So I got slandered in the Guardian last Friday. I would have responded sooner, but I don’t normally blog on weekends, and yesterday was the highly successful Book Bombing of John C. Wright’s latest book. We got him into the 200s overall, #2 on three different bestseller list, onto the Movers and Shakers list, and the top of Hot New Releases. Side note, it is kind of funny how I’m not a *real* writer, yet I somehow manage to routinely manipulate the sales rankings of the world’s biggest online book seller once a month for my friends. Go figure.
Anyways, my name showed up as the poster child for hate mongery and villainy in the Guardian (a liberal tabloid that passes for a major newspaper in Britain). I’ve been in a lot of American news things but this was a first for me, so on Friday afternoon I had to discuss with my fans on Facebook what I should put on my new business cards. We finally decided on Larry F. Correia, International Lord of Hate. Almost went with The Hatemaster because of the 70’s super villain vibe, but that looks too much like The Hamster when you’re reading fast.
So here is the article written by Damian Walter. It turns out that Tom Kratman knew him back when Asimov’s had a forum, and remembered him as a shrill little libprog, and that if Damian was at the Guardian a village somewhere in England was missing their idiot.
Somebody else told me that Damian is an “aspiring” author, and that he’d recently been given a grant by the British government to write a novel. I have no idea if this is true, and don’t care enough to look it up, but man, if it is… your government actually pays people to write novels? BWA HA HA HAW! Holy shit. As an actual novelist, that’s funny. And I thought my government was stupid.
Unlike Damian, I’m not a huge pussy, so I will include the link to the thing that I’m about to insult. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/11/science-fiction-needs-to-reflect-queer-fluid-gender-identity
As usual, the article is in italics, my comments are in bold.
Science Fiction Needs to Reflect that the Future is Queer
You’re probably thinking, oh, not this shit again. Don’t worry. I’m not going to fisk the whole thing. I’m skipping the first few paragraphs. It is just more of the usual whiny ass demands for more message fic catering to Special Topic of the Day X. Tomorrow the X will be different, but the lectures will be exactly the same.
Though you should read it for tidbits like how male gamers play female characters in video games because they are curious about gender roles… Uh huh… And not because if you’re going to be staring at your character’s ass in Skyrim for 200 hours, it might as well be an attractive ass. The new Tomb Raider spent millions of dollars to perfect 3D boob jiggle for the next generation consoles because male gamers really want to hear Laura Croft’s feelings about the dangers of cismale patriarchy.
All of the other dumb shit he threw out there has been taken apart by other authors already:
Dave goes through why gender roles actually exist for things beyond hurting Damian’s delicate lilac scented feelings: http://madgeniusclub.com/2014/04/14/cow-manure-and-truth/ (and this one is especially good, because as he talks about punching cows. That back breaking, filthy, dangerous job is how I grew up. No wonder every other job in my life has seemed easy in comparison. I must have “privilege”)
Sarah explains how Damian having to cut his hair isn’t the worst thing to ever happen, while trying to steal my title of International Lord of Hate: http://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/04/13/i-need-a-secret-lair-and-minions-and-piranhas/
And while the libprogs are tring to poison the awards well against other conservative writers, Amanda explains the modern literati libprog’s concept of fairness: http://madgeniusclub.com/2014/04/15/so-much-for-fairness/
I just want to focus on the part where he comes after me.
When author and historian Alex Dally Macfarlane made a call earlier this year for a vision of post-binary gender in SF, her intelligent argument was met with predictably intractable ignorance from conservative sci-fi fans.
First off, it wasn’t intelligent at all. It was a petulant demand for authors to end the default of binary gender in their fiction, and how she never wanted to see the default of binary gender again. Please, go ahead and read it. Don’t take my word for it.
For writers and fans like Larry Correia, whose virulent attack on MacFarlane
Interesting… Notice how Damian doesn’t ever link to what I actually said and never uses any actual quotes from me. Here is my “virulent attack”. If you’ve not read it yet, read it for yourself and decide if it matches anything Damian goes on to accuse me of: https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/01/28/ending-binary-gender-in-fiction-or-how-to-murder-your-writing-career/
was excellently dissected by Jim C Hines, sex is a biological imperative and the idea of gender as a social construct is a damn liberal lie!
If Jim’s pathetic slap fight attempt at taking me down strikes you as “excellently dissected” I’d hate to live in your sad little Everybody Gets a Trophy world. It was more of an attempted playground hair pulling, so then I responded by metaphorically knocking his fucking teeth in. Here is an actual dissection of excellence, where I take Jim Hines out and kick him around like a soccer ball. https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/01/29/5687/
Unlike Damian, I don’t need to put words in people’s mouths. Libprogs want conservatives to be silent. Conservatives want libprogs to keep talking so the world can see just how full of shit they are. The links are all there. Judge for yourself.
There are so many distortions that I can’t even take this line by line, I’ve been forced to responding to fragments.
But Correia boils it down to a much simpler argument.
Not even close. None of what he goes on to say is even close to my argument, which was story first, message fic WAY later.
However accurate a queer future might be,
Uh… Wow… No. I never made that argument either. First, “however accurate a queer future might be” – Nope. Whatever sexuality floats your boat, it is no skin off my nose, but only about 2% of the population is gay, so I definitely don’t think it is accurate that we are going to have a queer future, or that mankind is going to ever end the default of binary gender.
That’s just wishful thinking on Damian’s part. Even if Earth went full Sparta in the future, most of us would still think that Damian is a pussy. As for the future, western nations have become more forgiving of homosexuality, true, but once again, while a libprog is quick to lecture us all on white privilege, their usual soft racism overlooks the rest of the world, where cultures that despise and persecute homosexuals are common. I would assume that those cultures have a future too. Demographically those cultures are making babies and growing while the permissive euro-socialists have quit having kids. Yes, I’m sure in the future the Space Caliphate is just going to love it some gay folks.
SF authors must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they want to be “commercial”.
So that was my argument? Hmm… Interesting. Since Damon couldn’t be bothered to link to my actual article or use any quotes from me except for the ones he made up, let’s take a look at some of the things that I really said in the article:
“Now, before we continue I need to establish something about my personal writing philosophy. Science Fiction is SPECULATIVE FICTION. That means we can make up all sorts of crazy stuff and we can twist existing reality to do interesting new things in order to tell the story we want to tell. I’m not against having a story where there are sexes other than male and female or neuters or schmes or hirs or WTF ever or that they flip back and forth or shit… robot sex. Hell, I don’t know. Write whatever tells your story.
But the important thing there is STORY. Not the cause of the day. STORY.
Because readers buy STORIES they enjoy and when readers buy our stuff, authors GET PAID.”
Hmm… Write whatever tells your story… That sure sounds like me telling people to not write about gay people to satisfy conservative bigotry. Let’s see what other vile hate speech I spewed in those articles he was too chicken shit to link:
“Robert Heinlein had stories where technology allowed switching sex. Great. That’s actually a pretty normal sci-fi trope where in the future, there’s some tech that allows people to change shape/sex, whatever, and we’ve got grandmasters of sci-fi who have pulled off humans evolving into psychic space dolphins or beings of pure energy. If that fits into the story you want to tell and you want to explore that, awesome for you. I’ve read plenty of stories where that was part of that universe. If your space whales that live inside the sun have three sexes, awesome (that one was my novella push on Sad Puppies 1).”
Yeah. Wow. There I go again… Could it be that it is the libprog Social Justice Warriors who are bossing people around and trying to push conformist group think, and that they suffer from projection issues? Naw… That’s impossible. Let’s keep going, surely this simple idea that I boiled it all down to can be found in there somewhere!
You want a truth bomb? Readers hate being preached at. Period. Even when you agree with the message, if it is ham fisted and shoved in your face, it turns you off. Message fic for message fic’s sake makes for tedious reading. Yet, as this stuff has become more and more prevalent, sci-fi has become increasingly dull, and readership has shrank.
Nope. That can’t be it either. I warn writers not to bore the shit out of their audience for commercial reasons, but where’s the part where I tell writers not to write about gay folks?
Which is of course nonsense.
Yes, you fucking twatwaffle, it would be nonsense because you made it all up. When you can’t actually debate somebody libprogs go for Make Shit Up. And once you’ve hit that check box, they can go for Dismiss. For my new readers, here is a handy checklist for when you are arguing with morons like Damian. https://monsterhunternation.com/2013/09/20/the-internet-arguing-checklist/
Ironically, as this little ass clown was putting words in my mouth about how writers shouldn’t write about gay folks in order to assuage our homophobic red state audience, my book of the week was Sarah Hoyt’s novel with a gay narrator. My last Book Bomb was for a Michael Z. Williamson novel where the main character was a bisexual. You know why? Because the stories were entertaining and they were enjoyable books from talented authors.
The science fiction novels of Iain M Banks were bestsellers many times over, in part because the future they explored was openly queer.
In part? In fucking PART? By that logic Tolkien is a bestseller because some people really like books with trees in them.
Citizens of Banks’ future society the Culture have the ability to change their sex at will, and frequently shift between sexes and gender roles. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 became both a bestseller and multiple award winner with a vision of the future that included fluid non-binary gender.
I like how he throws these out there like he’s proving me wrong or something… I suppose if I was the imaginary straw man he’d constructed I’d be all sorts of outraged or something.
And Nicola Griffith’s historical epic Hild, nominated for this year’s Nebula awards by members of the SFWA, is built around a bisexual protagonist.
Anybody who wants to be a writer really needs to separate “award winning” and “best selling” in their mind. They are not synonyms. Sometimes a book will be both. Usually they are not, and prestigious awards don’t pay shit. To most readers “award winning” is more of a synonym for “boring and preachy” because they’ve learned the hard way that over recent years awards are more likely to go to whatever preaches about Special Topic X than what is actually the enjoyable. This is a leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness.
And if members of the SFWA like it? Whoop. SFWA doesn’t represent the book buying public that actually pays the bills. The SJW crowd of SFWA will love whatever preaches about Special Topic of the Day X, and then they’ll write blog posts about how it was too bad more left handed transsexual Eskimos haven’t won awards, then they’ll lead a lynch mob against one of their fellow libprogs for slightly deviating from proper goodthink. SFWA is useless and their Social Justice contingent is tedious.
Now I want to raise a question, why is the Guardian brining me up now? If you look at the dates, I pissed off the left half of the internet clear back in January. That’s like ten million years in internet time. Since then the Social Justice Warrior crowd has moved on and been outraged by Jonathan Ross for possibly telling fat jokes in the future, then they got outraged at Neil Gaiman for his being surprised at how easily they get outraged, then they got outraged at Robert Silverburg and a couple dozen other prominent writers for saying that they didn’t want a soviet style editorial board to prosecute thought crime, then they got outraged at liberal Patrick Rothfuss for saying maybe they shouldn’t be so easily outraged all the time, then they got outraged at liberal Wil Wheaton for agreeing with Rothfuss, and I think I’m forgetting some other outrages in there too.
So there’s been plenty of outrage since their outrage over me saying that their message fic is annoying. (if only I could figure out a way to harness the friction energy of liberal hand wringing, I’d have a source of limitless free energy… then I’d then sell the patent for this device to Big Oil for a zillion dollars, because I’m a greedy capitalist 1%er)
So why now, months later, does a British newspaper feel the need to mention me and make up some shit that I never said? Hmmm… What could possibly be going on in, oh… let’s say, London… Could they have been counting up Hugo nominations maybe? Naw… Surely this is just a coincidence.
Well, Damian, as a libprog it is never too early for you to start poisoning the well. Though if you’re going to make it as a journalist maybe you shouldn’t be so ham fisted in your timing. You might inadvertently reveal that somebody leaked information to you early or something.
Personally I look forward to the next few months of nonstop character assassination about me by the Social Justice Warriors. It will be just like when I was nominated for the Campbell. If I can generate enough infamy in Britain, maybe I will be invited to go on Top Gear to drive the reasonably priced car. Then Jeremy Clarkson and I can go over to Piers Morgan’s house and toilet paper his trees.
