/lit/ - Literature

I was expecting a good laugh... but you're right, I raged.

I think Glenn Beck may have penned this list.

I wish I could have raged...instead I am still numb....

>Beyond Good and Evil
> The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

...wow. I'm not raging, I'm just staring at the screen with my mouth wide open wondering what the fuck just happened. The rest isn't much better either. How do these people manage to operate a computer?

Knew this was going to be an amazing list when they specifically said conservative scholars.

I LOVE how they put a book on getting women to stop being stay at home moms on the list.

Almost raged a beyond good and evil being on there.

>>981259

You assume that they have actually read the books they voted for.

"The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17 "

RAGED HARD.

>FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

lol'd hard

I love how under #2 Mein Kampf, they have that advertisement clumsily placed so it looks like all those Fox News books were written by Hitler.

>The Kinsey Report

Yes, god forbid we have a scientific understanding of Sexuality. It should all be shrouded in mysticism and religion.

The first 3 books are understandable but after that it just completely degenerates into DERP.
The honorable mentions are even worse than the actual list.
>Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9

MOTHER OF FUCKING GOD I WANT TO KILL SOMETHING RIGHT NOW.

Mein Kampf isn't harmful?

Just the idea of Harmful Books makes me rage. If Marx is on the list, how come Rand isn't?

1,3, and 5 are not what I would call harmfull because dumbass people took it and made it harmful. (Even though socialism is complete bullshit)

>he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead.
Thinking is not a skill you need to have.

There's only one evil empire, and I'll be fucked if it's the Soviets'.

>>981317
>>Just the idea of Harmful Books makes me rage
Exactly. John Milton wrote, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." In other words, we can't just run away from or supress ideas just because we find then disagreeable.

>Silent Spring
>by Rachel Carson
>Score: 9

mybrainisfulloffuck.jpg.exe

Oh yeah, we should have kept spraying our food and children with dangerous chemicals. Sure would've saved a buck or two.

>the Kinsey Report

lolwat. Also, apparently every work by every philosopher who doesn't believe in God is DANGEROUS LITERATURE.

>>981387
Probably would have saved a lot of lives from malaria.

>>981276
Yeah, this one was hilarious to me. I was mostly just rolling my eyes until that point.

Also, I love /lit/, for the simple fact that we can laugh at this.

>>981442
Agreed.

>Harmful books
>On Liberty
>My face

>>981565

Liberals are bad news, man!

I smell tea. Pure right wing bull shit.

Looks like they've got a sense of humour, though.

seriously questioning these guys' qualifications

:/

>The Communist Manifesto.

>>981565
mill's proto-socialist justification of the welfare state! a work of the devil and an apostate of CLASSICAL LIBERALISM

>Honourable Mentions
>Gramsci, de Beauvouir, Mill, Adorno, Freud, Club of Rome to name a few

>>981608
The Soviet Union was pretty evil though.

>>981622

What does that have to do with the Communist Manifesto? Marx hated imperialism.

I can understand all of those but the Kinsey Report and the one by Dewey.
And I noticed the Origin of Species is on the honorable mentions, which is just stupid.

>List full of idealistic books by authors whose intentions ultimately failed in practice
>Evil
>No religious texts

Stay classy, retards

>>981622
The Soviet Union did not follow Marx's teachings. The Soviet Union wasn't communist, there has yet to be a proper communist country. Everything there has been so far has been Totalitarianism and Imperialism in disguise as Communism.

>>981635

I can understand all those books. In the sense that I can understand that conservatives are fiercely anti-intellectual and would hate all those books.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKKgua7wQk

>my face when I realise what we're up against

>>981622

Yeah, but it had fuck all to do with ideological Marxism.

The USSR was communist in the same manner that the US is libertarian.

>no holy texts.

>>981653
Lady states fairness
(Socialism)

Another lady wants her to make a difference for the better
(Left Wing ideal)

>>981653

>What do [Obama's] books describe?
>Oh, eh ... uh, ... you know, his, his Marxism, his Leninism ...

