The Inscrutability of Angels

[Syn]

I dunno I feel like maybe democracy has run its course and we should try out the philosopher-king option.

[Elok]

I dunno I feel like maybe democracy has run its course and we should try out the philosopher-king option.

But what if the philosopher is ... Steven Pinker?

(see what I did there?)

[Buster's Uncle]

I dunno I feel like maybe democracy has run its course and we should try out the philosopher-king option.

I fancy that works here...

[Elok]

Bumping this because OSC was mentioned, and I never recounted my favorite WTF OSC-reading moment.  Spoilers follow for two rather bad OSC books.

(click to show/hide)

So, the Gate series is about a kid, born to a family of wizards, with the long-lost ability to create teleportation gates.  It starts out promisingly enough, with the kid realizing what he is and finding what he can do with it.  There's a little Cardian misogyny, but you can largely brush past it in the first book.  Then you get to the second, where the whole story gets hijacked by the author's ongoing obsession with demonic possession, soul-procession, and sundry other ideas he's done to death before.  It turns out the Devil is the real villain, and he possessed the last gatemage and caused big trouble with his powers.  So now that there's another ultra-rare, ultra-powerful gatemage, the Devil wants to nab him.  And, uh, he finds it easiest to possess people when their guard is down, emotionally, against the person he's currently possessing, so he can jump hosts.
Enter Nikki, our the gym teacher's sexy teenage daughter, who for some weird reason is current host to the Lord of Lies.  Danny the gatemage unwittingly reveals himself to her at the start of the first book, and Old Nick spends the whole rest of said novel making her act like a total skank so Danny will sleep with her and he can possess a gatemage again.  As it happens, her behavior is only slightly sluttier than that of Danny's other female friends, who all want to nail the magical superbeing and bear his magical spawn, because OSC.  Anyway, she/he eventually succeeds, and the Devil crosses over to Danny.  She becomes pregnant in the process.
In the third book, Danny finds a way to neutralize, and finally destroy, the Devil, who turns out to pose a surprisingly insubstantial threat.  Nikki refuses to have an abortion, because the whole point of her getting pregnant was to have her model pro-life principles.  Now, she's a teenager, with no mother and a gym coach for a dad.  The child, which she conceived via an extremely extended and demeaning act of sorcerous rape, will almost certainly have strong magical powers, while she has none.  Danny, during the third book, discovers a new form of magic that gives him ludicrously godlike powers.  His involvement with his child, and its mother, consists of him checking in on her and reporting to his friends that she's basically doing okay and Coach Leider enjoys being a grandpa.  And that's it.  There's no indication that he will ever have anything remotely resembling a fatherly relationship with the kid, nor will he ever help out its poor mother.  I can't recall if we're even told the child's sex.  Card's hero is a borderline-omnipotent deadbeat dad.

So, yeah.  Next to that, the sins of Empire are rather trivial.
EDIT: Derp, I shared this on the very first page, I just forgot I did.  Anyway, that was incredibly FUBAR.