Camestros Felapton

Two Time Hugo Award Finalist

Category: Politics

  • Whatever happened to the CLFA?

    Back in 2018, I discussed briefly the so-called “Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance”. At that time, it seemed to be doing OK, unlike many of the other attempts to create a right-wing fannish organisation. I speculated at the time that maybe it was succeeding because it was a fairly low-key group mainly engaged in networking and book…

  • It’s election day in New South Wales

    Exciting blog topic today! Australian state politics! It’s just like Australian Federal politics but without arguments about submarines or asylum seekers on boats or anything else navy related. New South Wales doesn’t have its own navy, so that’s a massive chunk of political topics wholly off the table. About 65% of the population of NSW…

  • Binomial misnomers

    I was reading a thing about “effective altruism” or at least the version of the term adopted by tech/finance gurus. The term rapidly headed from an interesting philosophical position to a way for wealthy people to rationalise the way the power of wealth can be abused through philanthropy. A longer discussion on the term is…

  • Fascism and third parties

    There is a really interesting essay by Jack Graham at Eruditorum Press on the fascist turn in US politics. The essay covers a lot of ground and is well worth reading. One of the possibilities it considers is whether Trump will lead a break within the Republican Party, resulting in a three-party system (at least…

  • Goal posts and shadow bans

    If you haven’t been following the ongoing manufactured fuss on Twitter, the latest Musk nonsense is the so-called Twitter files. The structure of this story is not unlike when a trove of hacked emails are “discovered”, at last claim the journalists covering the story, we have access to the juicy scandals going on behind the…

  • I lost track of bonkers voter fraud theories

    Since the 2020 US Presidential election, there have been a lot of theories from the right explaining that they didn’t really lose. There was a revival of these claims this year when the midterm elections fizzled for the Republican Party https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2022/11/10/more-nutty-fraud-claims/ There was a time when I tried to keep abreast of each of the…

  • The weird attempt at a 2014 revival

    Given this blog recently enjoyed great success with a whole book centred on right-wing shenanigans in 2015, I perhaps shouldn’t complain about the latest culture war gambit. I say “latest” but I can’t think of a better way of putting it than “let’s do 2014/15 again”. A lot of this is coming from the Twitter…

  • Interesting results in Victoria

    Election results in an Australian state which I don’t live in, aren’t usually interesting but yesterday’s state election in Victoria highlighted some common themes for this blog. At stake was the majority held by the Australian Labor party and its leader Daniel Andrews. During 2020 and 2021, Victoria (and Melbourne in particular) had a series…

  • Will the new Trump campaign fizzle out?

    Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was running again for US President. The announcement was met with some scepticism across the political spectrum. There is an assumption that Trump’s influence is waning, particularly after the recent mid-term elections in which the GOP did relatively poorly and in which wackier candidates, in general, did badly (with…

  • More nutty fraud claims

    After Correia stamping his feet on Twitter, Sarah Hoyt carries on the refrain on her blog: “As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet. Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake…

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