Not to detract this into too much of a flamebaity controversy, but I’ve had more fun reading Card’s random opinions about everything in the last few years than anything I read of his fiction. Those Ender’s Game sequels, yawn.
He does seems to have some deeply weird personal issues with homosexuality and undoubtedly promotes a few very wrong ideas about it, but that’s religion for you. That doesn’t mean, to me, that his voice is automatically worthless on every other topic, or that reading his reviews can’t be enjoyable even when you disagree with them.
His column was where I found out about the recommendation for the hilarious and sadly missed Sassy Gay Friend web series, for instance, and his take on it is not the frothing ball of hateful slime kind of thing you’d expect from his reputation.
But then again, I’m a other-peoples-opinion-enjoyer by nature, so results might vary. Maybe I just missed the worst of it and would be more indignant if I knew more.
Edit. Just remembered people similarly seem to hate Dan Simmons, and I don’t know enough to tell you why. I do know Hyperion rocked my world, and the sequels didn’t. The Terror disappointed as well.
Well, I was actually making a suggestion in good faith, so no need for the sarcasm.
ETA - Also, I really feel as if I need to push back on the whole history as teleology point. I think that not enough people know how destructive modernity has been, how destructive European colonization, how destructive westward expansion was… I mean, there is a text book in texas that wants to cast slavery as essentially “migration”.
We have yet to come to terms with the violence in our past, and whitewashing history won’t help. That doesn’t mean we ignore the good, but we need to put it into context.
Good to know that. Sorry for the prickly response.
Just to explain, “You know that there are books” is exactly the sarcastic response I would have given to someone who said something along the lines of “don’t blame me for my ignorance, I had bad teachers.”
And I did say “I had bad teachers”, just not the other part.
“Teleology” is a strong word, I wouldn’t subscribe to that, either. But I am one of those who claim there has been “progress”.
Slavery as “immigration”? Wow.
As for the “not enough people know” point, I don’t think we two are the right people to productively discuss this, as the state of “common historical knowledge” in Austria is definitely different from the one in America. Austria, due to its geography, was only ever a continental European power; we had comparably little opportunity to engage in colonialism and slave trade. Thus, there has been much less resistance to teaching children about how bad it was. People know that America was stolen from its native peoples. People know about slavery. People know about segregation. People know that other continents have history and traditions of their own. A general sentiment of anti-modernism was and is much more popular than it ever was in America.
So if we are to agree about any statement about what people should know more about, and in what direction in particular their world view should change, we’d first need to spend some time (like, a separate thread) to synchronize our impressions of what people are thinking now.
The problem with “putitng in context” is that people usually have a hard time imagining how many different orders of magnitude of badness there are. So, if you take anything and “put it into context” by comparing it with how things would be in an ideal world - as far as we can imagine it -, then it will look pretty bad. If you take the same thing and compare it to the Holocaust, it will likely look quite good; and if it doesn’t look good enough, put it in the context of the Generalplan Ost.
