For some reason it’s even more disappointing when a science fiction author, and one who has produced some pretty good stuff, so easily falls for such pseudo-scientific guff by right wing nimrods.

Oh, by the way, it was Gramm’s December 2000 “Commodity Futures Modernization Act” which preserved the unregulation of the derivatives / credit default swap market is what allowed a problem with sub-prime mortgages to balloon into a $60+ trillion fake financial system.

If I may respectfully disagree, El Cid. I’ve been an avid sf reader since I stumbled into the sf section of the library as a small child and got my hands on the anthologies (flashing my geek here, yes.)
Orson Scott Card can’t write for shit. He’s a racist, homophobic one trick pony.
Also, he’s a complete and utter idiot.

Wow. We need to tap into that poor minority power. By simply defaulting on their secured loans, they brought down Lehman Brothers, AIG, and most of Wall Street, to the tune of more dollars than the sum of all of their mortgages combined. Now that is power! (Snark!)

Leave it to Wall Street to figure out how to counterfeit electronic money…

Don’t forget: L Ron Hubbard considered himself an SF writer…

I’ve been reading SF most of my life. For the most part, I try to stick to those who can tell a good yarn and do their homework. Hacks bore me. Ender’s game was pretty good, but I haven’t read anything else of his that I cared for.

I don’t think there is a single wingnut alternate-reality fucking lie that pisses me off more than this current blaming poor minority people for the mortgage mess. I worked in the mortgage business; it was bloody obvious that the whole thing was unsustainable. I was squawking about it five years ago! But greed won the day. Blind hog full out greed on the part of the lenders and mortgage brokers, not on the part of the home buyers.

The people who took these mortgages were flat-out flim-flammed in a lot of cases. We took training classes to learn how all the various ARMs and balloons and bridges worked. It was hard to understand, even when you were getting thoroughly educated about the various deals. The average person on the street – and I’m talking average person with a high school diploma or even a college degree, not junior high dropouts – didn’t have much of a chance of knowing what they were getting into at all. And no one made any effort to help follks learn either.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck this pisses me off. I hope that Card winds up living under a bridge some day, and that the loan shark he bought his “waterfront residence” from comes and repo’s his cardboard box because he didn’t make his weekly can & bottle money payment and that then the under-bridge dweller’s homeowner’s association kicks him out to sleep on the street.

I remember that scene, I was thinking how incredibly racist it was of ABM to call TB “white-boy” and “honkey”, when TB was clearly Korean. Note that “Casper” is fine, since this is what was printed on TB’s name tag:

Casper Soon Park
Terrified Banker

From the article:

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

Cid, OSC has been a wingnut for a while. If you’re a fan of his work, and want to remain so, stay away from the book Empire. It’s garbage on multiple levels.

When he focuses on his actual strength (fantastic circumstances and how people adapt to them: see Ender’s Game) he’s a good author. When he starts talking politics, his work takes a slow burn towards total crap. Its not as silly as the absolutist, actionless Heinlein, but its pretty poor.

I’m tossing the ender books into the compost pile today. I can’t possibly read them anymore without thinking what a complete dipshit card is. And he is. A complete dipshit.

Why does ABM talk like Early the Squidbilly?

If I may respectfully disagree, El Cid. I’ve been an avid sf reader since I stumbled into the sf section of the library as a small child and got my hands on the anthologies (flashing my geek here, yes.)
Orson Scott Card can’t write for shit. He’s a racist, homophobic one trick pony.

Even his Glorious Achievement of Children’s Literature is pornographic, brutal, and fascist.

There are people on the Christian right whose homophobia overtook their good judgement, who originally fought hard for civil rights. Fred Phelps may be the most infamous example – his career as a lawyer was mostly devoted to fighting racial inequality. I used to pin Card into this column.

His willingness to go to bat for the vile BLACKS DID SUBPRIME CRISIS conspiracy theory – one that requires we ignore both data and history, that we excuse away an unexceptional rate of default among blacks and the surreal credit scoring system under which making under $40,000 a year is a more severe black mark than bankruptcy, that we pretend redlining was a practical policy rather than a brutal system of discrimination largely harming middle-class African-Americans, and most importantly that we consider enormous finance bodies who have been given every possible advantage and who have made a great profit from every single irresponsible practice leading to the crisis completely innocent.

It’s literally the most insane possible take on recent events, and it only works if you’re a fucking bigot.

Of course, that wouldn’t be too much trouble for Card. Udall, another Mormon Democrat, left the church when they dug their heels into the ground over interracial marriage. Card, whose novels are about as homoerotic as any modern SF not specifically made for man-sex, suddenly developed an obsession with Depraved Sodomy when the right-wing culture demanded it.

And now he’s marching in lock-step with the right-wing bigots at the bankers’ behest.

Fuck you, Card, you Satanic asshole. Even the huckster who started your religion had better moral sense than to side reflexively with the powerful the way you do.

I really liked “Ender’s Game” when I first read it, long ago. I thought “Xenocide” was rather blathering and monotonous, but I like the whole speaker for the dead idea. Then I read a recent short story collection of his which included some stories from his Mormonism POV that kind of just made my brain let go of my lower jaw and all I could think was “Wha?”. Plus, I get a misogynist vibe from him. And after reading this, he’s also quite the ignorant, easily led asshat. Which I guess also explains the Mormonism.

Card has written one really good book, a few reasonably decent books, and a raft of crap (which presumably floats well on shit moats). I have read a lot of unmitigated sf/fantasy crap (always on the lookout for that 10% non-crap that Sturgeon’s Law tells me is out there), and I stopped being able to read Card at least 15 years ago, well before I knew about his political wingnuttery.

