Frankenstein

On Wed, 3 Jul 2024 18:00:30 -0000 (UTC), Don <***@crcomp.net> wrote:

<snippo RC attempt to defend Queen Victoria and so their hatred and
contempt for anything that has happened since>
<you lost, guys (and I /mean/ "guys"), get over it>

All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.

The films, BTW, appear to be based on a stage play, or on earlier
films, and not the book directly. There may have been an exception or
two, but, if they copy the book, they are long, boring, and praised
only by high-level intellectuals.

Unlike, say, Stoker's /Dracula/, which was written by someone who at
least knew how to do it.

--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

Don

2024-07-04 19:45:55 UTC

This is an excerpt from a talk given by Dr E Michael Jones at a high-
school commencement ceremony in June, 1995. It pertains to Mary
Shelley's motivation to write _Frankenstein_.
... By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing
procreation in the laboratory and not where God intended it,
which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein created a monster,
whose major work was death and horror. Which leads us to
answer our question about why a young lady connected with
the cream of English society at the time, people of
undeniable talent and seemingly unlimited promise, would
write a horror story as the best evocation of their lives
together. It is because sex disconnected from the moral
order leads to horror. This is not a new story, although it
seems to be a story that each generation has to learn in its
own way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae
thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god Dionysos
became an object of worship in any State, someone is going
to die. Sex disconnected from the moral order leads to death.
As soon as the women leave their looms and go off to dance
naked on the mountain side, horror is soon to follow. The
mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
the music of undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in
some form of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore
off, she found herself sitting with her son's head in her
lap, and in answer to her father's question about what she
saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see grief."
...
... If you carelessly bring life into the world without
regard to the moral law (which is another definition of
sexual liberation) you invariably create monsters which
will return and destroy not only you, but your friends
and family, indeed, your entire culture as well.
Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
at the time married to someone else, reading the Marquis
de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which had already
led to the horrors of the French Revolution. In gazing at
the pornographic illustrations in Justine, she was smart
enough to understand what role 18-year-old girls were
going to play in the brave new world by revolutionaries
like her father and soon to be husband. "Woman," said the
divine Marquis in Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness."
Sexual license is in its way ultimately just a way of
treating people like machines, and as Mary must have
understood by reading Justine, the fate of female machines
was not a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the
trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated
from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured
and killed.
Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the
world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was
proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It
keeps getting retold because we still live in that world.
The protest is still necessary because the Enlightenment
is still with us in the form of in-vitro fertilization,
and test tube babies, and an $8 billion a year pornography
industry. In his latest encyclical the pope denominates
this world of the Enlightenment, the "culture of death."
<https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/frankenstein-10806>

<snippo>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.
The films, BTW, appear to be based on a stage play, or on earlier
films, and not the book directly. There may have been an exception or
two, but, if they copy the book, they are long, boring, and praised
only by high-level intellectuals.
Unlike, say, Stoker's /Dracula/, which was written by someone who at
least knew how to do it.

Note: correction to the attribution at the top of my original post.

Readers who click the link will discover another remarkable nexus of
English writers.

... The story that Mary wrote, the one just released as a
video last week, was called Frankenstein, subtitled The
Modern Prometheus. Which brings us to a further question:
Why did a lady in a situation as promising as this write
the world's most famous horror story? Before we write
this off as an aberration, we should say that just about
everyone there at the Villa Diodati wrote horror stories
as well. George, or as the world would come to know him,
Lord Byron, brought a physician with him who anticipated
Bran Stoker some seventy years by writing the first vampire
story in English literature, The Vampire by John Polidori.
The vampire in question was Lord Byron. And as anyone who
has read Mary Shelley's novel can see, Frankenstein was
modeled on the other paradigm of English romantic poetry,
the man who was eventually to become her husband, Percy
Bysshe Shelley. ...

The plot thickens...

Inspiring Frankenstein

In the early 1800s the growing sciences of chemistry and
electricity offered provocative new tools to help solve
an ancient problem: what is the nature of life? The recent
experiments of Luigi Galvani hinted at electricity as a
life force.

