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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2025

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  • I haven’t read a lot of Sanderson, but I’ve read enough to sense that this difference is in true personal disposition.

    Sanderson’s drive seems to be more of wonder, curiosity and adventure, and the stories delve into morality and justice as a source of plot tension.

    In contrast, I think OSC has always been more of a black-and-white thinker. I think his best stories have been ones where he is exploring a moral struggle or thought experiment. But at the end of the story, you can pull out what OSC has concluded morally about those characters - who is good, who is bad (and always has been), and maybe who is a necessary evil.

    All of OSC’s stories are about categorizing people, behaviors and decisions into ‘should/should not’ buckets. And I’ve just never gotten that sense from Sanderson’s books.


  • At 13, I read Ender’s Game and was absolutely obsessed. Read a ton of other OSC books at that age and it took me decades to rid myself of all the veiled mormon morality in his books.

    As an adult, I never had one hesitation about disavowing him. I re-read the Ender saga a few years back to see how it held up (it didn’t hold a candle to my teen-self’s impression), but I had no problem not paying for new copies of anything that would pay OSC.


  • Ooohhh I see, I am judgemental because your circumstances and stated preferences represent everyone in a hard place.

    If you both could have and would have done it, it is completely reasonable to make that an expectation on everyone who struggles.

    Your struggle was definitely representative of the worst circumstances bc you had 1 job and were a single parent – even though I mentioned how plenty of parents (including single ones) balance a FT job and gigs or a managerie of gigs. Or a FT job, single parenthood, and a disability. Or…

    If you can’t see past your own life and circumstance, but want to proscribe what other people ‘should’ do (or no longer deserve your empathy), you are the one who is judgemental.






  • Unfortunately, research on prisoners and concentration camp victims did produce new valuable medical information.

    Most of the field of gynecology is based on experiments done on women slaves, where the “doctors” decided their victims conveniently didn’t have nerve endings.

    Ethics throttles research.

    But I am aghast at the thought that we should permit unethical research in the pursuit of, at the end of the day, greed.

    And I say this as a professional scientist.

    I can’t believe this conversation is even necessary.