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wikipedia has renamed the page 'Mass killings of landlords under Mao Zedong' to 'Chinese Land Reform' lol, good lads over thereGuavanaut posted:Speaking of edgy takes on religion, I think (regardless of it's other flaws) that theory does very well explain the people that went from Dick Dorkins New Atheism in the 00s to Gordon Peenertron Rules for Lobsters in the 10s. Speaking of which, His Dark Materials is New Athiest as all hell but is still amazing, and some of the themes are genuinely very cool for a kids book. e: the history of new atheism as a whole is real interesting, because despite its eventual association with the alt-right edginess I definitely remember its very early period having a very liberatory tone. Whatever crap Dawkins went on to say, the god delusion was as critical of christianity as it was islam etc iirc, and he made an effort to include lots of contact details for organisations that help people out of oppressive, super conservative religious environments. It did initially feel like he was trying to do A Good Thing regardless of your position on his work. I'm pretty sure my transition from dumb 16 year old libertarian to socialist was influenced by that. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Jan 14, 2020 |
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radmonger posted:Maybe for the best. Taken literally, Buffy was about the necessity of forming a gang to violently take back the streets from predators of another race. And getting into doomed romances with those predators 
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Jan 14, 2020 11:40
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What I remember from when I was a kid was that there was this massive establishment push for Harry Potter- Rowling is getting children to read! She is a warrior in the fight against the degeneration of youth! There was a similar sort of buzz around Pratchett and Pullman and others but I don't think it was anything like as large. Which makes sense, really- Discworld is this cynical, scatological satire, and HDM is a bizarre gnostic screed which could have made for a serviceable JRPG plot. HP, by comparison, is... equal parts whimsy and intimate psychodrama. HP is the sort of book literature teachers expect and want children to like, basically.sebzilla posted:Also Xander is just terrible Xander is hilarious, at like a conceptual level, because he's supposed to be this uncool dweeb who can't make it with the ladies despite Nicholas Brendan very clearly being a towering colossus of chiselled beef with shoulders you could break the world on. This isn't something which is unique to Buffy but I don't remember any other show was quite so funny. I might do a rewatch, actually, since it has slipped out of my consciousness and I liked it well enough at one point to have the whole thing on DVD.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:41
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Guavanaut posted:Speaking of edgy takes on religion, I think (regardless of it's other flaws) that theory does very well explain the people that went from Dick Dorkins New Atheism in the 00s to Gordon Peenertron Rules for Lobsters in the 10s.  ) to New Atheism. Then again, maybe he'd have fallen into the same pit as Dawkins and wouldn't be as fondly remembered as he is. So it goes when you speculate about alternate history.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:42
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ThomasPaine posted:all this talk of kids books had made me think of both the wind singer and artemis fowl for the first time in many many years, both great books for young me Oh unhappy people! The time has come to sit and eat buns! Windsinger owned, especially the sequel where the aging despot randomly pisses on the floor to stop himself buying into his own hype.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:43
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Oh unhappy people! The time has come to sit and eat buns! I only read the first two, wind singer and (I think?) slaves of the mastery. Never got round to the third in the trilogy for... reasons, I guess?
