As for Scott Lynch, you certainly appear to be a disingenuous little minx.
Hey, I looked up "disingenuous" in the dictionary just now and "truthfully calling Vox Day on an easily-researched point of fact that you'd have to be a complete dipshit to miss" isn't offered as a definition...
Yeah, real scientists, those two. Feeble, Scott, very feeble.
No, truthful, Vox, very truthful. Your exact words, easily disproven, were "not a single scientist in the bunch." I suppose, of course, that the fact these women merely earned degrees in hard science disciplines isn't enough to fit the Vox Day Conveniently Adjustable Definition of a scientist. But then, you can special-plead your way out of anything if your streak of intellectual cowardice is wide enough. Yours is an eight-lane highway.
Vox Day wrote:
"Do let me know when someone gets an official hard SF-writing head count together."
Sure! You just get back to us when you find a universally acceptable definition of "hard SF" and a metric to measure it by.
Vox again:
Let's see, that U of M program has nine core professors, plus another 60 affiliates. And, of course, not a single scientist in the bunch, not even an economist.
Jigna Desai, associate professor. BA in Astrophysics from MIT.
She's the second core professor on the list.
Jacquelyn Zita, BA in Biology from Washington University.
She's the ninth core professor on the list.
Two "lab science" degrees in just thirty seconds of research, Vox. Now, if you didn't know this, it means you didn't do any research before you started tossing out "facts" in public. If you did know this, it means you'll lie to preserve your caricature before you'll incorporate contradictory evidence honestly into your arguments. A third and possibly more charitable interpretation is that you're just a really, really sloppy reader.
Not that I expect any of this to penetrate. It is, after all, merely true.
Nick B wrote:
His point, ma'am, is that there are few female SF authors of merit whatsoever. This clearly is going to reflect on the works themselves.
Dammit, I checked the weather channel today and it didn't say anything about it raining stupid fucks.
Sorry, I don't see too many women even knowing where to LOOK for the knowledge of how to determine such information, much less actually being able to do it without even a calculator.
Huh. Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark blew up in the last space shuttle disaster, but an ignorant asswit like yourself gets to keep hanging around with us on the material plane. Joy.
So, even though there are thousands of men writing fantasy for publication as a first preference, only female fantasists are to be excoriated for fleeing from the Cold Hard Purity of Math and Science, huh?
What a dipshit.
Ray wrote:
Scott,
Thanks for the kind words... it's obviously a friendly place around here for those who march to a slightly different drummer...
Oh give me a break. You're the one who walked in proclaiming that Patrick's one-sentence dig at Bill First must of course mean that he spits on the fundamental human rights and dignities of the Iraqi people. If you want to strut around wagging fingers and citing freeper boilerplate, you should be able to take a few wags and pokes in return without trying to play the "Woe is me, I am but a humble, civil traveler in strange liberal blogs" card.
The fact that people here are actually arguing about the validity of this election versus previous elections where the only person on the ballot was Saddam Hussein;
Nobody is "arguing about" this point. One person has mentioned it so far. Once.
worries about accurate counts; and not trusting the election makes me shake my head in sadness.
So, respectfully, you're either being incredibly naive or you're putting on a standard-issue Gosh, aren't you liberal folks such cute little conspiracy theorists! song-and-dance number. Heaven forfend that we should worry for the actual substance of democracy when the show is so fantastic!
I read about as many lefty blogs as I read righty blogs and there's not been much mention at the lefty blogs I read about the Iraq election... lets take inventory: Here at Electrolite: no mention... BoingBoing: no mention... OliverWillis: a mention, but nothing that I would call serious commentary...
So you read three "lefty" blogs? One of which is a multi-writer clearinghouse of all sorts of crazy and interesting stuff (BoingBoing) and one of which is the intermittent (and only intermittently political) personal blog of our host here? I don't read Oliver Willis, so I have no comment there. But two out of your three don't exactly post a sign saying "We will cover geopolitical events as they happen!" So why should you be shocked that they don't necessarily cover geopolitical events as they happen?
Eschaton, Daily Kos, World O'Crap, TalkLeft, Tapped, Talking Points Memo, Altercation, This Modern World, Political Animal, Kicking Ass... ever heard of 'em? Try a google search for "top liberal blogs" or "best liberal blogs" or just scroll through Eschaton's links, or Kos' links. They discussed the Iraqi elections six ways from Sunday.
You don't have to like them.
You don't have to agree with them.
You just don't get to run around pretending that whatever little selection of "lefty" blogs you read is representative of that side of the political spectrum.