>Never read the fucking books, but Glenn Beck ses so so it's true!

>>981643
>>981676
There is actually a rather lengthy discussion in the comments about whether holy texts should be included.

my favorite is this one:
>For those of you who said the Bible should have been on the list, if you read the Bible correctly, it is a book of love. Just because others interpret it violently does not mean it is so.

>>981653

I always admire how this dude can keep a straight face no matter what.

>>If Marx is on the list, how come Rand isn't?

Seriously, did you look at who the "judges" were for this list? Phyllis Schlafly was one of their intellectual arbiters. (With her pamphlet "A Choice Not An Echo", she led the Goldwater movement which prompted Richard Hofstadter to write "The Paranoid Style in American Politics.")

This is straight-down-the-line American revanchist / reactionary / party-line Republican tripe. In other words, these are the people who WORSHIP Ayn Rand (except that they have to tiptoe tactfully around her atheism).

That's why John Maynard Keynes makes their list of the 10 most dangerous books of the past hundred years, yet "The Fountainhead" doesn't. But which one looks more like the sentiments behind 9/11 to you? Which one caused the economic crash of 2008?

Also worth noting: this list is from 2005. The nutcases that Phyllis Schlafly started rousing up in 1964 had just won the White House for Dubya (for the first time, unless you think he actually won the 2000 election) and they were on an all-time-high power trip.

But a list of "dangerous" books that includes Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" has only one agenda. And it's the same agenda that Ayn Rand had.

>>981699

Actually the books are ambivalent on many things.
Especially the Bible and the Koran.

>The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy.

O LAWD

I'm surprised they couldn't fit the Quran in there.

>The Feminine Mystique
>The Kinsey Report

Someone mentioned the bible in the comments and how it should be on the list and here is someone's respons,
>No dice Rachel, Marxism killed more people in the 20th century then the Crusades .
RAGEEEEEEEEEEE

Also I have no idea how their stupid score system works but apparently The Communist Manifesto is a 74 while Mein Kampf is only a 41.

If you put this in perspective of people killed its semi-understandable considering Stalin killed way more than Hitler. I personally would take into account that the Soviet Union wasnt really communist and that The Communist Manifesto was just misguided idealism compared to Hitler which was kind of blatantly evil. But whatever I can let that slide(even if it is a 33 evil point difference), but when you put it in perspective of the rest of the list:

>Mein Kampf 41
>Kinsey Report 37

The Kinsey report is just 4 evil points away from FUCKING HITLER.

IT'S LIKE 20 9/11S JUST HAPPENED IN MY BRAIN

I will read what I haven't read of these books in a short time.
Look at me, so non conformist. Just a little anarchist, that's me. So cute.

I tried to read Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, but I had no idea what he was talking about when he was references people.
Are there any books I should read before I go into Nietzsche?

>>981996
>>981996
Read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science before Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is not hard to get into, although you will feel a little clueless in Zarathustra if you don't know anything about him. Zarathustra is just a bunch of parables that demonstrate his various philosophies.

I actually like this list, because it just became my "books to read as soon as you fucking can" list.

>>981996

>>982007 is just fucking with you, ignore him. You need to know the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Hegel at least.

>10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
FUCK

>>982030
I was surprised it wasn't higher.

>Notice The Origin of Species is an honorable mention.

How is that vaguely harmful? I just don't know.

Mein Kampf is only in there to benchmark various pet-hates against it. They get to put Marx ahead of Hitler, with 'The Femine Mystique', Dewey (!), and Keynes closing in.

Interesting absence of the Zion Protocols. Maybe they'd have to explain Henry Ford's affection for it, among other upright men.

>>982053

Because as well as contradicting the Good Word, it also legitimises genocide, don't you know.

>>982053

Man did not arise from the mud. Therefore...

Dangerous and bad ideas cause harm?

My god, who would've known?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
98% of "Americans" won't stand up for God.
Be one of the 2% that will, copy this in your signature.

