/lit/ - Literature

Most intellectuals live in an alternate, entirely cerebral reality where the merit of an idea is judged entirely on paper and any evidence they encounter against their favored ideas is chalked up to human error. To them, the actual applicability of an idea takes a backseat to how thoroughly engineered it was in the lab. Maybe the worst thing about these people is that, being intelligent and studied, they're also very good at rationalizing up bullshit excuses about how their emotionally-based opinions are actually grounded in facts and reality. It's not quite the "book smarts" vs "street smarts" thing that stupid people use to make themselves feel smarter than smart people, but it's close. Everything you learn in a book or a classroom should be tempered with actual, real world experiences. An intellectual who has memorized 10,000 books on economics, politics, science, philosophy, psychology, etc. is a useless human being without the experiences to contextualize this information. That's where most intellectuals sit.

Recommend me the most unique sci-fi novellas and short novels you can think of. I really enjoyed Roadside Picnic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dying Inside, and I'm particularly a sucker for sad stories about troubled men.

>he thinks humans are unworthy fleshtards
>he uses means of judgement derived from humanity to determine that machines are "superior" lifeforms who deserve to inherit the earth
Off yourself, boltlickers.

>>14686775
>Hogwarts suffers 7 major terrorist attacks in 7 consecutive years and does virtually nothing to improve security
>Hogwarts is placed immediately next to the most dangerous forest imaginable, full of giant spiders, rape horses, and vampires, but can't be bothered with so much as putting up a fucking chainlink fence
>Hogwarts administration decided to give a pubescent girl a fully functional time machine that she could (and does) use improperly just so she can overload herself with more classes than their are hours in the day
>Hogwarts had a year-long fiasco where children were being fatally assaulted during the night, but made no practical or magical effort to monitor the halls
>Hogwarts is named fucking Hogwarts
>Hogwarts still has a house named after Slytherin, a guy who's overwhelmingly regarded as unambiguously evil, who openly advocated for the genocide of a people who now commonly attend Hogwarts, and whose giant, secret murder snake was recently found roaming the halls murdering and paralyzing children
>Hogwarts administration willingly endangered students by agreeing to take in a prized immortality stone, knowing that there are terrorists who will kill to get it, and guard the stone with what amounts to fucking magic minigames
>Hogwarts has become such a clusterfuck of secret magic bullshittery over the past 1000 years that there are entire rooms, dungeons, etc. that no one knows exists, many of which are incredibly dangerous, yet there has been no known efforts to definitively map the school
You're better off being a hooker in Somalia than a student at Hogwarts.

>>13716248
>The genocide of the Native Americans is one of the most unremarked upon crimes of history
Are you fucking high or just not American?
In the USA, the American Indians have received the most flattering cultural sugar coating in history. For the past 30 years, entertainment/literature has gotten lambasted just for showing them as doing anything other than sitting around and painting with the colors of the wind until the white man shows up to murder them. If anything, the book is aimed more toward showing that these people, while victims in one sense, were also fucking terrifying savages. Blood Meridian is one of the only things I can think of that shows Native Americans acting like real, nuanced human beings and not just the one-dimensional little victims you see elsewhere, conjured up out of a revisionist sense of white guilt and the information age's inability to maintain the illusion that savages is all they were. While the essence of the Judge definitely had a part to play in the execution of Manifest Destiny, you're not giving McCarthy enough credit by limiting him to that. Stop listening to you professors and listen to the actual text.

>>13400411
My senior English teacher actively tried to ruin Beowulf for me by forcing us to read it as a group and stopping to paraphrase after every four or five lines for longer several times longer than it took to fucking read it. It was hell. I eventually nagged my parents enough that they gave me a ride to go pick up my own copy to read out of class. The bitch did the same thing with Macbeth, too.

In college, I also had a professor who tried to ruin Moby Dick for me by demanding we focus on the supposed racial commentary. I started out fucking loving it and he made it such a chore I stopped reading halfway through. I'll start it over again once the taste's out of my mouth.