I Used To Like X

I want you to fix in your mind your favorite artist. Make a list of all the things s/he did to make you like him/her. Let's suppose you like the way s/he puts words together. Or you like the way s/he provides insight into the human condition. Or you like that clever twist at the end of his/her short stories. Now, for the purposes of this essay we'll refer to this artist as X.

If I met you in a coffee shop and mentioned X, you'd wax rhapsodic about him/her and recite at least some of those things on that list that I asked you to make.

Now, suppose that you discover that wonderful creative person you had in mind was also a leader of the National Socialist Party. Or s/he was outed as a closeted KKK member.

I'm supposing that everyone reading this hates fascists and white supremacists. But if you don't, substitute something else that you hate. (It is an unfortunate trait of our society that we tend to identify mutually antagonistic classes of people and then we set at each others' throats.)

Armed with this additional factoid about X, let's return to the coffee shop and I ask you about X. Now what do you say? Perhaps you'll feel rather sheepish: regarding X's writing as a guilty pleasure, or perhaps denying any enjoyment of X's work.

Then imagine the next time you're in a bookstore and you see X's latest work on the shelf. Will you snap up a copy with the same fervor as before? And after you finish it, will you post a review that is as positive as before? Or maybe not, you don't want the taint of association with double-ungoodness.


If you are an artist, you won't want that taint, and you won't want to be identified with any demon groups. This is a matter of personal brand management. Though it is easy to eschew evil in its Nazi and White-Supremacist forms, it get tricky when you're a Republican looking at a Democrat artist, or vice versa. (That's why I'm a Whig. A pox on both your houses!)

A bit of controversy can be great fun as any fan of cismale gendernormative fascism or glittery hoohas can attest. If someone on one side says something ridiculous and someone on the other side responds with ridicule, pass me the popcorn. This explains why I like Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt.

It's easy to go too far as I've said about Ann Coulter. I'm not concern-trolling Mr. Correia or Mrs. Hoyt, because they have NOT gone too far. But I am not interested in tilting at every windmill. Unless you really enjoy slapping around idiots, there are some topics of conversation you might want to avoid. Some controversies are more interesting to me than they are to you, I want to shy away from those you'll find boring.

Let's return to your friend X. It is common in these busy times to go off half cocked. Internet mobs are like traditional mobs in that low-information people respond to half-truths or lies with great passion. Thus we may find that X really isn't really a Nazi, but s/he said something that could be construed as such. Or maybe X's art was wholly independent of his/her Nazism.

If you liked X because of his/her art, and you discover a taint of something evil in X, you should remember the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every person. You should be slow to judge until you've got all the facts. And checked them. And you should temper your judgment with understanding.

I fondly remember the Tarzan and John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My enjoyment thereof is alloyed somewhat by accusations of racism, but I cannot deny he could spin a great adventure yarn. Though I used to like Edgar Rice Burroughs, I should not dismiss his work.

Just Change The Names

I was recently reminded of words I penned 13 years ago. What has changed? Just the names. The activists have only gotten more overt about their dishonesty. Change the names to Travon or Sacco & Vanzetti if you want to rewrite this for today or for the 1920s.

If you sought a one-word characterization of recent politics, polarized might come to mind. We're seeing the extremes of left and right going beyond saying the other guys are wrong to saying they are evil. And you see this online with one side calling the other "wingnuts" and the other side calling their opposites "moonbats." 

Why is this?

For one thing, the stakes have been raised. A lot of folks believe we're only one Supreme Court Justice away from resumption of the Salem Witch Trials. 

A lot of other folks believe the Axis of Evil will enable someone to create a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. Because the stakes are so high, we're disinclined to shrug and go back to ignoring the politicians.

We're in an environment where you simply cannot talk to some people. I think this is because we disagree about what some words mean. For instance, I think everyone from the most moonbattish to the wingnuttiest believe in "liberty and justice for all." But what does liberty and justice mean?

