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Yea, pretty much any reading from the early part of the 20th century is gonna have some racism issues. It's not exactly like it was hidden back then.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:20 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:22 |
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I should clarify that I didn't decide to never read another word of the story or anything like that; it just made me roll my eyes. I knew Howard had some odd, racist views; I just didn't expect them to come up so often. Having said that, the idea that every 30s writer had the same attitudes as Howard seems wrong to me. The only other author of the time still widely read whose views really seem comparable is Lovecraft.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:22 |
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Eh, to be fair Lovecraft hated everyone. I don't think he even liked white people around him in his real life. But yea, dude was not exactly subtle about it in his writing.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:31 |
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DeusExMachinima posted:You'll probably have to avoid most writing then, old or contemporary. Just keep in mind that 80 years from now someone will be trashing our posts for using gendered pronouns or whatever. It comes with the territory. tooterfish posted:I personally love reading silver age and pulp science fiction. You'd be surprised at just how prescient some authors were, even going back further than the turn of the century. But to enjoy it you've got to accept that you'll occasionally come across things you don't agree with. Racism in 1930s America was like background radiation, almost impossible to get away from. Yeeeaah, see, the problem with applying that argument Howard in particular is that the Conan stories aren't just good pulp fantasy with lashings of unfortunate but standard and unavoidable racism. They are exceptionally racist, even by contemporary standards, and hardly subtle about it. The entire series was built around the concept of history as the clash of races, with the refined and civilised Aquilonians pitted against the virile Hyperboreans, savage Picts and degenerate Stygians. Sorry guys, but I'd probably feel more comfortable recommending someone push through Missee Lee, the Swallows and Amazons book that is 75% crude Orientalism by weight. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Sep 4, 2015 |
# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:38 |
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Silver2195 posted:Just started reading this, and wow, Howard is hilariously racist.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:48 |
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tooterfish posted:Yeah, kinda goes without saying. You'll have to try and see past that. Fwiw, I read this as having a very clear implicit if you're going to read it, you'll have to try and see past that. Not saying you should see past it and keep reading.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:51 |
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tooterfish posted:Yeah, kinda goes without saying. You'll have to try and see past that. The thing is, Howard's work can well be viewed as one giant political treatise as well as pulp adventure (with some BDSM appeal thrown in to appease Weird Tales's horndog of an editor). It's basically his take on history as informed by his eugenicist, protofascist ideology, describing how various cultures and civilisations shift between decadent civilisation, subhuman savagery, and the ideal middle ground, barbarism, which spends most of its time conning the civilised folk and exterminating the savages in pornographic detail (the remainder is spent with civilised folks exterminating savages when there aren't any useful barbarians to hand). These two articles provide a pretty good (if lengthy) overview.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 22:53 |
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^^^ This is how you talk about racism or other problematic issues in dated topics. Not by getting all goggle-eyed at it.RVProfootballer posted:Fwiw, I read this as having a very clear implicit if you're going to read it, you'll have to try and see past that. Not saying you should see past it and keep reading.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:06 |
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Autonomous Monster posted:Yeeeaah, see, the problem with applying that argument Howard in particular is that the Conan stories aren't just good pulp fantasy with lashings of unfortunate but standard and unavoidable racism. They are exceptionally racist, even by contemporary standards, and hardly subtle about it. The entire series was built around the concept of history as the clash of races, with the refined and civilised Aquilonians pitted against the virile Hyperboreans, savage Picts and degenerate Stygians. Darth Walrus posted:The thing is, Howard's work can well be viewed as one giant political treatise as well as pulp adventure (with some BDSM appeal thrown in to appease Weird Tales's horndog of an editor). It's basically his take on history as informed by his eugenicist, protofascist ideology, describing how various cultures and civilisations shift between decadent civilisation, subhuman savagery, and the ideal middle ground, barbarism, which spends most of its time conning the civilised folk and exterminating the savages in pornographic detail (the remainder is spent with civilised folks exterminating savages when there aren't any useful barbarians to hand). These two articles provide a pretty good (if lengthy) overview. How you could possibly see anybody besides Lovecraft as the King poo poo of SF racism in the 30's is one big to me. The core of Conan the Cimmerian is basically adventure for adventure's sake and oh yeah the author lived in the 1930's so prepare yourself for the baggage. OTOH, Lovecraft's entire concept of Cthulhu/the fishmen/whoever else interbreeding with cultists is pretty core to his entire universe and is 100% an anti-race mixing thing. He's explicit about it in his letters.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:10 |
