We once read a book called "Feed" in high school - a ham fisted anti-capitalist book. Wherein citizens are 100% connected to an internet like service that only exists to sell them products. 90% of the class couldnt get it. Even when the teacher sat down and explained the entire plot of the book they still couldnt wrap their head around it.
I'll always bring this up. The USA has a functional literacy rate of 87%. The median American reads at around a 5th grade level. Total illiteracy is common enough for whole industries of literacy aides to exist, like people who will read stuff for adults.
Even with people who know how to read, and got through college, having a structured stance on a piece of media doesn't seem common. Reading into subtext doesn't seem common except among total nerds. I really get sad when I hear something like "it's just a movie." Yeah, it's a movie that propagates a specific ideology, you can't see it?
I don't think people are dumb, I think people are overworked past the point of caring about anything other than their immediate circumstances and it's a complete tragedy.
Total illiteracy is common enough for whole industries of literacy aides to exist
When I go to my folks’ place out in a very rural woodsy area, the local stores have pamphlets for helping illiterate adults learn to read.
Yeah, I used to work as a literacy instructor for adults, like what those pamphlets advertise. It was a medium sized city and our phone was always ringing asking for classes. Sometimes it was people calling to ask if we could help them buy groceries since they had to read nutrition information now. One time I helped an illiterate couple sign divorce papers. More than once I met people with more impressive jobs than I'll ever have taking the classes. They had the finest bullshitting abilities on Earth and had somehow achieved senior level positions without ever having functional literacy. Yes, one was a cop.
Sometimes it was people calling to ask if we could help them buy groceries since they had to read nutrition information now
This is kind of heartbreaking tbh
Are we including all the senior citizens who refuse to bring their reading glasses when they go to the supermarket?
No, the elderly people I worked with both couldn't see well and also never learned how to read. It's even more depressing than how I describe it.
"Yes, and movies are based on things that happened or things people believed."
I was attempting to tell a coworker that Marvel movies are pro-CIA and pro-imperialism, to which the response was "They're just movies. You just gotta turn your brain off and enjoy them"
Yeah sorry I don't enjoy DoD financed propaganda
Unfortunately we have to start from square one or we sound like conspiracy theorists (it ain't a conspiracy if the CIA explicitly says they do it but w/e). Specific examples first, then connect them once enough clues are gathered.
"So Iron Man just wins at Afghanistan because he has better guns? And he's fighting in Afghanistan because the terrorists have guns he built in the first place? That sounds a lot like... hey, ever see that movie War Dogs? Pretty good comedy, check it out some time."
Reading into subtext doesn’t seem common except among total nerds
People don't see any subtext if they're propagandized enough, it's actually terrifying. There's a best of the worst episode about Carnosaur, a right wing propaganda, where the main character is a security guard for a construction site plagued by hippies chaining themselves to bulldozers and stuff. The hippies are portrayed as braindead potheads, and there's an insane scientist who gives birth to a t-rex in the hopes that the dinosaurs will wipe out humanity. I'm talking Poison Ivy from Batman & Robin level of blatant anti green propaganda. So basically every left leaning character is evil and stupid. Jay, a professional movie critic points out how every left leaning character in evil and stupid, and then instead of recognizing the movie for the right wing propaganda, he somehow assumes the movie creators are left leaning but also incredibly stupid. He thought they tried to show their point of view in a positive light but failed so spectacularly they came out as villains. It's honestly one of the dumbest takes I've ever heard in my entire life.
professional movie critic, btw
blows my mind people couldn't even get the themes of parasite which are so obvious it felt like I was being beaten over the head with it.
To some people it's just a movie about crafty poors taking advantage of nice rich people.
I have people in my family that don't accept that Snowpiercer or Squid Game are discussions of capitalism from the South Korean perspective and how shitty that country has fared under it.
Watching Bong Joon Ho's oeuvre and coming away thinking the dude just really likes slapstick tragedy
it's literally called Capital idiot how could it not be pro capitalism
It really is wild how "show don't tell" went from being advice about literally showing background details in a visual medium instead of just having characters stand around on stage talking about mundane stuff into being a literary advice that actually means "tell, but only tell gently and as obtusely as possible to make it hard to understand what you're on about."
