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I happen to like NK Jemisin and thought she deserved a discussion thread, so here one is. From Wiki: Nora Keita Jemisin (born September 19, 1972) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, better known by her pen name N. K. Jemisin. She has also worked as a counseling psychologist. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years or for all three novels in a trilogy. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020. Do people have strong opinions about her and her work? Yes! One reason is she writes about things like cultural trauma that can be very personal. Another reason is because she's an outspoken black woman, and she has done things like speak out about against white supremacist authors and the general racism and sexism in the genre. The genre/industry isn't racist or sexist! Yes it is. Fair enough. What has she written? The Inheritance Trilogy  Her first books, that initially made her famous. It mostly follows a young woman and her journey into palace intrigue. The Broken Earth  Follows a woman's journey across a dying planet in an attempt to save her family. This is, IMO, a better written series and also made her the first black person to ever win a Hugo for Best Novel. The Dreamblood  Does she like to write short stories? She sure does. Here's a list. "L'Alchimista", published in Scattered, Covered, Smothered, Two Cranes Press, 2004. Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 18th collection. Also available as an Escape Pod episode. "Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows", Ideomancer, 2004. "Cloud Dragon Skies", Strange Horizons, 2005. Also an Escape Pod episode "Red Riding-Hood's Child", Fishnet, 2005. "The You Train", Strange Horizons, 2007. "Bittersweet", Abyss & Apex Magazine, 2007. "The Narcomancer", Helix, reprinted in Transcriptase, 2007. "The Brides of Heaven", Helix, reprinted in Transcriptase, 2007. "Playing Nice With God's Bowling Ball", Baen's Universe, 2008. "The Dancer's War", published in Like Twin Stars: Bisexual Erotic Stories, Circlet Press, 2009. "Non-Zero Probabilities", Clarkesworld Magazine, 2009. "Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints in the City Beneath the Still Waters", Postscripts, 2010. "On the Banks of the River Lex", Clarkesworld Magazine, 11/2010. "The Effluent Engine", published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, Torquere Press, 2011. "The Trojan Girl", Weird Tales, 2011. "Valedictorian", published in After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, Hyperion Book CH, 2012. "Walking Awake", Lightspeed, 2014. "Stone Hunger", Clarkesworld Magazine, 2014. "Sunshine Ninety-Nine", Popular Science, 2015. "The City Born Great", published as a Tor.com exclusive available for free online, 2016. "Red Dirt Witch", Fantasy Magazine: PoC Destroy Fantasy, 2016. "The Evaluators", Wired Magazine, 2016. "Henosis", Uncanny Magazine, 2017. "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death", A People's Future of the United States, 2017. And one bound collection of short stories  You can listen to Levar Burton read Cuisine des Mémoires from that book. Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 22:57
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BananaNutkins posted:Brief thoughts on The Fifth Season The series is about societal racism, generational trauma, and plenty of other things. She wants you to feel the pain and trauma. She wants you in Essun's place. The book says "“Two days pass before anyone comes for you. You’ve spent them in the house with your dead son,” that is fundamentally different from “Two days passed before anyone came for her. She spent them in the house with her dead son". And I think something is lost there. The author is asking you to feel empathy. As for enslaving a bunch of magical people, the implication of that is if you had the right ability, you'd be unenslavable. But the system is such that anyone can be enslaved, if it's done in such a way where it feels inescapable. Orogenes are abused and broken practically from the moment of birth. And then there are Guardians, who are both abusers and parental figures, and who can control them both emotionally and magically. I like stories about empathy. One of the reasons I like Malazan, despite it's over the top 300,000 year old emo night-elf poo poo, is that it is at it's core a plea for empathy. Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 08:32
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BananaNutkins posted:I like stories about empathy too. The Stranger by Albert Camus is one of my favorites. Jemisin's use of the 2nd person POV just flopped for me. It didn't work to enhance my understanding or ability to relate to the protag. It drove me further from it. The protagonist is intentionally not conventionally likeable.
