... but wait, there's more! Sorry, after I posted the previous, I got to thinking about it and realized that I didn't even get into what is, to me, probably a bigger Humanity!Fail than the book itself, and that's the mocking and dismissal of those who brought up issues with the book's concept in the Tor thread.

I'm not accusing you of doing that. But I do see this pattern, which was very prevalent during RaceFail earlier this year, for someone who says "Hey, this book offends me" to be insulted and attacked, labeled stupid or ignorant or a poor reader. These, too, are charged terms. And if you dig deeper into the Tor thread, past Bujold making an ass of herself, there are the usual comparisons to book-burning and censorship.

I absolutely do think that we need to talk about this stuff and air these issues in the open. Nothing should be de facto off limits. But how can a rational discussion be held when just raising the issue in the first place is an invitation to be shouted down, insulted and accused of supporting censorship? And every time that a discussion like this gets a tip of the asshat from people like Bujold (whose books I really like, who I used to respect a lot as a person), it makes the next discussion that much more fraught and tense.