In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
@Pecunium: The Closing of the American Mind was actually by Allan Bloom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind
Easy to get the two Blooms mixed up — but Allan was a classics prof.
Harold is English prof, cordially loathed by all medievalists for his theory that humanity had not sense of individuality until the “Renaissance” (his proof for this; HAMLET), and that before then, especially in the “Dark Ages,” everybody apparently went around in sort of porridge mush of communal something or other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom
I’ve read The Anxiety of Influence several things, and I tell you, it’s so close to being Harold/Shakespeare slash that it’s…..sublime.
I have a grudge against Harold for his off hand dismissal of Tolkien’s writing style (discussed by John Rateliff, author of the superb HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT manuscript study, here: http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2011/03/harold-bloom-disses-tolkien-again.html)
And here is a review of Bloom’s critical edition (he set up a sort of assembly line thing at Yale apparently and had a bunch of grad students doing the shit work for a bunch of these edited anthologies): http://greenbooks.theonering.net/turgon/files/082300.html
@Cassandra you make a good point about why Skyrimjob isn’t trying to emulate Hitch. Maybe he actually doesn’t know a damn thing about writing beyond “he convinced me to agree with him, therefore he must be a good writer”.
@Skyrimjob
Didn’t I already tell you to GTFO with that mansplaining, “craft is more important than politics” bullshit? It’s easy for men like you and Bloom to dismiss sexism and feminism as mere “personal politics,” but to me and other women, that shit has a direct effect on our lives.
Anyway, I find the argument that one should ignore a writer’s politics kind of strange when those politics are the topic being written about. One is supposed to ignore views one finds abhorrent or harmful because they were presented well? Surely you can understand why some people would disagree with that?
Ithilia: So he did. Yes, I confuse them… both were somewhat less than impressive in the erudition, and a bit offensive in the message.
@Pecunium: It’s like they are evil twins separated at birth–both exemplars of how privileged white men throw temper tantrums (but,clearly, sublime ones) when their game is no longer the only game in town.
But now that I am refreshed of which Bloom it is… I can see why he also appeals to Skyrimjob… both Bloom, and Hitchens affect the, “I know better than you do what is of merit; agree with me and together we can look down on the fools who don’t appreciate it.”
Ithiliana, I’ve been meaning to ask: You mentioned (and, obviously, correctly) that you can’t convince people that something is good writing through quotes and excerpts. Do you think that writing can’t be evaluated from a small sample, or is it just that a skeptical audience is unlikely to be won over so quickly?
Queering Tolkien? *flashes back to years of LotR fanfic* Oh geez yes. Hard not to.
Open-access peer-reviewed science is on our side!
Here’s a startled baby red panda:
I’m still trying to figure out what taste in literature has to do with liking cat videos. I would ask if Skysulky was under the impression that is was an either/or kind of deal (either read great works of literature or watch cat videos, never both), but let’s face it, we all know that he was just flailing desperately in search of something that might make his argument seem less ridiculous.
OMG that was one wonderful trollsplosion! And all while I was asleep.
It struck me this morning that it’s a good thing I don’t have internet across the veil. Conversataion this morning with Mr Kitteh on the subject:
Me: [fills in details of trollsplosion] Isn’t it a good thing we don’t have the Net at Home?* I’d have spent last night saying ‘Wait, wait, Son of Al is melting down, I don’t want to miss this!’
Mr Kitteh sends image of himself going RAAAAARRRRRGH and pulling electric leads out of the wall, then facepalms before getting the giggles.
*I capitalise Home as shorthand for ‘across the veil’.
Oh yeah, and if you’re still here, Skytwit: flailing and swearing about kittens (or any animals) just makes you look even more of a turd. At best it says you’re desperate to upset people here (tip: you failed), at worst it says you’re a nasty little creep who can hate on animals. Either way, you lose.
Definition of a truly miserable person – feels bitter rage when other people coo over videos of cute animals. Definition of a truly miserable person who is also a troll – feels bitter rage because the other people are cooing over cute animals when they should be telling him that his reading/musical preferences make him the Most Awesome Person Ever, has public meltdown during which he uses the phrase “stupid fartworld” in the middle of an attempt to prove how intelligent and erudite he is.
Dismal Desmond the kitten-video hater.
Oh, going back to the heights thing, I was talking to M the coffee-shop-owner-from-France the other day, and he said it’s funny, but at home he’s average height (5′ 7″) while here in Australia he can’t see over the crowd.
One thing that I love about spending time in some parts of Asia is that I actually get to be of average height for once. It’s nice to have hang straps on the bus be at a height that doesn’t make me feel like I’m about to dislocate my arm.
In Holland on the other hand I felt like I was in a chapter from Gulliver’s Travels.
