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So... David Brin posts here?
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Jun 2, 2019 22:51
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Polikarpov posted:Yeah you're much better off just reading the Aubrey-Maturin series which has actual living breathing characters who gently caress up plenty but still pull through. Well, you'd really be better off reading O'Brian than most other things, I'd say.
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Jun 2, 2019 23:14
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General Battuta posted:Haha I think we all know what ‘uncomfortable truths’ were about to be revealed by ‘modern genetics’ now You must have some really sick moral inclinations if you thing acknowledging different genetic distributions of talents and behaviors among different populations calls for naziism. It probably just means saving a lot of wasted money on educational interventions. It’s not going to turn Appalachians into brahmins, Igbo into Yoruba, Irish into Englishmen, or Sephardim into Ashkenazi. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 3, 2019 00:29
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Drone Jett posted:You must have some really sick moral inclinations if you thing acknowledging different genetic distributions of talents and behaviors among different populations calls for naziism. It probably just means saving a lot of wasted money on educational interventions. It’s not going to turn Appalachians into brahmins. Not exactly a student of history are we?
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Jun 3, 2019 00:34
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Drone Jett posted:You must have some really sick moral inclinations if you thing acknowledging different genetic distributions of talents and behaviors among different populations calls for naziism. It probably just means saving a lot of wasted money on educational interventions. It’s not going to turn Appalachians into brahmins. fury road thats bait . jif
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Jun 3, 2019 00:36
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pseudanonymous posted:Not exactly a student of history are we? We can do better. We don’t have to lie out of fear.
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Jun 3, 2019 00:38
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:Also, is Jerry Pournelle a creep? I have always had a suspicion reading the way he writes women (cringe). I have never heard anything specifically about Pournelle mistreating women, but it's true that he was a walking flame war and a total chud before "chud" was a thing. See his collaborations with Larry Niven, which include a novel where the good guys reintroduce slavery (Lucifer's Hammer), or Oath of Fealty, which is basically Besieged White Angelenos vs. Greedy, Resentful Dusky Hordes. When Pournelle kicked off a couple years ago, there was a lot of throat-clearing, foot-shuffling, and "well I don't want to speak ill of the dead but" from the SF community.
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Jun 3, 2019 01:14
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Drone Jett posted:We can do better. We don’t have to lie out of fear.
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Jun 3, 2019 01:24
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Hey guy, you're a loving Nazi. Just because nobody called you a loving Nazi yet and I'm not going to mince words here, you're talking bullshit that isn't supported by any empirical science and, also, you're a goddamn loving Nazi.
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Jun 3, 2019 01:36
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love to, get enlightened (darkly) on here. post a picture of your phrenology calipers plz.
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Jun 3, 2019 01:46
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Drone Jett posted:You must have some really sick moral inclinations if you thing acknowledging different genetic distributions of talents and behaviors among different populations calls for naziism. It probably just means saving a lot of wasted money on educational interventions. It’s not going to turn Appalachians into brahmins, Igbo into Yoruba, Irish into Englishmen, or Sephardim into Ashkenazi. Could you speak up, Milo, I'm getting some kind of high-frequency whistle, my dog's going nuts over here
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Jun 3, 2019 02:04
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Rusty posted:Race science is pseudoscience, it would be lying to people to tell that we know that IQ distribution is caused by genetics since no such thing is proven, and in fact seems unlikely. It's hilarious people are again bringing up the Bell Curve after all these years. It seems incredibly likely on a macro population front (the world’s patterns of GPA and IQ tests look exactly like you’d expect on a macro level if it were true), and twin studies have overwhelming shown that 40-50% on an individual level is genetics with the rest as random noise and almost nothing to do with shared environment. It’s a lovely reality, but it’s the one we live in. As bad as Seveneves was, this is why the last part was at least slightly interesting. Stephenson knows what’s up.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:07
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General Battuta posted:Could you speak up, Milo, I'm getting some kind of high-frequency whistle, my dog's going nuts over here It’s a shame white culture’s disinterest in marathon running dooms them to being such poor world class competitors. Anyway, the future is Chinese and they don’t seem likely to suffer these self delusions themselves, ostrich strategy isn’t going to be helpful in a global level.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:10
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You walked into an undergraduate survey on biology, listened for ten minutes, and somehow ducked out before anyone got to the last 30 years of genetics. Cool. Is there any point trying to talk you through the science or would you prefer not to hear it?
