He’s also a racist conspiracy theorist. I’m not a fan of Obama myself, but Card’s ideas are hateful and loony — he thinks Obama is going to place Michelle Obama in the presidency with a force of “national police”.
"Where will he get his ‘national police’? The NaPo will be recruited from ‘young out-of-work urban men’ and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.
"In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.
"Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people ‘trying to escape’ — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama."
Utterly bonkers. And here there’s a movie coming out based on one of his books…which I will not be seeing. Ever.
Welp. That kills any desire for me to ever see his movie.
I liked Ender’s Game, although it left me with no desire to read the rest o’ the series. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how a person’s politics should be divorced from criticism of their artistic output. To which I say:
BULL. SHIT.
I cannot, in good conscience, financially support someone who thinks my very existence should be criminalised, however good his YA sci-fi is. And in a free market, I can put my quids wherever I like.
So, um… nerr? I guess?
I hear Obama’s group will be Dedicated, Aggressive Nasties. We can call them Danites for short.
Urban Men, urban gangs, and young thugs. Well that doesn’t sound the least bit like coded racist bullshit. I’m also not going to see the movie.
I liked his books a lot more before I knew anything about the author’s personal beliefs.
I hope his movie shit tanks like that white Tonto Lone Ranger crap, oh and white Aang Avatar.
I posted that before even reading the OP. Holy shit this guy is … (avoid ableism avoid ableism) … HORRIBLE! Abysmal. Abominable. Execrable. Straight-up shitty, yo.
Geez, I remember this conspiracy theory. I guess there are no new ones out there.
So much for the hypothesis that OSC was moderating his rhetoric for the sake of movie marketing…
I started to read “Ender’s Game,” and gave up because it was just poorly written, with literally unbelievable characters and a stale premise that didn’t do justice to a story about war. Think “Heinlein Lite.” Card’s disconnect from reality is evident both in his character-development, and in his current bigoted lunacy. I’d boycott the movie because of the latter, but I’m already giving it a miss because of the former.
This is one of those occasions that I hate the author but enjoy his books.
Has Card always been this bad? Or is he just getting this way in his old age?
To paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, Orson Scott Card is not even worse than we imagine, he’s worse than we can imagine.
Think “Heinlein Lite.”
Ouch, RB. I loathed Heinlein, and only made it through a third of SiaSL before I flung it from myself in a spasm of disgust.[/drama queen]
My thoughts exactly. A black man being given the top job has sent Card’s racist paranoia into overdrive, and he now thinks Obama will orchestrate the creation of some sort of police state where black people have hegemony.
I’ve read so many of these outlandish screeds that I don’t even have the spoons to be angry any more. I’m just dissapointed. And a bit sad.
Give it 5 minutes though. A second reading will ahve me nicely riled.
Card may be a raving-mad junkyard moonbat but his opinions are held by roughly half the American public. I don’t see how the US can remain a world power with this level of disconnect with reality.
I think the reason for the craziness is the demographic transition that’s now occurring. Whites will be a minority in the foreseeable future and many whites are terrified of that. That can’t express that fear directly, or they may not be even aware of it so instead we get “the neegras are comin to take my guns” type shit.
I’ve never read any of his stuff. I now do not intend to.
I always preferred the Alvin Maker books just because they were so utterly weird – an odd combination of harshness and humaneness, I suppose. I wouldn’t pay a penny for one of his books now as I don’t support bigots. (I’ve nothing in principle against buying books from _dead_ arseholes.)
OSC: “Just because I said urban young men and gangs, doesn’t mean I meant black people! The fact that you associate black people with gangs makes you the REAL racists!”
The World: “Uh huh. Suuuuuuure it does.”
How strange. I’m just finishing The Ogre* by Michel Tournier, which takes place in a Napola,** and that’s what I’ve constantly been thinking: “This sounds exactly like a program Obama would start!”
*Highly recommended for those who like historical-philosophical fiction.
**The book isn’t mentioned on the Napola WP page. Someone should fix that.
Wow,… after reading the article from the The Bilerico Project, I was stunned. Been a sci and sci-fi human since I was a wee lad, but have lost touch with a lot of sci-fi lit it in recent years. And in general, I’ve always tended to have the view that sci-fi authors were a cut above in progressive thinking.
I have known of OSC as a sci-fi author, but knew nothing about his foundational political/social beliefs. What a shocker; I had no idea.
I feel that this is getting very close to quote mining. The opening lines of his blog entry from which the apparent garbage came, start as shown below:
“Unlikely Events
This is the column where I predict how American democracy ends.
No, no, it’s just a silly thought experiment! I’m not serious about this! Nobody can predict the future! It’s just a game. The game of Unlikely Events.”
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2013-05-09-1.html
Whilst the guy has shown himself to be a bit of a dick, I am willing to take what he wrote at the start of the column at face value.
Meanwhile, while Card is dribbling out his racist spittle, actual, real-life efforts by Republicans to disenfranchise those “young out-of-work urban men” have accelerated frantically.
I read Ender’s Game as a kid…but don’t’ remember it…will not read it again or see the movie. There is plenty of good sci fi out there for me to read without supporting this jerk.
@ KevinKat, Panda Rouge, Dansant au Soleil #1.
You mean his vehement and violent homophobia hadn’t already done that?
The man has plainly called for the murder of gays.
That’s he’s a well-rounded bigot, filling out his homophobia with racism, shouldn’t be anything other than additional impetus, certainly not the final straw.
@Tomathy:
No, the homophobia made me not want to see his movie in theatres. I might have picked it up later on.
Beanfeast: Ok, I read the whole thing. And fuck you very much for that.
Then you need to work on your reading comprehension. He starts by saying no-one can predict the future because we can never know all the facts, or accurately predict trends.
He then spits out a shitload of “facts” pulled straight from NewsMax.
His conclusion is based on things he believes are true, with a caveat that no-one can predict the future. It’s not, as you imply, a wild speculation based with no underlying reasoning.
Card is a bigot and a loon, but at the end of the full article he seems to be saying that all these supposed predictions are just a fictional extrapolation or something. Not that it makes any sense, but at least it seemed to me (by reading the full article) he doesn’t actually believe Obama is setting up his wife to succeed him.
So, do you think that caveat applies to the pile of “facts” which the conclusion is built on? I sure don’t.
Oh, well, that’s better.
Keep in mind: the LDS holds Card up as a spokesman of the Mormon religion.
I feel that this is getting very close to quote mining…
The additional “context” you provide is nothing more than OSC trying to preempt criticism by saying “I’m just kidding!” Which is what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter routinely do. It doesn’t make any of their bigoted crap any less reprehensible. If he’s serious, then he’s a raving unhinged bigot. If he’s joking, then it’s not funny. And if he’s just idly specualting, then it’s crappy speculation driven by a bigoted tribalistic mindset.
Beanfest: “Whilst the guy has shown himself to be a bit of a dick, I am willing to take what he wrote at the start of the column at face value.”
That is, to say the least, an extremely generous take on what is, to my view, an alarmingly racist screed. Card’s “thought experiment” is what he considers to be a plausible scenario based upon his belief that
1. Obama is the dumbest President in American history
2. Obama is dictatorial by nature
3. that he is predisposed to use “urban” gangs to enforce his obviously racial, leftist agenda.
I am all for giving people the benefit of the doubt but having read that article, are you really prepared to defend it as just some innocent and non-consequential thought experiment
I read Ender’s Game as a teenager and liked it, though I did think it fell short of some other great books I’d read at the time. It was very readable, which I imagined helped it become popular.
A friend of mine is actually a big fan of the series, and thinks the sequels are where the story actually hits its stride. However he says that it’s funny, one of the messages that my friend took away from the later books is essentially “It’s okay to be yourself and you don’t have to change”. Strange that such a gay friendly theme would be put out by such a raging bigot.
Why haven’t you fixed it? :-) Remember, you don’t even need to register for that. Just click on “Edit”.
I guess he’s covering his ass so the “national police” won’t arrest him first. He might as well have added “, but I’m not a racist.”
So what if Card throws out the caveat that no one can predict the future before engaging in racist conspiracy mongering? Does that then mean we should modify the amount of criticism we give Sylvia Browne when she admits that she’s wrong around 15% of the time?
