Good news, everyone! The good folks on the RedditorOfTheDay subreddit picked our friend AnnArchist to be Redditor of the Day yesterday. He filled out a little questionnaire for the RedditorOfTheDay folks listing all sorts of fun facts about himself.
In addition to moderating the Men’s Rights subreddit and posting hilarious videos of women getting beaten up to the beatingwomen subreddit, AnnArchist (who is a dude, despite the name) also enjoys: Skyrim, bass fishing, sports talk radio, chicken tacos, and football!
His biggest pet peeve:
People who want to interfere with other people’s happiness.
His biggest worry about Reddit?
I just hope the community doesn’t grow so quickly that we lose the quality debate and discussion that has kept many of the users around reddit for a long time.
Over on ShitRedditSays, fxexular has helpfully catalogued some of AnnArchist’s contribution to the “quality debate and discussion.” Like his considered opinion on one female judge:
I hope someone kills her.
And his opinion of an alleged false rape accuser:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
You can find even more of these charming nuggets in my post about him here.
In his answers to the RedditorOfTheDay questionnaire, AnnArchist reveals himself to be a truly sensitive soul. Here, he shares a painful moment from his past:
When I was a senior in HS and when my friend and I saw … the plane fly into the twin towers our first reaction was laughter rather than OMG thats a tragedy. Yea, we’re fucked up. I TPed my High School that night. I’m a horrible person.
Oh, and did I mention that he’s the creator, sole moderator, and basically the only contributor to the NSFW4 subreddit, devoted to posting pictures and videos too horrific and offensive to post anywhere else on Reddit?
Godspeed, AnnArchist! Thank you for making the world a better place!
NOTE: This post is almost entirely made up of sarcasm.
@Quackers
If you are reading the “standard” analytic philosophy canon (the type of thing that most people would read in a philosophy department) there are definitely very important people to that who are still alive. Three that I can think of off the top of my head are Saul Kripke (logic and philosophy of language, wrote “Naming and Necessity), Daniel Dennett (philosophy of mind, not just a wacky atheist!), and Jerry Fodor (philosophy of mind, articulated the “modularity” hypothesis which is a huge component of modern philosophy of mind).
If you want to see someone who’s coming up with interesting ideas and interesting questions, probably literally as we speak, I’d look at Joshua Knobe’s work and the whole experimental philosophy movement. (I tend to think that they’re doing crappy social science on the whole, but they are asking some really interesting questions about how people make moral decisions. There’s an X-Phi blog here at: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/)
A huge chunk of the ideas in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language have been invented in the past century or so; although the broad questions are similar to things Plato or Aristotle asked, there are a number of conceptual distinctions that did not exist then and the modern means of talking about these topics would be unrecognizable to them.
Whoever said they steal abortion arguments from philosophy is probably thinking of Judith Jarvis Thompson, she’s the one who came up with the “dying violinist” and “people-seeds coming through the window” thought experiments, Which I have to give props to her for because they’re impossibly clever. (She’s also still alive! Read her paper “A Defense of Abortion” if you like ethics.)
Ithiliana is right that philosophy is probably the humanities field with the biggest gender problems (it’s imbalanced by something like 20-80 or 25-75) and race problems (there are like no POC). I know that there are things actively being done to correct the gender issue but some departments aren’t very open to them. It is still very much an old boys’ network. If you like to hear terrible stories about sexism and total cluelessness, this is for you: http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/
Oops, I meant “articulated the modularity hypothesis, which is a huge component of modern cognitive science”. (It is still a big part of modern phil. mind as well, but that’s not what I meant 🙂 )
This one really pisses me off, because A: the Allies were winning WWI without us, just slowly, and B: the USSR could beat the everliving shit out of hitler alone, after the initial advance had been halted (which obviously had fuck-all to do with the USA’s intervention).