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DeusExMachinima posted:How you could possibly see anybody besides Lovecraft as the King poo poo of SF racism in the 30's is one big to me. The core of Conan the Cimmerian is basically adventure for adventure's sake and oh yeah the author lived in the 1930's so prepare yourself for the baggage. OTOH, Lovecraft's entire concept of Cthulhu/the fishmen/whoever else interbreeding with cultists is pretty core to his entire universe and is 100% an anti-race mixing thing. He's explicit about it in his letters. Read the articles. Lovecraft and Howard were both insanely racist even by the standards of the time, but Lovecraft could occasionally turn it off and write good horror without significant baggage (The Colour Out Of Space owns, and the Outsider is a pretty good example of an admittedly now-overexposed story), while racism was the ideological underpinning to all of Howard's work, and it just becomes more obvious as you read more of it.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:17 |
Arguing over which of those two is the worst racist is kindof futile, but I'm leering of ascribing too much "philosophy" to Howard -- a lot of his race-history stuff has always seemed more fictional-philosophy than actual worldview. I'll read the articles but the impression I've always had of Howard is that he was basically just letting his Id run buck-wild on the page, and that meant a lot of incidental racism. Conversely, with Lovecraft, he was just deeply terrified of the Other and that informs a lot of his writing. So both racist, but one out of pants-wetting fear, the other out of testosterone overdose.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:26 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Arguing over which of those two is the worst racist is kindof futile, but I'm leering of ascribing too much "philosophy" to Howard -- a lot of his race-history stuff has always seemed more fictional-philosophy than actual worldview. That kind of goes out the window when he starts writing closer to home, I'm afraid. The Conan stories are specifically supposed to be set in our world's ancient past, and he deploys the exact same civilisation-barbarism-savagery trifecta in his Roman, medieval, and Old West stories (where the frontiersmen are the 'barbarians' - you can probably guess who fills the other two slots).
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:36 |
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DeusExMachinima posted:How you could possibly see anybody besides Lovecraft as the King poo poo of SF racism in the 30's is one big to me. The core of Conan the Cimmerian is basically adventure for adventure's sake and oh yeah the author lived in the 1930's so prepare yourself for the baggage. OTOH, Lovecraft's entire concept of Cthulhu/the fishmen/whoever else interbreeding with cultists is pretty core to his entire universe and is 100% an anti-race mixing thing. He's explicit about it in his letters. That article is interesting Darth Walrus, thanks for linking it. I personally don't see the point of dismissing all of the stories out of hand despite their flaws though, and especially despite the flaws of their author. Like I said, leave it to your own conscience. Also, the comments section is full of people saying "yeah, I haven't read any of them BUT I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING YOU SAID", which is pretty loving hilarious, so thanks for a good laugh too. tooterfish fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Sep 4, 2015 |
# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:40 |
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I don't remember any civilization in Conan not being horrible in various ways. Even the Aquilonians come across as racist as hell, but maybe they were just intended to be the advanced White People race and so being racist ancient world Nazis was just a side-effect.
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# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:44 |
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Evil Fluffy posted:I don't remember any civilization in Conan not being horrible in various ways. Even the Aquilonians come across as racist as hell, but maybe they were just intended to be the advanced White People race and so being racist ancient world Nazis was just a side-effect. Depends how you're defining 'civilisation', but like I said, Howard doesn't really like civilised societies except when the only alternative is savagery. The real heroes are the virile, harsh-but-noble barbarians who live on the thin line between civilisation and savagery, and the Aquilonians are a decadent civilised society who get redeemed by a barbarian taking over and putting some steel in their spines (sometimes literally). The parallels to the myth-building of the early fascists are remarkable, and there's good odds that Howard was inspired by many of the same writings - unlike Lovecraft, though, he didn't like Hitler because the guy was too much of a bloody Kraut. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Sep 4, 2015 |
# ? Sep 4, 2015 23:49 |
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Defining Howard as concerned primarily with race is strange to me, since his letters make so clear he was primarily interested instead in the battle between civilization and barbarism, how civilization empowers a people materially even as it weakens them mentally and spiritually. He and Lovecraft (who takes the side of civilization) exchanged dozens of notes on the topic.
