In re: the comment spam.
It's hard not to be at least somewhat charmed by a website whose menu options are: "Company", "Glory", "All Product", "Catalog", "Sale Net", "Contact" and "Login".
People looking to spruce up their website -- adding a button labeled "Glory" is probably the way to go.
Teresa:
I do hope that I've not given any indication that you're supposed to feel sympathetic toward the person in question. I'll admit to being somewhat sympathetic myself, but that's mostly sympathy towards someone I've constructed in my head, rather than the actual vanity publisher.
It's probably worth noting that the business model that seems to be in play is the author sells books to friends and family directly, rather than pointing them at Amazon; hence the talk of buying shipments of books on the tribute page that's now the house's front page. Thus, low Amazon sales figures aren't going to be seen as evidence for failure. I still think that gormless, rather than evil is a likely explanation, but I'm perfectly willing to accept the fact that I might be wrong.
On an unrelated note, a bit of comment spam got into this entry before the great shutting of threads.
Not that I'm re-reading the whole archive. Er, yeah. Not that at all.
"And, as I was writing this comment, this came up," is what I meant to say.
Doh.
And, it's probably worth noting, Profitable Publishing has clearly noticed the attention tnh has sent its way:
"Hey Bloggers, check out these books - you don't need a ten foot pole to read them! LOL!" is a comment that showed up on the front page there recently.
And, as I was writing this comment
"Just for the record - the bloggers who have recently negatively targeted my website have never done business with me. Their opinions are strictly their own and do not originate from an informed position. This blog thread originated from someone being made at an entirely different publishing company. Please judge my books and my publishing company for yourself. I completely embrace you researching this company thoroughly, or calling me for more information.
Thank you for visiting Books To Believe In!"
(Er, who was being made at what company? Also, I'm not sure I want to be completely embraced by this guy.)
Music of the sort that might appeal to those reading this:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
Sample lyrics:
(From "Skullcrusher Mountain")
I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
(From "Mandelbrot Set")
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry
(Apologies to those who have seen me promoting this on my livejournal. It's just that I like it, not that I have any connection to the site, the musician, or anything of that sort.)
Perhaps not exactly obscure, but writing this amused me:
"If one finds a ring in a dark cave, or an enchanted blade in a grave-barrow, these he is allowed to keep."
If one finds a ring in a dark cave -- what is the reason for this? Thus said R. Yitzchak: It is because the owner of the ring would have been checking it at all times, and thus, he would have noticed when he lost it, and surely he would have said, "woe is me, for I have lost my preciousss," and as R. Zvid said in the name of Rabha, if one says, "woe it me, for I have lost my preciousss," he does not expect to recover it.
And of which rings are we talking? Rabha bar R. Chana says, "even the nine". Ullah says, "even the seven." Reish Lakish says, "even the three." R. Nachman says in the name of Shmuel, "This is only true of the One Ring, and that only because the One Ring is never truly lost by chance."
Despite the fact that while in office Fillmore wasn't a complete failure, it's worth noting that he ran as the Know-Nothing candidate a few years later. Given the platform of the party -- virulently anti-immigrant, anti-catholic, and with an election strategy that relied heavily on thugs near the ballot boxes, it's not going to be easy to view Fillmore as a model of personal moral probity.
There was an AP article I saw in passing -- http://www.boston.com/dailynews/131/world/Few_Bronze_Stars_for_scandal_t:.shtml is the first place that came up with it when I googled -- which reports that the approval rate for bronze star recommendations for the 800th MP brigade dropped from 80% to 20% after the Abu Ghraib story broke.
In the article, there are fairly extensive quotes from a letter that Brig. Karpinski sent to the AP.
And, frankly, they're horrible stuff. Karpinski may be a nice person -- I don't have enough information to judge that. But she's presenting as a horrible officer. There are any number of angles from which her comments can be criticized -- a drop from eighty to twenty percent in approvals is not an eighty percent drop in approvals, for one thing. The decision to throw a snit in the press is also problematic. But that's not what caught my attention.
Her primary complaint is that, as she characterizes it, the majority of the 800th were good soldiers, doing their jobs under difficult circumstances, and it's not fair to fault them for the actions of those who were doing bad things.
Now, I'm not sure how far to trust that -- the very kindest read of the Abu Ghraib situation that can be made is that Karpinksi is not necessarily the person to turn to if you want to find out what the 800th MP brigade is up to.
But even if it were true, to make this claim shows that she doesn't understand what a military unit is, and that she doesn't understand either honor or dishonor.
A brigade is not a collection of individuals who happen to be doing similar jobs. The members of a unit are answerable to each other, and the members of a unit are responsible for each other. And even if what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of lone psychopaths, unlikely as that may seem, those psychopaths brought dishonor on the US, on the armed forces, their division, on their brigade, and so on down the line. And it gets more concentrated every step of the way.
