It's good to finally be back here doing this.

In past years, it would have also been an opportunity to see and get caught up with friends like docstrange, unclevlad, Gabe, Jayson, and so many more. Perhaps some are here, I am checking.

Today we buried my Grandmother. We had a memorial project, in which her children, nieces, and nephews shared stories about her. I found that as a Grandson I had nothing to add, just variations on the same themes.

One of the stories has been kept secret for about 80 years. My Great Grandfather had a general store, back when Flushing, NY was still a farm town. Like most mobs, the one in Flushing had a protection racket, and like most shopkeepers, Great Grandpa felt he had no choice but to pay, even though he was going broke with this store[1]. Grandma -- then a teenager -- marched into the office of the mobster in charge and told him her father couldn't pay, her father wouldn't pay, and if he lifted a finger against her father she'd go straight to the police, and how'd he like them apples?[2]

The mobster backed the fuck down. The mobster cut Shiffee a deal: he'd stop collecting protection money from her father so long as she didn't breathe a word of this to anyone.[3]

Many years later, she told one of us, and now that one has told the rest of us.

Both of my Grandmothers were women with whom you did. not. fuck. Shiffie hid it better than Rose. I understand alot more about my whole family knowing this.

[1] Two of my Great Grandfathers completely missed all that Shrewd Businessman training we're supposed to get along with our Hebrew lessons and went broke running stores.

[2] "How do you like them apples?" is a phrase she'd reuse all her life.

[3] He kinda had to. A 15-year-old girl, even a Jewish one[4] vanishing or turning up dead would have brought down far more heat than any mobster wants to cope with.

[4] Remember, this was well before Ashkenazim became white.

Some days there's too much to give each its own post.

• One can argue whether the jury that convicted Johannes Mehserle for manslaughter with a gun enhancement should have convicted him of murder instead, but that's kind of moot at this point. When the judge elected to overturn the gun enhancement and sentence Mehserle to a paltry 2 years, with double-credit for time served, there's a very clear message sent that the law doesn't think brown skinned people's lives matter and that it's not afraid of saying so. It's hard to count the number of ways that's bad message to send.
  
• Hey geekboys! Stop harassing women at our events. Stop excusing the harassing of women by focusing on their behavior rather than the behavior of the harassers. It shouldn't be necessary to say any of that, but apparently it is. Here's some resources for those who have to deal with the folks who have chosen to disregard the memo -- no one hasn't gotten the memo.
  
• Once upon a time, same sex marriage was a Christian rite.
  
• Via delux_vivens, a history of lies told to make you afraid of Muslims, starting with the song of Roland.
  
• I love having good authors for friends
  
  
  
  • tithenai has an excellent story in the all-Muslim edition of Apex magazine.
    
  • shweta_narayan has an excellent story in Three Lobed Burning Eye magazine.
    
  
  

There seems to be a trope going around that Steampunks are reacting negatively to people voicing the opinion that they don’t care for Steampunk. Nothing could be further from the truth. ( Read more... )

I was inspired to write this in reaction to reading Catherynne Valente's recent unfortunate[1] article on Steampunk -- to which I presently decline to link. The specific exchange arises from her defense of her comment that if something calls itself steampunk she is entirely justified in assuming it will suck, because 90% of it does.

I can already hear the groans of any surviving First or Second Fandom who actually read my e-scribblings.

Let me now take everyone back in time, courtesy of James Gunn, to the 1953 WorldCon, at which the great Theodore Sturgeon spoke about the poor quality of Science Fiction criticism:

"When people talk about the mystery novel ...they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,' and they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important. and the ten percent of science fiction that isn't crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere."

Most people now refer to "Ninety percent of everything is crud" as "Sturgeon's Law," though he called it "Sturgeon's Revelation." In 1958, he expounded on it further:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms. -- Venture Magazine, March 1958

I imagine the fact that SFF authors are saying "ninety percent of X is crap" to dismiss a subgenre of SFF has Mr. Sturgeon turning in his grave. Happily, he illustrated the bankruptcy of the critique and gave the proper rebuke: it's the other ten percent that matters.