And then you can go and make the most hamfisted message possible and literally have the narrator say your message clearly and explicitly and people still won't get it, because they're so conditioned to media being deliberately pointless and empty or open to interpretation. You can unironically go and make a character whose entire thing is that he's a really stupid, self-defeating bigot and chuds will still go "omg so based this guy gets it" and fanboy over him.
56% of Americans are below the literacy level needed to interpret complex information from a text, which I read as 60% of Americans can't understand metaphor and 90% can't understand a subtle one.
open to interpretation
I know there are good things that end being "open to interpretation" where there's supposed to be enough context that the reader gets the point without it being explicitly stated, but there's way more shit things trying to be good that just never had any point to make in the first place.
I mean people don't even want to accept that Brave New World is legit a anti-capitalist screed of how it relegates the human soul into nothing but producer and consumer.
Actually, you'll find that every single book about a dystopia is really about how communism is bad.
was he for or against fat asses?
Depends what you imagine “pneumatic” to mean
How about a fat ass that sits on you so hard it crushes you like a pneumatic press.
It does have a sadly masculine only viewpoint in characters. Though I always felt that John was also a point made about how any and all of his struggles against the system itself were just commodified and turned into an "experience" since his call to a rebellion leads to legit nothing but a crazed drunken orgy and no actual meaningful change (maybe a metaphor for trying to start a revolution in a population that have no actual theoretical basis?). The stratified class system was also main point of consumption as the society streamlines it's population into easily pleased consumer units with simple producible needs (Soma is just a metaphor for basic ass treats the west consumed).
I'd definitely need to take a re-read as well. Huxley though is a democratic socialist similar to Orwell but he does not fully go into his critique. One can draw anti-capitalist sentiment from his work, but similarly like your read there does have a definite lens of anti-feminism inherent as of the self actualized characters none of them are female with most females used as narrative devices for the male leads to grow from. The book can be seen as somewhat reactionary as well, though the traditionalist slums that John comes from are not painted in a good light as they are more or less brutish ghettos as described by John and other characters from the cities (though the city dwellers would also be unreliable given they have only ever existed within their heavily propagandized lives). In the end I feel Brave New World is a grab bag of ideas that still can be sen as a criticism of modern capitalism at least and during Huxley time its development towards atomizing the individual even further, however this is trended more towards the spiritual death due to consumerism from that particular type of capitlaism (instead of being just inherent anti capitalist).
Yeah it's most definitely not an overt anti capitalist piece but instead utilizes a lot of complaints of capitalism for it's time that Huxley lived and can be seen as pseudo anti-capitalist with element of traditionalist reactionary thought. The noble savage theme I feel fits specifically for John and tbh I get some very weird and at times almost overt ubermensch style vibes in which he attempts to define himself outside of either societies but his drive for individual freedoms and liberation for the city dwellers doesn't lead to a positive result as they merely consume his "individualism" similar to how many today consume spiritual commodities without any actual adherence to the theory behind it. I think one of the key traits that I still find most interesting is that there is no true sense of freedom within either the savage society or the consumerist society and that one must be broken and molded into something befitting either one (the exile of our main character to a island of creatives so as not to disrupt society may be seen as a "good" way of dealing with outcasts but is literally just a form of a capitalist prison island in which they likely ensure no movement of rebellion can come form).
Yeah it is weird as Huxley comes of as a hodgepodge of ideas similar to other sci fi writers during the time (or you wind up with outright fash like Heinlein). The book has quite a lot of commentaries for the start of what would have been the beginning of mass marketing and consumption as seen by Huxley and also borrows heavily from outdated tropes to communicate these thoughts (again John as the use of some type of divine man born beyond the current sin of the society he dwells in), and that these concerns do indeed com from a place of more concern for how it impacts their own social status and interactions than actual working class concerns (much more in the book is focused towards a degradation of human intellect/spirit with the low tier cloned workers such as the Gammas relegated as consumer cattle by all the characters with no actual ability to self actualize beyond their "station").
grapes of wrath explicitly says capitalism is evil how and why. what the fuck
When we read it in middle school our teachers gave us an open invitation to discuss the meaning. 99% of the students said it was an allegory for suffering while still being faithful to God, like some kind of virtuous suffering. The teachers didn't really get into how Steinbeck was himself a socialist.
