Radical Farce
In the comments following this, on the proposed reality show Zoe Meets The Murgatroyds, Nikw211 replied,
Among the gems to savour are the endless factional disputes over exactly how capitalism should be toppled, feats of farcical mismanagement, an earnest exposition on “penile imperialism,” and interviews with former self-styled radicals, now sitting by private swimming pools, fretting about fridge ownership, or planning to work on llama farms.
For those with an interest in history, or indeed obliviousness, the three episodes are linked below.
The questionable pleasures of communal living. Specifically, a squatted street in Brixton. Contains scenes of waiting for utopia to materialise. And biohazard crockery. Oh, and the primal screaming commune at number 12.
In which, we’re told that lesbianism is an ideological duty, and that any woman can be a lesbian if she just tries hard enough, is mentored, and embraces the right kind of politics. A claim that has a somewhat self-serving quality, given the people making it.
The tale of a bewilderingly inept attempt in 1987 to launch a radical left wing tabloid, fuelled by the fever-dreams of Cambridge Marxists. The project was, unsurprisingly, a disaster, with its failure a direct result of ideological pretension. As illustrated by the scene in which, with the paper’s first edition about to go to press, most of the staff is out of the office on a deafness awareness day.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
It all seems a much gentler, more earnest and idealistic Leftism, when compared to today’s brand.
As a window into the 70s and 80s, it’s quite effective. And I don’t think Ms Engle is entirely unsympathetic. I would guess that, as a documentary maker, her politics are some flavour of leftish. In her chosen career, it’s all but mandatory.
But that’s sort of what makes the series work. The interviewees are fairly unguarded, perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, and so they say more than perhaps they should. They’re allowed to air their thoughts, and that’s where the dark comedy is.
From part one:
At which point, we cut to Xander, an architecture graduate from Cambridge, formerly at Eton, attempting to convince us that he wasn’t rich, and that his rather comfortable background was somehow immaterial, while sitting next to his swimming pool.
The acknowledgment of class is one of the things that’s striking about the series, relative to the identity politics favoured today, which tends to be preoccupied with other attributes.
Oh, and then we meet another Oxford graduate, Mr Cooper, who was very excited to get a chance to wear a “worker’s uniform.”
At which point, comment seems unnecessary.
What a great find. Thank you.
Mr Cooper, by the way, is also seen singing, “The sin of property we do disdain,” while playing a violin that presumably no-one owns.
Did he identify as a worker?
[ Slides bowl of chilli-flavoured toenail clippings to EmC. ]
Indeed, it is evergreen farce. I recalled David blogging about this before, so I did an internet search which revealed that David first blogged about it in 2007., returned in 2008, and 2009, and again a couple more times. A virtually inexhaustible source of pathologies.
But we should be very cautious about towards whom we extend our sympathy. Consider, for example, Ursula K. LeGuin, who presented herself as a gentle loving soul who was searching for a gentler and kinder future. But when I read one of her essays (or interviews? it was a long time ago) I was struck by how strongly she desired a society in which the natural human ego and individualism was suppressed in favor of some sort of socialist ego-less society. On close reading it was very chilling. And I was not surprised to find that Maoists thought highly of her. Le Guin may have been, in her own life, a kind person but her aspirations were pernicious.
His gender is “communist git”, which gets a blood-red stripe on the constantly-updated Pride flag.
It stands up well. There are so many good bits. I remember a scene in the third episode, about the launch – and prompt collapse – of the radically socialist tabloid, in which Alan Hayling, a key architect of the disaster, insists, “Clearly, we weren’t trapped in a leftwing bubble.” As a failure of self-awareness, it’s quite something.
You could practically liveblog a viewing of it.
Mr Hayling, since you ask, was subsequently employed as a commissioning editor by Channel 4, and as head of documentaries by the BBC.
Or, in part one, on communal living, having to get group permission for any intended sexual relationship. Permission only being granted after all parties had shared their feelings, in detail and at length, with the entire collective.
*creep alarm*
The undertone of dysfunction and, at times, creepiness does become hard to miss.
Among the other purported joys of squatting – cooking rotas and all of the, er, surprises that entails; biohazard crockery; and sharing one tiny bathroom with fifteen other misfits. Sorry, “transient” people trying to “sort their lives out.”
