Dateline: Lincoln, Nebraska
Two items:
- US Customs officials continue to ably occupy the niche of gate-keeping trolls with tiny dicks and/or withered vaginas, who seem to think that people might actually want to stay in their miserable dick-ass country a day longer than absolutely necessary.
- Nature has accepted another story of mine for their ongoing "Futures" series. This one's called "Hillcrest v. Velikovksy", and it draws its inspiration from this entry here.
Labels: writing news
posted by Peter Watts at
9:35 PM
9 Comments:
There's no reason to be nice to america. Of our 300 people only about 10,000 can read Peter Watts without their brains imploding or some such.
I bet if you could monitor the average american's brain as it skims over ideas via literature its kind of like guitar hero. For dan brown its just 'slow ride' on easy but blindsight is like misirlou on expert with only two fingers.
Terrible metaphor but thats why I leave the writing to the professionals.
After your previous rant on committing violence against political leaders, my money was on you not getting into the country.
But if you think that going through US security is a pain in the ass, you should try going through Heathrow. Although, I highly recommend the body cavity search.
Just relax. Do as you're told. Obey orders. That's all that's required of you.
--Doc Neeson
And we love you, too.
*sigh*
It hasn't a thing to do with America that you got the Big Hassle, Mr. Watts. It's not about my "dick-ass country." Ehem.
I have a very respectable friend who was driving up to visit Glacier National Park. The Canadian Border Services Agency got uber-thuggish on him, questioned him with suspicious squinchy eyes, and with lots of unnecessary shouting, ordering about, and intimation that a close search of his person was imminent. They sent him to the little security area while they searched and even dissassembled parts of his rental car.
His "crime"? He had in the trunk a trade paper copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which any idiots can tell you, is a history of the Manhattan Project, not a recipe book. All they had to do was thumb through it, but that would have required opposable thumbs, and ....
It's not about you, Canada, or America. It's about 19 Saudis flyin' jet planes into tall buildings - welcome to the 21st century, y'all, and we hope you enjoy your flight.
bec-87rb opined...
It's not about my "dick-ass country." Ehem.
Of course it's not about your dick-ass country. I'm sure that your country is very nice indeed, and I'm sorry if I gave offense to it or to its inhabitants.
It's about their dick-ass country. Not the place where the Saudis flying jets into buildings was a tragedy, or an atrocity, or even America's-birds-coming-home-to-roost. I'm talking about the dick-ass country where planes-into-buildings was a good thing, a lucky break — because it let certain people throw their weight around even more than they did before, because it did away with quaint trifles like the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions, because it let them disappear any poor bastard with caramel skin and Achmed as a middle name. That's the dick-ass country I'm talking about.
I'm sure you don't live there, beckster. I don't even live there myself, not today; today I've been hanging out with a bunch of friendly, smart, welcoming folks whom I would gladly invite into my home. But yesterday I was in that other country: the home of the mouth-breathers, the unintelligent semiliterate hamster-worshippers, the gate-keepers, the trolls under the bridge.
And believe me, describing the country they live in as "dick-ass" is downright charitable.
And yes, you can enter that country by heading north as well as south. Hell, our own government is little more than an ass-licking lapdog these days; our Tories are kind of like your own current administration, only without the strength, the initiative, and the Machiavellian shadows behind the throne.
I can see this really bothered you.
Don't know if you've seen it yet but John C. Wright has a review, of sorts, of BLINDSIGHT on his blog:
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/164297.html#cutid1
As is almost always the case, I think John's completely full of shit.
Particularly in this little gem he ends his post with:
Final thought:
At the same time I read BLINDSIGHT, I was also reading THE CUBE AND THE CATHEDRAL by George Weigel. Weigel makes the argument that Europe, by rejecting Christianity, not only rejects its own past, and the fountainhead of its greatness, but undercuts the necessary foundations for the post-Christian Enlightened secular world view. In sum, the argument is that if Europe rejects Christianity in the name of tolerant equality extended to all races, it unwittingly rejects any good reason to embrace notions like toleration, equality, and universal brotherhood, because these things are unique artifacts of the Christian world view and make little or no sense outside them.
I always have to keep a tight lid on my gag reflex when visiting his blog.
Gotta admit, though, I loved his GOLDEN AGE TRILOGY. Course that was, according to him, written back in his days of Godless atheism.
bec-87rb said...
I can see this really bothered you.
Actually, no more than usual. It bothered my buddy far more than me, I think — he's a US citizen, and I think the reception took him by surprise. By my standards, it was actually pretty mild. They didn't even sequester us in the little white room.
But the fact that I'm used to it does not make the reduce the asshole quotient of the trolls one iota.
David B. Ellis said...
Don't know if you've seen it yet but John C. Wright has a review, of sorts, of BLINDSIGHT on his blog:
Yeah, I scanned it. And with all due respect to Wright, I think he just didn't read the text very carefully. He misinterpreted some pretty obvious stuff. His very first complaint about my lack of narrative follow-through, for example — Szpindel's "...ssssuckered..." remark — is pretty obviously in relation to the diversionary tactic used by the aliens, given that the very next sentence is "You haven't even met the aliens yet, and already they're running rings around you." And yet Wright seems to think that line refers to Mission Control, and then complains because I never got around to explaining why Mission Control fucked with them thus.
I ran down the first half-dozen such complaints, and every one of them resulted from a misreading of the text. So I stopped reading.
It bothered my buddy far more than me, I think — he's a US citizen, and I think the reception took him by surprise. By my standards, it was actually pretty mild. They didn't even sequester us in the little white room.
But the fact that I'm used to it does not make the reduce the asshole quotient of the trolls one iota.
Every workday, I go through a metal detector and my belongings are x-rayed. I hate it.
The trick is two-fold, if you don't want The Hassle from the guards:
1. Learn the routine so you look bored and they stop noticing you.
and/or
2. Subordinate yourself.
The reason this stuff stings is that the main social exchange going on in these checkpoint situations is utterly disconnected from the official reason - safety, security - for the inspections of your person.
The social exchange is dominance and submission. The guards are given uniforms and enough authority that they're artificially dominant, and they expect you to be reciprocally submissive in your body language and speech.
If you fail to do this, they get nasty, and try to intimidate you into making submissive gestures, eye-movements, and speech. Your actual probable dangerousness is beside the point, once you fail the boredom and/or submission test - the point after that is to cause you to behave submissively. It becomes a battle of wills.
That's one of the reasons they search closely whom they do, and fail to search some they should. And why you, as a man, are going to get The Hassle more often and harder: There are some highly primate things going on in security lines.
Kinda sad.
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