Oh, rotten hanging straps! The ones on our trains were made by some twits who seem to think that everyone is at least six feet tall. Worse than that, some of the trains have bars at the height the straps would hang from, and you’re expected to hold on to those. I can barely reach ’em on tiptoe (I’m 5′ 4″).
@Katz: You mentioned (and, obviously, correctly) that you can’t convince people that something is good writing through quotes and excerpts. Do you think that writing can’t be evaluated from a small sample, or is it just that a skeptical audience is unlikely to be won over so quickly?
Ooh, intriguing question. Probably both!
Well, part of it is what Pecunium noted: “good” is subjective, so to argue that X writing is good, you need to explain what “good” means in this context, and, what the context is, including the genre: what is GOOD writing for a business memo–and there can be badly written memos, heh, is not likely to be the same as good writing for a sonnet. And I think the more expert with the genres the person making the claim is, the more likely they are to be able to develop a strong set of criteria AND to be able to muster the evidence.
Second, yes, I do not think a small sample, just a few quotes, is likely to persuade anybody–well, except maybe somebody who agrees with the argument (if there is one), and who isn’t used to analyzing language (which most people aren’t–we respond to language, but most aren’t trained to analyze the rhetorical elements of texts). And a lot of people think that if they like something, it’s self-evidently good (which it is–for them!).
A sceptical audience is generally likely to demand more in the way of evidence, I suspect (in my college writing courses, I tend to make it easier on students–especially in the first year courses. Write to a neutral audience, I say, those who have not made up their mind, and try to convince them of your point–and even then it’s hard for many of the students). In the upper level literary courses, the audience is someone who knows the primary text, but not the scholarship (although the kind of argument I teach aren’t focusing on whether the writing is “good” or “bad” — they’re analytical and interpretive).
I am spacing out on the name of the scholar who did a sort of quasi experiment (decades ago, now). He gave college undergrads some famous poems by famous authors WITHOUT the names attached and asked them to evaluate the writing. The undergrads, not tipped off by famous name (and presumably not recognizeing them), evaluated them all as badly written.
Dang, I hate forgetting names….
But surely, given a known genre, you can evaluate an excerpt based on certain criteria without being too controversial. “Is it grammatically correct?” would be an obvious criterion, as is “Does the author make his or her point clear?”
ithiliana: I remember that. I don’t recall who did it either.
I haven’t heard of that study, but I’d believe it. My high school freshman English class had a bit of a revolt against The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, even though our teacher said it was the poem that made her want to study English XD
@katz: The snobby part of me wants to say your class just didn’t get it.
I’ve viewed Prufrock as a satire for as long as I’ve known it.
Come to think of it, the first place I encountered it was in a book from the Pythons, in which context I thought “as a patient etherized upon a table” was just the Ps taking the piss.
Ithiliana, that experiment reminds me of endless discussions I’ve had on an amateur writing site, and with friends who’ve been published. So much of the advice about what’s “good writing” or what are OMG DEADLY WRITING SINS ends up being about what’s fashionable rather than about effective use of English. There seems to have been a real “if it isn’t choppy faux-Hemingway, it isn’t good writing” idea among some US agents and publishers, and this gets reflected in the advice handed out. Friend of mine, the writer of the Griffin’s Daughter fantasy trilogy, had this sort of nonsense from her ex-agent, saying her next book (currently in publishing process) would never get a publisher, nobody reads this sort of thing, the writing style is wrong, blah blah blah.
You know, nobody actually needs to have a good (i.e. “logical to Skydude or any other dude”) reason not to like ANYTHING.
I’ve never read a word of Hitchens that I know of. I never will. I don’t need to justify that. There’s tons of stuff out there – literature, movies, music, food, travel destinations, types of cars, you name it – that I just don’t like. Sometimes I have reasons (I can’t stand the texture of beans), sometimes I don’t (No seafood). And I get to do that, without having people trying to compel me to change my mind, my habits, my likes and dislikes, and I don’t owe anyone an explanation.
So dear Skytrolldude, I get to exist with my unique feelings about whatever, and I don’t have to justify my existence to you.
Also? I have never read a word Hitchens wrote, and I never will, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.
Bur drst, don’t you care that you’re condemning yourself to live in a stupid fartworld? DON’T YOU?
About assessing good writing – the way I’d put it is that you often need quite extensive samples and a basic familiarity with the genre in order to determine whether or not a piece of writing is really good, but with bad writing short samples are often enough to be able to make that call.
It’s interesting that the Hitchens sample that our petulant friend chose actually hit several of the markers for “wow this writing is fucking terrible”. I don’t think that proves that Hitchens was a terrible writer in general so much as that SkyTroll doesn’t have a good enough instinctive sense of how language works to pick a good sample.
Cassandra: Did rimjob actually post it? I thought it was someone else pointing out what it was about Hitchens they didn’t like.