/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23044688]

Normal people used to read Shakespeare and Dickens for fun and now your average person can barely read Stephen King.

[Anonymous No.23044701]

>>23044688
>send text with word "transactional" to a friend
>he replied saying he would "look that up later"

[Anonymous No.23044709]

Literature as entertainment is dying by degrees. It was partially replaced in the 1910s by radio, then in the 1950s by television, in the 1980s by home computer (games), and in the 2010s by smartphone applications.
Communication (and by extension thought) was once abstract. Conveying images used to rely on language, with graphic transmitting technology language became secondary to image.
Read "entertaining ourselves to death"

[Anonymous No.23044712]

>>23044701
>ask a girl at work if I'm contractually obligated to do a task
>"I don't know what that means"

[Anonymous No.23044713]

No they didn't you faggot. Reading had always been a niche hobby. The only reason why people read those authors before was because few people had access to their works, let alone read.

Nothing has changed in the modern era. Literacy rates are up, and people still don't read. Can lead a horse to a cock but you can't get him to suck it.

[Anonymous No.23044717]

>>23044709
Socrates warned that the advent of the written word would lead to this. You should have listened, bro.

[Anonymous No.23044719]

>>23044688
Stephen King is fun.

[Anonymous No.23044723]

>>23044719
Go away, forever.

[Anonymous No.23044725]

Normal people used to be middle class whites, now the average person is a violent 80 IQ minority and a retarded whore consumerist

The center of gravity of society has been shifted on purpose because these people are easier to control in aggregate than you are

[Anonymous No.23044730]

>>23044713
>Reading had always been a niche hobby
Not always.
In the early USA (mostly northern colonies) people wanted entertainment, and effectively everyone knew how to read. The Protestant values of reading the Bible for yourself is to credit for that. I would hesitate to say that the 19th century peaked in literary achievement but it did peak in literature as entertainment

[Anonymous No.23044731]

>>23044723
no.

[Anonymous No.23044733]

>>23044709
>entertaining ourselves to death

[Anonymous No.23044745]

>>23044733
oops
Again he has great points when talks about how colonial fisherman or northern coal miners were as literate and well read as British aristocracy

[Anonymous No.23044755]

>As today his surroundings do not so force him, the eternal mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to any authority other than himself, and feels himself lord of his own existence. Conversely the select man, the excellent man is urged by interior necessity to appeal to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, into whose service he freely enters. ... Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendent. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.

>Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us — by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law" (Goethe). The privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary, they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were necessary, and if anyone were to dispute them. ... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in today's speech by a word so inspiring as "nobility." For, by coming to mean for many people hereditary "noble blood," it is changed into something similar to common rights, into a static, passive quality which is received and transmitted, something inert. But the strict sense, the etymon of the word nobility, is essentially dynamic. Noble means the "well known," that is, known by everyone, famous, he who has made himself known by excelling the anonymous mass.

>As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the majority of men — and of women — are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. And for that reason, those few individuals we come across who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the ascetics.

[Anonymous No.23044758]

>>23044713
>Reading had always been a niche hobby.
A Christmas Carol sold more than two million copies in the century after its first publication.

[Anonymous No.23044769]

As well, I wouldn't trust the nominal rates for literacy. I think most everyone is legally obliged to pass highschool but you see graduates that can't read labels but instead shop by looking at pictures, picking things that are familiar. Even "literate" self-employed people can have trouble grasping a compound sentence.
>reads first clause
>takes eight seconds
>skips second qualifying clause
>looks up confused
>"but how-... "
>looks down again instensely
>"..."
>"ohhhhhhhhh"

[Anonymous No.23044776]

>>23044688
I spent 10 minutes the other day reading Chris Brown's social media and I understand now why blacks are just getting stupider and stupider.

[Anonymous No.23044779]

[Anonymous No.23044783]

>>23044688
>Normal people used to read Shakespeare
no, they watched other people perform shakespeare.

