quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Well I didn't bother with a point by point but I did make and disseminate something which is kind of how I feel about the whole of Orson Scott Card's political writings and I guess it's getting some traction. Not that anyone cares, because few people even bother to defend the guy anymore and just sort of sit around awkwardly silent hoping that we just won't talk about those insane things he writes, because it's awkward and embarrassing at this point even to try to suggest that he's not just saying completely nuts things or that even if he's arguing passionately about something it's still totally unfair to think he's not a nice guy because he would be soft-spoken if you met him in person or something
I'd be happy if we talked about the things he writes instead of talking about what it says about him as a person all the time.
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I did just that a few posts back. Specifically, talking about what he wrote about American Sniper and my own opinion about the movie.
Honestly, most of the conversation in this thread has been about the things he writes about. Like how much I dislike his patronizing disapproval of millennials, or how I disagree with his political opinions, etc. And I'm sure he's a perfectly wonderful person IRL, and seems very nice and charming in the videos he's in, but I've never met the man, or spoken with him other than a few threads here. (He stopped posting shortly after I started, sorry about that) So my only exposure to who he is is the things he writes.
And over the past decade, there has been a pretty dramatic shift in his rhetoric and a radicalization of his opinions, to the point that you have to wonder what's happened to him as a person to cause this shift. I wouldn't necessarily say he's changed his political stance so much as he's become so incredibly political that it infects literally everything he writes at this point. Everything Obama does is proof of his contempt and hatred for America. Every movie he doesn't like is because the producer was contemptuous of history and an elitist liberal who sneers at the common man.
It's an incredibly defensive, reactionary posture, and if I were to guess I would say that it coincides with the attacks on him about his views on homosexuality, which really picked up steam ~2005 or so. A lot of those attacks were incredibly hyperbolic, demeaning, extreme, and sometimes outright dishonest, and I think maybe unfortunately they've lead him into becoming the sort of person they made him out to be.
Honestly I don't want to continue down this path, since I think this sort of psychoanalysis is pretty condescending and disrespectful, and I'm uncomfortable talking about him that personally. I'm sure he has his own reasons for the choices he made. OTOH, I have no problem with sharing my disappointment with what those changes have caused him to write, if only because of how much I respect the person he used to be. (or perhaps still is, but doesn't show, or never really was but seemed to be)
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quote:Originally posted by JanitorBlade: I'd be happy if we talked about the things he writes instead of talking about what it says about him as a person all the time.
Sure, let's talk purely about the words in the articles. Their complete buy-in to weak manufactroverseries like the Churchill bust or the bulk rate 2012 Benghazi conspiracies shows that these political screeds can't or won't avoid preposterous yawners if that would impede the ceaseless obsession with denouncing Obama constantly with the most unsustainable and absolute hyperbole possible. This body of work will tilt at literally any windmill possible to proclaim Obama and the American Hating liberal Leftaliban in sheer contempt for civilized values in general, worst president, joseph goebbels, etc.
But beyond just these specific starters, the meltdown after Obama's re-election and the absurdly deranged article full of 'tongue in cheek' dogwhistles about black people becoming Obama's new dictatorial National Police that 'sure sound plausible' are just completely nuts and these articles are showing no signs of relenting from this trend of laughably pompous neuroses, whether about Obama or liberals or the media or hollywood or feminists or believers of global warming. But it would be nice if at bare minimum these articles avoid a troubling retread into racist territory, for the sake of whatever moral credibility they still claim to have.
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but seriously it's honestly becoming conspicuously irrelevant because talking about the articles IS talking about the man writing the articles, it's utterly inseparable and in the absence of any real controversy about them here or anywhere because practically nobody appears to be seriously trying to defend them anymore, this is if not an idle amusement just sort of a continued output of wonderment specific to the community about what these articles are really saying
but! if anything, we are super experts at irrelevant wonderment, so we got that going for us.
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Card has left on me a deeply ingrained legacy as an author I'll never discard or forget, and will keep reading Enderverse fiction, as it comes out, until they are no longer fun reading (which hasn't happened yet).
Not to say that I'm not deeply disappointed in the way things have gone, but I guess I'm just doomed to have to be interested in works written by caricatures of wingbat Right Wingers.
Thankfully I never got into Ringo's Posleen series, crikey.