If I'm irate, I'm not sorry. You seem to be trying to be civil, for which I give you credit and thanks, but you're trying to foist two major right-wing trademark Acts of Condescension on us here:
A. The insistence that "liberal bloggers" have a duty or a need to blog about {insert topic here} on your schedule. Often coupled to an incomplete (in your case) or deliberately cherry-picked (all too otherwise common) understanding of just what the "liberal blogosphere" is. This seems to happen every time there's a new suicide bombing, or a terrorist or insurgent kills a hostage... we get a torrent of posts by self-described righty bloggers. "Gosh, why aren't all the liberals condemning {insert atrocity here}?"
Because, of course, we should have to jump through hoops on command to reaffirm that beheading people is wrong, and executing hostages is a bad thing, and that suicide bombers are bad people.
And of course, it's right-wing bloggers to whom we owe this trained-seal show of moral affirmation!
Can you see why this attitude might grate after a (very short) while? I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and presume that you thought you were bringing a new point to the table. But you're most emphatically not.
B. The insistence that qualms about the recent Iraqi elections are tantamount to cynical disrespect for the courage/dignity/aspirations (insert your phrase of choice) of the Iraqi voters themselves. Which is, let's call a spade a spade here, phantasmagorical bullshit.
My personal attitude (one which is pretty much plastered across every lefty/progressive blog I listed above) is as follows:
1. I'm amazed at the courage of the Iraqis who did turn out in such numbers, despite the threats they were facing. This is a good thing-- nay, an awesome thing.
2. Despite this, it doesn't mean much if the election fails to eventually seat a stable, representative, and genuinely sovereign Iraqi government that can deal reliably with the hideous security problems Iraq now faces without the presence of 150,000 U.S. troops to do all the work for it.
3. A deep distrust for the Bush administration and its dancing menagerie of fuck-ups and spin-jobs in no way equates to disrespect for the Iraqi people, or ill-wishes for their future. As has been pointed out, the courage of the Iraqi voters isn't the property of anyone over here. Neither is hope for their future. Where we disagree is on the fitness of the Bush administration to leave Iraq a better place than it was found, and to do right by the hundreds of thousands of Americans tasked with rolling this boulder up a hill at great personal risk.
Ray, in your quest to take the shit-stirring gold, you forgot to start your post with "What you people don't realize..." and you forgot to call Patrick "partisan" (it's a very important form element). I can only give you a 7.75. The judge from Albania gives you an 8, though.
You wouldn't know it happend from looking at this and other progressive, left-leaning web sites.
Actually, you would. You'd just have to look at actual websites, on the actual web, rather than the magic strawman fantasy diorama no one but youself and the readers of Powerline can see.
Sennoma wrote:
I apologize for any offence my ill-considered remarks may have caused.
No harm done. I can be more thoughtless than you with one hand tied behind my back and a broken keyboard, so don't worry about it. :)
Bad humor on my part, but I think bad humor leading to potential misunderstanding
Gotcha, Steve. No problem.
Oh, cripes. Sorry for the fire-related tangent, but here's Steve:
(This is, of course, why Benjamin Franklin's paid fire departments are still around, crushing the specter haunting our nation, the specter of community involvement.)
Um, no. Ben Franklin's brand of fire insurance worked on the principle that if your building displayed a paid-for "fire mark," certain fire companies (which were paid for this service by the insurance company) would try to put out fires on the premises. No fire mark, no service.
Modern fire departments put out any blaze they can reach. The only thing "paid" about 'em is that career firefighters are, mysteriously, paid for their efforts. For sitting around in long on-call shifts, at all hours of the day and night, in all kinds of weather, waiting to hop to it if someone needs help.*
The bastards. Anti-community service provocateurs, the lot of 'em.
And then there's Sennoma:
I dunno about you, but I want professionals hauling my ass out of a burning building. Community fire brigades are wonderful (there's a strong tradition of same in Australia, where I'm from), but they're a supplement to, not a replacement for, the pros.
Look, I know you didn't mean much by this. And I know this crack about "professionals" seems like a pretty glib and obvious thing to say. But the fact is that there really is no such thing as an "amateur" firefighter, at least in the United States-- volunteers and on-calls train to the same standards, and use the same equipment, as the career folks. If someone dressed as a firefighter is pulling your ass out of a burning building, that person has trained for many hundreds if not thousands of hours against the same requirements set down for career fire fighters, even if they're a volunteer.
The vast majority of emergency services personnel in the United States are part-timers, volunteers, and on-calls. According to my class materials, 88% of the fire departments in the U.S. are all-volunteer or mostly volunteer-- and just 6% are entirely composed of career fire fighters. About one-quarter of the million or so currently active U.S. firefighters are career; those folks are also very heavily concentrated in major urban centers.
Even when career fire fighters go on a call, chances are they'll have support nearby (or at hand-- seven different departments responded to a recent building explosion in St. Paul, for example, and half a dozen got together to help out with the hideous cat-hoarding mess reported in Teresa's blog a few months ago) from part-timers. Part-timers drive the engines, maintain the quipment, run the ambulances, haul the patients, man the radios, and man the hoses just as vigorously as careerists do.