Oh, and the group cervix examinations. Did I not mention those?
You’re tempted, I can tell.
Channel 4 is also home to the slimy little worm Cathy Newman who embarrassed herself so badly in an attempted attack interview with Jordan Peterson.
Funny how these “thoughtful and caring progressives” keep recreating features of Maoist China.
The naive individual might assume that the obsessions of leftists and the obsessions of “queer” activists would be quite separate and distinct, and yet the more one pays attention the more overlap one discovers. They’re all creeps.
Having rewatched the first episode, what struck me, other than the moments mentioned above, is the self-flattering waffle from interviewees about how “proud” they are of what they’d “achieved.” But so far as I can see, what they’d achieved is basically freeloading, delusion, self-indulgence, and a kind of arrested adolescence.
In fairness, some of them manage to laugh at their younger selves, at least momentarily. But some of them don’t.
Theft is an achievement?
I’m reminded of a documentary I saw about a communist newspaper. There were two particularly amusing interactions that reporters had, one internally in the paper, and the other with other communists.
The first was the discussion of the “black beat”. Being communists, they were fully immersed in Black consciousness, and agreed the paper should have a dedicated column for Black issues. This created a problem, however, as (a) the column would have to be written by a Black, obviously, and (b) the entire office staff was whiter than a South African whites-only beach.
So, they scoured the company, looking for a suitable Black candidate, only to discover that they had one single Black employee. He worked in the print department as a physical labourer, loading the delivery trucks.
Despite knowing absolutely nothing about writing, editing, or, as it turned out, speaking English. He was an African immigrant whose English was passable, but not really great. This, to the editors, was a feature, not a bug, as it meant their columnist was “valid”. When they approached him about his new role, he was confused. He knew nothing about politics, he didn’t speak English well, why on Earth were they offering him this position?
“Because you’re Black, obviously” was the answer.
Why was this important, he asked.
When they explained that they were fighting racism, he pointed out that they’d just decided to offer an unqualified person a job solely on the basis of skin colour, so that’s what his first column would be about, and could he get all their names?
The editors left the printing area, aghast that he didn’t know his place.
The second interaction was even more amusing. The reporters visited a farm owned by a lesbian Marxist. There were Che posters everywhere, “overthrow the patriarchy” stickers on the wall, etc.
They asked her what her dream of a Marxist farm would be like.
“We’d divide the labour equally, help the poor, and support each other here on my farm”, she said.
This drew a sharp rebuke from one of the other lesbians.
“What do you mean, your farm?”.
What followed was a quite spirited discussion. Just because this farm had been “occupied” by her parents when they were alive, and she’d grown up on it, and the patriarchal government had a slip of paper with her name on it, none of that meant that the woman actually, you know, owned it. The collective did, another lesbian said, which was greeted with much head nodding and and agreement.
Sadly, the documentary crew left before that discussion went into overtime, it looked like it was very popcorn worthy.
They see themselves as “earners“.
I am reminded of this classic “Be Honest” clip, as apparently the phrase “working class” seems to include being driven to school in a Rolls-Royce, as is common amongst the chimney sweep and day labourer classes.
https://youtu.be/3E4s0RqCBzU
See also episode three, above.
That would have been very entertaining to watch.
Band name.
Band name.
Second album by primal screaming commune*.
*Lower-case shows it’s about the music.
Funny how these “thoughtful and caring progressives” keep recreating features of Maoist China.
Well they can’t very well create images of “modern” China. After all, it’s a fascist state. Something which is never really talked about.
Channel 4 is also home to the slimy little worm Cathy Newman who embarrassed herself so badly in an attempted attack interview with Jordan Peterson.
Speaking of Jordan Peterson, they’re after him again. This time for using the word “retarded’ while referencing Kamala Harris.
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biohazard crockery
I’m not sure I want to know. At first I thought gazunder, but the next part mentioned a shared bathroom, so…
The term came after cooking rota, so spoiled food storage? But I guess the simplest explanation is sharps container for the druggies who inevitably colonize such situations.
From an earlier discussion on the subject of squatting:
Ah, simpler times.