EDIT: John C. Wright has chimed in, and holy moly, Damien gets whooped on. 🙂 http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/04/a-marvel-from-a-d-801702/
Brilliant!
Good Lord.
I thought the article about ending binary gender was a load of horse shit. I’ve written gay characters (positively – not just as gross villains) and tried to make them realistic. But I’m not writing about anything that means I have to use the term “cisgender” or any variant. I’m also not interested in reading anything like that.
This doesn’t make me prejudiced.
Lunacy…
Top Gear? THIS MUST HAPPEN!
Please, yes!
send e-male to top gear!
“…but that looks too much like The Hamster when you’re reading fast.”
Thus averting a potentially nasty dispute with Richard Hammond.
Yes, it would be awesome to see Larry on Top Gear!
IMO being “slandered in the Guardian” is an honor. [Wink]
Well, I don’t know if people in London are scared of you being nominated for the Hugo, but I voted to nominate Warbound anywway.
I hadn’t heard of the Rothfuss/Wheaton thing, though. I hope a lot of liberals wake up to the fact that many of their comrades are making them look like pansies. I just can’t believe that some people who have the power to stop these whiners will, instead, listen to them. If more people just ignored their cries of outrage, they would realize what little difference these whiners can actually make when push comes to shove..
When you’ve lost Wil Wheaton… 😛
Are you insinuating that Wil Wheaton wasn’t acting when he guest starred on Eureka? I didn’t think even most Hollywood actors had that much abrasiveness in them. It was like applying a bar of Lava soap to my eyeballs.
Larry you are The Man, but really you spend way too much time on these retards. Best thing for you to do, write more SF and make ’em cry with how there’s never any gender-bent characters in your WILDLY SUCCESSFUL novels.
Maybe you could make some really loathsome gender-bent monsters that only come out at night, then blow ’em up with silver bullets. I’d pay money to read that.
I disagree. To not reply is often taken in the same light as silent assent in our world. Libprogs have made as much progress as they have because too many of us failed to speak out over the years and throw the BS flag on their plays. And Larry is the master of throwing the BS flag.
Oh, I’m not suggesting no reply. More like a Glasgow Kiss and a “f- you!”, then onward.
No reason to serve up a ten course ass kicking when a back hand upside the head will suffice. 🙂
But the ten course ass kicking is so entertaining to read! 😀
CombatMissionary, I went just now and read the whole article and all the comments to date. What a bunch of -retards-.
I conclude my first impulse was correct, and this Damien Walter dink rates no more than a terse “fuck off” and a flick on the ear.
To wit:
“When author and historian Alex Dally Macfarlane made a call earlier this year for a vision of post-binary gender in SF, her intelligent argument was met with predictably intractable ignorance from conservative sci-fi fans. For writers and fans like Larry Correia, whose virulent attack on MacFarlane was excellently dissected by Jim C Hines, sex is a biological imperative and the idea of gender as a social construct is a damn liberal lie! But Correia boils it down to a much simpler argument. However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they want to be “commercial”.”
The whole thing can be boiled down to “predictably intractable ignorance from conservative sci-fi fans” and “the bigotry of conservative readers”.
So, just another not very clever intolerant prick out to trash anybody not in his group. Substitute “Jewish” or “Black” for “conservative” to get the full effect.
Haterz gonna hate.
Do remember it was Seanan McGuire who started the FATwa against Ross. She claims to be an “Award winning” stand up comic.
Who?
What was the award? “Person nobody had heard of until she attacked her betters”?
“FATwa” I see what you did there. You owe me a new can of Diet Mountain Dew!
Yeah, that Mountain Dew is rough when it comes out your nose.
Just picked several 2 liter bottles of Diet Dew at Walmart for $1 each. You might want to check your area.
Thanks, I’ll stock up during our Walmart run before the weekend!
No SLIMwa?
Thanks Mike. I needed a reason to want a “like” button on WP 😀
Her theatrics really pissed me off because I was kind of addicted to her October Daye series and now its ruined. 🙁
Ditto, I liked her stuff as well. Now it’s spoiled in the same way that I find out an actor or actress I liked was a lefty douchecanoe. :-/
My MIL had an expression for that type of hissy fit: “showing your behind” – and that’s really what it was – Ms. McGuire couldn’t bring herself to behave professionally (forget like a lady) – she just showed her behind to all.
Actually is was feminist and SFF scholar Farah Mendlesohn who got the ball rolling by quitting the Hugos in protest and sending out emails. Charles Stross was in early too. But that was because of the time-zone difference. McGuire started her apoplexy and weeping act as soon as she woke up East Coast time and ate a raw deer.
Her tweet when she found out about Rossy:
Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire · Mar 1
I was supposed to be safe at Worldcon. I was supposed to be safe at the Hugos. I voted for you, @loncon3, because you said I’d be safe.
Turn’s out Ross was McGuire’s Horla. Who knew Horla’s were real? And that they were anti-all-you-can-eat-buffets?
Stross has indulged in one of these hissy-fits?
Man, I knew there was a reason I’ve never read anything he’s written outside of alt.peeves.
Let’s not forget that this is the woman in whose zombie novel, in the middle of the Land of the Dead, the main charachter goes off on a tirade about how gun laws aren’t stiff enough and anyone who wants to liberalize them has blood on their hands.
No, really.
DaveP, I just… she what?
To quote the great Dr. Venkman, “You know, I have met some dumb blondes in my life, but you take the taco, pal.” Adjust to her proper hair color and preference for address.
Adam, No foolin’.
She writes under the pseudonym of “Mira Grant”, and about halfway through ‘Feed’ her blogger/journalist is interviewing a horrible heinous reichwinger presidential candidate and runs him over the rocks about how he wants to liberalize gun laws, and isn’t he afraid there’ll be an upswing in murders disguised as zombie-killings?
This is about a chapter before her brother abandons his guns (with the special ammo that’s so dangerous that he had to study for a month and take a government test to get licensed to carry…yes, really) for a crossbow to take out a zombie that is threatening her. Why did he abandon his perfectly usable guns? Well, if he didn’t… he wouldn’t have to use the crossbow, and there wouldn’t have been as much dramatic tension.
Yup.
And for the best take on “award winning,” I give you the late, great Roger Ebert:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/deuce-bigalow-european-gigolo-2005
The really fun part of all this is that I hadn’t even *heard* of Seanan McGuire before all this, but now I will never. read. any. of. her. stuff. ever.
I also made the mistake of searching for some images. Jebus….
I was half interested in the Feed series, thought the back sounded like something new.
Now that I know it’s message fic, I’ll pass.
Don’t. She’s unreadable anyway.
I tried starting her latest series (written as Mira Grant) which sounds amazing (gengineered tapeworm symbionts become sentient and start taking over their human hosts!) but couldn’t get past the first thirty pages because it reads like a YA novel targeted at teenage girls. And her attempts to write like a scientist are laughably bad.
Even better… gender-bent characters that love low taxes and the 2nd amendment, and outsell all the SJW message fic by a mile. That’ll really piss ’em off.
Log Cabin Outer-Space Republicans? ;-p
I wore a Log Cabin Republicans pin last time I went to a political rally! I had *both* sides looking at me crossways. (Not gay, but the uptight branch of the Repubs biting their tongues, while the cognitive dissonance of the Dem’s not being sure if it was OK to hate me was totally worth it.)
I still remember with great affection my booming reply to the Demwit who asked me if I was a teabagger. I happily and enthusiastically accepted his offer as ‘I hadn’t had time to shower that morning, and would appreciate his tongue bathing my scrotum clean.’
“But… I didn’t mean to insult..”
“You lying f***. You meant to insult the hell out of me. And now you’re trying to weasel out of your promised blowjob. Lying crapweasel!”
Lefties collapse when you get in their faces in real life. He expected a proper republican gentleman who would quietly endure his insult, and probably not even know what teabagging even was.
His stock did not rise with his peers that day.
Heh, thanks, that was great…. I just woke my wife up, couldn’t stifle the laughter 🙂
Armed and dangerous lesbians hunting tax collectors… yeah I could read that. ~:)
Uh… read A Few Good Men… Mine, not the movie novelization!
Oh, yeah, someone asked if my evangelical readers weren’t upset. I said “no” BUT what I should have said was “no. They were too busy chortling over the book making vile prog’s heads explode. 😛
I bought it already, its sitting waiting for me to have five minutes in a row to read it.
Now I know it has lesbian tax collector hunters, I’ll make the time. 🙂
No. Sorry. It has gay guys who fight for freedom… 😛
I promise Lesbian Tax Collector hunters as a cameo in one of the Earth revolution books, though. Any names you want me to give them?
Call them Jola and Eden. Two girls I used to know. Back in the day they were hawt! Not gay, but so, so hot. Ah, youth. 🙂
Just made a note 😉
Lesbian tax collector name? Hillary.
That would be the Best Top Gear Episode. EVER. You’d need a big MHI sticker to put on the Stig’s helmet.
Also, I’m totally saving this quote for future use. It’s gonna make someone furious :-).
“Libprogs want conservatives to be silent. Conservatives want libprogs to keep talking so the world can see just how full of shit they are.” – Larry Correia
if you teepee Piers just tape one square to his front door. as far as Damian and his “queer future” he is probably dying to come out of the closet. not because he is gay but because all the cool kids are and he feels left out.
Mr. Correria!
I am shocked and appalled at the incredibly serious mistake you have made in your post.
How could you, as (a person who claimes to be) a red blooded make such a grievous and unforgivable mistake!
It is Lara Croft! None of your cheap imitation knock-off laura croft please.
That, “extremely” important topic aside, is it me or are these brave internet [s]trolls[/s] warriors getting worse with each successive batch? I like a good frisking as any other reader but these last batches of “defenders of truth” feel hardly worth the effort.
First, I still want a lair, preferably in an extinct vulcan or volcano or something. Second you forgot the part where Damian should pull up his socks. Third, I bet Baen writers write much better (and heroes) gay characters than the cis-whiner crowd. And that’s why they hate us.
a shot in the dark! an abandoned missile silo, strange radiation lighting the western sky….and mystery.
If the future is queer, then I hope I die soon. Not because I have a problem with gay people. Far from it. However, the people who tend to use the word “queer” these days are the SJW types who want to tell me I’m a bad parent because I pointed out to my son that princesses are girls, while princes are boys.
I know, my hatred knows no bounds.
You CISmale hatey hate-monger, you!
I’m going to the CISmale prison in the queer future because I’ve got my kids enrolled in MMA, and I’m teaching them firearms and archery. You know, tools for the oppression of the minority, or whatever SJW accusation they can come up with. I look forward to shaking your hand when I get there.
I can respect that on all counts. The only reason my son isn’t in MMA right now is because there aren’t any schools in the area that will teach his age (almost 13). The only school only teaches adults for liability reasons.
As for the rest, I’m working on that with both kids (son now and daughter as soon as she’s old enough).
Oh, and saying, “You CISmale hatey hate-monger, you!” is the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. [sniff] Thanks!
@Tom: A guy who’s proven his martial arts ability in ways I hope to never experience recommends Gracie Ju-Jitsu to learn grappling and Mui Tai to learn stick fighting (which translates directly to knives).
Power yoga for overall fitness and flexibility, since strength and flexibility make for a long life. Especially when two hostile people are grabbing at the same thing when it’s ‘winner take all’. He wind sprints, because open streets are a target range.
He rides his people hard on training and conditioning. A great many of them over the years have come back to him and thanked him for being alive because of it.
Lastly, remind your kids “If you’re ever in a fair fight, you’ve screwed up big time.”
Actually, the “MMA school” I was talking about was actually Gracie BJJ that throws in some striking. They won’t take the kiddo yet. No Mu Tai schools at all in the area.
Luckily, my kiddo isn’t doing too badly. After months of harassment by another kid who thought my son was a soft mark, my son thoroughly beat the ever loving snot out of him without the little douche bag ever landing a punch.
