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CharlestheHammer posted:Because dumb lectures are boring as poo poo and you get nothing of value from it. If you want a treaty on other political views and not them clumsily inserted in a sci fi book. Man I also disagree, but you don't need to be a prick about it
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Jan 17, 2018 04:00
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Ravenfood posted:Same. Personally I thought it was fun to try to figure out something about an author when he swings wildly between revolutionary ancap moon colonies that require unprecedented AI power to "function", an ode to fascist militarism, and an exploration of free love communes and a new religion. Comparing and contrasting those is pretty great, and I'm not sure that Heinlein was ever 100% endorsing any of the societies he lays out in any of those books. The an-cap society of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was, explicitly within the text, something that could not work. Prior to the revolution, it relied on the benign tyranny of Earth forces, and, due to impending extreme environmental collapse caused by everyone following their own individual self-interest, the society would literally eat itself within decades. During the revolution, it was held together by an omnipotent Big Brother (seriously, the computer was named Mycroft). After the revolution, it immediately gave up its earlier anarchist pretensions -- which were just that, as stated above -- to adopt parliamentary democracy.
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Jan 17, 2018 04:01
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Ravenfood posted:Same. Personally I thought it was fun to try to figure out something about an author when he swings wildly between revolutionary ancap moon colonies that require unprecedented AI power to "function", an ode to fascist militarism, and an exploration of free love communes and a new religion. Comparing and contrasting those is pretty great, and I'm not sure that Heinlein was ever 100% endorsing any of the societies he lays out in any of those books.
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Jan 17, 2018 07:12
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Ravenfood posted:You're posting in the "lets read the works of idiots and comment on them" thread to tell me that there's zero value in reading works that you politically disagree with? It doesn't matter whether i agree or disagree there is no worth in dumb lectures in books that aren't specifically about that. It's like Rands lovely book, whether a libertarian or not John Galts speech is a dumb time waster.
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Jan 17, 2018 07:22
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The peak of literature is having an entire doorstopper to explain your political philosophy and then ending it with a 200 page speech literally saying the same thing as the past 400 pages.
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Jan 17, 2018 09:51
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CharlestheHammer posted:It doesn't matter whether i agree or disagree there is no worth in dumb lectures in books that aren't specifically about that. It's like Rands lovely book, whether a libertarian or not John Galts speech is a dumb time waster. This is a real bad analogy. Heinlein had legitimate talent at writing prose which was readable and enjoyable and moved the book along, even when that prose was also in service of odious ideas. The Speech is, according to top google hits, 60 pages long. All the attempts to make movies out of Atlas Shrugged have been forced to take serious liberties with it since it would take hours of screen time to present as-is. The rest of the book isn't much better, it's more than a thousand pages of hateable cardboard characters and implausible events, all of it a hamfisted attempt to prove (through fiction!) that Rand's ideology is Real Truth and anyone who says different is a filthy looter who deserves to be shot dead by our noble hypercapitalist overlords. Even in that context, The Speech stands out as a giant steaming turd which takes you completely out of the narrative for a very long time. Starship Troopers is quite short by modern standards for fiction novels (my paperback is 208 pages), and Heinlein wrote it to work as a military adventure novel, not just a polemic. Yeah people in this very thread have criticized the ratio of adventure to politics, and yeah there are literal lectures. The thing is, here they're short and snappy, never lasting more than a page or two IIRC, delivered through characters who know how to be highly opinionated in an entertaining fashion. One of the main lecturers is a likely authorial self insert and, even so, he's pretty fun. By all accounts, Heinlein prided himself on writing well, and he knew enough about the craft to avoid being a Rand. (Put another way, if you want some Heinlein closer to Randian quality, look at his post-stroke novels. He had become too big a name and ego to listen much to editors anymore, and the stroke robbed him of the ability to plot well or police his own worst tendencies. But even in the resulting meandering, bad books, he never lost the ability to write good sentences and paragraphs, and there was never anything like The Galt Speech.)
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Jan 17, 2018 11:13
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Reminds me of an interesting, critical biography of Heinlein that attempts to figure out what the hell was going on with his politics. Long story short, dude was a solipsist, and it had the predictable effect on his broader worldview.
