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Interesting. I've always felt the story to be a bit of a straw man. Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?
Not always. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome People are fickle in their adulation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I've always felt the story to be a bit of a straw man. Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?
There have been school districts lately that have been getting rid of advanced math classes in the name of equality.
My hot take is that this story is highly overrated. It’s boring, poorly written, and lacks nuance. The reason people remember it fondly is (1) everyone loves Vonnegut because he’s funny, so they don’t want to criticize it and (2) everyone read this story in middle school and are blinded by nostalgia.
I think it has a special place in the hearts of people who are especially affected by interruptions, more because of what is concretely inflicted on the title character than because of the abstract argument about equality and inequality. There was no language for talking about being sensitive to interruptions back then, and there isn't really now unless you have some kind of diagnosis. My wife does not understand tha…
Captive to our smartphones, distracted constantly by an endless succession of oh-so-important notifications for trivial things. Who in modern life does not feel a little like Harrison Bergeron with his federally-mandated thought-train-interrupting earpiece? And who among us cannot sympathize with Albert Brock, The Murderer? https://www.readkong.com/page/the-murderer-by-ray-bradbury-8...
It is baffling that Bradbury was able to write The Murderer in 1953. The transistor was invented in 1947 and the first fully transistorized radio wasn't available until a year after Bradbury published this, but he got all the way through predicting ringtones, smartwatches, housing automation, GPS digital dispatch/gig economy jobs, and smarmy digital assistants in the span of a single story. I am not aware of a more p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I've always felt the story to be a bit of a straw man. Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?
There have been school districts lately that have been getting rid of advanced math classes in the name of equality.
I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses. Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. The kids who want to excel generally will, and can often just be advanced a grade or two. The rigid structure of class groupings by age is anachronistic and maybe like 50% appropriate. There are better ways to structure education.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There have been school districts lately that have been getting rid of advanced math classes in the name of equality.
This is probably a vain attempt by management to put a shine on a cost cutting exercise. There is a poisonous ideology at work in the background but ultimately defunding schools comes from a desire for more inequality, not less.
The superintendent, the school board, the city council or the voters?
This story is typically seen as a critique of socialism, but it's more likely that Vonnegut intended it as a critique of critiques of socialism [1]. Vonnegut himself was a socialist [2], and the absurdist tone of the story reinforces this idea. [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/197545/03882696bf... [2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/kurt-vonneguts-socialism-fr...
The notion that socialism cuts off the heads of over-achievers to enforce a dull sameness on society is basically a straw man argument that doesn't correlate at all with how socialist governance works in practice. Some will point to higher taxes on billionaires as a counterexample, but it's equally clear that the wealthiest rely heavily on things like roads, ports, etc. (to get goods from one place to another), and since without that infrastructure they'd have little opportunity to accumulate wealth, higher taxes on that wealth are appropriate.
/me thinks reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_selection_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_men…
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