Further, she explains that this decision is going to be bad for the brigade's morale. Well, actually, the quote has her saying that ''This will contribute in a large way to the morale of the soldiers who placed their lives on the line every day and survived", but I think she meant that it will do the opposite of that.
And, you know, assuming that she did actually mean something sensical, rather than the words she typed, it's a point. Not getting medals will hurt their morale. And getting medals would be good for their morale. And you know what would be really good for morale? If they all got Bronze Stars. Hell, why stop there? If every member of the 800th got the Congressional Medal of Honor, they'd probably all be mighty bucked up.
This is what happens when you do bad things -- other people suffer. And not just the people you're doing the bad things too. But your friends, your comrades in arms, the people who you're counting on to save your ass, they're going to get hurt too. Their individual heroism and their individual accomplishment are tarnished. And it's all your fault.
That's the way it has to be, because an army is an army, not a conglomeration of heroes. No, it's not fair. Fair doesn't enter into it. An army that relies on individual bravery to get people to fight, an army in which every man's responsibility is to look solely to himself, is an army that will lose.
And it's not just Karpinsky who doesn't quite get it. There's a soldier quoted who is in the 800th MP brigade.
From the article:
"Karpinski's subordinates at Abu Ghraib at times disregarded her commands, and didn't enforce codes on wearing uniforms and saluting superiors, which added to the lax standards that prevailed at the prison, said one member of the 800th MP Brigade."
Translation: We were terrible, terrible soldiers. Yes, the officers, particularly Karpinski, should have done something about that, but it doesn't change how wretched we, personally, were.
"The soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said commanders in the field routinely ignored Karpinski's orders, saying they didn't have to listen to her because she was a woman."
Also, we had something of a leadership problem.
Now, that soldier said his own Bronze Star commendation was quashed after the investigation started.
"''I was supposed to get one and so were others. (The recommendations) were downgraded and subsequently kicked out,'' he said."
Despite this, I should get a medal.
"''There's a stigma of belonging to the 800th. You don't deserve any medals. Everybody thinks it's the 800th that's guilty of these crimes, when it's a subordinate unit.''
The seven soldiers facing criminal charges in the abuse case, including those posing with naked prisoners, are members of the Army's 372nd Military Police Company, based near Cumberland, Md. The 372nd is one of more than a dozen companies within the 800th MP Brigade."
By subordinate unit, apparently, he doesn't mean a unit from a different brigade that was attached to the 800th. He means one of the 800th's component units.
I could probably sympathize more if this guy stuck with the line of "it never happened, and they deserved it," than I do with his, "it's the next unit over that's been doing monstrous things for quite some time before they got themselves caught, and it's not fair to blame me." It's at least got a certain amount of spine in it.
Dishonor tars the innocent and they guilty; the only way to avoid it is to be the guy that stands up to it, and speaks out. In addition to being about parades and medals, and people saluting you, honor means taking the responsibility for things that you didn't personally have a hand in; sanctions within the 800th for the 372nd are certainly appropriate. But the 372nd was part of the 800th, and the other people in the 800th can't just walk away from that.
Similarly, the army can't just pretend that the 800th wasn't part of the army, and Americans can't pretend that the army isn't part of America.
And I'm baffled as to how a woman who doesn't seem to get any of this managed to rise to the rank that Karpinski did. I'm far from an expert on the US military, but if this is the sort of people we have as generals, the military's problems aren't a product of the current administration, and I'm not sure if they even can be solved, let alone how they're going to be solved.
I have to agree that the essential problem here is the amount of ground that "contract mercinary" covers.
In Israel, for instance, much of the security for public places is handled by private security companies. Were someone to explain how they were unmoved by the death of the guy wanding people at a bus terminal because that guy was a private citizen and the bus company mostly owned by the government, I'd think it a rather stupid remark. This is independent of what they think about the situation in Israel, or where they grew up. Yes, these people have guns, and are authorized to use them, at their discretion. And, yes, the government is employing them through a proxy.
This is completely different from a situation where the government is hiring mercinaries to deniably kill trouble makers, or to engage in military adventurism without having the numbers show up on casualty rolls, or any of the other situations where paying people with guns plays a more sinister role.
I mean, even in those cases, those are still people, and being completely unmoved by people's deaths isn't necessarily an admirable trait, but where people are doing bad things, I've got no problem with that.
The thing is, in Iraq, you have a complex situation. Unless the US government is willing to provide security for every single organization, local or foreign, that does business in Iraq, there is going to be a need for armed security guards. Maybe this is something that the police should be handling, but given that things in Iraq are the way they are, I see nothing immoral in hiring people with guns to keep various business interests safe. And I can't see much reason to deny those people the same moral standing as the guy with a metal detector outside a bus station.