When other kids in In-School Suspension were trying to pick on him, a group of girls who witnessed the fight told the other kids to watch it, because my son would kick their asses.
When the girls are warning others about your prowess, you have reached a certain level of bad ass I guess. 🙂
The kids have a lot to live up to. Grandpa once got in a fight with about 25 gangbangers… and was checking the newspapers for a couple weeks to see if he’d killed anyone in the process of winning the fight. Walked through NY Central Park at midnight on a dare in the 70’s. His advice was, “The fight’s not over until somebody’s on the ground and not moving.”
You don’t mess with cowboys.
Oh, I do one better. I point out that rarely in any fairy tale is the princess anything but a spoiled, over-sensitive brat. “But they’re refined” my ass… Any woman who can’t deal with a lump in her bed through more than one mattress is far too fragile to deal with reality.
True enough.
That’s the reason I married a real woman, and no fairy tale princess. Even if they existed, I’d have had to pass. Way too much drama for me. 🙂
I want a fantasy princess who kicks ass and takes names… kind of like Julie. A real man likes a woman who can take care of business and still act like a lady.
Viking maiden princesses for all! 😛
Mmmmmmm…..Viking maidens. 😀
How about a fairy princess who uses a grenade launcher to take out an ogre?
Sounds like my mom. When I was in school, I used to tell guys, “My mom can beat up your dad.”
You weren’t slandered… In print it’s “libel”.
Trouble is, this isn’t actually going to hurt Larry’s reputation. At least, not with anybody that matters. His bottom line will likely see some upward movement from all the free publicity. Speaking of which, Larry, got any openings for junior hate-masters?
I think that would make you a “hate apprentice”. A hateprentice?
To learn at the feet of the master? Don’t really care what the label is. Labels are for lefties, anyway . . .
There are always two — the Master and his apprentice.
I look forward to that epsiode of Top Gear. I am sure Clarkson would be up for it.
Larry,
You should abuse the British Justice System the same way that everyone else has. Britain has some very plaintiff friendly libel and slander laws that have led to some interesting tourist attractions. (see link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism
You have already made the libprogs cry, now do what they claim you do when you write bestselling novels that push them out of the market, and take their money.
That might cost Damian his job… But then again I’d be surprised if they actually paid him. 😀
And we would hate to burden the tax payers of Britain anymore than he already has.
Hmm reading the comments I noticed that apparently Tom Kratman offended their community standards.
I’m shocked, shocked I say by this totally unexpected outcome…. 🙂
Knowing Tom, he probably did it while being very polite too. 🙂
I just spent about an hour and a half reading all the different ins and outs of this issue (via Correia’s links). It was entertaining… and long. I can see both point of views, but can’t help agreeing with the International Lord of Hate’s perspective—must be because there’s more legitimate reasoning involved on his part.
Woah. Larry, you take the phrase “Fire for effect!” to a whole new level.
And I’m shamelessly stealing that libprog quote for my WTA signature. With proper accreditation, of course.
On behalf of my country, I would like to apologise for The Guardian.
Apology accepted. I know some perfectly conservative Brits that I think would have made excellent and commendable American Patriots had they been born here.
You conservative Brits are some of the most excellent of people :).
I’ll forgive Britain a lot just for samizdata.net.
Not necessary, brother. We have our own fools too.
Larry, let me know when you start recruiting evil minion non-coms.
“Earth going full Sparta” do you mean the planet going completely militaristic with small boys being taken from thier families and being raised in barracks enduring harsh training and gay sexual antics with their instructors and fellow trainees until they reach the age where they are taken and married to a woman whom they have never met and told to reproduce for the glory of Sparta because if they don’t the population of slaves ,none of which are black, will revolt and over throw the country? That going full Sparta?
It was the gayest culture I could come up with off the top of my head.
it was the longest sentence I could write.
Heh.
It is also a good example of why a gay culture cannot last. Even though pederasty was illegal in Sparta ( unlike the rest of Greece ), the Spartans inability to reliably breed meant that when their final showdown with their neighbor Thebes ( an ethnic Egyptian colony in Greece! ) happened, they could only muster 1000 spears.
The Thebans freed the helots after beating Sparta.
That same pederasty in the rest of Greece saw to it that Greece was full of ghost towns when the Romans invaded, and the few cities left had more statues in them than people.
( Sparta only remained free because the Romans could not bring themselves to conquer the country that produced the 300 at Thermopylae. )
Haters gonna hate. This is proven by Larry’s hateful message of, and I’m paraphrasing here, “write whatever you want as long as it doesn’t suck.” Larry, your seething hatred for sucky writing is turning off fans left and right, I’m sure. You would have such a larger fan base if you would just embrace writing that sucks and not be so hatey. Your hatefulness toward suckage totally eclipses the inclusiveness of your “write whatever you want” message, so that portion will from now on be ignored forcing me to label you as being, duh duh duuuhhhhh, exclusive.
Yes, Larry has utterly lost the oh-so-powerful niche market of “People who WANT their entertainment to suck”. {grin}
It looks like Kratman’s comments over there got censored.
What shock.
I absolutely love how Larry can take any piece of crap thrown at him and turn it to his advantage. The more hate that is spewed at him the stronger he gets, the more money he makes, and the happier his fan base is! These are the traits of a brilliant general or a genius, possibly both.
Let the naysayers attack him, it only lends him strength! He’ll just take their garbage and recycle it into something far better. Gotta love it! I wish you luck winning the Hugo sir!
Larry claims to be a literary tetsubo, but he humbly forgets to mention all the literary akido he tosses in to turn libprog attacks back on themselves ;).
Literary Corbomite?
Does this mean that all your releases through Baen will have the name “Larry F. Correia, International Lord of Hate” on the cover? Or will that be for special editions in the future?
Will you be modifying your autograph?
😀
I think we’re going to need some Official International Lord of Hate Minion Goggles ™ to wear.
Or at least a patch. I’d totally wear that.
Not just goggles – I’d recommend almost anything, but I’m partial to the Eye Safety Systems brand – but I’m hoping for the O.K. for minion NCOs to privately purchase Saiga automatic shotguns with mounted 40mm grenade launchers.
Or, would that be considered a tad excessive? 😀
Will we see a licensed Hate Minion edition snow cutter, a la the Harley Davidson F-150’s?
Larry needs to get the badge and coin made out of International Lord of Hate ™ made ASAP. And you better register the trademark now.
I was just suggesting to A Lee Martinez that he should do a few Merchandizing items as It seems to do pretty good for Mr Corriea and for Howard Taylor
For the record, if he does this I will cheerfully give him more of my money for it.
I WANT THAT on my next signed copy!!! It’ll go so well with the MHI sketch!
Just read John C. Wright’s write-up; Wow, that was the most polite verbal whuppin’ I’ve ever read. Outstanding!
I almost needed a dictionary to read that ass-whuppin’. It was wonderful and scathing and geeze I need to read it again :P.
I caught John Wright’s work of art. Yes, it was a whooping. Or, to state another way, I felt the need to lay forth about head, shoulders, buttocks, anything really in range, using my trusty walking cane.
Now, I have no idea if Mr. Wright uses a walking cane. He may want to get one. I just hope I never offend either or both of you.
I’m well into the first novella of Awake in the Night Lands. That thing is unbelievable. I will want to praise it on Amazon but don’t think I’m worthy enough.
Mr. Wright doesn’t just have a cane, he has a sword cane!
John C. Wright, was just withering.
If he were to ever have cause to say similar of me, I’d probably apologize to my family and change my name.
“Now, I have no idea if Mr. Wright uses a walking cane.”
I carry a sword cane.
Not to worry, you are worthy to praise any book you like. We authors work for you. The reader is the boss. When the Wormtongue takes tax money to pay for his unreadable manuscript, it is not we real writers he offends: it is you readers. He is usurping your sovereign authority.
You, sir, are a badass and a wordsmith.
Carry on :D.
Damien Walter: anti-Lusophone, anti-Latino, anti-cis-people, International Lordette of Love. Probably doesn’t like cis-Fado or cis-Samba. Typical Portuguese-hater.
Walter’s in Chiang Mai now. I was there once. It was common for “things” with pancake batter on their faces to come up to me and my buddy at night and say “Me half boy half girl [redacted]”
To wit, I respond, “Cis-wtf?” 😀
I thought it was kind of funny that if you go down through the comments,one person actually makes a similar argument to your rebuttal, including citing the internet arguing, quoting some of the same parts of the article, and pointing out the counter-fisking. The authors response?
“Counter-fisking? Hmmm…. sounds kinky.”
And yet the core of his argument is based off of an article by Jim C Hines. An article that is by definition a counter-fisking.
Incidentally, if you hear a loud whistling noise in the air, don’t be alarmed; it’s not an IDF, it’s the sound of irony going over the author’s head. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he actually had a counter-point. He doesn’t. At this point, I’m pretty sure he’s ducked into his government funded flat/foxhole sipping tea in a state of shell shock and contemplating the maelstrom he’s unleashed upon the world.
Of course I used Larry’s checklist when responding to something purporting to be a response to Larry’s work.
Now we ought to see whether journalistic practice at al-Ghardian is to allow a rebuttal, and make them host a copy of this post. 👿
(Wrong smiley; that should have been 😈 .)
An excellent example of your premise is the book Outies. It was written by the daughter of Jerry Pournelle, and is the third book in a very solid SF series, but the book itself is awful because it pushes a message over all else.
Thank you for saying this — I thought it was just me!
“Yes, I’m sure in the future the Space Caliphate is just going to love it some gay folks.”
Space Caliphate. Is that where they launch 3 rockets, photoshop in 30 or 40 more, yet none of them make it to orbit?
Go to liveleak and search “gay hanging”
The executed homosexuals swinging from industrial cranes aren’t photoshopped.
Before we get to interplanetary or interstellar colonization in any significant form, the ships will be standard production items, easily built by almost any nation that wants to, and available for “cash and carry” by any that doesn’t want to bother with the shipyard infrastructure.
Sure, Muslim nations -currently- cannot produce high tech missiles and fourth generation fighters from scratch. But, to use the example of Iran, produce viable military aircraft in-country. Sure, it’s not NATO first tier stuff, but it’s serviceable.
For certain, Muslim dictatorial theocracies will have an easier time _filling_ the colonization ships, and certainly will have at least competitive birth rates. . .
Geodkyt,
For a possible view of that universe, read “A Desert Called Peace” by Tom Kratman. It is for sale by Baen Books, or available in their free library.
I generally approve of Carerra’s way of handling the muslims terrorists in the first two novels :D.
Didn’t Lois McMaster Bujold write a novel based on the premise of a planet without women. I don’t remember the title. It came out about the same time as Warrior’s Apprentice. As I recall it was about a man’s interaction when he had to go out into the two sex world.
Wish I remember the title.
Ethan of Athos.
Vox Day took a swipe at Damien as well a couple of days ago:
“And that is what fundamentally separates Pink SF/F from Blue SF/F. We tell stories to entertain the reader and make him think. They print propaganda to lecture the reader and stop him from thinking. We ask ‘what if?’ They assert ‘it will be so!'”
And it just infuriates the Damiens of the world that we’re too busy reading Correia (and Weber, and Kratman, and Hoyt, and Williamson, etc.) to even notice them, much less pay attention to their arguments. Which, I suspect, is one reason they keep picking these ridiculous Internet slap-fights.
(Hmmm. “Larry Correia, Official Magnet for International Leftist Douchebags…?” No, perhaps not.)
As for John C. Wright’s observation on what kind of “writer” would be taking a government subsidy to practice his craft, well, Soviet fiction was just full of such people; I had to suffer through quite a bit of that crap in college literature courses.
IMHO, it’s no coincidence that Damien is writing for the Guardian… 😉
I have followed the complaints of people like Damian and I keep wondering who is listening? I know more than a few people that I would consider very liberal and a fair number read Sci-Fi/Fanstasy. We often trade books and read many of the same authors. I find it difficult to believe that most of the book buying public envisions the same thing as Damian.