His willingness to go to bat for the vile BLACKS DID SUBPRIME CRISIS conspiracy theory

Wait, is that going to be the next big DC Comics crossover? Jeez. They are running out of ideas.

Ah, the poor poor can’t get a break from Wingtards. It’s so Jesus-like of the Jesus folk not only to repress the poor’s voice in elections but to blame them for our current economic state.

It’s been mentioned before, but it’s always worth hauling out: Orson Scott Card has always been an asshat.

Anyone looking for the 10% of decent SF that’s out there should try Ken Macleod, his drinking chum Charlie Stross, and (coming a poor third IMO, but still better than that eejit OSC) Stephen Baxter.

Orson Scott Card can’t write for shit.

Well, he is a one trick pony. I enjoyed “Ender’s Game” enough to seek out others, but then realized it was the same-old, same-old.

It’s a common misconception to think that because a person is smart is one area, they would be smart in all areas. But we all know that’s not true, don’t we?

I have a lot of talents, but my cooking is erratic, at best.

I like the disclaimer at the beginning making sure we all know he’s a democrat so obviously he must be right in blaming democrats/the poor. What a hack.

I put Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” next to “Ender’s Game” on the shelf and my house was destroyed in an antimatter-matter reaction. It’s a good thing I didn’t try “Empire” or else the world would have been destroyed.

OSC needs to take a few minutes and read Irvine Housing Blog and learn about HELOC abuse.

And maybe take another few minutes to check out sweet Tanta at Calculated Risk.

Or perhaps peruse the Wiki:

The “Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000” (H.R. 5660) was introduced in the House on Dec. 14, 2000 by Rep. Thomas W. Ewing (R-IL) and cosponsored by Rep. Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R-VA) Rep. Larry Combest (R-TX) Rep. John J. LaFalce (D-NY) Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA) and never debated in the House.[2]

The companion bill (S.3283) was introduced in the Senate on Dec. 15th, 2000 (The last day before Christmas holiday) by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and cosponsored by Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL) Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) Sen. Thomas Harkin (D-IA) Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) and never debated in the Senate.

Then he can go back to stroking his hot well-oiled piece, and drive home the clip, hard.

It’s not only factually/historically bolloxed, it’s not exactly what a self-described libertarian (Reynolds, don’t know about Card) is supposed to argue, is it? By making this argument, aren’t they conceding that financial markets need to be regulated?

Of course the only libertarian alternative (seriously, can anyone else think of another?) is the Paultard argument that the money supply is artificially large since we went off the gold standard, and that the massive contraction that would happen if we let the credit markets seize up is not only inevitable but salutary.

It would seem that libertarianism is pretty much parasitic upon prosperity. Once that freedom claptrap comes between Joe Sixpack and his bass boat/jet ski/snowmobile, he’ll tell the libtards to stfu.

FAO Righteous Bubba:

Thanks for that link to the OSC is an asshat essay. Very interesting. In response may I recommend Michael Moorcock’s Starship Stormtroopers essay, as hosted on the net by Ireland’s Workers’ Solidarity Movement?

http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html

RB: Hell of a find. Thanks for putting that in perspective (the article he talks about is what I linked to under ‘fascist’).

PS: I’m largely ceding this topic to djur, who knows more about SF than spooky alien handjobs and that one Star Wars with the whales. I’m functionally illiterate, see.

Anyone looking for the 10% of decent SF that’s out there should try Ken Macleod, his drinking chum Charlie Stross, and (coming a poor third IMO, but still better than that eejit OSC) Stephen Baxter.

Y’know, I like MacLeod’s books, but I do get tired of the constant political pummelling. Any recommendations on where I might start with Stross or Baxter?

Thanks for the links, DA. Nice to have affirmation of what I knew in my gut. That is, the wingnut crowd are shitbag, racist liars too blind to recognize the real enemy.

As per Brad’s suggestion, Card should be depanted and locked in the stocks in some prominent place on Wall Street with the Miami Herald piece tattooed on one buttcheek and the Barron’s article on the other.

I notice that Card referred to the “Democratic Party” rather than the “Democrat Party,” as required by the Republican style manual. That alone might get him sent to a re-education camp.

>>>Any recommendations on where I might start with Stross or Baxter?

Where to start with Stross? In view of the present thread’s subject, I’d say with Iron Sunrise (though you might want to read it’s predecessor Singularity Sky first). An alternative title for IS might be ‘Space Nazis Must Die’. At lot of Charlie’s stuff is available for free on the net – try his site antipope.org

As for Baxter, I find his short stories more interesting than the novels – you might too.

Finally, regarding the politics in Macleod, well it’s not all forced down your throat, and he often gives the best lines to characters who don’t share his own brand of Marxism-Trotskyism – not something you’d ever catch Heinlein doing.

The fact is, he is telling the truth and all the liberal propoganda out there in the left leaning Dem in the tank for Obama newspapers and TV are trying to spin a lie that the productive class caused this problem. It was the dependents, the lazy, the unfit. We keep trying to raise them up by socialism, it doesn’t work. People need to work hard on their own. Some people just can’t do it. Perhaps its better if they just die of starvation and from killing each other outside the gates of civilization and the Real USA, it is in the long run less cruel and costly.

>>>Perhaps its better if they just die of starvation and from killing each other

‘This Irish famine will only kill 1 million people and that is not enough to do any good’.

Well, guess what, we’re still around, a century and a half later. And we don’t intend to go away any time soon.

Not only that, but one of our sundered brethren in Amerikay will be playing Alfred to Obama’s Batman Real Soon Now. . .

Finally, regarding the politics in Macleod, well it’s not all forced down your throat, and he often gives the best lines to characters who don’t share his own brand of Marxism-Trotskyism – not something you’d ever catch Heinlein doing.