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Jun 3, 2019 02:10
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Drone Jett posted:It’s a shame white culture’s disinterest in marathon running dooms them to being such poor world class competitors. This is like perfect because Ostriches don't actually stick their heads in the sand. Like all this poo poo you are spouting it's based on bullshit, basically.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:12
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General Battuta posted:You walked into an undergraduate survey on biology, listened for ten minutes, and somehow ducked out before anyone got to the last 30 years of genetics. Cool. I wouldn't bother, he said "IQ Test". Which is totally not a test that has biases based on socio-economic and educational backgrounds, no siree. I haven't decided which would be more pathetic. The fact they're actual true believers or if they declare themselves a master-troll puppet master. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 02:12
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General Battuta posted:You walked into an undergraduate survey on biology, listened for ten minutes, and somehow ducked out before anyone got to the last 30 years of genetics. Cool. Sure, what do you think of the IQ genes being found in the last 30 months of GWAS studies? I think they’re still in the low single digits of effect, but it’s going to grow. How have the last 50 years of social and educational reforms in any country gone? Is there anywhere the rank order isn’t always Ashenazi > Asian > white > mestizo/Hispanic > African American? Maybe no one has been trying hard enough.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:16
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Drone Jett posted:It seems incredibly likely on a macro population front (the world’s patterns of GPA and IQ tests look exactly like you’d expect on a macro level if it were true), and twin studies have overwhelming shown that 40-50% on an individual level is genetics with the rest as random noise and almost nothing to do with shared environment. It’s a lovely reality, but it’s the one we live in.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:17
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It's an idea that folds so quickly to the slightest critical examination (there is simply not enough consistency within 'races' and not enough difference between them for them to exist on the biological level) that you know anyone who's stuck with it past their teenage years needs it to dress up a deeper, uglier set of beliefs — or they're just following the alt-right script for normalizing Nazi ideology and making it palatable for discussion. But I always want to give people a chance in case they just fell into a Milo hole when they were sixteen and need someone to pull them out.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:20
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the sad puppy has logged on what's some good sff inspired by ancient Rome. not the dumb Jim Butcher thing pls. I read AE van Vogt's Empire of the Atom last year and it was mediocre. like I'm looking for Cpt. Jules Caesar whoopin space Gallic rear end or Elf Diocletian restoring a near ruined magic empire. but good, does such a thing exist?
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Jun 3, 2019 02:29
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Drone Jett posted:Sure, what do you think of the IQ genes being found in the last 30 months of GWAS studies? I think they’re still in the low single digits of effect, but it’s going to grow. quote:But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science Edit: Sorry about this in the Sci-fi thread. On another note, I finished Children of Ruin and thought it was even better than the other book, have people talked about this book at all?
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Jun 3, 2019 02:33
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my bony fealty posted:the sad puppy has logged on They're a mixed bag rec because of reasons explained in this article but if you want Rome as its own entity in space vs US in space vs aliens, this is your book series.
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Jun 3, 2019 02:33
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Drone Jett posted:It’s a lovely reality, but it’s the one we live in. Says the guy who embraced the pseudoscience that puts him at the top of the food chain without actually having to do anything or distinguish himself in any way or accomplish anything in his life. "Oh no," the chud says, "it's terrible that I'm clearly part of the master race, if only it were not so."
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Jun 3, 2019 02:35
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:the only good part of march upcountry was the prince's name. david weber isn't really that hard to understand, his entire worldview is 'the british colonial empire in the 1700 and 1800s was humanity's peak' and therefore any non-humans in his books are stand ins for colonized people that are being helped by the grace of humans because the white man's burden is real and good. The March UpCountry books were Weber's second or third pass at retelling Xenophon's "Long March" story and Ringo's first try at it (Ringo definitely tried it again solo at least once more). Retelling Xenophon's Long March saga is pretty much crack-cocaine/a required rite of passage for mil-fiction authors(especially poo poo mil-fiction authors). Here's how I remember other scifi/fantasy authors I've read/tried to read and then in a few of the cases, mostly tried to forget about : Asher: super stupid everything + massive amounts of BODY TORTURE/BODY HORROR porn. Hamilton: Han Solo analogues + super awkward sex scenes galore. Watts: futuristic misery fiction, with a focus on body horror and a minor in scientific reference footnotes. Stephenson: extended Infodumps because he can't figure out how to insert them organically, violently allergic to endin---. Miéville: i enjoyed kraken, every other story he wrote seemed to be run through wordnik.com 8x-10x times. Erikson: exponential increases in philosophizing if it's a series + power-creep levels that make Dresden Files or the Dragonball Z Saga blush in shame. Drake: working out his Vietnam War issues on paper one-story at time ever since he started writing. McLeod: socialism, class struggle, characters with genetically embedded knowledge of Locke + Hume's entire bodies of work. Bujold: fully fleshed out worlds and side characters but by god you better enjoy space romance (spoiler: I don't). Weber: Mary Sues, Long Marches, and autistic descriptions of battle damage/missile strikes (MS Word + Gratuitous Space Battles are probably the only things installed on Weber's computer). Lem: possibly a KGB plant/a synthetic author ala Nicolas Bourbaki due to the sheer range of Lem's work. HA, god i love PKD. Baker (Kage): author-self insertion in the Heinlein style, only insaner with more self-incestous retcons than Anne Rice. Dick: galactic ideas + super detailed plots, always with a sense of loss and focus on the mundane elements of human life.