I am hardly the first to note this, but one of the many annoying things about people like Mr. Walter is their lack of knowledge of the field about which they pontificate.
He’s talking about “gender fluidity” in science fiction, yet he never seems to have read the late Jack Chalker, who appears to have been obsessed with the idea, to the point where certain of his novels read less like a story in the conventional sense and more like a guided tour of his sexual fetishes and fantasies.
Not that anything’s wrong with that, of course, if that is what the reader is looking for. I wasn’t, so of course his work didn’t do much for me.
Nonetheless, Mr. Walter’s ignorance is showing.
heh. That’s why I bailed out on the Well of Souls series. . .
I figured he was talking the Flux and Anchor series.
But yeah, transformations, including Gender, are a constant theme in his work.
Oh, good, glad I’m not the only one who bailed on that.
I recall enjoying Four Lords of the Diamond, but read them decades ago, when I was a teenager. Never tried anything else by him.
Oddly enough, this week’s installment of “Does Not Play Well With Others” was about a fun way with dealing with projectionists who claim you are the aggressor against them.
http://www.doesnotplaywellwithothers.com/
I laughed
CombatMissionary,
WW was a child actor who played the most obnoxious character in Trek.
He was basically destined to be warped with liberal thoughts. 😉
Touche. Touche. Alas, the poor boy was typecast from the womb.
I feel his pain. I’ve been typecast as a drunk conservative a-hole.
(Excuse me while I hit “replay” on Casablanca)
If I watch the earlier TNG episodes I find him horribly annoying, but *at the time* they first aired I liked the character a whole lot… mostly because he was geeky and super smart and wanted so very much to be just like his dad.
Bwahahahaha!!! They never learn do they. Despite the fact that they keep passing the argument torch on to new people, they seem to be getting worse and worse, not better and better.
Also none of them seem to be able to actually hold up a real argument. if they were in a situation where they had to put up a reasonable argument or else be killed they would be dead in no time.
I hope you make it onto top gear Larry. That would be awesome.
One goal of common core is apparently to teach children how to build an argument, so maybe they’ll eventually get better. Kind-of doubt it, though. Hard to argue reasonably when you don’t have facts to back you up.
“In the future, everyone will be offended for fifteen minutes.”
That was a very hateful post Larry. You’re a racist hatey hate monger, cismale gender normative fascist, white supremacist who’s not a real author.
And I don’t like the tone you’re using!
Well done as always Larry… LOL
Larry,
You’re pining for some right hand drive piece of British econobox shit on their tiny track? Seriously?
You live next to Miller Motorsports Park. They sell high performance driving lessons, in real high performance cars. On the best autocross track in the country. Their driving schools are certainly in your price range.
Give them a call, and when you get to Top Gear, you might score well enough to get your name near the top of the board, with all the free advertising that will entail.
Or take an Offensive driving school. They exist, and when the lefty zombies take over, you might be able to get away. Or save your own (and kids’) skin on some winter night of icy panic.
As far as Geenius Boy’s use of the name of Iain M. Banks to conjure with…
First, I don’t think ANYBODY read Banks because of ‘gender roles’. They read him beacuse he could flat-out write.
Second, in the “queer-positive” Culture that Banks was basing his stories in, human gender didn’t matter… because humans didn’t matter. The Culture was controlled by AI’s and they were about as interested in the freedoms and opinions of the humans involved as I am in consulting with the spiders in my crawlspace. Humanity could lose itself in hedonsim because nothing of significance was being asked of it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Damien thought the sacrifice was worth it.
Someone pointed out that the Minds in the Culture were a stand-in for Banks and his fellow Euro-lefties – just put the proper Top Men in charge and socialism works! (still enjoy the hell out his writing, though).
That’s a dystopia I could easily do without
Love it.
This, and the column on John Wright’s blog, is like watching artillery and snipers take out a position. Massive fire for effect, followed by pinpoint strikes to take out any survivors.
Just wow.
If only it was a live fire exercise…
If it were a live fire exercise, these Guardian types would quickly sneeze and blow their own brains out.
Only International? Why not Galactic or similar? ;-D
How about INTERGALACTIC Hatemaster?
But then Larry would have to go through the enormous expense of reprinting the business cards. /sarc
OR Larry could hand out the “old” business cards as limited edition hatemaster cards?
I was thinking Interstellar or Multiverse…let’s not limit the HATE
The Hatemaster… is he related to the Shockmaster?
Overall, a fine response to a silly article.
Larry, you are a *real* writer because you write stuff that is worth reading. I just learned about you and was pleased to nominate Warbound for a Hugo. Your ability to manipulate Amazon sales rankings on behalf of your friends make you a *real* promoter, a separate and often valuable skill.
I doubt that The Guardian is very interested in who wins Hugo awards. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t aware of their existence.
Sadly, you aren’t sufficiently famous in Britain to drive the reasonably priced car; so why not skip that part and invite Jeremy for a TPing?
Messages in fiction is like feces in filets mignon: no matter how prime a cut of meat, how great the chef, or how skillfully prepared, it’s still a piece of meat with shit on top.
Keep your dirty, dirty politics out of my entertainment, because I don’t need your shit.
Persecution complex fed, lol. Does anyone care that some dick wrote this that limp-dicked article in The Gaurdian? Larry I like your books but this is pretty sad, quoted half sentences followed by paragraphs of conservative catch words. Presenting a counter argument just kind of makes you look retarded when it is so self-explanatory.
I like the simplistic fantasy environments your politics lead to with clear right and wrong, a 90’s understanding of race (captain planet style, token characters of each race at least in MH), and ridiculously overachieving characters. When you start spouting it outside of a fantasy context it make you look fairly ignorant about politics. Anyone who has followed politics for any length of time has to realize that the idea of two sides or one that is ‘right’ is ridiculous. Politics is just bullshit oversimplifications of complex issues for chumps to eat up.
I guess I will finish up with a Correia style rebuttal.
“Holy shit. As an actual novelist, that’s funny. And I thought my government was stupid.”
Get out your sweater vest, chalkboard and glasses so you can college education here Glenn Beck. ‘The Government’ should be treated as a single entity and rather than deal with complex issues we should just simplify everything so that it doesn’t work equally. I guess our government is nearly as retarded because they subsidize the college education necessary for many authors. This guy calling someone else a pussy when he dedicates a whole blog post to his hurt feelings from some random dude in another country. I am glad you came out guns blazing to own a guy complaining about how fiction wasn’t gay or accurate enough.
Larry I like your stuff but as a conservative author, I wish you were a little less conservative and a little more author. Thanks, MORE BOOKS!
Good old #7. Nice try, noble Concern Troll. 🙂
Amusing how defending yourself from libel is “feeding” a “persecution complex” or whatever.
Silly conservative deathbeast, you’re not supposed to respond to a pack of lies. Why, that makes it more difficult for the meme to spread. All that “uh, that’s not what I said” makes all that Guardian drone’s hard work more difficult. Sheesh.
;-D
Remember, Patrick, we are simply to serve as targets for the left. We’re not actually supposed to fight back or anything.
I mean, people might actually find out that we’re not racists, we don’t hate women, and we believe all humans are capable creatures who don’t need government in every aspect of our lives.
I was about to say, Larry, “Concern troll much?”
I am noble, thank you *bows*. I guess liking your books and thinking you are politically a retard does kind of lead to a watered down response.
Points without consideration for the author:
1) You kicked the shit out of a dead and buried horse with this article about fantasy not being gay and accurate enough.
2) You called the guy writing it a pussy, which is way too flattering.
3) You assassinate the fuck out of this guy’s character including random gossip (maturity +1) and then go on to complain about how he misrepresented you. Points for use of the word shrill a.k.a. annoyingly female a.k.a. gay.
4) You bitched about him misrepresenting you while quoting him in sentence fragments.
5) You are politically ignorant. You use political catchphrases as a substitute for complex understanding (still doesn’t quite surpass the shear oversimplification stupidity of the 99%), treat ‘the government’ as a single entity, and act the conservative martyr when you encounter arguments this ridiculous.
6) You mistook me for a concern troll. A concern troll pretends you have a point or an argument while your methods are the problem. I agree with your methods but I don’t think you have a point or argument and therefore think you look retarded. I guess you could think I am concerned with your overall method of arguing with other retards but I don’t really give a damn what you do I was just saying when you prop up softball arguments as serious ones you seem pretty dumb.
6) I am hoping to have this summary of points I made to stick it to you last longer than my actual first response, that will show real communication ability.
TROLL: I am writing a book called ‘Monster Hunter National’ it is about an organization that is constantly involved in international business. The government is the reason the company ‘Monster Hunter National’ is in business but instead of realizing that we are completely reliant on government funding and attempting to establish an independent but profitable relationship we pretend that the government is our incompetent enemy. Now the cast alright the main character has to be a badass so lets make him a super overachiever with no real flaws. Ah I guess we can make him big and ugly or something, big is still badass. Even then though there is usually some sort of training phase where a hero has to work to gain his skill. Screw that, lets deus ex machina this bitch with a destiny. His father dreamed it or some bullshit. Wait now we need sidekicks, *spin race wheel*, black guy. Alright like all black guys lets make him athletic but to show we are enlightened and not just stereotyping despite random inevitable references lets make him a nerd. Alright 2 more to go, lets start with female. Now combining female with another race would decrease our diversity points so might as well make her white. Where could she come from that readers could sympathize with? Ah, a stripper just working to go to school perfect. Oh and she probably has to be tough or smart or else she will be a crappy sidekick. Alright I guess we are left with one more, mexican or asian. Asian it is, it is inevitable this guy will end up doing something smart. Asians are hardworking so he at least has to try to be a regular hunter but with disaster we can stick this nerd where he belongs. The perfect cast. Sorry just too bored writing a fail sarcastic review of MH, trolling ain’t easy.
“Sorry just too bored writing a fail sarcastic review of MH,”
Freudian slip.
Intentional, try not taking life so seriously.
“Get out your sweater vest, chalkboard and glasses so you can college education here Glenn Beck.”
Am I the only one who can’t find a coherent sentence in those words?
“I guess our government is nearly as retarded because they subsidize the college education necessary for many authors.”
A college education is necessary to be an author? I thought all you needed was basic grammar skills and the ability to tell an engaging story.
At least point out the irony of talking about a college education in a non-sentence, lol.
Again, that ‘many’ seems to mean ‘all’ for some people. I guess to take it to the opposite extreme; a college education wasn’t necessary to the success of some authors?
@SlipperySnake
Well – your name befits you. No, that’s not really meant as a compliment, but more a reference to the twists and turns you take to remold the truth.
Your opening opus was full of half-truths who’s base and implicit assumptions betray far better what worldview you approach this from, and it is not the one you claimed.
I’ll take one example – your statement on how there were two sides and neither were ever going to be the truth.
I’m so glad that in all my years on this ball of rock, lava, and dihidrogen monoxide, that I never figured that out. In a universe with chaotic propagation, hidden information, and limited scopes of knowledge and processing capability, never mind a core law of physics that tells us – barring a complete rethinking of how the universe works – that we never CAN know everything and have to go on incomplete knowledge, and no one answer can fit all circumstances, that somehow no-one in a two sided argument would be perfectly in accordance with truth and fact.
The problem is that in staring so long and hard at this particular tree – one our progressive friends love to dredge up and beat people with, you miss the forest.
Both sides can indeed be grossly wrong. OTOH, more usually, one side or the other is far more approximately closer to being correct. Often enough, they may be as close as realistically possible, given people, exceptions, etc. To borrow from Neal Stephenson, but we are made up of those who – by luck or deliberate choice – managed to at least avoid making the “wrong” choices long enough to sire another generation, and have our culture survive to this day.
There are, even as difficult as it is to philosophically nail down, such things as objective truths and ideals – even abstract ones.
Those who claim otherwise come from a place where there are no truths.
And so you betray yourself.
