What I Did This Weekend

So this weekend I did something I’ve never done before, or more accurately I was something I’ve never been before, the Guest of Honor at a science fiction convention. It was ConfinementCon, organized by Mike Williamson, author of the Freehold books, among other things. Sarah Hoyt was there, along with Toni Weisskopf and a host of Baen authors. InstaPundit co-blogger Charlie Martin was there, too – I think it was the first time we’d met in the flesh in spite of knowing each other for over two decades. Such are the ways of the Internet. And there was another first, about which more later.

I gave a keynote talk, lasting about an hour including the rather lively discussion. My talk was basically an updating of my Is Democracy Like Sex? thesis, as applied to the special interest massacre currently underway because of the last election. As I wrote here a while back, my initial treatment of the topic didn’t pay enough attention to the enormous unelected power structure in today’s America. But on the other hand, the aftermath of the 2024 elections is sending all sorts of changes rippling through the system, in a way that suggests that, at least sometimes, American elections are in fact still capable of wreaking change not only on elected offices, but on bureaucracy, media, and academia. This is a hopeful note, and even people who don’t like Trump’s changes – to be clear, I’m quite happy with them -- should be pleased that such changes are possible in our system, which many, possibly including me, had thought ossified beyond easy remedy.

I also did a panel on contact with extraterrestrials, which was fun. One panelist was talking a lot about the psychic shock of meeting aliens; I took a contrary view, suggesting that people might have been shocked by that in, say, 1950, but that now everyone’s used to the idea. Heck, the government basically told everyone that UFO’s were real and that they’d been covering it up for decades and the public yawned and said yeah, we know.

As I wrote some years ago, today it’s more likely that angels visiting the Earth would be greeted as extraterrestrials than that extraterrestrials would be greeted as angels.