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 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 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 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 | August 9, 2010
Cue REM. Dorchester Publishing looks at its bottom line and decides OMG we can’t afford to do this anymore, switches to e-publishing launching the Greek Chorus chanting “death of print, death of print.” This is premature for a number of reasons. (Not the least of which is the technical reasons I listed in an earlier [...]
S Andrew Swann | August 6, 2010
I tend to write libertarian-themed Space Opera, which means that when I read this recent blog post by Charlie Stross, I had a bit of a reaction. Here’s the money quote: “In other words: space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.” Okay then. I guess it [...]
S Andrew Swann | March 16, 2010
I love conspiracy theories, but the latest article on such by Newsweek has left me a little cold. Not a single black helicopter to be had. And how does questioning the maternity of Sarah Palin’s kid rate high enough to be on a list with Goldman Sachs looting the world? Nary a COINTELPRO, ECHELON or [...]
S Andrew Swann | January 22, 2010
There is a certain class of people who combine stupidity, deep-seated insecurity with a pathological need to control. The worst place to put these people is in a position where they are charged with keeping people safe. Case in point: We have a report (found here) of an unnamed vice principal at Millennial Tech Magnet [...]
S Andrew Swann | December 30, 2009
Someone has again scratched a pet peeve of mine, that old pseudo-literary bugbear “relevance.” As in, SF is losing it, and it better get some quick or else be declared “irrelevant.” This is a bit of an oversimplification of the essay by Jetse de Vries, Should SF Die? But it pretty much encapsulates my problem [...]
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