Raven Onthill

Campbell was an awful crank, but he was also a brilliant editor. I'm not sure that SF would have existed at all without him.

(And don't forget Kay Tarrant.)

(And what if Stanley G Weinbaum had lived?)

Both in the UK and the USA, we have to begin to avoid policing.

i think it's cool that the existence of Zohran Mamdani is clearly driving the Vice President insane

Is the revolution going to be led by medical researchers?

I think it will be every major city. It isn't only anti-Black racism at work; cities are pluralistic centers.

I never was able to read Fromm—his Freudianism makes him difficult for me—but this sounds correct.

Steal these books.

to borrow from a story about Winston Churchill:

X: BlueSky, you're insufferable!

Bluesky: You're a Nazi. In the future, I might not be insufferable. But you will always be a Nazi

We regard this as unconscionable when North Korea does it; it should be no less when Israel does it.

Editor: Sorry to cut this short, but the venture capital firm that just bought us needs the chair I’m sitting in for scrap metal.

I wrote this book so people will have receipts showing US homelessness policy is inhumane and also Ronald Regan's fault, and to make people give a shit about homeless kids while seeing the hope, community, and fire with which we survive, despite all this

linktr.ee/nowordforwater

There have been immigrants everywhere, always. Why are they suddenly a threat?

Of course, that makes Rowling part of the modern canon.

Sigh.

Louis XIV had better taste.

The air traffic control system is coming apart, completing the decay that began when Reagan broke the controllers union. It's like when Trump was elected all the people who were working so hard to keep things together just…relaxed and everything is falling apart. "First slowly, then all at once."

every single appointee an absolute perversion. if the U.S. were a church, this admin would be a Black Mass.

As far as I am concerned we are 25 years late.

Let him concede his senate seat.

The National Guard also are not Street cops. We're going to have a lot of people trying to be police in Washington DC and none of them know how to be police.

Or perhaps le feu.

Missouri needs regime change.

And look where we have arrived. There were authors who predicted a backlash—Heinlein!— but I don't think anyone foresaw this ignominious surrender.

It was a much more optimistic future when the classics were written. Space travel was just beginning, no one knew just how harsh the inner planets were, and there was hope that technology would lead to a better future. There were also dystopian works but overall SF was an optimistic literature.

The standard history is Mahon's *History of the militia and National Guard*.

I wrote up a short history a while back, here. You don't have to believe my history; I cite sources, you can read them. There's also a fair bit of legal literature on this if you really want to dig, as well as a great deal of blither.

The various states ended up declaring that most of the male population was part of the "unorganized militia," which had no duties. The militia was finally regulated into the National Guard in the 1903 Dick Act and there were several subsequent laws.

The term was coined by Fletcher in 1698 and by that he meant a universal draft; "well regulated" in the sense of regular military. The founders actually legislated that universal draft in the 1792 militia acts but it was a deeply resented obligation and it didn't make strategic sense. It withered.

Thank you. And thank you for reading!

I think at this point we have to start saying something like, "this isn't the future we dreamed of, but it's the future we've got. How do we live in it?" I'm not sure how much science fiction is adopting this attitude.

FBI agents are not trained to patrol streets. And every agent that is assigned to do that is NOT investigating:

*foreign spies stealing gov’t and trade secrets
*foreign and domestic terrorist threats
*crimes like fraud, corruption, trafficking, and violent crimes (among others)

Do you feel safer?