[Anonymous No.23044802]

>>23044755
This is just looking down your nose at everyone. I can't do anything. Should I kill myself?

[Anonymous No.23044813]

Find and read letters from the 18th or 19th century or earlier. Shakespeare as an example here would be a little misrepresentative, unless you focus on the monologues. Let me try to imitate the style-
>And as you would know, the letter which I am writing intends to tell you about these recent developments; where the state in all its false magnamity intends to corrupt, subvert, and otherwise consume wholesale our freedoms; to this our reply must be a resounding and triumphant "Nay"!
This is one sentence. This would pass for insane rambling today, but the style stems from both a highly literate people and from an age before editing was as easy as ctrl+c+v. Read one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches. It looks and reads like literature but people traveled leagues to sit silently and hear him talk for hours.

[Anonymous No.23044818]

>>23044813
I remember seeing a comparison of presidential speeches even from the 50s/60s to Obama and it went from two intelligent guys talking in a smoking room to
>We need to have hope. Hope is what makes good better. You are good and so can I too. With both of us, we will make good. You have hope. I have hope. Hope is good.

It's just the larger negrification and retardification of the planet, everyone must become illiterate brazilified lumpen shaking their bunda at eachother on TV. Read Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. Bourgeois European culture was the first truly mass literate society in human history, and it was also the last. We reverted to primary orality in the 70s. We are now at prehistoric levels of it.

[Anonymous No.23044823]

>>23044818
Get over yourself. You're just a racist.

[Anonymous No.23044827]

>>23044745
> colonial fisherman or northern coal miners were as literate and well read as British aristocracy
Is that accurate?

[Anonymous No.23044830]

>>23044818
> (v) Close to the human lifeworld
>In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the mort immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. A chirographic (writing) culture and even more a typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions in an abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context. An oral culture has no vehicle so neutral as a list. …

>(vi) Agonistically toned
>Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle. Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. It separates the knower from the known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle. Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or a contradictory one (Abrahams 1968; 1972). …

>(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced
>For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known (Havelock 1963, pp. 145-6), ‘getting with it’. Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’, in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. …

>(viii) Homeostatic
>By contrast with literate societies, oral societies can be characterized as homeostatic (Goody and Watt 1968, pp. 31-4). That is to say, oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance. … Print cultures have invented dictionaries in which the various meanings of a word as it occurs in datable texts can be recorded in formal definitions. Words thus are known to have layers of meaning, many of them quite irrelevant to ordinary present meanings. Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies.

>Oral cultures of course have no dictionaries and few semantic disagreements. The meaning of each word is controlled By what Goody and Watt (1968, p. 29) call ‘direct semantic ratification’, that is, by the real-life situations in which the word is used here and now. The oral mind is uninterested in definitions (Luria 1976, pp. 48-99).

[Anonymous No.23044836]

>>23044827
Given that aristocracy were typically multilingual (and literate too), probably not

[Anonymous No.23044844]

>>23044823
https://counter-currents.com/2018/10/jean-piaget-the-superior-psychogenetic-cognition-of-europeans-1/

I am not even a materialist reductionist but even I have to concede that many niggers don't have object permanence or the ability to entertain counterfactuals. Capacity for truly abstract thought is a rare acquisition in general and a society that promotes and reward it enough to create an entire class of abstract thinkers is an even rarer thing in human history. There are definitely material and biological determinants of intelligence and thus of the capacity for abstract thought. I am a believer in epigenetics, so I have more faith in these being remediable than others might have, but at least as a factual statement of the status quo, things like The Bell Curve are irrefutable.

[Anonymous No.23044847]

>>23044844
None of this is real. And if it was it doesn't matter. I already know every study because ten years ago I was you.

[Anonymous No.23044850]

>>23044844
The Bell Curve is outdated. People are more retarded now.

