cognitive dissonance

A friend sent me this tonight:

[My brother] repeated an ongoing argument defending a few of his right-wing acquaintances who are Romney supporters based on his assessment that they are educated and smart, just wrong-minded. He attempted to separate these Republican “elitists?” from the great unwashed, those of poor mental acuity, under-informed and religiously fanatic. “First,” I argued, “how informed are your educated Romney-voting friends if they’ve come to the same stupid conclusions as the nincompoop horde? Second, if those Republican smarties are equally ill-informed, then how effective has their education been for them? Third, if Romney’s rich, educated supporters consider Obama a Kenyan anti-colonialist, welfare-loving nigger (as educated Republicans I know believe) how does that distinguish them from the moron masses?” “Well,” he responded, “they’ve convinced themselves, that’s why.”

 

It seems to me that the contest tomorrow is going to be between ordinary people and the inhabitants of Oz.

reviews 'n' stuff

Grrl Scientist has given a wonderful plug to Denying Science in her Guardian blog; I keep meaning to talk about it here but failing to do so because there've been exciting developments on my three earlier science books, Denying Science, Corrupted Science and Bogus Science, that I want to talk about at the same time. More on those developments later.

In the meantime, though, David Hebblethwaite has said kind things about my recent PS Publishing novella The Lonely Hunter on his Follow the Thread blog. Here's some of it:

[T]his novella from PS Publishing is as good as ever. . . . As a murder mystery, The Lonely Hunter plays the game with its red herrings and twists. But Grant’s novella is about more than that: Emil is open about the fact that he has changed some of the identifying details of his tale, and muses over the differences between real life and fiction. This is what I think is at the heart of The Lonely Hunter: individuals creating stories about themselves and others, to the extent that they become fictional characters, of a sort – and you’ll close the book wondering exactly where the boundaries between reality and fiction lie.

Although, because of the film noir encyclopedia, I've had virtually no time over the past two years or so to write fiction, I find my inclinations turning more and more toward a sort of noirish form of fantasy, as exemplified in The Lonely Hunter, my earlier novella for PS, The City In These Pages, and a bunch of other short stories. That said, the next longish fiction I want to write -- and this'll not be until spring next year, at the earliest (how frustrating this is!) -- concerns Ellery Queen tackling something that looks a bit like the parallel worlds hypothesis but in fact isn't.