The acknowledgment of class is one of the things that’s striking about the series, relative to the identity politics favoured today
Yes, that’s Bezmenov 101. Economic class turns out to not be as immutable as the classical Marxists think in non-authoritarian societies. It’s a little hard to sell the oppressor/oppressed narrative when you can just stop being oppressed by being good at your job. They had to pivot to immutable characteristics like sex and skin colour. Much of the full-court press to define sexual orientation as something biologically hardwired comes from the desire to create that as a new class.
Consider, for example, Ursula K. LeGuin
Whether it’s LeGuin, Mieville. Correa or Heinlein, I long since came to the conclusion that people who live their entire lives making up fairy stories ought not be listened to about anything important.
Funny how these “thoughtful and caring progressives” keep recreating features of Maoist China
The timorous and neurotic will turn to authoritarian control as a way to assuage their own fears.
Also this, from the same:
Seems apposite.
LeGuin and Mieville: I understand, as they were fiction writers from day one.
Heinlein: I can agree, at least with regards to his opinions about sex. (With the caveat it wasn’t his entire life: 5 years in the Navy, hospitalization, and then 5 years trying out stuff until he took up writing.)
Correa: Which Correa? Francisco Laguna Correa? Hugo Correa? Larry Correia? Larry was an accountant and gun store co-owner before he took up writing fiction.
Don’t forget Heinlein, along with other science fiction writers, worked on projects for the government during WWII.
Listening to them isn’t the same thing as taking what they say as gospel.
[ Slaps forehead ]
Likely explanations:
Back in the day, I visited 4 communes in the US.
1) A small group (15) in a farmhouse, none working, living off an insurance settlement. Poor sanitation so all got sick while I was there.
2) A big commune on an old resort property supported by a rock band. You were supposed to work but it was pretty loose. Lots of freeloaders.
3) A geodesic dome commune in Colorado that was a way-station for drug dealers and supported thereby.
4) “The Farm”, a bunch of San Fran hippies moved to TN and started a vegetarian pot-smoking farm. Partially supported by a rock band. They actually farmed. Most of them worked. You had to build your own house. Little radical politics. They had a guru.
And that’s always a good sign.
[ Logs onto Amazon, orders kaftan, amulet. ]
Ooh.
Which,
And it’s only £5.99.
Bargain.
The guru requires you to wear diapers made from hand-woven curated hemp fiber…made by his followers…sold for $129 each…a bargain for those seeking true enlightenment.
If you order them, I’m arranging an intervention.
Anyone who clicks that link will find their Amazon suggestions poisoned forever.
Can’t talk. I’m raising my vibrations.
If two of you will hold David, I’ll wrestle him into the straitjacket.
[ silence ]
We owe it to David to do something.
[ Logs onto Amazon, orders kaftan, amulet. ]
Kaftan or muumuu?
Lord help us.
LOL
Offer him some of the bar snacks. That should damp the vibrations.
Ooh, this. This.
We want to help him, you monster!
So…open thread wise…
TIL that some (well at least two but…what are the odds that I encountered the only two?) grown, “mature” adults, “conservatives” even, don’t understand how banks work. They think that all the money you put in the bank stays there in the safe until you want to come and get it again. After thinking about this a minute…kinda stunned, really…it occurred to me that I don’t recall in what specific general education class I would have learned about how banks work. Or where in the curriculum it would have come up. I had mostly advanced math classes so perhaps they do teach this in Math For Every Day Living or something like that?
You just said we should do something.
Yeah, imagine what happens when you buy a gimp suit for a mate’s stag….
I find a very high proportion of adults have very little understanding of very many aspects of their lives. This makes it easier for fanatics and snake oil sellers to prey on them.
As a political example, the idea that the UK could ‘decarbonise’ its grid by 2030 would be laughed out of contention and no one espousing it would get a vote if people knew what was entailed in producing and delivering electricity to 70 million people.
That was incredible. These people would drive you mad.
It does conjure images of the dinner party from hell. And it’s a pretty good illustration of what can happen when vain and ludicrously unrealistic people are given lots of other people’s money. Their pension funds, for instance. And so, with the paper’s first edition about to go to press, most of the staff were busy elsewhere, walking around the streets of Manchester wearing earplugs, so as to understand the plight of the deaf.