[Anonymous No.23044858]

>>23044850
Yeah it's sort of frozen in time as a statement. Now things are moving so quickly and there are so many factors in play, both dysgenic and cultural, that basically all you can do is hold on for dear life. But that doesn't mean the dialectic of these factors couldn't be captured in principle. For example the "competence crisis"
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
should be read in the light of BOTH the increase of dysgenic/retarded minorities AND the influence of dysgenic/retarded minority culture even on people who are less innately retarded. Also, women are forced multipliers as they drown out genuine conversation and drag everything down to a social level wherever they go.

And all of these trends are of course being promoted by people who have a stake in turning society into a soup of lumpen.

[Anonymous No.23044863]

>>23044858
Man you live in a completely different reality. It must feel like a wild ride. None of this stuff is real but you want it to be so it is for you

[Anonymous No.23044867]

>>23044823
>You're just a racist
racism is based

[Anonymous No.23044869]

>>23044858
force multipliers* typo

Bonus pic. Remember, we're talking about "fine-tuning" a society where the only real net producers and maintainers of infrastructure (white male working class) are effectively serfs and the national pastime is shitting on them and telling them to die. Everybody else is a, statistically speaking, a parasite and non-producer, and this graph doesn't even take into account that much of how modern "wealth" is calculated is meaningless GDP padding in an elaborate corporate welfare system. Women contribute FAR less to actual production than this indicates.

The last 50 years have been one giant, increasingly manic saturnalia, in which the people who made such a thing possible are expected to keep it going as long as possible while being ground beneath the feet of the revelers.

[Anonymous No.23044873]

>>23044863
>None of this stuff is real but you want it to be so it is for you
>t. the "men can be women too" crowd
kill yourself, faggot

[Anonymous No.23044874]

>>23044823
He's absolutely right. It's a cynical fact but the audience of Presidential speeches has gone from senators and representatives to basically everyone, and for the sake of power the language is sculpted to the lowest denominator. Trump's speeches aren't much better. Trump talks like a salesman from the streets of New York City because he is. My theory about Trump is that he can barely read, he likely has eye problems. Watch his eyes track a teleprompter, those words must be enormous.

>>23044836
Well I suppose that traditionally educated aristocracy (and the Thomas Jeffersons of the world) would know classical languages as well. They both read the same books and could discuss the same literature. The USA didn't become an eminent manufacturing state by accident. People read Ben Franklin's Autobiography.

[Anonymous No.23044880]

>>23044827
It depends on which period and region, along with all kinds of other factors, but yes. Kinda, but yes. Aristocrats and landed assholes were tutored and educated, but not Oxford dons unless they weren't set to inherit and too far down the line to take the robes. They could read contracts and sound out poetry about as well as anyone else. Your merchant class and offshoots were more likely to be multilingual and know latin, genuine lords have no need for a piece of paper showing their value.

[Anonymous No.23044882]

>>23044863
What's the point of just saying "you're wrong" repeatedly? I don't want to be rude ignoring you but I don't see much to reply to.

Also remember 95% of all strain on social services, prisons, squalor, filth, littering, etc., basically everything you think is "normal urban blight," comes from blacks and hispanics. WHITE PEOPLE DO NOT LITTER. Take the liberal meme travel pill and go to a real white country (if you can find one), or Japan for that matter. Zero litter, zero filth. High trust everywhere.

European societies were not meant to accommodate pre-modern jungle murderer/rapist people.

[Anonymous No.23044883]

>>23044873
I'm not any of the things you think I am. I dont see why you would even care about any of this stuff unless you personally work for the gov.

[Anonymous No.23044887]

>>23044882
I dont really care about litter. Does it really bother you that much?
Cities are fine, except for the part where you cannot walk around them. But thats a design that was encouraged by the race of people you venerate so much.

[Anonymous No.23044892]

>>23044883
>bro why do you even care bro
Kill yourself faggot.

[Anonymous No.23044896]

>>23044874
Oh i see. you're under the fallacy that reading literature makes you better. Ha. I remember when I believed that bullshit

[Anonymous No.23044897]

>>23044892
If blacks and hispanics have worked out how to cheat the gov out of money that sounds good to me.