Had Luigi Galvani discovered the spark of life? During an
electrical experiment, Italian physician and anatomist
Luigi Galvani watched as a scalpel touched a dissected
frog on a metal mount - and the frog's leg kicked. ...

Sir Humphry Davy, a Cornish chemist and inventor whose
work Mary Shelley had read, applied Volta's battery to
his experiments. In his popular lecture series, he spoke
about the "creative" powers of the scientist, "which
have enabled him to modify and change the beings
surrounding him, and ... interrogate nature with power."

It is widely thought that Mary Shelley may have used
Humphry Davy as a model for Victor Frankenstein. Certainly
they shared a passion for chemistry. However Davy, along
with most of his contemporaries, believed strongly that
science, the new science of chemistry in particular, was
unequivocally a power for the public good. Shelley's novel
upended that conceit, presenting perhaps for the first
time, a vision of science - unchecked scientific ambition,
in particular - with a dark side.

<https://library.si.edu/exhibition/fantastic-worlds/body-electric>

Finally, one of my earlier posts re-posted:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twitchable frog leg always reminds me of...

"Our man in Peking" by Haydon Howard appears on the cover of the
February 1967 _Galaxy [1]. At the start of the story...

He was dropped into Red China on a mission he didn't know -
with his life a forfeit if he failed!

Hunted by the F.B.I. as a convicted mass murderer and
concealed by the Central Intelligence Agency for some
damnable purpose, Dr. Joe West plodded across the dark
runway. His footsteps clumped toward the silhouette of
the aircraft.
His legs felt impossibly heavy. Swollen. But he
thought his legs were as thin as when he was an
undernourished scholarship student at Harvard Med
School.
Imaginary heavy legs? Dr. Joe West's mouth split
in a confused grin. Psychosomatic elephantiasis? What
had the C.I.A. given him?

A few pages later the story segues into classic, very old school chem
trail...

The bomber howled and bucked through updrafts. Dr. West knew
the aircraft was laying a trail of aerosol fog across the
formerly desolate mountains of South Central China.

"They should have told us," the Major blurted. "I'm a
professional. I should have been given the chance to
volunteer. The Colonel and me, we're going to complete
this spray run on the chance that the Air Force did
agree to - sell us out. You C.I.A. spook, we've decided
to complete the spraying mission.

The Major waved the almost prehistoric .45 automatic
ineffectually. "Now do you feel better or worse?"

Dr. West surreptitiously had managed to raise his
thumb from the button. At first his thumb had not wanted
to release the button, as if it had an over-trained
one-track mind of its own. The flickering red light
stayed on, and Dr. West knew the spraying was
continuing anyway. Probably if he never had pressed the
button, a back-up mechanism would have initiated the
spraying. Probably he was not only expendable; he was
superfluous.

Note.

1. Loading Image...

Danke,

Cryptoengineer

2024-07-05 03:12:41 UTC

Post by Paul S Person
<snippo RC attempt to defend Queen Victoria and so their hatred and
contempt for anything that has happened since>
<you lost, guys (and I /mean/ "guys"), get over it>
All I remember of /Frankenstein/ -the-book was how hard it was to get
through. And so a pain to read.

Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.

It was a first novel, and it shows.

pt

2024-07-05 10:33:12 UTC

Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.
pt

I enjoyed Frankenstein. Great book!

Don

2024-07-12 13:45:21 UTC

D wrote:

<snip>

Post by D
I enjoyed Frankenstein. Great book!

Karen Karbiener's notes in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition:

<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35247.Frankenstein>

are loaded with literal pattern recognition. For instance, a hint of the
theme of incest between creator and creation manifests itself as the
daemon promises to join Victor on his wedding night.
Mary Shelley wrote the book on incest calling it _Mathilde_. Her
father successfully suppressed _Mathilde_, both during his life, and
from the grave, until 1959.

