Honest to god, when I asked to buy a copy of Atlas Shrugged from a bookstore when I was younger my (basically sane but left-wing) mother audibly muttered "Know thy enemy, I guess".
...
Sure, thy enemy, that's why I was buying it.
Honestly I can't read the moral values thing as anything but a phrasing issue. You seriously think the average democrat doesn't totally abhor the moral standards and ideology of most of the rest of the country?
The thing is the phrasing "Moral values" is too close to religious, they don't think they believe it when they do, they just call it something different. Ask about a country's ethical standards or generally use intellectualised phrasing and you'll get the opposite results.
Yeah. I don't get the hype for Consider Phlebas or Player of Games, Ian Banks has done genuine proper philosophical novels that are well worth reading.
Use of Weapons is stellar, essentially following the life of a sci-fi intelligence agent whose job it is to screw with less technically advanced civilisations. The whole thing is essentially arguing the prime directive isn't just an important moral position for the sake of the less advanced civs but that breaking it seriously hurts the MORE advanced civilisation too, as the protagonist utterly ruins himself playing god amongst various native cultures.
Or Hydrogen Sonata, which is one of the better arguments on the meaning of life I've seen. The Culture get ahold of a secret that disproves the religion of a fellow civilisation and spends a spy thriller internally arguing over whether or not to tell them.
So many people mentioning the Culture novels but no mention of Transitions?
Starts off as a fairly standard techno-thriller about a society of dimension-hopping assassins and then blindsides you by turning out to have been a philosophical treatise on the implications of the fact the human imagination has limits all along.
Not as in, on what those limits are, just the implications of the fact that there are limits to it at all.
And also contains the absolutely legendary line "I'm not racist, some of my favourite prostitutes are black people"
I mean, he's not wrong. At least in Rotheram, minorities and whites don't have equality under the law. And yes, attaining equality under the law should be the goal, we aren't there yet.
Let's start by arresting the "Asian" gangs that have been given immunity to the law, and maybe we'll get there someday.
She wrote two of the best episodes of Justice League Unlimited... which admittedly were fairly female-centric ones. But that's all I know her for, really.