The New Right Dystopianism

Not to sound like Harlan Ellson here, but to call this kind of paranoid garbage "science fiction" is to do an injustice to L. Ron Hubbbard, much less any real science fiction writers.

Cranky

A real dystopia of liberalism would be something like Houellebecq - boredom, no real point to life but making money or having sex, angst, pointless and ceaseless travel, extreme sports for no reason, etc.

Presenting one's enemy as both comically incompetent and stupid AND an enormous, efficient threat to all that is right is an old right-wing trope that goes way back. The Cold War presentation of the Soviets ran along those lines - Russian science and technology was horribly backwards and laughable and their system was so fucked up they couldn't put toothpaste on the shelves and you had to wait in line 11 hours a day to get bread BUT they were also this relentless, ruthless, cunning, and efficient existential threat to the entire West. Now, we have these comically backwards cave-dwellers who nevertheless are well-advanced in their plan to impose a global Caliphate and make dhimmis of us all. Shoot, this even applies domestically - to them, Bill Clinton was simultaneously a slack-jawed backwoods hick and the most brilliant, devious, and untrustworthy political mind of his generation. Hillary gets the same treatment.

And you're right about these things being wish-fulfillment of a very nasty sort. I rememberthe "survivalist" movement of the 1970s being, on close inspection, only about 10% surviving a nuclear war and 90% fantasizing about using your well-prepared stock of guns and ammo to set yourself up in the post-apocalypse era as emperor of all you survey. They weren't trying to avoid or survive a nuclear holocaust - they were actively rooting for one to come on so they could emerge as big wheels on the newly-cleansed earth.

I frequently ask right-wingers how, exactly, are the "Islamofacsists" going to take over America.

I have never gotten a straight answer.

Never.

At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win

If this is satirical you slid it in beautifully. Otherwise, could you please reconcile it with your claim that you can whip any 60 year old alive.

A real dystopia of liberalism would be something like Houellebecq - boredom, no real point to life but making money or having sex, angst, pointless and ceaseless travel, extreme sports for no reason, etc.

And that is different from life today, how?

"At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win."

Now that is really scarey. Such a long way from Harper's Ferry and Homestead we have apparently willing come. No wonder Bush feels confidant.

This also confirms my intuitions November 8 2004.

If this is satirical you slid it in beautifully. Otherwise, could you please reconcile it with your claim that you can whip any 60 year old alive.

Well played, sir.

I think that the troublesome thing is that the vicious, demented fringe of the Right has not been marginalized. They aren't a big demographic, maybe 10%, maybe even 20%, but they've been an integral part of the governing coalition for 6 years, and the meda treats them quite respectfully.

>

Which is why we need to start forming armed left wing militias.

I'm quite serious.

"At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win."

True, but I'd manage to take a few conservatives down with me if that ever happened.

I'm all for left wing militias, it would scare the hell out of all the right people. Liberals would never be part of it though, so the point still stands.

I think that the troublesome thing is that the vicious, demented fringe of the Right has not been marginalized.

Just so. I worry constantly about whether it will be possible to live in political comity with these people in the years to come. How can a democracy/republic function when a significant portion of the populous (an influential portion at that) is opposed to the very idea?

If the jihadis are strong, they kill the liberals, not leave them around to repress conservatives.

No, that's not right. The liberals will simply surrender to the jihadis. Think modern day al-Andalus. It's already happening in Europe, dontcha know.

I can't believe that no one's saluted MY's signal act of genius: he was able to make something useful out of Demolition Man. Cripes. There must be a foundation that will offer funding on the strength of that alone.

Now do the Earnest Goes To... movies.

The French do the liberal-dystopia thing much better. Jean-Christophe Rufin and Maurice Dantec are particularly good. It's a shame the novels don't get translated--I think only one of Dantec's is available in English.

No, that's not right. The liberals will simply surrender to the jihadis. Think modern day al-Andalus. It's already happening in Europe, dontcha know.

Nope, I don't stuff my head full of paranoid bullshit, I'll keep my eyes open for Moors though.

We don't need to write dystopias, we're living ours right now.

"The retarded son of George W. Bush steals the presidential election and lies the country into World War III...."

You know the rest.

"[W]hile liberalism is easy to satirize effectively, it's extremely hard to dystopianize as a means of critique. The problem is that liberalism's alleged weakness is crucial to the conservative critique of liberalism, which makes it hard to outline a coherent liberal totalitarianism."
Well said, sir. And likewise FMguru and the rest. Speaking of right-wing dystopias, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand attempted to satirize leftists by giving them Dickensian names like Wesley Mouch. They were truly dictatorial, but then she was probably attacking the excesses of the New Deal, many of whose supporters were still around then. I don't think even she tried the trick of simultaneously castigating liberals for their supposed timidity in the face of
external threats and for instituting a dictatorship here.
But maybe she did, too. I never did get through the book, and anyway, that was 1960 and in another country and besides, the wench is dead.

I think armed liberal militias is a seriously fantastic idea. If there's any myth that needs to be demolished, it's the myth of liberal wussiness. Please let me know where I can sign up.

At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win

Umm, that would explain why the liberals lost the American Revolution?

The conservatives, when they're not furiously masturbating to "Red Dawn", love this image of themselves as tough, brawny warriors and the liberals as a gaggle of effete, latte-sipping ponces.

That's simply part of their rich fantasy lives, and it's a little irritating to see it passed on here as if it had validity. The issue boils down to what we are willing to fight for. We all have a line beyond which we fight. Conservatives, being creatures of deep convictions and shallow thoughts, are simply closer to their line than we are to ours.

Didn't A Clockwork Orange already cover this?

At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win.

Nonsense. Most of them will have had no military experience.

I'm imagining a liberal militia. They have 3 meetings. By the third, there's nobody there but a couple of ex-jocks and some real muscular women and their German Shepherd Dogs. And a Methodist minister who always, always keeps his appointments.

Wild in the Streets! Remember that one about compulsive retirement at age 30, with enforced LSD doses? That's all I recall, as it was the drive-in and I was busy making out.

Seriously, what is it with these people, their reflexive shadow projection, and perpetual fantasies of their own victimization? High school social trama?

The problem is that "liberal" and "conservative" are such loaded terms. I think that if, today, people were forced to "pick sides" between GWB and Al Gore, and fight it out with carbombs and whatnot, the Gore supporters would probably end up winning.

You people should just stop bandying the L and C words already. There's nothing inherently "liberal" in surrendering to Islamofascists, and there's nothing inherently "conservative" in fanstasizing about post-apocalyptic shoot-em-ups. It's just Left and Right.

