So, I'm basically with the person above who complained that the characters were acting with little to no evidence, other than the beating (which, as someone else pointed out, was never explained, only described, and so isn't evidence of much of anything. I did, in fact, assume cyberlogi's explanation for it and was somewhat surprised when that was never made clear).
My perception of what the story was going to be about was very much influenced by Anna's intro (I'm too often much too easy to sway, though in this case it was also that I've got just about as big a
liberal dick as either she or ElectricPaladin, thanks!) and so I kept expecting the story to be about that, but at the end I was seriously hoping that there was a
ton of untold story that explained why these people suddenly took Younger Son-In-Law's (?) word for it all, rather than (say) sending messengers to neighbouring villages to confirm his stories, or possibly getting the elders to ask the Landholders why those two old men were beaten (and attempting to corroborate the veracity of the answer), and so on.
Because based on the rumours and paranoid panic-mongering they were going on, they were on pretty thin ice.
That said, I would love to see more fantasy stories that deal with (as opposed to simply taking place in) more up-to-date political realities. The Russian story was an interesting example.
Are you sure? I'm basically a communist. I also think that not only should gay and polyamorous marriage be legal, I also don't think the government should be in the business of marrying people at all. And I think that pot should be legal (but probably not cigarettes...).
So the government has no say in who or how people get married and pot should be legal, but no one should enjoy cigarettes? Anna might be more liberal...
I'm all for the legalization of most illegal drugs. Not that I think they're a good thing*, but that the amount of money we (as a society) spend on trying to prevent their use would go a lot farther if we spent it on preventing the harm they cause instead. As it is, I believe the (attempted) enforcement of drug prohibition, not to mention the price inflation - and subsequent attraction to get into the business - cause more harm than the drugs themselves do.
On the other hand, I shouldn't have to be non-consensually exposed to them. No drinker would consider forcing my jaws apart and pouring part of their bottle of beer down my throat, but smokers think nothing of contaminating my air supply. Go ahead and smoke 'em if you got 'em, but keep 'em in your own house, thanks.
*I don't subscribe to the notion that legal necessarily equals good, and illegal necessarily equals bad, nor its converse.
ETA: Link to political one-upmanship discussion.