More Than Once Upon a Time

To read this rant, you need to go to SFNovelists.

In the London Times.

Money quote.

“The Republican gamble, in turn, is that the extremism of their populist oppositionism doesn’t rally the fringe of their base at the cost of alienating the critical middle that still holds sway in American politics. My own sense is that in a low-turnout mid-term election, they could do very well with this tactic. But at a strategic level, I suspect that this is a trap for 2012. If they cannot attract younger or minority voters, if they continue to fail to offer actual policy alternatives instead of recitation of right-wing dogma, they could manage to stymie Obama later this year at the cost of immolation in 2012. Winning in 2010 could even persuade them that becoming even more radical is the way to win in 2012. A Palin nomination is perfectly possible.”

And they can do whatever they want. Here, in a nutshell, is the secret to bookselling success. Don’t be the same as everyone else. Be different. Books are different. Read what you like. And sell what you like, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/nyregion/10stop.html?ref=todayspaper

(Read the 4th para.)

In David Brooks’s column at the NYTimes today.

This should have been great. Man, what an idea. I mean think of the cool science fiction fun you could have with shipwrecked aliens on Earth, and they breed, so Earth ghettoizes them, and then, really, what are you going to do when they start competing with an overcrowded earth for resources? Very, very cool.

But no. That’s not where District 9 runs with it. Instead we have to belabor an already obvious metaphor by sticking the aliens in an already apartheid South Africa, and all the humans have to be venal brutal militarists, and the hero is an oblivious moron who’s as racist as everyone else till he has a catharsis for no reason at all at the end of the movie and helps the aliens get away. Oh, and the Blair Witch thing at the beginning and the end was really, really annoying. What, you’re not a good enough writer to work the exposition into the story?

But it was SF, and some of it was pretty cool, especially the smart alien.

…if he keeps writing columns like today’s. He points out what so many economists are loathe to do - that free trade with China is not really free trade as long as the Chinese refuse to float their currency. The Chinese, in short, are not playing fair, and have never played fair. Just as the Japanese never really played fair either with their artificial barriers to entry that prevented Americans from selling anything in Japan (especially agriculture). But it was never a big deal with Japan because Japan isn’t big enough to really affect us.

China is.

I’ve been arguing this point for a long time. Glad to see a major economist is finally taking up the stick. The fact is, the only Americans who actually benefit from this sort of one-way free trade are the big corporations, who make money regardless of which way the trade is flowing as long as it flows.

Free trade is the best economic model of all. But only if it’s really free.