Again, it’s worth noting the ratio of interviewees who re-read their own earlier pronouncements and then cringe with embarrassment, as seen early on, to those who don’t laugh at all and who lay all blame externally, as if unfairly cheated from a roaring success, a glorious destiny.
As Alan Hayling, our Cambridge Marxist, puts it, they felt the country needed a paper staffed by fellow radicals, a paper that was “putting over leftwing ideas.” But having done precisely that, the results were endless, fevered acrimony, widespread incompetence, and the paper going bankrupt two months after its launch.
And, as shown, this wasn’t a case of some random bad luck. The disaster followed inevitably from the participants’ own ideology and attitude. Their personalities. And yet Mr Hayling insists, “Clearly, we weren’t trapped in a leftwing bubble.”
Is today’s word ‘symbolism’?
The constant sexualization of friendship is toxic in ways I don’t even think we have begun to appreciate. (Via The Critical Drinker.)
I first noticed this in the late 60’s/early 70’s, with gay activists pointing to close male friendships as “proof” of gayness. I also noticed a trend of boys becoming more reticent about expressing friendship.
EDIT: And a good number of those boys made it clear that their reticence had to do with accusations of gayness.
EDIT: Those gay activists probably included many leftists, but I cannot be sure because this was long ago and I was politically naive at that time.
As several people note in reply, given Tolkien’s experiences in WW1 and their influence on his novels, Jessie Gender’s self-satisfied comment is particularly tin-eared.
Naturally, “she/they” declares she-theyselves an educator. A bringer of wisdom.
Call it dishonest. Maliciously so.
Take 1:
Take 2: Meet Andrew Stewart…
The quality of educating is truly nonpareil
As I’ve said before – for instance, here – you find yourself trying to imagine the job interview, and the supposed vetting process. Unless, of course, mentally unstable misfits are actively being selected.
More accurate, I think.
An officer of a social organization told me that a mandatory pronouns rule was essential because it was essential to “make non-binary people feel welcome”. So normal people must be bullied on behalf of the psychologically damaged.
One more time:
I do think fabulist pronouns should be acknowledged. But only as warning signs.
people who live their entire lives making up fairy stories ought not be listened to about anything important.
Wouldn’t that apply to most political commentators? Or, for that matter, to the politicians themselves?
Never take seriously any philosophy from anyone who has never held a serious job. One with clear, objective results. Of course how many people actually do anything of productive value these days?
[ Starts compiling Friday’s Ephemera. ]
Well, I have known quite a few people in STEM and other fields who were rather naive about matters outside their areas of expertise. (And inside, in the case of teachers.)
Socialists/commies: a great controlled experiment was Germany after WWII. Same people, same initial conditions. By the time of unification, the contrast was stark. The only car you could buy in E Germany was the Trabant, a piece of polluting shit. People were poor, roads bad, the whole shebang. Yet I heard someone praise it because people were more equal.
It is funny when people don’t understand how banks work etc but NOT when the leaders don’t even understand (or it is convenient to them to not understand). Then you get the printing of money, censorship etc. Dumping millions of low-skill workers into a country will do what exactly for wages of low skill POC already here? Supply-demand says their wages will tank. Good job lefties.
It’s reminiscent of Michael Apted’s Up series : the Up cohort was born in 1956, so they’re slightly younger than Engel’s interviewees, but still in the generation to have somehow muddled through to home ownership and pensions and so on despite some bad life decisions in the 1970’s.
Apted’s series started in 1964 with the assumption that class would be the defining issue of these kids’ lives, and spent the next 50 years trying to reorient to themes of minorities/women/race. But as late as 1987, the grand gesture could still be a class war grand gesture: let’s give a committee of British auto workers veto power over our national newspaper.
Intersectionality: the women who seemed to accept the implications of dismantling the system/seizing the means of production in the class and sex wars, but who in the intersectional race domain still thought it was about a secure permanent racial majority being maternalistic/gracious/indulgent to its racial minorities. Linda Bellos’s story about the endless requests for journalistic commissions to dignify somebody’s third world vacation – no, we want you find a third world woman and give her the gig. And maybe eventually to give her your permanent job. Do you get it now what your place in the grand plan is?
