The main offender, in most of your eyes, was Annalee's post about a future free of fear of socialism from Monday night, which... well, got some of you kind of upset:

JosephineAluminoid: "Worst part of elections — poorly constructed, poorly thought out political theory invades my non-political blogs. It's like listening to grandma tell me why Herbert Hoover was better than everyone thought. This stuff is so weak, it's not worth arguing. Have fun, vote, support your team, whatever... but please don't quit your day job."

rovroman: "officially done reading io9. enjoy your pinko utopia, when the federal budget slowly eclipses the entire gdp, and govt controls every economic decision you make."

Daveinva: "I really don't feed the trolls. In this case, sadly, that's you, Annalee."

kidneystone: "hooray for IO9. just when i thought they were gonna stay neutral and talk about cool things like SF and giant monsters...they get all Obama on us. great....just cause your in San Francisco."

djklaus: "One of the reasons I love this site is that I hear politics at work. I hear politics at the dinner table. I hear it on the radio. In the car. From friends. This is one of those sites i can go to and just enjoy the things I really love (scifi). Well my bubble has just been burst, I guess. Don't just write a fluff piece on Obama and think it's 'scifi' just because you used the phrase 'in the future'."

Ubik2501: "Imagine a Gawker where rational, intelligent political debate takes place. Imagine a Gawker that hasn't been hijacked by political bloggers for page hits. Nah, maybe that's too far out there."

Not everyone was necessarily rushing to judgement, however:

Gothamite88: "Other than the "imagine" part, how is this Sci-Fi related?"

Grey_Area: "The "imagine" part is pretty crucial to SpecFic. Often the best Science fiction isn't about robots going "pew, pew, pew!" or tentacled horrors slavering/peeing over hot chicks, although that doesn't hurt. It's postulating what splendid dystopias and fucked-up utopias might arise from strange new social or political systems. Annalee's just bouncing ideas off our pointed little skulls hoping that we will reverberate with new ideas and carry the geek-spangled banner of Fandom to ever greater heights. Excelsior!
Either that or she's been huffing glue again and [forgotten] which blog she's the editor of."

Point to Grey_Area for channeling Stan Lee with that "excelsior!" and also giving a better explanation of Annalee's intentions than I could've managed. I understand that io9 - and, let's face it, many other sites that normally stay away from politics - may seem to have strayed into an area that you'd rather we didn't over the past few weeks, but there's no getting away from the fact that the election was on everyone's minds, and even though we're an SF, futurism and urban fantasy site, we feel some responsibility (beyond just trying to get hits, as much as that may surprise some of the more cynical amongst you) to reflect what people are talking and thinking about. For those who were upset, we're sorry, but look on the bright side: the next US Presidential Election isn't until 2012, and we'll probably be more interested in the end of the world and timewave zero by then.

Or, to put it another way, jajbowler's comment seems appropriate:

looks like this post caused some science friction.

that was awful. i'm sorry.

Edward Bellamy and the Socialist Movement: In 1888, Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts lawyer, published Looking Backward: 2000-1887, one of the most influential socialist works ever written. A young Bostonian falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000 to discover that America has transformed into a socialist utopia. In a world without capitalism, the state runs everything, providing for social and technological advances, paving the way for credit cards, the elimination of middlemen for goods and services, the reduction of the work week, and early retirement. By not wasting their energy on market capitalism, he argued, men were able to become rich, productive, and part of a totally integrated society.

Looking Backward was by no means the earliest work of socialism, but it reached middle class America in a way no similar text had before. It became an overnight bestseller, rivaling Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur in sales. Bellamy removed the stigma of socialism, which had long been associated with sexual libertines and non-traditional values. “Bellamy Clubs” sprang up around the country to discuss the book and its ideals, and it has been said to have influenced England’s garden city movement and the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles. The book was also a profound influence on many famed American socialists, including Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, and Erich Fromm.

HG Wells and Winston Churchill: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is almost as well known for his oratory skills as for his wartime leadership. But many of his lines and ideas came straight from the Grandaddy of Scifi himself, HG Wells. Churchill was a great fan of science fiction, and of Wells in particular, and Wells’ words had a habit of creeping into his speeches. Borrowing a phrase from The War of the Worlds, he referred to the rise of Nazi Germany as “the gathering storm.” Shortly after reading A Modern Utopia, Churchill spoke before the Scottish Liberal Council in Glasgow advocating for social reform in a manner that echoed Wells’ text. Just days before the speech he wrote to Wells, telling the writer, “I owe you a great debt.”