[Anonymous No.23044898]

>>23044874
>Trump's speeches aren't much better.
Go watch his 2018 State of the Union address. All of his speeches written by Steven Miller are beautiful.

[Anonymous No.23044901]

>>23044897
That's because you're a fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.23044905]

>>23044901
All you do is read articles and watch the news.

[Anonymous No.23044906]

>>23044887
>Does it really bother you that much?
Yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
It is demonstrable that general filth and squalor begets more filth and squalor. It atomizes communities. The real reason cities are abstract dirty shitholes where people just live in boxes, instead of series of communities and neighborhoods with families setting down roots, is because they are just concrete jungles for niggers who are 90% unemployed. Statistically 1/3 of black men are in prison or dealing with some form of arrest or parole etc., at any given time. Cities have become free welfare daycare centers for violent blacks and endlessly multiplying hispanics.

It's not just racial or biological. It's that these people have no culture. Natives (Indians) are just as bad. In any city with a 5-10% population of them, they are once again, 90% of what the police/emergency services deal with.

White societies ARE basically utopian as long as white people live in them. Same with Japan. People are basically conscientious in Japan, so you can just implement a good system and it will mostly do fine. The "net tendency" is toward cooperation and maintenance of good things. In western cities, niggers will degrade and destroy just to degrade and destroy. And you are paying them with your tax dollars to do it.

[Anonymous No.23044909]

>>23044906
That doesn't describe my city at all so I'm not sure where you're pulling this from. I don't think you get out often.

[Anonymous No.23044916]

>>23044906
But white people are the ones responsible for the terrible urban planning. So I don't care. Its not my problem. They should have built a good country with good cities.

[Anonymous No.23044919]

>>23044909
This may have worked 15 years ago when the default normie was on your side but even default normies are starting to see that the ship is sinking. Like I said maybe 15 years ago I'd get all indignant and do ten times as much work as you to post stats and prove my case, even though all you do is make lazy retarded responses, just because I care about the truth so much. But now the mainstream is already leaning more toward reality than to your neoliberal religion so I don't really care. True believers like you are an endangered species.

[Anonymous No.23044921]

>>23044896
Why are you here?

[Anonymous No.23044927]

>>23044919
I'm not a liberal. Like I said I'm not what you think I am.
>the average blah blah blay
Get out of your online bubble. The average person is living and dying like they always have. All this bullshit you're obsessed over has no bearing whatsoever on reality. My city isn't what you describe at all.
>>23044921
I like literature. What a silly thing to say.

[Anonymous No.23044933]

>>23044927
Is this... Butterfly?

[Anonymous No.23044934]

i don't care of black people are bad or if people are dumb. my goal in life is to go on a date with a girl. i don't car about anything else. i don't get this argument

[Anonymous No.23044937]

>>23044688
The great kicker OP? They did that shit with handwritten letters and candlelight. The great discoveries, treatises, essays, legends, metaphysical research, etc leading up to the 20th century? All written by hand and with candlelight.

Now we have all this technology at our disposal and our collective ability to reason and express complex ideas is in the shitter.

[Anonymous No.23044941]

>>23044934
Then you want a less atomized society with less technology.

[Anonymous No.23044946]

>>23044941
but I like video games. I want to play video games with my girlfriend and eat yummy food.
I want to go on a date with a girl.
I want to hold a girls hand
I want to touch a girls boob.
I want to kiss a girl.

if I can do all that I think I can die happy
nothing else matters. 100% nothing dude

[Anonymous No.23044952]

>>23044906
I am a littering sympathizer. Litter makes it hard for sheltered white people to maintain this delusion that they live in a safe, clean environment without problems. I've been around, and I can tell you that people are way more savvy about what is fucking up our country in places where you can't avoid coming into contact with the ugly reality that is drugs, crime, and low culture.