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Apr 3, 2021 18:05
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Carrier posted:I've only read the fifth season and that was years ago at this point, but the only thing that stuck with me from that book was the god awful sex scene. I know people love dunking on e.g. Peter F Hamilton for his sex scenes, and they really are terrible, but jesus this one was equally bad. Maybe I just don't get it, but I never understood why the first book won so many awards. Probably because a lot of people thought it was good.
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Apr 5, 2021 02:44
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killer crane posted:Nah, it's just my own unfair, bad faith take on the theme presented on the page (the superior people are kept down by the greedy masses). I would suggest you read that again because that's not textual or even subtextual.
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Apr 5, 2021 06:34
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killer crane posted:Dude, the name of the story "The Ones Who...", the call to action at the very end "don't walk away," the fact that she mentions Omelas at all. It's not subtle. I think BBFU is saying that it's not a "response" to Omelas as much is it is a conversation that includes Omelas.
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Apr 5, 2021 19:55
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killer crane posted:If the story had nothing to do with The Ones Who Walk Away then you're right, it's not a defense of causing suffering. But that's not the case. As a response to/conversation with/argument against The Ones Who Walk Away, which asks if would you allow suffering to continue to maintain the luxuries of society, The Ones Who Stay and Fight says, clearly, yes, as long as it's the right kind of suffering (we'll even do it humanely). From the piece quote:Does this work for you, at last, friend? Does the possibility of harsh enforcement add enough realism? Are you better able to accept this postcolonial utopia now that you see its bloody teeth? Ah, but they did not choose this battle, the people of Um-Helat today; their ancestors did, when they spun lies and ignored conscience in order to profit from others’ pain. Their greed became a philosophy, a religion, a series of nations, all built on blood. Um-Helat has chosen to be better. But sometimes, only by blood sacrifice may true evil be kept at bay. I don't know that is saying that there's a right kind of suffering. It's saying there's still suffering to be had, no matter how "humane" you make it.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:18
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Ccs posted:I was looking for a historical example in which "A small minority of people with great power could be controlled and manipulated by society over generations based on that simple idea alone." Sorry I'm too busy looking for historical examples of 300,000 year old night elves. Steven Erikson writes about anthropology so it's vitally important that there be a historical basis for this. He covers real world themes and most of the textual night elves I can find just didn't live that long.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:32
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Ccs posted:Ha ha. I mean has there been any small group with outsized economic or military power in the real world that has been manipulated by society? I can't think of any. People like to imagine certain ethnic groups throughout history have been both rich and oppressed, but usually it's just because there was an even richer group oppressing them. The only arguments I've seen to actually support this point point to revolutions where an aristocratic or royal family was all killed or sent to the gulags. A number of France’s elite lost their heads in 1789, but just a few decades later they were back, ruling through their wealth and power like nothing happened. Wizards with intrinsic power would have clawed their way back to power in a generation or so. What about magical golems who eat geodes? Sham bam bamina! posted:Slaves in the antebellum South were stronger than their masters and had the advantage of numbers but were kept down anyway, which would seem to be an argument against Ccs's point. The Gullah people of SC literally provided food and technology to starving useless whites and still didn't get the vote when the country was formed.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:12
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I'm not really getting your point here. What comparison are you drawing between "providing food and technology" and magic powers that can kill with a thought? Now why do you think I brought up guns? My point is that a lot of fantasy and Sci Fi uses things that aren't real as settings for stories that touch on universal themes. Orogenes aren't real, but the story is a fantasy writer writing a character who is dealing with historical erasure, bigotry, oppression, systemic violence, etc. The book opens with a woman mourning a child who was killed out of fear and hate by someone who was supposed to be his protector. These are themes a lot of people can relate to, and the're pretty well written and that's why the book has a lot of awards and fans. The powerful earth wizards part is not a thing people can relate to. It's a fantasy element, just like heron-marked swords and dragons. Obviously there's subtextual themes there for agency, just like swords and dragons have subtextual themes, but I don't need to find an exact analogue in history for this story to appreciate much of what the author was doing.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:37
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Oppression is real, and killing people is real. That's why the ability to kill matters in a discussion of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic in the books. Many oppressed peoples have the ability to kill, or not kill. I'm not sure why you're hung up on the magical earth mage aspect.