Author's Introduction [to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley]

... "We will each write a ghost story," said Lord Byron,
and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us.
The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he
printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more
apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of
brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious
verse that adorns our language than to invent the machinery
of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his
early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a
skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a
key-hole - what to see I forget: something very shocking and
wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse
condition than the renowned Tom of Coventryd, he did not
know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to
the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was
fitted. ...

End Note [by Karen Karbiener]

Poor Polidori: John William Polidori (1795-1821) claimed
that he had begun a novel entitled Emestus Berchtold; or,
The Modem Oedipus (completed 1819) at the same time
Frankenstein was planned. Polidori also developed the
fragment of Byron’s abandoned ghost story and published
it as The Vampyre in 1819.

With incest and Oedipus pretext out of the way, we can now embark to the
recently departed, doctor of script, Robert Towne's magnum opus:
_Chinatown_.
The trajectory from Polidori to more modern interpretations of
_Oedipus Rex_ leads to a psychological focus, particularly through the
lens of Freud. One of my ambitions is to acquire the 1975 issue of
_Film Quarterly_ where Wayne D. McGinnis compared Chinatown to Oedipus
Rex by Sophocles.

This thread from last year attempts to sort out the existential hot mess

First, a review of previously posted postulates. The Oedipus complex
manifested within Perry Rhodan's son, Thomas Cardif is a straight
forward "I want to kill my father" impulse.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Thora's funeral a foreshadow hints at Cardif's intentions to fully
indulge his Oedipus complex (whose usage in this context is shown below)
and kill his father. Thus the tragedy begins and metastasizes.
Freud was absolutely obsessed with changes that take place in
our minds as we move from childhood to adulthood. When we are
children, Freud suggests, we are fiercely devoted to our mothers,
because they nurture and protect us. Anything or anyone who gets
in the way of this devotional love becomes, in our irrational
baby minds, a threat that should be eliminated-even if that
What I've just described is a version of Freud's famous Oedipus
complex, in which a male child, echoing the actions of the tragic
Greek king Oedipus, wants to kill his father and marry his mother.
<https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next comes Priestley's thoughts on /Oedipus Rex/.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PR's Thomas Cardif affair was treated as an /Oedipus Rex/ adaptation by
me in Lynn's recent review of 67 "Interlude on Siliko 5." And it turns
out Priestley mentions /Oedipus Rex/ in _Man and Time_. And, his words
But the reason for writing plays in this form has nothing to do
with the Time element. It is because their action works like a
coiled spring, producing an effect both of increasing tension
and dramatic inevitability. In plays of this kind (of which
perhaps the supreme example is the /Oedipus Rex/ of Sophocles)
we are made to feel that the characters are helpless victims of
fate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now for something new - a person posits how the movie _Chinatown_
contains complex components comparable to /Oedipus Rex/.
Analysis and interpretation
A modern Oedipus Rex
In a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly, Wayne D. McGinnis compared
Chinatown to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. He suggested that a
"wasteland motif predominates in both works", in which a
character (Noah Cross in Chinatown and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex)
uses "a plague on a city" to get into public power and then
harbor corruption. McGinnis wrote that both works allude to
"a sterility of moral values in its own era": of Athens in
"a time of intellectual upheaval [...] after the heroic battle
of Marathon" in Oedipus Rex and of America in the Watergate
era in Chinatown. He also argued that in the film, director
Roman Polanski splits Sophocles' Oedipus into two morally
polar figures, with the film's protagonist Detective Jake
Gittes paralleling the "good" Oedipus: the one uncovering the
source of corruption. McGinnis asserted that after "confronting
the web of evil perpetrated by Cross [...] Gittes is the Oedipus
whose success, to the use the words of Cleanth Brooks and
Robert B. Heilman, 'has tended to blind [him] to possibilities
which pure reason fails to see'". McGinnis concluded that
"There is finally pity for the doomed, ignorant Gittes, just
as there is pity for the blind Oedipus in Sophocles", however,
"Gittes' real sight, like Oedipus, comes too late".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)>

