The Wisdom of Isaac Asimov

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

The Wisdom of Isaac Asimov

A few days ago was Isaac Asimov’s 99th birthday. (Rather, his official birthday. He knew he was born between Oct 4, 1919 and Jan 2, 1920, and since he hated the idea of being old, he took the latest date possible as his birthday.) One of the comments on a blog I was reading that day about the Good Doctor was the following:

“Story that Isaac told: Isaac sat in on a class where the professor was teaching about one of his stories.  He approached the professor after the class and said, ‘That story doesn’t mean that at all. I should know. I wrote it.’  And the professor looked at him and said, ‘So?’

And at that moment, Isaac said, he realized that the professor was right.  No matter what the author intended, what the reader got out of it was what was really there.”

If only JKR had his wisdom. I suggest that the official motto of DTCL should be the following:

Saith Isaac Asimov: No matter what the author intends, what the reader gets out of the story is what is really there.

P.S. Don’t stop commenting on sunnyskywalker’s thread below just because I’ve started a new one. The intricacies of the Fidelius Charm are entirely worth a thorough thrashing out.

Comments

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Rant? I do not think that word means what you think it means ... :-)

Since you didn't know anything about SJWs I guess the relevance of the association I was drawing escaped you. Other readers who know of SJWs would have hopefully immediately grasped my meaning.

Brad makes a valid point, and it would be just as valid if he were writing about a conservative author (shall we say a ‘wing-nut’?) who produced a book full of liberal values, which the author later tried to disavow.

Yes, thanks. Except I wouldn't be able to apply the term 'Social Justice Warrior' in that case, since that is a label which applies only to the (extreme?) Left.

Since Rowling is of the Left, since Rowling's post-publication propaganda has been attempts by her to introduce leftist 'social justice' adjustments to her books - Dumbledore is a homosexual! There were jews at Hogwarts! Hermione wasn't necessarily white! - and since the chantaldormand's 'Potterheads' are of the left, the term 'Social Justice Warrior' was quite appropriate.

It wasn't a case of 'name calling' (i.e. pejorative labelling with no substance behind the accusation to derail or vent). It was a case of classification!

It's become quite clear to me - amusingly so! - that my frustrations in the early years of my HP experience, with young people who seemed to ignore facts, chantaldormand's Potterheads, who would tell me that "it's my opinion that Harry and Ginny are soulmates and opinions can't be wrong" and so forth, were probably the same folk who graduated university and became SJWs. I had a sneak preview of what the rest of the world saw a few years later, when the kids finished reading Harry Potter and started looking at real world 'social justice'.

[chantaldormand]

Please, don't call these people mine. I'm in no way associated with them and usually I try to avoid them. This is simply a term that had catch on in the part of internet that I frequent.

Honestly I think this is more problem of how parents treat their kids than what kind BS celebrities or teachers spout. If you leave your kids with internet and television instead of talking to them, then their are going to absorb whatever crap they will see there.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Please, don't call these people mine.

Oh. I wasn't trying to be clever. I meant they were 'yours' in that you were the one who coined that term. They're 'my' pro-Jo disciples, they're 'your' Potterheads.

You didn't have a smilie so I have to take you seriously, but I wasn't associating them with in belief or mindset with you at all. Just the label you used to classify/group them.

Honestly I think this is more problem of how parents treat their kids than what kind BS celebrities or teachers spout.

Hmmmm ... I disagree. I don't have any first hand experience with today's educational system but I've read/watched multiple articles discussing how socialist extreme-left thinking has 'taken over' the humanities at the universities of the west, how it's encouraging the great divisions - well, one of them - in society via identity politics and so forth. I won't discuss that any further here, you may agree or disagree, but there is a definite body of thought ascribing 'Potterhead' thinking to what is being taught in universities, a lot of evidence I think.

Sadly, as you say, there's also often a lack of parental guidance to mitigate this.

[chantaldormand]

I suspected as much, but it's better to make sure than be sorry. Especially when we are talking about SJWs :P

I'm under 30, and while my experiences might be bit different than those in western Europe or USA I don't think they are that much off. I studied at social sciences Dep. and it was interesting time. Among many experiences I was invited to black mass headed by Neo-nazis, argued with a few SJW I met there, but mostly I butted heads with religious fanatics and right wing nuts.
IMHO what we see in newspapers is "loud minority". Sure there is always that one academic teacher who is in middle of getting their Phd who will spout political nonsense or a group of SJW/MGTOW/whatever other fringe group you pick, who will protest something. But those people will either go get job and temper their opinions or crash and burn ending on couches of their parents and/or friends.
Heck if I had to evaluate my education then I would say that up until Uni, I had no contact with anything resembling postmodernism.
That is why I say that parents should be blamed for this situation; if your child at age 18-19 have problems with telling difference between reality and fantasy (*cough*AnitaSarkeesian*cough*) or objectively analysing text then perhaps you should reconsider your actions.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

I think maybe your experiences *are* a bit different from those in western Europe or the USA because the nutcase balance you describe doesn't exist there from what I've read and heard.