So it's a little bit ass-backwards to say "they're a supplement to and not a replacement for the pros." Fact is, in most places, career emergency personnel are a supplement to the volunteers. Fact is, they all train to the same standards, and they are all professionals of a sort, and they are often on a scene side by side.
I start my training as a fire fighter in four days. My class material is on my brain. I don't mean to snap at you, but nowhere in my syllabus does it say that those of us with volunteer service as an eventual goal get to slack off.
---
*Asterisk! Part-timers and on-calls tend to get some measure of compensation on an hour-by-hour basis, when responding to calls and for certain compulsory training events. This varies from location to location. In the city I was living in, it was $8.88 an hour for on-call firefighters and paramedics. Note that that's not money for sitting around waiting for one's pager to go off; that's what you start to accrue only when you run out the door and zip over to the station to do some work.
Abigail, if I may, I think part of the general objection to your dissection is this: With "fantasy" such a squidgy and mutable term in the first place, many of us tend to define it with an inherently inclusive rather than reductive sentiment.
Once you start to argue that certain books "aren't really fantasy" because they contain elements of other genres or famous series, why stop? Why should "boarding school story" elements disqualify Potter, when there are fantasy nautical adventures, fantasy westerns, fantasy crime novels, fantasy technothrillers, fantasy espionage capers, fantasy psychological thrillers, fantasy Horatio Alger tales, fantasy epistolary novels, and fantasy romances, for example?
The thing about purity testing for aesthetic tastes is that it's arbitrary as all hell (regardless of good intentions!), and riduculous when taken to its logical conclusions. You can argue anything and everything out of any genre if you're persistent and reductivist enough:
"G.R.R. Martin doesn't write fantasy, he's just re-doing the War of the Roses with dragons and zombies."
"Steven Brust doesn't write fantasy, he just does noir thrillers and Dumas romances with swords that eat peoples' souls. "
"Neil Gaiman isn't a fantasy writer; he just writes Clive Barker stories with more talking animals and fewer entrails on the wall."
"Clive Barker doesn't write fantasy, he just writes O. Henry stories where people have sex with insects and die a lot..."
You get the picture.
It might not be as insulting as the old "This can't be fantasy, it's actually good" line of crap, but, with all due respect, it's about as useful.
"Fantasy" is best described the overlapping heart of a literary Venn diagram; if you try to make it one of the exclsion zones on the edges of the diagram, you end up with a few thousand authors and novels left out no matter what you do, and you go stark raving mad trying to parse it all down to a perfect taxonomy.
As long as the Democrats think "no enemies to the left", and try to excuse and justify various fringe insanities, they're not going to be taken seriously by sane people.
Yet in this universe, Bush and Kerry are virtually neck-and-neck in every poll and projection at this point, almost as though a great many people were taking the Democrats seriously. Care to spring another National Review talking point on us? Or shall I start listing the various fringe insanities the GOP needs to apologize for cozening up to before I take them seriously again?
To Scott: I know it hurts when your ox has been gored. I've suffered the same fate many a time. Perhaps you will someday be able to learn from the experience without spasmodic ad homenem attacks.
(Arthur, having chopped off both of the Black Knight's arms, proceeds to cut one of his legs off)
Black Knight: Right, I'll do you for that!
Arthur: You'll what?
Black Knight: Come 'ere!
Arthur: What are you going to do, bleed on me?
Black Knight: I'm invincible!
Arthur: You're a loony.
Black Knight: The Black Knight always triumphs! Have at you!
Mary Kay wrote:
Scott: A RASFF award is a very good thing indeed.
Yay! In that case, thank you, Teresa.
The only mental juxtaposition I was coming up with was "Razzie" or Raspberry Award. Them's not so good.
I'm (shuffles feet, glances down nervously) not really a Usenet person; when I try to hunt down something on rec.something.somethingelse, I use Google Groups.
Fear my lameness.
Cheers,
SL
Um, what's a RASFF Award? Is that bad?
Ivor wrote:
This isn't really that difficult to comprehend, Scott. If someone states that he/she is an atheist because he/she does not believe in the existence of god, yet he/she can provide no evidence to substantiate the belief, then the belief is emotional and illogical.
You're right, provided they cite no evidence. But I cite the evidence of my own experience and observations, as does, oh, every human being on the face of the flippin' planet when discussing their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
Now, replace "god" in your paragraph above with "Loch Ness Monster" or "Tooth Fairy" or "Outstanding Rob Liefeld Illustration" to see how elementary the flaw in your alleged logic is. Do you believe in any of those three things? According to you, if someone can't prove that they don't exist, it's illogical to not believe in them. That's craptacular enough, but you also have the problem of continually confusing "categorical denial" and "simple disbelief."