Some think that "liberty" means freedom to be left alone. Others think that "liberty" means being able to be self-actualized. Freidrich Hayek would say that liberty means that one is free to starve to death. 

Conversely, Thomas Merton would say that I am not free if my brother is in bondage. Some think that "justice" means that the law should apply to everyone equally. Others think that "justice" means that everyone should play on a level playing field.

Thus Michael Moore speaks of clean water and universal health care when he's thinking about freedom because he's thinking about something completely different from Charleton Heston when he's asserting the second amendment.

To half of America the term "economic justice" means that everyone should be taxed at a fixed rate and no rich person should be taxed more simply because he can afford it and no poor person taxed less simply because he can't. The other side believes there is no justice if anyone in society doesn't have a satisfactory standard of living.

Take the words "good" and "evil." The moonbat's good is the wingnut's evil and vice versa. Is it evil to allow people to starve? and good to force others to pay to feed them? If you say, "yes" then what if that person being starved is in a permanent vegetative state like Terri Shiavo?

I leave as an exercise to the reader finding an equally ironic formulation of the wingnuts involving pro-life, Scott Peterson and the death penalty.


The problem is that it does not suffice to form up sides and throw rocks at each other. There are insights in each partisan position that the other side must aggregate to understand the world as it is and to refine the quality of his own thinking. That's the genius of democracy. People disagree, but a democratic process forces disparate voices to be accommodated and extreme voices of wingnuts are cancelled-out by the extreme voices of moonbats.

Neither side should be given the power to silence the other, and each side should thank the other side for serving to refine their own thinking. Peruse the Socratic dialogs and you'll see Socrates thank those who contradict him most sharply. They call to his mind the parts of his thinking that need work and create opportunities to elaborate the parts of his thinking that aren't immediately obvious.

I think that my own position is most strongly vindicated when I talk to someone on the other side, and instead of hearing reasoned arguments, I hear abuse and insult. Maybe I'm wrong, but I know that the other fellow won't set me straight and I can go on from there.

Check Your Premises

We all know what happened a while back in that criminal case about that person who was killed by that other person. And we all know the verdict the jury came to was all about race, or politics, or both. And we're outraged about the actions of the judge, prosecution and/or defense counsel.

Then you meet someone who also has just as strong a sense of outrage over the case THE OPPOSITE WAY. (When this happens to me, I know why. It's because I'm a Whig, and everyone else is a Republican Democrat or a Democrat Republican). I'm a thoughtful, intelligent human being and that idiot is just plain evil.

Right?

Or maybe not. Maybe I just drank too much Whig kool-aid. The truth is more complicated and the innocent party wasn't innocent, and the guilty party wasn't guilty, or some combination of the two.

But we're too busy to do a thorough inquiry into the facts of the case, and all our friends have strong opinions, so we just repeat the most appealing snippets of the news that we've paid attention to. It doesn't matter whether it bears on the verdict the jury came to.

All I remember is that if the glove does not fit, you must acquit. Or something equally inane.

Because we just accept the cartoonish narrative of Our Partisan Side, we have no alternative but to think the other fella is a dangerous lunatic.

Like the KKK members in rural Michigan who didn't have any blacks or Jews nearby. They had to look to Catholics to hate. But they knew their Catholic neighbors were good people. So they created the bogus category of "good Catholics" and "bad Catholics" and the bad ones lived in the big cities and hid guns in their churches. Completely bogus consequences follow from uncritical acceptance of completely bogus premises.

Did O. J. kill Nicole? Or is he sincerely looking for the real killer? I wasn't on the jury. I don't know the facts of the case. Ergo, I have no opinion. Same goes for the guilt or innocence of any other newsworthy case I wasn't on the jury of.

I trust the judicial system just enough to believe that the relevant facts of the case will be presented to the jury. The rest of us will get whatever sells newspapers and whatever advances activists' careers. Did the jury make the right decision? I don't know.