There are people who thought Starship Troopers and 300 were meant as satires of machismo. Word of God says they’re meant straight.
Yeah, I’m pretty certain that Card’s now just working the “there is no bad publicity” theory. For every decent person who hears about this and thinks, “What a fuckhead. No way I’m seeing his movie,” there is likely some asshole thinking, “Yeah, he’s so right! I’m gonna run out and see his movie six times!”
And a larger number of people who go, “Ender’s Game? That looks like a good movie. I remember hearing something about the author of the book, but I don’t remember what it was. Must be okay, then.”
Seriously, I’m still baffled by the sheer number of people who did not get a clue about Orson Scott Card worth as a human being from Ender’s game:
it’s probably the most blatant self-insert masturbatory fantasy this side of Ayn Rand’s corpse: “Oh, look at the poor little genius abused by these petty bullies who hate him because they’re jealous of his superior intellect: trully he had no choice but to kill one of these, oh, and his act of genocide is totally OK because he saved Mankind and in his heart, he feels very, very bad about it“.
It doesn’t take a nobelized genius to see that Ender is what Card imagine he is: a supremely intelligent man despised by inferior subhumans incapable of perceiving the scale of his intellect and virtue. Regardless of his prophessed political preferences (and remember: Card spent decades pretending to be a staunch liberal): the fact that he is an insufferable contemptuous and contemptible douchebag was clearly hinted by his “magnum opus”
No, I don’t either. It’s a load of crap- I just took it to be a load of crap that Card spewed while at the same time saying “not that I believe any of this”, or something.
That is 100% proof conspiracy theory blather right there; on a par with chem trails and the 9/11 truthers. I half expect him to suddenly reveal that he believes Obama to be a Reptilian infiltrator from Alpha Centuri. I wonder if Card is just spewing racist drivel, or if he is actually so far gone that he has come to really believe this ludicrous fantasy?
———————————————————————————————————————
borax @ 4;
I can just imagine Card having to repeatedly rewrite this column piece to edit out what he is clearly actually talking about – the young black men he reflexively hates and fears because he is a ranting, racist bigot – and replace all such references with ‘urban men’. That he actually thinks this will fool anyone is simultaneously insulting to the general public’s collective intelligence, and a pathetic indication of how completely out of touch Card really is.
I have never read Ender’s Game or any of Card’s works, and I never will, nor will I support the upcoming film adaptation. His racism on its own is more than enough to ensure that I could never support his works in any way in good conscience, but there is also his history of testerical homophobia to consider.
From the link in the OP;
Violent, revolutionary rhetoric in the name of ‘defense of marriage’ homophobia is worrying to say the least. I wonder where gay people would fit into Card’s heteronormative post-revolutionary ‘utopia’? I rather fear that the answer might have something to do with concentration camps.
I, in no way, endorse torrenting the movie from Chinese pirates two days after it’s released in theaters.
Ok, this is going to sound mean but seriously wtf?
You can’t honestly be this fucking stupid. Seriously, how can anyone be this fucking, ‘shitting their paints gullible.
Why the fuck did he write that? What’s the point of it? Is it satire on RW paranoia? no. Is it satire on Obama? no, or if it is it’s still fucking racist. is it to entertain? if so still racist. What is it, what’s the fucking point? Do you honestly believe that this somehow just sprung ex nillo and Scott wrote down whatever diarrhea spewed from his mind randomly and felt it was good enough to publish?
What the fuck do you think is the fucking point of someone spewing racist fear mongering with some winking “not that this is true, WINK WINK” ass covering?
So tell me what is the “or something?” What the fuck could it possibly be? What the fuck has this guy done to earn this welfare of doubt (we’re way beyond benefits)
Cause this is what I hear: “A RICH WHITE MAN!? WELL OBVIOUSLY WE MUST PRESERVE AND RESPECT THE MASTERS!”
Seriously what the fuck is wrong with you? Use your goddamn brain
It’s bad enough if he’s just gone mad, but if he’s emitting this stuff as propaganda, without believing it, that makes it so much worse.
If that’s what he was going for, that seems worse. It is one thing to think he’s become unhinged. It is another to believe that it is a calculated attempt to race bait and fearmonger.
Oh and my post was not meant to offend or question the intelligence of anyone or insinuate they’re blinkered unthinking dolts. I don’t think that at all. My post isn’t about that at all. I’m just talking.
I only read the original novella, which was an almost perfectly structured story, every detail added to the story and no ends were left hanging. It dealt only with the period of training and seamlessly transitioned the training from simulation into actual warfare without Ender knowing that he was now directing the battles. The reveal was subtle, and the reader was left to decide whether Ender should have, or would have, made a different moral choice had he known that his actions were killing sapient beings. It was a beautiful short story.
I’ve rarely been happy with novelizations from short stories. Either the added material simply detracts from a nice short story idea (I’m looking at you Micheal Crichton), or changes the idea into some more nebulous and without as much punch. Or even alters the core idea into something completely different.
So I’ve avoided all the Ender books in order to retain my memory of a great short story.
Of course, Card’s bigotry has not helped convince me to give them a try.
Card sure makes me appreciate and miss Banks.
@Marcus Ranum
OT: Speaking of which I’m looking curiously at his scifi. I got Use of Weapons on audible and checked out one from the library. Any recommendations for the best?
leftwingfox, Raging Bee, brentalistair, et. al.
I am not arguing about the ethics or validity of what OSC wrote, but it doesn’t surprise me he would churn out something like that.
However, if I ask myself whether OSC really thinks that the next president of the US will be Michelle Obama and that she will be enforcing Barack Obama’s will via para-militarized gangs, I don’t think he does and I don’t see how anyone reading that blog could take that to be OSC’s personal expectation of what the US will look like by 2018.
Therefore, taking a chunk of text out of the middle of his piece of speculative fiction and saying that he does think this is what is going to happen is questionable:
It is the sort of thing we complain about when Ray Comfort does it and it makes me uneasy when I see someone who holds, by and large, the same opinions as I, do it.
Maybe he just cashed some huge hollywood checks and has decided that he really doesn’t care what people think now that he’s financially secure. Perhaps what’s oozing out of him is what’s been bottled up inside for his whole life, held in only be fear of consequences. This isn’t “fuck you, I’ve got mine!” It’s “I’ve got mine, fuck you!”
@Beanfeast
Oh I’m so sorry we fucking took his word for it!
Seriously what the flaming fuck is wrong with you?
Ingdigo Jump – this may cause controversy but i’d say “use of weapons” and “consider phlebas”
Neither do I. I say either don’t watch it, or donate the viewing cost to the opposing cause you support.
use of weapons is so far well written, but the writing gimmick is translating not too well to audible format
Neither do I: it’s notoriously known that you have to wait at least three week to have a good quality cam where image is both clear and synchronized with the soundtrack.
OSC is a hateful, batshit crazy, loonytoon, who doesn’t deserve a penny of anyone’s money but does boycotting the movie do any of that? Hasn’t he already been paid for the rights to make the movie? Is he getting a percentage of the gross? My fear is that a boycott will not hurt OSC at all but the entire genre of SF movies in general. That producers, when presented with sa proposal for an SF movie, will just look at the poor returns (and turnout) from Ender’s Game and say “we’ll call you, bye.”
While I do not, by any means, what to be considered an “apologist” for OSC, I am still afraid that by boycotting the movie we’d be “shooting ourselves in the foot”. Maybe, even if so, maybe still better to do it “for the principle of the thing”. I’m so torn, I want to see the movie but I hate OSC’s attitudes about everything. The *book* was pretty good, the 2nd was a little “deeper”, the 3rd was too weird, and the next ones kept getting stranger.
And if (and hopefully when) his movie bombs he’s going to play the victim card because all us liberals were intolerant of him.
Excuse me but as a fan of the genre: Boo fucking hoo.