@dgarsys
You seem to think that by me stating that political issues are complex I am saying that they are subjective. That isn’t it at all, it isn’t unknowable it is just hard.
Complex is not impossible. If you spend any amount of time just looking at local politics you will understand just how complicated it is. Then multiply this on a national scale to be condensed into two sides on every issue. You can’t tell me it isn’t absurd.
May their be a perfect balance of our freedoms and responsibilities? Possibly, but I don’t think the oversimplified and manufactured two sides has anything to do with it.
I guess I find the the use of bullshit catchphrases a particularly galling example of how far this oversimplification can go.
@Slippery Snake
I am so glad that you’ve pointed out to me how “complex” politics could be. In my more than twoscore years on this planet, I have never realized this.
Bravo! Bravo!
Has it occurred to you, your condescensionness, that perhaps we DO understand how complicated it is? Nah – you’re too busy telling us how stupid we are, and how we don’t understand anything, much less what you plainly said and what that necessarily implies.
If you don’t get a college education, how will you have the tools you need to ham-fistedly shove your message down the throats of all those ignorant proles who prove constantly that they don’t know what’s good for them by failing to buy your books?
[INSERT COMMENT ABOUT EATING YOUR PEAS HERE]
” I guess our government is nearly as retarded because they subsidize the college education necessary for many authors.”
College education is necessary? Oh well, then. I guess I should give up, since I skipped out on college to join the Navy and then go to work instead. Since I didn’t get that college education, clearly I don’t get to be a writer.
Oh, wait, I just realized something. I don’t give a flying fuck what this douchenozzle thinks, since clearly he’s a complete and total moron. I feel much better now.
Yup, I claimed to be the arbiter of whether people could be writers or not. Also when I said “many writers” I meant ‘all writers’ so thanks for putting that into a context that fits with your bullshit.
As opposed to the stream of bullshit you spewed?
Honestly, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt as it was. If you’re going to pitch a bitch fit about that, then you’re about as useful as used toilet paper.
Tom – here he’s flat out denying the plain meaning of what was said. And then twisted it around. So our resident jailhouse lawyer and goalpost mover focused on the difference between many and all when you are plainly disputing that college be considered “necessary” at all.
He also repeatedly confuses “complex” with “more advanced”. And is still unwise enough to talk about “oversimplified” in matters where he doesn’t understand decision scoping.
Of course.
What he doesn’t get is that college screws up as many, if not more writers every year as it helps. The truth is, many writers (maybe even most) learn how to write through discussion, trial and error, and workshops that exist outside of college.
There are a lot of MFA graduates who have never sold a single story, after all. Meanwhile, there are guys like Larry, John Ringo, Michael Z. Williamson, and Sarah Hoyt, just to name a couple, who honed their craft well outside of the walls of college.
Of course, with a name like “SlipperySnake”, what did we expect?
I have an architect client who – if it weren’t for the degree requirements to get an Architects license above and beyond proven journeyman time and passing cert tests – absolutely loves his HS interns and would rather hire them and train them to standard than hire college graduates.
Why?
He has to untrain the college grads.
I’m not surprised. What’s amusing is that Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of all time, would even be able to work today with the rules the way they are.
He apprenticed.
That got me thinking about the time my doctor sent me to a sports medicine clinic because of back problems. Every time I went over there they would have these high school girl interns giving me back massages. [CLOSES EYES, GRITS TEETH] “I’M A MARRIED SPUD, I’M A MARRIED SPUD!”
Lol, so apparently none of you have a college education and you are proud of it. This reverence for ignorance is hilarious, yup college is brainwashing everyone. Pursuing your education to make more money means that whenever you argue with someone you are the arrogant one talking down to them. I mean after all Jesus didn’t have a college education and he turned out alright. I mean lets just ignore that stats and bring of examples of guys we know for the ‘truth’.
Fuck, I could even agree with your crazy idea that college screws up more writers than it helps and my point would still stand. For many authors it was necessary and so what if for many it wasn’t. I guess I could present a list myself but it seems a little silly when you guys are so determined to misinterpret my words.
Did you eat paint chips as a child? Seriously?
Who the fuck said shit about ignorance being revered? Oh wait, the same fuck who can’t communicate a coherent thought if his life was on the line.
Lol, so apparently none of you have a college education and you are proud of it. This reverence for ignorance is hilarious, yup college is brainwashing everyone
Son – your willingness to misstate and misunderstand is worthy of your chosen name. You lack the moral courage to stake out your territory, metaphorical, intellectual, and I suspect literal, and defend it.
I’ve forgotten more languages than the several I speak, and my careers, plural, have included nuclear steam plant mechanic (and submariner), Quality Assurance, HVAC repair, Programming, Manufacturing systems analysis, network engineering, and computer systems administration.
I also literally have a larger library than a couple of the local schools. That doesn’t include the books I’ve thrown out over the years in repeated moves. Half of it is technical or historical.
You’ll find that “willfully ignorant” describes very few people around here – you’ll have more luck looking in a mirror.
You might also want to consider the reading level of many people entering college these days, vs what used to be considered normal high, and even middle school reading.
Your ongoing posts are shrill bleatings from someone too willfully ignorant to acknowledge that “going to college” is NOT the same thing as “being educated” – it is but one possible path, and one that carries with it its own blinkers if not leavened by experience. Again – learn some history. There’s these things called facts. And philosophy. They may surprise you.
Finally – your overbearing condescension is insulting. You owe an apology.
“Lol, so apparently none of you have a college education and you are proud of it. This reverence for ignorance is hilarious, yup college is brainwashing everyone.”
That would be funnier if college -wasn’t- mostly brainwashing.
I have two degrees, a BA in Anthropology earned in the 1970’s and an MSc in Physical Therapy earned in the 1990’s. The difference in quality and direction of the instruction in those twenty years was shocking. The difference between the 90’s and now is even more shocking.
Please show me an English or History course at any large main-line American university that is not taught from a Leftist political slant. Or even a tenured English or History prof who openly votes Republican. If you can find -any- in the whole country there will not be more than you can count on your fingers.
If a person wants to pursue an education in anything other than Post Modern Marxist bullroar, they have to do it outside the university system. Your assertion that not going to college equals ignorance is evidence of a very small and elitist mind. It is also hilarious. I loaghed out loud.
In conclusion, I must say that your writing is very nearly incomprehensible and your argument is abysmally stupid. If I may suggest a remedy, you might try looking at facts more and try being a little less hipster. Its not working for you.
Douche nozzle there never figured out that college not only doesn’t necessarily prevent one from being ignorant, but it’s also not the only way to educate yourself.
He’d much rather pontificate on stuff he doesn’t really even understand and articulate it in a way that is incomprehensible to the vast majority of the English speaking world, and then act like it’s our fault for not reading his mind. Never mind that to read his mind would require us to read nothing but small print.
StupidSnake’s problem is he isn’t even trying to make an argument. “You guys are all repeating talk radio talking points! I win!” He thinks college is the only way to smarts, that anyone who demands that a professor be competent is a moron, and that those who recognize the legitimate limitations of college are just obnoxious.
If I had the time, I could tell the story of how I got a Marxist professor fired for being incompetent. I got another professor disciplined for discriminating against military class members, and I personally thwarted the indoctrination efforts of a third on an entire class. I’m a veteran of two branches of the military, spent some time in law enforcement, have worked in a handful of other industries from retail to an airline, and I usually DO know more about a lot of things than most of my professors. And if he thinks demanding competence out of professors is stupid, then he’s a prime example of the adage that Americans want their money’s worth out of everything they pay for except education.
Tom said: “Douche nozzle there never figured out that college not only doesn’t necessarily prevent one from being ignorant, but it’s also not the only way to educate yourself.”
I might go so far as to say he hasn’t been out in The World yet, so he doesn’t know how worthless his “education” is yet. When one pursues a professional degree, contact with Real World professional practices is often a shock.
I was lucky, I started my MSc as a 40 year old man with a wealth of experience in PT and a lot of other things. I made myself most unpopular by laughing out loud in the back of lecture after lecture.
The really fun part was what followed when the instructor indignantly demanded to know what was so funny. Because then I’d tell them.
I seem to recall that Larry, our esteemed host, made reference to similar things as an accountant once upon a time. You go to school for four years to learn how to be an accountant, and then when you go to work, you have to really learn how to be an accountant.
It’s not that I’m down on college, because I’m not. I’m down on “education” that is essentially a waste of time and money because they don’t give a student anything useful for the real world. Wasting four years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars for a degree that just gets you in the door so you can then be taught how to do things correctly just boggles my mind.
Teach it right, or push for OJT or apprenticing as the way to learn that skill. What the hell is so difficult about that?
People who didn’t go to college have such a chip on their shoulder about it and apparently tend to think that everyone who did thinks it makes them superior. You guys continue to put words in my mouth so that now apparently I am saying you are uneducated if you didn’t go to college.
What I am saying is that this idea about brainwashing and Marxism (lol, over dramatic much) is just silly. I have no idea what other people may have experienced but mostly my teachers just taught. Conservatives are so obsessed about how history is taught but don’t seem to realize that the majority of people going to college don’t give a shit about history. Most of us were doing it to get an actual job afterwards. All those leftist engineers and chemists though must have really got to us. Damn liberal engineering.
Statistics say that you are likely to make more money if you have more degrees. The point of college isn’t to prepare you for the real world and employers don’t expect graduates to come out ready for their chosen job after a bachelors degree. It is about the perseverance to get the sheepskin and getting a general education. Are there other methods of education? Sure. Does what you most of what you learn have jack shit to do with what you will end up doing at the bachelor level? Fuck no.
Finally you call me overbearing and insulting. I accept the insulting part but what I find offensive is people shitting on something they know nothing about. I mean if it makes you feel better you can go on thinking that by not going to college you dodged the brain-washing bullet. The problem with ‘pursuing your education elsewhere’ is that it either means learning a trade or trying to rediscover the wheel by yourself. It is great that you are well read but colleges exist for a reason (mostly to steal your soul and spend it on football).
Actually, no one was shitting on something they knew nothing about. Your assumption is that we know nothing about college.
Kind of like a lot of other assumptions you’ve made that were absolute bullshit.
Oh, and those of us who don’t have a degree don’t think we’re better than people who have one. We think we’re better than overbearing jackasses who think they know it all when it’s clear they don’t know a damn thing about life. There in lies the difference.
@Tom
Since we’re talking about assumptions, a cartoon ironically fitting to our condescending friend…
https://xkcd.com/1339/
And unlike him, when Charles Dodgson wrote nonsense, it was Entertaining nonsense.
….sadly this Jabberwock does not appear to have a head to go galumphing back with….
Honestly, he’s needlessly slaughtering innocent electrons with his incoherent ramblings and yet he continues with his condescending bullshit.
It would be entertaining if he wasn’t so damn boring. Thus, he’s committed the sole unforgivable sin here at Larry’s blog.
StupidSnake said: “You guys continue to put words in my mouth so that now apparently I am saying you are uneducated if you didn’t go to college.”
That is what you said. I quote:
“Lol, so apparently none of you have a college education and you are proud of it. This reverence for ignorance is hilarious, yup college is brainwashing everyone.”
Nobody’s putting words in your mouth. You’re denying you said what you said. Evidently your major is political science.
You said this too: “what I find offensive is people shitting on something they know nothing about.”
Untrue. I know all about it. I’m shitting on you because you are seriously in need of being shit on. In a bar I’d pour your beer on you right now.
In conclusion, if you want to pretend you didn’t say what you clearly said, you should be doing so in a forum that doesn’t faithfully store your words for all to see, permanently.
You’re not slippery. You’re stupid. Your new name forever more is StupidSnake.
Phantom,
His complete and total lack of communication skills clearly makes him exempt from actually being held accountable for his comments.
Of course, after his incoherent diatribes polluting this thread over and over, he starts calling other people idiots. Seriously, it’s freaking hysterical.
He’s the type of troll who says anything he thinks will get a rise out of people.
To wit: StupidSnake said “Why the hell am I explaining this to people who jump at any chance to show they are educated despite not going to college?”
