It’s American exceptionalism.
If there are going to be mass shootings, we will have the biggest and the best.
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I guess I’m thinking something along the lines of a mass breakdown of cognitive ability.
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That too.
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I keep seeing attempts to blame anti-fascists and/or false flag operatives for each attack.
To his credit, Buttigieg is willing to call it “homegrown white supremacist terrorism,” and the centrists are afraid he’ll crack down.
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Good luck, Mexico.
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Have we talked about Stand on Zanzibar before?
John Brunner’s novels are barely science fiction anymore
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Holy crap that’s prescient.
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mass murders are so common they’re covered between sports and weather on the news
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a cranky old comedian is considered an influential thought leader by mainstream society
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huge numbers of people rely on a private computer company to do much of their thinking for them
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his “shockwave rider” was the first cyberpunk book ever written, and “the sheep look up” was one of the first global warming environmental dystopias.
just don’t read anything other than those three. he was a pulp writer who was, for most of his career, probably paid by the word. i don’t think any of his pulp books were even edited.
yet still, somehow, he wrote three amazingly spot on novels. how’d you do it john?
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I haven’t read The Jagged Orbit but people usually lump it together with those other three
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thanks for the tip! i think i actually have a copy of that… somewhere. just haven’t read it yet
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George Carlin?
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no, he’s influential, but not cranky.
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The closest real-world analogue is probably Bill Maher.
Of course, Brunner couldn’t quite imagine people like Carlin and Maher and Bill Hicks and Jon Stewart being influential commentators, the Gore Vidals and William F. Buckleys of our era, so the guy in Stand on Zanzibar is a sociologist who talks like a comedian.
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We must’ve been listening to two different Carlins. He was pretty damned cranky, if not downright curmudgeonly, near the end of his life, and especially right after his wife died.
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And he no doubt has no idea who Will Rogers and Fred Allen were.
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well, that would make anyone cranky. i thought you were meaning just in general, over their entire public life. when i think of someone who’s a cranky old comedian, i think of, i dunno, Lewis Black – but that’s his schtick, too.
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Go Mexico!!
I would prefer George to the current occupant of the White House.
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Ouch. I’m sure Carlin was insulted many times in his career, but I can’t believe that he was ever damned that harshly with faint praise.
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“Just as much swearing, immensely better policies and decision-making.”
Better?
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