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Jan 17, 2018 11:17
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BobHoward posted:One of the main lecturers is a likely authorial self insert and, even so, he's pretty fun. By all accounts, Heinlein prided himself on writing well, and he knew enough about the craft to avoid being a Rand. Almost every male character in every Heinlein novel is a self-insert. The thing was, he contained multitudes, so it actually worked out OK for the most part.
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Jan 17, 2018 16:23
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Goon Danton posted:The director's commentary track is basically just Verhoeven exactly saying that, over and over. Also the story about how the cast would only do the nude shower scene if Verhoeven also got nude, who being a dirty old Dutchman was more than happy to do it
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Jan 17, 2018 17:50
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Ravenfood posted:You're posting in the "lets read the works of idiots and comment on them" thread to tell me that there's zero value in reading works that you politically disagree with? I think that above all Heinlein liked to argue. He was quite fond of having characters lecture the reader on an idea, but for almost every Heinlein lecture there's a counterexample. Even within ST, the lecturer at the beginning of the book talks about how putting military people in charge is what makes the society work, and the lecturer later on (implied to be more correct) says that's a myth they tell themselves.
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Jan 18, 2018 02:08
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MikeCrotch posted:Also the story about how the cast would only do the nude shower scene if Verhoeven also got nude, who being a dirty old Dutchman was more than happy to do it You can never out-nude a european
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Jan 18, 2018 02:19
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Anticheese posted:And yet some people still don't get that it's meant to be satire Literature prof at my university said it definitely wasn't a satire because it wasn't winking at the camera. I have serious doubts about my uni's literature department
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Jan 18, 2018 02:24
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Tunicate posted:Literature prof at my university said it definitely wasn't a satire because it wasn't winking at the camera. Wait so they expect NPH to look straight into the camera and wink at you after the it's afraid! part?
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Jan 18, 2018 04:49
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Didn't Heinlein write about how sexy 13 year old girls are, frequently
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Jan 18, 2018 06:22
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Yes, and I think he had a specific focus on ones that were related to the protagonist.
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Jan 18, 2018 07:45
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https://sadoeconomist.tumblr.com/post/169829274204/removed-from-all-positions-of-power-even-in
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Jan 18, 2018 18:14
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CharlestheHammer posted:Because dumb lectures are boring as poo poo and you get nothing of value from it. If you want a treaty on other political views and not them clumsily inserted in a sci fi book. I want to believe that your error is indicative of a smirking style
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Jan 18, 2018 19:45
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The Vosgian Beast posted:https://sadoeconomist.tumblr.com/post/169829274204/removed-from-all-positions-of-power-even-in PYF Dark Enlightenment Thinker: I really wish ‘weeaboo’ didn’t already have a common meaning associated with it because you could replace ‘weeaboo’ in the original comic with ‘social justice’ and it’d explain what’s happening at universities, and Google and the rest of Silicon Valley, and Marvel and most other media companies, and the mainline Protestant churches, and the Democratic Party
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Jan 18, 2018 20:22
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Friend of the thread Cingulate is over in the libertarian thread talking about his fondness for Charles Murray.
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Jan 18, 2018 21:24
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you said his name 
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Jan 18, 2018 22:10
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Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:Friend of the thread Cingulate is over in the libertarian thread talking about his fondness for Charles Murray.
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Jan 18, 2018 22:57
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The Vosgian Beast posted:
Is he talking about the straightedge subculture? IIRC some of the more radical elements of that subculture were against eating meat and against casual sex. But even if that's true, on what god forsaken planet is the straightedge subculture part of mainstream progressivism? gently caress, does the straightedge movement even exist anymore? I first heard of them about 10 years ago and I haven't the faintest clue. But yeah, it's more likely that Rev is making stuff up.
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Jan 18, 2018 23:24
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The really hardcore straightedge kids got into religion and became hardline, and some of those got into right-wing Islam since it validated their views. (If you know people who very specifically hate straightedge, interacting with these assholes is probably why)
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Jan 18, 2018 23:49
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pookel posted:I have a really hard time remembering that Charles Murray is a real person & a racist rear end in a top hat, with no connection to Charles Wallace Murray of A Wrinkle in Time. It is really unfair that such a lovely person shares a name with Charles Wallace. if it makes you feel better, in the books it's spelled Murry, so it's a little different!