Turtledove seems to be the only left wing speculative military fiction author at the moment I know of, I need to see if I can find others.
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I too would like to read it...however it would be inappropriate I bet to post a link here...how bout the proper key words to Google it?
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All I have to say is, if you don't like the fact that I treated this place so disrespectfully at my whim over the last 14 years, you have our esteemed host to thank. Whether I was wrong or not, my behavior is a direct result of his. Coming here and treating this like some kind of safe space, in the wake of his behavior ( since @2000 or so) is/was sticking your head in the sand, at least to some degree.
The real downfall of the forum, though, wasn't occasional trolls like me. It was moderation that allowed certain extremely strident members to...do what they did, which was run off most people to other hatrackosphere forums, or other unrelated forums. You can't troll it up through articles, then expect trolls to NOT overrun your own forum.
That sure wasn't my fault.
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quote:Originally posted by steven: if you don't like the fact that I treated this place so disrespectfully at my whim over the last 14 years, you have our esteemed host to thank.
No, I think that's you.
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Man, give it up. Every so often you peddle this bunk around about how your admittedly douchy behavior wasn't really that bad because *point over there*.
You were contemptuous of Card and others here, and so decided to behave contemptuously here in a deliberate (and frankly silly, adolescent, narcissistic) ploy to trash something Card and others liked, making it worse.
Fast forward years later and it's worse, so your story goes, but heck if that's anything to do with you! I guess. I mean, were you either lying about your motives, or just incompetent?
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Yeah, OSC pays for these boards, they are not cheap, and judging by how fast Kristine will reply to queries about book publication and the business end of things, the Card family still reads them (unless JanitorBlade is tasked with letting them know when he sees queries, and then they just pounce on those). I've heard OSC himself make the analogy of it being his living room when he was promoting SOTG back in 2005.
If you want to disagree with what he writes or say something is wrong or silly, that's one thing. The entire point of why we are here is to discuss things that Orson Scott Card writes.
The short time that OSC posted regularly on these forms was pretty awesome and I do miss it. I imagine people would want to continually look to engage him on the political front, which would cut into writing time, be a continual chore, and a waste of time that he could be using to spend with his grandchildren.
... It's also really weird to have people talk about you on the internet as if you can't read what they are saying. I have had to do some interviews for my job, and "who's the hot chick in the middle?"* popped up in one of the internet comments (we had a group picture, and I was in the middle). Part of me was flattered and glad I wore makeup that day (cystic acne is terrible), but the rest of me was seriously disturbed. Like, do I reply to that? What do I say? Am I going to get myself a stalker once they figure out that we were labelled in another picture? Was it a random person? Or someone I know making a joke? I make crap comments on the internet all the time. And then my mother and one of my other co-workers felt the need to tell me that someone on Reddit thought I was hot. Honestly, it was a harmless comment, but still an unsettling experience, and I'm glad I don't have a higher profile so people who I don't know start developing stronger interests and opinions of me. I don't want strangers to care that much.
*This was a categorically inappropriate comment for the interview, which was a group interview about the science we do. And for the morbidly curious, in the picture I was wearing an LL Bean purple hooded zip-up sweatshirt over a button-up, collared shirt (that didn't really go with the sweater, but I keep it in my office and never wash it because work isn't warm enough ever). It was very librarian not-chic.
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quote:Originally posted by steven: All I have to say is, if you don't like the fact that I treated this place so disrespectfully at my whim over the last 14 years, you have our esteemed host to thank. Whether I was wrong or not, my behavior is a direct result of his.
quote:Originally posted by theamazeeaz: I imagine people would want to continually look to engage him on the political front
I disagree. I honestly believe the reason most conversations about him here focus on his political beliefs because that's what he writes about relentlessly. When he writes about non-political things that are interesting and insightful I'm more than happy to talk about those too, and TBH I could probably do a better job of posting more about the things he writes that I greatly appreciate (like his recent TED talks about education), but I think if he started posting here again it wouldn't instantly become political. Unless, that is, he decided to post political things. What do you say then? "Your rant was very grammatically pleasing?"
quote:I keep it in my office and never wash it because work isn't warm enough ever
You know, I started my current job 3 weeks ago, and it's uncomfortably warm in the office all the time. I wear short sleeve dress shirts or roll my sleeves and drink ice water constantly, but I still end up sweating through my undershirt by the end of the day.