Superficially clean places are often the worst of all, you can have rampant crime and drug abuse but bourgeois liberals are able to close their eyes to it and talk like it doesn't matter and the real problem is "racism" or covid or whatever media driven meme issue. See Colorado, California suburbs, parts of New England. 8nrd

[Anonymous No.23044953]

>>23044946
>he summarized all philosophy in 292 characters

[Anonymous No.23044957]

I am a littering sympathizer. Litter makes it hard for sheltered white people to maintain this delusion that they live in a safe, clean environment without problems. I've been around, and I can tell you that people are way more savvy about what is fucking up our country in places where you can't avoid coming into contact with the ugly reality that is drugs, crime, and low culture.

Superficially clean places are often the worst of all, you can have rampant crime and drug abuse but bourgeois liberals are able to close their eyes to it and talk like it doesn't matter and the real problem is "racism" or covid or whatever media driven meme issue. See Colorado, California suburbs, parts of New England.

[Anonymous No.23044959]

>>23044957
I'm a hard-core communist after I played this game called disco elysium.

[Anonymous No.23044961]

>>23044959
dammit I deleted and reposted to fix a typo and forgot to link the post im responding to

[Anonymous No.23044965]

>>23044906
I am a littering sympathizer. Litter makes it hard for sheltered white people to maintain this delusion that they live in a safe, clean environment without problems. I've been around, and I can tell you that people are way more savvy about what is fucking up our country in places where you can't avoid coming into contact with the ugly reality that is drugs, crime, and low culture.

Superficially clean places are often the worst of all, you can have rampant crime and drug abuse but bourgeois liberals are able to close their eyes to it and talk like it doesn't matter and the real problem is "racism" or covid or whatever media driven meme issue. See Colorado, California suburbs, New England.

[Anonymous No.23044975]

>>23044946
And one day you will :)

[Anonymous No.23044986]

>>23044965
I'm a hard-core communist after I played this game called disco elysium. Because you see. The most kino shit comes from communism. I'd rather have a shit life that is kino than a shit life that isn't. I'd rather have a shit life that is kino over the capitalist idea of success which is working some meaningless management job with your ugly house in the middle of nowhere and your kids who are doomed to be spoiled unless you or your wife drop dead which you on some level hope for because it would mean an end to the ennuic drudgery of your life and your kids would have a better shot at being realized human beings rather than just being retarded bodies and you can retire in your 70s and pretend you car about some stupid shit hobby that would have embarrassed the version of you that existed in your prime but on paper your name has a few acres of land associated with it in some abstract way which I guess is supposed to fill that hole in your heart and you can entertain idle fantasies of shooting a trespasser with your ar 15 not out of any real desire to assert your existence or protect your land but out of pure boredom

On an unrelated note I might become a liberal. I always wanted to dunk like that and steal TVs

[Anonymous No.23044996]

>>23044975
im in my mid 20s and a virgin and im poor it aint lookin no good

[Anonymous No.23044997]

>>23044733
saved

[Anonymous No.23045010]

>>23044996
Idk man just talk to girls and stuff

[Anonymous No.23045017]

>>23044986
explain the meme please

[Anonymous No.23045019]

>>23044688
Shakespeare was never meant to be read, it was meant to be watched being performed.
Dickens' novels were meant to be read, but in chapters read once weekly over the course of a year or more.
Sitting down and just hammering your way through reading it, for either author, is not how it was intended to be enjoyed.

[Anonymous No.23045023]

>>23044688
Normal people were not reading anything for fun because they could not read. As far as normal people go they're as educated as they've ever been. The problem is they don't measure up to the people who could afford tutors and shit because of course they can't. Only counter to that is spite driven immigrant who will keep pushing or die.

[Anonymous No.23045044]

>>23044934
>>23044946
Nietzsche's last man.
You should be ashamed of being an animal, but you aren't. You should be ashamed of that too. Only shame can help you.

[Anonymous No.23045048]

>>23044869
Pleasing last paragraph, well done.