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Apr 6, 2021 22:56
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I'm not sure why you're going out of your way to ignore the point I'm making, nor why you're being such a prick about it. I'm not ignoring the point. I'm not even sure what it is. You seemed to be trying to support CCS's point. killer crane posted:Power disparity exists in the real world without magical earth mages. The problem pretty much everyone itt has with this book is how it addresses power dynamics, and the implications of that in the theme of oppression. like ccs pointed out: oppression flows from power, not to. Uh "everyone in this thread" except the people who disagree, I guess? Anyhow, your argument seems to rest on the idea that the Guardians have no power or not enough to defeat the orogenes, but the book makes it clear that they certainly are able to completely genocide them when a Fifth Season comes. Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 23:13
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The point is that slavery was preserved for so long because the slaveholders had deadly force at their disposal – guns, most saliently – that crushed slaves' attempts to rebel or even simply escape. Slavery was only ended after people with more guns shot the slaveholders in a bloody war. If the slaves had been the ones with the guns – weapons that make it very easy to kill, in the same way that a supernatural mastery of the elements might – their insurrections and escapes would have prevailed and killed the institution of slavery before it could even become one. Slaves were frequently in situations where, guns or not, they had the upper hand due to sheer numbers, yet didn't rebel. Yet there were also, guns be damned, slave rebellions. The orogenes in the book, are pscyhologically broken from a small age by an abusive immune magical police force. There are rebellions, that's what Alabaster does. He also kills a huge number of people and most any orogene who uses their power is going to do that because very few have the fine control to do micro-targetted magic. Most would be destroying entire villages full of regular people. It's like asking why black people in the US don't bomb state capitols on the regular, and ignoring the existence of police. The earth bending is the fantastical part of the story. It's not realistic, nobody should expect it to be. The experiences of the main character are the parts you're supposed to identify with. And because it's a fantasy, she does magically get the ability to be agent , an opportunity a lot of real people in her position do not.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:34
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Sham bam bamina! posted:That makes a lot more sense. I've seen people go back and forth over these books so much on the forums that I thought something this basic would have come up a lot more. I also didn't see anything so direct after a cursory search for more information. Please forgive me. This is why I was keeping quiet before! You haven't read these but you were participating in the argument? And yes, the Guardians are able to control and subdue orogenes very easily, and even have specialized teams where they are can defeat them with a touch, no matter how powerful, as well as the lifetime of being an abusive parental figure that makes it very very hard to disobey them psychologically. People who don't think that kind of trauma matters if you're a wizard, have often not been the victims of that kind of trauma. The protagonist's abuser is a sociopath with endless experience, a hugely imposing figure and enough strength to break bones with zero effort, and he can drain her magic. As for why people discussing the books, seem to ignore the existence of guardians 
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Apr 7, 2021 00:03
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Ccs posted:I just don’t think the existence of Guardians is relevant to how making the oppressed group a legitimate threat distorts the central metaphor. You don't think the literal hand of oppression is relevant? vvv Give the first book in the Broken Earth series a read. It's pretty well regarded. Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 00:06
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Ccs posted:I’ll echo my post above: Racism and sexism, etc are the result of irrational fears based on misconceptions, usually employed to strengthen the current ruling class. Wizard powers, at least as depicted in The Fifth Season, are a legitimate threat. This changes the context of the oppression that these storytellers seem to want to explore. Even if the reaction to this danger is overly harsh, the ordinary humans are still acting out of self-preservation. This is almost never the case in real-life oppression. The Guardians are literally the police boot on the neck of black people, for the purposes of this metaphor. Black people don't stop being a legitimate threat to authority because they're oppressed. Your problem appears to be that you don't think the author powered them up enough for the metaphor to work and you don't buy them as antagonists. Whites are voting for fascists right now, and supporting murderous cops right now, because they fear, legitimately in their eyes, that they are in danger if they lose their position of supremacy. Even though most minorities have no interest in treating whites as bad as whites have treated everyone else, that's what they're worried about. Even if the reaction to this danger is overly harsh, whites are still acting out of self-preservation.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:29