Wells’ influence on Churchill involved more than apt words and social theory. During the Great War, Wells advised Churchill on the creation of a device for trench warfare, although it was developed too late in the war to be of use. The two maintained a friendly relationship, and corresponded until Wells’ death in 1946.

Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, and the Libertarian Movement: Ayn Rand grew up in communist Russia, and devoted much of her literary career to penning tales like Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, in which boldly self-interested souls would stand up against communist dystopias. Robert Heinlein wrote anarcho-capitalist tales of bold frontiersmen who tame the moon free from government interference. In high school, a young man named David Nolan read these authors, and their work helped mold his ideology. Nolan would go on to found the US Libertarian Party, and to this day the party uses works of science fiction to illustrate its objectives and values.

Robert Heinlein and 1960s Counterculture: Heinlein has influenced a wide range of cultural arenas, and his novels have been found in the classrooms of America’s military colleges and in hippie communes in the 1960s. Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s tale of a mystical man from Mars and his church of communal living and free love matched neatly with the urgings of counterculturalist Timothy Leary and the Eastern philosophy in Hermann Hesse’s novels. Heinlein may have meant Stranger as a fictional exploration of social mores (or, if you believe some accounts, part of a bet with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to see which writer could start a religion), but many New Agers used it as a literal manual for daily life, giving it a niche in the counterculture movement.

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and the Green Movement: Published in 1975, Ectopia was hardly the first work of environmental speculative fiction. Works like Aldous Huxley’s Island and Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants considerably predate it. What makes Ecotopia special, however, is that it provides a roadmap for sustainable living in a high-tech society. It envisions a near future in which a political movement has succeeded in creating harmony between man and nature.

Several environmental movements of the 1970s adopted the book as their manifesto, notably the green parties in Europe. And many of its ideas – the focus on localism, the elimination of combustion engines, and production on demand, continue into the modern American green movement as well.

The Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy and Ronald Reagan: Ronald Reagan was famously a fan of science fiction, having grown up reading the epic adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And he didn’t view science fiction as mere fantasy; he believed that science fiction writers offered an invaluable insight into technology and the future. Science Fiction writer Jerry Pournelle pulled together the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy from astronauts, engineers, and, most prominently, several other science fiction writers, including Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Robert Heinlein, Greg Benford, Dean Ing, Steve Barnes, and Jim Baen.

Their original function was to help the Reagan transition team adjust to its new role in space policy, but the council eventually became a fixture of the administration, drafting several space policy papers for Reagan’s team. One of the council’s most famous endeavors was to convince Reagan that it was technically feasible to intercept ballistic missiles in flight. The council even drafted portions of Reagan’s first speech regarding the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would become better known as Star Wars.

I think they actually might be. I don't think America will ever be a socialist country, but I do think its citizens might learn to tell the difference between, say, a communist, a unionist, an anarchist, and a socialist. This would be a giant step: The U.S. isn't exactly a nation of political subtleties. We are democrat or republican, not complicated things like "utopian socialists," Keynesians, or that science fictional favorite, "socialist libertarian." So what I'm saying is that while Obama won't make America socialist, he might make it a place where you can call yourself socialist without people thinking that you eat babies or love Stalin.

Writes Jo-Ann Mort, a lefty columnist in the UK Guardian:

Obama, with billionaire businessman Warren Buffett and former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker among his top financial advisers, may support a more equitable America, he is no socialist. Which isn't to say that an Obama administration couldn't inspire socialist policies or attitudes . . . Obama's stance is significant, not because he has proclaimed allegiance to socialist ideology - he hasn't - but rather because he is expressing support for notions of social solidarity and interdependency and government intervention akin to European social democracy. Surely the majority of Americans don't link these values to any kind of socialist strain. Unlike Europe, socialism and social democracy are not even part of the American political scene. But Americans are searching for a vision of society different from our present one.

Meanwhile, conservative Donald Bordreaux writes in the Christian Science Monitor that though Obama is clearly not socialist, his economic policies might lead to a "milder" form of socialism:

If reckoned as an attitude rather than a set of guidelines for running an economy, socialism might well describe Senator Obama's economics. Anyone who speaks glibly of "spreading the wealth around" sees wealth not as resulting chiefly from individual effort, initiative, and risk-taking, but from great social forces beyond any private producer's control.

I disagree with how Bordreaux characterizes socialism, but at least he's treating it like an actual system of ideas, rather than a recipe for witchcraft. Socialism is being discussed in a semi-rational way in America, for the first time in two generations. Who knows what the future might bring?

Barack Obama's Populist Vision [via UK Guardian]

Is Barack Obama Really a Socialist? [via Christian Science Monitor]