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Jan 14, 2020 11:45
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floofyscorp posted:177 results on AO3 Only 177? Practically ephemeral.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:45
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Only 177? Practically ephemeral.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:46
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Miftan posted:In non-awful person news, all around good egg David Graeber has written a piece about Centrism and the election I think the thread will enjoy and that on first read through seems mostly very plausible to me I did like the essay, but it is odd to write this quote:As Thomas Frank has pointed out, as early as the 1970s, formerly leftist parties from the US to Japan made a strategic decision to effectively abandon what remained of their older, working-class base and rebrand themselves primarily as parties representing the interests and sensibilities of the professional-managerial classes. This was the real social base of Clintonism in the US, Blairism in the UK, and now Macronism in France. All became the parties of administrators. (In the UK, of course, this included those endless legions of lawyers and accountants.) and not even mention the New Left, the 1968 Democratic Convention, May 1968, the new social movements, counterculture, women's lib etc as things that existed. Parties that resisted rejecting vanguardism and embracing new social movements like the PCF and PCI did not find much success either... instead he presents the responses of left-leaning parties in the 1970s as a unilateral abandonment. Who was donning the hard hats in 1970 then? One would think that Graeber the great intellectual anarchist might regard the spirit of interdit d'interdire a little more fondly, but perhaps it had the wrong demographic makeup... too many bourgeois backgrounds
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Jan 14, 2020 11:47
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Miftan posted:Sorry I'm not being clear. I agree with you and I think Graeber might as well. He's just saying the tories might have found a way to leverage that frustration into winning with people whose interests they don't represent. Whereas I would say that the evidence that working-age people were fooled in that way in any meaningful numbers is weak or non-existent. Most Tory voters were correctly expressing their class interests by voting Tory, at least on the cases as presented by the two parties. Some people pick up bins, some have bins picked up for them. Consequently, their class interests are in conflict. Not much reason to overthink things beyond that.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:50
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ronya posted:I did like the essay, but it is odd to write this He's almost definitely not happy about it, but if we're being charitable, it's a statement of fact - what happened - not a judgement call. The judgement call is reserved for how this interacted with the 2019 election. That analysis, whatever your opinion of it, is I think solid. It may or may not be true, as is true for all analysis, but I think it's an interesting idea to think about. Ultimately, it's just another way of saying that people think of politicians and the establishment is being pencil pushers and bureaucrats and Johnson managed to conflate that with the EU while positioning himself as the opposite. That's why you get people saying things like "he says it like it is" and all that crap.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:52
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Miftan posted:Sorry I'm not being clear. I agree with you and I think Graeber might as well. He's just saying the tories might have found a way to leverage that frustration into winning with people whose interests they don't represent. Yes and they got away with it because the leftist analysis of class wasn't adopted by the public as the way of analysing their plight. The left can't win by agreeing that classes of rulemakers are the problem any more than they can by saying migrants are the problem, it's an intellectual surrender and will confuse any strategy going forward. ronya posted:I did like the essay, but it is odd to write this Which of those parties exist today at a meaningful level though? He's not writing history he's writing about now.
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Jan 14, 2020 11:53
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e: I'm an idiot
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Jan 14, 2020 12:00
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:What I remember from when I was a kid was that there was this massive establishment push for Harry Potter- Rowling is getting children to read! She is a warrior in the fight against the degeneration of youth! There was a similar sort of buzz around Pratchett and Pullman and others but I don't think it was anything like as large. Which makes sense, really- Discworld is this cynical, scatological satire, and HDM is a bizarre gnostic screed which could have made for a serviceable JRPG plot. HP, by comparison, is... equal parts whimsy and intimate psychodrama. HP is the sort of book literature teachers expect and want children to like, basically. Paul.Power posted:And to bring in yet another author, it always makes me wonder how the course of all this stuff might have altered if Douglas Adams hadn't died of a heart attack in 2001 aged 49. In that Adams, Dawkins' best friend, was also a staunch atheist - but one capable of making jokes about it and understanding others' point of view. So he could have added a lot more humanity (humanism, if you will That the Dawkins horsemans of atheism clung to their own mythology of rational scientific progress, logical positivism, and unbiased method I think is what became their undoing, especially after the fallout from the Great Recession where eternal progress myths didn't look so hot anymore, and left a lot of disillusioned people ripe for the lobster traps of degeneracy myths and chaos dragons. There's probably a good book to be written on that in a few years time.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:07
