Can you guess who said these things?

Mouthwash said:
The answer:

Spoiler :
That's right, science fiction's very own Orson Scott Card!



Vice: Orson Scott Card Is Officially the Most Racist Sci-Fi Author

Salon: Orson Scott Card’s long history of homophobia

Huffpost: Orson Scott Card Outdoes Himself With Insane, Racist Rant

Cracked: 4 Big Reasons Orson Scott Card Is a Goddamn Lunatic

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

Before you respond, the purpose of this thread is not to show that Card is *really* a progressive paragon despite his reputation, or that he is *really* a bigoted reactionary despite the progressive sounding quotes I posted. It is to show how outrage culture can make intelligent, nuanced people into a byword for hate if they don't have the correct opinions. Perhaps we should be more hesitant to take these sites at their word?

Here are the sources for Card's quotes:
1) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2015-10-29.shtml
2) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2017-05-18.shtml
3) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2008-07-20.shtml
4) http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-06-25-1.html
5) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2016-10-13.shtml
Click to expand...

Am I supposed to know who this guy is?
 
CurtSibling said:
I know friends who dislike Tolkien, but even though I find the very idea heretical - I accept people have varied palettes and move on.

Getting bent out of shape because someone does not share your fandom preference is the height of absurdity.
Click to expand...

It's obvious that you haven't been around for a while. CFCOT has scaled new heights of absurdity that you cannot even imagine.
 
Manfred Belheim said:
Why? If nothing she knows about it so far has enticed her, ler her get on with the things that actually interest her.
Click to expand...

My whole argument is that the things she sees aren't representative of the content of the books.
 
Mouthwash said:
My whole argument is that the things she sees aren't representative of the content of the books.
Click to expand...

And?

At the end of the day Harry Potter and whatever he's up to now isn't such a thought provoking tome that it should be on any required reading list, ever. The debate over whether it's "outright crap" or "a good light reading diversion" isn't really worth having, in my opinion of course. Frankly, throwing Harry Potter into the mix in a thread about Orson Scott Card is a disservice to Orson Scott Card. Like his politics or not, like his style or not, at least Card's work has some meat. Foul, fascist meat, maybe, but meat worth chewing over.
 
Harry Potter is fantastic y'all are goofing. (Never seen the movies.)
 
Hygro said:
Harry Potter is fantastic y'all are goofing. (Never seen the movies.)
Click to expand...

Okay, a debate over whether it is outright crap or a fantastic light reading diversion. Still doesn't change the question about what makes it a debate that's really worth having.
 
No I mean the seven Harry Potter books are fantastic books. No separate category needed. Mouthwash is confused why someone would avoid a fantasy series with such a massive impact because of movies and merch. Well, people are random, Mouthwash, and they won't optimize. People make their taste decisions by proxy and some of them then defend those taste positions as part of them. As someone who avoided the movies and merch, it had no bearing on my reading experience. Valka is free to miss out.
 
Wait wait wait. Card's Ender's Game series justifies genocide? Or were we talking something else? I mean, Starship Troopers seems to go through more hoops to try on militarism-as-utopia*, are people into busting the chops of Heinlein over Free Lunches and nuclear war and polygamy? Or does his work on the Hippie Bible free him. Honest questions, I haven't kept up.
Spoiler :

I got as far as Xenocide, and it sure didn't seem to through there. Never got through the Shadows books, but if I remember the character that would later become the Hegemon, he wasn't a good guy even if he rated as a compelling character.


*The movie butchers that point and I think that was the point. Gates of Fire does it better, maybe, anyways.
 
Mouthwash said:
The following are all quotes from an American public figure on various political and social topics. Can you guess who it is without looking at the answer (or Googling the quotes)? I think most posters here will find this person's identity... intriguing.

Note: I can't control the content of posts, so I don't recommend scrolling down until you know the answer.


Spoiler On labor unions :
Much of what we're proud of in America today -- yes, even conservatives -- was accomplished by the courage, vision, and determination of Progressives from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

That was a very different time. Children routinely labored long days for pathetic pay, women couldn't vote and were limited in many other ways, the Jim Crow laws in the South, not to mention lynchings, were undoing every speck of progress that the Civil War and Reconstruction had brought to the former slaves.

Workers endured terrible conditions and starvation wages -- and if they tried to strike, the government used police and National Guard forces to protect the even hungrier men and women who crossed the picket lines to take their jobs and their wages.

