"But isn’t it immoral to think, write, create such art? Wouldn’t it be better if we wrote only about the world as we wish it would be, where men and women are completely alike save for some externals, and where there is no such thing as non-consensual sex or slavery? Or at least, if we have to write about such a time, shouldn’t we condemn it loud and clear?This You Cannot Think
Ah, you lotus eaters. You have no idea how most of the world lives even now, much less in former times. You don’t understand the GLAMOUR of evil, even as you feel it — or do you really think your little witch hunts are inspired by loving kindness? Do you think we believe you don’t feel the thrill of the hunt, the joy of sadism? — and you can’t comprehend not scolding when something is not right in tune with your quite up to the minute “morals.” You lecture us on tolerating “the other” while completely incapable of grasping what “the other” is."
Sarah Hoyt can go on at length, it's true. But not only is this good, it's worth going on and reading over more than 200 comments as they meander from one subject to another.
But if you only read what I quoted above, I'm satisfied.
6 comments:
What a generation of mewling babies, with the intellectual rigor of a drunken sot. Their inability to even imagine something that might potentially be offensive to someone, somewhere has so restricted their little pea brains that they are functionally historically illiterate. They not only are unable to imagine that someone, somewhere, might not have believed as they do; they don’t think anyone should try to imagine believing or living differently than the morals of our times. This at the same time they enjoin us to respect as our equals cultures that are far worse than those imagined far-off ones.
Well said.
What a generation of mewling adults. Who are they even talking to? If it's students at universities then they're talking about children. And if pastoral college then privileged children and this is a rarified few. You will not encounter any such at Auraria campus nearby. None. Not one. And why is that? It's because they're all serious people who are working and going to school, working single mothers toiling desperately to improve their lives. Many young people living at home and going to school so they can move out. Every single professor I've had at that campus says so, many work both campuses, CU Boulder and CU Denver, hands down Denver campus is serious. Sear ee us. Super Serial.
I do not see these people spoken of. I just don't. And they're all around too. They fill this building. I'm not saying the ones described here imaginary, not straw people, obviously all these professor types are seeing a lot of hard core privileged aggressive dipsticks but the young people I see, the college students I talk to are hard working, smart, and ambitious.
Why concentrate on these few and suggest they are representative? Why not, they're the cutest little things?
Now, c'mon. Just yesterday. I stopped by where Dexter is hard at work at his desk. Saturday. I asked him if he was sure he opened all the little compartments to his Odyssey pop-up book, there's a lot that is hidden. You have to actually read the whole thing and go, what? something is missing, oh, here's a flap I didn't notice. And Dexter said, I did! But now that my classes have ended I have time to really examine it well. He was taking three classes on top of his full time job. I did not know that. One class is Western Civilization. Now, here's where you say, how cute! Professors I read online right wing sites all tell me Western Civilization is no longer being taught. How encouraging. See, there was serendipitous overlap there with the Odyssey pop-up book. Another class Spanish. Didn't catch the third. (I'm a poor listener sometimes) My point is Dexter is typically atypical to all of this. I'm not rejecting it, I'm modifying it with my own experience. My experience is 100% different than 100% of all that I read online in this category of coddled activist type students and young people in general.
He's actually took Western Civilization. Paid to learn it. I cringed. For the waste. Don't you think you'd know it by now? Guess not. My own approach was better to pay a small sum to prove you got that. I did not tell Dexter this, that is one the CLEP tests that counted for a full year. That was a very good CLEP to take. I think it counted for two semesters. F'n aced that test. That was the one that scared the pee out of me when the verisimilitude arrived in the mail. It was all the technical stuff that I avoided and none of the fun stuff that liked. Crap about the structure of poems, about matching book titles to author to main character of book I never read, things I never heard of, names of ballot positions and terms. And I thought, oh poo, I'm going to fail this, but it turned out to be Western Civilization for dopes, all the fun stuff I liked. It was easy as eating pie. And I mean it. Easy. Cherry pie.
My dad used to always say two things about this. It doesn't matter how much you know unless you have that degree and having the degree doesn't prove you.
And my attitude back was, if you are so smart then prove it.
I meant him, not me. But then I grew to college age and it turned out to apply to me. CLEP is perfect for satisfying that. Just prove it. $22.00 boom the whole class done. Maybe that was $44.00 for it being worth two. A steal at twice the cost.
So that whole class was like candy. And the Odyssey pop-up book even more so. So candy-like that it's cloying. There is no way the pop-up book could contribute to any understanding whatsoever except to highlight a few incidents. It's insulting, actually.
The second thing dad always said about that, it's not what you know it's who you know. And my response to that is, thanks, that sure is something to know.
Not even talking about college students so much as old folks, older than I am, who are insisting that science fiction has a higher calling of reforming and informing society in a particularly upstanding manner.
College though... I just graduated. I didn't run into much silliness and was rather encouraged by how most students rolled their eyes at the antics, when there were antics. Chick-fil-A is still on campus.
But there were a few times, little things, small digs. I dropped one class equally for reasons 1) something had to go, 2) the instructor expected the undergrads in the 400/500 class to do the same work load as the graduate students, and 3) I didn't want to be in a fight constantly in class. The class was on "English Grammars" and we were talking about Ebonics and how linguistically the grammar is consistent and valid. All good. Until we're looking at videos and written transcripts of interviews and picking up the rhetorical nuances... which is still all good... except that the answer was always "racism". So I ask, might not the anger be defensive, because the woman knew that this (wave around the class) was going to be the reaction to her opinions? I'm old enough to remember when this was in the news and this is how it was reported, so why wouldn't people think so? Instructor: But that's not what it *is*. Me: That's how it was reported. Her: But that's not what it IS. Me: Which if people knew, would be fine, but that wasn't how it was reported. People reacted to what was reported. Her: But that's NOT WHAT IT IS.
I took my last English requirement as a far more practical writing class because who has the time to bang your head on a wall?
Is science fiction the only genre where the readers take so much interest in the nuts and bolts of the writing? I don't seem to hear about these kinds of disagreements among, say romance genre fans, or historical fiction fans. Even when I read through anthologies of science fiction, it seems the editor devotes an unusual amount of time describing the publishing history of this or that author before each story. What is it about science fiction?
I think that it's partly delusions of litrachure. Certain elements liking to sound pretentious.
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