Also I'm guessing most of the students were giving a kind of "yeah, uh huh" answer.
allegory for suffering while still being faithful to God
Puritanism and its consequences…
Our school had to ban diary of a wimpy kid because for mandatory reading 90% of kids wanted to read them for the 12th time.
That's actually kinda awesome lol.
Say what you will, but that author found his niche, I respect it.
Didn’t Ray Bradbury explicitly say Fahrenheit 451 was about how crass and pandering television was compared to literature?
He infamously stormed out of a university discussion on the book because he felt everyone there was misinterpreting it.
the way he described TV being customizable to the extant characters would ask your opinion even though you couldn't answer and they would actually say your name is pretty horrifying. I mean, I'm still going to watch Vtubers, but I recognize how messed up it is.
What's R and J about tho, like thematically? Gang wars are bad and dumb?
It's mostly about how allowing blood feuds to decide your life is a really, really bad idea. Like, don't let some kind of vague enmity destroy your life. The reason some of the adults in the story allowed Romeo and Juliet to get married was because they thought it might end the feud, but the reaction was more violent than they expected.
What's that tweet where some said that illiteracy is the best tool yo fight comunist propaganda?
The correlation being if you can read well you will figure out our system is bullshit.
As part of my job, I've done research into online reading habits. You wouldn't believe how little it takes for people to give up on reading even a sentence or two. Something like 60% of users abandon web pages without scrolling down to view the rest of the page, because the fact that there is enough text to warrant scrolling is enough to turn people off of the content.
Even outside of web content, I regularly catch my peers not reading the emails I send them. Even a few simple sentences with direct questions are often skipped so it takes several messages for me to extract the right info from them.
my managers regularly demonstrate that they have less reading comprehension than me.
Guy I replaced once asked me to proofread an email for him and I practically had to rewrite the entire thing, then he did it again and I gave up. I was like man they're gonna wonder why any e-mail you send on my day off is incomprehensible.
in middle school I was essentially the team captain for our school's 'battle of the books' team and let me tell you out of like 12 6-8th graders, the only one I ever felt kinship with was the kid who was severely on the spectrum to the point where he'd threaten people with physical violence if they missed an obvious answer. Once watched that dude pick up & throw a chair at a teammate because they hadn't read Eragon yet (it was on the list that year).
Maybe the only person I'd trust with carrying out parts of my will lol
Someone get that fellow a copy of the Belgariad Cycle, AKA Better Eragon
David Eddings was an absolute monster who abused his adopted children bad enough that both he and his wife went to prison for it. I tried rereading some of his books as an adult and it gets very, very uncomfortable very quickly.
The couple adopted one boy in 1966, Scott David, then two months old. They adopted a younger girl between 1966 and 1969. In 1970 they lost custody of both children and each were sentenced to a year in jail in separate trials after pleading guilty to physical child abuse. Though the abuse, the trial, and the sentencing were all extensively reported in South Dakota newspapers at the time, these details did not resurface in media coverage of the couple during their successful joint career as authors, only returning to public attention several years after both had died.
fucking hell man, can't trust any of these authors anymore :sadness:
I sure hope Steven Erikson hasnt done anything fucked up I'd like to re-read the Malazan series one day
The Eddings married in 1962. They adopted a son in 1966 and a daughter several years later. In 1969, alerted by neighbours to the sounds of mistreatment at their South Dakota property, police arrived to find the adopted son locked in a cage in a dirty basement (the basement shared with several animals) and being beaten by his parents with a belt. The Eddings were arrested and the children removed into protective custody (subsequently their adoption of the children was revoked). During the subsequent trial, exacting details of physical and emotional abuse emerged, with the
spoiler
children imprisoned in the cage for the slightest perceived disobedience and corporal punishment being regularly administered. Both children were traumatised by their experiences Newspaper from the arrest: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/33401936/david-eddings/ (Cage part can be found right above the subheading No Light near the top middle):::
Holy fuck :homer-bye:
Glad I have never actually purchased any of his books & used the library.
Yeah, it's bad. Good job on digging up the newspaper, hadn't seen that before! Maybe add a content warning since you are describing details of child abuse.
How much did he pay to get that story buried? Or did the patriarchy do it for free as a favor to a marginally useful entertainer? This information ruins something I love, so the chances of this being slander are near zero.