And a good number of those boys made it clear that their reticence had to do with accusations of gayness.
The funny thing is that the boys least affected are the conventional jocks, who can pat each other on the ass and say “I love you man”, because nobody takes seriously the quips about the cryptohomoeroticism of football. The boys most affected are the sensitive feminist ally types who’ve never been seen romantically with a woman. They’re more emotionally constrained than their grandfathers were in expressing affection to other men: it’ll be met with knowing nods, and if they protest too much about it the knowing nods will get even more knowing. It’s a cruel trick, a false sexual signal that has a license to be bandied about in educational or workplace environments where even baseline sexual signalling is discouraged and suppressed.
Perpetrated by queer activists and pervs, and then spread by sadistic adolescents.
Heh. Again, the seeds of their own downfall.
That was, in fact, one of the many reasons I wrote off Samuel R Delany as intellectually dishonest and morally perverse: He could find “obvious” homoeroticism in the most dubious places, and used it as a cudgel.
Yes, only without the personal growth.
Re part three, I also spotted this, in the paper’s Wikipedia entry:
Make of that what you will.
from another reply in that thread:
I did notice, decades ago, that there are gay and queer men who rabidly hate straight men and all women. It would be better for society if such men were ostracized as Nazis and Klansmen.
And that reminds me:
About 25-30 years ago I became aware of the growing problem in Europe of Muslim immigrants who were violently intolerant of gays. And then I found out that a significant and growing part of the left refused to admit the problem existed and wanted those who said something should be done about should instead have something done to them.
Also violently intolerant of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, pork products, “uncovered” women, education for women, etc, etc.
The left’s increasing interest in excusing and protecting such deadly enemies shocked me at the time, but I now see it as just one more illustration of the left’s spiral down into unlimited evil.
Attention comrades: It is now offensive to call someone “middle aged”: Bristol and York St John universities have published “language guides” listing these and related expressions as unacceptable.
Woman who says ‘trans women are women’ comes into contact with reality.
(via Dicentra)
Not to mention “phobia” of those who force these lies upon us.
‘Medieval’ it is then.
Time to get medieval on their asses.
An inspiring thought:
I now identify as black.
Daniel Ream said:
WTP said:
Couple of thoughts in connection to these two seemingly disconnected quotes:
First, it’s a rather massive mistake to take anything that an author comes up with in terms of fiction as being the be-all summary of what those authors believed or thought. The vast majority of them were writing what sold, not what they truly believed or thought…
In other words, while you can work out rather a lot of illuminating things about the audiences they had from what they wrote, the pathway into what they really, truly believed is rather more fraught. Yes, some authors grant you an open view into the cesspools of their minds (G.R.R. Martin, anyone…?), but I’d say that the majority of them were simply responding to what they perceived as “market forces”. Which, again, will tell you a lot of things, but not what those writers truly believed in.
The second point is that there’s this huge flaw in what WTP is saying, that practitioners are the one true source of wisdom, as opposed to what we might term the “academics”. There’s a real problem with this idea, and that boils down to the fact that an awful lot of “practical” people never, ever actually consciously think about what they do. You go to ask them things like “Hey, Bob… Why the hell did you do that thing that worked, the other day…?”, and odds are excellent that Bob won’t be able to tell you a damn thing you can understand about that thing he just did by instinct. He got results, but he cannot articulate why, or in any way convey to you how to replicate his performance.
I’ve been around people in my family who can do, but who also cannot articulate the how or the why, and are entirely incapable of teaching you how to do that thing that they’ve mastered.
There’s rather more to much of this than the average person can wrap their head around. You think that the coalface foreman guy, who knows exactly how to set up and run a really good work crew would be capable of laying out how he does what he does abstractly, and then be able to convey that to someone else, but the skillset that would allow him to do that is vanishingly rare, and not often encountered at the coalface in any form. You have to be a bit of a philosopher-foreman, and possess a hell of a lot of self-awareness and attention to detail, plus be articulate and able to convey to another intellectual and articulate person the key bits of information they need to understand just why their concepts of how that work crew goes together and functions don’t work.
