Human Brain EnthusiastHonestly, read or watch whatever you want, just dont give people or companies money who use it for hate criming.
However I reserve the right to call you names if you read shit like Ayn Rand or racist drivel from she who must not be named.
Fabian Transchel@thomasfuchs I am here to disagree with you.
Read Atlas. Read Mein Kampf.
We must know what it looks like.
HP on the other hand is no loss 🤷♂️
Aaron Sawdey, Ph.D.@ftranschel @thomasfuchs Actually being forced to read Ayn Rand is probably a form of psychological torture banned by the Geneva Convention. I picked up a copy of The Fountainhead as a teenager and read it (you find the damnest things on the shelves when your parents are both English Ph.D.s 😂) ... by the end I'm slogging along thinking these characters are the least believable ...
Emelia/Emi@acsawdey @ftranschel @thomasfuchs Can confirm. Was forced to read Atlas in college. It was bad. It can be summed up as similar to "Almost everything Marx said about communism was wrong in practice. Unfortunately everything he said about capitalism was right." In that while they did make a few very good points, the actual "logic" surrounding them was way out of whack.
(Not to mention it repeatedly descends into the same rant-ish block every chapter or two, IIRC. Made it quite difficult to actually read)
@becomethewaifu @ftranschel @thomasfuchs The rants, yeah ... the characters are all just sock-puppets I realized.
datarama@ftranschel @thomasfuchs You know, I've actually tried. But I simply couldn't make it through either of the two, because aside from being terrible people, they were also shit writers.
(I've only read the first HP, and while Rowling's a better writer than the two others, that's not a high bar to clear. I didn't like it, but that might just be because I'm outside the intended age group. This was long before I knew anything about her terrible opinions about trans people.)
@datarama @thomasfuchs That's a fair assessment to make and one I absolutely share. Still, imo getting first-hand impressions is vital if that fight is to be won - and it must be.
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@ftranschel @thomasfuchs I read a bit of Mein Kampf once, when I was trying to learn more about early-to-mid 1900s dictatorships. Honestly it was of no value to that effort and I ended up throwing the book in the rubbish burner. Painfully whiney self-involved drivel. I learned far more from reading the Wikipedia page on the book and following a few links to contemporary literary analyses.
@ftranschel @thomasfuchs part of the problem of just reading the books directly is that the work itself inherently doesn't provide you with any framing, so unless you're already familiar with the belief systems and accompanying zeitgeist surrounding the work it's really quite hard to reliably discern the why of it. which might be fine if you're just reading out of curiosity (although I wouldn't recommend putting yourself through that; the writing is abysmal) but it doesn't teach you much.
@gsuberland @ftranschel Agree, Mein Kampf is absolutely unreadable drivel. It's honestly worse than like a LLM-generated novel. The only proper use of that book is for toilet paper.
F4GRX Sébastien
Carlos SolísWhich is why I've been forced to wean out of entertainment almost entirely - ultimately, nearly every commercial content or show either finances the people that ultimately harm the population, platforms people whose ideas and actions are harmful, or (more often than not) both at once.