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# ? Sep 5, 2015 05:41 |
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Howard seemed to have been lightening up on the race thing a bit as he wrote and exchanged letters with a lot of people outside his small town Texas home. Then he killed himself at age 30 so we'll never know how he might have developed. He was pretty feminist and often defended the ladies in his letters, as well as including female characters with some degree of agency. I mean they certainly didn't compare to the mighty thews of Conan and he spent a fair bit of time on their 'attributes' but they also slung swords and double-crossed our hero. Conan's life itself was pretty much a neverending clusterfuck, he was this enormously capable and smart guy but he couldn't keep his finances together, he was constantly on the run, couldn't deal with authority, and was witness (and cause) to constant disaster. Most Howard stories ended with Conan having basically nothing more than he started with, sometimes less--sometimes a lady friend instead of riches, but that was all. The racism is really apparent if you read the Howard stuff as an adult though. The specific descriptions of 'black races' are...not nice, and Conan even works with the Aquilonians in their attempts to exterminate the 'picts' of Zogar Sag (I don't think he knew what a Pict was) because he couldn't abandon a white race to savagery. He thinks their advance into the savage realms is ill-advised but his principles won't let him leave, at least not until all is truly lost. Aquilonia is Rome through the lens of a writer who probably learned history from the legacy of Gibbons, which attributed Rome's fall to decadent immorality. Conan himself is meant to be not-Irish, as Howard was proud of his Irish heritage, but the visual and a lot of his feats are based on the noble savage ideal of a Cherokee warrior. The thing is, the nobility of 'barbarism' seemed to be reserved primarily for the weird way (to us) that Howard defined whiteness--Conan was a barbarian while the Picts were savages and not of the white races despite being based on a Celtic origin. Still, for all that, Howard's racism originated less from the frantic fear of basically everything that dominated Lovecraft's life. Reading his stories in the modern era can be tough--I still enjoy them but I am able to do so because the author is dead and not spouting nonsense about half-savages on his blog or whatnot.
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# ? Sep 5, 2015 07:06 |
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Xotl posted:Defining Howard as concerned primarily with race is strange to me, since his letters make so clear he was primarily interested instead in the battle between civilization and barbarism, how civilization empowers a people materially even as it weakens them mentally and spiritually. He and Lovecraft (who takes the side of civilization) exchanged dozens of notes on the topic. He was a 1920-30s protofascist, though, which meant that (a) he didn't see much of a dividing line between society and genetics, and (b) he thought genetics were highly mutable over a short timeframe. Civilisation literally weakened your blood as it moved you away from the constant survival-of-the-fittest that kept the barbarians mighty, while savagery literally devolved you into a subhuman animal (there's at least one story featuring oddly intelligent apes who used to be human). Now, this did mean that it was relatively easy for different races to shift between the three stages (the savage Picts, Conan's favourite sword-fodder, actually won the Hyborean Age for a while after ascending to barbarism), but that's never treated as an excuse for barbarians not to dick over the other two groups as much as their wild, proud hearts willed them to. Basically, it wasn't so much that he wasn't a racist as that his ideas on race were really loving weird.
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# ? Sep 5, 2015 09:09 |
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Why do people itt get so hung up on racism in old books? I mean, no duh?Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:Lies of Locke Lamora unless you deem that too GoT/WoT for you, in which case your loss cause that book is great. Bought, cheers. flosofl posted:Traitor's Blade and Knight's Shadow. Those look interesting. Fangz posted:Earthsea. Got the series, thanks. Antti posted:Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. It's about necromancer lawyers and a court case against a god who has died and screwed over the city it was protecting by running up a huge divine influence debt. Something different! Tales about old gods and poo poo are cool, that's why I picked up City of Stairs. Khizan posted:China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Read it! Autonomous Monster posted:Can we count The Book of the New Sun as fantasy for these purposes? tBotNS is always the answer, no matter what the question is. I am also thinking Small Gods (mostly because we just had a dust-up about it in the Britpol thread). Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, too. Perdido Street Station? Wow! OK... Jonathan Strange sounds god awful, no thanks. Book of the New Sun, that sounds fantastic and exactly the right kind of thing. Game of Thrones started off great but devolved into trite by the end of book 3. Wheel of Time was super awful-young-male-protagonist-plus-boring-world crap. And I just started a book called A Crucible of Souls, and that is just endless backstory and first person drama. Now, the type of sci fi I like involves philosophical ruminations, an intrigue plot, rounded characters that we discover and aren't told about. Anything that tells and doesn't show is awful, and that's the main problem I have with a lot of fantasy (though I know it's a problem in SF too). Usually it's because it's told in first person and the writer has the plot/world revolve and centre around a character, rather than have a character react to a world. I think that's the key to a good genre fiction book. Less melodrama. Imajica and Black Company look good. Dark Tower was meh after the excellent Wizard and Glass. Earth and Power looks OK. KJ Parker is definitely someone on the radar. Half-Made World was excellent, really should