The thing that really bothers me, in addition to the utter inaccuracy, is that it’s not like USians have to give up being assholes here, I’d actually be happy if they were ones slightly better grounded in reality. “Or you’d all be speaking Russian” even plays into typical commie-hating. Why’s it so hard to be a little close to reality? :<
That’d be me, and that’d be her, thanks.
“if it weren’t for us, you’d all be speaking German right now!”
There’s actually one time I heard of where I think that would’ve been totally legit (albeit unwise): my sister and her friend (both American) were visiting Normandy beach while they were in Europe, and the French guy driving them there complained that he had to speak English to them. Like, literally en route to the place so many Americans died to help France out. Sooo asking for the speaking German retort right then. ;D
B: the USSR could beat the everliving shit out of hitler alone, after the initial advance had been halted (which obviously had fuck-all to do with the USA’s intervention).
this is kind of what i was going for with what i said. like, yeah, the ussr could have won the war all by their lonesome, but if they had done so, the longer campaign would probably have meant they got even more destructive
The thing USians claim credit for is beating Germany. As I said; if they stuck to “You’d be speaking Russian”, that’d be a rather different thing. Somewhat simplified, but still much, much closer to reality.
The Japanese were fucked. Like, you do remember why they attacked pearl harbor, right? They wanted a quick surrender and trade back. They were running out of the supplies with which to make war. It’d have been a hell of a lot longer, but again, our intervention didn’t stop a magic empire. It helped a lot of people, but that ain’t the same as what we usually bluster about.
@Bee: Knowing stuff =/= being smart.
YES! Thank you. Finally. I’ve been sitting on my hands because omg this discussion.
And I’m not even sure about the “know more stuff” as opposed to different stuff.
I mean, how many of us could survive in a medieval peasant economy–IF they knew less about the world outside their village/region/area, it was because there was vastly less information available, and because 95% of the people were print illiterate. They knew a shitload of how to create their own good, clothing, goods, and survive, and raise their children to survive. So, more stuff or different stuff?
And by the way: Socrates and a bunch of his cronies were totally against writing anything because that totally ruined learning–it was to be done by talking. DO NOT WRITE STUFF DOWN! gargh! (Ditto with the shift from oral culture to print culture–I’m sure the bards were all OMG you will kill poetry if you write it down! It has to breathe to life!)
And yes, knowing a lot of factoids (many of which might be proven WRONG upon research) is not the same as being smart (whatever that mans. I’m a teacher, and while I can point to various behaviors and skill sets as useful in this environment, does that mean that’s all of intelligence–well, no, because I teach English). So “smart” is pretty much a completely undefined term for any useful purpose.
We may be destroying the environment at a greater rate, but that’s due to population pressure (environmental degredation is a human characteristic–but when we were little small groups of hunter gatherers, we could move on, and there weren’t enough groups to destroy on a global scale). The only argument I might hate more than “we’re all getting dumber and the past was better” is the “we’re all getting smarter and the future will be better.”
And educators a century plus ago were bemoaning the lack of writing and critical thinking skills of the incoming freshman………to the IVIES.
One of the best things about the internet (from a teacher’s viewpoint) is how easy it makes it to prove plagiarism: a quick google, and voila.
My favorite story is the student who copied and pasted the entry from Spark’s Notes on a writing assignment and did not remove the HYPERLINK FORMATTING AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
*beating Germany as opposed to giving the other democratic capitalist states more leverage in post-war europe, I should say.
yeah, if i didn’t make that clear, i agree that the prevailing us narrative on wwii is totally insipid and self-congratulatory, it’s just that the correct response isn’t ‘the us, what did they reaaaallly do anyway’
I hope I wasn’t doing that, it was definitely not my intention.
Wetherby, a study about a decade ago I heard about (please consider the source) stated that since Americans had their TV interrupted like we do, it made our ability to remember stories better because we had to re-engage with a story after a five minute break between the arcs. This was in comparison to the British who do not have theirs interrupted by commercials so their ability to handle interrupted stories to not be as high as Americans.
