#aliteracy

[unsolicited-opinions]

Why are Americans so easily propagandized?

Less than half of Americans read even a single book in a given year. If you're not reading regularly, you'll have trouble recognizing misleading rhetoric. You won't have the historical & media literacy needed to distinguish truth from lies. This is why they want you illiterate.

[lifeofquotations]

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

Mark Twain

[unsolicited-opinions]

Why they hate Huxley

A few recent comments and reblogs have taken issue with the idea that the works of Aldous Huxley are an important defense against the propaganda challenges of our time.

But Postman was right:

"Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us" is terrifyingly relevant to the mid 2020s.

We're not living in Orwell's nightmare of enforced ignorance and pain, we're living in Huxley's nightmare of voluntary distraction and pleasure.

We're drowning in:

Infinite scroll and algorithmically optimized engagement which has made propaganda more effective and widespread than ever before

Outrage as entertainment

Complex policy reduced to memes and hot takes

Complex peoples reduced to black-and-white moral caricatures

The transformation of citizenship into spectatorship and team sports

"Discourse" that's really just performance

What makes this particularly insidious and aligned with Huxley's warning is that nobody is forcing us to watch TikTok for hours, let it reprogram our brains, or reduce politics to team sports. We're doing it willingly because it feels good, because it's easier than sustained attention, because trivial culture is more fun than serious engagement.

That's how we know we're living in Huxley's Brave New World.

The Huxley-deriding replies and reblogs fixate on his coming from an elite, well-off, British, intellectual family, but those who dismiss him as an elite snob are doing exactly what he warned about, using a simple, emotionally satisfying dismissal (eg. priviledged white guy = bad/wrong) to avoid grappling with uncomfortable truths about how we've all become complicit in our own intellectual infantilization.

Why do people reach for this particular class-based line of attack when I make an argument about Huxley's prescience regarding media and propaganda?

Ad hominem deflection: It's easier to dismiss ideas by attacking the messenger than to engage with whether Huxley was actually right about soma-like escapism, entertainment as distraction, or technological control. If they can make Huxley seem unsympathetic or out-of-touch, they don't have to grapple with how his warnings apply to our current media landscape. Thinking too hard is scary.

Academic Class Bias: Many online fat-left critics see Huxley as a stand-in for a kind of British paternalism or condescension. They aren't necessarily responding to what he wrote, but to the archetype they've constructed. A soft-spoken Oxbridge intellectual wringing his hands about pleasure while ignoring material injustice.

Discomfort with cultural self-critique: Huxley's critique lands hardest on us. Our appetite for distraction, our complicity in choosing comfort over thought, our thirst for spectacle. That makes some readers bristle. Dismissing Huxley lets them redirect attention away from their own eager participation in the system which is actively manipulating them.

It's easier to dismiss Huxley as a privileged pessimist than to ask what he actually saw coming and examine how close we are to living in it.

It's more comfortable and satisfying to mock the man warning us that this comfort will be our undoing. It's unsettling to realize the undoing is already underway.

If Huxley was right, they have to face that we didn't lose our freedom, we traded it willingly for dopamine, for distraction and for emotional resonance.

That's hard to protest and feel righteous about because there's no villain to topple...just thousands of tiny daily choices we're already making...and making poorly.

For some, taking that much responsibility for themselves is both too frightening and too much work.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Might as well condemn the invasion of Nazi germany, at that rate. "violence solves nothing" except for all the times it has ended genocides and stopped fascists because the only language they understand is violence

Anon, your Ask is a masterclass in moral and intellectual failure.

(As I walk you through exactly how comprehensively you've embarrassed yourself here, remember that I'm not a fan of Charlie Kirk's person/worldview/politics, and I do not mourn him.)

Your opening statement, "Might as well condemn the invasion of Nazi Germany," reveals you can't distinguish between (1)a declared multinational war against a state which had already murdered millions...and (2)the domestic assassination of a civilian. The Allied invasion of Nazi Germany was a multinational military response to a fascist empire that had launched a world war and committed industrial genocide. It wasn't political score-settling, vigilante justice, or a private citizen murdering a pundit they didn't like.

If you think murdering Charlie Kirk is analogous to liberating Auschwitz, your moral compass is profoundly broken.

It isn't just historically illiterate, Anon - it's also categorically incoherent. You've committed textbook false equivalence while also smuggling in the implication that condemning murder somehow means condemning all uses of force. Even among all the stupid, shitty straw men I've posted from Asks, this one stands out as particularly stupid and shitty.

"violence solves nothing except when it ends genocides and stops fascists"

That's a tankie bumper sticker at best.