I see a difference between Freud's idea that sons
(is it just sons?) love their mother and resent their
father, and the supposed actual history of Oedipus,
whose actual father orders the kid taken away
to be abandoned to die, since he, Oedipus, is destined
to kill his father and marry his own mother (what?!)
A twist is that Oedipus instead is adopted, doesn't
know that - the adoptive parents deny it - and does
know about the destiny, so to try to protect his
not-real parents in Corinth, he heads for Thebes -
and runs into his actual father (a road rage incident)
and then his mother, and destiny takes its course.
One reading of this is that when the gods hate you
with or without good reason, this is very bad.
As far as Oedipus knew for most of his life,
he loved his father. Who was not the man, Laius,
who arranged his murder as a baby, and then drove
a cart over him in an argument at a road junction.
Laius seems to be not much of a loss, even excluding
a rewrite where he raped a male student which
apparently makes everything else fair punishment,
of Laius. But Oedipus didn't consciously resent Laius.
Perhaps he did unconsciously recognise and resent him?
Anyway, which way is it with Thomas Cardif?
He knows that Perry Rhodan is his father, and he
is against Rhodan? That's more like Mordred -
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur%27s_family>
Although Mordred's parents may be siblings -
that wasn't in the story originally, someone "sexed it up".
And then Mordred gets a prophecy and Arthur supposedly
tries to kill any child born around the given time.
You know, like Voldemort did.

My original post inadvertently intermingles ideas.
An Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytical term. It involves a child's
hostility towards the parent of the the same sex - a son who wants to
kill his father.
My first snippet shown above pertains to psychoanalysis practice.
Thomas Cardiff suffers from an Oedipus complex and wants to kill his
father Perry Rhodan.
Mordred also suffers from an Oedipus complex. Ergo, Mordred wants to
kill his father too, King Arthur.
OTOH, /Oedipus Rex/ denotes the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles. The
second and third snippets appearing above apply to /Oedipus Rex/.
Danke,

In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
recorded incident of road rage.

Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.

Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

Paul S Person

2024-07-12 15:46:42 UTC

Post by Don
In the Sopocles play, Oedipus has no desire to kill his father; in fact he's
fleeing the area where he thinks his bio parents live to avoid that fate, when
he *does* kill Laius (who he does not know is his father) in the first
recorded incident of road rage.
Nor does he know that Jocasta is his mother when he marries her, as a
prize for getting rid of the Sphinx.

This is because the point of the play is that "the gods" are cruel and
remorseless. Oedipus is their victim, not a villain. This is, after
all, /tragedy/, not crime drama.

Robert Graves somewhere asserts that the winning plays (well, the
tragedies) each year (and those we have were all winning plays, that
is why they survived) were treated as /theology/. The Sophocles
contribution to Greek pagan theology must have been very much a
downer.

Post by Don
Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.

IIRC, Freud asserted that the Oedipus myth was a /product/ of his
complex, and so "proof" that it existed way-back-when.

When I read the volume /Freud/ in the /Great Books of the Western
World/ collection I formed the theory that his was a formal system: if
you replaced "sex" with, say, "eating corn flakes with milk for
breakfast", then nothing would change except that "sex" would become a
sublimation of "eating corn flakes with milk for breakfast", as would
everything said to be a sublimation of sex by Freud.

IOW, I concluded that Freud's theory was founded on sex because Freud
was obsessed by sex. And for no other reason.

But that's just me. And very much IMHO. Feel free to disagree.

Freud himself, in /Civilization and Its Discontent/, asserted that all
the problems he was investigating was a result of Western culture (ie,
Victorianism). People not raised in that culture, including anyone
below the upper middle class (which was good, as they could not
possibly afford the fees), was free of them.

The whole production, IOW, is a result of "high culture". Which rather
raises the issue "how stupid do you have to be to adopt a 'high
culture' that drives you and your children insane?".

--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

Bobbie Sellers

2024-08-07 00:54:25 UTC

Post by Paul S Person

This is because the point of the play is that "the gods" are cruel and
remorseless. Oedipus is their victim, not a villain. This is, after
all, /tragedy/, not crime drama.
Robert Graves somewhere asserts that the winning plays (well, the
tragedies) each year (and those we have were all winning plays, that
is why they survived) were treated as /theology/. The Sophocles
contribution to Greek pagan theology must have been very much a
downer.