There was some kind of actual positive about our having an attention span of a gnat in it but I forget what.
The thing is that, through the filtering effect of time, a LOT of the crap has been sifted out. We don’t have the Elizabethan equivalent of Michael Bay, because no one bothered to keep track of his works; we just have Shakespeare.
Having read a lot of non-Shakespeare Elizabethan writing, most of it is indeed crap. It’s actually very similar to our own time, in that new technology (in this case, the printing press) had suddenly provided ordinary people with opportunities to express themselves as never before. So of course they mostly published overheated tabloid news, angry religious screeds, bad poetry about freak shows and hideous murders, and sexist/racist/just-plain-nutty manifestos.
Meanwhile, Elizabethan literary critics thought their era would be remembered for its epic poetry, which mostly sucked. Most playwrights didn’t even bother to publish their plays. Shakespeare’s work would have been lost if his theater company hadn’t decided to put out a book of it after his death. (We also have all of Ben Jonson’s work because he was a control freak who self-published everything he wrote to compete with the bootleggers putting out badly-transcribed copies. Yes, the Elizabethans even had their own version of Internet piracy.)
It’s often been speculated that there may have been playwrights even greater than Shakespeare in the Elizabethan era, but we don’t know about them because their work hasn’t survived. But we also probably lost a lot of crap that no one liked enough to preserve.
Another thing to keep in mind: you see more writing from dumb people these days because more dumb people can write. If the people on Reddit and 4chan had lived a century ago, most of them wouldn’t have been sharing their ignorant opinions with the world, because they would have been functionally illiterate.
I think you guys are referring to my comment on this, and let me point out that I did not say “knowing factoids.” I was very careful in how I worded my comment, and said that an average person today has a much broader understanding of the world around him or her than people did previously. And yes, I believe that literacy and access to information has a large part in that.
I hope I wasn’t doing that, it was definitely not my intention.
i was more responding to the blackbloc post i quoted, but that was probably more ‘the way blackbloc talks’ than anything else.
i really just wanted to talk about wwii…
That may well be true – I like things in hefty chunks, and often take in two or three episodes at once these days: one of my annual guilty pleasures is a six-day 24 marathon, four parts a day.
And BBC4, our highest-brow channel, regularly schedules drama series in blocks of two – for instance, the original Danish version of The Killing is currently playing in just such a fashion, effectively as a single two-hour episode broken halfway by credits.
@shaenon:
True, and in the last decade or so this has been compounded by the fact that more dumb people can publish – and they do, in vast quantities. Most of the effluvia that gets mocked on this site wouldn’t have circulated in any usefully influential form even as recently as fifteen years ago.
I should have added, my argument is not that we’re vastly more intelligent than people in the past. But I do expressly reject the notion that we are dumber — the discussion of the movie Idiocracy is what started this whole conversation. IMO, we’re generally the same now as we ever have been, however there is broader access to basic education amongst groups of people who were not educated in the past and that does make a difference.
an average person today has a much broader understanding of the world around him or her than people did previously.
Depends entirely upon what you mean by broader understanding of the world — and ‘average person.’
There is a lot more knowledge and understanding of some aspects of the world (whatever that means), but given the scientific illiteracy, ideological limitations of ‘history’ and failure to teach reading, writing and critical skills in today’s standardized test driven NCLB educational system, I am not at all sure (after being a teacher for 25 years) that I would agree with your statement (although again it depends on how you define the terms).
Shaenon: Well, we did remember the Faerie Queene, so I will count them as, like, ten percent right. 🙂
Ithiliana: As the originator of the “people are actually getting smarter” thing, I would like to point out that there’s no evidence that that means the world is going to get better, insofar as we are still pretty fuckstupid, and thanks to technology and population pressure we know have far more power to fuck things up.