read the sequel. Other suggestions are intrgiguing. Cheers! The Red Knight and The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron isn't particularly childish (and is pretty good). If what you consider "childish" as actually just straight Tolkien-esque High Fantasy (as opposed to High Fantasy that is more morally grey, I suppose) then there's a lot of fantasy that doesn't fit that mold. We even have an entire thread dedicated to one of the preeminent authors in that genre (Joe Abercrombie). And there's even a fair amount of Tolkien-esque High Fantasy that isn't rubbish. Anyone pick up Twelve Kings in Sharakhai by Bradley P. Beaulieu? I grabbed it on the strength of the first three chapters (which were pretty drat strong) but haven't had time to get to the rest of it just yet. Still, it's one of those few stories that isn't in a Stock Medieval Europe setting, and with the current "Durr Muslims" attitude in the US it's refreshing to have a protagonist who talks about niqab or abaya like it ain't nothing. [/quote] These look OK, will have to check Abercrombie. Thanks for all suggestions, I will return with my response in 1 year hence. thehomemaster fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Sep 6, 2015 |
# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:19 |
thehomemaster posted:Why do people itt get so hung up on racism in old books? I mean, no duh? They think racism is bad and feel uncomfortable when around it. Personally, I am in favor of more people feeling comfortable with calling other people wetbacks or redskins.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:29 |
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thehomemaster posted:Why do people itt get so hung up on racism in old books? I mean, no duh? Some old books are significantly more racist than others. I mean, Fritz Leiber's stuff is right there if you want sword and sorcery from the same time period that's less objectionable than Conan.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:31 |
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ITT: People offended by old books who probably have no problem reading works by guys like Orson Scott Card.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:36 |
Any time someone feels uncomfortable reading or hearing an ethnic slur, that's a failure of liberalism. We will only be free when we call homosexuals fudgepacking faggots without a quiver of guilt.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:40 |
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Does Card really get a pass though, by and large? I recall the makers of the Ender's Game movie (which was a pretty good adaptation of a pretty good book imho) went to great lengths on the nerd scene to make it clear there was a distance between themselves and the author. Hell, when's the last time Orson's been welcomed to a convention like Comic-Con? Although that'd be pretty funny to see. Any room he was in would probably be non-stop "God Hates Formics" signs held by gender-swapped cosplayers or something.Darth Walrus posted:He was a 1920-30s protofascist, though, which meant that (a) he didn't see much of a dividing line between society and genetics, and (b) he thought genetics were highly mutable over a short timeframe. This describes basically everyone of any influence from the 20's and 30's. Eugenics were really popular back then and it took WW2/the Holocaust to get people to put that particular crack pipe down. Howard really doesn't stand out from his contemporaries in the way some posters itt seem to think he does.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:43 |
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DeusExMachinima posted:This describes basically everyone of any influence from the 20's and 30's. Eugenics were really popular back then and it took WW2/the Holocaust to get people to put that particular crack pipe down. Howard really doesn't stand out from his contemporaries in the way some posters itt seem to think he does. Not familiar with the Harlem Renaissance or Eleanor Roosevelt's reformers then, are you? And that's just the really obvious anti-racists. There were plenty of authors who weren't as enthusiastic about scientific racism as Weird Tales goons like Lovecraft and Howard - poo poo, the Thirties were the decade of Orwell of all people, and even amongst pulp authors there are folks like CL Moore and the aforementioned Leiber who didn't feel the pressing need to insert their weird racial theories into everything they wrote. Another guy worth a shout is Tolkein, who certainly had his problems with racism but really didn't like it, tried to improve, and loving loathed the genocidal bloodlust of the fascists (see also, his letter to the Nazis about whether he had Jewish ancestry). Suggesting that everyone in the interbellum period was a frothing racist on par with the worst of the Weird Tales crowd is pretty grotesquely historically ignorant.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 01:58 |
The whole dismissive attitude on display is really weird when it comes to genre fiction, especially when it comes to motherfucking Conan. Like, it's understandable when it comes to someone talking about literary fiction, or even something that's been massively influential like Lovecraft, but Howard's influence is much, much smaller than that of pastiches and homages nowadays, along with reinterpretations like the comics and movies.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:04 |
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Xotl posted:Defining Howard as concerned primarily with race is strange to me, since his letters make so clear he was primarily interested instead in the battle between civilization and barbarism, how civilization empowers a people materially even as it weakens them mentally and spiritually. He and Lovecraft (who takes the side of civilization) exchanged dozens of notes on the topic. It's what you get when you try to jam something through the lens of modern social activism instead of taking a more insightful and context-based analytical approach. There were some actual interesting and thoughtful posts like that in the Lovecraft thread if you bother to sift through all the white noise garbage.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:06 |
