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expendablemudge 's review for:
The Lost Gate
by Orson Scott Card
No stars for you, homophobic douche.
In 2008, Card made a bunch of idiot statements about gay people. I disliked his stuff before that, going back to ENDER'S GAME many years ago; but reading his work and insulting it became a mission in 2013. That was the Year of the Deletions, when Goodreads committed a horrendous breach of trust by simply deleting reviews flagged by a group of idiot users as "not community friendly" or some such crap.
Users affected by this weren't given notice of the company's intent to destroy their data. It simply...vanished. At that time, I was a significantly more well-read reviewer than I am now. I left Goodreads out of a sense of outraged solidarity with people who had no backups of the content they created, unpaid and out of love for books, that Goodreads then and now uses as value-added sales material. Not that long after Amazon took over Goodreads, it became obvious that "negative" reviews were in for a flagging and, if that wasn't enough, a trolling.
So many issues got rolled into the outrage and sense of violation that goes with some business entity acting ham-handedly that it became easier and better for my personal mental health (which would snap shortly anyway) to get out of here. I went from the Forbes 25...the 25 most influential reviewers on the site...to a group blog and a lonely little personal blog for new reviews. Naturally enough my supposed sway here diminished and then pretty much vanished as life's vicissitudes finally caught up with me and sent me to the psych ward for a good long stretch.
But before I vanished, I mocked the many 5-stars-or-else thugs who ran (possibly still run, I'm better at ignoring people these days) roughshod over the idea of respectful disagreement with the opinions of others by rating some of their darlings as above. It drove them nuts that I rated books like this one AND had read them, so was immune to accusations of partisanship.
Well, not immune, I was and am a partisan of political, social, economic, and moral Liberalism and liberalism. It shows. I'm happy with that.
I liked the premise of this book when I picked it up. I was bitterly let down by Card's erratic weaving in character development, his protagonist lurching across borders of acceptable and consistent behavior for no apparent reason. It's the "no apparent reason" that gets my dander up.
So rather than review the books at the time I read them, I rated them and waited for the haters to hate. They didn't disappoint me. Three years on, I don't care about the anvil chorus of conform-or-suffer any more. So here it is: I didn't like this book by an author whose politics and personality I don't like.
In 2008, Card made a bunch of idiot statements about gay people. I disliked his stuff before that, going back to ENDER'S GAME many years ago; but reading his work and insulting it became a mission in 2013. That was the Year of the Deletions, when Goodreads committed a horrendous breach of trust by simply deleting reviews flagged by a group of idiot users as "not community friendly" or some such crap.
Users affected by this weren't given notice of the company's intent to destroy their data. It simply...vanished. At that time, I was a significantly more well-read reviewer than I am now. I left Goodreads out of a sense of outraged solidarity with people who had no backups of the content they created, unpaid and out of love for books, that Goodreads then and now uses as value-added sales material. Not that long after Amazon took over Goodreads, it became obvious that "negative" reviews were in for a flagging and, if that wasn't enough, a trolling.
So many issues got rolled into the outrage and sense of violation that goes with some business entity acting ham-handedly that it became easier and better for my personal mental health (which would snap shortly anyway) to get out of here. I went from the Forbes 25...the 25 most influential reviewers on the site...to a group blog and a lonely little personal blog for new reviews. Naturally enough my supposed sway here diminished and then pretty much vanished as life's vicissitudes finally caught up with me and sent me to the psych ward for a good long stretch.
But before I vanished, I mocked the many 5-stars-or-else thugs who ran (possibly still run, I'm better at ignoring people these days) roughshod over the idea of respectful disagreement with the opinions of others by rating some of their darlings as above. It drove them nuts that I rated books like this one AND had read them, so was immune to accusations of partisanship.
Well, not immune, I was and am a partisan of political, social, economic, and moral Liberalism and liberalism. It shows. I'm happy with that.
I liked the premise of this book when I picked it up. I was bitterly let down by Card's erratic weaving in character development, his protagonist lurching across borders of acceptable and consistent behavior for no apparent reason. It's the "no apparent reason" that gets my dander up.
So rather than review the books at the time I read them, I rated them and waited for the haters to hate. They didn't disappoint me. Three years on, I don't care about the anvil chorus of conform-or-suffer any more. So here it is: I didn't like this book by an author whose politics and personality I don't like.