The Left's basic liberalism consists in wanting a totally secular European-style socialism without entirely realizing or admitting it, and the Right's basic conservatism consists in a reflexive, paranoid hatred of anything and anybody different from themselves without entirely realizing or admitting it. Both sides are willing to use whatever liberal or conservative tactics will reinforce these respective mindsets. Because the Left can't collectively admit what its ultimate goal is, reinforcing this mindset amounts to exhibiting perpetual weakness. Because the Right thrives on various phobias, reinforcing this mindset amounts to excessive and counterproductive displays of strength.

Jesus, claimed by "conservative" Republicans, was the end-all liberal. I don't know what you call Fidel Castro at this point other than a conservative. Hoo ha.

At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win.

In their fascist wingnut (dry climax) dreams, maybe, but in the real world, notice how many of them find excuses why they just aren't the right people to enlist in the military, and when their stupidity is attacked they cry their way to the waaaambulance? (wetting their pants - or worse - on the way).

So, Bring It On! (to recall a phrase)

The Second Amendment has two sharp edges, not just one:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

We may have to seal the borders on certain hotpockets of wingism to prevent some unlawful combatants from escaping to Free America, but since most of the real wingers will be hiding under their beds and are no real danger, those who truly value freedom won't put up with much more crap from the lunatic right fringe.

Dystopian sci-fi works by conservatives include Anthony Burgess's "Clockwork Orange," Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins," Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (although libertarians, bless 'em, think this is a libertarian utopian novel) and Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers" and "Brazil" (which can best be described as "1984" if written by Evelyn Waugh).

Typically, the theme in conservative dystopian literature is "things fall apart." Society loses the will to repress criminal behavior, while the government goes instead after harmless representatives of the old civilization.

And Vladimir Nabokov's 1947 "Bend Sinister" is a traditional dystopian novel about a European totalitarian state. Not his best work, though.

to: Cranky Observer (first comment)

DITTO.

I completely disagree. If it came to real conflict, I think we'd see the Libertarians slaughtered in about 10 seconds, and then a senseless and prolonged battle in which the conservatives would eventually lose. Ideally, the Faux intellectuals & pundits etc would be some of the first to go, and the rest of us could negotiate peace.

At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win.

I question this assertion. First, if all hell broke loose, and US had armed conflict in the streets, I doubt you'd see some liberal vs. conservative war. What would each of them have to fight for? Left and right ideologies are premised on the prevailing conditions of American life as it now stands. Race, religion and class would be the likelier dividing lines.

Second, there is nothing inherently wimpy about liberals. Take, for instance, the labor struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. Many of the labor battles were won because the capitalists just couldn't stomach the violence. The idea of labor unions as bastions of enlightened democracy is sadly a myth. Disipline was enforced with fists and clubs.

If conservatives tried to forcefully impose their will on people, they could expect a taste of the same.

Why do i go back and re-read my comments?

Left and right ideologies are premised on the prevailing conditions of American life as it now stands. (redundant, sorry)

Dystopian sci-fi works by conservatives include Anthony Burgess's "Clockwork Orange,"

That's the second time I've seen that and I just can't see it. The book's final chapter (excised for American movie audiences) was Alex growing up and realizing what a selfish, stupid, idiot he had been and getting a job and starting a family. I don't see how that could be a "conservative" message at all. Where is the good old fashioned justice? Where are the victim's rights?

Demolition Man is the only Sylvester Stallone movie I've ever seen, all because I'm somewhat acquainted with the guy who wrote the screenplay. He's a kid from Marin County (well, he was at the time) who also wrote Action Jackson. Not much since, though.

I thought it a bit odd that the San Angeles museum kept live ammunition in its banned weapons display in Demolition Man, but I guess the plot required it. The dystopia in DM was certainly a parodistic nanny state with no violence (it was considered atavistic), no person-to-person sex (only joint brain stimulators), no swearing, and certainly no weapons. One wonders how this happened in a universe in which the Arnold Schwarzenegger presidential library is part of the scenery. What happened?

they're wish fulfillment about a world in which the right gets a legitimate rationale for battling liberalism through brute force.

This is the most accurate observation here by far.

In semi-related news, I have a standing offer to teach any self-proclaimed liberal how to handle and shoot firearms. Seriously. I'm in the Denver area.

Non-right-wing sci-fi authors, too, have depicted "liberal" dystopias: off the top of my head, Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven" (in which a person whose dreams become reality is exploited by a well-wishing scientist who tries to harness his power to create a utopia, with predictably bad side-effects) and "The Dispossessed" (in which an anarchist utopia doesn't quite work out).

That said, your point stands: these works seem intended to make typical understandings of cherished values less naive, rather than to satirize them.

Orson Scott Card's novels, or at least the ones I've read, have always been about wish-fulfillment fantasies of special circumstances in which it's okay to beat people to death, or to judge and control them. This is not to say that, at his best, he doesn't put some complicating mirrors up around the basic premise -- but that's still the basic premise. When is it okay, even good, to be brutal? When can we root for the killer? I have to wonder why a person ever wants to ask this question -- he's eager to do violence but he wants to feel good about it afterward.

Card's biggest novel, _Ender's Game_, is about that, and a lot of its readers over the years have assumed that it can't possibly be as pro-violence as it looks on first sight, and interpreted it as a cautionary tale. No; it's all about kicking the shit out of people.

The big achievement of _Ender's Game_, incidentally, is that it includes the maximum possible amount of boneheaded SF cliches -- bug-eyed monsters, a kid saves the world, a video game that turns out to be real, a special space academy, world government, super-geniuses, etc. -- and in spite of all that provides a rollicking tale, mainly by never breaking its serious face or acknowledging the screaming cliches as cliches.

I guess my points are that you can find right-wing dystopianism going back decades, and that what is screwed up in r.-w. d. is very deeply and creepily screwed up. No wonder the stories make no sense. These folks are not fully okay in the head.

Thanks, Steve Sailor at 10:19 or so, for reminding me of some real, thinking, non-screwed-up conservatives (though I'm not sure all of those people are conservative in the sense being used here). Evelyn Waugh -- now there was a dystopian thinker.

Cakesniffer, you'd be surprised (and gratified) to know the number of "liberals" as well as gays & lesbians here in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville area that have gone and gotten guns, long arms, mainly, and then learned to use them.

All thanks to the wingnuts who keep yelling "kill the liberal scum!", like Michael Weiner Savage. Great job, Savage Weiner, Coulter, et al! You actually scared Liberals into exercising their Second Amendment rights here in the "People's Republic of Massachusetts."

The local weekly 'alternative' newspaper, The Weekly Dig, has had an ad in it for what seems like months, for a local shooting range. "Learn How To Use A Gun!" "No Permits Required!"

Let me tell you, should the "Conservative Revolution" actually come, the local rightard/wingnuts are going to be VERY surprised at the response by the "faggots" and "hippies".