Boycotting the movie hurts his career as it potentially shows him as a toxic asset to investors/producers. It also hurts the potential of sales for his movie tie in reprints and merchandising. The fact that he himself asked for the boycott to be called off shows it has some value. Furthermore, showing Scott to be a toxic asset has an effect beyond just him. It’s sending a message to Hollywood that the consumers might consider such people “blacklisted”
Let me assure you that it can’t hurt SF anymore than actual SF authors have
Stevem, a boycott spreads awareness of what kind of person OSC is and will hurt his ego. The studios know why people are boycotting his movie so that will lessen any splash damage to other SF movies. The studios will also look at Elysium and the other SF hits this year.
Remember the movie Golden Compass and the threats of boycotts it received? Did that hurt other SF movies? So maybe an Enders Game boycott will hurt future SF movies. Maybe not. But I think its worth the risk and maybe, just maybe, studios will look more at the author of a book before they adapt it to a movie.
Wow, my first time being seriously flamed on Pharyngula! I’m so excited.
I think you misunderstand me, because I agree with everything you’re saying about Card. He’s a bigot, a loon, a fear monger, etc.
Agreed!
However, if I ask myself whether OSC really thinks that the next president of the US will be Michelle Obama and that she will be enforcing Barack Obama’s will via para-militarized gangs, I don’t think he does and I don’t see how anyone reading that blog could take that to be OSC’s personal expectation of what the US will look like by 2018.
That makes his incendiary, racist, fear-mongering rhetoric about “urban gangs” and “national police” MORE reprehensible, not less.
I hope someone is keeping a list of these predictions so that when they fail to come true we can bring them up and laugh at them. I’ve found the most effective way of neutering bigotus fearmongerensis is to show the people who might give their dog-whistling some credence how they’ve been wrong in the past, in the same way.
Just to clarify, the “worried listeners” here are people who are culturally racist but don’t realise it. The ones who look at this and think “Hmm, I heard about those urban gangs on the news. Surely this wouldn’t happen… but could it? Is this something I need to worry about?” These are the people the humanist movement needs to reach in my opinion, because they’re the ones who can be converted. The people who hold racist views but don’t realise they’re racist, and would be horrified to see themselves as racist.
In short: empirical evidence defeats speculative fearmongering in normal but misguided people.
kreativekaos
Unfortunately, not true at all. There’s a very large contingent of right-libertarians and general right-wingers among science fiction writers.
You know who else is an “urban male”? Michael Bloomberg, that’s who!
Somehow I don’t think Card or his adherents are picturing billionaire mayors of the nation’s largest city as a violent problem.
Oh, this is just so much shit, layer upon layer of sheer irrationality and nonsense.
As for a failure of Ender’s Game hurting the SF movie genre, I’m pretty certain there’s little risk. It might hurt the chances for certain types of movies to be made (e.g. Old Man’s War), but even the dopes in Hollywood can understand that “racist asshat alienates audience” is a factor exclusive of the genre. Paula Deen’s comments didn’t scare publishers out of the cookbook genre; Card’s stupidity isn’t going to scare movie producers out of the most lucrative genre in their business.
I should probably clarify that I singled out OMW because it’s in the category “intergalactic future war” category. Scalzi is about the opposite of Card.
For those thinking of indulging in Gendered Slurs–male or female–don’t.
flex @ 46
I wish that I could say the same. I read the novelization and a couple of the sequels and grew more disappointed with each one.
Mostly off topic, but relating to OSC: Is he the one that came up with the “tillage hypothesis” for Asimov’s Foundation series? This explained why humanity found earthlike ecosystems on all of the habitable worlds in the galaxy, but no other civilizations. Robots had preceded us and following the laws of robotics, had made the galaxy safe for humanity by destroying and eliminating all traces of other civilizations that might have been in competition with us.It was a disquieting thought, and I seem to remember he was involved, but I can’t trace it down.
Stevem:
(This meant somewhat tongue in cheek)
Ahhh, The Argument from SciFi movies…
I do not think Enders Game can hurt SciFi any worse than Prometheus…
Well, in case anyone else didn’t want to even skim his screed, and I don’t blame them, here are the money quotes from the end of it:
Yeah, totally different. Not at all paranoid and deluded. And racist? My monocle drops at the very notion!
Tangent: All the hatred I keep seeing makes me more and more convinced that I gotta see Prometheus.
For years, I’ve been thinking of OSC as the Glenn Beck of science fiction.
I liked Prometheus, though I was barely able to suspend my disbelief at the many little bits of utter stupidity in it. I liked it, but I enjoy mocking it.
He proposes Obama’s going to pull a coup d’etat to put HIS WIFE in charge? What in the flying fuck?
No no, Rutee, he’s totally just pulling your leg. He wrote that entire column with his fingers crossed behind his back. Possibly through voice-recognition software, SF authors got all the latest gizmos.
I completly disagree with some of you.
If you are going to boycott something than you should disagree with that something.
Enders game is a good book that was written 30 years ago by a guy who at the age of 61 became born again mormon.
This is not unique amoung authors or even actors. You enjoyed there books and movies before you knew about there views and odds are you continue to enjoy them even after. If you were to boycott everything related to people you strongly disagree with you’d be awfully bored. They may be bigots in person but on the screen or in there books they behaved like professionals.
Also Almost every single participant in the movie made a public statment stating that they disagree with Cards views.
Afterall there are many thousands of peopel who stronlgy disagree or even hate PZ views. should they boycott his class or school because of them?
I’m not defending Card. I’ve known for a long time he is not the best individual.
Only because he thinks there are facts we don’t know about, and that trends don’t always continue. His logic leads to this conclusion. He shows no signs of not believing the logic he lays out, merely in his inability to make an accurate prediction of the future based on that logic. All of his “Ha, ha, just kidding, crazy right” is a pathetic fig-leaf when the whole of the column is taken into account, and the conclusion useful capsule summary of the twisted logic that precedes it.
Actually, “an experiment in fictional thinking” is a pretty decent description of his entire worldview.
He is not a “born again”. He served a mission. He went to BYU. His family has been members for generations.
Please do not lie again.
Oh, OSC, the gift that keeps on giving…
I ‘got’ to hear him speak last year at a work function. He’s the kind of person who puts off a VERY good veneer of intellectualism. Those within his white, middle-and-upper class, male bubble were often nodding along. He’s a good speaker, too (just talking technical delivery, here).
Anyone who had experience *outside* his bubble could find flaws right and left.
And — this is pure bait for the pharyngulites :P — the main thrust of his talk was entirely evolutionary psychology. Lots of stuff about how we wimmin folks were designed for nursing and it was all about the bebbies and that’s why we wanted strong men (and choose to stay with abusers — which comment made one of my coworkers spend the next hour in the bathroom crying). There was a digression in which he dissed all of east Asia because he “Can’t eat soup with chopsticks.” All of this was somehow getting around to the idea that language allows stories and stories are cool, which would have been a perfectly excellent point if he hadn’t used any of his ‘supporting’ anecdotes.
So when I see this, I’m really, really not surprised — I’m just glad to see more and more people recognize it for what it is.
I’m not even close to bored and I’ve got a plenty long list of people I boycott. The list keeps getting longer like with Mr. Deity just added yesterday, and I’m not worried about it at all.
You either suck at searching for good things or are just too fucking lazy to stand on principles.
Fuck Orson Scott Card. Never read him, never will and I certainly won’t see his fucking movies either. There’s a millions of books out there, why bother wasting my time and money supporting asshole people? It’s not like food deserts where you have to go the closest grocery store just to eat, no matter what. If anything, there are so many, many, many, many books that you could barely hope to read a good fraction of them so why not narrow the field by weeding out asshole authors?
The idea appears in David Brin’s Foundation’s Triumph, which is the third instalment in a trilogy of Foundation sequels authorized by the Asimov estate. As far as I know, it’s original to that novel.
I would love to see movies made out of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenisis Trilogy of from Wild Seed. But I do not see that happening. So I will reread her novels (and never read Card again) and be very happy. Shit, there are hundreds, thousands, millions of books and movies for me to read and to watch.
I never need to depend on the squalid imagination of Orson Scott Card. So sorry that your life is so limited that you have to depend on a bigot to keep you entertained.
No, you’re just for some reason busy telling everyone that a bigot shouldn’t face one of the consequences of his actions – that people avoid him and his work.
And “not the best individual”? What a wishy-washy statement. What a stupid statement. NO ONE is the “best individual”.
