And then it turns out that having taken bits and bites out of my entire mortal day, to pursue this pointless argument with you, was just what I needed even if nothing at all what I wanted. It put me in a state of mind where I could find some kind words to say to my family that I think some folks there may have been quite a bit, if in a small way, needing to hear for a while.
That's not even slightly to your credit, of course. But I can't fairly say you weren't involved, and I have to admit I genuinely appreciate this result, however inadvertent and I'm sure unimaginable on your part it may be. So, though I say it through gritted teeth, thank you for your time. If for absolutely nothing else whatsoever, for that at least I must express my genuine gratitude.
Intolerable though you've been throughout, and despite what I assume to have been your every intention, something good may yet come of your ill efforts. You deserve to know that. May it heap as many coals of fire on your head as your heart should prove small enough to deserve.
> At this point I'm mostly just intrigued to see whether you'll keep replying and whether you'll make any substantial points.
Every substantive point I've actually made all day you have totally ignored, and this is what it's worth your time still to do. But sure. You can stop paying me rent to live in your head any time you like. Keep telling yourself that. I don't doubt you need to, to get through a day.
> Substantive as in about Heinlein's work, rather than attacks on me or my motivations.
We could have done that fifteen hours ago [1], or eleven hours ago [2], or nine hours ago [3] [4], or any time you wanted. You haven't. What's changed?
I've given you lots of opportunity to offer a defense to the points I raised in my first reply to you. I've offered to go into more detail. I've contrasted Heinlein's work with contemporaneous works. Saying "you should go and read more" is not compelling, especially given the amount of effort you've expended to avoid saying anything of substance. I wonder if you feel insecure about whether such a defense is possible.
> I've given you lots of opportunity to offer a defense to the points I raised in my first reply to you...Saying "you should go and read more" is not compelling...I wonder if you feel insecure about whether such a defense is possible.
No, you don't. I've said nothing I need defend, and you've said nothing you can. It would be one thing if I had to say not to piss on my boots and tell me it's raining, but this doesn't even count as pissing. It's just you repeating yourself from yesterday and that's boring for both of us.
"You are a bigot" is a factual claim I have made [1], now quite a number of hours and comments ago. You haven't addressed it. You won't. You can't. You have no choice now but to let it stand. You have shown it more true than even you yourself can pretend to ignore. You need someone to tell you it isn't really true, in a way you can believe. No one is here to tell you that.
There are other embarrassments, of course; you've shown yourself not a tenth the scholar you fancy yourself to be, nor able to handle yourself even slightly in the face of someone who needs nothing from you and cares neither for nor against you. You would care more that I called you an abuser, but you don't see the people you try to treat that way as human. So what you're really stuck on is that I called you a bigot and you can't answer back. Hence still finding it worth your while to try to talk me into letting you off that hook.
Sorry, not sorry. Go back to bed. Read a book while you're there, why don't you? It might help you sleep.
edit: You also haven't explained what makes those four books you named as exemplary as you called them. Can you describe the common thread? I ask because I actually have read them, in no case fewer than three times, and they really haven't all that much in common. Oh, by the same author, certainly. But you've only dropped names. You haven't tried to draw any comparisons or demonstrate anything by the rhetorical juxtaposition of those characters, though I grant you keep insisting it must count for something that you listed them. You haven't, so far as I can see, discussed or even mentioned a single event in the plot of any of those novels. For all the nothing you've had to say with any actual reference to them, even the few texts you named might as well not exist!
It is extremely risible at this time of you to try to claim you are the one here interested in talking about Heinlein. If there were a God, it would not be safe to tell a lie of that magnitude near a church. But no matter. To get back to the first question I asked here just above: Did anyone actually explain to you why those four should be the first and last of Heinlein worth talking about? Did you ever think to ask? Or was it that they were part of an assignment? - you turned in a paper and assumed the passing grade meant you must have learned something by the transaction, and that for you was where the matter and all semblance of curiosity ended.
I hope it isn't that last one. I already believed firmly that student loan relief was the correct action both ethically and economically; as I have said in other quarters lately, it is not possible for you to be enough of an asshole to change my politics. But if this is you recapitulating something you paid to be taught - if you're currently
pursuing or God forfend have completed an American university education, and the best approximation of clear thought you can manage is this - then whoever sold you and your family that bill of goods ought damn well be horsewhipped, and that they merely see the loan annulled instead would be a considerable mercy.
I meant that you might offer a defense of Heinlein against my initial points: for example, that there's a strong element of wish fulfilment in his characters. This is neither an extreme nor an uncommon critique. You clearly disagree with it quite strongly. I just want to know what about it you personally find unconvincing.
You ask what I find unconvincing. I'm happy to further oblige you:
> His male characters typically fall into one of two cartoonish camps: either supremely confident, talented, intelligent and independent (e.g. Jubal, Bernardo, Mannie, Bonforte...) or vaguely pathetic and stupid (e.g. moon men). His female characters are submissive, clumsily sexualised objects who contribute very little to the plot. There are a few partial exceptions - e.g. Lorenzo in Double Star and female pilots in Starship Troopers - but the general atmosphere is one of teenage boy wish fulfilment.
"Cartoonish." "Pathetic." "Stupid." "Submissive." "Clumsily sexualized." "Teenage boy." 'Moon men' - you mean Loonies? And this all was you yesterday [1]. How far do you really expect to get with this farcical pantomime of sweet reason now? I ask again: What's changed?