Wasn't "The Turner Diaries" a dystopian tome?

You all remember where that little read got us, donchoo?

A real dystopia of liberalism would be something like Houellebecq - boredom, no real point to life but making money or having sex, angst, pointless and ceaseless travel, extreme sports for no reason, etc.

That would be a lot like Logan's Run, which is a decent example of a "liberal dystopia" -- complete focus on youth, drowning out their days with easy access to sex, and, to top it off, it's all overseen by an overindulgent central computer call "Mother." (at least in the movie-- I haven't read the book)

Wasn't "The Turner Diaries" a dystopian tome?

No, that was absolutely utopian from it's own point of view...

I don't know. There's a whole genre of action movies where the police dept. is a liberal dystopia of annoying rules and regulations, and the hero is defined by his willingness to break them to get the job done. "Demolition Man" is a futuristic incarnation of it.

This leaves open the age old question: do Hollywood Republicans gravitate toward action movies or do action movies turn actors into bad ass Republicans? Either way, the Bush foreign policy is like a bad action movie where the ends never materialize at all. Whether they justify the means is kind of moot.

If it ever came down to armed battle between liberals and conservatives, the liberals would win. Why?

Simple.

The liberals will have the vast majority of the cute-and-geeky girls. (Trust me, I know a lot of cute-and-geeky girls. Two of them are libertarian, the rest are all raging liberals.) Which means they will also have the vast majority of the engineers.

And, as science fiction novel after science fiction novel has pointed out over the decades, you do NOT want to go up against engineers because you will lose every time.

Well, sure, in an armed conflict conservatives would defeat liberals. That's why, when such situations have actually arisen in history, the liberals have turned to the Left for defense. Basic story of every revolution from England (1648) to France to Russia, Spain and Nicaragua, not to mention near-misses in Chile and elsewhere. Hobsbawm is good on this.

(One view of fascism is that it's the opposite case -- liberlaism threatened by the illiberal Left turns to the illiberal Right.)

In the US liberalism is so entrenched we've never really seen this dynamic. But there's been a hint of it in the Civil War period -- John Brown and the like as the cutting edge of liberal defense against the slavocracy -- and in the '30s, when Communists went to the barricades for the New Deal.

This is one of many cases when it's important to recognize that there are three independent poles in modern (post-1789) politics, not two.

Sigh. . . I JUST got the Card book out of the library today, and I find out that he is some kind of right wing nut job. Glad I never actually paid for any of his books.

So now it's Chrichton, Card, and Rosenberg tainting the field of Science Fiction.

A great look at the horrors of a right-wing takeover are shown very nicely in Allen Steele's 'Cyote' series.

Perhaps Mr. Sailer could comment on his friend Jerry Pournelle, who (especially when he writes with Larry Niven) seems to specialize in writing about manly right wingers and techies defending civilization from liberals and lefties run amuck, whether it's the black cannibal army deserters intent on destroying the nuclear power plant/beacon of civilization (!) in Lucifer's Hammer, or the evil environmentalist world government that shuts down civilization and causes an ice age, only to be thwarted by heroic science fiction fanboys in Fallen Angels. As friend and sometime coathor (and liberal African American sf writer) Steven Barnes once said of Pournelle: "Nice guy, but whenever he sees me he always wants to talk about The Bell Curve. It's really creepy."

To be fair, Hank, in Lucifer's Hammer the main black character is fairly sympathetic. He's on the wrong side, but only because he's a pawn of the really evil dude, a crazy Christian preacher. I didn't read Fallen Angels, but I think the environmentalists there are also lined up with Christians crazies. Pournelle is creepy, yes, but not really in step with the contemporary American Right.

Conservatives are fucking gay.

I think armed liberal militias is a seriously fantastic idea. If there's any myth that needs to be demolished, it's the myth of liberal wussiness. Please let me know where I can sign up.

I have a line on an ex-Israeli commando type (with Wobblie leanings) who does hard-core survival training. Anyone in SoCal want to get together and hire him for lessons?

As SomeCallMeTim observes, kudos to Matt for making a serious point by means of Demolition Man. And it didn't even occur to me to object.

To stay with the awful sci-fi movies, I ask Constantine above: If Logan's Run is a liberal dystopia (and I would tend to agree), then wouldn't Brave New World (which I don't think has come up yet in this thread) be one as well? Both do share a trait, the incongruous one which Matt points up, which is that these supposed "liberal" societies are buttressed by a tremendously violent apparatus which enforces order at all costs.

In that sense, these "liberal dystopias" are really a lot more like the Roman "bread and circuses" system. And I don't think anyone would call that "liberal."

You don't want to read any of Pournelle's non-fiction stuff though, he is a wingnut. Sounds like Limbaugh on a bad day. He likes the idea of not allowing people to vote unless they own substantial property. I used to read all of his books. I was really suprised to see some of the stuff the ghostly remainder of Byte magazine let him write. I think he may be senile.

At the end of the day, everybody knows that if it came down to an armed conflict, the conservatives would win.

But who are the conservatives going to get to fight for them? They won't do their own fighting. They never have, never will. And even if they did, would you bet money on Rush Limbaugh in a fight against anybody under 60, male or female?

I'd bet on Franklin Roosevelt (wheelchair and all) over "Dubya" in a fight. FDR was a cripple, but not a coward. Hell, even Eleanor would kick junior's ass.

About Anthony Burgess and his conservatism: he wrote a very odd book called 1985, which I recommend. Or rather I recommend half of it. The first half is a collection of essays, self-interviews, and other non-fiction pieces about Orwell, about dystopia as a genre, and (among other things) about what motivated Burgess in writing A Clockwork Orange. Very interesting, with great digressions like a short piece on the significance of character names, including half a dozen implicit meanings in "Alex". The second half of the book is a dystopian novella about everything Burgess hated in '70s Britain, more or less, and wow does it suck. It's apparently all the fault of the unions and teachers.

Well, see you get to the heart of what the "Goerring Youth" mean when they say "Liberal Media Bias". Portraying the guy who lies, steals, and dumps toxic waste into peoples' basements as a 'Bad Guy' gives away the fact the media HATES profits and therefore HATES Democracy and therefore HATE Freedom and therefore HATES Capitalism and therefore HATES Americans.

True 'Americans' know that guy is really a hero for increasing profits no matter who else has to suffer. True Grit kind of MAN.

True Grit kind of men who never have to sleep around people they abuse. Men who always have a couple of 'assistants' there to obey every order they give, instantly. Men who never run out of food or ammunition.

20th Century creative writers who were overt political conservatives would include:

Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Stoppard, Tom Wolfe, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Burgess, P.G. Wodehouse, V.S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, T.S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Alexander Solzehnitsyn, Walker Percy, and John Updike.