He’s a racist, homophobic asshole bigot. He should be ostracized and his work left in the waste bin. To do otherwise is to give an out for assholes and that happens too much. “Oh, he’s a rapist but he’s a great filmmaker!”, “Oh, he’s written great books, so what if he’s a rapist!”. Fuck all that bullshit. I will not legitimize rapists and bigots by supporting them.
If they’re principled, yes. Why should an exception be made for PZ, or in fact, anyone?
OSC is a mormon.
Nothing else need be said.
I used to have mild respect for the mormons, though their religious beliefs were clearly nonsense, but their efforts to pass the anti-gay Proposition 8 in California were the last straw. Now I have no time for them at all. They live in a bubble — a well-scrubbed, squeaky clean bubble, admittedly — and in general appear to be so un-street wise, so disconnected from the realities of life that it’s fair to call your average believing mormon delusional.
Our public High School requires reading of Ender’s Game as part of the curriculum. If that is multiplied across the country, there is quite a pipeline of money coming into Card. Not to mention the disservice to education, when this is propped up as literature.
Ok first off this is a blatant fucking lie following an opinion I don’t share.
Second, I don’t buy shit from people who are deplorable and my list includes Peirs Anthony, OSC, Tom Clancy, Frank Milleretc etc etc.
Third, there is a difference between “not all that nice” and “served as a big cheese of a hate group”
Blake Stacey @ 82
Thanks. Where I read that has been bothering me (slightly) for quite some time. It makes a great example of unintended consequences.
Ender’s Game is a seminal science fiction book, winner of numerous awards and should be high on any list of self respecting science fiction fans top 100 novels.
Orson Scott Card is a pretty vile person.
These two are not mutually exclusive; I think some commenters seem to have lost sight of this.
Incidentally I made the mistake of reading all the sequels to Ender’s Game – they are pretty terrible and his religious pandering starts to rear its ugly head. Anyone that does take the time to read EG I suggest you stop it there.
I saw some people asking about good sci fi recommendations. I thought I would suggest a few that are a bit different to the regular recommendations;
The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C Clarke
Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
And miss out on Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, which are both vastly superior?
I hold the hypothesis that OSC was a better person when he wrote EG and Speaker, and then changed some time after, or perhaps in the middle of, writing Xenocide.
At least based on what I read in those books.
The early Alvin Maker books too. You can see the change in authorial tone as the series went on.
JAL @ 81: “The list keeps getting longer like with Mr. Deity just added yesterday”
Wait, what? I have not heard about this. (Perhaps my head has been unknowingly under a rock.) What did Mr. Deity do?
——-
As for boycotts in general, why would anyone object? There is no reason to do business with people you don’t like if there are more palatable alternatives.
There is also no reason to spend a lot of time checking out every single person you deal with. I am generally aware that the head honcho of Whole Foods is an ass; I limit my excursions to that store and instead go to my local farmer’s market. It’s entirely possible that my local poultry farmer is some form of asshole–given where I live, he’s probably very religious, at the least–but as long as he’s not handing me self-serving Bible quotes with my chicken cutlets, I’m happy to let him do what he wants to do in his private life.
Whereas Card, has gone out of his way to talk shit about whole classes of people in large, public forums. He’s not sitting around with fellow bigots in a corner booth at the local diner railing against the black gay muslim whatevers; he’s sought out (and gets, because of his celebrity status as bestselling author) national platforms from which to spew his bile.
He’s an active evil. His speech diminishes the quality of life for a very large number of people. Even though I am straight and white, it diminishes my quality of life, to hear someone talk such utter, demonstrably false, bullshit. This man has encouraged the violent overthrow of my government, and the imprisonment and unpersoning of my friends.
Fuck that noise, and fuck him. He can have his mortgage paid by his fellow racist homophobic bigots; I won’t contribute. There are a million other writers telling good stories. I will not lack for entertainment.
frog, Mr. Deity made a very stupid video, that’s all.
P.S.: By saying “that’s all” I didn’t mean to diminish the stupidity or hurtfulness of the video. It is quite bad. I just meant that there isn’t any allegation of sexual harassment or assault against him.
uksceptic wrote:
Maybe it shows my age a bit when I think that the Bester, Clarke and Keyes recommendations are fairly common. Rendezous with Rama and Flowers for Algernon (also better as in the original short story form) were part of my high school reading courses. But it could be a cultural thing too.
So rather than pull out Brunner immediately, as I suspect most people are aware of his work, let me recommend Lewis Padgett.
Lewis Padgett was one of the pen names for the husband and wife writing team of Henry Kutner and Catherine L. Moore. Their collaborations are probably some of the funniest, and most terrifying, short stories ever written.
I do boycott and ignore every content creator past a certain level of discrimination. I am never bored with my options for entertainment. As it happens, most authors don’t share their hateful opinions, because they are aware that shit affects sales.
H.P. Lovecraft was racist and Dostoevsky an anti-Semite. Iconic, brilliant writers.
If they lived today I probably wouldn’t buy their books or magazine submissions.
Ahhhh, thank Yog Sothoth they’re dead.
Fuck O.S. Card.
borax (#4)
There’s a scene in Orphan Black where one of the characters tries to use “urban” as an euphemism for “not white” but has to explicitly say that’s what she means when the person she’s talking to doesn’t understand the reference.
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stevem (#56)
Who’s this “we”? If refusing to support mega-bigots really did result in the loss of all future Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters (Hahahaha! As if!), then that would be an acceptable consequence. I mean, really, think about this. You’re saying maybe it’s better to toss gay people and black people and whomever else OSC and his ilk hates under the bus because big budget sci-fi flicks make you happy in the pants. And you want everyone else to join you in this tossing?
Fuck. That.
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Alverant (#57)
Your future tenses are misplaced. He already played that card about the boycott.
JAL: Snark, Sarcasm & Bitterness @81
I hadn’t heard that one yet, so I was a bit surprised, but on reflection not so much. It took few a couple minutes with Google to find some explanation. I had been musing lately that he’s been getting less interesting and more dogmatic. When I got the notification of his latest video I didn’t have enough interest to bother. Looks like my apathy has served me well in this case. Now I can easily unsubscribe from his feeds without any regret whatsoever.
Jeffret, Ophelia blogged the Mr.D incident, and John Morales provides a transcript in that thread:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/08/the-gospels-are-anonymous-geddit/#comment-610532
spector567:
So everyone else is supposed to adopt your reasoning on boycotts?
No, I do not think so.
I have never read OSCs books and I doubt I ever will bc of his bigotry. I also will not see any of movie adaptations of his books bc I do not want to support anything that asshole could benefit from.
I largely boycott WalMart for their business practices (I cant in full at the moment given that they are the only place close to me and I have no vehicle ATM.)
I boycott ChickFilA, and have for some 6 years now. And I *like* their food, but I will not support a company causing the harm and anguish they do.
People boycott for a variety of reasons. Those reasons are not determined by you bc it is not about you.
Boycotting makes Free Market Jesus cry.
Hitchens: Religion poisons everything.
It certainly poisoned his mind. Decades ago he could pass as a normal person. I even read a few of his early books, a fact I’m vaguely ashamed of these days.
Question: How come most of the well known Mormons are far out there, even for kooks. i.e. Glenn Beck, Romney.
This supports once again The Theory of Fundie xian Induced Cognitive Impairment. And as usual, the Mormons are ahead in the race to the bottom.
I wonder if it’s simply because it’s a trait of Mormons in general and we just don’t see it from the normal members of the group who don’t have any national spotlights?
Could well be. They do produce some ugly in their mind people.
Seeing Beck, Romney, or Card doesn’t make me want to convert to Mormonism. It makes me want to transport Utah to planet Kolob.
Here’s something to note: Of all the religious groups out there, even Evangelicals, Mormons are incredibly right-wing. The most conservative, Republican religious group in America. I’m guessing that that means that they also have a lot of RWAs in the mix, and thus come the kooks. Whether it is something specific to the religious dogma and the strict, highly structured and intrusive Mormon religion that causes its members to be more wingnutty, whether it Mormonism is so extreme that it disproportionately attracts wingnuts only, or some combination or some alternative to the above, I don’t know. But I’m guessing that the politics are in play in there, somewhere.
