I am concerned about one thing, above all, understanding how and why humanity escaped (at last) from its old, vicious cycle of feudalism and began a tremendous enlightenment. One that included vital things like science, democracy, human rights and science fiction. I’ve come to see that openness — including openness to free-flowing criticism — has been the key. Secrecy is the thing that makes every evil far worse. And it is especially pernicious when practiced by the mighty. But the real irony is inside the sci fi community. The trend toward feudal-romantic fantasy may seem harmless. But dreaming wistfully about kings and lords and secretive, domineering wizards is simply betrayal. Pure and simple. Those bastards were the enemy for 6,000 years. Some kings and wizards were less bad than others. But they were all “dark lords.” We are the heirs of the greatest heroes who ever lived. Pericles, Franklin, Faraday, Lincoln, Einstein. Any one of whom was worth every elf and dragon and fairy ever imagined. David Brin ☀
If we’re more opposed, for instance, to what we take to be ‘bad language’ and nude scenes and films about gay people than we are to people being blown up, starved to death, deprived of life-saving medicine, or tortured, our offendedness is out of whack. David Dark ☀
I’m of the opinion that Martin Luther King Jr. will probably be remembered as the greatest American who ever lived, the one whose prophetic posture toward the land of his sojourn helped usher in an America worthy of celebration. He loved the hope of America enough to refuse to worship it. He was determined to mine the open-ended language of the Constitution for all it might be worth. King embodies an evangelical tension, a tension that gets glossed over when people get worked up over American flag lapel pins. In the rush to claim affiliation with King’s brand, it is often overlooked that the same King whose gravesite is featured in presidential photo ops passed his final moments in a Memphis hotel room working on a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell”. David Dark ☀
Pervert is a verb, and we do it all the time. To pervert is to degrade, to cut down to size — and we do it to people in our minds. We devalue them. We reduce them to the limitations of our appetites, of our sense of what might prove useful to us, of our sense of what strikes us as appropriate. When we think of a person primarily as a problem, a potential buyer, a VIP, a celebrity, or an undocumented worker, we’re reducing them to the tiny sphere of our stunted attention span. This is how perversion works. Perversion is a failure of the imagination, a failure to pay adequate attention. David Dark ☀
The moment those reporters granted anonymity to the government sources attacking Valerie Plame, American journalism took the side of the powerful figures against non-powerful figures - and exposed the transformation of the media to the public. Between the Plame affair and the willingness of of the media to transcribe Bush administration lies about Iraq WMD, we now know that in the dark, shadowy places where news is reported, many major reporters no longer see their job as questioning and challenging power - they see their job as aiding and abetting it against those who dare to ask questions. Whistleblowers and truth-seekers of America beware: that old friend of yours known as the media has now been infiltrated by your enemy. David Sirota ☀
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