Quoting myself? A bad habit, but sometimes I say what I mean best. “It’s good to grow some of your own food, but it is both morally and practically obligatory to get most of your Calories from industrial agriculture, because it uses two orders of magnitude less labour per Calorie. Anything else is headed back to serfdom, because Marx was quite right (and you won’t hear me say that often) that the mode of production strongly determines the form of social organization. Leave pastoral fantasies to the Far Right.”

2025–08–18 A conversation with smj in the hours immediately following the Worldcon, partaking somewhat of the character of an after–action report.