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Jun 3, 2019 03:28
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my bony fealty posted:the sad puppy has logged on
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Jun 3, 2019 03:31
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StonecutterJoe posted:Says the guy who embraced the pseudoscience that puts him at the top of the food chain without actually having to do anything or distinguish himself in any way or accomplish anything in his life. "Oh no," the chud says, "it's terrible that I'm clearly part of the master race, if only it were not so." I’m not Jewish or east Asian, though! White supremacy is really dumb because they’re obviously not supreme by their own measures. Who wrote that series about the future Chinese super cities covering the Earth and Europeans incorporated as their subservient mercenaries and adjuncts? The first book was meh, never tried the others.
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Jun 3, 2019 03:35
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Drone Jett posted:I’m not Jewish or east Asian, though! I see where this is going. lol. that series is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Kuo_(novel_series) btw.
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Jun 3, 2019 03:43
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my bony fealty posted:what's some good sff inspired by ancient Rome. not the dumb Jim Butcher thing pls. I read AE van Vogt's Empire of the Atom last year and it was mediocre. like I'm looking for Cpt. Jules Caesar whoopin space Gallic rear end or Elf Diocletian restoring a near ruined magic empire. but good, does such a thing exist? There's "The Far Arena", by Richard Ben Sapir, where a geologist working in the Arctic finds a frozen Roman. Despite the goofy premise, it's an oddly serious novel, so if you solely want shoot 'em ups it won't work, because you're mostly getting a Latin-speaking nun and an ex-gladiator wandering about. I enjoyed it quite a bit. uber_stoat posted:that series is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Kuo_(novel_series) btw. I really liked the first three books, but man it's pretty much the definition of the series where the author loses the plot.
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Jun 3, 2019 03:45
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Drone Jett posted:I’m not Jewish or east Asian, though! This is a cool new dodge for proud-boy lite turds, you loving Nazi.
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Jun 3, 2019 04:20
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Drone Jett posted:Anyway, the future is Chinese and they don’t seem likely to suffer these self delusions themselves, ostrich strategy isn’t going to be helpful in a global level. Nah, the future is more likely Indian. Also, lol, if you don’t think the Chinese (very broad term) have their own set of stupid self delusions.
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Jun 3, 2019 04:43
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Has anyone in here read the Poppy War? I just finished it and I think I didn't like it very much, but I'm not sure how to put my feelings into words overall. It felt very... rote? And obviously trying to do complex grey morality, but it came off as an extremely simplistic view of the world.
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Jun 3, 2019 05:33
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uber_stoat posted:I see where this is going. lol. I read that series (up to the 6th book) in HS, and liked a lot of it. Looking back on it now I cringe harder and harder, and that’s without having read the final book where DeVore is revealed to be an extra dimensional rape spider. Wingrove very clearly loves traditional Chinese culture while still seeing it as inferior to industrious Euro thought, and his Chinese super civ wreaks nothing but horrors on itself. It also completely ignores the changes China had undergone, brushing them aside as a return to the “natural” Chinese way, which is as crazy as suggesting there is an ancient and unbroken “German” way. Even as the nazis praised their idealized German past they didn’t try to revert to it.