LIE-BRILS: If YOU don't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand IN FRONT of them.
Socialism KILLS, AMERICA saves; GOD bless RONALD REAGAN

i'm a hArDcOrE (xXx†hXc†xXx) Christian fiRsT, AnD i b3lEve iN ev0luTion Wh3n mY MuDkIp rEaChEs Lv 18.

I just lost so FUCKING HARD. Number one is bad enough, but number nine?! WTF guys, did you all stroke out or some shit?

>>982078

So does the Bible.

>The Kinsey Report

FUCKING RAGE

not sure I wanna read further

No self-respecting Neo-Con would call Mein Kampf dangerous.

>Introduction to Psychoanalysis
>by Sigmund Freud

>Sigmund Freud

>MOTHERFUCKING FREUD
Excuse me, I need to go drop bricks on the passerby from my window.

Unsafe at any Speed? You know, I'm not a fan of Ralph Nader. But this book did save a lot of lives.

Ask a bunch of more open-minded people: "what are the 19 and 20th century books that most influenced society and that every one should have read?" and you'll get about the same results...

>When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity

I just don't even. It's just fucking amazing how delusional these people are. What constellation of journalistic tragedies compounded that allowed these illiterate retards to command a mere pencil?

Guess I'll have to give "Democracy and Education" (#5) a spin.

>“Kinsey’s initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation: ["supposedly"] 95% of [men] could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws,” the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released.

What, they couldn't read/quote the book themselves. Assholes.

>>982120

This.

It's basically a reading list. Like the ancient lists of banned books.

It says that in 1966 American liberals were Maoists. Really? Freedom of expression and pacifism were central tenets of Mao's philosophy? Fuck even John Lennon called out the Cultural Revolution on their shit in his song Revolution. Oh well, they're just going to keep throwing up strawman arguments.

>>982132

You quoted the #4, the Kinsey Report, and citing a more significant publication like they did is just wanting to present something as having more authority than when you just say it, and it's perfectly fine.

All you guys defending Freud are off your rockers. This list is bullshit, but defending Freud?

All he did was fuck up psychoanalysis. That coke fiend was a charlatan bullshitter through and through.

>>982146
obvioustrollisobvious.png

>>982146
>fuck up psychoanalysis
>implying(I cringed as I typed that) psychoanalysis even existed before Frued

>>982146

>fuck up psychoanalysis

>implying it existed before him

>implying there's something to fuck in psychoanalysis

Freudian psychoanalysis is pseudoscience, but he still launched what became psychology and is much acceptable. You can disagree with the book's claims, but not with the book's major positive importance.

>>982149

Hey fuck you.
He founded psychiatry. He had a big impact on clinical diagnosis. His work was pretty creative, I'll give him these things.

So many of his ideas just turned out to be guesses and intellectual exercises. There needs to be a lot of mending done with his actual work to make it work today.

The whole ego and the id thing was a nice piece of literature, but if you tried to walk into a psychiatry school and talk about it seriously today you'd be retarded.

His theories were totally unscientific and untestable. They aren't used these days.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with that list. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised.

And yes, if a book helps create a movement that kills 100 million people, it should be considered harmful. Stop bitching.

>>982158

did you even read the list?

Really liked that bit about the national debt, didja?

>communist manifesto
>100 million dead by communists
>TOTALLY NOT A BAD BOOK AMIRITE

Dumb liburls are dumb.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
98% of "Americans" won't stand up for God.
Be one of the 2% that will, copy this in your signature.

LIE-BRILS: If YOU don't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand IN FRONT of them.
Socialism KILLS, AMERICA saves; GOD bless RONALD REAGAN

i'm a hArDcOrE (xXx†hXc†xXx) Christian fiRsT, AnD i b3lEve iN ev0luTion Wh3n mY MuDkIp rEaChEs Lv 18.

>>982142

I hope you don't imply the Washington Times is as objectively significant as the Kinsey Reports. To my thinking, they should have just quoted the book. It's accessible enough.

>>982155
Shit, reading this made me think of how Watson read Holmes' "The Book of Life" and called it absurd. And yet, Sherlock was genius.