This is true. And I do enjoy his books. Heinlein…sigh. He was one of my favorites in my pre-teen/early-teen days, especially his earlier books. Later on, he got deeply fucking weird, and I just really couldn’t take it anymore.

I’ve been enjoying Alastair Reynolds a lot lately, especially his short stories. He’s a libertarian? Say it ain’t so!

OSC needs to take a few minutes and read Irvine Housing Blog and learn about HELOC abuse swift kicks to the nuts.

Mormons are especially good at falling for BS. It’s in their genetic stock…

See: Smith, Joseph

Orson did have one other thing besides “Ender’s game” going for him – the “Alvin Maker” series. The first four books were tolerable.

I had to quit reading it when he prominently featured a misgenating plantation owner forcing his top slave to have sex with his wife, during/after which the plantation owner blew their heads off with his shotgun.
Bad mocus.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

Orson Scott Card must challenge You Who Produce Our Local Daily Paper to a duel. It is the only way.

He will have to allow You Who to pick the weapons, but he does get to have Glenn Reynolds as his second.

Reynolds I find unreadable, except for one or two of his short stories.

Fredrik Pohl – now there was a good crypto-Commie Sci-fi author. Watching Mad Men brings back fond memories of The Space Merchants for your humble correspondent.

Now there’s a thing. The Reynolds in my last post was Alastair, not Glen (who he?).

Fear of A Black Bank President

It’s not just the predatory borrowers assaulting poor mortgage brokers. I personally witnessed white homeboys displaying their gang pinstripes raiding poor mom & pop outfits like Lehman and Bear Stearns demanding some “sweet CDOs” and “triple-A default swaps, bitches” and threatening innocent firms like AIG to “insure these derivative muthafuckas.” It was enough to put me off my steak tartare at the Palm.

For some politically/morally insightful SF, I go to Octavia Butler. Seriously peoples, get yourself some Butler.

Can’t go wrong with Ursula LeGuin, either. Left Hand of Darkness is the perfect allegory for the inevitable success of a tech-savvy multiculturalism over the parochial, racist idiocy of the Palins and Cards of the world. Heck, since it takes place on a mostly frozen world, it’s an awful lot like Alaska …

Reynolds I find unreadable, except for one or two of his short stories.

I found a couple of his first books to be tough reads, but his more recent stuff hasn’t been difficult at all. Having just finished Galactic North, I do think that I like his short stories more than his novels. What didn’t you like about them?

The characters: I find them unconvincing, unysmpathetic, and ultimately uninteresting.

“The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.”

Soooo, they held office for 6 years and didn’t bother to fix it? Okay then.

‘Vote GOP: Who says you can’t be lazy AND stupid?’

The characters: I find them unconvincing, unysmpathetic, and ultimately uninteresting.

I’ll grant that characterization is not his strong suit (though I think he’s improving). I may just not demand much from my space opera. I’ll definitely give Stross and Baxter a look.

…trying to spin a lie that the productive class caused this problem. It was the dependents, the lazy, the unfit.

Michael Moorcock’s Starship Stormtroopers

Thanks very much.

Mormons are especially good at falling for BS. It’s in their genetic stock…

See: Smith, Joseph

Joseph Smith was no more or less of a prophet than Ezekiel or Jesus or Muhammed or anyone else who has claimed to be. Smith probably believed his own shit as much as the others did. Mormonism only looks weird because it is so recent. But what is kooky about Mormonism is in fact characteristic of all religions at some point in their development.

For some reason it’s even more disappointing when a science fiction author, and one who has produced some pretty good stuff, so easily falls for such pseudo-scientific guff by right wing nimrods.

I still can’t understand why people think that. I’m a sci-fi junkie from since I was in short pants, and I find Card almost unreadable. I thought Ender’s Game was crap, on par with Battlefield Earth, which in fact was more entertaining.

Joseph Smith was no more or less of a prophet than Ezekiel or Jesus or Muhammed or anyone else who has claimed to be. Smith probably believed his own shit as much as the others did. Mormonism only looks weird because it is so recent. But what is kooky about Mormonism is in fact characteristic of all religions at some point in their development.

Which Vidal book was it that pointed the same thing out about Christianity? I forget.

I didn’t mind Ender’s Game, although I only read it once and never cared for it enough to actually spend money on it (the library is a handy “preview” feature for reading matter in meatspace), which is fortunate. I don’t think he was quite as wingy a wingnut back when I read his book as he is now; the last several years have put a lot of people way, way out into La-La Land.

The story at Righteous Bubba’s link reminds me somewhat of a distinctly more violent (and appropriately so) version of my dealing with Spider Robinson, who’s also a glibertarian asshat, especially when he’s not looking for money.

loneoak: Octavia E. Butler, yes!
Also, James Tiptree jr. (aka the lovely Alice Bradley Sheldon), Cordwainer Smith (evidently a bit of a douchebag himself, but at least he could write.) Throw in some Harlan Ellison for your pepper and Bradbury for your sugar ( LeGuin for pepper AND fiber, natch) and you have yourself a pretty tasty sf stew started.
So many more…so many, many more worthy writers than Orson “magic underwear protects me from homos, vaginas, and democrats” Scott Card.

The story at Righteous Bubba’s link reminds me somewhat of a distinctly more violent (and appropriately so) version of my dealing with Spider Robinson, who’s also a glibertarian asshat, especially when he’s not looking for money.

Spider is just carrying the torch for Heinlein, out of lingering loyalty because Heinlein loaned him money when he was broke. Spider at least takes his social libertarianism seriously, as did his mentor. And he lives in Canada, is uncritical of their health system, and cheerfully takes government grants for his wife’s dance works. So what does that tell you?

Well, I guess Spider could be an asshat on a personal level, but then, by all accounts, so is Keith Olbermann.

