randomly

Interestingly crappy thread moderation by John Scalzi here. People who disagree with the dominant view in discussions should be afforded extra protection, not less. Worse, in this case I judge that the suppressed minority voices were making trenchant points.

Also interesting for a conservative (I assume) reading of LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas" I hadn't thought of in political terms - that the ones should have walked to the nearest gun store. This I think runs into the problem of where responsibility ends - plenty of children in this world live in Omelan circumstances.

Re LeGuin, having reread _TLHOD_, _The Dispossesed_, and the Earthsea trilogy recently, I read _A Fisherman of the Inland Sea_ and found it about evenly split between preachy failures and incoherent failures, with one beautiful story, "The Kerastion", in the middle. Really high peak, long decline phase, in baseball parlance.