The motto of the Republican National Convention was "Country First." Some people online are pointing out that this bears a resemblance to the name of the "America First" anti-war movement during World War Two, a movement that attracted Nazi and Fascist sympathizers. Indeed, America First's most prominent spokesman was known Hitler admirer Charles Lindburgh.

Moreover, the idea that a person's nation should come before everything else—that is, that the needs of the people should be essentially subordinate to the needs of the state—is a cornerstone of Fascist ideology. As Jim Henley points out, "There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your 'country.'"

Not to mention that rows of pasty white men with crew cuts throwing their hands in the air and chanting the name of their country, as we saw at the RNC, has certain, shall we say, precedents.

This is beautiful.

Via

Another reviewer receives a free issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is disappointed. This after, my own recent review of a different issue found it lacking.

It's clear to me at least that the editor of the magazine is hopelessly out-of-touch and, in general, may simply have poor taste. For good SF stories read instead:

Farrago's Wainscott
Clarkesworld
A Fly in Amber
Strange Horizons

All of which are free on the Internet.

Last night in Minnesota, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin delivered possibly the most vile, hate filled, and repulsive political statement by a major American figure I have seen in my lifetime. Certainly there have been more vile speeches, but in all honestly I feel like I would need to reach for pro-slavery democrats, pro-segregation dixiecrats, or actual card carrying eugenics supporters in order to find something worse. And those special cases are too extreme and hyperbolic to carry the full weight of the comparison I would like to make. Perhaps the best comparison would be to the extremist views that Pat Buchanan regularly brought before the Republican party back when he was making his various unsuccessful runs at the Presidential nomination. Even in that case however, Buchanan was always recognized as a fringe player who represented the most extreme segment of his party. Sarah Palin, by securing the VP nomination, is apparently right where the Republican party thinks it should be. And that, dear readers, is fucking scary.

Via

That was the greatest speech I've ever seen at a political convention.

That guy really needs to be president.

For a while now NPR has been quietly (so to speak) podcasting Symphony Space's Selected Shorts series in New York, where actors read short stories on stage. Here's some highlights for your listening pleasure:

John Updike

Philip K. Dick

Michael Chabon

Wet Asphalt favorite Brian Evenson

Italo Calvino

Stanza, the ebook reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch that I blogged about previously, finally has a program that allows you to transfer books from a Windows machine to your device. (Previously, only a Mac version existed.) The program installed much more cleanly than that of rival BookShelf's, and I moved a PDF book from my computer to my iPod Touch wirelessly with very little trouble.

Stanza is clearly the best ebook reader for the device, there is just no contest anymore.

Also, I discovered that the service Stanza uses for public domain/creative commons ebooks is called FeedBooks and can also be used with the Kindle, Sony Reader and other ebook/PDA type devices. The formatting is designed for these sorts of devices so the books render better than those from Project Gutenberg. (Though Gutenberg still has the much larger library. Fortunately, Gutenberg books can be read on the iPhone and iPod Touch using Stanza.)

So with Joe Biden, Obama has not only picked someone who makes an art of putting his foot in his mouth -- anyone remember “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”? He's also someone who is an enemy of net neutrality and is best buddy to the idiotic and suicidal MPAA.

So, yeah, not that happy about this. Still, better Obama/Biden than McCain/anybody.

Nick Harkaway's new novel The Gone Away World may have its problems. Its weirdness is sometimes too self-conscious, in a way common to first-time writers, throwing together as he does ninjas, monsters, mimes and other oddities. His view of corporations, around which much of the book hinges, is naive and simplistic; corporations in The Gone Away World are uniformly and inherently dehumanizing and evil without variation or exception, and the hierchy of their employees can be measured in exactly how dehumanized and evil they've become. Yet, whatever its faults, this is exactly the kind of novel I want to read. There's a temptation to call the novel cross-genre, as it mixes both science fiction and fantasy elements (to the extent that they can be distinguished or even defined) with a "literary fiction" sensibility (to the extent that that exists or can be defined). However, cross-genre for me brings to mind someone deliberately taking bits of two genres and joining them together-- the SF detective novel, the literary urban fantasy novel, the paranormal romance and so on. The Gone Away World doesn't so much do that as ignore genre boundaries all together; things happen according to the internal logic of the book, and not because of some loose system of conventions hobbled together over the decades. In the end, he creates something like a map of the human psyche, populated by freakish embodyments of friendship, fear and love.

I'm intentionally avoiding a plot summary because any one I gave would spoil the many twists and turns of the narrative. All you really need to know is that this is a book which is highly entertaining and also contains depth of character and elements of social commentary and satire. It is at turns fun and serious, wacky and emotionally tough, and is representative of a new kind of fiction gradually emerging, a fiction which knows no boundaries.