[1] Stronger language did occur to me, but I will defer using to such time as I'm willing to devote the time and energy necessary to unpacking them.

Shorter Charles Stross on Steampunk: Nothing says “deconstructing my white male privilege” like policing women's clothing choices and acting as if women and people of color using Steampunk as a way to deconstruct colonialism don’t exist. Where’s my cookie and pagehits?

Author Elizabeth Moon wrote a particularly Islamophobic entry in her LiveJournal in which she spent considerable effort displaying her failures as a citizen of the United States. Quite a few people, including I, replied with a variety of reactions, mostly expressing our disappointment in her failure as a citizen.

For reasons she has not seen fit to share, Ms. Moon has deleted all these comments and locked the entry against further comment. There may be a way to view this action on her part that redounds to her credit, but for the life of me I can't imagine what it is.

As luck has it, I have a copy of my reply to her and I decline to be silenced. Thus I repost it here:

Elizabeth,

You have a number of good points to make about citizenship, though I suggest that the next time you enjoy a frankfuter, hamburger, pizza, taco, or gyro, that you reflect on the fact that the process of immigration and entry into American culture is not the one-way assimilation you describe. That list, after all, could be much longer and not confined to popular food options.

That said, I must respectfully bring to your attention that in this post you yourself are failing as a citizen.

You fail as a citizen when you describe, as you do, the bigotry with which Americans receive immigrants with the subtext that that's just how it is, or even that such bigotry has justification, rather than condemning it unequivocally as one of our great failings as a nation.

You fail as a citizen when you treat bigotry against Muslims, as you do, as having a reasonable basis to which Muslims should show a deference that you do not expect Christians, Jews, Atheists, or any other group to show.

You fail as a citizen when you treat, as you do, the entirely manufactured outrage as something with any rational basis whatsoever. A Muslim community that has lived in that neighborhood for years, that was a part of the economy created by the World Trade Center, that itself lived through and were victims and survivors of the 9/11 attacks, is building a community center because they need a community center. They are building it where they are because that's where their community is and that's where they could find a building they could afford. Out of the kindness of their hearts, instead of building a mosque -- because the reason this all started is that their current mosques are so overcrowded people have to kneel in the street on cardboard boxes to pray -- they're building a community center that will serve the needs of people of all faiths.

Republicants created outrage out of nothing because they really don't want to head into November talking about the economy and how it got here. And you're carrying water for them by saying it's a reasonable reaction. It's not, and you fail as a citizen for being hoodwinked, for not calling bullshit.

But me no buts about how close it is to the World Trade Center site: if it was another 2 blocks or 20 miles away Republicants would have manufactured the same outrage. You should know this because if you bother to look, you will see them manufacturing this outrage all over the country, anywhere Muslims are trying to build Mosques.

I challenge you to stop failing as a citizen: Unequivocally endorse Park51 not only as something a patriotic Muslim American community has a right to do, but as being exactly the sort of thing a patriotic Muslim American community would and should be doing. Unequivocally condemn those who manufacture irrational outrage. Address that outrage in those who have been hoodwinked, or even in those few who sincerely can't yet think of any Muslim thing with the same compassion and firmness that you would a drunk friend asking you for their car keys. Become an active part of the growing dialog between actual Muslim and non-Muslim Americans, get past the big monolithic shadow Islamic stereotype you write about and pay lip service to denying.

Hours away from the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9 September 2001, I join in remembering that day -- including the neighbors I did lose and the friends and family I didn't lose through blind, dumb chance.

I also remember some things that I don't see called out often enough:

• The most successful rescue operation in history: over 20,000 people evacuated before the towers fell.
  
• The first time in the history of history that hospitals had to turn blood donors away because they were booked solid taking blood for the next week.
  
• People coming in from all over the country to participate in the rescue effort, only able to do so because they knew someone who could get them in to make coffee and food for the front line rescue workers.