When I don't know, the my reasonable response is skepticism.

My skepticism extends to whether Sarah Palin is an idiot or George Bush is a white-knuckle drunk.

I have no skepticism about Barack Obama, however. I'm sure he is a Keynesian.

And I'm sure that when I talk to someone who is on the other side of whatever strong opinion I hold, that person had just good a set of reasons for that position. Just as I do for mine.

I have a friend from India who is a devout a statist. When probing his opinions, I find that where I distrust the state, he trusts the state, and where I trust the individual, he distrusts the individual. Anything else we might argue about--guns, abortion, taxes, or welfare--are just theorems derived from these divergent axioms.

When I debug software, I see things that ought not be, and often the most blatant obvious problems are consequences of a much smaller error upstream. I liken the process to surveying a railroad train derailment and then setting aside all the obvious twisted metal to find the much more subtle point where the train went off the rails. Fix that and you don't have to worry about all that twisted metal next time.

And that's what I think I should do when I encounter some person who doesn't have the good sense to be a Whig like me. Set aside the distracting bits that everyone is wringing their hands about and focus on the person and the ultimate premises that give rise to their way of thinking. That's where the useful conversation takes place.

Let's not talk about ObamaCare, tell me what you think the obligations of the state should be.

Poor Man's Fight

There's a point where one wrong tends to bring about another wrong through an appeal to something right. I remember the '60s and its appeal to freedom and its contempt for regimentation. It was pretty cool, despite being morally handicapped.

It's common in GOP West Michigan to think that Ann Arbor is the Democrat Nirvana. But that's not true, there are a lot more Libertarians (of the secular kind) in Ann Arbor than Democrats. If you want to do weed in AA, it's a non-criminal infraction.

Poor Man's Fight starts out on planet Sally Mae. Not really, but I want you to think about a future where every bit of education mandated by the state, costs money, and is borrowed from an Interstellar Sally Mae. (Its a perversion of the separation of School and State gone horribly wrong.)

If you are unaware of how US higher education gets funded, the gubmint artificially keeps tuition dollars flowing into universities by promiscuously offering student loans to anybody who wants to get a degree in feminist post-colonial film studies or something less fashionable. (My daughter, the nuclear engineer, printed the paperwork for her last Sally Mae check onto a sheet of paper on which she'd placed an image of a blood-sucking tick. Education loans are one of those paving stones on the road to hell good intentions that makes wage-slaves of young college graduates.)

Now, imagine Sally Mae debt-slavery cranked to eleven.

Poor Man's Fight begins with our protagonist, Tanner Malone, blowing an achievement test that's clearly rigged against him. (Good move that.) And by failing, he is indebted to a greater degree than had he passed the test. It's an ingenious form of slavery. And I give Elliot Kay high marks for thinking of it and putting it in his book.

Debt slavery is the dynamic force moving Poor Man's Fight along.

The protagonist, Tanner Malone, enlists in the military to acquire some debt-forgiveness. He then is enrolled into a Space Navy boot camp that's quite brutal and intense.

Alternating chapters follow the exploits of the Space Pirates that we know Tanner is going to be fighting in the third act. I'm something of a broken record about antagonist design, however. You have to be careful about that, because AFTER seeing how Tanner Malone gets screwed over, I started to sympathize and identify with the pirates. The pirate captain recruits among the crews of the ships he captures with an opening question, "How much debt do you carry?" Since I've seen the system is rigged to enslave everyone through debt, I found his sales pitch most appealing.

I started wondering whether the Space Pirates were the heroes.

In particular, the Space Pirates seemed cool in an Ann Arbor kind of way. I started wondering whether the pirate base would be Galt's Gulch.

Meanwhile, Our Hero goes through boot camp and despite the brutality of the training and his unsuitable temperament to fighting, he excels. I think everyone who writes Military Science Fiction has to write a few boot camp chapters. It's probably in a NATO treaty or something.