>>982158

Why didn't they even put JD Salinger on trial for killing John Lennon again?
At least conspiracy to commit murder.

>>982158
>>982163

The same could easily be said about Ricardo or Smith's works which, by the way, dwarf the figure killed by "Communism" with an extra century and a half under it's belt.

>>982167

John Lennon, the filthy, lazy communist? Salinger did the world a service.

>>982167
DUR HUR A RETARD KILLING SOMEONE AND BLAMING IT ON A BOOK IS TOTALLY THE SAME AS A BOOK BEING USED TO START A IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT THAT KILLED 100 MILLION PEOPLE WORLDWIDE

>>982173
>Describe the world as it is.
>START A IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT

>>982174
>>Describe the world as it is

Butthurt is not the same thing as clarity, son. I mean literally, the guy was butthurt.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
98% of "Americans" won't stand up for God.
Be one of the 2% that will, copy this in your signature.

LIE-BRILS: If YOU don't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand IN FRONT of them.
Socialism KILLS, AMERICA saves; GOD bless RONALD REAGAN

i'm a hArDcOrE (xXx†hXc†xXx) Christian fiRsT, AnD i b3lEve iN ev0luTion Wh3n mY MuDkIp rEaChEs Lv 18.

>>982174
I see you're a communist, so I'll just go ahead and ignore everything you say. Come back when you grow up.

>>982173

Please explain the difference.

>>982026
You should know them, yes, eventually. I STARTED my "journey" with Nietzsche and I am pretty sure I've made it fine, motherfucker.

I will let you by with telling him he needs to be "vaguely familiar" with these people to understand Nietzsche and his ideals.

>>982187

Nah dude, he's pretty much right. You can understand Nietzsche but you won't really be able to appreciate what he's doing.

It's like trying to watch a Quentin Tarrantino movie without knowing film history, or read a Grant Morrisson book without being familiar with comic history.

You'll get it. You just won't "get it."

>>982177

The carbuncles, right?

>>982178

Seeing that Marx was lucid (and furthermore rather timid about applicability) doesn't make one a communist.

You're right though, I am a communist. I'm 28 years old.

>>982180
He's implying the books only supplied the ideas, whereas it took a person to put them into action. Which is true.

I wonder what the rubric was? How do they define "harmful"? Because Evolution of Species wasn't in a sense "harmful". I guess just challenging the scheme of things?
Being cutting edge is, apparently, bad. Top conservative scholars agree!

>>982195

I don't agree with that because the totalitarian government of the Soviet Union only superficially resembled the communist ideas put forth by Marx.

>>982193
>You're right though, I am a communist. I'm 28 years old.

My mistake, I thought the reason you were a communist is because you were young. It's because you're an idiot.

>>982192
True, assuming he's only reading Nietzsche. There's no crime in reading Nietzsche first if that is what interests him, and he can travel around to other philosophers afterwords. Eventually, the ideas will mesh together and make their appropriate imprints on him.
There is no arbitrary sequences for reading philosophy. Especially among existentialists.
But I guess you should be somewhat familiar with the terminology or you'll be lost. But that shit should come to you via history class.

>>982177
How about you get that gay shit off your posts, huh?
faggot.

>in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.

They didn't?

>>982205

The sequence isn't arbitrary. Philosophers generally shape their philosophies in response to not only their own life and times, but define them against other philosophies that have come before them.
That's why it's also known as philosophical discourse.

I'm not gonna suck the fun out of it, start anywhere and move around how you like. I'm just saying that unless you want to revisit works later with a renewed appreciation (which you should do anyway) through the scope of history, you'll have a lesser appreciation for what's happening in the work.

>>982204

Ha ha. You sure showed me.

>>982214
I will admit you should definitely have somewhat of a path thought out, especially as you're only just starting to read.
But you have to admit it doesn't SUPER matter.
Pals?

>>982220
I think we've reached an amicable agreement, yes.
Pals it is.