I thought the Ender’s Game short story was good. Never read the book version. His novelization of The Abyss was pretty good too, though I wonder how much of that came from James Cameron. Other than that, I haven’t read any of his SF work. His political rants, however…hoo boy.

“Dork Calling Orson,” that was funny 🙂 Nanu nanu!

In the midst of all this anger, can someone point out where in his article Orson Scott Card is blaming the poor?

It reads to me more as if he were blaming Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the political supporters of those organizations, many of whom are in the Democratic Party, and the whole sub-prime lender pep rally these cheerleaders whipped up.

He does not say the poor forced anyone to grant them a loan. He says the poor were enticed (and thus victimized) by politically connected organizations who “encouraged” lenders to grant unpayable loans, and then greed took flight.

I do believe a straw man has been thoroughly dismembered in many of these posts, with some ad hominem bashing thrown in for good measure.

plus, i bet the “negros” forced those poor aig execs to drink grape kool-aid at that fancy california resort!

poor execs!

kth:
Joseph Smith was no more or less of a prophet than Ezekiel or Jesus or Muhammed or anyone else who has claimed to be. Smith probably believed his own shit as much as the others did. Mormonism only looks weird because it is so recent. But what is kooky about Mormonism is in fact characteristic of all religions at some point in their development.

Agreed.
But the difference with Mormons is that the development of their mumbo-jumbo is well enough within modern history as to be verifiably false. So false, in fact, that church elders have to buy contrary evidence. Thus, the “kookiness” generates less empathy.

When South Park nails your ass to the wall, well, that pretty much says it all…

RB, nice link, fascinating stuff. It clarified that “back of the head” feeling that I didn’t care enough to pursue at the time.

But what is kooky about Mormonism is in fact characteristic of all religions at some point in their development.

The epic fail for most religions is in the smallness of their followers; they cannot wade into philosophy waters, and thus demand “just so” stories that harden into dogma.

This is where Buddhism usually dodges a bullet (that whacky cult in Japan with the nerve gas notwithstanding) because adherents know going in that it doesn’t attempt to nail down every little detail.

Which is why wingnuts cannot embrace Eastern religions, or even Pagan ones; it would require making up their own mind.

If we’re turning this into an SF suggestion then I would consider such a thread woefully incomplete without mentioning Joe Haldeman. One of the best living SF writers. Great books and guess what, he’s not insane (h/t Firesign Theater). Haldeman’s brilliant.

The analogy is a bit old, but this is like blaming the UAW workers at Ford for the Edsel. Management, in far too many businesses, always find a scapegoat when they screw up, and cost people jobs and homes.

Maybe the wingnut welfare kings should start looking in the mirror when they are tempted to blame someone else.

Poor pukes. They had the presnitzy. The Supreme Court. Both the Senate and the House.

And yet they couldn’t stop the liberals and the coloreds.

It does make you wonder what the compelling case is to vote puke, even if you buy their b.s.

The more I read of OSC’s increasingly compulsive and desperate attempts to write persuasive essays on social issues, the more I’m convinced that he’s a self-hating gay or bisexual man who can’t resolve his sexuality with his faith. And, you know, I don’t level this sort of accusation casually, given all the grief that Frederic Wertham gave Dick and I about our partnership. To be fair, Dick does tend to overcompensate a bit; I swear, that boy gets more punani than a convent bicycle seat.

MKS,
Please see alec’s comment upthread, especially the bolded part. Let me quote it for you:

and most importantly that we consider enormous finance bodies who have been given every possible advantage and who have made a great profit from every single irresponsible practice leading to the crisis completely innocent.

So in answer to your question, Card does not actually use the words “niggers forced banks to give them liar loans” – but it is impossible to read what he wrote without assuming that fact and/or being grotesquely offended at his stupidity and immorality.

MKS:

He’s blaming the poor, because he’s saying that poor people all got loans they weren’t able to repay. It’s the same strawman that’s been erected to blame minorities for the current crisis. The attack might confuse someone because he starts by saying it was a political decision. He doesn’t seem to directly accuse people of ignorance or deception, he just says poor people, likely minorities, are to blame.

It’s a tired, and disproven, argument.

“It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.”

Yer missing “Where’s mah mofo iced tea, bitch????”

Cordwainer Smith (evidently a bit of a douchebag himself, but at least he could write.) Throw in some Harlan Ellison for your pepper and Bradbury for your sugar…

Bradbury himself is, of course, a grade-A psycho douchebag par excellence.

I don’t read much SF these days — I tend to spend nearly all my time in the horror section of the bookstores.

I’ve always been a big fan of Bradbury. Hate his politics, but dangit, I can forgive a lot for the guy who wrote “Dandelion Wine,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and all those great short stories…

Urm, I don’t think I’d call him a “grade-S psycho douchebag par excellence.”

“Conservative ass,” sure. But Bradbury’s politics are not anywhere near as extremist as Card’s.

Oh, and on the subject of horror — I have no idea at all about most horror writers’ politics. I think King is a liberal. Lovecraft was a loon, but not much loonier than anyone else those days. Rice is a loon, but she doesn’t have Lovecraft’s talent to fall back on.

The small-time horror writers I’m acquainted with tend to be liberals, but I’m sure that’s not universal…

“Grade-S.” HAH.

I could go on all day about horror and politics. King famously said the horror genre was (paraphrasing) as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece suit, but that’s largely because horror relies on something evil coming in and busting up the status quo, requiring someone to come in, vanquish the evil monster, and re-establish the status quo…

Sometimes I think Bradbury’s problem is that on some level he still thinks he’s writing for some cheapskate pulp editor and might get screwed out of his penny a word, and doesn’t grasp that his work is now fair game for literary and other allusions. It struck me as funny that he considered Fahrenheit 911 possible plagiarism, when he lifted Golden Apples of The Sun from Yeats himself.