After Our Hero graduates from boot camp he gets assigned to a space ship where he is the low man who's unfairly treated. Just like that poor, nice Mr. Midshipman Hornblower was mistreated. And like Midshipman Mr. Hornblower, he acquits himself very well in action against the Space Pirates.

In fact, he becomes quite adept at killing pirates. So much so that he loses touch with his humanity. That's pretty cool. It's one thing to see John Carter of Mars going from adventure to adventure, but an altogether different thing to see a sensitive human being turn into a killing machine.

The final third of the book gets a little rushed, and I think a few points could be fleshed out a little.

The last chapter is where you sell the sequel. And that's where Elliot Kay lost me. In the opening chapters of any novel you wonder, "who's pulling the strings" as the author shows you his/her world-building. He does a good job of teasing out a few clues in the middle of the novel to set up the final scene. But he showed he's going to take the sequels someplace I don't wanna go.

Poor Man's Fight 5-stars well deserved.

Let Hitler Speak

Years back, I was reading a periodical, I can't recall whether it was Analog or Isaac Asimov's magazine, and someone said something bad which occasioned me to write to the editor. My point then and now is that one does not defeat bad speech with censorship, but with reasoned counter-argument.

Let's suppose you think my advocating Whigs is not just disagreeable, but downright evil. And rather than counter my words, you scream shut up, and censor any utterance of them.

I think that is wrong, and instead, you should reply to my Whig speech with your own anti-Whig speech. If you disagree, say why you disagree. If you claim I'm evil, make your case to that effect.

Then, our respective audiences can decide for themselves whether Whigs deserve their place in the dust-bin of history.

In the case of Nazis, there are better reasons than, "They lost WW2," to believe they are wrong and evil.

Every person must take action in this life convinced what is right and what is wrong. We need better reasons to think the Nazis were evil than the guy in Indiana Jones pulling out a folding hangar in a menacing way, and then getting his face melted off when he looks inside the Ark of the Covenant.

What do you do when you find out that JFK admired Hitler? If all you know is "Shut him up! They're evil!", then you might think JFK was evil, too. However, if you understand that some things Hitler did were good and other things were much more evil, then you can sympathize with JFK's admiration for the good he could see, and give Hitler the doubt about the evil he did not yet see.

Transgressive things can have a sort of appeal to the ignorant. When I was a kid, parents were shocked and appalled at sex, drugs, and rock & roll. And kids went for it. Can those things kill you or ruin your life? Loud music can cause hearing loss I suppose. And alcohol is a legal, recreational drug.

You can't just say, "shut up," but you can teach discernment. And discernment requires more than Reefer Madness.

No matter how deeply you bury Hitler's evil, it has a way of coming back and citizens need discernment to recognize it when someone who doesn't sound or look like Hitler says the same things as him. For instance, the sloganeering of both John McLame and Barack Obama had a great deal in common with Nazi sloganeering. Are the GOP and Democrats both Fascists? You need discernment.

I say you get that discernment by letting the evil Fascists have free speech to make their case. But you don't stop there. They are evil. You have to follow up with your own free speech to make the opposing case that they are not only wrong, but evil. This means you have to know why we fight.

When I read Liberal Fascism and I got to the chapters about the present day, there was an Elephant in the room, and it was obvious that Mr. Goldberg was uncomfortable with the definition of Fascism he'd spent the rest of the book crafting fit Mr. Bush's "big government" as well as Mr. Obama's.

That is the reason against educating people about why good is good, and why evil is evil.

If a thing is evil because your party boss says it's evil, and good because your party boss says it's good, then you can wake up one morning like American Communists did on 23 August 1939 to find that Nazis are no longer evil, but good. And then when Hitler invades Russia, oops, your party boss has to tell you they're evil again.

