[Main Blog Post] Thoughts on "The Hanged God"

[jprussell]

If you've been sick of Spengler, now we're onto something new! I read the first book of Shani Oates's The Oðinn Trilogy called The Hanged God: Oðinn Grimnir, and I've shared my thoughts here.

Oh, and as a bit of a PSA, the RSS has not updated since the 4th Spengler post, and I can't quite figure out why just now, but I'm working on it.

Comments

[causticus]

Oof. Frequent use of the passive voice is just a bit of a red flag in my book.

I encountered a similar issue recently as I was reading through a book on Hellenic reconstructionism. The author frequently used the passive voice to (seemingly) stealth his own off-topic opinions into the text; as if his opinions are some sort of vague consensus, rather than just his own opinions. Ofc, this gimmick might seem pretty obvious to anyone who has a basic understanding of English grammar and syntax and is paying attention to what they are reading.

Regarding the dodgy source-attribution you mention, I've seen this a lot when an author is trying to pass off their work as being academic. Throwing in tons of citations does sort of present a veneer of scholarly rigour. Of course, it's easy to see for yourself if the citations actually confirm what the author is trying to claim. I'm guessing a small percentage of readers actually investigate a book's bibliography. Thus, an unscrupulous (or just sloppy) author can make all sort of spurious statements and generally get away with doing such.

[jprussell]

If I'm being charitable on both of your points, it is, in fact, rather hard to keep track of where you learned stuff, especially in a field where you run into the same or similar claims from different folks, or you've had a hunch based on connecting the dots from different folks and now that's just part of your mental model of how things are. I think a lot of folks get confronted with that when they try to write, and instead of doing the leg work to track down something to back them up, they just make it mushy.

Academics are supposed to be trained in the hard skill of remembering where you learned stuff and referring to it appropriately, but it seems that they can be just as bad, or worse at just slapping some citations on something to make it look credible, even when the citations in no way back up what they're actually saying. (There's a lot more where that link came from over at The Last Psychiatrist, if you want to become deeply depressed about the state of medical "science").