Post by Don
Oedipus doesn't have any of the motivations described in Freud's 'Oedipus
Complex'.

Well the patients he saw were sexual abused which because
he was very concerned about societal acceptance in Vienna of the
time he reported as the patients' fantasies

Post by Paul S Person
But that's just me. And very much IMHO. Feel free to disagree.
Freud himself, in /Civilization and Its Discontent/, asserted that all
the problems he was investigating was a result of Western culture (ie,
Victorianism). People not raised in that culture, including anyone
below the upper middle class (which was good, as they could not
possibly afford the fees), was free of them.
The whole production, IOW, is a result of "high culture". Which rather
raises the issue "how stupid do you have to be to adopt a 'high
culture' that drives you and your children insane?".

It would be hard to find a culture, high or low,
which when it basic premises are extended far enough would
not drive its victims mad.

Well it was just a result of the Catholic religion and its peruliar
views of sexuality. It was a state religion for the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire which disitegrated after WW II. But it
caused a lot of so-called religious wars in the time of
the Protestan Reformation.
SF connection is the "Ring of Fire' series.

Have you watched the PBS series "Vienna Blood" which
features the cooperation of a police detective with a Jewish
Physician who is a follower of Fruedian discourse.

I happen to think it is really excellent and it depicts
the forces which will later bring the A-H Empire to an end and
which still disturb the peace of the atates which were part of
that Empire.

bliss

--
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com

Scott Dorsey

2024-07-05 22:31:26 UTC

Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.

I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long
digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although
I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

2024-07-06 10:29:23 UTC

Post by Scott Dorsey

Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.

Hmm, maybe I will read it again. It was more than 20 years ago that I read
it so it would be interesting to see how it has aged. Given all the
AI-hysteria I think it fits nicely with the spirit of the times. ;)

Don

2024-07-08 14:43:22 UTC

<snip>

Post by Scott Dorsey
I liked it when I read it at age 14. It was mostly filled with long
digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although
I might find them less novel today. And it was not a large book.
--scott

poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."
- Mary Shelley's husband Percy.

Hyperbolized hysteria's in the heart of the beholder.

Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil seems smitten with Singularity in a style
somewhat similar to _Rapture of the Nerds_ (Doctorow & Stross).

Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction
that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of
the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor
and futurist will live forever.

<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/technology/ray-kurzweil-singularity.html>

The _Washington Post_ has been joined at the hip with her sister paper,
the NYT, ever since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They have a
gentlemen's (or lady's if you like) agreement to coordinate front pages
with each other.
Anyhow, the NYT's sister sneaks in a small snark about Kurzweil's
IQ:

Perhaps the shape rotators [such as Kurzweil] are convinced
that computers can outthink us because their own minds are
so impoverished.

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/>

Then there's this guy, who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it
any more:

<https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/>

Danke,

2024-07-08 20:14:02 UTC

Post by Don
<snip>

poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."
- Mary Shelley's husband Percy.
Hyperbolized hysteria's in the heart of the beholder.
Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil seems smitten with Singularity in a style
somewhat similar to _Rapture of the Nerds_ (Doctorow & Stross).
Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction
that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of
the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor
and futurist will live forever.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/technology/ray-kurzweil-singularity.html>
The _Washington Post_ has been joined at the hip with her sister paper,
the NYT, ever since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They have a
gentlemen's (or lady's if you like) agreement to coordinate front pages
with each other.
Anyhow, the NYT's sister sneaks in a small snark about Kurzweil's
Perhaps the shape rotators [such as Kurzweil] are convinced
that computers can outthink us because their own minds are
so impoverished.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/>
Then there's this guy, who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it
<https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/>
Danke,

Rapture of the nerds. I like that! I will steal it! =)

