What genre is "The Da Vinci Code" in? I've tried to read it (so as to have a book in common with family members to discuss) but I couldn't get through more than a few pages of it before tossing it aside.
Tripe?
Nah, it's the seekrit conspiracy revealed! meets action genre -- with added tripe. I think specifically it's got a lot in common with modern paganism?
I would say that romance as a genre gets less respect than sf, but that sf fans are mocked far more harshly than romance fans.
Comity. Also relative popularity plays a part, I think.
Keir @ 132, 151: If I were to define SF the way Patrick outlined (which I might for some purposes, but not for determining what "really is" SF), I would start with Gernsback, not Wells. Excluding 1984 and Brave New World would then be reasonable, and indeed part of the point if one were trying, for example, to examine SF as a publishing category, and assess the differences between books published therein and books with SF tropes published as mainstream.
If you read Wells out of SF, you don't have SF, you have American engineer literature. (I mean, if your definition of SF doesn't include Wells, something is wrong with your definition. It'd be like defining Ingres out of Academicism.)
I.e, it is a given that Wells is SF, so your institutions have to include Wells; I could see a plausible institutional theory of SF but it wouldn't be one that assumed the institutions of SF were those of American fandom. (See prior rant about SF not cutting itself off from European roots.)
Wells certainly had genre self-awareness and all that.
Hmmm? You said that you could conceive of an institutional definition of sf, and that would rule Brave New World out of sf, to which I responded that in point of fact your institutional definiton wouldn't rule Brave New World out.
That that definition isn't even plausible is rather the point.
(And I have an aesthetic revisionist argument against it, viz. that by letting Brave New World etc out of sf, sf loses some really important work and loses a politically engaged European tradition that I think is really important to reading European sf, esp. the New Wave. And using the institutional theory to read it out is a way of defining a certain narrow type of sf people as a norm.)
I find it odd that the revulsion towards sf has persisted longer than the revulsion towards any other genre form. Heavens, some critics rank us below pr0n! I wonder why.
You joke, right? Most everyone accepts sf nowadays -- part of the wonderous post-modern thing (the ones that don't tend to be hidebound fogeys or journalists, not exactly well known for accuracy.)
Secondly, er, um, romance gets it much worse than sf.
Patrick at 19:You can plausibly define "SF", not as a particular group of literary characteristics, but rather as the joint project of a particular group of people over a particular historical period. By such a definition, Brave New World would not really be "SF," despite its obvious similarities to works that are "SF," because Huxley had little or nothing to do with those people and their work.
See, I'd dispute that --- Huxley (and Orwell) were responding and in dialogue with H G Wells (specifically Men Like Gods) and if reactions to Wells aren't SF then the term is meaningless.
Claim back your roots: SF was a reputable literary form in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe; just because there's a High Modern narrative where serious literature becomes retrospectively defined as Bloomsbury and friends is no reason to give up on the heyday of political involved sf.
Keir: But surely the Chilean government also used force as a substitute for legitimacy.
No. This is exactly wrong. The Chilean government, being democratic, derived legitimacy from the people, the people being generally accepted as the source of legitimacy in a free and democratic society. See, for instance, the French Revolution. (Arguably there are other sources of legitimacy, but a democratically elected government is normally seen as very good.) They then used force to make the legitimately made decisions stick, but it was legitimate use of force, as opposed to the substitution of force for legitimacy.
To bring in the morality of the decisions made merely muddies the waters. They may have been right or wrong, but that is a matter for the Chileans to decide, not you or I. When I say decide, I don't mean we can't discuss it; I mean we have no right to impose our views upon the Chilean people, outside a very small number of exceptional events.
This is something that really annoys me. People discuss the economic policies of Allende -- or which ever leftist government is involved -- like the fact that Allende was driving the country over a cliff should matter. The point of democracy is that if the Chileans chose to jump off a cliff that is their right.
I don't like John Key's government, and I think this current Parliament will make some bad laws, but that is their right. Discussing the morality of those laws doesn't really come into it, except in some utterly outrageous cases.
Talking about the democratic nature of the USA is exactly as specious as discussing the democratic nature of the 1945 British House of Commons with reference to India -- the wrong demos is involved. No matter what the CIA thought, it is generally accepted that democratic self-government is better than the imposition of fascist juntas.
I reject the claim that corporate sins justify confiscation-
But the people of Chile in their full sovereignty as a nation, in their full right to self-determination, disagreed with you, and you (or more exactly, the US) have no standing to object.
That's the point; all this talk about the decision made is pointless. The fact is the decision was made, and the US didn't like it, so the US used physical force as a substitute for legitimacy. That seems close enough to bullying to me; if you disagree, then we can say that the US merely engaged in colonialism.
Also, er, the Falklands was a case of Argentine aggression, and the people who lived in the Falklands wanted to stay British (roughly).
When righting past wrongs is to be solved by a sort of lawlessness, defensiveness is entirely reasonable, even for the "guilty"
This is offensive nonsense. `a sort of lawlessness' is a value judgement you have no standing to make. It is arguably incorrect, and, further, even if it were correct, it isn't any of your business, especially if the people of the country involved disagree with you, further provided there aren't any crimes against humanity occurring, and even then still.