But, in Iraq, you have an ongoing military campaign. And this campaign is of the sort that I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear involves mercinaries hired to do very bad things to people, for reasons that are moraly problematic, at best.
(As an aside, the level of military training that these people will have gone through isn't a filter that can reliably be used to tell the difference between the sort of functions mercinaries are being used for; if you're hiring a man to carry a gun, hiring ex-military is a perfectly reasonable way of knowing certain pre-requisites are met.)
Given that we don't know what sort of job the guys killed were doing, it seems reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt. Given the relatively low cost of sympathy, witholding it is rather petty, and public airing of the lack of sympathy seems rather dumb. Yes, there are reasons why Kos is less inclined to grant that benefit of the doubt. That doesn't change the fact that I find his statements in this case rather dumb. I'd like to think that I've earned the right to say that, here. By being a person with a computer, and all.
That said, the rush to disavow Kos, and attacks on those who fail to disavow Kos are. . . well, they're a number of things, all of them bad. This is the sort of thing that the Bush campaign has been doing -- being shocked and hurt by the other guy doing things that they do all the time. Kos said something tactless, and in my opinion at least, dumb. If you generate a sufficient quantity of prose, sooner or later, you'll say things that are tactless and dumb. If I were a daily reader of a blog in which I saw something like that, I might put in a comment. Hell, I might even talk about it other forums. But this isn't the sort of thing that needs a communal shunning, and by implying that it is, those whose politics are opposed to Kos', they're playing a dirty game. If he gets shunned, it reduces the number of their outspoken opponents by one, and serves warning to others to reduce their output, lest they say something less than perfectly smart. It also establishes their side as the one of moral probity, and Kos' as the side of dangerous lunatics. If Kos isn't shunned, well, obviously, anyone who doesn't shun him is in complete agreement about everything he had to say.
It is for this reason, more in sorrow than in anger, I urge people to remove from their blogrolls, and return donations made in the names of anyone who've attacked those who failed to attack Kos. It is my deepest regret that they've chosen to use tactics of this sort, and I hope only that something, something, something, and etc.
In terms of American military incompetence, you can find many, many examples of both strategic and tactical foolery, if you go back and look closely, same as anywhere else in the world. My vote is for the Battle of the Crater, but I could suggest a number of others for the crown of least intelligent thing the US Arned Forces have done.
Grt Nw Sc-F Nvl!
Hy, jst rd n rtcl bt fthr nd sn tm tht wrt nvl clld "ttck f th Rckds . . .
Alternatively, a t-shirt that says, "So, about my manuscript. . ."
I'm shocked, shocked to discover that you've looked at those Trojan ads, Teresa.
After all, you're not supposed to click through unless you're a resident of the UK.
There aren't that many mentions of willows in the Old Testament; maybe a half dozen or so. I looked it up, and then forgot. One of those is in the list of things that are supposed to be taken during Succot, so there's a certain amount of literature about the symbolism of willows in later literature, but those aren't really ancient Hebrews. Just kinda old Hebrews.
As far as biblical references go, it's worth noting that the sort of big, handsome weeping willows don't really show up in the mideast. What you get is a sort of shrub, which tends to show up on riverbanks and in moist valleys. And, just about all the times it shows up in the texts, it's pretty explicitly linked with rivers or wadis.
So, it seems as though for the ancient Hebrews, willows were a feature of rivers; the symbolic value of rivers, particularly in the psalm refered to is another matter -- Babylon was famous for its rivers, while Israel, particularly Judea, wasn't.
As far as Alter goes, sadly, it doesn't show up in Ancient Hebrew at all. It means "immediately" in the Talmud, and in Yiddish it means "elder" -- like "Chaim" (life), it's a name that gets tacked on to a sickly baby, in the hopes of encouraging it to live longer, and I'm named after someone who was named after someone who was sickly as a child.
Teresa:
There's another route through which bad books make it through the publishing pipeline.
"On the one hand, my Conan pastiche has all of the elements that made The Eye of Argon what it was, but without being as likeable or amusing. On the other hand, I am Lin Carter."
While people who know who Carter was might be able to understand how the book got an editorial pass, a reader who doesn't recognize the name might well wind up dumbfounded by the fact that the various Thongor titles made it to print.
There are other examples, of course, where who the author was explains how the book got published. And the degree to which readers can be expected to know who the author was varies quite a bit.
FranU, I've counted three separate iterations of something along the lines of "I'm done replying, I'm going away," from you.
Assuming that the third of those is not fundamentally different from the previous two, you might want to consider leaving that bit off the next time you post; even if you mean it when you write it, it's starting to lose credibility.
