Orson Scott Card is a raving idiot

[tkmorris]

I know that isn't news to some of you but I just read his latest Kool-Aid flavored diatribe and became disgusted all over again. How could the author of Ender's Game etc. be such a right-winger?

The Riots of the Faithful

So Newsweek prints an uncorroborated allegation about American interrogators flushing Qurans down the toilet in order to get fanatical Muslim prisoners to talk, and there's rioting and death all over the Muslim world.

There are several lessons to be learned from this incident, some trivial, some quite important.

1. The courts have given the news media carte blanche, in the name of the First Amendment -- but the media are no better than government at exercising unchecked power. When it's known that no one can punish you, a certain kind of person stops caring whether he hurts anybody. And such people tend to rise within any organization that doesn't work hard to have a conscience.

....So Newsweek kills people with a false story that is actually a lie (unlike anything President Bush ever said about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction), and nothing happens to the perpetrators.

More... http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-05-15-1.html

[Technowitch]

1. The folks I've been talking to at the SF conventions...

...have suggested that he's been heading further and further out there as the years have gone by.

[NewHampshireDem]

2. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I read this in his anti-Lucas

screed:

"It’s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it’s something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being. "

He's a <strong>Mormon</strong> for god's sake. Kettle, meet pot. But, who knows, maybe Card actually believes horses and elephants are native to North America. :shrug:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16700_1.html

[semillama]

4. side point: horses are native to North America

Didn't they in fact develop here and spread to Asia?

And we used to have elephants (Mastodon, Mammoth, etc) here, too.

not that I support anything OSC says or does. His wacko views have completely ruined him for me. I can't read his stuff without associating it with his ravings.

[Love Bug]

5. Modern horses are NOT native to north america

The Spanish brought them here in the 1400s.

[semillama]

6. if you're going to nitpick

Horses developed in North America and went extinct after the last Ice Age, along with much of the megafauna on the continent, probably due to a combination of climate/habitat change and changes in predation (including increased human predation). In terms of species development, modern horses are fairly new (domesticated about 8000 years ago), but your general wild horse species that the modern horse developed out of have North American roots. An interval of only a few thousand years between local extinction and reintroduction isn't that much of a stretch to call something native in my book, and seeing how well wild horses have adapted to their former natural habitat in the southwest supports that. I recall a book that argued to really get into restoring the environment of north america, we need to reintroduce species that went extinct after the ice age, including elephants. Kind of extreme, and based on the theory that humans were the prime mover in the extinction of megafauna.

Now, where these elephants would go, that's a really interesting question. Where WOULD you put a bunch of elephants?

[cprise]

11. Did you know he didn't write Ender's Game?

It was apparently written by a team of ghostwriters. He is a big BIG phony.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034

(corrected link)

[Orsino]

3. Card invents an enemy...

...that is trying to destroy his country from within, willingly signing on with the Administration that kills with its lies.

He seems too far gone to be aware that Newsweek has been proven right, and that his beloved Bush White House is still trying to lie about it. He's an idiot.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

7. He's a morman on steroids. Whaddya expect?

[CrownPrinceBandar]

8. It sucks he's such a freak...........

because I've read many of his books, and some are quite good. I'm reading Ender's Shadow right now and I'm guilt-fully enjoying it.

Maybe I should pick up Dan Simmons' Ilium.

[semillama]

9. yeah, i told myself no more OSC.

but I will bend the rules for the Advent Rising video game, which he apparently scripted.

[cprise]

12. Now that's showing him. n/t

[Blue-Jay]

10. Ilium is a pretty good read. I have a signed copy, too!

And yeah, it's a shame about OSC. I really like many of his books, but I'll only get them used from now on, if at all.

[porkrind]

13. Right-wing Self-Indulgent Mormon Douchebag

I should know, Utah has a million of them. :(

I liked "Ender's Game" the short-story, but it was hardly worth a book, much less a series. It's fine in my book to be a hack SF author, but why be an asshole with delusions of grandeur?