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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word.

Glampers makes the world a worse place because she has made a mistake: she values equality over human flourishing to an unreasonable degree. I confess I didn't get far enough into Goodkind to learn much about Emperor Jagang, but from what I did read I'd say his empire made the mistake of accepting immediate, concrete evil in pursuit of nebulous, far-off good; they burn down the flawed present in pursuit of a false dream of a better future, a lesson I think you'd agree remains timely. No idea about powers of the earth, I've never heard of it before.

Both of these examples are reductive; in the case of Glampers, this is because she is from a parable so short that nuance is counterproductive; the whole point of the piece is that equality is not, in fact, a valid terminal goal, that "more equality" can actually be a bad thing in at least one case. In the case of Goodkind's books, the reductiveness is in fact a detriment to the story as a whole. Neither are even close to as reductive as "Men want us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds." Nor to the other examples you provided. That is just straight-up bigotry.

The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.

To a first approximation, monopolies don't exist. I don't think you can actually find examples of the same general combination of notability and reductiveness/bigotry from anything other than progressivism. Quotes like that aimed at women surely exist somewhere, but none of us will ever hear about it because such writing is marginalized quite thoroughly. Meanwhile, this is a Hugo winner.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

I'd say that they aren't selecting for objective quality, but for some combination of author identity, ideological fervor, and nepotism. I don't think they're ever really going to stop. Why would they?

It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies.

Yeah, the former was who I had in mind with "bad-faith actors of both tribes." From where I sit, it seems clear to me that the reasonable people left for greener pastures long ago.

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