F*ck "civility"

There are professional columnists and more prominent bloggers who can say what I want to (and they will - see the links below) with far more politeness than I can muster right now, but the amount of gut punches that I took with a series of Supreme Court rulings this week - and practically all of them by an ideologically lock-stepping 5 to 4 vote - pissed me off to the point where I wanted no part of social media because I knew exactly how I would initially react on it. The title of this post is certainly more than a tipoff as to my sentiments, but let's face it: I knew that things would get bad if Trump had his way with the courts, and "bad" may be an understatement. We now have a much more restrictive, corporatist, downright elitist political landscape to deal with, and it's all because a idiotic Foghorn Leghorn cartoon made human flesh from Kentucky refused to even give a previous nominee the courtesy of a straightforward "no" vote in the Senate.

There are a lot of people out there who are now calling for "civility" towards an alleged President who shows none towards an incredibly wide-ranging group of others: domestic political opponents and allies alike, members of his own administration, foreign allies, you name it. The nicest he's been lately is to a Stalinist retread (third of a continuing series!) who leads the government of one of the worst human rights violators in Asia, if not the entire world. And then there's his esteemed Russian friend, of course. He can't ever not give him a thumbs-up for being such a great role model, right?

So before you ask me for civility directed at someone like that, ask yourself this - why should I? Or anyone else, for that matter? Especially when you know returning the favor (what we used to call "civil discourse" in a previous day) would never be considered?

Feel free to peruse the following pieces by Ed Brayton, Charles P. Pierce, Heather Digby Parton and Jordan Weissman for more on the events of the week.

In Memoriam: Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018

Harlan could be an incredibly prickly, combative individual - almost to the point of self-parody at times, especially when some of the fights were ones he probably shouldn't have picked - but he was also one of the SF authors who kept my interest in the genre going during my teenage years, and his short fiction (which was almost all of his output, since he wrote only a handful of novels) was easily some of the best I've ever read.