The fact that violence has sometimes been used to fight evil doesn't make all violence noble.

That's like responding to the arson attack on Governor Josh Shapiro and his family by saying "...fire is good, actually, because you can use it to roast marshmallows."

You've named exceptional cases of responses to atrocity while ignoring the overwhelming base rate where political violence fails, backfires, creates, or accelerates the very harms you performatively claim to oppose.

You're also equivocating shamelessly between state warfare and private murder, falsely treating them as interchangeable when they operate under completely different legal, moral, and practical frameworks.

Your claim that "the only language they understand is violence" is perhaps the most damning proof of your broken moral compass.

Ask yourself how you would feel if you head someone suggest that "the only language Gazans understand is violence."

No, really. Take a minute and think about that.

You're asserting group psychology without evidence, erasing documented cases of successful nonviolent resistance, and begging the question by assuming the very thing you need to prove. It's also conveniently unfalsifiable. Any nonviolent failure can be dismissed as proof that "only violence works."

This is peak intellectual dishonestly.

You use "fascist" as a thought-terminating cliche. You offer no criteria for this label, no evidence your target meets any defensible definition, and no limiting principle for when violence wouldn't be justified.

It wouldn't even matter if I agreed Kirk's views supported fascism, because when the definition of "fascist" is distorted to cover anyone you dislike, your argument becomes tribal justification for violence perpetrated by your ingroup against anyone you dislike in your outgroup.

Huh. What sort of governments have made that policy...? Oh yeah, fascist governments. (Horseshoe theory is real.)

You're mining Holocaust trauma to license present-day killing and using extraordinary wartime measures by states as templates for peacetime partisan violence in a democracy...and you don't even have the decency to be ashamed of this?

Or maybe you are ashamed, and that's why you're Anon. You believe the disgusting thing you're saying...but not enough to put your name on it.

In all of this, you dodge the actual question. Instead of addressing whether political assassination should be normalized in domestic politics, you fog the issue with irrelevant historical detours. You ignore available legal and democratic remedies, present a false binary choice between murder and inaction, and completely fail to consider reciprocity or societal costs.

If your side can kill "fascists," what happens when the other side adopts your logic? What happens when the cycle becomes impossible to stop? Have you read any history at all?

You offer no evidentiary standards, no exhaustion of alternative remedies, no proportionality tests, and no limiting principles for violence. Just the attitude of he was a fascist, so it's okay to murder him and this has no societal consequences.

Without boundaries, this is just permission slip for whatever violence you happen to favor.

'By any means necessary' thinking is juvenile, short-sighted, ignorant bullshit, and all you're doing with it is engaging in post hoc rationalization, treating the act as self-justifying while dressing up vengeance as virtue.

(Seriously, WTAF is wrong with you? Did you not get enough hugs as a child?)

Your Ask is a trainwreck of factual, logical, rhetorical, and moral failings. You've traded on emotive manipulation and elastic definitions to avoid engaging with the actual stakes.

What are the actual stakes? Glad you asked!

The actual stakes are whether we'll normalize political murder as a tool of domestic politics.

If you weren't a cowardly Anon, I'd ask you: now that Kirk is dead, are the "fascists" stopped? Are trans people more free? Immigrants less attacked? No?

No. Of course not.

It not only accomplishes nothing, it worsens the situation.

If you actually cared about any of these things, you'd be appalled at the damage done to these causes.

You're cheering for the murder of Charlie Kirk because you find it satisfying and emotionally resonant to see someone you dislike murdered.

I didn't like Charlie Kirk either, but I'm not celebrating or justifying this because I haven't lost my humanity or knowledge of history.

The depth of your intellectual poverty here would be impressive if it weren't so dangerous and alarmingly common among the young and the stupid.

If your stance is 'violence is justified if I believe the target deserves it,' then you're not anti-violence, you're pro-murder with caveats.

If so, own that. Don't hide behind the history you obviously haven't studied and clearly don't understand.

You're no better than the people whose murders you endorse. You're them in a mirror.

[unsolicited-opinions]

*illiteracy. And why waste time arguing with fools on the internet?

No, aliteracy.

And it seems I could ask you the same thing.

(We're talking about this post)

[lifeofquotations]

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

[tweedsmuir-library]

Freedom to Read is Useless if People Don't Read

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” Source: Unknown* The rights and freedoms of Canadians include the right to read what you want to read. Such rights and freedoms are fundamental to democracy. However, such rights and freedoms are meaningless unless citizens exercise these rights and freedoms. There are authoritarian forces at work in our society that…

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[zoobus]

Saw 4 back to back sponsored posts that were entire chapters or chapter excerpts of books @staff you said it was random wtf