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Vetitum posted:This ties back to a lot of stuff that's finally being written about in regards to the divide between young and old in this country - John Harris touched on that a lot (make of him what you will) but I think it talks to a deeper truth when you consider that actually the type of economic security that gets ascribed to Baby Boomers is by no means enjoyed by everyone of that generation. Absolutely. Many pensioners are living in poverty. Those who had long working lives in the civil service /public sector etc with decent pensions equating to not-far-off a median salary for those in today's workforce by no means represent all pensioners. Ed: and not even all those have great pensions. Friends who spent their entire working lives in the lower rungs say as nurses or whatever are retiring with pensions of about £7k p.a. More people are becoming 'pensioners' who have had those 'gold-plated' schemes taken away several years before retirement and have in some cases lost their entire pension pots (how I hate that word!) or savings through bad advice. Too many people just get brain freeze if anyone starts to mention the words 'national insurance', 'tax' or 'pensions' and trust any smarmy bastard in a posh suit. There's also the changed pension age. When I was 40, I would have been entitled to state pension this year. By the time I hit 45 this had moved up to another nearly 7 years. For people that employers are already rejecting on an age basis, to find that you have to get in an extra 7 years employment at a time when employers are busy making anyone over 40 redundant, and refusing to employ anyone over 50 on the spurious grounds that an old dog can't learn new tricks, when women in particular just a little older than myself may have had several years out of the workforce raising children or being carers for elderly parents, this doesn't leave a lot of opportunity to get these huge pensions young people seem to think the elderly have. There's also the problem with the DWP Pensions forecast unit using very weasel words to the extent that my friend and I had an argument over the new year about exactly how to interpret the wording on hers - she interpreted it one way and me another - in her interpretation she would be £2000 a year better off when she gets to retirement age than in my interpretation. She has an optimistic view. Me I don't trust a word that comes out of their mouths. £2000 represents a lot of money when your total income after state retirement age is going to be around £750 pm (possibly + £166pm if her interpretation is right). Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Jan 14, 2020 |
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Jan 14, 2020 12:08
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Paul.Power posted:A cool thing Pratchett did often was reference people's impressions and pop-culture knowledge of a thing rather than the thing itself, which broadens accessibility. That's not to say he didn't do the research, he did a ton of research, but it often got highly distilled in the writing process. My first Pratchett was Equal Rites which had just been published. I used to go to a science fiction reading group in London at CityLit and this was scheduled. Pratchett came and gave us a talk/chat on it. He wasn't very famous then! In the early 90s I used to go to Discworld - or maybe Octarine - conventions - small affairs with under 100 people - I was in some group called Octarine that had a publication called Tales from the Talking Drum. One of them, Robert Rankin came too. He was a sort of protege of Pratchett at the time I think. I loved his East of Ealing trilogy.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:10
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Miftan posted:I think the point Graeber is trying to make is that people are really sick of, and this is the biggie, rules that they can't change and disagree with. This is everyone with a stupid boss, nurses raging at the admin who make them fill out a million forms instead of caring for patients (every job has this to some extent) and gammons raging and unelected brussels bureaucrats. Graeber is interesting because he’s never less than 40% or more than 60% right. He has a talent for getting one big, controversial idea that’s broadly correct but he tends to then take that off into corollaries that aren’t (and isn’t very interested in details). Example here: people don’t like being subject to rules they didn’t make and can’t change (true). Therefore anyone who makes a career out of understanding, interpreting or applying rules is annoying to people who don’t, particularly because that kind of expertise tends to be better paid than doing stuff directly (true). Therefore there is a fundamental divide between a useless parasite class of rules-understanders / professional organisers and a good salt of the earth class of genuine carers who are too busy doing REAL WORK to understand things like rules, which are all made up and pointless in any case (false and weirdly overreaching). He’s like a more left wing Will Hutton.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:15
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Beefeater1980 posted:Graeber is interesting because he’s never less than 40% or more than 60% right. He has a talent for getting one big, controversial idea that’s broadly correct but he tends to then take that off into corollaries that aren’t (and isn’t very interested in details). I'll have to reread the article, but I don't think that's the point he was making. I thought it was (to your second true point) "and the tories successfully placed the EU and Labour in the rules camp and them in the opposite. This was the basis for the recent wave of right wing populism since 2016."
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Jan 14, 2020 12:22
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think i managed to cancel my labour membership but that was really long winded, ended up having to email like 3 different people
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Jan 14, 2020 12:31
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Beefeater1980 posted:Therefore there is a fundamental divide between a useless parasite class of rules-understanders / professional organisers and a good salt of the earth class of genuine carers who are too busy doing REAL WORK to understand things like rules, which are all made up and pointless in any case (false and weirdly overreaching). it bertrand posted:First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. That's a huge overgeneralization and I'm certain that Russell knew that, being a professional writing-about-thoughtser, but one that was a useful preamble to where he took it.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:35
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gh0stpinballa posted:think i managed to cancel my labour membership but that was really long winded, ended up having to email like 3 different people Why would you cancel it before the leadership election? At the very least you couldve held on to it for a bit more to make sure the proper rear end in a top hat don't get in.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:35
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Paul.Power posted:I've just realised that 177 is Vimes' badge number so now I'm thinking that this number is made up. Actually, 177 is just the number of works on AO3 containing both Vimes and Carrot. When you narrow it down to specifically a romantic pairing or the two, there's only two results - that's a real rarepair!
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Jan 14, 2020 12:35
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gh0stpinballa posted:think i managed to cancel my labour membership but that was really long winded, ended up having to email like 3 different people that was foolish of you!!
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Jan 14, 2020 12:40
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gh0stpinballa posted:think i managed to cancel my labour membership but that was really long winded, ended up having to email like 3 different people This seems like a silly idea!