Teresa: You've almost fixed it -- it's "Jon", rather than "John" Stewart.
A few things:
Teresa: Yes, on the time thing. F&SF's rejections tend to be to the point, without much in the way of feedback. Other markets have given me really nice rejection letters, filled with compliments and advice. F&SF is always the first market that I send appropriate stories to, as their turn-around is something like two weeks.
As far as to why publishers can get away with frowning on sim-subs, while simultaniously submitting resumes is standard practice, it's worth considering how little of a standard publishing house's list comes off of the slushpile. It's something on the order of a title every couple of years, or less. This means that there's a real power imbalance -- publishing houses will not be upset if their rules mean fewer people send manuscripts in.
Thought I'd pass on a link that Naomi pointed out: http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cap03/sandra/book_curse.html
Oh, and I found it rather odd how much of the Casa Mobile site I could understand. "klikk her for mer info", indeed.
Yonmei:
I remain unconvinced by the ability to draw distinctions between church and state in cultures like Dynastic Egypt, where the head of state wasn't just the supreme pontiff, but was, rather, a god, a not a minor one either. The state is the church, working to fulfill the wishes and bring glory to the name of the God, be it by raiding Nubia, or by building large things with limited practical function. It may well be that the justice system that commoners turned to when their contracts were not being fulfilled was not affiliated with the state at all, and was thus at least somewhat secular. But that doesn't improve the argument that marriages were of concern to the state before they were a concern of religion. Oh, and. Most of the written evidence that we have about the lives of the common folk in Egypt comes from the New Kingdom and later -- 1570 BCE is the start date on that, so it's practically modern, and somewhat less than relevant.
As far as the spirituality issues goes, if you look at a traditional Jewish Ketubah, which is the documentary part of a marriage, you'll discover that it's in Aramaic, which you probably won't be able to read. However, if you get a translated version, you'll see a good deal that amounts to a legal contract, and relatively little about spirituality. Nonetheless, there is a certain amount of evidence that current and traditional Jewish practice assigns at least some spiritual value to the marriage process. Absence of evidence, evidence of absence, and so on.
Even if you're going to posit that the marriage as a contract was lacking a spiritual dimension on the basis of that evidence, there's still going to be the usual pile of custom and religious taboo as to who can marry whom, at what ages, when different parties are to be held, or not to be held, and so on.
On another subject, to the best of my recollection, the Ur-Nammu code (2050 BCE) is the earliest legal code that we've found traces of. It would be foolish to assume that it's the earliest code ever, of course, but there were communities larger than families or even clans well before that; Jericho as a city, for example, is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site, which dates back to four thousand years before Ur-Nammu. It's not just earlier than writing -- it may well be earlier than agriculture.
Oral traditions are, of course, imperfectly preserved, and it's highly possible that they had what amounted to an oral legal code. But distinguishing between that, and tradition, and religion is beyond me. And beyond you, as well. I'm getting the impression that your model of a religious marriage seems to be one in which marriage is seen as a sacred bond, and one in which marriage is supposed to be eternal. I'm freely willing to admit that this is a fairly late view of marriage. It's also a fairly Christian view of marriage. Well, actually, it could also be a traditional Hindu view of marriage, but I'm far from expert in that area, so I'll ignore that possibility. Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and other Near Eastern legal codes all allowed for the possibility of divorce.
I'm not a hundred percent clear on what delineates a sacred bond, so I'll pass on that half of the model.
Teresa:
I'm actually not all that expert in this particular sub-area. If we were talking about, say, the Ma'agen Mikhael wreck, or the mortise and tenon system on the Ulu Burun wreck, or so on, that I'd concede to being at least somewhat expert on. However, I've sat one course that talked about Egypt, and that was focused almost exclusively on trade ties, and evidence thereof. My background in this area is a hobbyist's, albiet a hobbyist who's looking to go into a related field.
One of my favoritist memories on a similar subject was listening to one of the people who excavated at Catal Hoyuk talking to a neo-pagan Goddess type about the finds. He was being very polite, to the Goddess type due to a desire for the precious, precious funding, and to a certain degree his part in the conversation could have been replaced by a tape recorder that interspersed, "yes, that's possible, but we don't have much evidence on the subject" with "if we had more funding we could do more DNA work, and maybe get some evidence." Only a tape recorder couldn't have captured that look of pained horror that he kept trying to hide in the face of firm convictions as to the meaning of finds on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.
Jonathan:
Kiryat Joel has its own problems, as a theocratic township, but I've not heard any allegations of systematic child abuse anything like what's being reported about Short Creek. It would probably be at least polite not to suggest that people are handing out teenage girls like party favors, and driving unwanted boys away without at least some supporting evidence.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 23 |
| 2003 | 7 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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