To be annoying, obviously. Fail.
I should know. I’m educated in spite of going to college.
StupidSnake by contrast can’t carry the thread of an argument even though its all printed out there in front of him (or, outside chance, her.) Perfect gender studies undergrad.
He misses that he’s the one who brought up college as somehow essential to the development of any number of writers (though I can’t think of a single one who has accomplished anything that couldn’t have done the same without college), yet when people slap him down over his assertion, he gets all bent out of shape.
Yeah, plenty of us educated ourselves outside of college. We’re proud of that. Why? Because self directed study where no grade is at stake requires more self motivation than doing something as part of checking off a block toward graduation.
That’s not knocking college, in part because it’s just different. There are obstacles in learning on your own (mostly that there aren’t any professors to help you correct mistakes in understanding of various subjects), so it’s not all peaches and cream. However, you bet your ass we’re proud of it. Why wouldn’t we be?
Of course, I’m a complete idiot. At least I can use basic punctuatation properly and make a coherent argument. If I’m able to do that and be a complete idiot, then what does that say about someone like him who is unable to do either?
@Tom
I didn’t assume you knew nothing about college, it is obvious by how big of a fucking idiot you are. After I first corrected your bullshit assumptions you have gone on to keep posting random limp-dicked ‘proof’ of your ‘truth’. Yeah Bill Gates didn’t go to college either dumbass and not everyone who graduates is a instant success, woah college isn’t foolproof tell me more. I mean if pointing out someone is stupid is condescending then guilty as charged. Keep pretending you know anything about ‘life’ as you do what all the rest of us do, the best with what we got.
@dgarsys
People who don’t agree with you are condescending, got it. Tell me again how many books you have, lol. We can keep pretending this didn’t all start with a misunderstanding of the words ‘many’ and ‘necessary’. It seems pretty condescending to take every word to its most strict meaning. I mean are you guys are still seriously saying that college wasn’t key to the success of several authors. I mean you can play word games all you want and pretend I was making some definitive pronouncement if it suits you I guess. If your point was that not all people need to go to college to be writers then what the fuck are we arguing about. I am just saying that quite a few people used college to become good writers. Ah, whatever. Why the hell am I explaining this to people who jump at any chance to show they are educated despite not going to college?
Oh you silly little moron. You just keep digging that hole deeper, don’t you?
You continue to contradict yourself over and over, yet I’m the idiot. Sure. Whatever help you sleep at night when Mommy won’t read you another bedtime story and the teddy bear ain’t cutting it.
@ the phantom
Thanks for the rechristening and nice Athrolology degree dumbass. Talk about majors, you might as well have majored in bullshit. Also it is good to know that dickholes like you think that because they have paid for classes they deserve to be disruptive in them and laugh in the back. How old are you? You seem very mature disrupting a class for other people because you disagree with the professor. I mean leaving, dropping the class, or speaking to the professor afterward would just be way too adult. Talk about never being in the real world, if what you learned was that paying money means you are entitled to be a douchebag, I am just glad I am not in the same field as you.
See in the real world you don’t just get to speak your mind and waste everyone’s time. I don’t know how you do it with work presentations but you don’t seem very professional for all your experience. Usually older students I met coming back to school were professional and goal-oriented, most seemed to realize that it was a component of their career. I hope really hope you were exaggerating.
Oh look, stupidsnake finally realized I was kicking his ass here.
Stupidsnake said: “See in the real world you don’t just get to speak your mind and waste everyone’s time.”
Oh, you mean the way you are here, right now?
Stupidsnake then said: “Also it is good to know that dickholes like you think that because they have paid for classes they deserve to be disruptive in them and laugh in the back. How old are you?”
I’m fucking -ancient-, kid. I’m so old that I’m no longer impressed by credentials and titles. In fact, I’m SO old that I require guys who stand up at the front of the room and take my money actually know their shit.
One of the things you’re going to learn when you finally get out in the world, stupidsnake, is that there are people like me who just won’t let you slide on your bullshit. If you are up at the front of the class and say for example “gender is a social construct” then the huge, evil looking old Scotsman at the back of the class (me), who paid a bunch of money to take that class, is going to laugh.
If you’re fool enough to get all shirty about it, he’s liable to give you the benefit of his extensive reading on the biological basis of gender in everything from ants to chimps, and then start in on the anthropological record of cross-cultural gender customs. You’re not going to come out of it looking good.
See, I’m a -customer- at school. I’m not some schmoe who has to sit there and take any stupidity that gets served up and say thanks. Sit in on a medical school continuing education thing some day. The doctors commonly heckle the presenter when he screws up. Sometimes they yell. I’ve seen guys throw stuff. Because they don’t have any reason not to. They’re fucking doctors already, they should put up with stupid in a course they paid for?
You are a kid. You are arguing with people -way- out of your weight class here, and it shows. Maybe you should ease off with the hipster bullshit and you might learn something.
@ the phantom
Ah, the fucking self righteous customer defense. Just like buying a drink at a bar doesn’t entitle you to be an asshole to other patrons, paying to attend the class doesn’t entitle you to disrupt the class. It isn’t about title or authority it just common courtesy. Lot of self-entitlement for someone who claims to know the ‘real world’.
“Sit in on a medical school continuing education thing some day. The doctors commonly heckle the presenter when he screws up.”
Lol, this is starting to sound a lot like community college in some backwater. I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone who has spent enough years in school to become a doctor still has no idea how to act like a student.
People like me deal with people like you all the time in the ‘real world’, you are called entitled assholes. Luckily I don’t work in an industry that deals with customers so over time you guys tend to get weeded out because people don’t tend to forget you being an asshole to them.
I mean personally I have found that being a confrontational douche isn’t a very effective life strategy. Where on the internet I don’t give a shit what people think of me in real life it tends to matter quite a bit more. I guess you are ancient and you already know it all though so maybe in another 30 years my job may be in the ‘real world’.
Poor old Stupidsnake just ran out of argument, all that’s left is to pound the table and say bad words. Must have hit a nerve. Owie.
Stupidsnake said: “People like me deal with people like you all the time in the ‘real world’, you are called entitled assholes.”
So, you work the drive through window, eh? I figured.
Using small words so you’ll understand, buying a drink at the bar entitles me to a drink. If they’ve watered the Lagavulin, I laugh at the bartender and demand a refill of what I paid for. If its not forthcoming I tell the rest of the bar they water the scotch.
Predictably the bartender/prof gets upset at being caught out. Too bad so sad, next time they do their damn homework.
The backwoods medical school is in White Plains New York. Don’t try to run a snowjob on a Scarsdale doctor, you want my advice. In -actual- backwoods towns the doctors are polite to your face, but weeks later your head falls off because they cut your throat when you weren’t looking. Backwoods small-towners play the long game. They have time.
Then stupidsnake said: “I mean personally I have found that being a confrontational douche isn’t a very effective life strategy.”
Yes, its not working well for you here, is it? See, your problem is you’re doing it wrong. If you want to get up in somebody’s face and demand excellence out of them, you have to know what you’re talking about. I do. Tom Kratman does. Larry Coreia does. You don’t. You don’t have a clue.
What you do have is an unjustified level of self esteem and an attitude of entitlement that fairly screams East Coast Undergrad Artsie. If that’s so I hope your parents didn’t go into hawk for your school bills, because the job you get when you finally graduate will be at Starbucks.
The trouble with snot-nosed little hipsters like yourself and the cause of this entire thread, Mr. Damien “Dumbstick” Walter, is that you children really, really believe that guys like me, Tom, Larry, John Wright and everybody else here are a bunch of ignorant, bigoted know-nothings who only disagree with your noble selves because we are stupid. If only we had your education, we’d all shut up and agree that guns are bad, global warming is real, and gender is a social construct.
Because your stuck-up elitist pride can’t admit that one of us deniers might have studied all that book larnin’, and holy crap might have a legitimate argument! That can’t be! So instead you close ranks and do war on our reputations with propaganda. Which is what that Guardian article was, pure propaganda with zero useful content.
Then we kick your narrow asses in the comments. Because you don’t actually -know- anything, you make an easy target.
I suggest you give up this Ivory Tower crap, you suck at it. Take up welding. Keystone pipeline is going to need welders, good pay. You’ll have to learn to shut up though, or one of the roughnecks will bust your head. He will probably have an MSc in metalurgy as well as the build of a mastadon, and he won’t take your sass. Like me, just younger.
@ The Phantom
Are you semi-retarded or slightly senile? You continue to pretend that I am a ‘kid’ and a hipster, lol. Shit man you have issues, you even have to invent a fake life for me. I guess being 35 and working at Monsanto is similar to a drive through but not really. You are either are a super weird troll, have some sort of weird mental problem, or are genuinely one of the most ridiculous people I have ever talked to. Whatever the case, I am done. Pretend you kicked my ass and scared me off or whatever. If that isn’t good enough you can invent a few things for me to say as a teenage hipster.
Rage quit. Bwaha!
As someone who is in college at the moment (and old enough to know better)… oh, and taking an English minor… I think that I would seriously tell anyone who wanted to be an author to beware. You might learn something useful while analyzing literature but the actual writing that happens and the writing, *in particular*, produced by students in the English department is enough to make a person weep.
I recall one paper I was supposed to do a peer review on and I was wondering how to diplomatically tell the guy how to improve it after he’d specifically said he wasn’t interested in sentence level feed back… and I got to the conclusion where he mentioned his “writing students” and realized that he was one of the grad students in the class teaching freshman English courses as a TA. “Appalled” is not too harsh a term.
It’s almost as though the English department teaches obfuscatory discourse *on purpose*. The discourse community you’re trained to write for is an extremely narrow element of academia which, itself, seems more interested in signaling inclusion in that community and proving intellectual acuity through verbal manipulations than anything else as pedestrian as clarity. (And this paragraph was a deliberate demonstration, so everyone can see what I’m talking about.)
My approach to “college as preparation to write fiction” is to take a science major so I have more to write *about* that I know something about. The English minor is just to have for my resume, to prove I took classes on editing and grant writing.
Kind of what I’d seen myself.
Like it or not, more writers seem to make it in writing by reading stuff the liked and learning what works and what doesn’t from that.
For instance, my best stuff is when I don’t try to make something profound, but just write a kick ass story.
“Anyone who has followed politics for any length of time has to realize that the idea of two sides or one that is ‘right’ is ridiculous.”
Sooo …. logically that means the side you are on, whatever side that may be, is not the right side. So if you are on the side that says ‘the idea that there is a right side is ridiculous’, then the side that says ‘the idea that there is a right side is ridiculous’ is wrong. Presumably, wrong on this point as on all others.
This is what we call a self-impeaching statement. If the statement is taken at face value, it means the statement is wrong.
Logic fail, did you read what I wrote. I mean this is a little silly to explain but I said that I find the idea of one or two sides to an political issue to be ridiculous. You assume I must select a side although that is the exact opposite of the point I am making. Maybe I was unclear but what I was trying to say is that political issues are more complex than most of us could ever give a shit about so pretending that they could be simplified into one or two sides for each issue is stupid.
Rewritten for clarity:
Political issues are often oversimplified and presented with sides when they are actually extremely complex issues based in an extremely complex legal structure.
One addenda, this doesn’t mean you need to be an uninformed douchebag calling himself ‘independent’ as he makes false equivalencies and pretends that all solutions should be directly between both ‘sides’.
@SlipperySnake
“Logic fail, did you read what I wrote.”
Wow, this is just sad. Did you get one of those government subsidized educations? Because if you did I want my tax dollars refunded, since you don’t seem to grasp the concept that a question even a rhetorical one should end with a question mark not a period. I’d say get grammar down first then we’ll move to irony,
You know never mind that, why don’t you save us all some time and just tell us what the title of your book is that your trying to push like the last nonsensical argumentative troll around here was doing.
Logic fail? Me? Never in my life.
