The pessimism and dystopia in sci-fi doesn't come from a lack of research resources on engineering and science. It mainly comes from literary fashion.

If the fashion with editors is bleak, pessimistic, dystopian stories, then that's what readers will see on the bookshelves and in the magazines, and authors who want to see their work in print will color their stories accordingly. If you want to see more stories with a can-do, optimistic spirit, then you need to start a magazine or publisher with a policy of favoring such manuscripts. If there's an audience for such stories it's bound to be feasible. There a thousand serious sci-fi writers for every published one; most of them dreadful it is true, but there are sure to be a handful who write the good old stuff, and write it reasonably well.

A secondary problem is that misery provides many things that a writer needs in a story. Tolstoy once famously wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I actually Tolstoy had it backwards; there are many kinds of happy families. Dysfunctions on the other hand tends to fall into a small number of depressingly recognizable patterns. The problem with functional families from an author's standpoint is that they don't automatically provide something that he needs for his stories: conflict. Similarly a dystopian society is a rich source of conflicts, obstacles and color, as the author of Snow Crash must surely realize. Miserable people in a miserable setting are simply easier to write about.

I recently went on a reading jag of sci-fi from the 30s and 40s, and when I happened to watch a screwball comedy movie ("His Girl Friday") from the same era, I had an epiphany: the worlds of the sci-fi story and the 1940s comedy were more like each other than they were like our present world. The role of women and men; the prevalence of religious belief, the kinds of jobs people did, what they did in their spare time, the future of 1940 looked an awful lot like 1940.

When we write about the future, we don't write about a *plausible* future. We write about a future world which is like the present or some familiar historical epoch (e.g. Roman Empire), with conscious additions and deletions. I think a third reason may be our pessimism about our present and cynicism about the past. Which brings us right back to literary fashion.

Ask the Europeans that constantly tell us Americans we are too enslaved to the notion that we all need our own car.

You just made that up. I don't know if you've ever driven around a European city, but car ownership is pretty widespread, at least judging by driving through Rome/London/Paris/etc.

It's funny what some Americans think about Europe. They've got this AM talk radio version of Europe knocking around in their heads. "Yeah, they're all dying in the streets because of socialized medicine and everybody's gay and you can't get a decent hamburger anywhere. And they're a bunch of carpoolers who don't realize that we fought and died so that people could drive their own 4500lb vehicle like God intended." "You betcha, Mack. Next up is Fred from Midland. So, what grinds your gears about Europeans, Fred?"

I guess that would be an answer if nobody ever took the time to show you how to defend yourself with your hands.

I think you have been listening to people, that have gleefully lied to you.

I think you are projecting.

A far cry from "proven to make up data and conceals data that doesn't fit his ideology".

No. Not being able to produce the data that your most important work is based on is not a far cry from making up data and concealing data that doesn't fit his ideology.

If a researcher can't produce his data, his work is not taken seriously. The scientific method includes making your data available so other people can review your work.

They sort of look and feel like apple stores.

I do not want to buy my expensive Tesla from a smelly "genius" walking around with a corporate-logo polo shirt snug around the belly that hangs over his belt, which sports an iPhone holster. I'd rather just order the damn thing on-line and have USPS deliver it to my front door.

You failed to demonstrate that more than one of these many annual nonfatal injuries involves a penis being shot off.

Most US gun owners don't have good enough aim to shoot off their own penises. That's why they need semi-automatic weapons. It raises the odds of being able to actually hit that tiny thing.

Pathology? There is nothing pathological about a person wanting to employ all self-defensive measures to secure life or liberty

Gun ownership in the US has very little to do with "life or liberty". Be honest with yourself. If it was really about protecting your "life or liberty", you wouldn't have clown shows like this.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/blo...

There is nothing invalid about using defensive uses of guns by police and against animals, since if there were no gun available

Yes, there is. No gun control proposal in the US has suggested taking guns away from law enforcement, the military or people who live where there are wildlife attacks. It's completely invalid. The technical term is "red herring". Look it up. Lott's book was about civilian ownership of guns. Kleck's work was designed to support civilian ownership of guns and has been used to attack all gun control laws. What's worse, his sloppy work and broad assumptions were used by the Supreme Court in the Heller decision, which began this entire notion of the Second Amendment being about civilian ownership of guns. Remember, until the '80s, there were no legal scholars who believed in this absolutist notion of the Second Amendment. Even Robert Bork, the sainted patron of the modern conservative, believed the Second Amendment did not apply to a right of every civilian to own (not to mention carry) a gun.

This entire argument is an artifact of Edwin Meese, the NRA and the Reagan Administration. There was a time when the NRA's literature quoted the entire Second Amendment, including the militia clause. Now, the quote above their headquarters door leaves that entire clause out. People who act like this so-called "right" goes back to the founding fathers are dizzy.

Let's assume Lott's figure is in the ball park just for argument sake.

No. Why should we do that when we know it's an imaginary number.

Your assertion that the U.S. may be the most lawless country in the world is ludicrous.

That's not my assertion, it's Lott's. His results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992. He assumes that there were 2.5 million attempted crimes that were thwarted by gun ownership. If that's true, and without those guns those crimes would have occurred, it would make the United States the most lawless country in the world. Do the math yourself. Assume for a moment that gun ownership is banned. Add 2.5 million to the crime statistics. That would just about triple the crime rate in the US.

Secondly, my neighbor travels to South America regularly and used to live in Argentina.

Do you know what "anecdotal" means? I lived in Sao Paolo when my wife was doing a math fellowship at a university there. The crime statistics in Brasil are about 30% higher than the US. Not double, not triple.

So as far as i'm concerned I'd believe him before believing your generalization.

What generalization? I cited a list of researchers and their studies that have refuted Lott. Are you going to believe your neighbor over published studies, too?

And who are the anti-capitalist-empire candidates, pray tell?

They're out there. You don't think Senator Bernie Sanders being invited for the first time to Meet the Press this weekend after 24 years in the Senate doesn't make the Koch Brothers' assholes pucker a little bit?

I think there's a lot of untapped anger out there. Even some tea party types I know are starting to sound a lot like Bernie Sanders, but they don't know it. Things could break funny in a year like this. How funny would a Bernie Sanders/Rand Paul contest be? You'd have certain people throwing themselves out windows.

More good guys with guns, less crime.

You're not paying attention. It can NOT be 2.5 million. It can't be half of those. I understand that you're going to believe what you're going to believe, considering your reading list, but you don't get to make up your facts.

Nevertheless - equal or MORE uses for defense than for offense

Go back and count again. 135,000 deaths or injuries for "offense" as you put it. Total number of civilian defensive shootings, in the hundreds. The 67k includes people who showed a gun in defense, but it doesn't include Kreck's millions of sepculative numbers where there he assumed the criminal thought there might be a gun.

As opposed to voting rights absolutists? Fifth Amendment absolutists?

Voting rights absolutists and Fifth Amendment absolutists aren't responsible for people's deaths. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

As opposed to voting rights absolutists? Fifth Amendment absolutists? Rights aren't rights when you're only allowed to exercise them in a place and manner dictated by the government.