>>982202

Marx underestimated the ability of a population to move against its social hierarchy, no matter how backwards culturally or economically; such as in Russia. He was at least cognitive enough to recognise that it would come from the urban proletariat, not the peasant countryside, which was more than enough for the Russian communists.

>>982229

I think Marx expected the Communist Revolution to begin in Germany. At least a nation state that was not an Imperialist Monarchy run by a Tsar and populated by mostly rural former serfs like Russia. The radical change in that country was a real wildcard.

>Silent Spring
>by Rachel Carson
Only the most important environmental book ever written.
Fucking hell republicunts.

These 'scholars' seem to only have ad hominem as justifications... at least under what the summaries say.

These guys are prototypical conservatives.

>Silent Spring
>Origin of Species

What the fuck man. The panel seems to be mostly from the South anyway, so maybe they can be disregarded somewhat.

>Democracy and Education
>In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.
Because you know that wasn't a generation to accomplish some of the most important advances in modern history, so much for those "thinking skills", eh?

[ ]Conservative
[ ]Scholar

Pick one

Adorno? Mill? Foucault? Oh man. I assume they only left out Walter Benjamin due to lack of space

>>982550

Benjamin? He didn't write anything too bad.

>>982346

That makes no sense. There are scholars with many opinions. Being a scholar who specializes in the field of linguistics has almost no bearing on your political views, for instance.

>Honourable Mentions
>On Liberty

This is why almost no one that has graduated from high school and isn't married to a relative takes conservatives seriously.

Unfortunately, there are enough inbred dipshits to keep them around.

>>982229
While it's true in Russia, East Asian revolutions don't follow the same pattern, being mostly from the countryside.

raged so much

I love how the 'Origin of Species' gets an honorable mention.

List is pretty bad. For example, on Nietzsche:
"The Nazis loved Nietzsche."
Frankly, if the Nazis didn't get there ideas from him they would have gone to another source. Nietzsche hated his sister for her anti-semitism and found Germans to be uncivilized.
Also, On Liberty should not be an honourable mention. It's a relatively benign essay and almost seems to be written as a response to communist works.

And i mean goddamn, talk about predictable

>Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

I despise the vulgarism of this common interpretation of Nietzsche.

He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

Roflcopter

If you guys are done laughing/crying over this list, read this one.
>Top 10 Books Every College Student Should Read
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33504

>>982173
>DUR HUR A RETARD KILLING SOMEONE AND BLAMING IT ON A BOOK IS TOTALLY THE SAME AS A BOOK BEING USED TO START A IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT THAT KILLED 100 MILLION PEOPLE WORLDWIDE

You idiots, do you think Marx created communism, that the communist idea sprang from the mind of a man instead of being developed by men spontaneously in the horrors of post-Napoleonic Europe in the industrial age?

Marxism teaches the application of theory to praxis because all human intellectual activity has its base in manual labour, and it is fitting that it should originate in the sweat of a man's brow (in this instance, in the blood of the revolutionaries of the Parisian commune of 1848).

And remember, these people aren't conservative by any natural political tendency, they are conservative out of spite, because they can reject all these ideas without consequence and embrace ideologies that are much simpler and seemingly non-contradictory, not to mention they play on the conservatives' capitalist-spoilt-child mindset. Is global warming a major problem I can't do anything about? Fine, I'll just imagine it away - no more global warming. Now who wrote the book I can blame for the phrase appearing in print...

You could compare their methodic and somewhat informed rejection of modernity to the behaviour of Islamic terrorists or New York hipsters. Neo-conservativism springs from reformed Trotskyites like Kristol sr. after all.

>>982655

>Orwell was another professed Socialist who was in many ways conservative.

I really hate when conservatives say things like this. It reminds me of the conservapedia entry on Orwell.

>>982655
>The Bible

closed tab

No, I don't hate christians or religion and I'm not some smug athiest. I just don't think The Bible should be top of the list for college students to read.

Fucking conservatives

>>982675

The Bible should only be at the top of a lit major's list, if only because so many important works reference it endlessly.