echtroipolemos (u/echtroipolemos)

echtroipolemos commented on Dracula's Biggest Mistake blog.ayjay.org/the-real-v... · Posted by u/chesterfield

runeofdoom · 2 years ago

The author thinks that Helsing & company killed Dracula... and that is certainly the narrator's desperate belief. But as Fred Saberhagen pointed out in his more modern telling of the tale, Van Helsing himself maintains Dracula must be staked, decapitated and have his mouth stuffed with garlic to perish. And yet, despite this and despite knowing that Dracula can turn himself to mist, the heroes are content with victory when, in the shadows of sunset, they stab and cut Dracula with steel knives and he turns to "dust".

Fun article though, even with that small "mistake". :)

echtroipolemos · 2 years ago

In the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula is eventually killed, but at what cost? Harker must eventually drive a stake through his beloved Lucy. Dracula is a virus, not a man.

echtroipolemos commented on Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920) hackneybooks.co.uk/books/... · Posted by u/waihtis

kosolam · 2 years ago

Here are the key points I took away from the excerpt of "Pleasures" by Aldous Huxley:

- Huxley argues that the real threat to modern civilization is not external dangers like war, but the "auto-intoxication" of mindless pleasures and distractions.

- He contends that pleasures and entertainments have become progressively more passive and devoid of intellectual effort. People now soak up ready-made distractions like movies, radio, and newspapers without thinking.

- Huxley criticizes the sterility and sameness of modern distractions. The same movies and dances are consumed everywhere without local variation.

- He sees the proliferation of effortless distractions as promoting boredom, atrophy of the mind, and decline of civilization.

- The essay ends with a warning that the bored populace may eventually demand ever more violent entertainments, as happened in decadent Rome. Huxley fears we may "live to see blood flowing across the stage."

echtroipolemos · 2 years ago

"Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility."

This is the Cartesian distinction between understanding and imagination. Imagination requires a peculiar effort of the soul, which AI is unable to exert. Understanding is knowing that a triangle's interior angles add up to 180 degrees. Imagination is understanding that and being able to represent the image in your mind.

echtroipolemos commented on Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920) hackneybooks.co.uk/books/... · Posted by u/waihtis

echtroipolemos · 2 years ago

"There have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world."

Not only did Orwell predict the total surveillance state, but his French teacher Huxley foreshadowed the necessity of the opioid crisis in maintaining the existence of such a society.

echtroipolemos commented on Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, police officer nytimes.com/2024/02/05/bo... · Posted by u/pepys

echtroipolemos · 2 years ago

The material for Down and Out in Paris and London was due to his disgust and self-loathing which arose from his time serving as a lapdog of the Colonial Raj. Following his time as a dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris and the ensuing poverty - which he characterised as an intensely boring endeavor - he moved to the UK and lived amongst the tramps - following them from spike to spike and writing travelogues.

In Road to Wigan Pier - to the decry of mainstream Marxists - he noted that blind opposition to landlords is nuanced in working class coal mining communities. Generally the property would have been the only source of income for an old widow. I believe that's the project in which he remarked that, "The working classes smell."