Thread won.
re A. Noyd @98:
mea culpa! Thanks for the insight. I never realized I was doing that; just to support the SF genre in movies, at any cost. I see that going to the movie (or refusing to) doesn’t just “line his pocket with cash” (or deprive him of cash). The issue is the “moral support” the attendence provides him and his “attitude”. His “attitude” is completely abhorrent and I do not want to support it in any way at all. Too bad, producers, you picked a very bad author of whose work to make into a movie. Pick someone else for your next one. I like SF, but not that much. Sie-a-nara [sp?].
Heh, thanks David.
The thing is, boycotts should just be considered as the perfect expression of the free market. But plutocrats and their political toadies really hate boycotts because they’re a way for the little people to express a little power in the system. Boycotts are a way for people to bring the externalities of business back into the ledgers and force businessmen to account for them. They hate that.
I do think that writing something roughly similar to that as a warning against getting lazy about keeping tabs on what our government is doing, and responding appropriately if they start to veer off track, can be a valuable thing to do. Saying “We need to pay attention so they don’t go (too)corrupt on us!” is one thing, actually painting a picture of such an outcome can be much more effective.
That being said, it seemed pretty clear that Obama was thrown in there for more reason than he’s the guy that happened to be in office at time of writing and he wanted it relatable or something like that. The racial angle to it all, Cards known right wing tendencies, and saying it’s “plausible” without saying something like “Maybe not Obama, but if we don’t pay attention something like this will come”… Card isn’t scared of a lazy citizenry allowing tyranny to slip in while we aren’t looking, he’s scared of the black guy. He’d have generalized this at least briefly to any future Presidents as well if the former was what he was really worried about.
Fictional is right. Cards seems to have ripped off the plot of Robocop 3, what with the villain hiring a street gang to serve as his private police force. Except in the movie, it was a heavy-handed condemnation of the privatization of public services.
@stevem:
Sayonara (and technically the pronunciation should be “sah-yo-nah-rah”).
RFW
The well-scrubbed, squeaky cleanness is a veneer; as with most (if not all) insular religious groups (and nonreligious, but the religious ones are often larger), that veneer hides horrors, which are concealed from the outside world by ingroup loyalty, apologetics, and the need to maintain that veneer, without which the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
microraptor
The short answer is yes.
Stevem
Sayonara is the word you’re looking for.
Another movie added to my ‘torrent instead of cinema’ viewing list.
Ender’s Game is the most overrated book in the history of the sci-fi genre. And that’s not hyperbole. It’s unreadable.
Anyway who thinks that Card will not profit financially from the movie should think again. He has been given an “executive producer” credit for the film, and that means he will most assuredly be getting a taste of the movie’s profits. Buy a ticket for that movie is like donating money to the National Organization for Marriage.
lol@ free market jesus. I’m gonna steal that one for later.
Judge the book, not the writer, right? The book about wiping out all of the Buggers. Nope, can’t see how anyone could read anything objectionable in that.
Has anyone asked OSC why Chuck Norris is not in jail yet?
I’ve heard other right wingers muse in fear about a national police force. Kind of strange given how many national law enforcement agencies the US already has. Not much point in say Obama creating a new one when he could just subvert/strongarm the others. Conversely they don’t seem to notice the example of say the RCMP, which is close to the national police force they worry about, and tends to support the status quo of society.
That’s a lot easier to do once the fucker is dead.
But I still understand why people don’t wanna use Gill Sans and want the stations of the cross in Westminster Cathedral removed.
As repeatedly mentioned, the original novella is a nice work, no wonder it won an award.
The novelization, on the other hand, is average and in my opinion won the second award just by hanging at the coattails of the former.
What put me off OSC years ago was the Homecoming Saga. Still not giving up (after all, I even read Battlefield Earth, in amazement, thinking how can it get even worse with every page turn), every time After trying to read a couple of Ender follow ups, I gave up in disgust. About a decade ago, I went back and re-read the Ender novel again, now much more older and mature, I could pick up a lot of little threads I skimmed over previous time and the novel gave me a very bad taste indeed.
Since then I have learned what a miserable person OSC is. I shall not spend an other quid on any of his offerings ever again. I look at his original novella and wonder, what if he was actually a decent person, what kind of lovely stuff he could write about the morality and anti-war sentiments. Alas, that’s all in the past.
I always put myself as a person who would read anything, and then make a judgement about the novel and the times, but this is not eighteen hundreds, it is now and it must be taken in today’s context and what OSC talks about, writes about is not acceptable.
Now I’m just hoping Scalzi never turns to be an asshole. So far so good in that front!
Also if the space opera can survive Battle Feild Earth, it can survive Ender’s Game.
I’m also growing to hate scifi as a community despite being a target audience for the genre; mostly because of how incredibly shallow and small minded it really is despite it’s aspirations
I question whether people didn’t see sentiments the writer didn’t intend
I read Ender’s Game when I was young and even then it bothered me without really knowing why at the time.
Since I grew up in a very Mormon family, I read his subsequent novels and the Alvin Maker and Homecoming series as well. The Homecoming Series is basically the first books of the Book of Mormon set in space with no regard to even trying to disguise the Character names. The Alvin Maker series stole many parts of the story from what I learned about the early life of Joseph Smith. In fact, while reading both I kept checking the author’s notes in the back to see if he reference that these were based on what Mormon’s felt were “actual” events and then lead them to find out more. I was always amazed that there was never anything in the books themselves citing the clear source material being used for his stories in these cases. Maybe he felt the Mormon readers would get it and others would think they were original.
It took a long time to get out of that bubble, but I am glad I did and there is no way I would go back. And I decided long ago OSC or his works would never get another cent of my money.
Ingdigo Jump @ 123, Ender’s Game the book is anti-abortion, anti-choice and very very Christian, one of the things Ender is being a third child, in a world where every family is limited to a maximum two children because of overcrowding. Hence Ender is always bullied at school, even by his own siblings. Even then, his parents tell him that he’s special because he exists, in a time and place he shouldn’t have because they disobeyed the World Government and since every sperm is sacred, managed to spawn a third kid. We’re really lucky that they didn’t attempt sex for a fourth time.
When I was in my early 20s, as godless as I am now, I just skimmed those bits. When I was in my 30s, it came to me much more blatant and in-your-face. I don’t recall these bits in the novella, even though it could have been mentioned, it wasn’t pages of discussions and explanations.
One of the other thing is the blatant racism (or should I say, xenophobia), the buggers and how they can be so nasty and different therefore they all must die. Indeed, Ender himself is the killer of all, then goes and gets forgiven by the magically surviving Queen. Don’t get me started with the Randian machinations of his siblings.
The novella is way way better. Even then, fuck OSC.
Criticism of mormons here is reading a little like criticism of moslems. They don’t walk in perfect lockstep and have a diversity of political and social opinions. Some are in favor of gay rights, for example.
One would hope liberal mormons would end their tithes, just as one would hope the same of catholics, but some people end up supporting evil by merit of laziness and conformity and that sucks. And unlike moslems, they haven’t been around long enough to have many extremely divergent local groups, so they are closer to the stereotype of being in perfect conformity of belief than the former.
But it’s still far from accurate to say “they are all X” when there’s plenty that aren’t. No, I don’t have a citation for that because I don’t know the religion of every public figure ever. I read that the lead singer of The Aquabats is mormon and I hope he isn’t one of the bad guys, but I don’t know.
Fuck religion, but I’d rather not point to any religion with a hojillion followers and start dehumanizing those people en masse. As for Card, and the shitstains in control, and those FLDS patriarchs gone wild that Krakauer details in a rather horrific book… They dehumanize themselves.
Oh really? And you know that how?
You don’t because you are more or less wrong.
1. It’s a toxic mind control cult. A top down authoritarian religion. As one General Authority stated, when they have spoken the thinking is done.
2. There is a huge amount of pressure within the religion for conformity, in every way, residence, dress, hairstyle, number of kids, you name it. My friends and relatives frequently refer to them as the clones.
This is one reason they hate the gays. The gays aren’t too likely to move to a homogenous Mormon suburb, marry a Mormon girl in the Temple, have 4 or more kids, bring lime jello to the potluck, and drive a Mormonmommobile aka SUV.