Meanwhile, with no income tax, the most prosperous members of the ownership class had no limits on their acquisition and display of wealth. This is when the "summer cottages" of Newport, Rhode Island, were built -- summer homes that were filled with the expensive relics of Europe, all so the rich could have a lovely place beside Narragansett Bay to hobnob with the same people they saw all the time in New York City the rest of the year.

The "business cycle" had not yet been tamed, so that every decade (or less) there was another financial "panic" that led to business failures, layoffs, and drastic wage cuts that the working class could not survive.

But these very conditions led to powerful movements that later were lumped together under the name "progressive," though they rarely cooperated. The Knights of Labor set the tone for the whole era. The first federation of labor, the Knights admitted workers of every race and national origin; they admitted women workers; and they were determined to stand together to gain the right to unionize and force the factory owners to pay them enough to live.

Between the government and the owners, the Knights were eventually broken up, but new labor unions formed to take their place and continue part of the fight, at least. Now blacks, foreigners, and women were excluded, but in the long run, the union movement brought benefits to all. As they grew in political power, they began to achieve vital rights, like the right to organize and exist as unions -- and the minimum wage.

It's almost laughable to hear the arguments -- often made by very smart people -- against the minimum wage. "It eliminates entry-level jobs," we're told. But in that era, the minimum wage made it so that employer could no longer cut wages below the subsistence level in order to sell their goods at a lower rate. It meant that if a man had a job at all, he could earn enough money that his wife and children wouldn't starve.

The minimum wage made it possible for families to survive without putting their children out to work -- or breaking up the family because they couldn't feed them all. Nobody was worried then about whether teenagers wouldn't be able to find food service jobs -- the minimum wage and the right to strike brought workers out of desperate poverty that periodically dipped into famine, and started them on the road to entering the middle class.

And it can be argued that the melding of the working class with the middle class, owed to the unions and the minimum wage, is the foundation of American prosperity. Since car companies could no longer compete by cutting salaries, for instance, Henry Ford competed by raising wages while increasing worker productivity, his goal being to make cars that his own workers could afford to buy.

In other words, the laboring class was given a handhold on the American dream of freedom and prosperity.

Spoiler On African-American linguistics and culture :
John McWhorter's new book Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca returns McWhorter to his roots as a public figure. A serious linguist working in creoles and pidgins, he first came to prominence when he refuted some of the extravagant claims about Ebonics in Oakland, California, in the 1990s. Now he tackles the whole issue of how American Blacks talk.

Is Black speech just bad or broken standard American English? No. It's a genuine dialect, with complex grammatical devices that standard American English doesn't have -- as well as simplifications, which are already the hallmark of English.

......

Blacks need to read it so they recognize that when they "talk Black" among themselves, they aren't speaking bad English, they're using the valid dialect that marks them as insiders in their own community.

Yes, for purposes of career advancement in many fields, it's useful to also learn how to use standard American English, just as immigrants benefit from learning it. But American Blacks should no more abandon, suppress, or demean Black English or the accompanying Blaccent than immigrants from other lands need to forget or hide from the native language of their forebears.

Of all Americans, White Southerners should understand this. The various southern accents (from the Appalachian twang to the tidewater drawl) all sound stupid to outsiders, so that many or most southerners regard it as part of their education to learn to speak so that nobody even suspects they're from the South.

But, as I learned from a Southern girl I knew in college, "The minute I get home to where people talk right, I drop right back into my native speech." In American life, in order to get ahead and get along, it's valuable to be multilingual -- which includes learning how to use different accents and dialects accurately and fluently.

McWhorter shows how the diglossia of American Blacks is a complete answer to the frequent comment: "Well, you couldn't talk that way in a job interview." Blacks don't need to be told that, says McWhorter -- they already know.

American Blacks engage in code-switching all the time. Most Blacks with jobs work in places where there are few (if any) other Blacks. They immediately learn to put on their Standard American speech when they get to work and use it throughout the day.

......

Code-switching is a part of the lives of American Blacks, and they don't need White people to tell them about it. What they need is a chance to unwind every day among people who speak the same native language.

If White people wonder why Blacks segregate themselves residentially or, on high school and college campuses, at the cafeteria table, part of the reason may be the simple comfort and rest of being among speakers of their native language.

......

Anybody who thinks that Blacks speak "broken" English doesn't know what broken language sounds like. Blacks in America have more control over their grammars and accents as they switch from code to code than any but a handful of American Whites.

Hispanics, by the way, do similar things, especially second-generation Hispanic-Americans, but the fundamental difference is this: Nobody thinks Spanish is "broken English." It's another language with a history as old as our own.

