Absences and Inhumanity: Six Works of Abstract Horror

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

The alternative to privately owned companies is government ownership? I'm still a little uneasy about that because there's so many companies I wouldn't trust the government to own responsibly.

The alternative is the workers owning the means of production rather than having a private unaccountable elite we expect to act against their own interests. Ideally we'd have smaller communities running themselves.

[Mr. Veech]

Quote Originally Posted by James

The alternative is the workers owning the means of production rather than having a private unaccountable elite we expect to act against their own interests. Ideally we'd have smaller communities running themselves.

That is what I'd like to see. Under distributism the means of production would be redistributed to actual workers. The farmer who owns their own equipment is a historical example of this. Self-employment is more dignified than working for someone else. When you're engaged in the latter, it becomes morally questionable about who gets what. Distributism is attractive to me because the worker works for themselves, not the state or some other entity in which certain individuals are placed in a privileged position due to "networking," which is an unfortunate feature of capitalism.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I thought workers owning their output would be considered a private company? I had assumed all businesses not owned by government were private companies.

Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production.

[luxfugio]

I repeatedly with a genuine commitment described to Druidic what would happen if Donald Trump got to be President. And when this pedophile makes a disgrace of the nation, it is just fine, because he is a Republican.

I hate, as a writer, to be so obvious; I would like to be apolitical. But the time for that as anything but affectation is over.

Vulgarity and stupidity have become prized leadership traits in today's world, so debating about Trump seems pointless to me these days. I eventually got tired of having to justify why behaving well and actually knowing things are positive attributes.

[Evans]

S. T. Joshi - Blog

Are any of the things Joshi satirizes here actually happening? Has anyone threatened to 'give up on Weird Fiction' because of him or is anyone really having a collection of their blog entries published? One of the reasons he comes over more petty than is likely the case is because he rarely links to or clearly spells out what his detractors are saying

A few words on his review of Paul Tremblay

Quote

The key episode in the book is Marjorie’s confrontation with Father Wanderly and a Dr. Navidson who is brought in to determine whether Marjorie is really possessed. This scene is quite gripping, although not in a weird manner; for Marjorie shrewdly taunts her pious interrogators, profoundly shaking their faith. At the end of the interview she boldly queries Father Wanderly, who had admitted to performing a few exorcisms in the past: “After you performed the exorcism, how did you know that demon wasn’t still in there, hiding? How do you know it didn’t go in a hibernation state, quieting down to come out later, years and years later when no one would be around to help? Hey, how do you know if the wrong spirit left? What if you expelled the person’s real spirit and only the demon’s spirit was there to take its place? If I believed in any of that stuff, I’d be afraid that was going to happen to me.” (176) Then, as a final coup de grâce: “Father Wanderly, how do you know if a person has a spirit inside their body in the first place? Have you ever seen that, at least?” (176). The novel is beginning to read like an atheistic—and, therefore, non-supernatural—version of The Exorcist; and so it proves to be.

This is a good example of how Joshi's 'pop atheism' or 'atheist paranoia' leads him to say absolutely stupid things. If he thinks *that* amounts to serious, edgy or even interesting criticism then he's sold out any intellectual integrity on the basis of a grievance. Think of it as being along the lines of a scholar of comedy who feels compelled to praise the crudest pie-in-the-face or flatulence sketch merely because they are billed as comedy.

(The actual 'horror' or disturbing idea hinted at in the italicized sentence is the Turing Machine problem that stems from the analogy of other minds, namely, that we have no way of knowing for sure whether another being really is conscious or just an automaton programed to mimic the external behavior of a conscious being. This leaves the door open for the schizophrenic nightmare scenario on which we are the only conscious being in a world of automata. These problems arise regardless of whether one holds the mind is material or immaterial )

I have gotten around to reading Chasm, finally. It was a decent deaf. Chock-full of cliches and contrived dialogue, but the sparks of originality in Land's prose and ideas make it readable. The manifesto which serves as a postscript was my favorite part of the book.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

He said True Detective was the most intelligent show in television history, so that's an additional no-no from me.