This all began when I said you obviously hadn't read what you claimed to have [2], and it got so far up your nose you couldn't help going and proving me right. You've made a lot more bad decisions since then, but don't worry: I'll keep reminding you as long as you show you need me to that you can amend your behavior at any time.
Will email you some links/screenshots later today to demonstrate that I've read them (and expand on my points). Would post them here but keen to keep accounts separate.
Okay. Before you do so and for no particular reason, I feel I should note two things.
First, assuming you are not in fact a public figure, I will not publicly reveal your identity or any information I believe could lead to its disclosure, and that is exactly as far into my confidence as you may expect to come. That caveat excepted, I hereby explicitly disclaim any presumption you may have of privacy in any communication you make with me via email or other nonpublic means.
I won't dox you. I understand it isn't as safe for everyone as for me to have their name in the world. And I'm not saying I intend to publish all, or indeed any, of what you send; if it deserves in my view to remain in confidence, I will keep it so. But if you think taking this conversation to email will give you a chance to play games where no one else can see, you had better think twice.
(Should you by any of several plausible means dig up my phone number and try giving me a call, I hereby explicitly advise that any such action on your part constitutes "prior consent" per Md. Code §10–402 [1], and I will exercise my option under that law without further notice.)
Second, there exists an organization with which I have a legal agreement, binding on all our various heirs and assigns, to the effect we are quits forever. I will refer to this company as "Name Redacted for Legal Reasons" or "Name Redacted" for short, and describe it as the brainchild of a fascinating and tight-knit group of siblings, any of the three (technically four) of whom I'd have liked the chance to know better than I did.
I will also note, not for the first time, that I signed that agreement in entire good faith which has endured from that day through this, and I earnestly believe the same of my counterparty both collectively, and in the individual and separate persons of those who represented Name Redacted to me throughout that process as well as through my prior period of employment.
Now, if I were an employee of Name Redacted for Legal Reasons, and I had started a day's worth of shit in public with a signatory of such an agreement as I describe - that is, if I had acted in a way which could be construed to compromise my employer's painstakingly arrived-upon mutual quitclaim - then the very last thing I would ever want to do would be to allow to come into existence documentary evidence of my possibly somewhat innocent but certainly very grave foolishness. Because if that did happen, I would understand I R. May confidently expect very soon to become 'the most fired-for-causedest person in the history of fuck.'
As I said, I signed in good faith. In that same good faith, what choice really would I have but to privately disclose in full detail? It would be irresponsible of me to assume this was the only problem such intemperate behavior might be creating for Name Redacted, any or all of which might be far more consequential than this.
I'm sure at this point I'm only talking to hear myself speak, though. In any case, I look forward to your email.
For posterity, I repeat here my entire response to your email, omitting only the signature where no new information is present:
> Is that all? You mistake your opinions for facts, and when motivated you freely ignore the difference between an author's voice and that of a viewpoint character. This you share with millions, and feel the need to be secretive about? I thought you had something serious to talk about. Go away.
No, I acknowledge that there's a good few paragraphs more of the superficial, doctrinaire nonsense you have been parroting than was immediately obvious to me here. Enough to be worth pasting through GPTZero, more than enough to say anything novel or interesting, and what a shame you never got there.
One example to shut you up: about the first thing every serious critic of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress addresses is that it's intentionally and explicitly written with about two-thirds of an eye toward the American "revolution" - hence the correspondences between Professor de la Paz and Benjamin Franklin (with a generous dash of Jefferson) on the one hand, and Mannie as an obvious George Washington expy on another. These are intentional similarities! Heinlein mentions it explicitly in Expanded Universe (don't hold me to that, it may have been in Grumbles from the Grave) and it's treated at length in one or another of the crit histories I've read, or maybe it was the Patterson biography, I'm not reading back hundreds of pages of diary notes for your lazy ass. It may have been the novel's own preface! He was intentionally loose with the correspondences, both in character and in plot, for narrative and didactic reasons, and that has proven a fruitful vein for both critical analysis and outright criticism over the years, and you can't even talk about any of it. You didn't notice any of this. Because you never learned the difference between looking at books and reading them. I'm sure you looked at every page, though!
These essays of yours are, generously, on the level of a college freshman who parties too much, studies too little, and treats English as a dump course. I did more thoughtful work as a high-school senior. For this you feel the need to be secretive? What a joke. Get lost, flyweight.
Just to note; it would be really helpful if you could ease up on the ad hominem. It's not going to stop me and doesn't add to the weight of your arguments. It just drags the discussion down and makes it harder to figure out what your arguments are
> These are intentional similarities!
I said that there are "clear comparisons" to the American revolution. I didn't suggest that the comparison was accidental. If anything, I assumed it was supposed to be read that way.
> One example to shut you up
Well, you've failed there. Perhaps we should focus on the cause of your initial outrage: Heinlein's (lack of) character depth?
> For this you feel the need to be secretive?
It's privacy rather than secrecy. I don't want it to be too easy to link this account to my Goodreads.
I assume then tha you have no arguments to make in support of Heinlein's characterisations. Thanks for the discussion I guess, in a way it's been vindicating.
All I'm looking for is some reasoning about why you think I'm wrong. Something that goes beyond fallacies such as "because it's not what I think" or "you're clearly a bigot" or "you must need to read more".
I've attempted to do some more reading of Heinlein analysis and am finding that it generally agrees with what I said (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703348). Would be interested t osee if you are anymore willing to engage now.