That being said, there are some outliers. John Huntsman was the best GOP candidate of a dismal lot and came in last. Harry Ried is LDS. and ???? well, gee, maybe there are 3 of them.
IIRC, Mormons voted for Romney by 80%.
I still judge Mormons as individuals despite their churche’s undying hate for people like me. Out of the dozens I’ve met over the years, there are only 2 I can relate to as people. Both of them are…converts.
Got that wrong too.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Mormon church has spun off an enormous number of cults. No one even knows how many but estimates are over 100.
Some of them are even uglier than the Mormon church i.e. the FLDS and other polygamists. One group is getting notorious for their huge number of human child sacrifices. It’s a small group of faith healers with a large number of dead babies and school children.
I do come by my anti-Mormon sentiments honestly, having spent a lot of time in one of my favorite states, Utah.
Mormon men are the worst. They are brought up to believe they are the One True Religion with the god-father on Kolob. All other xians are Fake xians.
They are all priests with magical superpowers. I’ve never been too clear on what they are though, casting out demons and annointing with holy oil or some such.
Women in that religion are just walking incubators. There is no position in the LDS church held by a woman without a male superior. (Trick question. Name a famous LDS woman. There might be some but other than Marie Osmond, I can’t think of any.)
They tend to have a superiority complex towards nonMormons. And women are just inferior to the point of invisibility. No problem, Contempt right back at you.
Nope. No conformity here. Just move along and keep your eyes in front of you. 90% of Utah Mormons voted for Romney, who has never lived in Utah. His grandparents were polygamists who fled to Mexico.
It was 80% for Mormons in general though.
Thanks Raven, that didn’t at all look like a point in his favor
Tsk, raven, how could you overlook Stephanie Meyer?
great1american1satan:
I disagree. I disagree with most of what you wrote. I suppose you can put that down to being married to an ex-mormon for 34 years, and having a metric fucktonne of mormon relations through said marriage, and having lived many years in mormon central, SLC. What do I know?
LOL!!!
You got me there.
I’ve never read a single one of her Twilight books or seen the movies. Even though I do read a fair amount of fantasy and urban fantasy. The reviews just weren’t that good and I don’t want to waste reading time on something that is a disappointment. The shortest one I read was, “Buffy stakes Edward. The end.
I did read some of Charlaine Harris’s reimagined Vampires books. They were OK.
I also haven’t read any Harry Potter. No reason except my impression was that they are more aimed at children.
In case anyone needs further evidence of OSC’s vileness, he thinks it’s possible for a child to seduce a grown man: http://kristinking.org/2013/07/10/orson-scott-card-is-creepy-and-not-in-a-good-way-spoiler-alert/
Question – Is paranoia a prerequisite for being a conservative?
given the quality of output, I am having a difficult time giving a fuck about the potential demise of SF movies. I had a hard time thinking of any recent SF movies I liked; what I came up with was the 1st Matrix movie, then a long time nothing, then District 9, then nothing again.
oh, and maybe inception, which was at least fun
I did say the stereotype was more true of them then of moslems, but like those polls indicated, 20% of LDS nationally voted for someone else. I live in Washington, where most mormons are probably shitty but many are not. Judging all of mormons by SLC is like judging all moslems by Karachi. But yeah, I don’t wanna be Mooney and I’ve only got one half of one give-a-shit about defending the religious, so I’m done.
Hakan Koseoglu:
Ah, the Homecoming Saga. As I’ve found with most OSC, there are a few beguiling ideas in there (I don’t quite trust my memory and I refuse to reread the thing to check it) and a whole steaming heap of crap. I gave up on reading it for any other reason but bile fascination when they went into the desert and all of a sudden that means that, if two people who are not married to each other have sex, the woman must be killed but not the man. Also, gay people have to get straight-married. There are “reasons” given which are just about what you might expect, that is, ridiculous.
The authors I find myself returning to again and again are Tiptree and LeGuin. Neither is exactly comforting reading, but it’s satisfying reading. Also Butler’s “Xenogenesis”. I like a lot of the classic
SF, but having to read them with reservations regarding the author’s attitudes about sex, race, etc. is so damn exhausting. One tries to commit wholeheartedly to reading a book and then hits one of these ridiculous speed bumps of sexism and just gets bounced right out of one’s willing suspension of disbelief.
Ingdigo Jump:
Re Banks SF: my absolute favourites are Player of Games and Excession. I think the former is the best introduction to the whole Culture deal; the latter is just a great story.
I guess if your idea of “stuff every self-respecting sci-fi fan needs to read and like” is basically a list of stuff old white dudes wrote, then yeah… I guess you’d run into problems quite quickly. given the proportion of that demographic with impressively toxic ideas about marginalized people.
Since that’s not my idea of must-read SF, I have no problems not reading stuff bigots write.
yup. after reading Beowulf’s Children by Niven/Pournelle/Barnes, I decided I can’t deal with that shit anymore; which is why I never went back to read The Legacy of Heorot, to which Beowulf’s Children is actually a sequel.
So now I stick to authors where I don’t expect that jarring experience to be a common occurrence.
OSC seems to have a split personality. When he writes about writing, or sf books, or entertainment, he’s thoughtful and lucid. When he writes about politics, he’s your crazy right-wing relative (or maybe your crazy neighbor’s even crazier right-wing relative). The difference between his two modes makes the head spin.
I’m not sure I agree with her in this, but since I’m mulling it over, I thought I’d gather input from you folks as well: my sister is saying that the movie shouldn’t be boycotted because more people contributed work to make it than just OSC. She is an actress, so she may be biased, but IDK.
I wish more people would consider that. A lot of people help create a film. The same is true for television or theater. I’m perfectly fine with the idea of boycotting a piece of media because the media itself is promoting ideas I find loathsome. But boycotting a movie because one of the collaborators promotes loathsome ideas that are not reflected in the movie is much less cut and dry.
I remember reading Ender’s Game when I was 10 or so, and being entirely entranced by the story of war, and heroes and the triumph of Good over Evil. I also remember crying when I got to the ending. It was one of the first science fiction books I ever read that made me realize that morality is much more complicated than I had previously realized. (I’m deliberately trying not to spoil, but the power of Ender’s Game is entirely located in it’s final chapter). I re-read it recently as an adult and despite the flaws that are now clearly apparent to me, I still love the book. Not even Orson Scott Card can ruin that.
140
ledasmom
Exactly.
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#146 lumen
I have no problem never watching anything with Roman Polanski because I don’t support rapists.
*shrug* That’s just me though. I’m a rape victim and there’s just no way to get that fact about him out of my mind. I’m no worse for the wear for that. Hell, I’d probably be worse for the wear if I did every try to watch his shit. If someone is a bigot or a rapist and people chose to associate with them, that’s their own damn fault if people avoid them. They made their choice, and I’m making mine.
Boo fucking hoo.
spector567:
Maybe you’d be, but, believe it or not, there are plenty of books out there written by people who are not bigoted asshats. Perhaps you don’t pay attention to them because they speak from lived experiences that are completely alien to you.
I’m sorry that you don’t feel strongly enough about bigotry not to put money in bigots’ pockets, but that’s your problem, not mine.
UKSceptic, got any recs for books that aren’t decades old, from writers who aren’t white dudes? Ever hear of Melissa Scott, James Tiptree, Jr., Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler…?
Rey Fox:
Unless it’s fundie xtians boycotting Disney or wingnuts boycotting the Dixie Chicks.
MIkeyb:
I don’t know if it’s a “prerequisite,” but in the U.S. it certainly helps.
Tekore and Lumen: The people who made the movie will still get paid. They will get other jobs. That argument is as tiresome as “Don’t boycott the 2014 Olympics because the dreams of some poor kid in Iowa is more important than the rights of LGBT people!!”
BTW, does it strike anybody else that “You owe these writers and moviemakers your money!” is reminiscent of, “You owe all these trolls on Twitter your attention!”?