I am a lawyer. Every single case I have ever encountered, read, or read about did indeed raise complex issues. And every case also had two sides: in civil cases, a plaintiff and a respondant, and in criminal cases, a prosecutor and a defense. That is two sides. The complexity of the case has nothing to do with the number of sides.
Beside, you have rewritten your sentence. Now it reads, “Political issues are often oversimplified and presented with sides when they are actually extremely complex issues based in an extremely complex legal structure.”
So, here again you commit the same logical error of not abiding my the rule you propose. Your statement, when simplified, is a simplistic way of saying “Political Issues aren’t simple.”
In reality, some are simple, and some are not. In reality, principles are simple, but care must to taken to see how they apply to a particular case.
In your case, you are not serious. You are not seriously saying that some issues are complex, because no one needs to be told that. You are ‘counting coup’ — pretending you are smarter than us, talking down to us, lecturing us on a rather obvious point, pretending you are a subtle and careful thinker, when in fact your point consists of the obvious, expressed badly.
Now, if you are tempted to answer back to me, my little noisebox, please resist the temptation. After all, as you yourself said in one of your semi-literate run-on sentences, ” Presenting a counter argument just kind of makes you look retarded when it is so self-explanatory.”
Grow a backbone, you gormless worm, and learn some humility. Children are proud. Adults are humble.
@johncwright2001
“Grow a backbone, you gormless worm, and learn some humility. Children are proud. Adults are humble.”
I am glad you are such an adult. I am flattered that you think of me as your ‘little noisebox’, but you should save the patronizing endearments for the courtroom counselor.
Thanks for telling me that complexity has nothing to do with the number of sides in a legal-system based on reducing things to two sides, fucking enlightening. Apparently what I was saying wasn’t self-explanatory because you still don’t understand it. The point is that when you spout radio show nonsense (aka buy into one side) you are showing that you don’t seem to realize it is all manufactured bullshit. Also this false equivalency between complex and simple issues is laughable. Just because there are complex issues doesn’t mean there are an equal number of simple ones, in fact I would say that most political issues are complex. I am not saying that to ‘count coup’ and tell you how you have never considered it. I am just saying to stop presenting square pegs to fit in this round hole.
It seems to me that real arrogance is insisting that the square peg fits when it is obvious you haven’t even looked at the fucking hole. I guess I could be wrong and spouting talk show nonsense isn’t a symptom of a severe lack of incredulity but I doubt it.
@Ad Astra
I guess I would be making a real ass out of myself if I had actually written a book but my shitty writing ability is confined to a comments section. I will however reveal my secret identity, Damian Microdong.
SlipperySnake, on April 18, 2014 at 9:04 pm said:
@Ad Astra
“I guess I would be making a real ass out of myself if I had actually written a book but my shitty writing ability is confined to a comments section. I will however reveal my secret identity, Damian Microdong.”
@Slippy
No you look foolish because you spout off about your vaunted college education but then make 1st grader grammar mistakes in your opening line.
Also, tokenism?
Maybe I’m just working off a bad definition, but I’ve always seen tokenism as being “the Token chick,” or “the black guy”. No defining personality, just there to fill a niche. That doesn’t really apply here. Sure you get characters with less to do, that’s part and parcel of having a huge cast. But I would argue that with MHI the cast stays consistently interesting and layered. Heck, take the villain, (or at least catalyst for the main monster) of Legion. We barely get any screen time with him, and most of that is spent as setting up the big reveal, but somehow we manage to connect to the tragedy of a man who’s lost everything in service to a nation that shunned him and a government that treated him like a criminal. And all of this from a man who, as previously noted, just sort of wonders on screen from time to time?
And keep in mind, that’s just a minor character. I defy you to pull up the main cast and tell me in what way any of them fit the role of token. Archetypes? absolutely. But to relegate them as mere stereotypes merely serves to make your “constructive criticism” all the more back-handed
I was kind of hoping to write more about this. When I am talking about have token characters I don’t inherently think it is a fault to have some diversity of perspectives. I don’t even mind the cheesiness of the athletic black that is actually a nerd or the stripper who is tough as nails and only did it to go to nursing school. I guess my problem is that is seems like Larry along with the rest of my fellow southerners is clearly beyond the overt racism phase and onto the over emphasis of race. I mean he isn’t to the point where he has to deliberately put characters in their opposite-stereotypical roles but he repeats several times that Owen is mixed race so of course it doesn’t bother him. It is just classic southern confusion about race coming from the conflict of being inherently a little racist and adamant that we aren’t.
“…being inherently a little racist and adamant that we aren’t.”
Speaking only for yourself.
“…. and adamant that we aren’t”
“…. and adamant that we aren’t”
Ah, how cute: The “I accuse you, you deny it so you’re guilty” ploy.
It’s funny how it’s people like you who see things in terms of tokens and yet it’s the other people who have a problem with racial, gender, etc.?
@patrickchester
I guess you figure recognizing stereotypes makes me a racist and if that is your definition then fine. If you want to ignore them that is fine, I don’t even think it is that big of a deal. I mean for one thing it makes it easy to imagine the characters. My point remains that many southerners think to not be racist means you include all races or ignore race completely. In another 10 years they will be to the acknowledge it when relevant and move on phase.
Hm. A mass telepath. How interesting.
Or someone projecting. Oh wait: Prog concern troll. Definitely projecting.
Also, you might want to not use “guessing” when you really mean “fabricate what the other person said”.
HTH, HAND.
IAC, straight down the line. The only one he hasn’t used yet is #8 (although to be honest I may have missed that one, since I just skimmed until I was offended).
Please note, sir, that your assumption of lack of education has been countered in a number of these posts. Obviously additional explication is going to be useless, since you’re not even reading the responses but simply regurgitating your original points.
Perhaps you even went to college, since the one thing I did learn was how to regurgitate professors opinions.
I asserted lack of education and was apparently disproved by a dude talking about how big his library was. I still do think it is a fairly ignorant attitude to treat not going to college as a badge of honor. Do I think this means that people can’t be educated in any other way? No. I do however think most people would be better educated if they went to college. You could say different strokes or whatever but I think generally it is a good place for people to explore their interests.
“Perhaps you even went to college, since the one thing I did learn was
how to regurgitate professors opinions.”
I really do think you guys have had rare experiences if this is what you learned from college. Personally I didn’t hang out with my teachers and ask their opinions about things but maybe some people did. Within classes they tended to try to do their job and stick to their subject without random opinions. I mean I guess I did take some electives where they could be multiple opinions on an issues but usually several different positions were presented.
Unless the curriculum has changed wildly since I was in school, most students spend the majority of their time pursuing their major. If this isn’t political science or philosophy then I don’t see much room for professors to do the brainwashing. I did have some limited experience from the teaching side as a teaching assistant and even at that limited level there was a level of professionalism and responsibility. It seems both naive and insulting to assume that a majority or even many professors are so unprofessional.
I have in fact read all the responses despite your assertion that I didn’t. After I corrected the first few misinterpretations I began to realize they were deliberate. Finally when The Phantom invented an entire life for me to fit into his preconceptions I then realized that he didn’t even consider anything I said, even on the most basic level. I am not opposed to hearing what other people think but I don’t really see a point in responding to some conservative talk radio screed.
Are you still here? I thought you rage quit on Friday.
That was hilarious by the way. Rage quitting trolls are almost as fun as fireworks in a plastic model.
SlipperySnake “If this isn’t political science or philosophy then I don’t see much room for professors to do the brainwashing.”
Then your eyesight is pretty damn bad. English, Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Psychology, to name a few, tend to be chock full ‘o leftist propaganda. In fact, some departments even have formal requirements that you accept leftist “social justice” ideology–no agreement, no admission (or no degree if you learn better in your four years.)
There was enough bullshit when I graduated in the late 70’s and it’s only gotten worse.
@pst314
I just deleted my whole real response after rereading yours because I realized you can’t be serious when you say this:
“In fact, some departments even have formal requirements that you accept leftist “social justice” ideology–no agreement, no admission (or no degree if you learn better in your four years.)”
So they read your minds to see if you accept ‘social justice’ then if you don’t agree you are out. This is just nonsense, any major schools in the U.S. don’t even usually have requirements to begin their coursework. I mean if your ‘beliefs’ prevent you from learning the materials then they have to draw some kind of line.
Just like you can’t have a legitimate writer that doesn’t understand grammar or a biologist that doesn’t understand evolution, you can’t have a psychologist that doesn’t understand the concept of self or whatever.
SlipperySnake “So they read your minds to see if you accept ‘social justice’ then if you don’t agree you are out.”
Uh, no. They tell you. Have you been living under a rock, that you have never seen any of the news stories about students who encountered such rules? I’ll give you one example of the rationale: Professors who insist that you cannot properly practice your profession unless you believe in “social justice”.
And don’t get me started about the various “Studies” departments.
In all fairness, I don’t know – YET – of any school that can read minds and know that – deep down – you don’t agree with the PC speak that is everywhere, especially on campuses.
That said…..
It’s like the water. It’s completely unrelated political commentary (always one-sided) thrown into a story for no good reason, or the orchestra conductor throwing in a gratuitous anti-republican comment before starting the night’s symphony. It’s entire TV series that – given they deal with violent crimes – would still have women antagonists 1/3 of the time instead of effectively never (and in the two episodes I’m aware of over several years of being exposed to it where “the woman did it” – it wasn’t ultimately her fault…).
It’s case after case in the last few years where zero tolerance idiocy and fear of inanimate objects has caused kids to be suspended for pointing fingers at each other, for bringing lego- sized plastic “weapons” to school, or chewing a pop tart in the wrong shape.
It’s College “hate speech” policies driven by the local women’s studies department (an entire department who’s assumptions are antithetical to the conservative position, and god forbid you mention that men – on average – are bigger and stronger than women. Or that perhaps women should take the same precautions for safety and situational awareness as men do towards not being mugged. The latter has repeatedly gotten me listed as a hateful victim-blamer). It’s recent incidents where a professor tore up posters and assaulted protestors on campus because she didn’t like their message or pictures – and got a slap on the wrist (guess which side was conservative). It’s a harvard president losing his job because he dared suggest that perhaps men’s IQ spread is wider (lower and higher) than women’s around the same mean….- complete with women fainting at such a shocking thought. It’s Columbia university making a bunch of books on socially aware topics required reading for students coming in – without the intellectual diversity to include other strains of thought.
It’s the willingness, after repeated racial/sexual hoaxes on campuses perpetrated by the “victims”, for many of the administrative staff who overreacted, to say “well, but this should still be an object lesson that ”
It includes college faculty of said SJ departments pushing to force inclusion of Womens/etc. studies as part of the core curriculum for all majors including engineering/etc.
So no – they can’t read your thoughts. But they sure as hell are doing everything they can to force you to swallow their point of view, and react with histrionics and hysteria if you dare say anything different.
I mean, it’s not like we live in a society where you can create a foundational technology in use by 99%+ of the web, guide and mold the development of one of the core three web browsers for decades, have no-one around who can point to you discriminating against any employee based on anything but talent, or denying any social justice group the use of what you produce, but be hounded out of a CEO position you were just selected for because you might have donated to a non-PC (but very popular) political cause.
Right?
@dgarsys
You seem to live in a completely different world because what you seem to be listing are not at all a representation of the average behavior I observe but are outliers. I mean outliers are what is reported so I could understand how you think things reported to fit a narrative might be representative but I just don’t think that is the case.
I mean a teacher just teaching organic chemistry doesn’t often end up on the news or anything. Maybe it is because some conservatives would so actively use their positions of power to spread their politics that they think that everyone does that but it just isn’t true. It is like the difference between NPR and Fox News Radio. If you think these two are equivalent representatives of either side of the spectrum you are experience the problem I am talking about. The main difference is the Fox people will force the news to fit their political narrative while NPR is just a place where liberals work to report the news. Does this influence the way NPR reports? Hell yes, but they don’t actively misrepresent or mislead their audience for political reasons.
Man, this guy is still around?
So, NPR, unbiased reporting. Fox News, evil. Got it.