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The problem is that wizards as black people is completely incoherent, because the wizards can trivially slaughter normal humans with absolutely no repercussions at all. Go reread the opening of the first book again, where Nassun gets mad her son was killed and trivially butchers an entire village, indiscriminately destroying people, buildings, and nature. The regular people can't even fight back, because Nassun can split crossbow bolts in flight. This isn't a metaphor for collective action or anything, this is just one angry woman who on a bad day can slaughter a town and nobody can do anything about it. It's not a study thing, it's not a training thing, it's entirely a eugenics thing based on inherited magical power. This parses to black people...how, exactly? A black man has the same intrinsic abilities as a white one. Because it's a black woman clearly writing about the oppressive structures of racism in a fantasy setting that doesn't work exactly 1:1? quote:Thus the metaphor collapses in two separate ways: while race is made up incoherent bullshit to justify oppression, Jemisin postulates a world where eugenics actually works and that the people who aren't born superior are conspiring to keep down the people who are. We see this idea a LOT in science fiction, because it's the kind of infantilizing crap of "Fans are Slans" and other power-fantasy crap where the oppressed nerd minority is actually smarter and cooler if only those drat jocks would let you finish telling the cheerleader about your 3000 points of Space Marines. She's created a book where she can write about trauma where it's not just a repeat of reality, so she gave the characters the actual powers to be heroes. Or villains. But at least have agency. It's similar to X men but I written by a black woman, which doesn't happen very much. And it's fascinating to hear eugenics here when eugenics has been historically used to "breed out" the oppressed group and it's characteristics and the breeding program here is meant to mimic that which happened under slavery and be horrifying to the reader instead of empowering, but I think you missed a lot there. quote:Now, I don't think anyone thinks the Guardians are good, because they do cartoonishly evil crap like rent out child sex slaves a la Pizzagate. That said, they get slaughtered to a man remotely at the end of the third book, so I'm not sure why everyone is so hung up on the Guardians' powers being sufficient to control orogenes, because they get completely destroyed every time they take on a protagonist in a straight fight. They don't even work as a metaphor for cops, Alabaster says in the first book their ranks are drawn from the children of orogenes who don't display any powers, and they're all given powers by the Evil Earth - who, at the very end of the trilogy, is not defied or defeated, but bribed to stop orogenic oppression. The Guardians, however, are slaughtered to a man, which is why I have such difficulty with all the arguments in the thread that orogenic power is, like, 100% controlled by the Guardians, maaaaaan! There's the scene with Edki in the first book, and he's overcome by using a magic rock instead of a magic earthquake. The protagonist has plot armor?  Better ignore all the oppression of most of the other orogenes, including abuse and murder by people who are supposed to protect them, because that's not eeexxaaactly how cops work in th real world. Like every criticism in here is "if this is a metaphor for the experience of a black woman why is it not exactly that but with names changed" and it's honestly a bizarre response. quote:It's poo poo like this that invites the Ayn Rand comparisons. To put this into context, this is thought by the protagonist as the Guardian takes away her power and prepares to kill her for raising a magic rock, and thus she causes a massive fuckoff explosion. You can easily compare this to Terry Goodkind's Richard Rahl whining about how the evil Mooch Empire wants to destroy magic forever. Both Goodkind and Jemisin have a class of hereditary magic users who are hated and feared by the common people because they can slaughter them with impunity, and they both depict the people opposed to the hereditary masters as a bunch of evil turborapists. Goodkind is more open about it by having Richard Rahl constantly quoting Ayn Rand, but it's the same principle that people who inherit magic are better than you. This is absolutely wild poo poo, on a number of levels, not the least of which is that orogenes are literally an oppressed subclass who are slaughtered when a fifth season occurs so that food isn't wasted on them but Rahls are god-emperorors of a vast land. But I mean, whatever you have to do try and make the Ayn Rand comparison work between the black woman and the guy who wrote about a group literally named the Mud People. Jaxyon fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 17:53
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Ccs posted:We get that's what it's trying to be. Storytellers often want to push back against oppression and marginalization, so they decide to use a parallel. But when the source of the oppression is switched from "a different race" to "a deadly power that can be used as a weapon" it changes the context of the metaphor so drastically that it no longer functions. It introduces implications that the story trips over. I get the objections, I just don't agree. It's fantasy. You have the option of given powerless people literal power, and some do. I've never had the probelem with X-men being a civil rights or gay rights metaphor despite the existence of omega level mutants. If you do, cool. This book and x-men is probably not for you. What I really don't get is the people stretching to make the Ayn Rand poo poo work when one has a person giving a 60 page explanation as to why everyone should worship them and one has a black woman save the world that white people hosed up, despite the fact she'll never be thanked.