Also, I’m guessing the writer better known for a computer column was likely Jerry Pournelle, who edited an endless series of military themed SF anthologies during the Reagan years and cowrote some things with Niven. Pournelle is apparently also a friend of Steve Sailer, so maybe that will help someone playing a wingnut variation of Six Degrees.

Cordwainer Smith’s whole story is too complicated for me to make any comment, the Sun Yat Sen connection alone I think makes that a different ballgame.

In the midst of all this anger, can someone point out where in his article Orson Scott Card is blaming the poor?

Card comes across as being all emo over those hurtin’ po-buckers, but unless he’s sleep-writing on Ambien here, he knows damn well that the wingnut cadres are in the midst of a jumbo Hate-A-Thon toward minorities over stuff like the CRA & its (nominal) ties to the sub-prime mess, & that his shoddy thesis justifies said bigotry.

Portraying Greenspan as some kind of Cassandra wailing omens of doom is gallows humor at best: he was the prime enabler of the mega-scam by jerry-rigging interest-rates & monetary policy to fuel the fire. So too is the popular wingnut meme of Republicans’ courageous efforts to reign in a rabid Fannie & Freddie – they were still behind the private sector by a country mile when it came to crappy lending praxis, largely due to regulations that the GOP would’ve happpily gutted if they thought they could pull it off.

BushCo knew this tsunami of pure fugly was on its way – & lied with a smile over & over & over again about the economy being “fundamentally sound” so as to prop up their economic house of cards, hoping to keep it intact until their inevitable loss to Obama.

Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences.

Ergo, Card is a dishonest hack: FM/FM aren’t able to “approve risky loans” because they don’t loan money, period. They buy loans – & if the only ones around are based on crazy sludge like hyper-leveraging or ARMs, you either play along or go out of business. The GOP have outpaced the Dems in the deregulation-sweepstakes by light-years, ever since the days of FDR – knowing full well what sort of nightmare their “Sieg Heil, Free Markets!” jazz invariably leads to when greed “takes flight” – & letting their Inner Nihilist out to play by encouraging it.

You can blame the pols (from BOTH parties, but mainly the GOP) & the Wall St. hammerheads who truly created this sinkhole … or you can blame ONE party (& the wrong one at that) & FM/FM, who had zero control over the loaning industry.

My economic savvy borders on the autistic, & even MY nose detects the stench of toxic bullshit – Card isn’t mistaken, he’s lying. Maliciously, & for personal gain.

Those lies are rocket-fuel for the Hate Patrol that wants to pin the Crash of ’08 on scary dark folks. That’s what’s causing “all this anger.”

There’s kind of a friendly vs. asshole/left vs. right spectrum for SF authors. Le Guin is nice and lefty, Ellison is an asshole and lefty, Bradbury is an asshole and kind of right wing, Heinlein is right wing but not as much of an assole as Bradbury, and Jerry Pournelle is a fascist dick.

I may chart this out.

Okay, I just got back from reading the kuro5hin essay about Card, and wow, there are a goddamn hell of a lot of fucking assholes in science fiction. Inviting someone to a convention just so you can ambush them and beat them up? That makes me want to start attending SF conventions just so I can hunt down the prick who wrote “Horseclans” and kick him in the balls.

The characters Buttocks: I find them unconvincing, unysmpathetic, and ultimately uninteresting.

Jus’ tryin’ t’help y’all out here…

mikey

The Buttocks have always been extraordinarily convincing.

Man, I love my Nephites. Love ’em, man. But the Lamanites — man, they’re always fucking shit up!

Mormonism only looks weird because it is so recent. But what is kooky about Mormonism is in fact characteristic of all religions at some point in their development.

I say this as a stark raving atheist — I disagree with this. As fucked up as the institutions of Xtianity are, there is at least a beautiful, motivating idea of universal justice hiding behind it. Yeah, the whole son of god stuff is just as dumb as Mormon tenets and of course the Xtian bible has a bunch of historically erroneous crap in it. But what exactly is the motivating idea behind Mormonism? Nothing BUT the historical lies: that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Jews, that Jesus came to America, that Eden was in Missouri (rly? come on), that Joseph Smith read some shit off of golden plates using a rock hidden in a hat. Basically, the LDS is the religion of loony racist American exceptionalism combined with wingnugget social ideology.

Mormons are Christians.

What? No discussion of the politics of Spider Robinson?

*

My $ 0.02 on the actual statement by Orson “what a” Card … if anything, the whole mortgage mess is a consequence of redlining, not a consequence of teh evil liberalz forcing bankers to lend money to teh po’ colored folk. If people could get loans they could afford (and get housing they could afford), then they wouldn’t be shunted to these impossible to decipher ARMs, etc. (anyone who blames the borrowers here for not understanding the terms should consider how carefully they read the reams of paperwork with their own mortgage) which bit them in the end.

But anti-redlining laws or no anti-redlining laws … people of color still get shunted away from certain properties (when my wife was looking to find a place to live, she was steered away from certain buildings that, well, don’t necessarily want “one of those people” living there … and this was in the 1990s in NYC!), denied loans they can afford (why do we have credit scores? people should be required to submit budgets for ‘how are you gonna repay this loan’ rather than having loan officers consult some bizarre oracle living in Suze Orman’s basement), shunted to loans that sound good but ultimately are unaffordable, etc.

Don’t forget: L Ron Hubbard considered himself an SF writer…

I definitely read that ridiculously long SF series by him as a kid (Mission: Earth or something –10 volumes!). Now every time I hear about Scientology, I think of that series and laugh and laugh. (I could probably diagnose him based on that shit, swear to god… I have *never* seen that much semi-graphic pedophilia, paranoia, lesbian sex, bestiality and rape thinly veiled as social commentary in one place before.)