This is pre internet, so I think they just moved and pretended that it had never happened. That was enough back then. You don’t have to let it ruin the Belgariad for you since he is long dead and cannot benefit from you reading/enjoying/buying his books any more.
What I tried rereading was the Elleniad, his more grimdark work with a more mature, more self inserted main character. Sparhawk is very, very, very problematic in every way, but as far as I remember Belgarion was not a child groomer and hardly spent a chapter talking about the horrors of race mixing, so those books are probably more ok!
Extremely low bar. I read Eragon before I was able to analyze text and I realized that mf is just Star Wars again
Now see, in the Belgariad books the characters are self-aware enough to understand they they're channeling archetypes and lean into their roles as enthusiastically as possible. A knight stops a battle from happening by punching the enemy commander off of his horse during negotiations, it's amazing.
Belgariad/Mallorean is like a 7/10 imo but I haven't read it since high school maybe, I definitely have always thought the Riftwar Saga, Xanth, Recluce was better though. Funnily enough though, aforementioned comrade was the one who put me onto both Xanth and Belgariad. We both have/had a big love for fantasy magic lol.
In grade school my class read a kid friendly homage to the tale of King Midas and the Golden Touch, titled The Chocolate Touch, about a boy who eats a magic candy and then turns everything he puts in his mouth into chocolate. The teacher asked the class what they predicted would happen after he ate the magic candy.
Some of the other student’s predictions included “he apologizes to his mother for eating chocolate after bed” and “he gets caught and punished for eating chocolate after bed”. I was the only one who guessed “he gets The Chocolate Touch”. The cover of the book showed something turning into chocolate while the boy had it in his mouth.
Is a reading comprehension problem or capitalist propaganda problem?
Yes
I think this is really it. It clicked that my AP American Literature teacher was probably some sort of communist or socialist years after I graduated when she was marshaling our local George Floyd protest. The whole year of her class we read books with heavy themes of class struggle, but I wouldn't even know that was a thing until a year after her class. We read The Grapes of Wrath. We read Fences and Death of a Salesman back to back. We literally read The Crucible. I, a self proclaimed communist, could probably not have picked a more radical list of American novels. None of us in the class got any of it. The idea that there are contending economic classes is something you really have to either stumble upon, go to college to learn about, or experience firsthand and American high school students tend to not have any of those things happen to them. Once they get a little older it's a different story.
I've thought about reaching out to my former teacher telling her she should be more blunt with her agitation, but I was an awful student so I'm not sure how she would receive it.
I’ve thought about reaching out to my former teacher telling her she should be more blunt with her agitation, but I was an awful student so I’m not sure how she would receive it.
If you contact your former teacher, and tell them their teaching had an impact on you in one way or another, they 'd be happy about it.
I told my 13-year-old nephew that “propaganda” is just an old word for “advertising” and he didn’t believe me lol
Is this a case of poor reading skills or is it just that the capitalist realism is so embedded in those kids they can’t even see the forest for the trees
Stuff like this is the foreseeable consequence of the radical defunding of US schools that has been going on for decades.
The US wants to be number one at everything, the most powerful empire in history that projects power around the globe yet they can't help themselves to let the bourgeoisie strip the copper wiring out of the walls of the very institutions that is supposed to enable those imperial ambitions. Ultimately it will not be China or Russia or communism that ends US power, the evil empire will cannibalise itself and gradually collapse with no exterior interference.
As we learn to interpret stories, we learn to tell stories from the disjointed facts of our own lives. I don’t think capital is super worried about their workers honing that particular skillset. And to all the parents of you kids, you can start doing reading comprehension discussion about the stories you read to your kids basically as soon as they can speak enough to respond.
I also think there’s an element of this never being modeled for kids. Teachers would ask leading questions that I could tell they thought were obvious. But I’d never seen this social game played. I didn’t know what kind of answers were acceptable. My kids have seen me talking with a reading group and my partner doing class discussion for college. We are both very privileged to have the time and money respectively to do those things. I know I sure as fuck didn’t see my parents critically discussing stuff on tv, let alone literature.
That's cuz your classmates were bussy not being nerds like you and me. Who cares about a book they make you read in school, the place you hate and makes you feel sad.
I was in college, taking a class I detested but was mandatory when I realized the pain all non-nerd people must have experienced for twelve years
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