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Apr 7, 2021 18:17
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Sarern posted:All they have to do is read the books, OP. I've read the books, and a bunch of the awful goodkind books, and wow is that a stretch comparison.
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Apr 7, 2021 18:45
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Forgive me for weighing in again, but it's really weird how Jaxyon keeps conflating this with "agency". It keeps coming up and keeps getting the same redefinition of terms in response. I interpret people having power fantasies as having fantasies of agency. If you want to be a super powerful wizard it's probably because there's things you can't control in your life you'd like to have control over. You can call it dumb but that IS what people are mostly doing with any superpower fantasy. That's why people jerk off over power levels in Dragonball or whatever. Now go read the book.
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Apr 7, 2021 19:02
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killer crane posted:Revolving a power fantasy around saving the world by committing genocide is a deep level of hosed-upness, whether your feel disenfranchised by your race or because you're an incel neckbeard. The world is not saved by genocide in the Broken Earth series. I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
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Apr 7, 2021 19:39
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killer crane posted:This isn't misrepresenting the plot though. Alabaster's magical actions to save the world kills massive amounts of people... and his actions are portrayed as necessary to save the world. Causing the right kind of suffering to the right kind of people. That's the problem with the story as "just a power fantasy." It hinges the entire story, the heroic climax, on originally ripping the earth apart. It ends up as an apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic power fantasy that justifies having the apocalypse as a good thing in order to reshape the world correctly. That's comic book villainy. It's not clear at all that Alabaster had to cause the Rifting, just that it was his understanding of it along with his wish to destroy the civilization that had traumatized him. If you want to go into Alabaster being a problematic 'tragic gay' trope, I'm right with you though.
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Apr 7, 2021 22:41
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killer crane posted:huh, I thought it was essential to the story that the rifting was Alabaster's first step in saving the world. I need to reread that book, because I don't remember his actions being a necessary step, just that he thought it was. I thought the "Gate" had enough power on it's own. Also I don't think you hate the series, I just think some folks have criticisms that are reaching (ie Essun is basically Richard Rahl). I've read a lot of trash fantasy, I've read deep into Raymond Feists catalog. I've seen poo poo. NK's stuff is at least different. She's not the only person writing from her perspective, but that's a smaller pool than it should be.
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Apr 7, 2021 23:55
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Ccs posted:Yeah but people in our society aren’t intrinsically armed. This goes back to points I’ve made before about how it changes the context of the metaphor. Many mutants don't have terrifying monster powers. They are just lumped in with the dangerous ones, in much the same way that black people/jews/roma/undocumenteds are viewed as dangerous criminals despite having at most the same criminality rates as their oppressors and usually substantially less. Whether or not the people targetted with oppression are actually dangerous is mostly irrelevant, because they will be treated as such either way. And let me take a bold stance here, maybe we shouldn't horrifically oppress people even if they do have powers that make you scared?
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Apr 8, 2021 00:26
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Ccs posted:This is why I keep saying that the stories don’t condone oppression, they just introduce an actual cause for the oppression by giving one group of people deadly magic. I’m using this as an aggregate example of every franchise that makes use of this trope, whether it be The Broken Earth, X Men, Dragon Age or Attack on Titan. I think it’s an incoherent metaphor. So am I reading this be that oppression is justified when people are scared enough of the people they are oppressing?
