221–230 of 275 posts
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> So you mean saying "oh poor you!" giving a sad look and moving on with your day? Oh what a zinger! You got me there! /s Honestly, why should I waste time arguing with you?
> Honestly, why should I waste time arguing with you? To show good faith… you succeeded at showing you didn't have that.
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You're not hearing it from this libertarian. Libertarianism is not code for rude, thoughtless, meanness, uncharitable, stealing, defrauding, enslaving, etc. It's code for people doing what they want to, as long as they don't hurt others. For example, I follow recommendations for making my web sites more usable for people using screen readers. Not because anyone makes me do it - I'm happy to do it.
Great. You want a pat on the back for doing the easy things? A lot of accommodations cost money and are supported by taxes. Are you one of the rare Libertarians who doesn't also believe "taxation is theft"? Other accommodations require regulation because incentives (money) alone don't work (and have been repeatedly proven not to). Have you squared your Libertarianism with the need for useful regulations of accommodat…
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Complaints of this type go back over a century. Before smartphones, people complained that nobody was socializing because they were all busy reading newspapers. I think it's safe to call this argument tired at this point.
I don't think you've really processed The Murderer. Bradbury was predicting that we'd have smaller slices of attention available, that we would choose to hyper-stimulate ourselves 24/7 and not choose to protect our time for quiet contemplation. That every moment would be filled with either important work messages or advertisements. Bradbury doesn't even predict a way that this causes secondary harm. He just says "hey…
Bradbury's writing is many things, but morally neutral it is not. Throughout almost all of his books is a morality that looks very skeptically at change, and a tendency to predict any trend into slippery slope. His prose and storytelling is fantastic and as a counterbalance to more optimistic authors of the time like Heinlein his works are great, but Bradbury writes from a very distinct viewpoint.
A much more neutral older SF author, IMO, is Le Guin. She does a great job of bringing up complex ideas and not picking sides.
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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…
Ever read "The Machine Stops" by EM Forster? Over 100 years old, and it's got Facebook style interactions!
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…
I'm not certain it is, but The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert has a rather interesting excerpt:
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>*And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.*
The Santaroga Barrier,
Frank Herbert, 1968
The way that tech uses "dark patterns" to keep us glued to our phones, and use fairly advanced science to do it, was sort of called out if not predicted.
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It's all double-speak for Marxism, or equal outcomes for everyone.
AFAIK Marxism isn't about equal outcomes, but it is opposed to enforced classes. So a Marxist would likely argue you shouldn't have lower and advanced courses separate, but you'd still have one course with a distribution of grades. The teacher would just focus more on the kids that need more help to improve the mean of the distribution, where our current method would create unnatural multi-modal distributions If you'…
LOL - whut? Did you read a different 1984?
Orwell's thoughts on governance was complicated, and changed over time, but in no way was 1984 some kind of endorsement of socialism.
Also, Marxism is not socialism.
https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=Th....
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Art classes seem the same, art and music teachers always seem eager to give special attention to kids who do much better than their peers.
Of course. Very few teachers take any interest in the students who do well in math. In fact, they'll often find them annoying. Yes, there are some teachers who do take an interest and do their best for those students. They just aren't the norm, and they don't get much support from the administration.
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Why can't it be both at the same time? Vonnegut was both a great thinker and a great writer (the former is typically a precondition for the latter).
Vonnegut was brilliant, but I never found his writing subtle. He generally was pretty straightforward about things. imho, Harrison Bergeron should be taken at face value as his indictment against holding back the gifted among us. Remember that his exemplars aren't great Randian industrialists, but like... dancers. Artists. Quietly intelligent men like himself. Vonnegut isn't saying "the strong should triumph and stan…
I have found it to be multi-layer, with an obvious layer at the top, and other stuff for those who delve deeper.
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Equity, not equality. Big difference in modern parlance.
It's remarkable how Equity was just smuggled into "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", without people realising that it doesn't mean the sort of equality that the majority supports.