I would imagine that a list of overtly leftist major writers would be several times longer, but that's not a bad little list.

What about H.G. Wells' The Time Machine? The future brings peace and rainbows and happy laughter. Everything looks cheery and everyone's free, and then the morlocks crawl out of the tunnels at night and eat you.

Ender's Game is still one of my favorite books, but I liked Speaker for the Dead more. That's the second book in the series, where the little boy grows up and realizes that no matter why he did it, he still committed genocide. Now all he has is regret and a desire to make sure that everyone else learns from his mistakes, so he founds a religion whose only gods are Truth and Compassion. In that light, Ender's Game becomes less about "when is violence good and necessary," and more about "we all have the potential to cause misery and death, but the price you pay is never worth it."

To SomeCallMeTim:

Watch "Ernest Rides Again". Looked at with the proper "are-they really-doing-this" attitude, it's one of the funniest movies ever made.

I can't, for the life of me, figure out why this movie isn't out on DVD right now: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063783/

An interesting side note about Ender's Game is that Card rewrote the short story as a novel in order to get a protagonist with the background needed for Speaker for the Dead, and as DataShade points out that novel is about why violence is usually not a good solution. The paranoid conservatives would just have wiped out all aliens and never felt any regret. The later stories on Earth with Bean as the protagonist on the other hand are strictly "the end justifies the means".

Anyone read Pournelle's "Oath of Fealty"? It's like 1984 written from the perspective of Big Brother. The police may have cameras in your kitchen, but they are nice police who only do it for your safety, and above all, they are a *private* security force in a company run complex, not from the slimy government.

As for who'd win in an American civil war. Who cares whether conservatives or liberals are best at grabbing a gun? What matters is who controls the Abrams, i.e. how the regular army sides. (In Iraq light militias only work because USA dismantled the army, under Saddam they were crushed on a regular basis)

Jerry Pournelle's books, often written with Larry Niven and/or Steve Barnes, frequently embody a sort of optimistic conservative dystopian sci-fi. The fantasy Burning Tower and the juveniles Birth of Fire and Higher Education all start with a young man in a slum who runs with a gang. The novels tell the stories of how the lads slowly rise above the dysfunctional culture of their 'hoods and learn some middle class adult virtues.

In general, white conservative writers, especially military-oriented realists like Pournelle, do a better job of getting inside the heads of gangbangers than do white liberal writers. To Pournelle, a kid in Compton or Santa Ana isn't much different from a kid who might have enlisted in the Roman Legions or, for that matter, from Jerry when he went off to fight in Korea (he was a teenage artillery officer during the long, bloody retreat from the Yalu River). They all are driven by an intensely masculine logic that's impossible to describe in politically correct terms.

Liberal writers, in contrast, tend to see minority youths mostly as props in their long-running attempts to display their moral superiority over white conservatives. They are often profoundly uneasy about describing exactly what goes on in young men's heads.

Speaking of Jerry Pournelle, the ultimate "makes no sense" conservative dystopia, for me, is the one he co-wrote in which there is no such thing as global warming because humans simply cannot affect the environment so strongly. In which a lesbian enviro-commie government in America cuts back on greenhouse gases, thus precipitating an Ice Age. Not the world cutting back, mind, just the USA alone does it. So what was that bit about how people can't change the climate?

The other "makes no sense" bit is how Pournelle (an old Goldwater fan with no love for the evangelical movement) has the lesbians achieve complete political dominance with the support of the Moral Majority! [head explodes]

I think the major difference between socialist dystopias by American Republicans and by writers by who aren't conservative, or who are, but not the stupid and dishonest kind, is that in the second category, the socialist dystopias are *popular*. People *want* their society to be that way, and only a minority kick against the order. Hence, Vonnegut or Burgess.

The first category are stuck with an iron belief that their right wing views are not only Correct, but are also the views of the overwhelming majority, so they have a harder time convincingly establishing how the Feminazis would achieve the conquest of the USA, despite being stupid, weak, and in a tiny minority.

Lately I have been reading Red State. Don't know why. I rarely leave my hovel which used to be the vault of my local bank but now serves as a sort of bomb shelter, dressing room, radiation free zone where I spend my days mostly trying to keep a record of our journey thru the endless winter of this post nuclear holocaust world and reading the only blogs that still exist, RS and Jesus General. Thank god for that train car of Dinty Moore stew that derailed when the first waves of Venezualan rockets hit the sun belt!

Anyhow I notice that at RS there is still this fascination with all things Lord of the Ringsish and Harry Potteresque. Before the "Big Exchange" I thought this focus was just a pathetic remnant of early male puberty Armageddeon fantasies but when President Bush picked Michael Crichton to be Secretary of Defense in 2007 I should have realized the Dungeon and Dragons crowd had grabbed the levers of government.

Come on, people -- what keeps all these right-wing dystopian pseudo-science-fiction writers madly dropping cheeto-crumbs into their keyboards is that they want to be the next Robert Heinlein. Now, I'm not a big fan of Heinlein (can you say *serious* maternal issues???), the man knew how to put together a book that people would read. He also considered himself a pulp writer for most of his life, meaning that he didn't get paid unless somebody thought they could sell his books, so he learned the value of plot and character. Unfortunately there are a lot of current right-wingers who read Heinlein at about the same time as they read Ayn Rand, which caused some of the rational parts of their brains to atrophy along with Broca's area, thus their ability to reason and to use language is seriously impaired.

What I'm saying is that most of the books in the Rosenberg/LaHaye-Jenkins/Pournelle spectrum rate, as writing, somewhere around the same area as the "Letters" section of Penthouse...and serve somewhat the same purpose.

Some information on our friend, Steve Sailer.

Nice when our cultural critics are white nationalists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_sailer

Actual link, this time.

Steve Sailor,

How many on that list would proudly vote for George W. Bush and Tom Delay?

I have no idea myself, but the point being that actual conservatism is a very different animal than the theoretical.

They are just continuing the tradition of the Turner Diaries.

There's always been a strong libertarian bent in American SF--Heinlein being the progenitor of that strain (unless you count Atlas Shrugged as science fiction, which is fair). And it frequently slides over into wish-fulfillment fantasies of justified violence against various charicatures of liberalism.

In addition to "Lucifer's Hammer," cited above (luddite eco-liberals join up with an army of black cannibals--literally--to try and destroy a nuclear plant, the Last Hope of Civilized Man. Fortunately the techno-savvy pro-nuke guys know how to make mustard gas), a personal fave of mine is Pat Frank's "Alas, Babylon," published in 1959 IIRC.