There's a woman who works with me who wears a coat. Not a jacket or hoodie, but a friggin coat to work and wears it all day. She always complains about how it's always freezing in the office.
There are some things I'll never understand.
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It's true that politics are what OSC most memorably engages his Rhino readers with, and so they come up a lot. But even if OSC stopped writing about politics and stuck to food and movies and never went on a tangent into politics, readers would still ask about his more memorable pieces, which are on the internet forever, and strike a nerve.
Is your co-worker thin by chance? Us thin folk are just freezing all the time.
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quote: TBH I could probably do a better job of posting more about the things he writes that I greatly appreciate (like his recent TED talks about education)
I think the last movie I saw in the theaters was Interstellar, and I don't buy many packaged snacks, so it's hard to give opinions on his reviews.
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quote:Originally posted by theamazeeaz: Is your co-worker thin by chance? Us thin folk are just freezing all the time.
Hey, what are you implying here?
No, she's pretty portly. I think I have a very high metabolic rate (I've had a lot of difficulty gaining weight, and had to go on some pretty strict weight gaining diets to meet my fitness goals) which may be why I'm always warm.
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quote: TBH I could probably do a better job of posting more about the things he writes that I greatly appreciate (like his recent TED talks about education)
I think the last movie I saw in the theaters was Interstellar (though he might change his mind), and I don't buy many packaged snacks, so it's hard to give opinions on his reviews.
Well we're both kind of SoL here, since Card's stated he won't go see Interstellar and I'm too poor/happy about not having diabetes to waste my money buying junk food. (Also, your snubbery of the Interstellar Thread has been duly noted)
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quote:Originally posted by steven: All I have to say is, if you don't like the fact that I treated this place so disrespectfully at my whim over the last 14 years, you have our esteemed host to thank. Whether I was wrong or not, my behavior is a direct result of his.
Dude, I don't troll my OWN forums...or anywhere else, IIRC. You might respond similarly if a devout Mormon author whose work you gave as gifts and recommended to dozens of people started posting hateful anti-Mormon screeds, for instance.
quote:Originally posted by steven: All I have to say is, if you don't like the fact that I treated this place so disrespectfully at my whim over the last 14 years, you have our esteemed host to thank. Whether I was wrong or not, my behavior is a direct result of his.
Dude, I don't troll my OWN forums...or anywhere else, IIRC. You might respond similarly if a devout Mormon author whose work you gave as gifts and recommended to dozens of people started posting hateful anti-Mormon screeds, for instance.
You know, maybe.
...except, you know, this one, as you started this sidebar by admitting again?
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I wonder why people still bother trying to tell steven that it's his fault at this point. Either he knows already and is just fishing for some uppity or he has no clue and never will since everyone has already explained it as nicely as humanly possible.
Either way it's not HIS time they are wasting.
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im gonna punch Steven in the jimmies some day and then lecture him about how I have externalized the fault of my behavior onto him
If he continues to complain about this or hold me responsible for the inflicted suffering I am going to use that as a continued justification for a newly renewed adolescent self righteous spree of further jimmy punchin'
Y'all brought this on yoself Steven you don't see me punchin anyone else's jimmies today
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Great post...sept for the threats of continued physical harm. Doubt that part is long for these boards dude.
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if it was inappropriate, i blame the forum. if you don't like it, hold yourselves responsible not me
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When I was working as a junior QA something like eight years ago in Longmont I was put right underneath an overcharged vent that turned my workstation to about 30f at best. I was wearing double coats and gloves and a hat in the middle of summer.
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quote:Originally posted by steven: All I have to say is, if you don't like the fact that I treated this place so disrespectfully at my whim over the last 14 years, you have our esteemed host to thank. Whether I was wrong or not, my behavior is a direct result of his.
Dude, I don't troll my OWN forums...or anywhere else, IIRC. You might respond similarly if a devout Mormon author whose work you gave as gifts and recommended to dozens of people started posting hateful anti-Mormon screeds, for instance.
You know, maybe.
...except, you know, this one, as you started this sidebar by admitting again?
I'm pretty sure that was clearly understood to be implied. If not, fine. Assume it to be implied.