(*cough*AnitaSarkeesian*cough*)

Nasty cough you have there! :-)

[chantaldormand]

Ah yes, sorry about that. I'm not sure that even Chloraseptic would be effective against it :P

Balance-wise? Yes. But when it comes to % of nutjobs/activists? Not really.
A good chunk of my time at Uni was spent helping out with ERASMUS. From what I learned from my contacts in the program and my pupils it seems that % those people among students is always in 5%-10% range. Balance of those minorities tend to depend on political climate in the country we are speaking about. For example at Greek Uni you are more likely to met straight up communist than your garden variety of SJW. In UK on the other hand you are more likely to meet SJW than religious nutjob.
When we look at social media or 24/7 news channels those politically motivated groups are so visible not because they are really popular, but because they are loud and make good news.
And if news channels showcase those nutjobs? Well then it's much easier for them to force the majority to bend knee.

You know what is the real difference between my experience and American students'? My Uni is funded from taxes so if I transferred to another Uni or heck even if half of my year transferred, it wouldn't hurt that much the University.
American students on the other hand hold much more power over their universities. The moment University notices that revenue stream is disrupted by some insane employees spouting political nonsense instead of teaching, they can very easily put halt to these practices :)

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Balance-wise your experience/locale might be different from the USA and western Europe - I know nothing about Greece and happily accept your evaluation of its universities - but I think also the spread of the SJW indoctrination. From what I've seen SJW/Left-style socialist thought and, most certainly, identity politics has quite taken over the humanities departments in western universities - North America at least.

But I have no personal experience of this. I've just been watching youtube videos and reading news articles. It's quite a big deal these days.

(Well, my personal experience was in encountering 'Potterhead' behaviour in young HP fans and then realising that same behaviour manifested in the silliness of SJWs a few years later.)

You know what is the real difference between my experience and American students'? My Uni is funded from taxes ...

American students on the other hand hold much more power over their universities.

That's very interesting and what I've heard is certainly consistent with that. There have been some extreme cases of US universities being 'bailed up' by students and many others where right-wing speakers have been refused entry because a small cadre of students have agitated against them.

[sunnyskywalker]

Okay, I have to laugh at the idea that identity politics have "taken over." Even if you're just talking about US politics, they have always taken identity as one of the major issues. You don't even have to go back as far as the 19th century to see it. Lots of 20th-century politicians made no bones about representing white men, valuing that group especially, and making preserving segregation a major point of their campaigns and administrations. The anti-suffragists were adamant that only men should vote, which is hardly an identity-neutral position.

Academics weren't shy in praising the superiority of white people, or in nodding sagely about how women are just different and not cut out for business and politics and rational thinking like men are. They were totally up front about thinking that other groups mostly didn't do anything worth writing about, because their white male identity was superior. The US performed tens of thousands of forced eugenic sterilizations based on how mostly-white often-men evaluated different identities (short version: poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities were sterilized far, far more often than middle-class white people with no obvious disabilities). I could go on.

American politics has always been identity politics. This is true of a lot of other countries, too. Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" is a poem about how identity should influence world politics. Just to take one tiny example. It's not that people were neutral and unconcerned with identity and then suddenly those darn universities started brainwashing kids to care about race and sexual orientation. It's that one identity isn't the unquestioned boss of the conversation anymore, so the people who share that identity and so didn't have to think about now do.

Also, incidentally, my experience of college was the opposite of brainwashing. My textbooks in lower levels of schooling usually had very simple narratives that left out a lot, and in college, we got a bunch more information--often by authors who disagreed with each other--and had to learn to sort it out ourselves. So don't go assuming that all colleges or college students who end up liberal are alike ;-)

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Amen to all of this! Also, as to Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" was a justification/praise song about the U.S. attack on the Philippines.

I think when Brad talks about "Identity Politics", he specifically means those people who speak up for marginalized groups. But it's absolutely true that the right wing have always used identity politics to energize their base. I also think its true that the actual left has always spoken for our common humanity, as our so-called extreme left wingers (Bernie, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Greens) are doing today.

[sunnyskywalker]

Probably, but it's such an odd way to frame it. People have always been using identity as justification for politics, but now they're talking about different identities, therefore kids these days have invented identity politics. Does not compute!

What conclusions anyone wants to draw about whether any particular brand of identity politics is good/bad/an extraterrestrial conspiracy/whatever is outside the scope of this discussion, I think, but my inner stickler couldn't let that pass. If the starting premise is inaccurate or incomplete, how can anyone ever have a proper discussion? /stickler