It would indeed be illogical for me to claim that "God" absolutely cannot exist. It's nothing near illogical for me to claim that the evidence I've seen so far indicates that "God" does not exist. And if you can't wrap your brain around that, Ivor, you're the one who's either a) having comprehension problems or b) being deliberately disingenuous.
My position is that it is possible for an agnostic belief to be logical, but that it is impossible for atheistic belief to be logical.
And your position is demonstrably wrong. You're very welcome to feel that way all you like, to be sure of it on a deep and emotional level; just don't pretend for a second that "logic" backs it up in any way.
Now, let's look at what we have so far.
The Ivor Argument Timeline
1. You make sweeping and moderately insulting statements of opinion backed by wonky logic.
2. You are justly and accurately refuted, not necessarily with malice, but with verve and vigor, from multiple viewpoints.
3. You call Patrick "smirking" and "arrogant," which he hasn't been. You'd know it if Patrick had it in for you; I mean, it would be more obvious than someone running your grandmother over with a Zamboni. It would be flagrant.
4. Then, because you're being an obstinate jerk, you get an ass-walloping from posters who know more about what you're talking about than you do.
5. You then enter passive-aggressive mode, claiming that your opponents are big meanies with no recourse but to call you names, conveniently ignoring your own initiation of Part 3 in this little history.
6. I call you an obstreporous chickenshit arguing in bad faith.
You, sir or madam, are an obstreporous chickenshit arguing in bad faith. From Electrolite's heart, I stab at thee; for amusement's sake, I spit my last ad hominem at thee; get bent.
Ta,
SL
As I understand it:
An agnostic doesn't believe in the rituals, dogmas, or conclusions of any organized religious sect, but believes in a spiritual something, however vague or idiosyncratic their conception of that something might be.
An atheist doesn't even believe in that spiritual something.
From a confirmed agnostic, a note about atheism: it's illogical and therefore should not be embraced by anyone serious about the study of religion. To be an atheist you must know that no form of supreme/superior/all-knowing/knows-a-bunch/flawed-but-kind-angry/etc. being exists in the universe. You cannot suspect this and still be an atheist. Nope, you gotta know it down to your bones.
Crap, nonsense, and posthumously-written L. Ron Hubbard novels.
As has been mentioned, several times, you are willfully refusing to differentiate between the two distinct philosophical statements that form the generally-recognized poles of atheism: "I believe/can prove that there is no god" and "I haven't yet seen any evidence in favor of the existence of a god." *
The "strong atheist/weak atheist" description is a good one; in my own mental filing cabinet, I've always labelled the positions "active atheism" and "passive atheism."
For quite a while, I thought of myself as an agnostic (believing in an unnamed higher power, but not in organized worship) until it gradually dawned on me that I had absolutely no feelings of "faith" in any sense. I don't believe in worship. I have no worshipful, thankful, or vengeful feelings toward any higher or unseen powers. In fact, I don't accept, logically or emotionally, the division of events into "natural" and "supernatural" categories. I haven't yet seen any evidence that the universe around me requires (or would be enhanced by) the existence of higher/unseen powers. So I'm a classic "weak" or "passive" atheist; "Do not multiply entities unnecessarily" strikes me as a wonderful idea.
Something may yet come along to change that belief; this is the crucial point you continue to miss or ignore. Weak/passive atheists don't spit on possibilities; we wait for what we believe to be sufficiently irrefutable evidence.
I can't and don't speak for strong/active atheists here-- remember, I disagree with their approach. When you criticize them, you're not even touching the edges of my own philosophy.
I understand the constant temptation to look cross-eyed at theists and supernaturalists, believe me-- the attractive urge to congratulate oneself for being "stronger" or "more rational," for not using religion as a "crutch." I mean, recite Henley's "Invictus" in front of me and I'm ready to punch angels in the face-- bring 'em on.
But.
I know too many decent, mature, rational, and responsible theists (and too many mean-spirited, self-satisfied evangelical atheists) to imagine that my club already owns Park Place and Boardwalk on the Monopoly board of spiritual truth.
I've had too many sleepless nights, close scrapes, and sad losses in life to begrudge anyone else whatever philosophy helps get them through those same events, and helps them appreciate this world to the fullest while they're here, so long as they don't start setting other people on fire because of it.
So, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop kicking straw men in the face and patting yourself on the back for it. Real arguments by real people who hold real beliefs have been set before you here. Ignoring our points won't mark you as a bold crusader for truth; it'll prove that you're a smug-souled nutsucker with both thumbs up your mental bunghole.
Cheers,
SL
*"God," in these sentences, is used as convenient shorthand for every possible manner of god, gods, spiritual forces, banished thetans, unseen powers, collective unconsciouses, tentacled horrors, etc.; imagine it as such and save us all many long paragraphs of defining terms, splitting hairs, and re-inventing wheels. ;)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 10 |
| 2004 | 8 |
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