This sounds ridiculous, but keep in mind the guiding principle of both Democrats and Republicans elected officials: "if you give us enough money, we vote like you like."

In this case, it isn't the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or Operation Barbarossa that redefines good and evil, but whose check is larger. If you have reasons to believe good is good, and reasons to believe evil is evil, then party bosses have to be picky about whose checks they cash.

This can be an inconvenience, but I think it should be a necessary inconvenience.

There Oughta Be A Law

I know the USA is doomed when I hear both parties calling for laws to address lawless behavior when there are already laws on the books that they choose not to enforce.

Let's unpack what I just said. A criminal breaks a law and this criminal act is used to inflame the passions of the electorate. These inflamed passions are cited by legislators to justify more laws. Particularly galling are the promises that this time it will be different.

If you're a Democrat, this means you want more gun laws. And if you're a Republican, this means you want tough immigration reform.

The perfect crime should be perpetrated by an illegal alien using an assault weapon. If he's a Caucasian the Democrats can search for a white male, and if he's a Muslim the GOP can search for an Islamofascist. Everyone wins. The government has a subsidy for Chechens to this very end.

And if you're Whig, you get the impression that you're being played by both sides.

Then there's the fact that when these laws actually get drafted they contain "poison pill" language intended to make it radioactive to the other side. The point isn't to get the law passed, it's to make the law fail and in failing inflame the passions of those disappointed true believers the politicians intend to shake down for more donations.

With this in mind, keep an eye on your postbox. Soon you'll get a flier with a picture of a werewolf on it named Hillary Bush or Richard Milhouse Obama. The text inside will tell you that this demon is about to corrupt your precious bodily fluids. And you must send them money to keep your family safe from this boogieman.

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.

One Thing To Remember About Polling

You may have some interest in the upcoming election. If so, I'm sorry. You should seek treatment. But until you do, here is one helpful tip that may help you survive the next fortnight.

My name is Poling. I'm going to talk about polling. And I've been hearing a lot about polling lately. You don't need an advanced degree in Mathematics to realize that Republicans will vote for their guy, Democrats will vote for their guy.

And Whigs (like me) will vote for the right guy.

The people who put compile polls realize this and they can adjust how many Rs and Ds they put into their sample to get whatever number they want. You might think that those evil lefty liberal newsies will put in a bunch of Ds to make their guy look good, or you might think that those corporate drones will put in a bunch of Rs to suck up to their bosses (who go around in striped pants like the Monopoly guy). (Nobody bothers with Whigs, so my opinion doesn't count.)

All these news outlets who do opinion polls have one thing in common: they like money. And there's more money in telling the story of a close game that's tied with two out in the ninth inning than the story of a game that's a lopsided 10-to-0 blowout. If there's going to be a landslide victory that has Donkeys or Elephants dancing in the streets, we'll never hear about it until the last minute.

(Incidentally, I think this upcoming election has been a foregone conclusion for the last year. If the final result is close, then I'm wrong and you should not pay any further heed to my prognostications.)

The way we get political news is what's wrong with American politics. Contrast it with Plato's dialogs. You have Socrates chatting up guys who forcefully disagree with him, yet Socrates gives those he disagrees with all the time in the world to explain their positions. When Socrates interrupts, it is not to contradict the fellow, but to get him to clarify some point he might not clearly articulate. Socratic questioning often brings to light things out unintended consequences of the position as well. By this means, the reader comes to understand all the different points of view and has the facts in hand to make tradeoffs between them.

This makes for boring TV.

If a politician says, "I favor buggy whip tariffs and my opponent is a poopy-head." The substantive buggy-whip advocacy will be edited out because the ad hominem attack sells more papers. Is the public diminished by this? Yes. Is there a better way? Yes. Is it to take the profit motive out of news coverage? NO WAY.

The better way starts with you, dear reader. You have the power to sift through the good, the bad and the ugly. Ignore the advocacy-speech of both parties and the news media and google for primary sources. Read the text of the propositions on the ballot. Choose that which corresponds to what you believe is best.