The effort to elevate Ebonics to a level parallel with Spanish or other languages-of-origin is perfectly understandable, though it's also completely wrong. Black English is not based on African, particularly Bantu, grammars or vocabulary. It is based on English as it was bent to accommodate their ancestors' inability to produce some of the sounds of English.

Far from being a broken language, what Blacks speak now is a powerful dialect of American English. You can't learn it from the criminal street dialect of Blacks in crime shows, largely because most of that is criminal argot rather than Black speech, and it's mostly based on other crime shows rather than actual Black Dialect.

Nor are we hearing authentic full-on Black English when we listen to comedy performances by most Black comics. They emphasize the accent, but only rarely drop into the actual dialect.

So even as more and more Whites learn to imitate some intonations and vocabulary of television and comedian Black dialect, it would be wise for us to remember that as White people, we will never hear full-on Black Dialect often and deeply enough for us to learn it.

This is not because Blacks are trying to exclude us; quite the opposite, they are trying to include us by modifying their speech quite deliberately so as not to say things in ways that they know we could not possibly understand. They're being polite to the person who doesn't speak the language.

Spoiler On media portrayal of LGBT people :
I had a wonderful time watching [Mamma Mia!].

Except for the appalling moment when Colin Firth's character suddenly reveals himself to be gay. No, it's not because I'm anti-gay. It's because they trivialize and ridicule him and homosexuality. His developing relationship with a gay Greek man is never shown or hinted at -- it is revealed only as a punch line. As a joke. It's a slap in the face to all gay people.

Everybody else's yearnings, everybody else's personal agonies, everybody else's love story is worth at least a few moments of screen time. But homosexuality exists in this movie only to be laughed at. It's as if they're saying that the feelings of gay people are amusing, whereas the feelings of heterosexuals are important and deep and meaningful.

Their treatment of their one gay character is as appallingly hypocritical as J.K. Rowling's announcement that Dumbledore is gay. Instead of making us know and understand the character as a gay man, we are slapped with it at the end, as if being gay were just an afterthought.

......

Don't these writers actually know any gay people? I mean know them, as friends, as family members, as colleagues? I can't believe they do. Because if they did, they could never treat their gay characters with such contempt.

Spoiler On immigration :
We Americans, what exactly did we do to earn our prosperity, our freedom? Well, for most of us, what we did was: be born.

Yeah, we work for our living and pay our taxes and all that, but you know what? I haven't seen many native-born American citizens who work as hard as the Mexican-born people I see working in minimum-wage jobs in laundries and yard services and intermittent subcontracting projects and other semi-skilled and unskilled positions.

I have no idea which (if any) of the people I see doing this work are legals and which are illegals -- but that's my point. Latin American immigrants, as a group, are hard-working, family-centered, God-fearing people who contribute mightily to our economy.

......

"But they come here and commit crimes and live off of our welfare system!"

Wait a minute. Who is "they"? All of the illegal immigrants?

Only a certain percentage of them. But when we round up illegal immigrants, do we make the slightest effort to distinguish between those who commit crimes here, those who scam the system to get welfare, and those who are working hard and living by all the rules?

No. We send them all home. There is, under present law, no special treatment for illegal immigrants who, during their time in the U.S., work hard and don't take anything from anybody without paying for it. No special consideration for those who live in shockingly desperate poverty here in the United States so they can send most of their pitifully low earnings home to their families in Mexico.

And yet most of the illegal immigrants commit no crimes, but instead live frugally and work hard. In fact, I dare say that many illegal immigrants work harder and obey our social rules more faithfully than a good many citizens whose right to live within our borders is unquestioned.

And if all you can say to that is, "It doesn't matter, send them all home, give them no hope of citizenship because we don't want to reward people for breaking the law to enter our country," then here's my answer to you:

Let's apply that standard across the board. No mercy. No extenuating circumstances. No sense of punishment that is proportionate to the crime. Let's handle traffic court that way.

The penalty for breaking any traffic law, from now on, is: revocation of your license and confiscation of your car. Period. DWI? Well, we already do that (though usually for something like the nineteenth offense). But now let's punish speeders the same way. Driving 50 in a school zone -- lose your license and your car! Driving 70 in a 65 zone on the freeway? No license, no car. Not coming to a full stop at an intersection? No license, no car.

No mercy, no exceptions, no consideration for the differences between traffic offenders.

Oh, you don't want to live under those rules? Well, you can't deny that people would take the driving laws much more seriously, right?