Ostensibly a grim look at post-WWIII America, but Frank seems mainly interested in showing how a nuclear holocaust might help solve the Race Problem in the South (just heating up when the book was written) and return us all to the infinitely better world of the late-19th century. By the end Dropping the Big One looks like it would work out pretty well for everyone. Well, leaving aside the 3/4 of the world's population that would be incinerated as a kind of unfortunate side effect. But damn if Whitey and Darkie don't learn to get along once that bit of nastiness is behind us. Oddly, Whitey is still in charge, even though Darkie seems to have all the actual resources and know-how. They just seem to naturally accept the White Guy as Leader, even though it's not at all clear what value-added he's contributing, other than his skin color. In spite of all that kind of loony subtext, it's actually quite a fun read.

I will admit to watching Demolition Man on several occasions and enjoying it every time.
Didn't Dan simmons write some screed against Muslims couched in some half-assed time travelling novella on the intratubes? read that about 2 months ago and that was about as big a WTF? moment as I've had in a few years. Seriously, Syracuse and Dhimmitude, WTF?

Personally, I think we need a middle-of-the-road death squad.

"In general, white conservative writers, especially military-oriented realists like Pournelle, do a better job of getting inside the heads of gangbangers than do white liberal writers."
Posted by: Steve Sailer on December 20, 2006 04:23 AM

..golly gee how could anyone know such a thing? does being a neo-darwinist enable you to see inside people's brains? is this skill an example of natural detection?

Walker Percy would be a strange kind of conservative. Love in the Ruins lampoons Republicans (Knotheads) and Democrats (LEFTPAPASANES) alike. Percy doesn't even attempt to resolve political differences but sees them transcended in Christ. He was no friend of the radical left and the liberalism of the 60s, but he apparently had no trouble with FDR's politics: the novel ends with a black friend of his hero resurrecting the Old Rooster wing of the Democratic Party. If all religion is conservative for you, even the Catholic Existentialism of someone like Percy, well, there's nothing to be discussed there.

Percy's narrators and heroes aren't cut-outs for Percy. When some reviewers read Lancelot they read it as mere ventriloquism which was nonsense. The narrator, if you've never read the book, is recovering in a loony bin where he's being held after murdering his wife. As he approaches "sanity" and release from the loony bin, his rhetoric becomes more and more bloodthirsty and unbending. Or vice versa. As he begins to speak more remorselessly, he's getting ready to return to society. More than one reviewer took that to mean that we were hearing Percy's "own" views at that point. Insanity. And stupid. Don't forget "stupid".

Dystopian sci-fi works by conservatives include Anthony Burgess's "Clockwork Orange," Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins," Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (although libertarians, bless 'em, think this is a libertarian utopian novel)

Not sure I'd categorize Stephenson as a "conservative" exactly. Ever read Zodiac? But he does seem to resonate with the techno-geek libertarianism that was the dominant culture on the Internet before the WWW, back in the old BBS and discussion group days, particularly among SF afficionados. (I remember when Ender's Game was the hottest topic outside of LOTR on those old boards, and look where Orson Card is now. Yuck.)

In a course I sometimes teach on Science Fiction (H.G. Wells's term was Scientific Romance, which is more accurate IMO, though archaic-sounding), and we do a section on Comparative Cyberspace: Snow Crash vs Neuromancer. My copy of S.C. is filled with marginal scrawls as a result, and when my wife got it signed by Stephenson when he was keynote speaker at a tech conference, he wrote "Stop writing in my book!" Got a soft spot for the guy, even if I don't know if I'd share all his political views. But he does seem to work pretty hard at keeping you off-balance when you think you've got him categorized.

Speaking of Jerry Pournelle, the ultimate "makes no sense" conservative dystopia

Pournelle wrote a book in which humanoid elephants attack us by throwing big rocks at us. I read the reviews (positive) so I read the book. I was in my 30s and it's an embarrassment to me to have gotten that far into life without realizing that really, really, really stupid people can review books.

I think what you're seeing here is just a market response to the lack of legitimate dystopias to project from modern conditions.

The well-executed dystopias were the flip-side of millennarian thinking. A writer would look at an idealistic movement or meme and imagine how fucked up the world would become if it actually achieved its goals. Brave New World is a dystopia of Progress; 1984 is a dystopia of state socialism and the cult of personality; etc.

The problem is that in our postmodernist world today, there really are no millennarian movements to perform the reductio on any more. Other than fundamentalist Christianity, which is self-satirizing. Without idealists dreaming of Progress, there's no reason to write Brave New World. In a culture where all such narratives have collapsed, there are no dystopias - no legitimate or plausible dystopias, anyway - to write about. The best one can do is to try to write a dystopia where the premises of postmodernism are themselves the problem, a la The Matrix.

But since people like to read dystopic fiction, the market still perceives an appetite to fill. The lack of legitimate or plausible dystopias creates a market opportunity for illegitimate, implausible, absurd dystopias. "Jihad Comes to the US" and variants on that idea would fit into this category. It's stupid and makes no sense, and on some level even the consumers of this nonsense know it's stupid and makes no sense, but if they're willing to buy the books the publishers are willing to acquire and sell them.

People here clearly don't know much about civil war. Okay, first Tanks aren't a magic bullet that make you win wars. They are generally structurally weak at the top, and we have plenty of technical and material capabilities for creating primitive, conventionally tipped rockets. If that won't work, they run on treads and are severely disabled if blown off them. Finally, by destroying the highway system (With planes or Helicopters, both of which are fairly plentiful in this country) we can force either force them to seperate their heavy armor from their light vehicles, or force them both to crawl at a snails pace. Finally, tanks have difficulty operating in dense forests and mountinous regions, and in this country we have several of both.

As this would be a regional struggle and not an ethnic one, the Army is unlikely to move en masse and select only one side. The Republicans will get most of the Officer corps, but the enlisted will likely fight for whatever state they lived in before the war. NCO's are a plenty capable of assuming the duties of Commisioned officers. The national gaurd also exists, and it will fight for whatever state their unit belongs to. so we will have a sizeable supply of military equipment even if the regular army does turn on us. We're a country of 300,000,000 people, generally at least a 1/3rd will choose each side in a civil war so that's a pool of 100,000,000 people from which to draw recruits on both sides. Those extra army troops and that equipment won't really go that far either way.

There are a number of other factors, paramilitary groups attacking enemy civilians, the chance that our side might get munitions from an international community terrified of a militant neo-conservative movement, and the fact that most conservatives I know talk big but refuse to fight when challenged. They aren't that tough.

One thing that always amuses me when these discussions break out is how fast everyone is to ascribe to professional writers of fiction the thoughts and motivations of their characters. Or as Harrison Ford put it, "Why are you asking me questions about politics? I am not the President; I just play him in movies".