As fucked up as the institutions of Xtianity are, there is at least a beautiful, motivating idea of universal justice hiding behind it.

The big difference between Christianity and Mormonism is the literary quality of the Bible (admittedly quite high) versus the Book of Mormon. The tale of Exodus, the book of Isaiah, the Gospel of John are all very beautiful. Unfortunately, the history of the Church has only the most tangential relation to these literary highlights.

A church is what it does, not what its books say. In terms of sheer brutality, stupidity, racism, really every species of low-mindedness that you can think of, the mainline Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, make the Mormons look like the Quakers.

Loneoak: Uh, right off the top of my head, eternal progression is one of the core tenets of the LDS faith and is as noble as anything in Christianity. The Book of Mormon has almost no doctrinal significance in the LDS. It’s relevant as “history” and as a symbol of Smith’s prophecy. The reason Mormons defend it so frantically is not because it’s core to their beliefs but because it condemns their prophet as a fabulist.

And this “beautiful, motivating idea of universal justice” in Christianity is? Pay your taxes? Pluck out your eye so as not to commit the soul-damning sin of lust? Throw away everything you own so you can follow a madman with delusions of grandeur? Abstain from sex and pleasure or risk forfeiting your life? If Rabbi Yeshua had been born in the 19th century, he’d have been just one of the maddest of the revival cult founders, a footnote in history.

The religion Joseph Smith created was as unlikely and unstable as that which Jesus did. It took successors, like Brigham Young and Paul, to incubate an untenable apocalyptic cult into a religion that human beings could reasonably practice, generation after generation.

The politics of SF and fantasy literature is a fascinating and underexamined topic, IMNSHO. Moorcock’s essay is great, and thanks to Moh Kohn for linking to it.

OSC’s Alvin Maker series was entertaining, but creeped me out even more than the Ender series did – it was like Alternate History and Magical Realism took some teratogenic hallucinogens and had a kid.
My husband was a big OSC fan until he hit the homophobia head on and decided to quit cold turkey.

Ah, Card. The Zell Lieberman of Sci-Fi.

He can go fuck himself with a Garden Weasel. He’s a hack writer that had some adolescent wankspawn go bestseller and somehow thinks that it makes his shit lack aroma. Fuck him.

At the time, or I guess some years later when I read the shit, I thought Enders Game a facile but not entirely awful bit of Junior High angst made solid. Not all that special, but spattered with enough archetype-dust that I could understand its popularity. He’d hardly be the first hack to make millions.

Many years later, into the current administration, I came across his name on an opinion piece for the WSJ. Thinking it might be interesting, I read it. Yowza! Here I had thought that the whole thirteen-year-old worldview thing was literary artifice. NoooOOOoooo. This clown, even in the intervening couple of decades, had still not managed to think his way out of that paper bag. What a dipshit. Seriously. I got a page or three into Empire when it came out because it was the butt of so much humor. I just wanted to know how bad it was. It was terrible. I have seen more cogent scrawl on vomit-stained bar napkins.

Card needs to slink off into whatever hole seems convenient and never bother sentient beings with his drivel again.

Even his Glorious Achievement of Children’s Literature is pornographic, brutal, and fascist.

The first I ever heard about Orscon Scott Card was a in nasty review of the fascist elements of Ender’s Game and the absolutely vile wingnuttery that was coming out of his mouth something like a year back. I bought Ender’s Game in a second hand bookstore on a whim and was ready to hate every word of it or to start snickering over the pages. Then something weird happened, I started reading page 1 and a couple of hours later I finished it. I was genuinely entertained by it.

Yes, there’s a near-fascistic moral aspect underlining the story. The psychology is also completely messed up; Card is said to have experience with abusive situations and perhaps the way other children behave towards Ender is his genuine perception of their motives, but, really, humans do not respond in such a one track fashion to someone who is ‘better’ than them, not even children. And that’s from a nerd that has seen his share of abuse from other children when he was young. Like I said, there was plenty to hate in there, yet I enjoyed it.

It dawned on me that it’s not the morality spiel or the nerd revenge fetish that makes it captivating, it’s the larger story motif. Like every succesful science fiction story, Ender’s Game follows the pattern of the Karate Kid: A young protagonist has a special skill and gets trained into its full use in a storyline that leads to an eventual face-off. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Dune, they’re all just clever bullshit stories around this same motif. And it tickles a boyish fantasy that gets such stories a large following. What is fascinating about Ender’s game is not that it is a big propaganda piece for Card’s own insane brand of wingnuttery. The real observation to take away from it is that the Karate Kid motif can captivate us even through a vessel of what amounts to terrible writing.

I’m tossing the ender books into the compost pile today. I can’t possibly read them anymore without thinking what a complete dipshit card is. And he is. A complete dipshit.

You shouldn’t disregard art or literature just because its creator is an asshole. Mozart was a juvenile asshole with probably terrible politics. Wagner was an anti-semitic bastard. Not that Mr. Card’s writing should be seen as quite that important on the scale of things, but if you enjoyed the books you’re a fool to toss them out just because the author is a huge flopping wingnut vagina.

Thank you for the succinct takedown.

Poor Orson. He’s moving beyond losing it, into the area of being really really lost. And it’s sad to see.

Conservatism is incestuously entwined with the GOP, and their delirious and and painful fornication is taking them ever further from reality. It seems like, to get the rise and the hallucinations they want, they have to choke off conscious thought. It’s like politico-erotic asphyxiation.

But Card doesn’t have to “go down” with them. He could let go at any time. All it would take is the pain of re-evaluating his ideological allegiances. But instead, he’s slapping on the chaps.