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Jan 14, 2020 12:43
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https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1217041173266804736?s=20 11% of the UK population would go to the moon, but only if there was an entertainment centre there first. What a country.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:43
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To be fair I'd get proper bored if I was there for more than a day. I bet the spaceship doesn't even have a Switch.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:45
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Miftan posted:Why would you cancel it before the leadership election? At the very least you couldve held on to it for a bit more to make sure the proper rear end in a top hat don't get in. i dunno, just bored of the leadership contest i guess. uninspired by the candidates, dont think any of them could win a general. gonna give the money to shelter or something instead.
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Jan 14, 2020 12:47
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I like how they include the people who just started arguing the premise of the question
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Jan 14, 2020 12:47
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Rarity posted:To be fair I'd get proper bored if I was there for more than a day. I bet the spaceship doesn't even have a Switch. What if we installed WoW Classic server there first?
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Jan 14, 2020 12:47
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Purple Prince posted:I think it's like the Dracos, in that both James and Lily are from old wizarding families and just have a shitload of wealth lying around where the actual source of that wealth is lost to history.  Lily potter was from a muggle fam, hence her sister petunia (now a Dursley) was not magical and hated all that poo poo.Really the simple answer would be "they had magic life insurance" or "everyone was sad when they died/you killed voldomort so everyone kinda felt they owed you, so we all chucked a few quid in a pot". At the start of the series it doesn't really matter it's all just part of the excitement of him being a wizard (and a rich one too!) This has the same fundamental problem that plagues most of HP - it starts off as a fairly good children's book for children. He's an orphan who gets whisked off to this magical world beyond imagining. It's exciting because it could happen to you too! Then Rowling tried to explain everything, and ruined it. Hence we got goblin Copying the best thing to have been on a 4chan 
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Jan 14, 2020 12:50
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I would LOVE to go to space, but I do not trust 'Virgin Galactic' to be safe in any way shape or form. Sorry, not sorry, Branson!
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Jan 14, 2020 12:52
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On the subject of hospital paperwork, I had to go in for a checkup yesterday and I had three separate people come back to me with forms I'd just filled in to ask me "Can you confirm your full name and date of birth? Now, is this your signature? Do you consent to the procedure?" Well, yes; that's why I signed the thing in the first place!
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Jan 14, 2020 12:53
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Junior G-man posted:https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1217041173266804736?s=20 We've been spending all this time trying to convince the Brits that we can build a better world and achieve better things but have we ever just considered the British are fundamentally miserable cunts who you could hand a winning lottery ticket to and they'd refuse it out of spite and lack of imagination?
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Jan 14, 2020 12:54
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Jan 14, 2020 12:55
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Junior G-man posted:https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1217041173266804736?s=20 VideoGames posted:I would LOVE to go to space, but I do not trust 'Virgin Galactic' to be safe in any way shape or form. Sorry, not sorry, Branson! winegums posted:Copying the best thing to have been on a 4chan
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Jan 14, 2020 12:58
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Junior G-man posted:What if we installed WoW Classic server there first? The latency would be a bitch
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Jan 14, 2020 12:59
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VideoGames posted:I would LOVE to go to space, but I do not trust 'Virgin Galactic' to be safe in any way shape or form. Sorry, not sorry, Branson! It'd get you there safely but it'll definitely be running late.
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Jan 14, 2020 13:00
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Virgin In Raging Galactic Inferno Nightmare
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Jan 14, 2020 13:03
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I don't think space trips will be popular outside of a very wealthy "status" group. They'll be too expensive for 99% to afford off the bat. Even of that 1%, only a very small percentage will be medically fit to be allowed. All the elder vampires who run this country Everyone is so loving tired that annual leave is a chance to just rest. There's far more tangible/relatable poo poo on earth to see before we go off planet. Fine for the leisure class who've "done" every major country and continent, not fine for some of us who still want to go to so many places on earth. And y'know what? It probably is a bit boring. Being in low/zero G will be a novelty but beyond that it'll be a lot of hanging around. Exploring the moon a little will be fun but again, limited number of things to see and do there. Lets just catapult anyone rich enough to do the moon trip into the sun instead.
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Jan 14, 2020 13:07
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winegums posted:I don't think space trips will be popular outside of a very wealthy "status" group. Just build some good old capitalist obsolescence into the craft, have it last until about halfway.
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Jan 14, 2020 13:10
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