Will Shetterly's Blog, page 144

Brother Will vs. Vox Day: The requirements of Christianity

At Vox Popoli: Mailvox: Are Christians "required to be dicks"?, Vox Day cites four verses to defend Christian dickishness. Two are offered to support expelling self-professed Christians who "willfully and proudly" disobey Christian teaching:

2 Thessalonians 3:6: "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us." 

1 Corinthians 5:11-13...

on Jorge Luis Borges and Victor Jara, or art and evil

Sydney Padua, whose Lovelace and Babbage delights me, tweeted:

'Arguments convince nobody. But a hint, a suggestion, receives a kind of hospitality of the mind.' Borges on poetry http://www.openculture.com/2012/05/jorge_luis_borges_1967-8_norton_lectures_on_poetry_and_everything_else_literary.html

 I want to agree. I've advanced that idea in the past.

But it's Borges.

Who I loved as a teenager.

And then learned that he reviled the elected government of Juan Peron and praised Pinochet's c...

Where Augustine goes wrong

In "What Does it Mean to be Pro-Life?" Elizabeth Stoker quotes Augustine:

And if any member of the family interrupts the domestic peace by disobedience, he is corrected either by word or blow, or some kind of just and legitimate punishment, such as society permits, that he may himself be the better for it, and be re-adjusted to the family harmony from which he had dislocated himself…To be innocent, we must not only do harm to no man, but also restrain him from sin or punish his sin, so that e...

Has the Ender's Game boycott been staged to increase sales?

I was just reading about a wacky conspiracy theory (our government's run by reptilians), so now I'm ready to propose one. The Ender's Game moviemakers have known for decades that Orson Scott Card's homophobia would be a public relations nightmare. Card has admitted that his side lost, but that doesn't make his haters hate him any less. So what do you do?

Until a few days ago, I had no interest in seeing the movie, partly because of Card's politics, but mostly because Hollywood scifi tends to d...

Comments welcome on this draft of my book about social justice gone wrong

Details here: a guide to the current draft of my Social Justice Warrior book, Social Mob Justice

We are all slaves of defunct ideologues

I may be becoming a binarian in my old age: I'm more accepting of simple divisions now. One is between purists and pragmatists. I try to stay in the latter camp, but I fail, of course. I stumbled on this John Maynard Keyes' quote a few minutes ago:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt f...

starting a conversation about catcalling and class

Hannah Price's photos of men who catcalled her are fascinating, partly because she's a fine photographer, partly because the conversation keeps being framed in ways she rejects. It first appeared under the headline My Harassers, but she rejected that simplicity in A Photographer Turns Her Lens On Men Who Catcall. She understands that those men are coming from a culture she doesn't know, and she understands the importance of treating different cultures, even those that seem threateni...

Why it's easier to talk about race and sex than class

If you're white or male, no one will expect you to go as far as John Howard Griffin or Christine Jorgensen. Most people will simply expect you to treat everyone as your social equal. Even among privilege theorists, you needn't do more than periodically acknowledge that you're aware of the privileges you have being white or male—you're not expected to give up those privileges because it's assumed you can't give them up without expensive medical aid.

But if your privilege is economic, everyone k...

"On the Depiction of Women in Games" And books, movies, comics....

"On the Depiction of Women in Games" by Amanda Lange:

The fact is that a lot of times when I see a call to “how women should really be depicted,” it worries me because it feels like there’s a big call for “women should be fully covered up” or “only wear reasonable clothes” and essentially take all the fun and fantasy out. That frankly sucks because even as a woman I like seeing sexy women kicking ass and really want to leave some room for this in my fun-times. 

Here’s my two cents on this....

weirdnesses of the day

Our house has an old garage with an old garage door—wooden, with two one windows. The strikethroughs are because someone broke one of the windows in the door last night. Nothing was taken, maybe because that wasn't the point, maybe because the motion sensor light came on and scared them away, maybe because they saw there was nothing worth the hassle.

Other weirdness is that inside the yard—meaning someone threw it over the fence—was a black power hair pick, the cheap plastic sort that has a fi...