"But it wouldn't be fair!" you reply.

That's right. It wouldn't be fair. Yet that's exactly the same level of fairness that I hear an awful lot of Americans demanding in order to curtail the problem of illegal immigration.

......

The voice of bigotry speaks: "But they're dirty, they don't speak the language, they live in such awful conditions."

Hey, buddy! They're dirty because they're poor and exhausted and they work with their hands and they sweat from their labor! They don't speak the language because they weren't born here and in case you've never tried it yourself, learning another language is hard. And they live in awful conditions because they're doing lousy, low-paying jobs and sending the money home.

How clean, fluent, and well-housed would you be if you moved to Turkey, took the lowest paying jobs in Turkish society, were struggling to learn Turkish during the few moments you were awake and not laboring, and had to support your family back in the home country on whatever you didn't spend to stay alive in Istanbul?

Of course, these complaints are often disguised ways of saying, "We don't want them here because they're brown and most of them look like Indians." Only we know better than to admit that's our motive, even to ourselves. So we find other words to cover the same territory.

Just remember this. Each new wave of immigrants from a particular country looked different from those who had come before. But after two or three generations, with or without intermarriage, we got used to seeing them among us. Their skin and bone structure and hair type and color became just another way of looking American.

Of course, Mexicans and Indians have been here all along. If they look strange to you, it's just because you haven't lived in a part of the country where it is common to see people whose ancestors lived here long before those of European ancestry showed up.

And a lot of those who get mad at seeing "all these illegal immigrants" may not even have seen any. Because a lot of people in our country who look Mexican or Indian are actually sixth- and seventh-generation Americans whose ancestors were citizens long before yours were.

Spoiler On the Donald Trump tapes :
I have been stunned by good friends, who I thought had a strong moral compass, who actually think that it's a complete answer to Trump's appalling remarks (and confessions) about his attitude and actions toward women to say, "He only said what Bill Clinton actually did."

Really? You're now saying that Bill Clinton's behavior was so acceptable that it provides a complete cover for Trump?

Even worse are the men who say, "That's just locker room talk. All men talk like that."

No. Not all men talk like that. In fact, no man that I know personally ever talks that way, because I associate with men who respect and love their wives, their mothers, their sisters, their daughters; they would be ashamed to have those thoughts, let alone speak them aloud to another person.

You can go through your whole life as a male and never think of women as possessions, as objects, as things to be owned and used and abused as you see fit. In fact, civilized men do go through their whole life without ever speaking of, let alone treating, women in such negative ways. Men who do think and speak of women that way are barbarians.

I take that back. Barbarians deserve a better reputation than that.


The answer:

Spoiler :
That's right, science fiction's very own Orson Scott Card!



Vice: Orson Scott Card Is Officially the Most Racist Sci-Fi Author

Salon: Orson Scott Card’s long history of homophobia

Huffpost: Orson Scott Card Outdoes Himself With Insane, Racist Rant

Cracked: 4 Big Reasons Orson Scott Card Is a Goddamn Lunatic

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

Before you respond, the purpose of this thread is not to show that Card is *really* a progressive paragon despite his reputation, or that he is *really* a bigoted reactionary despite the progressive sounding quotes I posted. It is to show how outrage culture can make intelligent, nuanced people into a byword for hate if they don't have the correct opinions. Perhaps we should be more hesitant to take these sites at their word?

Here are the sources for Card's quotes:
1) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2015-10-29.shtml
2) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2017-05-18.shtml
3) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2008-07-20.shtml
4) http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-06-25-1.html
5) http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2016-10-13.shtml
Click to expand...

Fwiw, i was afraid to click on this thread, due to possible ties to pro-Israel state mentality, or the "big reveal" being the person who said x was jewish.
So, if neither of those is true, how come you like this Card person? :mischief:
 
Relevant (and amusing):

Spoiler A bit sweary :
 
Farm Boy said:
Wait wait wait. Card's Ender's Game series justifies genocide?
Click to expand...

Well, yeah. There is a genocide in the books as a central plot feature, and numerous characters present dialog about how the circumstances most assuredly warrant it. Heck, given the circumstances as presented arguing against it is almost impossible. So, they do provide a launching point for "well, they aren't quite the existential threat that the bugs were in Ender's Game but genocide is still a justifiable solution to ______." It may not have been intended as a justification for genocide, but it serves admirably.
 