Yes, over time some authors put themselves into their characters; some even change themselves to become their characters. On the other hand, people change over time as well. By the end of his life Heinlein was becoming a paranoid reactionary to be sure, but thoughout most of his career as a guy who put bread on the table cranking out words he would have had no problem taking an assignment from the Daily Worker this week and the John Birch Society next week - and he would have done a workmanlike job for both clients.

Cranky

I think there is a bit of conflation of terms going on here. The fact that someone may satirizes "liberal" ideas in a science fiction format doesn't make the work in question right wing or even conservative. Case in point: 1984. Despite repeated right wing attempts to highjack this classic, the fact remains that Orwell, as a man of the left committed to a libertarian vision of socialism, was writing a critique of left totalitarianism from the left. This is an explicit theme in 1984 where he is at pains to have Winston Smith repeatedly opine that "If there is any hope at all, it lies with the proles." Hardly the right wing agenda.

As for Huxley's Brave New World, while it certainly contains much that might be described as conservative attitudes, the only character who actually subscribes to a full set of "conservative" values winds up committing suicide when he discovers that he can't live up to his espoused values. Likewise, while there is much about Huxley's imagined future that people might tag as liberal, sexual promiscuity, drug use, etc., I doubt that the notion of a biologically engineered caste system could be described as such. I don't imagine that a society which worships Henry Ford ("Cleanliness is next to Fordliness." matches up well with liberal opinion either. It's also an interesting irony to consider that Huxley, who attacked drugs as a means of social control in Brave New World, ended up as an early and influential proponent of the use of LSD and other psychedelics (see: The Doors of Perception.)

Of course this isn't to say that there aren't plenty of examples of right wing pamphleteering masquerading as science fiction out there. Niven and Pournelle are neither the first nor the last. However, attempting to lump them and the authors of murderous wish fufillment fantasies of anihilating "liberals" in with the likes of Huxley and Burgess strikes me as an excercise in incoherence. The former are intent on a political agenda and their books operate like clockwork mechanisms, moving robotically to predetermined conclusions. The latter two authors are interested in far more than parlor politics and are under no illusion that the complexities of their works can be reduced to a question of correct or incorrect ideas, much less ideologies.

For me the outstanding feature of the current spate of hackwork (How else can you describe books that posit an alliance between "liberalism" and reactionary Islamicism?)is their loose grasp of political definitions. What sort of "liberalism" could reconcile itself to a totalitarian state structure? Certainly not a Liberalism that advances individual rights or defends free religious or political expression. A Liberalism that is hostile to concentrations of economic or political power would seem to be antithetical to totalitarianism as well.

I'd say that these kinds of books are largely a reflection of the political confusion of their authors, which in turn mirrors the confusion in society at large. The Liberalism they attack is largely identical the chimeras tilted at by right wing radio gas bags. It resembles nothing so much as the mythological beasts found in Medieval beastiaries which combined attributes of several distinct species in one impossible form.

How, exactly, could a political doctrine that espouses social, ethnic and cultural diversity be reconciled with the totalitarian principle which is, by definition, hostile to these very elements? The short answer is that it can't. Totalitarianism, in any practical sense, is a doctrine that holds that society and everyone in it must be subject to a single totalizing principle or set of principles. Its hallmarks are enforced regimentation and conformity. This is why the State is central to the totalitarian project. By definition any political doctrine that embraces diversity and democratic contention, not to mention a opposition to entrenched institutional power, is hostile to the totalitarian impulse.

The totalitarian impulse is not the product of any particular modern ideology. It exists in embryo in the conception of the state itself. Particularly in the notion of the nation state. Its kernal resides in the notion that the state can operate as an institutional expression of a homogenous national/ethnic polity. The totalitarianisms of the 20th century were the products of this impulse rather than its originators. The only innovation that such movements produced was the idea that the state could be based on an imposed political identity rather than the traditional ethnic and cultural standbys of the past. As anyone who has studied Soviet history can attest this innovation was more apparent than real.

Here, I believe, we can began to discern how the notion of "totalitarian liberalism" is manufactured. It comes down to the superficial elevation of form over substance. In order to make their imaginative clockworks run, the hackworks above, like the right wing radio commentariat, have to ignore the sociological and historical substance of totalitarianism in favor of a puerile and self serving focus on ideological forms. This childish simplicity leads them to argue that Totalitarianism is, by definition, left wing. That Fascism and Nazism were actually left wing movements. That despots such as Augusto Pinochet or Francisco Franco were actually avatars of liberty as compared to Salvador Allende or Andreas Nin. Like the Bolsheviks, Nazis and Fascists before them, they argue that a crime committed in the service of "right principles" is no crime at all, whereas any action in service of "wrong principles" is ipso facto criminal. Included in the latter category of criminality are democratic elections if they result in the elevation of a Hugo Chavez.

In short, anything to the left of their own narrow views is labeled totalitarian.

Do they actually believe this? Sad to say, I think they do.

"...we can force..."

"The Republicans will get most of the Officer corps, but the enlisted will likely fight..."

"The national gaurd...will fight ..."

Any particular reason you're using the indicative mood?

"I think the best job is probably done in Demolition Man in which we see a kind of public health totalitarianism"

How about "California Uber Alles" by the Dead Kennedys?

From having read several of their collaborations (as well as taking several long hits off the crack pipe that is Mary Sue Harrington), I think that dissing liberals is the least troubling thing about a Niven/Pournelle teamup. What really bothers me is the total and utter lack of respect for civilians. Any and all civilians, who are at best useful as innocent victims and a tax base for the Military.

Re: Card's biggest novel, _Ender's Game_, is about that, and a lot of its readers over the years have assumed that it can't possibly be as pro-violence as it looks on first sight, and interpreted it as a cautionary tale. No; it's all about kicking the shit out of people.

Hope I'm not spoiling it for anyone, but Ender's Game had a suprisingly liberal ending (with sequals): the bug-eyed monsters turned out to be innocent victims, and the government was simply using the war against them as a means of increasing its own power. When the hero realized the immense crime he had assisted in, he ended up spending the three or four sequals seeking to atone for it, ultimately helping resolve a serious species conflict on another planet and restore the decimated bug-eyed monster species.

Re; Anyhow I notice that at RS there is still this fascination with all things Lord of the Ringsish and Harry Potteresque.

I don't know that either of these works qualify as conservative. Tolkien (who died over thirty years ago, and wrote LOTR long before that) is all over the map relative to contemporary politics: monarchy-worship on one hand, and some pretty fierce environmentalism and anti-capitalism on the other: there's a good reason the old Hippies idolized those books. Potter doesn't seem to have any political view at all (And the Religious Right does hate all that witchcraft and magic of course).

> What really bothers me is the total and utter
> lack of respect for civilians. Any and all
> civilians, who are at best useful as innocent
> victims and a tax base for the Military.