And I was always a good-faith member at ornery. I left after several years because I felt the mod had an obvious bias against liberal members, but I never trolled there.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I wonder why people still bother trying to tell steven that it's his fault at this point. Either he knows already and is just fishing for some uppity or he has no clue and never will since everyone has already explained it as nicely as humanly possible.
Either way it's not HIS time they are wasting.
Nicely? Did you ever READ the Hatrack Gossip Thread at Sake, before Mike got ashamed of it and cleaned it up? HA. 'Racka, please. LOL
Then there was JT's site, entropical isle. I'm not even sure how some people justify what they said there. It was offensive, and unnecessary. Anybody care to dispute that?
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It's almost as though people could... detect you were being a schmuck, and reacted to it, Steven. Weird!Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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i have never seen a community less effectively moderated than ornery. the entire place is demented beyond comparison and some days it feels like three quarters of the posts are frenetic overcompensatory obsession piled in a shamespiral of vomitous misery
that or it's like pete at home going for the bingo bonus of 9 rambling chain posts in a row
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: i have never seen a community less effectively moderated than ornery. the entire place is demented beyond comparison and some days it feels like three quarters of the posts are frenetic overcompensatory obsession piled in a shamespiral of vomitous misery
that or it's like pete at home going for the bingo bonus of 9 rambling chain posts in a row
It was better before about 2005 or so. Its downturn happened roughly in parallel with Hatrack's, I think. I lurked there for about 30 minutes once last year, and it has gone full-on surreal, I agree.
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quote:If you ask any American liberal what it is that separates them from those awful Tea Party conservatives, I bet you that nine times out of 10 they’ll answer, “Tolerance.”
Liberals have it; conservatives don’t. Or so liberals believe, in their rigid, unbending, hate-filled view of everyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Well, this week's article starts out nice.
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When did we decide that political affiliation was about personal qualities, rather than philosophical and epistemological convictions?
Tolerance is not a philosophy- it's a quality. It's not one that encompasses any particular philosophy. Something OSC demonstrates on a weekly basis at this point, as he spouts intolerance from every possible philosophical viewpoint.
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If you ask me what most important quality separates me from your average tea party conservative, it is that I am correctly informed by science and I am fighting their attempts to legislate from a position of scientific ignorance, whether they are doing so from a genuine failure to understand scientific consensus, or from having been paid off to undermine scientific consensus.
The fact that I AM also more tolerant, in that I work against structures of power that marginalize minorities, structures of power bolstered by anti-immigration zealotry, "defense of marriage" homophobia, racism that writes off black victims of police violence and dogwhistles urban blacks as 'thugs,' bigotry of many other sorts — qualities endemic to tea party republicans? Less important, but still present. I can only be amused if someone who wrote articles saying that if gay marriage was legalized, it would be justification for Americans to rise up and overthrow their government now wants to lecture others on tolerance or what it truly means to be tolerant or what the actually more tolerant party is. For good reason, I can't particularly take it seriously, and excruciatingly few other people will.
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Although I think you'd probably get a better batting average for "tolerance" among average liberals compared to average Tea Party conservatives, that's not what I'd pick as the defining difference. Besides, there is a worrying trend of intolerance among liberals (see Brendan Eich). I don't think our superior tolerance is the best way to brag while things like that are pretty fresh in our memory (although, tiresomely, we have to also point out that Eich is not an example of having his free speech rights or exercise of religion infringed by Big Brother).
Of course, the whole exercise of picking ONE thing as the biggest or most important difference is kind of silly. But if I was forced to pick one thing, it's that the Tea Party is organized around the idea that big government is inherently bad, and most liberals don't subscribe to that philosophy.
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Liberals are not Canadian. Also when was the last time I saw a self-declared liberal say that 600,000,000 non-liberals should be mass-murdered?
Oh right, I didn't. That was a Tea Party person saying that "all liberals in the world are scum and should be executed".
On another speculative military scifi author's forum.
I'd say Liberals tend to be just as intolerant, but less about race and more about stupid edgy lifestyle choices.
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Just finished the whole article. orson scott card is basically writing (and he may not be intending to say this but when you get to the core points of the article it's what the article is saying) that an example of the intolerance of liberals is that they don't want to see or vocally don't like a movie, but the movie is about people we should lionize no matter what. reading it out like that made me double check just to make sure i definitely have it right, that it's really that impossibly dumb once you boil out all the self-righteous fluff, because that seems a bit hard to believe! but it seems to check out.