That is one reason why the US is seen as bullying -- the intervention in other countries' internal affairs purely because you can. The rights and wrongs don't really come into it. Rather, it is the utter disregard for self-governance of other countries.
It is the use of force to make other countries obey that stinks to high heaven, and it certainly seems like bullying to me.
Ah, but NZ has a bunch of weird features -- like the Treaty of Waitangi and explicit Maori seats, and Ministers outside government. (That one was really, really, odd.)
Although we did have a bicameral legislature, but it was a waste of space, so we got rid of it in the 40's or 50's.
Arguably, the Crown in New Zealand isn't strictly sovereign, but is rather bound by the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi. Quite what that means is a bit up for debate, to say the least.
Strictly, I'd call it Waitangi 1.0, running a customised Westminster/Bonn system in emulation.
65 -- yeah, strictly. Imagine I was talking about Anne, would you?
Sorry, to rephrase: there is precedent for the Commons to deny a Government supply; this causes them to stop being the Government.
Regarding Commons, is there precedence for this?
Yes. It is The Precedent of Parliamentary democracy -- the Government must enjoy the confidence* of the lower House.
That is what being the Government means. If ever Harper were to lose supply, he'd no longer be the PM, by definition. That's why Harper is desperately trying to avoid that.
*Confidence includes the Budget, and supply in general in New Zealand, I think.
#49 -- lots of the Commonwealth nations are Republics. The Queen of the UK also holds the office of Head of the Commonwealth, but that's different from being the Head of State of any given Commonwealth nation.
I can bore for New Zealand on the Commonwealth, ever since reading a book by Patrick Gordon Walker on it.
Lots and lots of fun legal fictions around everything.
The Church of Scotland has no Bishops -- part of the Reformed aspect.
(The Scottish Episcopalian Church does, but the Queen doesn't worship with them when in Scotland.)
Instead, the Church has a presbyterian government, and tends to incite civil wars if the King gets too uppity about installing Bishops.
There isn't much to it, really.
OK, we must be the only nation on earth whose constitution is distributed, only partly canonical, of unclear ownership, not necessarily maintained, and poorly documented. It's an open-source project!
This isn't quite true; New Zealand has essentially all that, and has half the constitution residing in another country.
If Her Majesty the Queen is in the Dominion, then the Governor-General becomes redundant, but Her Majesty the Queen has all the same rights and duties as the G-G would.
Therefore, HMQ is exactly the same as the G-G, no matter what -- excepting faults, in which case you resort to the off switch, and start from scratch. (See 1688 and 1649.)
The really good bit is when HMQ crosses the Scottish border; she then stops believing in Bishops, while still being the Queen of Great Britain. This is much stranger than the normal Queen of x distinction.
The one difficulty is the Whitlam case, which involved incredibly dodgy goings-on.
The other fun part is that the Queen has some rights which she only exercises on advice of the Ministers, and some rights she personally exercises. People sometimes have difficulty telling them apart.
But think about the flowering of art in the Renaissance,
Yes, think about the way in which economics meant that most artists were forced to work on commission, and were therefore at the mercy of the wealthy patrons in Italy at that time -- that is the Church and the State.There's a reason we know the names of Pope Sixtus and Lorenzo il Magnifico, the Medici and the Sforza. The Renaissance really was a small elite of patrons funding another elite of artists, with massive gatekeeper effects in that most people in quatrocento Italy were peasants or comparatively poor town dwellers, who had neither the funds to patronise artists themselves or the time to do it themselves.
Likewise with the Enlightenment, although not so strongly, but still with the important underlying fact that most people in Europe at that time were dirt poor peasants, and the Enlightenment was built on their exploited labour.
Again, if you look at the computing revolution, the really seminal work was done by a small group of ridiculously smart people selected by universities with strong gatekeeping functions. Gottingen and the two Cambridges produced the modern computer. Yes, they opened it up later, but, at the point of revolution, it was Alan Turing being paid to do nothing other than think, at a time when most people in Britain were more concerned to avoid the poorhouse's help.
Taste is entirely subjective, certainly. But if someone reads, say, Byzantium Endures and doesn't get that Pyat is an unreliable narrator, then they're reading it wrong, which means that working on that would have some non-subjective benefit.
Really? Why are they wrong? Why isn't it possible to read Pyat as a truth telling narrator from (say) another world?
The first model has much less in the way of gatekeeping. You don't have someone deciding who is to be allowed to learn to program. ("Sorry, you can't be taught programming, you got a C in calc. Besides, everyone knows girls aren't any good at programming.") Instead, everyone who wants it gets access, as nearly as anyone can manage, and people gravitate to their interests, follow their talents and their loves. This permits the development of funny-looking meritocracies, and avoids the situation in which all the participants in some effort are cookie-cutter copies of one another, having been filtered to have the same education and background and life experiences and beliefs and assumptions.
Is there any actual data one way or the other?
There's at least one gatekeeper in the first model -- who has the free time to engage in such activities?
The gatekeeper is ultimately a function of limited resources (i.e, not everybody can be taught C, nor design rockets), and I'm very skeptical it can be got around by the bazaar model, especially given that the ISS is probably more gender and geographically diverse than most FLOSS projects.
The bazaar model hasn't been a great success when it's been put into practice in general, and actual literal revolutions tend to work on the Leninist/Jacobin method.
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