“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

At least not in the book. To be able to vote, you had to serve either in the military or in some other Federal (but non-military) service.

And in any case, he only used this idea in one novel out of dozens...so to say that Heinlein "believed" in this idea is silly at best.

Nevermind

Essentially, he was a Norquist libertarian republican who believed in a very small government with law and military enforcement its primary responsibility.

His crappy pulp sci-fi is a perfect example of the stereotype of Libertarians being man-children with the emotional maturity of a 12yo.

Then I'll understand mature, high-falutin' words like "dickwad"!

...I could give you a while list of sci-fi authors that are better than Heinlein, he is one of the most overrated authors, IMO. The only one of his works I thought was good was Stranger in A Strange Land, most of the rest is the kind of stuff wingnut Militia Teabagger types jerk off to.

how much publicity it's gotten.

As for your recommendations, I do rather like Clarke and Asimov (though their politics were naive). LeGuin writes well but doesn't interest me, and I can't stand KS Robinson.

I can highly recommend Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Stephen Baxter, Heinlein (naturally), Ben Bova, David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Alan Dean Foster, Robert L Forward, S M Stirling, and Harry Turtledove.

Just to name a few.

I also love Niven, I've read his Ringworld books and will soon read his "Smoke Ring" books.

I adore Frank Herbert's "Dune" books, they are some of the best fiction ever written, period.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" books are excellent classics, but are hard to find, I only discovered them because they were donated to the thrift store I work at. They are her early works before she wrote Mists of Avalon.

Anne McCaffrey, who passed away recently, is similar to Bradley in having a fantastic element in her sci-fi. Many of the stories involve people using ESP.

Trivia: They're set in the same universe (not Known Space) as his earlier novel, "A World Out Of Time" (also well worth reading).

I've read "Dune" but didn't particularly like it. Haven't tried Marion Zimmer Bradley, and got bored with McCaffrey.

I'm more of a fan of medium to hard SF (with alternate history thrown in).

...that a don't mind small bits of handwavium like assuming warp drives or artificial wormholes are possible, or the different "spaces" in the Uplift books.

I like the medium stuff as well as long as it does not get too loose on the facts.

Space Opera makes me gag.

Last edited Sun Mar 11, 2012, 02:15 PM - Edit history (1)

although in some ways it's like the death of a god to accept it. A kind of planetary sobering up. Also, it means Mad Max is a lot likelier than Star Trek (by a factor in the quadrillions).

I think the time will come when large round arks are built, or whole asteroids are turned into expeditionary craft and sent on their way with a few hundred colonists (and rafts full of DNA for clones) to take trips over several thousand years to likely candidate planets, like Kepler, and establish colonies there. Given many millennia, thousands of such projects can be launched. Given a few million years (peanuts in space-time), the human bubble can spread out over a larger swath of this galaxy.

Ah, scratch that.

Because you know it ain't going to be humans. It's going to be our fucking machine successors. They can potentially take such conditions for thousands of years and arrive ready to build more of themselves and colonize (god help any species that might be on the target planet). We can't.

If only it was as easy as the Jaunte in Stars My Destination, eh?

Let's suppose the civilization completely collapses, but humanity hangs on. Doesn't particularly matter why; nuclear war, peak oil, an asteroid strike, superplague...whatever. It's now 25,000 years later, and we're rebuilding technology.

But there's a problem.

All the easily accessible oil fields and deposits of minerals have already been, well...accessed. Sure, we can extract oil from shale in commercially useful amounts today, but that's with 21st Century technology. The same goes for other resources as well. There's millennia worth of resources in the asteroid belt, but if we can't climb from an 18th Century technology base to the 21st technology necessary to exploit them we might be stuck at a 1700s level of technology indefinitely.

They'll have access to a lot of know-how, and it will be decipherable. They'd gradually implement renewables; at a much slower pace than we can manage today, of course (where the conversion could happen in a mere 30 or 40 years). And that's assuming no breakthroughs that put us well past the need for hydrocarbons.

I can think of all sorts of scenarios in which humanity is reduced to the stone age. In such cases, there would be virtually no access to the the knowledge of "the Ancients".

And we're not just speaking of hydrocarbons, but mineral resources as well.

It would take a really big disaster: asteroids, nuclear war, that kind of thing.

Please don't take the following statement as normative, or prescriptive: a "mere" wipeout of most of the population and a set-back of the civilization for a while would, in fact, leave plenty of hydrocarbons for a reduced population to later rebuild - assuming they were more intelligent about it on the second go-around.

As I consider it, I suppose there are still untapped hydrocarbons that are relatively easy to extract...but what if our hypothetical mega-disaster takes place in 2100 or even later? Surely all the easy-to-get deposits will have been extracted by then.

Or maybe not...fun speculation in any case. I've always had a soft spot for post-apocalypse stories. Offhand, I can't think of any SF I've read that's dealt with this specific theme other than some short stories by Stephen Baxter.

It's the Newtonian universe assumed when the post-Einsteinian FTL travelers return to where they started and it's still the same year there. Or when they communicate in simultaneity with all other points in the universe, as though there is a single "now" frame for the whole thing.

In which any FTL ship is by definition a time machine.

Not my cup of tea.

and defines that in this interview.

I'm sure he would be much kinder to a Ron Paul supporter, right Glenn?

is directing his supporters favorably to a GOP created clip, and they will rec it up.