Raw unpleasant fact is, there are multiple wildly divergent sorts of knowledge out there, and we are mostly oblivious to this fact. The guy who comes up the hierarchy from the bottom has an intimate understanding of his job, and possesses all the tacit knowledge that goes into it, but because of who he is and how he was brought on, he is utterly unable to articulate it or pass it on in any meaningful way to those who come at the task from the world of academic theory. Sad thing is, that guy from the bottom may actually be smarter than many of his “educated” interlocuters, in terms of raw cunning and observational wisdom, but because they’ve been taught to devalue his “tribal knowledge” and its source, practical experience, they’ll never learn from him.
These two points are interrelated, in terms of describing aspects of a much larger problem. The sort of people who believe that Robert Heinlein’s fictional works represent “How/what he thought” are completely unable to process or accept that he was an author, writing for money, creating entertainment. He wasn’t a philosopher-king, laying out an ideology for all people at all times; he was not striving to be the Guatama Buddha or Jesus Christ; he was a writer trying to earn a living. Dude deserves appreciation, for his writing, but not insane veneration as though he were some saintly source of wisdom.
Likewise, the humble practitioner doesn’t deserve automatic approval and hero-worship. That guy may be a genius at his job, but if he can’t explain to you how the hell he does it, and can’t pass on that wisdom to others who will come after him…? He’s about as useful to the argument as that academically-trained dumbass over there who also doesn’t understand how the real world works.
Often they would play with ideas, and the writing of the story was part of the exploratory process. Heinlein did that a lot, so that one ought to his entire oeuvre before speculating upon his views. I doubt that Niven and Pournelle were really attracted to the no-privacy arcology they posited in Oath of Fealty. And so on.
That, too, especially when it’s time to either write another sequel guaranteed to sell or write something entirely new which may flop.
Did you see that? I used a French word! I must know what I’m talking about!
But libertarianism is a theme running through much of his work, and there is independent evidence from his non-fiction and his correspondence and conversations that he was indeed a libertarian. I could say something similar about his patriotism and views about military service.
That’s one of the reasons I avoid Heinlein interest groups. Well, all single-author interest groups, actually.
@pst314,
The point that I’m trying to get across is that without the ability to actually interrogate an author’s thoughts under duress, there’s really no way to tell what the hell they actually believe in, no way to distinguish between what they adopted because it sold books, bringing commercial success, and what they held as their actual core internal beliefs. For all we know, Heinlein could well have been laughing up his sleeve at all of his credulous audience members that thought he actually believed in the same things they did.
That’s true of all these folks. You cannot ascertain squat from their words; look, instead, to their actions. Heinlein is a popular guy; his writing was amazingly attractive to a lot of people. He expressed the zeitgeist of his times almost perfectly. That tells you precisely nothing about the actual man himself.
Look at all the weird sexual crap in his later works. Incest, polyamory, the lot. How much of that was expressed in his actual personal life, the one we can see? Almost none; I can find zero actual evidence for him doing things like that in his personal life; he seems to have been almost platonically perfect in his fidelity to Virginia. Or, at least, really, really good at covering up the swinging you might think to find there.
Though, there is the disturbing evidence to be seen regarding his time in fandom surrounding Walter Breen. There are some who say that he knew, and looked the other way, because reasons. Did he? No idea; there is enough there to ask the question, however.
There’s a rule in life that I’ve found valuable: Don’t listen to what someone is saying; watch their hands. Whether you’re talking a gunfight or an argument made in politics, take nothing that is said at face value; watch what they do. If you’re arguing things based on what someone wrote, then I fear you’re running down the wrong path. You should be looking at their actual actions, the things they did in their personal lives.
Which ain’t to say that one’s writing can’t be a window into the author’s soul, either. I personally would not be surprised to hear some truly heinous things about G.R.R. Martin, given what I’ve read of his work. Haven’t heard those things with any real veracity, so maybe he’s just really, really good at putting himself in some very sick and deranged shoes.
On the other hand, Samuel Delaney and MZB… And, the aforementioned Walter Breen.
Sometimes, people do tell you about themselves, and the things they would do if only they could. Other times? Not so much; I would hesitate to convict Robert Heinlein of incest on the basis of his writing, but I’d damn sure take a look at his personal life because of it.
