My response to all those comments . . .

Friday, 24 July 2009

My response to all those comments . . .

. . . is here. I would have posted it as a post, but I don't have time to revise it as I would like because I'm moving this weekend; yet I felt compelled to respond to it because it's on my blog, so I wrote a response and posted it sans revision.

Forgive it its infelicities, for it knows not my red pen.

Jul 24, 2009 10:45:33 PM

10 Comments

Civility is highly overrated. I repect where you come from, but you're wrong in your attempts to reach across the aisle to racism apologists like Patterico. As always with these incidents it's possible to pretend people are not arguing from racism, have other concerns that just coincidently happen to take the side of the white bully against the Black victim. You've been on the internet for a while, you know how those things go.

No, Patterico is not a KKK member or neonazi or whatever, but he is somebody who is willing to use racist imagery, to excuse white police brutality against Black victims. If you value his contributions to "the debate", you aresaying to everybody who is on the recieving of these actions that they don't matter enough.

I don't know if you paid attention to teh whole RaceFail debacle in online sf fandom earlier this year, but that wasone of the common themes; that being overly careful not to hurt the feelings of racists or people engaged in racism had the adverse effect on victims of racism, that being careful not to condemn white people for their racist actions froze out people of colour from huge parts of fandom, as they see that it's not safe for them to be there...

Posted by: Martin Wisse | Sunday, 26 July 2009 at 08:01 AM

That's pitiful how willing you are to call people racist solely by what amounts to an administrative formula. That's icky and fascist I think.

Posted by: happyfeet | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 12:05 PM

happyfeet - That is the only arrow in their quiver. Racist.

Posted by: JD | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 12:13 PM

But holding that civility is highly overrated is as invitey an invitation to robust racisms as I can imagine. No. Civility is a big big part of how racisms go buh-bye I think.

Posted by: happyfeet | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 12:29 PM

Yeah, the guy who called the President's wife "skeezy" and keeps trying to turn an instance of police overstepping their bounds into a second Ruby Ridge has any room to call anyone anything. In addition to be a pathetic writer, penguin, you wear your outrage in particularly embarrassing ways. Can't you tell us that Abner Louima deserved what he got

Posted by: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 08:11 PM

oh. You do not understand, Josh Lawrence. Amiri Baraka, former poet laureate of the blue blue blue blue blue blue state of New Jersey, says you're opposed to address powerful black women as "skeeza." For reals. Josh Lawrence you need to get with the times I think.

Posted by: happyfeet | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 08:31 PM

you're not clicking through are you Josh Lawrence? I will help you. If you clicked you would have learned that it's a marxist honorific...

His audience of overwhelmingly black listeners went absolutely wild when Baraka called Rice a “skeeza,” cheering and applauding and whooping with glee.

You need to learn how to show a little respect to our first lady, Josh Lawrence.

Posted by: happyfeet | Monday, 27 July 2009 at 08:57 PM

Oh, I get it, you think they all look alike! Now, the joke makes sense.

Do you ever practice having thought about politics unrelated to grievances or false equivalencies? You are like Marc Levin on acid, all over the place with the "well, one time a Democrat or liberal did it, so I can do it to."

What a chip this little man has on his shoulder, where every offense toward his "conservative" ideology since Watts is stored and festered and then randomly bleated out through a rambling, punctuation-less that is so third grade, ee cummings himself would sooner self-immolate than read another comment.

I find myself feeling sorry for a bitter, middle-aged man living with so many perceived slights.

Posted by: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain | Tuesday, 28 July 2009 at 07:46 PM

We should get together and go to a Jimmy Buffet concert.

Posted by: happyfeet | Tuesday, 28 July 2009 at 08:18 PM

*Buffett* I mean... unless you've already been to one. It's sort of a been to one been to them all kind of thing.

Posted by: happyfeet | Tuesday, 28 July 2009 at 08:19 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

Thanks to Adam Roberts, even academics writing books about comics are insufferable elitists. If you hadn’t noticed, one of my esteemed co-bloggers recently exploded the internet, such that people are saying things like: Oh, I see. Popular is bad. Common feeling among self-defined elites. That would be Kevin Standlee, responding to Rich Puchalsky and I on one of Adam Robert’s many other blogs. The three of us are, in Standlee’s estimation, elitists who hate science fiction: Oh, I see, you’re saying that anyone who likes SF is stupid. Those words were written in response to a post that argues: [T]he very heart’s-blood of literature is to draw people out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the mind-blowing. And if this true of literature, it is doubly or trebly true of science fiction. For what is the point of science fiction if not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange? I would frame that argument differently: when I read science fiction, I want to replicate the wonder my nine-year-old self experienced when he first read Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. I had never considered the possibility that the universe might be littered with the archeological remains of civilizations snuffed out before the proto-pre-dawn of human history. The thought of it was so sublime that, a decade later, I watched five seasons of Babylon 5 trying to recapture it. Not that I’ve stopped, mind you, but when you consider the sheer volume of science fiction I’ve consumed in the twenty years since I read Gateway, I think you can see why that experience is increasingly illusive: more often than not, what I read contains ideas I’ve already encountered, so the only avenue to awe is through the quality of execution. There are exceptions—Perdido Street Station being the one example, Adam’s conceptually audacious novels being another—but they merely apply meat to Adam’s claim that the nominees for the 2009 Hugo Awards fail to engender what proper science fiction should; namely, Schopenhauer’s sublime: [I]f the beholder [of a work of art] does not direct his attention to this eminently hostile relation to his will, but, although perceiving and recognizing it, turns consciously away from it, forcibly detaches himself from his will and its relations, and, giving himself up entirely to knowledge, quietly contemplates those very objects that are so terrible to the will, comprehends only their Idea, which is foreign to all relation, so that he lingers gladly over its contemplation, and is thereby raised above himself, his person, his will, and all will—in that case he is filled with the sense of the sublime, he is in the state of spiritual exaltation, and therefore the object producing such a state is called sublime. If Schopenhauer’s baroque prose doesn’t do it for you,, even though he attributes to Kant an elaboration that properly belongs to Schopenhauer, Žižek’s nice and pithy: The Sublime is therefore the paradox of an object which, in the very field of representation, provides...

"Good Grief!" Moving is never easy. I get that. But this move has become something else altogether. For example, today I drove my wife into the middle of nowhere and deposited her in an apartment with two anxious cats and no pillows, then left her there without a means of transportation or a working phone. Not that I did this on purpose: I thought that phone worked and that her pillows were in the apartment. (I couldn't do anything about the cats, as they distrust any mode of locomotion that can't be ostentatiously halted and redirected to where they'd always intended to go.) Now the movers will be arriving shortly and I'm not done packing yet and people are still slagging Skip Gates and company in that other thread and moving really is like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the eyes, but at least you don't have to worry about all the blood once you've forfeited the security deposit.