I don't live in a college dorm anymore, and I don't want to get into a discussion where it appears I am defending people I don't actually care to defend. So this won't be very detailed or thoughtful.

It isn't hard to come to the conclusion that Pournelle is a hard right proto-fascist. And I won't tell anyone who does that they are wrong. But there are two bumps in that theory; one within his body of fiction and one in his political essays.

In his essays, Pournelle claims that he was driven out of the Tennessee Democratic Party for the crime of being too liberal, particularly with regards to race. And then driven out of the California Democratic Party for the crime of being too conservative, particularly on defense and economics. But that as far as he can tell his politics didn't change from one state to the other. Take that as you will, but it is something to consider. Also, he consistently argues that the US needs to implment some form of protectionism and tarrifs to ensure that there are decent middle-class jobs for all members of society including those who have no capability/desire to go to college and do "work of the mind". A bit of a 1950ish way of thinking, but not exactly in step with Dick Cheney and the Gilded Age'ers either.

Within his work, I tend to think that the "Colonel Falkenberg" character speaks most closely for Pournelle himself (keeping my earlier caveat in mind). And yeah, the guy runs around the known universe machine-gunning marxist revolutionaries.

Except - the setting is that every intelligent person in the Earth empire knows that Earth is going to descend into civil war. And that when that happens the rest of the colonies will deteriorate into a dark ages due to lack of self-sufficiency. Neither of which are implusible theories to my mind. And for me the crucial point comes when the Falkenberg character, having just finished breaking the back of the local marxists, pins the new President against the wall and says something like "You can't live with yourself? _I_ just killed 20,000 innocent misguided people because you politicians couldn't manage your own simple straightforward colony. So you called on the military for help. But all the military can do is kill and destroy. I killed and destroyed enough to give you a second chance, set the whole thing up so that legend will put the blame on me, made sure you were clean out of it - and YOU are telling ME you can't live with yourself??"

Which is a thought that W Bush, Cheney, and Wolfowitz would do well to consider IMHO.

Cranky

Ishmael Reed's The FreeLance Pallbearers written in the '60's and said by some to be a satire of the Johnson Administration HarrySam the man in charge was so full of feces he never left the bathroom stall,can be called a vision of a dystopia by a a Black male author who took the outsiders view to paper and described a nutcase society more attuned to full bellied materialism than the freedoms their leaders said they had. The "colored" hero Rudy Doopeyduk always comes to mind whenever white pundits of whatever party start singing the praises of the Obamas, Fords, Steeles, Watts,as signs of their parties big tent a nicer way of saying politics is a big circus and come see our nice approachable Ubangi men. As for the rightwingers their heroic fantasy/scifi fiction tend to either be Robert E. Howard Big Brawny Barbarian types swaggering and slashing their way through decadent civilizations,militarised StarShip Trooperish, Babylon Five scorched planet sagas, catered to a market that fueled Soldier of Fortune magazine rise, survivalist-gunshow groupies, and fundamentalists/Dominionists who wish to be the next Joshua. It's when these people start enacting their fantasies like Timothy McVeigh that they and their literary instigators should be looked at with more than a dismissive glance.

JonF,
Just want to point out that the last Harry Potter book (I have an 8 year old daughter who is a huge fan), the viewpoint espoused by Harry and Professor Dumbledore as well as the other characters are definitely anti-Bush. Indeed, Harry takes a strong stance against the Minister of Magic who has imprisoned a wizard with no trial or evidence to back up the assertion the wizard is connected to the Death Eaters. I wish more elected Democrats would steal Harry's lines and make the same speech regarding Guantanomo.

Del C:

Speaking of Jerry Pournelle, the ultimate "makes no sense" conservative dystopia, for me, is the one he co-wrote in which there is no such thing as global warming because humans simply cannot affect the environment so strongly. In which a lesbian enviro-commie government in America cuts back on greenhouse gases, thus precipitating an Ice Age.

Did you notice that Reynolds describes this as his personal favorite?

No mention yet of Left/Right elements in A Canticle for Liebowitz, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, or Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia.

I would elaborate, but am under employer surveillance.

This makes "Darkness at Sunset and Vine" look cheerful.

All the conservatives I know are incredibly soft, and would get real cranky if they had to go a few days w/o a hot shower, meat, or Diet Coke, or give up their leather-wrapped, chrome-encrusted SUVs. The real liberals could go days w/o electricity, read for entertainment, and grow facial hair gladly.

The blather of telegenic idiots like Glenn Reynolds reflects their desperation and lunancy more than anything else. Facing the shards of their shattered control of Congress and the looming debt of blood and dollars wrought by Lil' Boots, they have nothing else to sell but fear--and more and more good citizens aren't buying today. They realize that they have lives to lead, children to raise, house payments to make, aging parents to worry about, etc., and they now know that most conservatives don't have any solutions.

If they want a civil war, let them fire the first shot. But they will regret it deeply.

Carnacki: Just want to point out that the last Harry Potter book (I have an 8 year old daughter who is a huge fan), the viewpoint espoused by Harry and Professor Dumbledore as well as the other characters are definitely anti-Bush.

Well, and then there are all those bumperstickers around that read "Republicans for Voldemort." A fairly pointed satire: conservatism ever yearns for aristocracy

I have always read Ender's game (the novel) as a liberal comment on Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

People who can't dream up a plausible liberal dystopia aren't trying very hard, whether they're conservative hacks or credulous liberals.

For example, applify the tendency to allege various forms of false consciousness - you see it fairly strong already in the public heath movement and in liberal discussions of why people are conservatives. Combine this with the tendency to make disagreement a psychopathology (you see this in Lakoff's writings, the psychiatrist questionnaires about Goldwater, an most recently a "study" purporting to link psychopathy with voting Republican, etc), you get a rationale for creating a totalitarian technocracy motivated by good intentions but brutal in practice. The government doesn't try to hurt dissidents - it helps them overcome their own mental problems to see the obvious truth that the government experts are right. And some stubborn cases may require involuntary commitment, but it's for their own good. The public's doubts are assuaged by "reformed" subjects who say how glad they are that they finally see the light and thank the government for the tough love they needed and the technocrats who have to cover up the nasty details of rationalize their doubts by the necessity of maintaining public trust in the system, aided by the fact that if they were to admit that the system were wrong, they'd have to admit to themselves that they were hurting those they purport to help.

See - not hard.

Sly:

Yet strangely, Tim McVeigh was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a vision of a atheist, post-materialist utopia where everyone seems to serve in the military and have lots of middlebrow hobbies.

FMguru totally nails it up top - what's the point of hoarding weapons and canned goods for years if the apocalypse isn't actually going to occur? And I think the idea of a "clean slate" is most of the appeal of "Atlas Shrugged". Simply the myth of the the "fesh start on the American Frontier" writ large.