Ender's game is about a genocide that never had to happen. I haven't read the direct Ender sequels but I know they start as a story about the weaponized human the system produced to conduct that genocide without his consent, and how he grapples with that. The Shadow books, which I read, don't justify genocide. They do get really boring as they go on, which sucks because they start so fun. The Ender books show you how a society might justify genocide and build toward it, which is similar to what each one of you are creating in your own heads every time you think The Purge is right around the corner.
 
Spoiler :
I'm pretty sure Ender, as a character, is trained to hit fatally hard his entire life while simultaneously having the knowledge of how hard he hit kept from him. He stopped hitting that hard once he wrested control over his life, even when the stakes were probably higher.
 
Mouthwash said:
I think most of the commercialization came after the Deathly Hallows. Besides, why should that affect your opinion of the books? if you want to be impressed by writing, how about you just read what's written?
Click to expand...
Do you realize how damned annoying it is to be confronted with Harry Potter ads everywhere? It was on TV, in the stores, it was part of the chattering conversations I heard, and people would start talking about it, expecting me to understand a ton of references that meant nothing. I got tired of it even before I might actually have been interested in trying it out. It's like retail workers get tired of Christmas music because they have to listen to it for weeks before Christmas even gets here.

I am not saying it's wrong for anyone else to like it. I've heard that a lot of kids who weren't into books before took to them like a duck loves water. So boosting literacy and reading is a good thing.

But my literacy and reading don't need that kind of boost. If I never bought another book, I'd have enough here already to keep me occupied for years, assuming I read a book a day of the ones I haven't already read. And most of them aren't short enough to read in a day.

Wait, you read Forgotten Realms? You said you didn't know what Menzoberranzan was!
Click to expand...
There's more to Forgotten Realms than the Dark Elves and Drizzt Do'Urden. I read the first three Avatar novels (used to be a trilogy, but I heard that a fourth book came out later), and have read a couple of the standalone novels. There are more in the collection that I haven't read. When books tend to come in trilogies, as is the case with a lot of the AD&D novels, I prefer to get all of them before starting. That way I won't be left hanging at the end of one and frustrated because of the time spent trying to track down the next one.

You mean I'm unlikely to be successful in getting you to read a single word of a book you've never read. You're a very open-minded person, you know that? (If it helps, I also think that Rowling is incredibly arrogant and in love with her own success, but that doesn't change my opinion of the books.)
Click to expand...
Could you leave the sarcasm offline, please? :huh:

How many of my favorite novels have you read? Ever read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood? How about Cyteen and its sequel Regenesis, by C.J. Cherryh? None of them are easy reads, and I'm very much looking forward to Season 2 of the Handmaid's Tale TV series... and if I had a few hundred million bucks lying around that I wouldn't miss, I'd gladly option Cherryh's Alliance-Union novels and either make movies or a couple of multi-year TV series out of them. Just Cyteen alone would easily run a couple of seasons. It's complex like Dune is complex - I gain more insight and nuance with every re-read, and the books are rich with science (genetics and terraforming), politics, how to set up a system of interstellar commerce when all you have is STL travel and how it changes everything when somebody invents FTL, and the ethics of not only cloning people but cloning them and doing whatever it takes to make the clone as much like the original as possible, in terms of intelligence, abilities, and personality.

Finally... if you absolutely refuse to ever read Harry Potter, you might at least try Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfiction that can be read on its own and has more appeal to sci-fi fans.
Click to expand...
Okay, I bookmarked it. I will admit that the description of bookshelves filled with books on a variety of topics, plus science fiction, got my attention. It sounds exactly like the living room I'm sitting in right now.


I do have to say thank goodness for online fanfic in a general way. I've been collecting print 'zines since the '80s, and have been reorganizing them lately. I hadn't realized I had 4 boxes of Highlander 'zines. And according to Fanlore.org (a fantastic wiki for print fanfic), the ones I have are but a small number of what's been published. I've also got some Darkover, Doctor Who, quite a bit of Robin of Sherwood, and there's one of Sliders and another of The Phoenix (Berzerker might like that one, since it's about ancient aliens and saving Earth; the main character was played by Judson Scott, who was also in The Wrath of Khan). But the vast majority are The Original Series print 'zines ranging from Spockanalia! (from the '60s) to ones from the '90s that are a mix of TNG and TOS. I'm not sure they'll all fit in the same bookshelf, but will make a good try at it.
 
CurtSibling said:
The conversation quality is definitely lower, and the choice of things people argue about are pale compared to the old days.
Click to expand...
I can assure having dug through the archives from time to time the quality of discussion and the felicity of arguments has greatly increased.
 
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