I also think it’s counter-productive to rule out art if the creator’s an asshole in some other area. Really, just about every single good author before say 1950 was a sexist, racist, elitist, imperialist or some other kind of shitty in their private life. And often in their public.

That said, Card is really starting to piss me off. And what good novel has he written for me lately?

tuned into Rush Oxycontin this morning just in time to hear him read OSC’s screed. thanks for pointing out the falacies in it. where’s my Fairness Doctrine when I need it?

Long before I read Ender’s Game, I read this absolutely awful book called Hart’s Hope, in which, in the opening chapter, the daughter of a king is raped by the conqueror of the country, because this is the standard way that a conqueror shows that he’s the boss (or some such shit), and that girl grows up to become this horrible monster who has to be destroyed by the young and innocent hero.

If I had remembered that Hart’s Hope was written by Orson Scott Card, I never would have read Ender’s Game. That book was also misogynistic, but not to the same extent as Hart’s Hope. And that’s about the best thing I can say about it, frankly.

The tale of Exodus, the book of Isaiah, the Gospel of John are all very beautiful.

The Gospel of John is the Jew-blamiest one.

Thanks to everyone for the links. As someone who has about 16 boxes of paperback SF from the 50s forward (I only kept the good stuff), I read OSC the way most of you do. Good first story, as a tale, and from then onward complete literary degeneration. Much like Heinlein, except quicker.

And if you look for something to read out of this thread, Cordwainer Smith’s “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul” ought to rip your heart out. In a good way. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is another great short story, highly recommended by me and Ursula LeGuin.

http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___6.htm

You know, of all possible human mishaps, disasters, catastrophes, and series of unfortunate events, I’d have thought that a collapse of Wall Street investment banks and its global repercussions would be the one thing that couldn’t be blamed on poor urban blacks.

Guess it was just their turn. Again.

I have to second the novelization of “the Abyss”. Really, it’s better than the movie – it’s an actual novel – and showed a surprising amount of human insight.

Dan Someone:

Card has written one really good book, a few reasonably decent books, and a raft of crap…

Pretty much my assessment, too.

…(always on the lookout for that 10% non-crap that Sturgeon’s Law tells me is out there)…

…and there, Dan Someone has demonstrated the only valid way to put Orson Scott Card’s name anywhere near Theodore Sturgeon’s.

I read the Financial Times pretty much cover to cover every day, and you’d think if bankers thought poor people or the CRA were at the root of the crisis, then that’d be the forum to bitch about it. but no. no one makes that argument there. ever. the only time i’ve even seen it referenced was when some poor sap had to interview retards at a mccain rally, where he was subsequently informed that its all the fault of the darkies.

then again, knowing what securitization is, what collateralized debt obligations are, what SIVs are….leverage ratios….credit default swaps….the LIBOR rate., etc. etc.,…all requires big hurty thinky power! ouch my brain! something i cant possibly understand must be the fault of TEH BLACKS!!!1!1!! Damn the liberal media for ignoring this!!!

say what you will, it must be really easy being republican.

I’m so confused.

Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.) [emph added]

But what is kooky about Mormonism is in fact characteristic of all religions at some point in their development.

I missed where mainstream Christianity went through a sacred-underwear phase, though it could have been the gnostics, I could never keep track of them.

The sacred underwear is right out of Freemasonry. It wasn’t an innovation by Smith in any sense.

Whoops, there went the last bit of my respect for Mormon Scott Card.

One thing he might like to explain to us – if letting the darkies take out home loans was the reason for the collapse of Wall Street, howcum it took ten to thirty years for it to work?

Seriously, people, who the fuck cares what we think about Ender’s Game? How the fuck is it germane and how the fuck did it make its way into 43% of the comments?

Well, it’s what he’s known for, and the main reason anyone’s been listening to what Orson Scott Card has to say about anything else, so I’d say it’s somewhat germane.

then again, knowing what securitization is, what collateralized debt obligations are, what SIVs are….leverage ratios….credit default swaps….the LIBOR rate., etc. etc.,…all requires big hurty thinky power! ouch my brain! something i cant possibly understand must be the fault of TEH BLACKS!!!1!1!! Damn the liberal media for ignoring this!!!

That.

Orson Scott Card used to go on Rusty Humphries’ radio show and is certifiable. Back in January 2007, he made these psychotic claims:

1) The Iraq War is the best run of any American war.

2) Pres. Fredo is the greatest President in Card’s lifetime.

3) Pres. Fredo is truly a moderate.

No wonder AssRocket thinks Card is reputable.

I actually spent part of an evening with the late author of the Horseclan series, drinking Greek brandy and talking about this and that. This was at a convention in Mobile, AL, where I got to meet Jack Williamson, who was the Oldest Living SF writer for a while until he passes away a few years ago.

He bragged that all he had to do was give a title of the next Horseclans novel to his publisher and he’d have a contract, along with an advance payment. He crossed himself whenever he mentioned his mother, so he had a Catholic upbringing, FWIW

As for kicking him in the balls, you’ll have to dig him up for that one, he’s been in the Choir Invisible for lo these 18 years.

Orson Scott Card is certainly a nut job and he’s fallen for this twaddle, but Jerry Pournelle is also spouting this gibberish. And Larry Niven is almost certainly repeating this nonsense too.

Sometime around 1984, all the right-wing science fiction writers seemed to go insane. Heinlein started promoting and espousing the senile criminal Reagan’s idotic and wholly unworkable Star Wars delusions. How could someone as smart and knowledgeable as Robert Heinlein fall for that horseshit?