The big problem with the Twilight novels is simply that Stephanie Meyers is a virtually talentless writer. She has essentially no idea how to show something to the audience instead of tell them, her characters who are supposed to be well read or highly educated are just stereotypes of what people who aren’t well read or highly educated tend to think they’re like (but aren’t anywhere close to accurate), and she’s got honestly no apparent concept of how to portray conflict and resolution. Then, add on top of that the blatant Mary Sue nature of the protagonist, the romantic portrayal of stalking and abuse… Quite honestly, it’s hard to imagine a way that the books could have been worse without turning into actual parody.
Well, they’re technically children’s novels, but they’re still well written and enjoyable for adults. There’s even some sly humor that’s definitely not aimed at younger readers.
Dear god I hate that this is what people get from it.
No it’s the triumph of a militaristic, fascist society that uses child soldiers and torments, tortures and kills those children in hopes of creating an ubbermech to destroy a race whose big evil crime is that it’s different.
HE HELPED HEAD A FUCKING HATE GROUP.
And dont’ diminish it, he’s not a “collaborator” he’s the fucking author, you weasely snivling lying pissant
I read the first one and a half of them and found them trite and emotionally manipulative. (Harry Potter really was an unappealing little shlub, and I say that as someone who was an outsider all through his school years and has sympathy for underdogs. The whole idea of making him a suffering Christ figure by way of his step-family, rather than actually building him as a character who deserved attention, really made me annoyed. Enough not to even finish the second book because I saw what was happening and didn’t feel like letting the author decide what my reactions should be.) And, as someone pointed out once on Salon, as with most “loser becomes school hero” stories, the books don’t actually overturn the whole “in-groups are popular and beloved and successful while outsiders are weird and to be shunned” idea which is so common in reality; Harry Potter is basically the QB-equivalent of the school’s football-team-equivalent, who has everything stacked in his favor in a variety of ways. You could write a very interesting sendup of the Harry Potter books by proceeding along the lines of the way Wicked turns The Wizard of Oz on its head.
@Ingdigo Jump:
Maybe that was a deliberate misspelling in reference to something I don’t recognize, but: that’s “übermensch”. German for (approximately) “Superman”.
But your point is absolutely correct. Both points.
@Ms. Daisy Cutter, General Manager for the Cleveland Steamers
This is absolutely true. The peon-level people, the ones other than the Very Big Names (who are already rich and don’t need our concern), are paid up front. (When you see a statement that “movie X cost Y million dollars to make”, that “Y million dollars” includes all the pay for people who aren’t getting a cut of the gross.*) Their compensation does not rely on the movie’s success at the box office. The question is whether we want the people who are being paid based on the movie’s success to get paid even more, and Card is one of those people. Of course, I wouldn’t go see the movie anyway, but even if I were tempted, I would stay away because of the possibility that some fraction of my ticket purchase was going to go into his coffers.
*Oddly enough, it also apparently includes everyone who was naive enough to sign a contract which gave them a cut of the “profits” as well. According to Mark Evanier, who should know, studios are able to define “profits” at their own pleasure, and will do anything — up to and including giving the head of the studio a thirty-million-dollar “consulting fee” for no reason at the last minute to use up an extra 30 million dollars which were still remaining in the bank — to make sure that the balance sheet for each individual film shows no “profit” as used to calculate payment. That’s why “percentage of the gross” is used instead for the people who are actually intended by the studio to get a real payback, while “percentage of the profits” is offered to the peons.
Fifty Shades of Gray, anyone?
I disagree. if movies written/directed by toxic bigots start failing more, they will be made less and other stuff will be made instead; the only people who will suffer are the bigots, since the non-bigoted contributors will still have jobs.
And if not… well then maybe we shouldn’t have a movie industry, if it can’t support itself without the input of toxic bigots
First off: Ex-Mormon, born and raised in Utah.
I think it’s fair to say that many LDS folks hold beliefs separate to OSC’s but the problem is that the culture is completely top-down hierarchically correlated. There aren’t schismatic sects, aside from the FLDS and RLDS, that are doing their own thing. You either hew to the word that comes out of SLC or you get excommunicated, period. Talking against the leadership is actually grounds for excommunication. And in Utah culture, your ward position, and church membership can have a lot to do with how the community treats you and how you are integrated. It’s easier to be non-Mormon in SLC, even easier in Park City. Everywhere else, if you are vocally non-Mormon, you are a target for love-bombs and conversion, if you are ex-Mormon, you’ll find your kids are never invited to sleepovers. All the clergy up to a certain level is lay clergy, but assigned through SLC. Lessons in church are assigned in SLC through a correlation committee. You will never have a bishop teaching off-topic for too long without SLC dropping on his head. (And bishops in Mormon parlance are basically pastors, not like Catholic bishops.)
The squeaky clean thing varies. A lot of people are actually that squeaky clean and innocent as far as I can tell. It’s what makes many of them a prime target for other gullibility. (Utah is really big into its MLMs.) Most of my still-LDS family is just as described above: bubbled up and thinking that everything good in their life comes from God and the Republicans.
This is not to say that there aren’t whited sepulchres aplenty, especially in the ranks of the leaders, but by and large, the Mormon populace has a giant but sincere stick (more like a sequoia) up its collective ass.
There is as Raven says, a super strong push to conform to a particular look in Mormon culture. Molly Mormons live their lives on Pintrest trying to pretend they fell out of a GAP ad, and that Utah doesn’t have one of the highest Prozac consumption rates in the nation.
Politics in Utah: It’s like finding out that you’ve inherited a rugby team you have to cheer for no matter what. Much of Utah is Republican, except in SLC where they have Democrats that look like centrists or Republicans everywhere else.
The church absolutely was behind much of the Prop 8 push. I had family members bragging about how they manned the phone centres during the final push in the family newsletter. I bragged about marching in the prop 8 protest parade in Seattle, but weirdly enough, that never made it into the newsletter. Huh.
There are liberal Mormons. Many of them tend to have grown up outside of Utah, like one of my close friends who has travelled the world. One of my inside Utah and still Mormon friends is a Democrat voting liberal who wore pants to church. One of my still-Mormon cousins attended the SLC Pride Parade this year as an ally because her best friend is gay. Another Mormon friend is a writer in the science fiction community. (We cringe when OSC opens his mouth these days.)
That said, I find it heartening when yet another Mormon sheds the indoctrination. (My sister! She just called last month to let me know what she thought and that she and her husband were going to leave.) Even better if they can break out of the church altogether. It’s just healthier, I think, because the mental gymnastics are so rough.
OSC: He’s been LDS this whole time, not born-again. (Mormons don’t believe in Born Agains the way mainstream Xians do. You can’t just go Praise Jesus.) However, I would say that he isn’t held up as a church spokesman specifically. When I was a kid, people used to theorise about his impending excommunication which never happened, and as time wore on, he got less whatever-brand-of-liberal-he-thought-he-was and more entrenched in defending particular LDS dogmas. My personal theory (and it’s only a theory) is that he got threatened with ex-ing, and worried that he would lose his wife and kids, turned around and toed a line more hardcore than your average Mormon. For me, as a science fiction fan, and a former Mormon, it’s been sad and the hero worship has long ago been burnt to a crisp.
Jadehawk@#137:
I had a hard time thinking of any recent SF movies I liked
You might want to watch “Primer” – it’s one of my favorite movies in years and it also demonstrates that you can make interesting and provocative science fiction without a bazillion-dollar CG budget.
@150. Ingdigo Jump :
(Edited & italicised for clarity.)
You hate the fact that different people always or at least often find different messages in different texts and have very different experiences and opinions about books (or anything artistic) than you do, Ingdigo Jump? You think someone can only ever interpret ‘Enders Game’ the way you do and that their subjective experiences and interpretations are wrong if they don’t match yours? Really? Wow.
You also left out a key factor that I – like Lumen – got from that novel (& others OSC novels which frequently featured some strange ethical dilemmas) :
#146. Lumen :
Emphasis added.
I agree with that. I found ‘Enders Game’ was interesting and thought provoking as a child because it raised some complex ethical dilemmas as did many of OSC’s later works. It wasn’t a “happy ending” but a complex one which made you think which posed problems with tough ambiguous possible resolutions. Yes, in retrospect there are many problematic elements and, yes, OSC has turned out at least in his latter years to be many ways the opposite of the kind of person I’d have expected from reading his novels. But still. His books did make me think and realise things at the time, I did enjoy them then and many others did as well and, well, I do think this is a lot more complicated than the whole “OSC and books = bad,evil, nasty shouldn’t ever be read! (& that’s the one & only right stance possible!)” view that seems expressed by some here.