Man, this one has staying power.
Serpente-El-Retardo said: “The main difference is the Fox people will force the news to fit their political narrative while NPR is just a place where liberals work to report the news.”
Hey, rage-quit boy. Did you know there is DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE at no less than the Clinton Library that 100% disproves your belief system? Turns out you have it exactly backwards, and there’s -paperwork-.
http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2014/04/clinton-fingerprints-on-media-party.html
I know it won’t change your mind, because nothing less than a near death experience is going to penetrate that much bone. But you should be aware that the rest of us know and can -prove- that you’re full of shit.
@pst314
First, I would say please realize that your news sources are not representative of an typical college experience. I am sure your are already aware of this but the news is all about outliers so if you are looking for how things work at most colleges they aren’t a very reliable source of information. They are focused on sensationalism and, depending on the source, twisting stories to fit their political narrative.
The crux of this seems to be focused around the words ‘social justice’ which to republicans demonized to the hilt and made synonymous with the worst evils of liberalism. Conservatives tend to do this all the time like when socialist equaled Marxist equaled communist equaled evil bad 50s prejudice. I mean is having a equal protection under the law ‘social justice’? I think so, all people should be equally subject to the law. Conservatives constantly redefine these words as extremes for political purposes but I encourage you to take another look.
I think we all believe there are some things we do better together and that should be done apart. The subject is often described as a right for the greater good vs. personal freedom but to me it seems more like a right for equality of opportunity vs. personal freedom. Conservatives to me seem to believe in equality of opportunity but don’t seem to have a way to establish it. Do they think it is already present? Do they think that if they remove the referee (governmental oversight) people won’t cheat?
The ‘free’ market is the usual solution but it isn’t really free or a market without rules. Conservatives always think I am condescending when I say things are complicated but I guess I just wish that they thought about things in less black and white. Grey doesn’t mean false equivalency or no right answer but it means that real politics is boring and not the kind of thing you are likely to see from the mainstream.
StultusAnguem said: ” Conservatives always think I am condescending when I say things are complicated…”
No, we think you’re a troll. A poorly educated one at that.
If this incomprehensible doodoo you’ve been wasting Larry’s bandwidth on is any indication, you should go find whoever was supposed to be teaching you English composition and beat them soft.
Because boy, you wuz robbed.
This is me sitting at the back of the classroom, laughing so hard I’m falling off my chair. Bwaha!
Larry, we really need to set you up proper for this ‘Internation Lord of Hate” gig. I’m thinking big mead hall, lots of shields & axes… a few bloodstained standards of course. And the skull on an enemy to drink out of is obligitory…
Not sure I buy International Lord of hate as a Viking thing, I’m definitely feeling a far more Bond Villain moon base giant laser vibe.
Unless we want to ditch the mead hall, keep the banners and a whole pile more of skulls besides the one to drink from, Then add flowing blood down the skulls and throw a throne on top of it.
Course Khorne might get mad 🙂
You could go the other route: antiseptic dark corridors, banks of computers with blinking lights, soulless minions with energy weapons in black body armor, a control room with a big vidscreen.
(Good news is, you can play video games on the big screen. Or a smaller side screen if Tony Stark is visiting.)
I’m down for it, but one minor nit-pick. Soulless Minions would be useless for an International Lord of Hate. I mean no soul = no passion, no passion = no hate…
I would swap them for fiercely loyal, just slightly below enraged at dumb ass “I need to whine about everything, we should be forced to be nice to each other, and money does nothing but bring pain so we should give it to our wise benevolent overlord masters so they can use it to help the poor or something” thinking minions with energy weapons in black body armor.
🙂
Are we going back to a discussion on the merits of viking babes? Not that I’m opposed. If we’re going to go there, I just need to know so I can get my wife that outfit.
If we’re going the ’70s Bond villain route, it should be International Lord of H.A.T.E. (Heavily Armed Tolerance Enforcers).
Naaaaah, if it’s Larry then it’s Heavily Armed Totalitarian Emasculators…. cutting the balls off of tyranny since 1896.
Where do I enlist?
Hurting All Things Emo?
Has A Taste for Explosives?
Hunt And Terminate Evil?
Happy And Tolerant Exterminators?
High Activity Thermite Explosives?
Huh, that’s a funny coincidence. I’m pretty sure I read something on the interweb that reported that the title of Cabbage Point Killing Machine’s new album is going to be “International Lords of Hate.”
In other news, Tor briefly mentioned the post a few days ago, though they somehow left out the part where Walters goes fishing for Correiaken. In fact, they pretty much stop short of calling him a visionary
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/04/bgff-no-more-moriarty#more
“Fishing for Correiaken”? Why am I reminded of that Far Side comic showing two cavemen fishing whilst using one of them as the bait?
“Throw, Thog! THROOOOOOOOWW! THROW THROW THROW THROOOOOOW!!”
I think Larry could volunteer to write a story for this SF Kickstarter anthology:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ellyblue/bikes-in-space-2-more-feminist-bicycle-science-fic
OK, really the only reason I would want him to try is to read the hysterical rejection letter he would inevitably get, along with his epic response…
Either that, or he is allowed to write a story for it, and it becomes the most awesome Kickstarter book project of all time.
“The first volume of Bikes in Space was the tenth issue of my quarterly feminist bike zine, Taking the Lane. The second volume will be in the form of a paperback book, instead of a stapled zine. It’ll have a spine, great cover art by the multi-talented Caroline Paquette, and more, longer stories.
There will be a third volume, a fourth, and more—I’ll keep making them until interest in feminist bicycle science fiction wanes or the future arrives, whichever comes first. It’s not too soon to start writing your stories for the next one.”
Laughing…. so….. hard…… I didn’t realize that Feminist Bicycle SF was A Thing.
Glad you explained yourself there. It wasn’t just out of left field, it was out of the hot dog stand on the other side of the parking lot behind the left field bleachers.
And be careful when you post links like that! I’m about to have lunch, and I like to eat kippers WITHOUT thinking of lesbians! ;D
“A Woman without a bicycle is like a fish without a…”?
I’m at ComicCon FanX, which is looking like it will have 100,000 attendees, ,speaking to packed rooms, in between hanging out with celebrities, so I can’t respond to our latest troll’s stuff line by line.
But anybody else find it hilarious that the dude who accused me of writing too much in my response (which you’ll note, is also on the checklist) has now written MORE words than my original blog post into the comments? 🙂 (where he will be read by a tiny fraction of the people who read my post?)
But reading through Slippery Snake’s stuff, its all checklist. Mostly making shit up to go for dismiss, combined withe strange projections about racism. Sad really.
Now back to ComicCon. Karl Urban is taller than I expected. Nice guy too. Despite the security detail, William Shatner just kind of hangs out like a regular guy in the Green Room. (where, I kid you not, chefs prepare us food while Playboy bunnies do their makeup) The cast of Star Trek is here. Benedict Cumberbatch is here. And best of all I got to hang out with Adam Baldwin for an hour talking about the Twitter Inquisition. Super cool in person. And later, dinner at the best restaurant in the state.
Sorry, anonymous internet pussy, any other week I’d have a chance to pick apart your stupidity line by line, but you’re just too lame to take up my time today. Buh bye. 🙂
“The best revenge is living well.” 🙂 Wish I was there!
Dammit, Larry, you’re making me wonder why I should be busy defending the nation today!
Tell Cumberbatch he ain’t Khan! Pasty faced Brit. Khan is Sikh as ably portrayed by Ricardo Montalban who while not precisely Sikh (I know there is some kind of connection) is not a pasty faced Brit. There were no athletic, handsome, actors to portray Khan? Not one Brit with some Indian ancestry or just one of a bajillion Bollywood actors that look like Indian princes?
Bah!
I just want to say that I hate the International Lord of Hate (personally, I would go for Intergalactic Lord of Hate, but then my mother always accused me of having delusions of grandeur).
I was reading the eARC of the Monster Hunter novel, and I ruined a perfectly good electronic device. Why? Because that bastard Larry was describing a vacillating, weak-willed, useless excuse for a President who bears absolutely NO resemblance to anyone we know (any resemblance between anyone herein and any person living or dead is purely coincidental, except you, Mr. Obama), and he continually describes his decision-making process as “waffling.”
The resultant orange juice spewing out all over the electrical touch screen destroyed the device.
There should be a “newest” between “I was reading the eARC of the” and “Monster Hunter novel” above. Remember kids, preview is your friend!
I just read Wright’s comments. Excellent takedown but for one thing … I don’t think Damian is smart enough to realize he has been worked over like a side of beef in ‘Rocky’.
“Uh huh… And not because if you’re going to be staring at your character’s ass in Skyrim for 200 hours, it might as well be an attractive ass.” Yeah and guys keep coming up with body mods to make their characters nude and more voluptuous because nothing raises awareness of gender oppression like watching a naked Kate Upton lookalike decapitating an orc.
Speaking of Kate Upton, Happy Easter Everyone!
I’m about to read this, but before I do I check out the original article. I’ve already read it, but I noticed something, it referes to a Jim Chines (hope that’s right) blog. The very top of the blog has edit updates.
Apparently for a whole replies were turned off after a whole 350 posts made it through what he calls “goblins”. Seems suspiciously similar to “delete well written posts that counter my points under the guise of protecting civil discourse”.
First, it’s funny he thinks 350 comments are a lot. Or that posts should stop if they can’t add anything. Under whose definition of “adding”? Discussion, is alwayse a good thing. The interweb is repetitive because it’s freaking huge. Things sometimes get marked TL:DR, or simply missed while scrolling. So because someone thinks repetition makes for poor discourse, when many don’t see the first iteration, we get talked down to like children. Told the conversation is over?
Second, deleting comments under the guise of civil discourse is not civil. It’s prevents open and honest debate. The debaters can themselves call attention to, and then ignore the trolls. Calling out uncivil it’s is part of debate. Deleting it isn’t. Especially when legitimate arguments could be deleted due to a poster simple slip up into emotional posting. Other debaters simply need point it out, or ignore it. Discounting an entire argument, because of one flaw is a fallacy, which makes the civility censorship, uncil, and illogical.
Take that with everyone’s experience on the left, right and center at seeing perfectly civil comments deleted from debates, and moderated/deleted debates are inherently rhetorical and biased towards the delicate flower who wilts at the possibility of honest, civil counter arguments.
Deleting comments is inherently dishonest in debates in my opinion. As is closing the discussion because you think enough has been said. Heck even trolls drive up traffic, and at least get the original blog noticed.
There are exceptions, and those are threats, or promises of illegal actions. I leave those up though, they mark the stupidity of the thug who resorts to threats instead of debating.
I leave up all my comments except for the really crazy murder hobo ones. Those I’m like, hmmm… Maybe I shouldn’t engage the dude who just said he wanted to murder me, burn my house down, and rape my dog. 🙂
It is funny though. Since I don’t “massage’ or “manage” my comments like most of the libprogs, they then try to use things that my commenters have said here, as if my letting them exist is some form of tacit agreement. Quite the contrary, unlike those assholes I actually believe in free speech and don’t just pay lip service to it for people who agree with me.
Wait, Damian left out John Varley?
Hi, I check your new stuff on a regular basis. Your story-telling style is awesome, keep it
up!
‘International Lords of Hate’ would be an awesome band name…
I submitted it as one here: http://bandnamefile.tumblr.com/
I’m coming to this late because one of my readers connected the two of us under the ribbon of “People Damien Walter despises.” Having now discovered who the fuck Damien Walter is, I’ve decided this is a great club to belong to. And having read this post of yours, I’ve decided you kick ass.
I got roasted for publicly quitting SFWA when its bylaws took it socialist. See you think writers should both work and get paid for their work. Same sort of idiot I am, then.
By the way, my husband plays video games as female characters for exactly the same reason you mentioned. “If I’m going to spent 10,000 hours looking at an ass, it’s going to be a nice one.” I play as female characters, too.
I just love this unabashed smackdown of the left. I have to come here more often. Why is this so rare?