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Apr 8, 2021 00:50
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Ccs posted:No it’s saying that unlike racism, which is predicated on fiction, these stories introduce deadly magical powers and give them to a particular group. It provides an actual reason for the fear. The oppression that results from the fear is not condoned. White people scared of The Other have a legitimate reason to fear. They fear that, much like an orogene losing control and blasting a village, a black man might "thug out" at any time and do crime. Because of this fear of the other, they treat a whole group as criminals. They use that fear to justify oppression. What you've said here is that if people are scared enough, it makes it hard to condemn the oppression. But it doesn't, because oppression is bad no matter how much you think it's deserved. Torturing small children is a bad thing no matter how scary they might be as an adult. quote:As opposed to real world oppression where a powerless group is enslaved and then the oppressors start to get nervous because these people have a legitimate grievance because they were oppressed. Or they were oppressed in the first place due to completely fictitious ideas about how dangerous the group was Oppressed people aren't powerless. That's a messed up way of looking at oppression.
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Apr 8, 2021 01:35
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Ccs posted:The thugging out is a paranoid fantasy. The text of the book shows us orogenes having deadly magical powers that can kill people. It’s a question of whether the fear is legitimate or not. Fear is always legitimate to the oppressor. It's how they justify the oppression. It has nothing at all to do with any reality and magma wizards don't change that. Child abuse is regulation, and that is your better metaphor? 
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Apr 8, 2021 02:03
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Ccs posted:Why are you changing the definition of legitimate? I mean inherently legitimate, not "this guy has a twisted worldview, but because it's HIS worldview he thinks its legitimate. After all, villains are always the heroes of their own story." What part of magical powers makes oppression be legitimate? Regulation is not oppression and it's pretty messed up to suggest that's an apt metaphor.
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Apr 8, 2021 02:11
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killer crane posted:I mean... removing access to legal abortion, and limiting marriage rights are regulations. What about forced sterilization, rape, murder, and child abuse?
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Apr 8, 2021 02:20
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killer crane posted:You said regulation is not oppression, and that's silly, because of course it can be oppression. More accurately, oppression is not regulation, which is what Ccs said. That's a gross metaphor. "I'm gonna regulate these jews out of existence, to keep the danger to our financial system under control, which is a very real fear to me" Regulation can be used to execute oppression, but that's not what Ccs was originally talking about.
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Apr 8, 2021 17:51
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Ccs posted:I don't want to keep having this argument but "a real fear to me" is not the same as "a fear born out of the capacity the magical individual has for violence compared to an ordinary human that is supported by the text of the story, not just by the paranoid imaginings of some of the characters in the story." It does not matter because the people doing the oppression always think the fear has a real foundation.
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Apr 8, 2021 18:54
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killer crane posted:So we all agree that controls on something legitimately dangerous is usually okay. Fear is a good excuse for gun control. Lets examine all the different wrong things going on in this part of your post alone: 1) Oppression isn't "controls" 2) Child abuse isn't "regulation" 3) Collective punishment for a group for potential danger isn't justified 4) The oppressor always thinks the oppressed is legitimately dangerous 5) Fear isn't a good excuse for gun control, safety is. 6) People aren't born with guns built in and if they were oppression wouldn't be a just response I'm probably missing some but holy poo poo quote:So what happens to the metaphor of oppression when you give the oppressors something to actually fear about the oppressed? It breaks the metaphor because it muddles bigoted oppression and control for actual social safety. Nothing because it doesn't change things at all other than you start getting apologists for oppression among the readers, but that's not really much different from real life either so.......
