Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffC
fer chrissakes guys, if you don't like the book just move on ....
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I think it's a matter of people wanting to see facts presented factually, and objecting when this is not the case. "If you don't like X don't do it yourself" isn't the answer. "If you don't like eating babies, don't eat any" doesn't do it. People have their opinions, and just being told not to act on the contrary opinion doesn't change those opinions.
I guess it goes back to the whole troll discussion, where people were saying "If you don't agree with trolls, let their statements stand unchallenged." I disagreed then, and I'll disagree now. One of the reasons we have so many flaky opinions out there -- the real tinfoil-hat type -- is that people just ignore anything they don't agree with, rather than refuting it, so the lurkers see it and say "oh, nobody's disagreeing with this, I guess they can't" ... and the tinfoil hats win.
Something I learned a very long time ago: "If not me, then who? If not now, then when?" Can I fix everything in the world? Of course not. But as Loren Eiseley's story "The Star Thrower" points out, I can do something about what's within my reach. If more people did something about what they could do, said something about what they saw, instead of waiting for "them", the mysterious "them" who can fix everything, to fix everything, things would get fixed. There's another one: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." If we disregard doing good while we're waiting for the unattainable perfect, nothing ever gets done.
So no, I'm not going to "move on". I'm not going to wait for it to go away. I'm going to say "Hey, this is wrong." I can't say that about every book that's wrong. I can't say that about every opinion that's wrong. But I can say it
this time, about
this one. Me > nobody, and 1 > 0.