And, again… Actions, not words. Judge these people on what they did, not what they wrote; the words should often be laid more at the door of the audience. I mean, if you found success selling stories of sexual debauchery through Penthouse, should we assume you were debauched in your personal life, as well? Or, just really good at fantasy writing for things like Penthouse Letters?
The other annoying thing about all these things is the number of times you see someone quoting a character from fiction as though they were living people that actually said/believed those things. You can illuminate thought through fiction, but when you start quoting fiction as though it were real…? You’ve got a problem distinguishing reality from fantasy that deserves clinical attention. I don’t know how many times I have heard otherwise seemingly sane and intelligent people quoting things from fiction as though they were real, thinking they’d made a point. The only point they make when doing that is convincing anyone hearing them that they’re clearly delusional. I could care less what Jean Luc Picard had to say about something; the man is an illusion, a character in a poorly-written television series full of drivelous thought. If you include a construction in your arguments to the effect that so-and-so said such-and-such, and treat that fictional character as though he or she were really a real person in a real situation…? You’ve lost your ‘effing mind.
Yes. The thing that gets glossed over by virtually everyone until they make an effort to stop and think about it is this. Additionally, it is not just the author responding to market forces but their editors/publishers. Especially as the 20th century progressed and marketing became more of a thing.
It was more a rule of thumb than an absolute…but…
This can turn into a chicken/egg argument at some point. Did it matter that Edison failed 99 times by trying? It’s the success that matters. The “why” it worked is important for the purposes of learning in order to build on that success. Many thoughtful engineers are (well, were) horrified by Elon Musk’s test-to-failure approach. I do not wish to specifically slander academics, it’s just that they have gotten way, way too big for their britches. Richard Feynman is one of my favorite academics. Which is why his famous “Don’t you trust me?” line was so spot-on. Academics have lost the self-deprecating ability to laugh at themselves. If they were only just hurting themselves…
Ever notice that most of those who excel at a specific sport, your Magic Johnson, Ted Williams, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth generally don’t succeed at coaching/managing while some of those who excel at coaching/managing had middling athletic careers? Tommy LaSorda, Steve Spurrier, Pat Reilly, Jim Leyland, etc. would never have made it to their respective Hall of Fames based on their playing careers.
I was heading to this but got lost…
This right here. But no. I had thought you were going somewhere in your comment regarding IQ and its limitations on the other post. Maybe not. Or.. maybe so. The concept of “smart” is heavily dependent upon context. That guy “from the bottom” isn’t able to communicate these things for the very reason that he understands them. While he was busy doing stuff and acquiring the knowledge that he has, the academics were spinning their wheels on academic communication stuff. It’s an opportunity cost issue. The problem with the academics is that the harsh realities of their early mistakes are hidden because they haven’t been tested. When other academic ideas, otherwise valid or not, are piled upon that fundamental flaw, well the best laid plans of mice and men…The practitioner however is much, much more likely and more often to have his mistakes bite him in the butt early on. It’s a humbling experience.
Just got to this…so, in the context of academia/practitionalia…practitionalism…practicality?..yes, this.
Added:
And this. This is what concerns me about 20th century society and up to the current day. Way, way too much consumption of fiction, of recent too-soon-to-be-taken-too-seriously fiction has warped much of our society. They actually immerse themselves in fantasy such that just to communicate with many of them you need to have a grasp of their fantasy/fiction worlds.
You overstate your case. You have a point, but you overstate it.
In the case of Heinlein, as I remarked, we have not only his fiction and essays but also his personal correspondence and the accounts of many people who knew him. We can be pretty confident about some of his views.
Similarly with regard to Harlan Ellison–with the added “bonus” that he was less able to restrain himself and could reveal his true feelings in bursts of rage.
One should bear in mind that while some writers are only “in it for the money”, others write because there are ideas that they passionately want to express. Jerry Pournelle, for instance? And it would have been essentially impossible to persuade Gene Wolfe to write a story which offended his sense of right and wrong.
And sometimes writers will try to maintain a public persona but occasionally let slip the mask to reveal their true views. Isaac Asimov presented himself as a liberal, but on a few occasions revealed his sympathy for the Soviet Union and his disapproval of any criticism of communists.