And anyway “people are getting smarter” is one of those footnoted things: people are getting smarter if you accept that IQ is a thing, correct for the effects of familiarity with standardized tests and realize that it’s probably all due to better health care. Also, we stopped getting smarter around 2000, so there’s that.
Rutee: I dunno, I can see a case for classics worship. If something is around for three thousand years, it’s bound to be pretty good, or people would have stopped reading it. 🙂
Quackers: I am entirely sympathetic to the disliking of modern philosophers*, because I have tried four or five times to read philosophy that wasn’t the ancient Greeks and Romans, and I always end up falling asleep. 🙂
*”Modern” means “after the fall of Rome,” right? >.>
I have a pet theory that I have zero evidence for but I think the reason for what appears to be a literal explosion in tech and other kinds of development like the Industrial Age is due to the access of the average person to education that was not there before.
I am reading a book on Chaucer by Terry Jones and some historians and it points out that while the Church had encouraged people to read, once they started doing so (and disagreeing with official Church doctrine), the Church freaked out with the predictable result of legislation being passed to prevent people of a certain type from learning to read. It is English centric but it is an interesting idea that it is educational access that has changed things from centuries ago.
And I could easily be wrong. 🙂
blitzgal, I’m sorry … I was being lazy when I wrote my comment, but I was actually referencing karalora’s comment, below, not anything you wrote:
I do think that, as ithiliana said much better than I am able to, “smart” is used in ways that render it pretty amorphous and unhelpful. But I’m trying to make a distinction between knowing things and being able to reason and use logic and think creatively and clearly.
Exhibit A: The Last of the Mohicans
“It is now no longer a question of accumulating scientific truths and discoveries. We need above everything to spread the truths already mastered by science, to make them part of our daily life, to render them common property. We have to order things so that all, so that the mass of mankind, may be capable of understanding and applying them; we have to make science no longer a luxury but the foundation of every man’s life. This is what justice demands. ”
– Peter Kropotkin, “Appeal to the Young”
(Pardon the usage of “man” everywhere… kind of a failing of every decent end of 19th/early 20th socialist author.)
If something is around for three thousand years, it’s bound to be pretty good, or people would have stopped reading it
Anybody here except me ever taught “classics”????
Anybody here know how censored Shakespeare (arguably the most ‘classic’ English text) is in high schools?
Anybody here remember how they hated a bunch of the classics they had to read in high school (and probably didn’t read, just read Cliff’s notes, or something like that?)
Anybody want to think about how many of the ‘radical’ notions of some of those classics (or hell the “sex drugs rockn’n’roll aspects of the said classics, see Shakespeare, above) get sanitized out by the prevailing ideology of the day?
I had stood in a classroom and argued with a whole bunch of adults mostly parents (this was community college so non-traditional) who all KNEW by god that Shakespeare had to be taught and all those other classics.
They couldn’t remember what they read in high school (but they knew it was CLASSICS).
They couldn’t say they had ever looked at a single one of those CLASSICS since high school, or talked about them with anybody, or used them in REAL LIFE but they by god knew it would be more important to teach those classics than anything like, oh, for example: contemporary science fiction, graphic novels, African American literature (remember the “omg they’re throwing out Shakespeare for Alice Walker!!” scare from the 80s?),etc.
And with all that, I actually read and teach Shakespeare–but in a way that would turn most classics worshippers heads grey (i.e. sodomy! queer Mercutio! dirty jokes!)–and the amount of scholarship published on Shakespeare has increased with the application of the newer critical theories (gender, feminist, queer, Marxist–you want a hoot, read Terry Eagleton’s postcolonial and marxist work on Shakespeare). And I taught Seamus Heaney’s translation of BEOWULF in my gender class as the literary text to which we’d apply all the theories.
The problem with one type of classics worship is the attitude that the GREAT works of LITERATURE will teach us to be MORAL and BETTER while the trash produced today will turn us into violent thugs.
That is of course utter crap, but that’s the kind of classics worship I abhor.
er, that should be “I HAVE stood”
oops.