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Jan 18, 2018 23:54
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Dickeye has already offered to fistfight him so I think we've peaked already
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Jan 19, 2018 00:42
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The Vosgian Beast posted:PYF Dark Enlightenment Thinker: I really wish ‘weeaboo’ didn’t already have a common meaning associated with it because you could replace ‘weeaboo’ in the original comic with ‘social justice’ and it’d explain what’s happening at universities, and Google and the rest of Silicon Valley, and Marvel and most other media companies, and the mainline Protestant churches, and the Democratic Party The average American today makes more in a month than their 1900 counterpart made all year. And that was after a hundred years of relatively rapid growth in the 19th century, which is actually when those Dickensian labor practices happened. When incomes were that much smaller, leisure time and safe working conditions were considered expensive luxuries and workers preferred more wages instead, but as incomes rose, workers increasingly demanded and received those things in lieu of pure wage increases. Families preferred to send their kids to work instead of school until they were earning enough that they could afford school. The fact is that those shorter hours, better working conditions, lower rates of child labor, etc. are things that were largely driven by an increase in incomes mostly well before unions were successful in their organizing and government regulators entered the scene - in fact, those people barely played a role at all, they simply were the ones to take the credit after economic growth had all but solved the problem. The relative economic freedom of the late 1800s before the world wars enabled states to take more and more control over economic matters is in fact still the period of some of the developed world’s strongest recorded economic growth. So the usual story is really blaming the cure for the disease - people had those problems because they were poor, not because they were free. And they stopped being poor because they were free.
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Jan 19, 2018 11:37
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Source your quotes.
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Jan 20, 2018 08:36
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WilliamAnderson posted:Source your quotes. Same blog posted:My areas of expertise are economics, libertarian politics, BDSM, and video games. I'm also into polyamory, science fiction, atheism, heavy metal, firearms, and space. Because, if you're going for bingo, you might as well go for a full board.
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Jan 20, 2018 09:17
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Also re: that weeaboo thing, boy would he not like Nicholas Gurewitch if he actually knew anything about him 
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Jan 20, 2018 23:41
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Somfin posted:Because, if you're going for bingo, you might as well go for a full board. Oh, loving sadoeconomist
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Jan 22, 2018 20:03
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WilliamAnderson posted:Oh, loving sadoeconomist I mean he's probably the dom just knowing that kind of person, but it would really fit better thematically if he were a libertarian who was into being hosed and denied orgasms or w/e
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Jan 22, 2018 20:16
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...wait, that's not Yud (deliberately obscuring his main work)? Checked all the boxes I knew of.
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Jan 22, 2018 21:14
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It's still missing anime.
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Jan 25, 2018 07:24
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Don't get your political views from fiction. The Bible is fiction too 
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Jan 25, 2018 15:36
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DACK FAYDEN posted:...wait, that's not Yud (deliberately obscuring his main work)? Checked all the boxes I knew of. Yud is far too egotistical to hide behind a pseudonym
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Jan 25, 2018 15:51
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I regret to inform you Scott Alexander is doing it again http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
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Jan 26, 2018 15:30
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I regret to inform you Scott Alexander is doing it again http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ this is finest scott.txt: quote:In trying to think of how a Marxist might respond to this attack, as is quote:It’s the Baffler’s article saying that public choice theory is racist, and if you believe it you’re a white supremacist. given that's a spectacularly  reading of what the article says,quote:But people have previously noticed that this blog is good at attracting representation from all across the political spectrum except Marxists. yes, the entire spectrum from Libertarian all the way to neoreactionary your guesses for number of words of Marx that Scott has read or number of Marxists that Scott has engaged with (without banning)
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Jan 26, 2018 17:48
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I tried to imagine how a Marxist might respond. Not by finding a Marxist and asking them or anything, though. They have cooties. Also yes, I'm sure you still never hear a Marxist complain about rent-seeking. That sounds like something someone who understands Marxism would say.
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Jan 26, 2018 17:56
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I'm trying to think of how a marxist might respond but it's not working - they're just standing there not saying anything, in the middle of a cornfield, scaring away crows
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Jan 26, 2018 18:16
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divabot posted:yes, the entire spectrum from Libertarian all the way to neoreactionary Hey, you forgot some stray token socdems who are willing to hang out with nazis. I forgot who said it, but it's worth repeating: When you have a community based on arguing for all possible positions, even for holocaust denial or pedophilia, you don't actually attract all possible political positions. What you attract is the people who really really want to debate the virtues of the holocaust being a filthy lie and then those people scare everybody else away
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Jan 26, 2018 20:05
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