"Barackward: CNN's Piers Morgan Mocks Obama 'Documentary'"

Given the creator, it's understandable.

http://www.youtube.com/user/GOPICYMI

Also, there goes Greenwald again with the claim "creepy" and "Leader worship."

He should understand such mentality since he once held Bush in the same light.

Piers keep referring to it as a "documentary" and it is not.

It would go something like "even the director of his campaign material thinks Obama is weak at _____".

Guggenheim hails himself to be a documentary filmmaker.

He absolutely embarrassed himself on this show. He does nothing to dispel the notion that Obama's hardcore supporters are delusional cultists who blindly worship authority, much as Bush's hardcore supporters were. This guy has clearly been mainlining the kool-aid.

You can have campaign material that is a documentary. Documentaries do not have to capture all sides of a matter.

What kind of idiot.....oh nevermind.

weird answer to give. Why put any negatives in campaign informercial and why couldnt he just answer that the movie was a pro Obama one. Not even Jesus was perfect so its safe to assume that he has no disagreements wth Obama's administration but this wasn't the medium to express it.

Sid

I swear, between you and Frum, we sure seem to have some wacky Canadians wanting a piece of US policy.

Randi Rhodes: "Obama's Top 50 Accomplishments" --
http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/pages/rrnews.html?feed=393046&article=9880240

Sid

You have a problem with site rules, and you're a Host?

Sid

But, if it makes you feel any better, I have been warned by several kind DUers that by election season I will be driven off the board and that the grave dancing thread celebrating my ouster will be epic.

in general, than partisanship. As always, those who will determine the outcome will be Independents mostly.

The election season is when the American people have something the candidates want. Corporate lobbyists are always in DC bargaining for what they want, but the one thing they cannot bargain away are the people's votes. During election season is when they begin to get some competition from the people.



What the people have learned from Corporations over the past decade is that you never start the bargaining process by saying 'hey, no matter what, I'm going to give you what you want'.

Election season is when the people have a chance to extract from politicians what THEY want.

Full of hyperbole and straw man nonsense.

SSDD

Like that?

As in, for example.

Perhaps sarcasm isn't your thing.

"Straw man" is not a magic spell. BBI tells it like it is.

Okay.

Don't worry, as you get older, time passes faster.

Hope you are well.

PB

"The only negative is that there too many positives.."?

Evidently he's found him.

Pot meet kettle

It s party independent, and it is not healthy in a democracy. Oh and it's been there under damn surface, it was formalized under Reagan.

The country really loved FDR.

It was somehow...different from historical accounts. That said, yes, he was loved.

This is outright cult of personality and is common at empire end.

Under his leadership we won a major war, the government put millions upon millions of people to work, he reined in the crooked banks (with REAL reform) and he fought back when the fascists on the right tried to undermine him rather than laying down and begging for compromise.

Most Americans' lives got markedly better under FDR's leadership, as a direct result of his leadership.

It's a condition of states for all intents. The same people bashing Obama would go out of their way to champion, say, Chavez or Castro, or, laughably, Trotsky.

Wake up and smell teh fascism!11elevens.

That's the name of the YouTube poster associated with the video. Could it be:
Go-Picy-Mi (Go picky me), or
GOP-icy-Mi (GOP icy me)?

Maybe both of them?

Was it doctored? Selectively edited? Did Guggenheim appear on the CNN show and answer the questions posed as shown or not?

It's more like associate the messenger! I looked at all the other videos of the same messenger on the one youtube page, GOPICYMI, a good portion of them have to do with Obama's speech reversed. Kinda hard to listen to, but a disclaimer at the end of one of them claims "unedited" or something like that! What I saw and heard were clips of Obama speaking, then seamlessly the video and audio moves into reverse, often with unintelligible audio. Now, I don't know how that can possibly be done without editing. Additionally, text appears onscreen at times that claims the unintelligible words are interpreted as whoever placed that text on the screen. I definitely wouldn't agree with all the text interpretations of the reversed speech. One or two of them assert the word, "nairf" in a phrase. Search out for what that word means!

So, back to Guggenheim, I haven't a clue whether Guggenheim actually did that interview, or whether it was edited or not. However, it is one of the few pure expressions of approval of Obama in GOPICYMI's selections that I reviewed.

There's nothing we can do about this. The Millenial (post Generation X) generation is NOTORIOUSLY AUTHORITARIAN in its outlook -- the ethos of the Millennial Generation as first described in the late 90s is libertarian on social issues, authoritarian and conformist on economic and cultural issues -- doctrinaire and politically correct, neo-50s conformists.

And this is the generation that is now getting out of College and will soon dominate the electorate. They have never known anything BUT the anti-libertarian, anti-left values of the Bush, Clinton, and now Obama era.

They have never known anything BUT homeowners associations, "makeover" shows that deride people for not dressing fashionably, authorities saying people who behave differently should be locked up, Presidents saying people who purchase the wrong health insurance products should be fined for the benefit of the Majority, which they define as the technocratic Upper Middle Class that the average Millennial aspires to.

Those of us who are on blogs like DU -- some of us anyway -- have rejected this ethos and I can only hope that with the New Sincerity we are prepared to demolish it altogether and sweep away the last vestiges of the postmodern, relativist, politically correct, authoritarian, conformist ethos of the late 90s and 2000s whose ultimate ideal was TYRANNY OF THE (SUPPOSEDLY AFFLUENT) MAJORITY.

You hit a nerve, obviously.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1240&pid=32106

I don't know why. I don't think idiots like pink slime, so I'm not sure where the association comes from.