The ancient Greeks distinguished between politicians who were like confectioners and physicians. The confectioners dispense sweets that rot your teeth, but taste good, while the physicians dispense bitter tasting medicines that are good for health.

When a country is going through economically painful times, the electorate will appreciate a candidate who feels their pain and promises analgesics. But pain-killers are not cures, and thus we see places mired in economic doldrums for generations.

I think we saw this in Argentina when Juan Peron took power and set a fairly advanced 2nd-world country onto the path that has brought it to its current status. Meanwhile, countries that the US had bombed into rubble or that started out with nothing have far surpassed the economic performance and standard of living of Argentina.

It is too easy to say this is a left versus right thing. I want to suggest this is a confection versus medicine thing.

A populace that's been devastated or that has never had anything, may tolerate some short-term pain because they've become inured to pain. They can go off their economic analgesics and take the bitter pill. After the economic poisons are flushed out of the system, the society is positioned to enjoy strong growth. Conversely, a nation that's comfy where they are will choose the drug to help them get through another term of economic decline.

Does this fit into a 10-second sound-bite? No. Does it give you any coded message about who to vote for in the next election? I already told you: Vote Whig. Neither the Rs nor the Ds are promising to stop handing out confections and start handing out bitter pills.

Speak Carefully Near A Pregnant Woman

I hope everyone has enjoyed their Labor Day holiday as much as I have. Every year for the last two decades I've gone camping Up North with the same circle of friends. In the intervening years all of our children have grown up. This year one of our friends' daughters was there and she is with child. She's due near Thanksgiving. We had a delightful time and tonight my wife disclosed a worry she'd had: that someone would say something that she could construe negatively. Happily, no one had and everyone was happy.

My wife, who understands these things better than I, pointed out that some times people are more inclined to react negatively than other times.

Now is such a time. This country is being seized with a peculiar form of quadrennial madness. Those worst afflicted have been reacting to "dog-whistles." A dog-whistle is a device that creates an ultrasonic signal that humans cannot hear, but that dogs can. This is a metaphor for racist code-speak that only certain sensitive induhviduals can hear. E.g. If I say, "things look darkest before the dawn," the metaphorical reference to diurnal illumination variation can be construed as dog-whistle-racist.

No, that's a metaphorical reference. As Sigmund Freud once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

While promoting my anthology, Finding Time, I used this quote: "My friend was raised by savages in the Americas who do not believe evil exists."

In my story, a time traveler from 2370 named Schlomo Davidson is introducing his companion, a time traveler from 2280 named Nell Playfair, to a Victorian street preacher. Schlomo says this as a dig at Nell's society, the Terran Empire of which he thoroughly disapproves.

Yet, this remark has been misconstrued on at least two occasions. Nobody's gotten mad or yelled at me. Yet. But I'm a little anxious to make things clear:

1) I am not referring to American indigenous people (i.e. Indians). American Indians were well aware of evil having been victimized by atrocities perpetrated by the Federal Government such as the Trail of Tears or Wounded Knee Massacre. The savages in 2280 Ann Arbor, are not Indians.

2) I am not referring to Democrats. They have demonstrated an acute awareness of evil and one has gone so far as to define sin as "Being out of alignment with my values." I'm confident neither the GOP nor the Democrats will survive to the year 2280. Go Whigs!

But suppose if I weren't some lonely Whig scribbling away in obscurity, but instead I were of those madmen who seek to rule by gaining elected office? Who knows what would be construed of my words?

I've said elsewhere that what our words are not judged by what we intend, but by how they are received. Yet, when you hear words construed in the most tortuous ways to mean things no sane politician would ever intend, can you characterize it as anything other than madness or dishonesty? Ergo, let me amend that a little. 

Our words are not judged by what we intend, but by how SANE, HONEST PEOPLE receive them.