thoughts and opinions by author s. andrew swann
S Andrew Swann | November 1, 2010
1. You can be a moderate, and be to the left of Barack Obama. 2. Calling for the death of novelists? No problem. 3. CBS couldn’t estimate the attendance at a three-year old’s birthday party. 4. Comedy Central does message control and suppression of the press better than some third-world governments. 5. Apparently Jon Stewart’s [...]
S Andrew Swann | October 28, 2010
NPR was wrong because they did not afford him freedom of speech. They did it in a way that was unfair. The context was he was arguing with Bill O’Reilly, saying why he should not be so virulently anti-Muslim … It reminded me so much of the case with Shirley Sherrod. They jumped so quick. … [...]
S Andrew Swann | October 24, 2010
I read a lot of political posts, some more obnoxious than others. To let my liberal readers know, if you are trying to actually convince someone of something (rather than rage or whine or perform public bonding with their chosen clique of like minded internet denizens) you should not use the term “teabagger.” As in [...]
S Andrew Swann | October 18, 2010
So I’ve been reading a lot of stories like this one that has me a little worried. We have 25% of the world’s population under an authoritarian regime that’s just on the edge of holding things together. When you’re spending just as much on internal security as you are on defense, in a world economy [...]
S Andrew Swann | October 3, 2010
So Scalzi opines on Atlas Shrugged (which I’m currently reading for the first time, via a 64-hour long audiobook. If you’re curious, the book that filled the Atlas Shrugged slot in my teenage-reader political awakening was the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Yeah, I’m weird that way.) and while I don’t have a lot to say about his [...]
S Andrew Swann | September 30, 2010
Make that a boot stomping on a human face — forever. I actually had someone try and pull that on me in a debate, more or less in the sense “BUSH HAZ WORST RECORD ON CIVIL LIBERTIEZ EVAR.” This was true, when he was in office. But Obama has doubled down on the fascist police [...]
S Andrew Swann | September 23, 2010
Elizabeth Moon upset a lot of people over the week and a half by posting about citizenship, the 9/11 attacks, and the proposed Cordoba cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero. As she said about building the cultural center, she “should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people.” [...]
S Andrew Swann | September 21, 2010
So rarely does the universe provide such an enlightening conflation of shallow facile consensus political wisdom, along with elitist literary snobbery as we have in this column by Maureen Dowd. Dowd has gotten the memo, that Christine O’Donnell is the designated political chew toy for this political cycle. O’Donnell is the acceptable target. After all, [...]
S Andrew Swann | September 18, 2010
Two unrelated things that I came across recently that should have some serious implications to anyone writing near-future SF. The first post is actually kind of obvious, in fact it touches on one of the central themes of the singularity. However, it hits a point that I don’t think is explored often enough: Quantum computing [...]
S Andrew Swann | September 16, 2010
Returning to my occasional bout with politics on this here blog, I thought I’d mention the somewhat wry amusement with which I’m watching the complete misunderstanding of the whole Tea Party thing. Even among allies of the movement, small and large-L Libertarians such as myself, saw the nomination of O’Donnell as a WTF moment since [...]
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