Maybe I need to reread ‘Enders Game’ (EG) again or maybe you do but I’m not sure that’s actually an accurate or fair summation of the books theme or the fictional society that was set up from what I recall of it. The term ‘fascist’ has a particular meaning for starters and I’m not sure that the EG society meets that definition – not that the EG society was fully explored in the text beyond the whole military school aspect which, yes, did feature child soldiers some of whoem were tormented etc .. but the creating ubermensch idea? Not something I recall being the purpose apart from Ender himself and that wasn’t to create a new race of superhumans so much as to mould one individual into the supertactician and warrior needed to quite literally save Humanity from destruction.
That’s just plain wrong. The Formic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formics) *species* “crime” was that they had attacked the Human race and seemed about to destroy our whole species. It wasn’t merely that they were different but rather that they were actively trying to exterminate us. A literal (& yes, highly unlikely in reality) “us-or-them” and “life or death” -at a species wide level – situation.
For Whatever Little its Worth, I also strongly disagree with Orson Scott Card’s repugnant homophobic bigotry and downright batty Mormon beliefs and I probably won’t see the EG movie at the cinemas.
No, StevoR, they weren’t. The Formics realized that humans were sentient in the middle of the Second Invasion, immediately regretted they damage they had inflicted, and resolved to never attack humans ever again. But the humans did not know this, and jumped to the conclusion that it was necessary to exterminate them, when, in fact it was not. Much as you jump to the conclusion that it is necessary to drone strike suspected terrorists when in fact, it is not, and the threat can be effectively contained with far less extreme strategies. At the time of the Ender’s Game storyline it is the humans who launch a pre-emptive strike on an alien civilization that was NOT in any way shape or form a threat to humanity anymore. That is the central tragedy of Ender’s Game and the entire series that follows it (this is the novel version, which was expanded after Card developed these ideas for his planned book Speaker for the Dead, which had initially not been envisioned as a sequel to Ender’s Game). Humanity turned Ender into a weapon of mass destruction and committed the most unconscionable act of interstellar terrorism imagineable, all because they were afraid, and refused to wait for confirming evidence before deciding to pre-emptively strike in “self-defence”.
In fact, the Formics were so badly shaken by their own guilt at having unknowingly killed sentient humans that the last surviving Formic Queen (who had been given the memories of all her predecessors) outright resolved in Xenocide to NEVER kill another human being ever again, for ANY reason. Even when a planet destroying fleet had been launched against the planet on which she was living (in an attempt to pre-empt another threat that turned out not to be as serious or threatening or requiring such extreme measures to deal with as first imagined), she flat our refused to build starships with offensive capabilities to defend herself (and she would have won easily if she had done it), choosing, if it came down to it, to die rather than kill, even in self defence.
All in all, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind had a very strongly liberal authorial tone. Whether Card was faking it for the sake of the narrative, or if that reflected what he believed at that time, only for him to change later, I don’t know.
I like how *I* hate OSC and the Books yet I knew more about the Formic’s than StevoR
But is anyone surprised that StevoR saw a war with ambiguous sides and boiled it down to good/evil?
Even in fiction he does this
I hated that people take that away because it’s wrong from the objective words on paper.
A) the humans cannot reasonably be called good due to the methods we see the military use (Child soldiers, treating children as disposable resources, genocide etc)
B) The Formics/Buggers aren’t pure evil.
Which to Card’s credit is part of the point. The Formic started the war not knowing that individual humans are sentient creatures, where Ender ended it KNOWING that the Formic where a hive mind. (ignoring the iffy parts of the remote war deception)
But then again StevoR has issues with understanding that people claiming the mantel as good can be wrong/lying and that the “we need to destroy them to survive” isn’t accurate.
Interesting that you emphasise that the Formics are a different species, as if that were a moral difference and “race” clearly incorrect… and then refer to the “human race” in the same damn sentence.
@ ^ jefrir : Huh, you’re right. Not sure how that word got there. I meant Human species of course.
@161. Ingdigo Jump :
Bracketed numbering added for handy reference.
For (1), well actually I *do* understand that good people or those claiming that mantle can be mistaken or can sometimes lie.
For (2) it may not always or even often be accurate but there are some times and some situations where that is true. In a gunfight or war or terrorism situation its often the case that if you do not kill your opponent you will be killed and your opponent will go on to kill others.
If someone is pointing a gun at you, raises it and is about to pull the trigger -and you yourself are armed and know this person will murder you and your family and many others if you do not shoot them dead then this applies. You choose to shoot them and survive – and prevent them killing others who you care about or you choose to effectively commit suicide by letting them shoot you.
How can you not grasp that sometimes that is simply the unpleasant reality?
@160. Ingdigo Jump :
In your opinion which you are, of course, entitled to just as others are entitled to their differing opinions.
Good is relative. Humanity is good because humans can be and often are good as well as evil. Because the military were acting as they did with the ultimate goal of saving Humanity from extinction rather than for gaining power themselves or for the sake of it. Yes, the side that is good can also often do evil as historically the Northern forces in the US war included people who were also slave-owners with views on women etc ..that we’d now be appalled by.
Well, exactly. Its more ambuiguous and there’s the dilemna and the tragedy. If Ender ahd known his final “test” was areal battle would he have destroyed the planet? Ender regrets what happened and tried to make amends and eventually rescued the Formics from extinction.
StevoR, when will you fuck off and eat shit?
@158. Amphiox :
Really? Okay. I don’t suppose you can provide a page number or source for that.
I’d also note the key part there is in that this realisation occurred in the middle of the second invasion when it was too late and they failed to communicate this to the Humans.
IOW, it was the understanding of the people fighting the war that the Formics were still determined to destroy us and it was the Formics who had initiated the conflict in an attempt to destroy us. Which means I’m essentially correct but just that it became a bit more complicated than that at the end. The Formics started a war of extermination against us (two wars ofextermination technically!), realised they were wrong halfway through and failed to communicate this realisation – which was tragic for both sides.
No. I start with the assumption that the counter-terrorism experts and Military Generals and Cheifs fighting the War on Jihadist Terrorism actually know what they’re doing and should be trusted to do it properly. If you have an issue with drone strikes then you’ll need to convince them not me because they have the requisite expertise, knowledge (incl. classified information) and responsibility. It isn’t my decision to make. Or for that matter yours. (Almost certainly unless you are secretly a high ranking counter-terrorism agent or psuedonymous General here!)
Yes – but the thing is, that’s a tragedy of ignorance. they didn’t know the Formics weren’t still determined to massacre us all. Given what they thought they knew they were right but what they thought they knew was wrong so it wasn’t right.
Me neither. I do find it very hard to reconcile the author I thought Iknew fromteh novels with the OSC who (later?) said all the hateful shit.
I second that question.
Sure would brighten the place up significantly.
You’re a horrible fucking person
@164. Ingdigo Jump : I won’t ever do that so you might as well give up the abusive attempts to bully me off here.
PS. Seems you have no good argument to actually make against the points I’ve raised there too, Ingdigo Jump.
@StevoR
grow the fuck up.
I’m not going to argue with your diarrhea anymore. You’re trolling
@167. Ingdigo Jump : You are entitled to your erroneous opinion. But I’m not the strawmonster caricature you have tried to make of me.
I was only stating the logic of the situation. Logic and science and reality may lead us to a whole lot of things we wish weren’t true but yet remain true whether we like it or not.
Yes I made you say all the horrible things you say.
Fuck off troll.
Really sick of this game where you pretend we all forget you’re a racist, authoritarian war mongering scum
@ ^ Ingdigo Jump : Well, I’m really sick of being attacked and bullied with lies like that. Stop abusing and lying about me.
@171. Ingdigo Jump : You haven’t been arguing to begin with – only abusing and bullying and off topic.
@170. Ingdigo Jump : Look at your own comments here and take your own advice.
No one is lying about you you racist nazi POS.
I refuse to deal with you anymore.