blacksundae

Excerpts from an interesting blog post by science fiction writer Charlie Stross:

American attitudes to crime and punishment are unspeakable; disturbing, mediaeval, and barbaric are some of the adjectives that spring to mind. But above all, the word that most thoroughly applies is merciless. The commission of a crime is taken as an excuse to unleash the demons of the subconscious, however dark, however disproportionate, upon the perpetrator. Once labeled a criminal, an individual’s right to fair treatment is utterly expunged, and any violation or degradation, however grotesque, is seen as something that they brought on themselves.

[...]

The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don’t get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy.

There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.

Read the whole thing. (via MetaFilter)

Halfway through an exchange of emails with the science fiction writer Charles Stross - a virtual meeting in cyberspace which might have had something of the exotic as little as five years ago - it strikes me that our text-based communication feels almost archaic now.

It’s a realisation that might have come straight from the pages of one of Stross’s novels. These days, email tennis feels almost boringly routine, and the rapid normalisation of the technologies which are changing people’s lives is a recurrent theme in his fiction. Despite their hard-edged technological focus, Stross’s worlds are often as quotidian as they are fantastic.

Link! The only novel of Stross’ I’ve read is Accelerando, but it was fantastic. Via Reddit.