champions of free speech; and now they are its most vehement opponents.

They use to be able to give some sort of argument or logical reason for their position, even if an incorrect argument; now they have no argument, none of them, aside from wild and insincere accusations delivered in a mechanical fashion without any hope of being believed, phony as a three-dollar bill.

They used to be firmly on the side of the workingman; now they hate the workingman as a white racist oppressor.

They used to be in favor of free love and the sexual liberation; now they object to rocket scientists wearing shirts with cartoon women printed on them, they object to science fiction magazines showing a scantily clad warrior princess slaying a monster, and they call all sex rape, and demand strict segregation of women and men. On the same day as these protests, they appear in front of the Pope, writhing on the ground naked with crosses and crucifixes inserted into their vaginas. So the Puritan rules apply arbitrarily, without sense or order, to anyone or no one.

They used to be in favor of Blacks and other minorities; now their disgust for all the impoverished and dispossessed is plain to see. All they want is to keep the Blacks on the plantation, addicted to welfare, addicted to crack, their children aborted, their parents unwed.

They used to be in favor of the Jews, and other minorities; now they kneel to Islamic Jihad at every opportunity, vowing that those who slander the prophet of Islam will no be in the future, and ergo the Left now curse the Jews, and pray daily for the destruction of Israel, and a new Holocaust in the warhead of a Muslim nuke.

What? You say that his the not what the Left says? That they say they are creatures of purity, goodness, and sweetness, who live only to help others out of the depth of their hearts and the depth of your wallet? No, that was the old Left, back when the Left still had some scraps of sanity and intelligence.

They serve Sauron and have forgotten their own names.//