Oh, also a hard to embellish strawmanny-thing:
quote:But in the minds of the Other Half, the people who don’t know any soldiers or sailors, “the military” is some faceless mob of angry gun lovers – and those who make or go to films that honor them and show us their sacrifice must be intolerant hate-filled Tea Party conservatives.
yeahhhhhh, so apparently if we want to know what real liberals think in any really representative numbers, he is here to explain to us that liberals think you must be a member of the tea party if you want to go see this movie. i'm really super glad we have him here to explain liberals to us so believablyPosts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I went and saw American Sniper and thought it was a great movie. I don't consider myself a liberal, but by OSC standards I'm pretty much a communist so I fall into the liberal group. I also know people in the military - in fact, I am a veteran. Does this mean I should consider myself a member of the Tea Party? Should I despise myself/hold myself in contempt? I'm so confused here.
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I hate all of you, I went and found that dumb article. Does anyone else notice that the idea of tolerance that he is working with just doesn't work at all. It just cartwheels over itself to support that he doesn't like that some liberals don't like something or don't agree with him. Or they say mean things about his beliefs. So he expresses that this is intolerance, and says mean things about their beliefs. And this is tolerance.
You wicked demon liberals I guess you'll never understand. My logic.
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50% odds its because people boycotted Ender's Game because of his personal beliefs and political advocacy.
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Parkour: Yes, his logic in it is so incoherent, convoluted and contradictory that it borders the line between "haha, crazy Card" and an argument you might expect from an actual crazy person. Like, I'm not saying that because I disagree with it (though I do), I say that because I'm not sure there's any way possible *to* agree with it. It doesn't make any sense.
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Also, American Sniper is a strange movie to pick as a target for a "liberal vs. conservative" benchmark. It's an incredibly successful movie that has been received quite positively by the snobby ivory tower librul movie critics and has gotten 6 Academy Award nominations - including Best Picture - from the bastion of elitist America-hating artsy-fartsy intolerant liberalism itself - aka, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
It's also interesting to see how Card is singing Clint Eastwood's praises and talking about how great his movies are, *including Million Dollar Baby*, when he completely panned it in 2005 and wrote it off as "shallow, stupid and pretentiously bad."
It's like he's trying to create a political conflict where one exists, and where nobody wants one to exist. Which is sad, because AS really is a great movie and is quite moving and has a lot to say about the past 15 years and war in general. There are so many interesting things you could write about or analyze in the movie, so many different things it has to say about human nature, but instead Card chooses to use it as a vehicle to launch a nonsensical political crusade. Which is a pretty effective response to BlackBlade's question of why we discuss his political opinions all the time - he doesn't leave us much in the way of options.
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Eh. Maybe I'm crazy too, but I think it makes sense and Elison has it.
In addition to the problems OSC's faced, the Miss California incident, Chick-Fil-A, Mozilla and Duck Dynasty are great examples of intolerance over finding somebody doesn't support gay marriage. The pro-gay marriage side gets gung-ho about boycotts, and the other side points out that it's technically unfair/illegal to stop someone over an unpopular opinion.
A lot of people will flat out refuse to date Republicans (it's a running joke in certain fiction I've read too), and conservatives do get a lot of crap at colleges. Whether this crap takes the real life form of anything that makes up those "Christian debates atheist professor and wins" chain letters is probably no.
The liberal intolerance for anti-gay marriage views is like intolerance for anti-vaxxers. Being against gay marriage hurts gay couples, which may be the liberal or a close friends. Being against vaccines hurts babies and the immunocompromised. There's a difference between's someone's opinions making them a harmless weirdo and hurting me and mine. One side is all "My religion says it's a sin, my opinion is that gay marriage isn't right and I'm allowed to vote the way I choose and support what I chose because this is the USA". The other side is all "You are denying benefits for my family or friends".
And the other issue that both positions are mainstream in some places and fringe positions in others, depending on where you go.
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theamazeeaz: did you even read the article? It's not about gay marriage at all. It's about how he thinks being liberal means hating the military.
Seriously, read it and tell me how much sense his logic makes by the end.
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