Cryptoengineer

2024-07-10 12:43:06 UTC

Post by Don
<snip>

   poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."
     - Mary Shelley's husband Percy.
Hyperbolized hysteria's in the heart of the beholder.
Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil seems smitten with Singularity in a style
somewhat similar to _Rapture of the Nerds_ (Doctorow & Stross).
   Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction
   that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of
   the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor
   and futurist will live forever.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/technology/ray-kurzweil-singularity.html>
The _Washington Post_ has been joined at the hip with her sister paper,
the NYT, ever since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They have a
gentlemen's (or lady's if you like) agreement to coordinate front pages
with each other.
   Anyhow, the NYT's sister sneaks in a small snark about Kurzweil's
   Perhaps the shape rotators [such as Kurzweil] are convinced
   that computers can outthink us because their own minds are
   so impoverished.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/>
Then there's this guy, who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it
<https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/>
Danke,

Rapture of the nerds. I like that! I will steal it! =)

You might want to have a chat with Cory Doctorow....

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rapture+of+the+nerds

pt

2024-07-11 09:13:44 UTC

Post by Don
<snip>

I liked it when I read it at age 14.Â It was mostly filled with long
digressions about the nature of life, which I found interesting although
I might find them less novel today.Â And it was not a large book.
--scott

Â Â poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Â Â Â Â - Mary Shelley's husband Percy.
Hyperbolized hysteria's in the heart of the beholder.
Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil seems smitten with Singularity in a style
somewhat similar to _Rapture of the Nerds_ (Doctorow & Stross).
Â Â Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction
Â Â that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of
Â Â the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor
Â Â and futurist will live forever.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/technology/ray-kurzweil-singularity.html>
The _Washington Post_ has been joined at the hip with her sister paper,
the NYT, ever since the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They have a
gentlemen's (or lady's if you like) agreement to coordinate front pages
with each other.
Â Â Anyhow, the NYT's sister sneaks in a small snark about Kurzweil's
Â Â Perhaps the shape rotators [such as Kurzweil] are convinced
Â Â that computers can outthink us because their own minds are
Â Â so impoverished.
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/>
Then there's this guy, who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it
<https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/>
Danke,

Rapture of the nerds. I like that! I will steal it! =)

You might want to have a chat with Cory Doctorow....
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rapture+of+the+nerds
pt

If he calls, I'll let you know. ;) But thank you very much for the book
recommendation it does look quite interesting! =)

Paul S Person

2024-07-06 16:05:42 UTC

Post by Scott Dorsey

Few books written by 18 year olds are page turners AND well written.
It was a first novel, and it shows.

It /seemed/ (to me) like a long book. That's because it took a long
time to get through, being mostly uninteresting.

I should note, in fairness, that I also found /Pride and Prejudice/,
when required to read it some time later, to also be indigestible.

I mean, really, a book about girls whose sole concern was marrying a
wealthy man and whose sole fear was that they would find out that he
really wasn't wealthy? This worked in /Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride/,
but that's a lot shorter. And the same cultural environment worked
well in /No Name/ (Wilkie Collins, probably best known for /The Woman
in White/ or /The Moonstone/).

And using /Frankenstein/ and Shelley to attack IVF (and so imply that
people produced through IVF -- which Shelley could have known nothing
about, as it hadn't been invented yet -- are monsters) and de Sade to
blame the French Revolution on (Durant suggests Roussou and the French
Philosophes -- and the pig-headed nobles, including the RC hierarchy
-- as the cause) is a sure sign of mindless (but well-written)
propaganda.

--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

Kevrob

2024-07-07 14:17:22 UTC

Post by Don
The
mother of young Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to
the music of

of what? of whom?

Post by Don
undoubtedly thinking.....

Jones seems to be a nutbar.

[quote]
CULTURE WARS/FIDELITY PRESS

South Bend, Ind.
E. Michael Jones, a former hippie who says he spent his honeymoon stuck
in traffic while trying to reach the 1969 Woodstock Festival...

[/quote]

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2007/12-anti-semitic-radical-traditionalist-catholic-groups

__
Kevin R

--
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Don

2024-07-07 17:03:38 UTC