PINING 4 PORKINS posted:It's what you get when you try to jam something through the lens of modern social activism instead of taking a more insightful and context-based analytical approach. Oh, never mind, I get it. It's about the dang SJWs, who don't give eugenics the insightful analysis it deserves.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:06 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Not familiar with the Harlem Renaissance or Eleanor Roosevelt's reformers then, are you? And that's just the really obvious anti-racists. There were plenty of authors who weren't as enthusiastic about scientific racism as Weird Tales goons like Lovecraft and Howard - poo poo, the Thirties were the decade of Orwell of all people, and even amongst pulp authors there are folks like CL Moore and the aforementioned Leiber who didn't feel the pressing need to insert their weird racial theories into everything they wrote. Another guy worth a shout is Tolkein, who certainly had his problems with racism but really didn't like it, tried to improve, and loving loathed the genocidal bloodlust of the fascists (see also, his letter to the Nazis about whether he had Jewish ancestry). So to boil down what you're saying, a majority of people in the West gave eugenics more than passing thought but wait you guys there were exceptions to that rule! Okay, great. That's not really a rebuttal to the point I made. Effectronica posted:Oh, never mind, I get it. It's about the dang SJWs, who don't give eugenics the insightful analysis it deserves. Are you on a quest to be the SMG of Book Barn? It's pretty obvious that what he's saying is that what stands out to us today may not be the primary motivation of the dude back then. It's not hard to find someone with that motivation though if you want to. His name is Lovecraft and he wrote openly about it.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:14 |
DeusExMachinima posted:So to boil down what you're saying, a majority of people in the West gave eugenics more than passing thought but wait you guys there were exceptions to that rule! Okay, great. That's not necessarily exclusive to the point I made. No, what he's saying is that it's invalid for people to openly respond negatively to racist things in old stories, because it's trying to jam something through the lens of modern social activism instead of taking a more insightful and context-based analytical approach. Which is bullshit on two levels, because first of all, it's good when people don't like racism and admit that fact, and second, a more insightful and context-based analytical approach is something that Conan cannot really withstand without getting to the point where Robert E. Howard was a pretty racist man and this lay underneath not just Conan, but Bran Mak Morn, Kull, Solomon Kane, etc. as well.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:17 |
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DeusExMachinima posted:So to boil down what you're saying, a majority of people in the West gave eugenics more than passing thought but wait you guys there were exceptions to that rule! Okay, great. That's not really a rebuttal to the point I made. You said that 'basically everyone of any influence in the twenties and thirties' was an enthusiastic scientific racist on par with Howard and Lovecraft. That's pretty badly wrong, and I gave examples to prove it. Unless you think that George Orwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, and so on didn't have any cultural influence? And that's not even getting into the Catholics - Casti Connubii was a huge deal throughout much of the Western world. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Sep 6, 2015 |
# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:21 |
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Well, I guess we have enough info for the original poster to decide whether they want to read Conan or not... (Read all the Discworld books instead IMO, not because they're less racist but because they're the best.)
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:29 |
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Chairchucker posted:(Read all the Discworld books instead IMO, not because they're less racist but because they're the best.) Agreed. Read them allllll
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:38 |
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Effectronica posted:No, what he's saying is that it's invalid for people to openly respond negatively to racist things in old stories Wow, no. Not at all. The guy you were responding to was spot on. If you want to get a good measure of the man, I think a good dose of early 1900s nationalism, essentialism and xenophobia needs to get through in along with the racism.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:38 |
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Effectronica posted:Oh, never mind, I get it. It's about the dang SJWs, who don't give eugenics the insightful analysis it deserves. Goddamn you are one facetious person.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:45 |
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Putting one out there for David Walton's Superposition Quite the quantum murder mystery. While he lost me in a couple points, not because of the science, mind you, but the writing, it was still a page-turner until the end. Would give it a solid B-.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:46 |
thehomemaster posted:Goddamn you are one facetious person. How dare someone be flippant on a comedy forum.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:48 |
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Hedrigall posted:Agreed. Read them allllll So, who had to tell the person that made that poster they hosed up at least one title.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:49 |
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Effectronica posted:How dare someone be flippant on a comedy forum. At least do it well.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:50 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 22:22 |
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thehomemaster posted:At least do it well. The chances of this happening are very, very slim.
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# ? Sep 6, 2015 02:57 |