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Apr 8, 2021 19:25
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Ccs posted:These are all issues that come from making a story where a certain group are given deadly magical powers. People are born with guns built in in these stories. This whole list is just evidence of the incoherency that results from trying to equate people with deadly magical powers to a marginalized group. If people were born with guns built into their arms it still wouldn't be OK to oppress them. The incoherence is coming from you and others deciding that oppression is actually justified if you're scared enough. quote:Also I'm not sure you get how this is important in context. It's like you're saying there no moral difference between someone taking an action because something is true and because they imagine it to be true. Torturing children is a bad thing to do, if you do it because you think they're dangerous, or because they are actually dangerous. I didn't think this would be a confusing point to make but here we are.
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Apr 8, 2021 19:42
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I think part of the issue is you've picked up Ccs's argument, who did liken oppression against wizards to gun control.
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Apr 8, 2021 19:51
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Lets get to the core of this, then.killer crane posted:Controlling their user of the guns would be just, and because the guns are intrinsic to them, it would be a control of them as people... The metaphor again breaks. If someone was born with guns in their arms, it would not be just to oppress them because of how they were born. Describing it as "gun control" is sophistry. If you don't see how limiting the freedom of someone because you fear their "danger" is different from "buying an object" and "regulating purchases" then you're going to have some trouble distinguishing oppression from gun control.
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Apr 8, 2021 19:58
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Ccs posted:You're specifically picking the most absurd answer by going for the torture option, which is considered immoral in all circumstances. Try it with something that would be moral given whether something is true or not and try again. What levels of oppression are OK if you're really scared of the people you're oppressing?
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Apr 8, 2021 21:30
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PeterWeller posted:I'm arguing that they don't symbolize marginalized groups. I'm arguing that they are literally a marginalized group. There are no separate vehicle and tenor here. There is no need to read them symbolically at all. Exactly so. That's why saying 'well it's actually OK to oppress them because they're scary' is incoherent to me. Because you end up being an oppression apologist. They're being oppressed. It's really traumatic and bad. It's there in text, not subtext. It's just that some people in this thread seem to think that there are, in at least thought experiment fashion, cases in which oppression is justified.
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Apr 8, 2021 23:34
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that's not symbolism, guys. 
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Bilirubin posted:It makes me sad that this thread is already as long as the James Joyce thread, which has been open for a year. Surely there is enough for nerds to fight over in his books Be the change you in the forum you want to see
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Apr 9, 2021 00:10
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Ccs posted:What the orogenes are put through in the series is terrible, but the nature of their powers raises questions that have awkward answers. Would you live near an orogene knowing that if their self control was less than perfect they could kill you? Not because of malice but because of a mistake. It would result in, at they very least, policies of control to minimize loss of life, and as killer crane noted, Where's the line between oppression and control at that point? So what I'm getting here is that some oppression is OK if you think it's justified because you're really scared of the oppressed group. To which you say "but they are dangerous!" which is also what people oppressing minority groups everywhere say. You're OK with some level of oppression happening to orogenes based on their powers as written. It's not really an awkward answer, but it might be an awkward thing for you to learn about yourself. quote:Or, y'know, if it was US-esque it might just result in a lot of dead people every year and everyone would shrug and say they can't do anything because of whatever the fantasy world equivalent of the Second Amendment is. I mean, gun nuts literally believe they're being oppressed by having their guns taken away, and as you've previously argued there's no moral difference between something being true and what someone believes is true. That's actually not what I've argued, and this has been a very enlightening thing for you to say, because it makes it clear you don't understand a lot of what we're talking about here. I've argued that in real world oppression, the oppressor class believes that they are justified in doing a bad thing because they think the danger of not doing so is real. Gun control isn't oppression. What you've described with gun control is a (mostly) non-oppressed class that is being regulated for things they have a choice in. In fact, gun control is used in action to oppress minorities because of what white people believe to be a legitimate fear of criminality among PoC.
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Apr 9, 2021 00:58
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If black people actually were of lower intelligence and violent nature, and we had proof(and historically we had "proof" that everyone agreed was real), it would still not be OK to oppress them. Same for "savage" indigenous people and "greedy" jews whatever justifications. It doesn't matter if you think it's materially justified, because oppression is wrong.
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Apr 9, 2021 01:07
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