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Pious Perverts See other Pious Perverts Articles Title: The Lies of Wikipedia James Patrick Hogan (born June 27, 1941, London) is a science fiction author. He was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. He left school at the age of sixteen and worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty and had two other subsequent marriages and six children.[1] He worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run their sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.[1] Hogan's style of science fiction is sometimes considered hard science fiction; in his earlier work he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, he postulates that theory should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded and replaced. The series shows both the strength and weakness of early Hogan, since the resolution of the mystery is impossible on astrophysical grounds. In recent years, however, Hogan's preferred theories have tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific. He is a serious proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism,[2] of creationism over Evolution,[3] and of the theory that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS reappraisal).[4] While such theories may seem to contradict his views on scientific rationality, they are consistent with the view that scientific theories should not be accepted simply because they are widely held (see, for instance, argument from authority). Hogan has also espoused the idea that the Holocaust didn't happen, writing that he finds the work of Arthur Butz and Mark Weber to be "more scholarly, scientific, and convincing than what the history written by the victors says."[5] Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete (e.g. the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free). This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story, And Then There Were None), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
Poster Comment: I know James Hogan, and what is in bold is absolutely untrue. He believes in open inquiry, that's all. I've seen distortions like this at Wikipedia many times. So many times, in fact, that I no longer trust the place.
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#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
Personally? I've liked everything of his that I've read, except The Anguished Dawn, which stunk. Cradle of Saturn was cool though.
Did anyone else notice the two Superbowl coaches were formerly defensive coordinators? Not personally. I used to write for http:// LewRockwell.com., which Hogan reads, and he occasionally wrote me letters about my articles. I've exchanged enough emails with him about various things to know that Wikipedia is libeling him. He said quite a few people have written him about that entry. Wikipedia is trying to make him out as a crackpot and a anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, and he's nothing of the sort. I've seen Wikipedia do this before, to the point I no longer trust the site.
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." -- Marshall McLuhan, after Alexander Pope and William Blake.
So why would someone do that? And why is that particular charge an effective club? What has he written that someone doesn't want read? Lots of establishment scientists certainly wouldn't want him widely read. But maybe there's nothing he's written or said, but rather his spirit of inquiry itself that is objectionable. All hidebound establishments loathe it. Enough outside-the-box thinking and someone might go read Jewish Supremacism -- which is mainly just Jews in their own words -- and come away with something other than a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Did anyone else notice the two Superbowl coaches were formerly defensive coordinators? |
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