Didn’t he realize we didn’t (and still don’t) have mirrors capable of reflecting X-rays, so there was no possible way we could produce X-ray lasers? Didn’t he know that after the shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, there was no possible way to ship thousands of shuttles worth of components up into space to create giant space-based lasers? Didn’t he understand that space-based lasers required such titanic amounts of energy that even if we could lift the thousands of tons of chemical or fissionable energy sources into orbit required to power a laser, you’d only get one shot? So you’d need thousands upon thousands of space-based lasers?

But Heinlein babbled that delusion idiocy in flagrant violation of engineering reality and physics and budgetary practicality…and he kept on spouting that gibberish, until the day he died. What the hell went wrong with Heinlein’s brain? You have to suspect brain damage of some kind.

Then Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven become adamant global warming deniers. The evidence on global warming is so overwhelming, convering from so many sources, that denying the anthropogenic nature of global warming is equivalent to denying the roundness of the earth. And yet Pournelle and Niven persist in their crazy denial of the mountain of evidence for global warming. According to them, global _cooling_ is the big problem…despite the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheets, despite the increase in hurricanes, despite everything. They just deny, deny, deny. Have Pournelle and Niven gone insane? Are they permanent high? Did they hit their heads in a car accident and suffer severe head trauma resulting in massive cognitive deifcit?

And now this latest insanity. The evidence is overwhelming that the ACM loans had a _lower_ delinquency rate than other types of loans. Yet Pournelle and Card blithely deny the facts and persist in blaming the victims for the subprime meltdown. You have to wonder — is there an epidemic of brain damage among science fiction writers? Did some brain-sucking amoeba get into their water supply and destroy their frontal lobes? What the hell is wrong with these people?

Next, I expect to hear the Democrats blamed for the Iraq war. Bill Clinton will be blamed for the corruption and incompetence over the last 8 years. It’s delusional. People like Orson Scott Card and Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven sound like they’re high on LSD. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Either that, or these people are just plain nuts.

Didn’t he realize we didn’t (and still don’t) have mirrors capable of reflecting X-rays, so there was no possible way we could produce X-ray lasers? Didn’t he know that after the shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, there was no possible way to ship thousands of shuttles worth of components up into space to create giant space-based lasers? Didn’t he understand that space-based lasers required such titanic amounts of energy that even if we could lift the thousands of tons of chemical or fissionable energy sources into orbit required to power a laser, you’d only get one shot? So you’d need thousands upon thousands of space-based lasers?

Mmm – Teller’s bomb pulse lasers are a design to turn a single nuclear blast into a single shot X-ray laser. No mirror required, although (obviously) a single shot. I would think aiming the bloody things would be a problem, though.

Then Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven become adamant global warming deniers. The evidence on global warming is so overwhelming, convering from so many sources, that denying the anthropogenic nature of global warming is equivalent to denying the roundness of the earth. And yet Pournelle and Niven persist in their crazy denial of the mountain of evidence for global warming.

Yup. I am now reading the latest rant from John Ringo (nutcase, but entertaining at times) which sneers at global warming based on the idea that if, fictionally, the sun stops shining as much, things will get colder.

No shit, Sherlock. And if pig had wings and feathers, they’d be birds – but in the meantime they still produce bacon.

And, from the real world, I see that Singapore is desperately worried about the fact that they now depend on dikes to hold back the tide as the sea level rises. You think these anti-global warming bozos would try making a killing speculating in low-lying land values, if it’s all such a con…

The cause of the sub-prime crisis was liar loans and option ARMs. Fannie/Freddie bought neither, and indeed Fannie/Freddie accounted for less than 30% of mortgage-backed securities in 2006, the peak of the sub-prime lending era. Sub-prime loans purchased by Fannie/Freddie had to pass standard Fannie/Freddie lending requirements, including proof of income sufficient to pay the mortgage, and had a default rate not much worse than their prime loans.

As for Orson Scott Card, it is widely known that he is a closeted pedophile. That is why so many of his novels are about children, this gives him an opportunity to undress children in his imagination while he writes. If you read Ender’s Game as an exercise in pedophilia — especially the ways in which the children are abused (in a way similar to sado-masochistic sex, you can almost imagine OSC wanking off while writing those scenes) — you start getting a really sick feeling and start wanting to track OSC down and tie him to the ground and let a dozen or so nasty 12 year old brats beat the sh*t out of him. OSC is one sick mofo…

– Badtux the Sci-Fi Penguin

For anyone who wants an analysis of the right wing claims that Fannie and Freddie were the cause of our current problem from an economist, rather than a washed up science fiction author (though I am a big fan of much of Card’s earlier work) I suggest:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/09/once-again-it-w.html

Consider, for example the chart of mortgage debt holdings. The pink line (agency- and government-sponsored enterprises backed mortgage pools) is Freddie and Fannie. Notice how their market share plummeted in 2003, which is when the housing bubble really separated from reality. That is also when the sub-prime and alt-A (a less sub kind of non-prime mortgage) mortage sector took off. The aqua blue line (Asset backed securities issuers) is the unregulated private mortgage finance industry. Notice how it exploded starting in 2003. You can see that F&F managed to halt their market share collapse in 2006, the pink line flattens out. That is when they entered the sub prime market, in which they were previously a bit player. By that time the bomb was there with it’s fuse burning and they were dooming themselves to be blown up along with the rest of the financial industry.

So F&F were followers in the crisis, not leaders. The leaders were the mortgage issuing companies (eg countrywide) and the unregulated private mortgage finance industry (such as investment banks).

Mark Thoma’s blog post goes over various other lines of evidence.

With regard to that chart I also find the earlier time period interesting. Notice how F&F’s market share had been increasing since around 1970, but really took off in around 77. Notice also the maroon line which is declining inversely. That maroon line is the Savings and Loan industry, which was collapsing under high inflation, then deregulation and looting by executives.