MattXIV also has his finger on a very real strain of thought. I am currently corresponding with a very intelligent, well-educated person who opposes the health care bill recently submitted in the Senate. Why? Because it has premium discounts if you complete a wellness program. And this is horrible because? "Just wait - eventually every aspect of your life will be regulated by Big Nanny Healthcare Plan - for your own good!"

attXIV also has his finger on a very real strain of thought. I am currently corresponding with a very intelligent, well-educated person who opposes the health care bill recently submitted in the Senate. Why? Because it has premium discounts if you complete a wellness program. And this is horrible because? "Just wait - eventually every aspect of your life will be regulated by Big Nanny Healthcare Plan - for your own good!"

I don't think that's it at all. Notice the scare quotes around "study". After Lancet I and II the scales have dropped from my eyes regarding how many people either don't understand elementary stats or have some sort doublethink ability to understand their chances to win the lottery or how the neilson ratings are arrived at and at the same time figure out some reason other things don't apply. It's math. Yeah, yeah, lies, damn lies and statistics, but if you don't know how to read the data or worse just disregard it when you disagree without knowing why (and that means knowing) it's pathetic.

He's pissy that psychopaths vote republican. It was sound data. Drawing a conclusion based on this that people who vote republican are psychopaths has an obvious logical flaw, but he didn't attack that, he attacked statistics.

Ed is right. Just as the data showing that felons favor democrats doesn't not imply that most democrats are felons.

Thomas Disch's novel/anthology 334 is sort of a liberal dystopia, and it's an underappreciated classic - dark, deadpan satire of a future New York City ruled by apathetic social workers and public health eugenicists, divided between TV-addled welfare proles and a ditzy professional class, all soaked in drugs and free porn. At least as grim as Brave New World, but a lot closer to home and a bit more humane: it's a pretty awful picture, but the people are just people getting by. Unlike Brave New World, it's written entirely from the perspective of the future citizens (no token modern moral guy) and their tunnel vision is pretty much the same as ours - there seems to be an endless Vietnam-like war going on somewhere in the Third World but no one is paying much attention.

(Disch is an odd, cantankerous character, not a right-winger by any means - there's a plausible version of a fundy-business-fascist Midwest in his later novel On Wings of Song - but sometimes teeth-grindingly contrarian in a Kingsley Amis style, and lately he's taken to trolling his own blog with weird screeds about "Islamis".)

Nitpicking about some earlier comments:
- Greg: your description of "The Lathe of Heaven" is odd. The anarchist utopia "doesn't quite work out" in some ways, but it still beats the hell out of the Earth-like societies on its home planet, and the book concludes that you just need to stay engaged with the revolution because people are imperfect.
- Thomas: Pournelle wrote "Oath of Fealty" with Larry Niven, and although it sure is creepy (you forgot to mention the nasty hippie eco-terrorists who seem to have modeled themselves on the SLA) I don't think it really has an anti-government theme; it doesn't try to deny that the building management is basically a government, it just says it's OK because the residents choose to live that way. Pournelle is a lot more of a classic wingnut than Niven, who (in his fiction at least) tends to portray a more-or-less liberal capitalist U.N. world government, and social permissiveness, as inevitable good things.

***
I frequently ask right-wingers how, exactly, are the "Islamofacsists" going to take over America.
***

How about this?

We all know that white, heterosexual males want to re-establish the racist patriarchy that used to run the West. We also know that there is a big loophole in the current rule of political correctness and multiculturalism. That is, if you are a Muslim you are allowed to be a misogynistic, violent, racist, homophobe whose worldview is based on antiquated myths. In fact, being a misogynistic, violent, racist, homophobe is just one more form of "diversity" to be celebrated if you are Muslim.

So, evil white heterosexual males simply begin to convert to Islam in massive numbers. Support for their racist, sexist, and homophobic ideas swells because liberals think that they are supporting multiculturalism which we all know is a good thing. Before the liberals know it, all the evil white heterosexual males in the country have converted and re-imposed their reign of terror on the country. Homosexuals are publicly executed, women are forbidden from appearing in public unless they are prostitutes or with a male escort, women and non-Muslims are banned from many professions.

There is now an Islamofascist dictatorship in the USA and the evil, white patriarchy is restored.

Mat didn't post the best part about that op-ed where Card says "Repetition makes even insanity sound normal." Pot, meet Kettle.

Card seems to have a well developed sense of empathy, but apparently despises it. I'd hate to see his shrink bills.

Right,left,whatever. Dead's dead. Read "The Iron Heel" by Jack London (1908)

I really wanted to like The Iron Heel, but I couldn't get through the damn thing and I couldn't keep a straight face past the first few pages. The premise is decent, but in style and characterization it reads exactly like a mirror image of Ayn Rand. The hero's name is Ernest Everhard; that says a lot.

(Also, modern lefties may find London's style of socialism a bit off-putting, when he gets to the part about how huge monopoly corporations are actually a *good* thing, because then we can take them over in a good cause and avoid all that inefficient local decision-making...)

"A real dystopia of liberalism would be something like Houellebecq - boredom, no real point to life but making money or having sex, angst, pointless and ceaseless travel, extreme sports for no reason, etc."

Something like Iain Banks' Culture novels.

Iain M. Banks' Culture is practically a utopia. Banks is just honest enough to show that some people will never be happy with that.

But no oppression, little coercion... In Consider Phlebas you even see that cults aren't even persecuted--just given the distance they desire, as long as all participants are willing. Banks' novels show how a form of anarchic materialism could work as a large civilization. The cost might be high, but that doesn't make it a dystopia, any more than limited dissatisfaction makes our own world a dystopia.

I just finished reading the Niven/Pournelle novel Footfall and man was it sock full of jabs at liberals. Characters mutter about the liberals every 50 pages or so and then of the two characters described as liberal: One is removed from power and the last we see of the other he's lamenting his opposition to industry and nuclear power as that might have saved everyone from the aliens. The novel was a bit stinky but not for these reasons, this part was just funny. I wonder which writer is the right-winger..? Maybe both.

This is a list of web hosting providers (WHP) and internet service provider (ISP) that had included AWStats in their services (When someone reported to me a such provider i add it in this list with the LogFormat parameter value required to make AWStats work).

I just finished reading the Niven/Pournelle novel Footfall and man was it sock full of jabs at liberals. Characters mutter about the liberals every 50 pages or so and then of the two characters described as liberal: One is removed from power and the last we see of the other he's lamenting his opposition to industry and nuclear power as that might have saved everyone from the aliens. The novel was a bit stinky but not for these reasons, this part was just funny. I wonder which writer is the right-winger..? Maybe both.........

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