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Jun 3, 2019 05:41
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PupsOfWar posted:there's clearly a demand in the public for fiction that simply presents expert people doing things expertly I should actually do the write up for the second book of the The Fleet series. They're anthologies about an overwhelming invading force and the coalition thrown together to try and save local civilization from the swarm. It's got a lot of rah-rah milsf and a lot of stories about the wrong people in the wrong place at the right time.The list of authors runs from Gary Gygax, Janet Morris, Margaret Weis, and Steve Perry to Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Anne McCaffrey, and John Brunner. With David Drake as an apertif. Bill Fawcett's recurring tales will scratch the "competent staff officer itch". Volume 1 is here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3554972&userid=115420&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post463731229 mllaneza fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 06:07
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Gluten Freeman posted:Has anyone in here read the Poppy War? I just finished it and I think I didn't like it very much, but I'm not sure how to put my feelings into words overall. It felt very... rote? And obviously trying to do complex grey morality, but it came off as an extremely simplistic view of the world. The first half is like reading a pleasant Avatar: The Last Airbender novalization. Then it whipsaws into grimdark with Difficult Moral Choices. It doesn’t work.
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Jun 3, 2019 06:19
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occamsnailfile posted:I read that series (up to the 6th book) in HS, and liked a lot of it. Looking back on it now I cringe harder and harder, and that’s without having read the final book where DeVore is revealed to be an extra dimensional rape spider. It's incredibly depressing because we start with small Chinese and Euro bands with believable nationalist or economic goals and individuals with actual motives and this interesting pseudohistory and by the end they're following 20 irrelevant subplots and drowning entire clone armies in the Mediterranean. quote:Wingrove very clearly loves traditional Chinese culture while still seeing it as inferior to industrious Euro thought, and his Chinese super civ wreaks nothing but horrors on itself. It also completely ignores the changes China had undergone, brushing them aside as a return to the “natural” Chinese way, which is as crazy as suggesting there is an ancient and unbroken “German” way. Even as the nazis praised their idealized German past they didn’t try to revert to it. I think you're being too harsh on Wingrove, since the engineered society he creates is in response to a particular series of chaotic breakdowns of the social order that unravels the rest of the world and, more importantly, the result of one supremely powerful dictator's vision (along those lines, I'm not sure Wingrove paints the West as well as you seem to, since IIRC they go on an imperialistic spree before collapsing under their own capitalist weight). The new order brings stability, security, food and shelter to the planet after it almost tears itself apart. It's a horrific utopia-gone-to-dystopia riddled with inequity, but we see it after a few centuries of stability have passed, and it's rooted in an actual premise (even if the books make clear it's a false one too rooted in one man's notions). One of the things I found most interesting about the series was its constantly wrestling with the idea of the chaos of change vs. the stagnation of order; it almost felt like Michael Moorcock in that way.
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Jun 3, 2019 07:34
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Goddamn, I just discovered there was a book written in the 60s called Night at Camp David, and it's about a batshit president who's gone insane and thinks the media is out to get him, wants to be friends with russia, and break out of all the non aggression pacts that we have with other countries. It was written right before the 25th amendment was ratified as well. Goddamn. That's just freaky.
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Jun 3, 2019 08:54
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Gluten Freeman posted:Has anyone in here read the Poppy War? I just finished it and I think I didn't like it very much, but I'm not sure how to put my feelings into words overall. It felt very... rote? And obviously trying to do complex grey morality, but it came off as an extremely simplistic view of the world. It was brought up very briefly a few weeks ago but yeah my take was pretty much the same. ed balls balls man posted:I was really excited about The Poppy War when it was first announced, I ended up giving up on it about 65% in. Felt really YA/immature to me, and the writing a little bland and lacking in depth, but twitter (especially women) seemed to love it, a lot of posts about trigger warnings and how people really connected to it about how dark it was.
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Jun 3, 2019 09:46
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Gluten Freeman posted:I know this is from a day ago but I just want to point out -- the person whose bio you have quoted (Sara the Black) is not the same person who wrote that Facebook post about Brin (Sumiko Saulson). It's the bio of a person she interviewed on her blog. Not to bring back any debate about whether that bio would somehow negate what she wrote in that post, but I think when making that judgment it's important to actually have the correct person. Thanks! My bad. Fwiw I found the description massively overwrought but didn't think it invalidated the criticism of brin. Just never meet your heroes I guess, especially if they write genre fiction
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Jun 3, 2019 11:57
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ed balls balls man posted:It was brought up very briefly a few weeks ago but yeah my take was pretty much the same. Me too, also didn't like the huge shift from peasant at magic school to guerrilla tactics on drugs.
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Jun 3, 2019 12:01
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branedotorg posted:Thanks! My bad. Fwiw I found the description massively overwrought but didn't think it invalidated the criticism of brin. Part of the problem is that old people are old. Established Sci-Fi authors like Brin are what, in their 50's, 60's? Yeah he's almost 70. So he's probably fairly progressive for his era. But not that shocking he has some regressive ideas mixed in.
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Jun 3, 2019 12:07
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