No more tricks or treats

The Trick or Treat toy has been taken offline due to popularity, so I looked at the list of other toys by the same author. Already done the sitcom and the pizza ones, oh, here, lt’s see what reading level is needed to understand my LJ:

agrumer's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 8
Average number of words per sentence:	17.94
Average number of syllables per word:	1.44
Total words in sample:	1902
Analyze your journal! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

"You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold-pressed latinum."

I’ve been thinking about politics.

OK, I’ve been thinking about politics for, um, the past eight years or so, ever since I noticed the extreme right wing was attempting to— well, I can go into that some other time. Today I’ve been taking a longer view, trying to figure out what issues will seem important hundreds or thousands of years from now.

Think the burning issues of our day will still be burning? Think abortion and gun control will still be hot-button issues? Here are a couple of major political issues of the 19th century for comparison:

Slavery: You’ve heard of this one, and you’ve even got an opinion about it: It’s bad, right? If you grabbed a hundred random Americans and asked if any were in favor of slavery, the only raised hands would be from jokers or maybe a crazy person. Didn’t used to be that way, though. If you went back 150 years and grabbed a hundred random people and asked them the same question, you’d get arguments and fights, just like you do now over abortion and gun control. But here we are, seven generations later, and it’s glaringly obvious to all of us that one side was Just Plain Right and the other Just Plain Wrong.

Free Silver: I like this even better as an example. If you asked a hundred random Americans how they felt about bimetallism, I’m sure at least ninety of them would have no idea what you were talking about. But this was a big issue of the late 19th century, especially of the 1896 presidential race. A century later and most people have never even heard of the issue, need several paragraphs of explanation before they can even understand what it was about. (Debt, mostly. Inflation is good for debtors, bad for lenders. There’d been an economic collapse in 1873 that had left a lot of people in debt.)

As far as I can tell from some editorial cartoons of the era (scroll to the bottom of that Vassar page), it was also about antisemitism, at least on the Pro-Silver side.

Fictionalizing Sunnydale

If Jorge Luis Borges were alive today, and a Buffy fan... nah, he still wouldn’t have written this, but Marcus Rowland (author of Forgotten Futures) did, and cadhla drew my attention to it.