[Anonymous No.23045051]

>>23045044
people always treated me like more of a animal growing up. ive never felt like I had much a heart to begin with suits me fine

[Anonymous No.23045088]

>>23044823
It's not a coincidence that society grows dumber after the civil rights movement - our intelligence has decline stands in direct proportion to our increased acceptance, respect and deification of negroids and their "culture".

https://counter-currents.com/2015/10/negrified-america/

[Anonymous No.23045095]

>>23045088
You're telling me the group of people marginalized by society and excluded from education tanked the scores once integrated into the system that excluded them? No fucking shit, Sherlock. The sky is blue.

[Anonymous No.23045202]

>>23045095
That doesn't take into account that they had time to catch up being in education for 50 years. The average intelligence should not be declining steadily if uneducated blacks get an education, more rights and freedoms to pursue self education and careers. My point is whites (especially younger generations) are influenced by rappers, criminals and retarded influencers like Tate (who also said reading is dumb).

[Anonymous No.23045207]

>>23044830
Good stuff. I’ll give it a read

[Anonymous No.23045208]

>>23045202
>catch up
Not him but that's straight up not how it works. You don't catch up in 50 years

[Anonymous No.23045209]

>>23044688
>Normal people used to read Shakespeare and Dickens for fun and now your average person can barely read Stephen King.
"Normal people" used to do rooster fights and pig wrestling for fun. Stephen King is a massive step up for them.

[Anonymous No.23045215]

>>23045202
Reading is dumb insofar as how modern people treat it as some ascended nonsense
It is simply another thing to do

[Anonymous No.23045226]

>>23044709
or we could be in the Golden Age of Literature as we speak

1) literacy rates at an all time high
>England: in the late 1400s 10% of men were literate, climbing to 20% in the 1500s, 30% by 1650, 45% by 1714, and 60% by 1754. For women the picture was similar but on a smaller scale: 10% by 1600, 25% by 1714, and 40% in 1754.

2) Education
>In Chaucer's time there was just Oxford and Cambridge. In Shakespeare's time there was just two two plus three more (all in Scotland)
>wasn't until 1832 that the UK had more universities than that
>now there are166 universities in the UK, all of which probably have an English Dept churning out works exploding the appreciation of literature
>during Chaucer and Shakespeare eras, very few people went to school, it was all apprenticeship system (In 1814, compulsory apprenticeship by indenture was abolished). it wasn't until the 18th century that people started going to school and it wasn't until the 1880s where they made it mandatory for everyone to send their kids to school

3) More Literary Figures and Styles to Be Inspired by
>think if the only literature was out there was Chaucer and Shakespeare. Very few people would get into literature or reading. But fast forward to 2024 and think of the wide variety of literature out there, something for everyone's taste. For example, the first detective story wasn't until 1841

4) Easier Access to literature
>you brought up smartphones like its a bad thing. Smartphones make it more easy than ever to have access to literature. It's literally all the libraries in the world in the palm of your hand. Before smartphones, you had to go to a library or bookstore. And how long have those been around? The first school that trained librarians wasn't until 1887. (1902 in the UK). Wasn't until 1928 that the first masters in library science were offered

Your argument is that, well there are all these other distractions other than literature, that's always been the case. More so back in the day when life was tough. More people have a comfy chair or reading spot now than every before in history, and more time than ever to read

[Anonymous No.23045233]

>>23045226
>>23044709

also with smartphones/computers/internet, it makes it easier to find people to discuss literature with like /lit/ here

Think if you had no internet, it would be easy to find some who wants to talk literature. But with the internet, now you have that 24/7 any time you want

[Anonymous No.23045241]

>>23045202
What do you mean by catch up? Other groups didn't stop moving to wait for an equilibrium. Now you're just behind and are packed into prison affirming warehouses like sardines and if you don't immediately grasp the value of education no one is going to pull you up.

[Anonymous No.23045297]

>>23045209
>"Normal people" used to do rooster fights and pig wrestling for fun.
You can do both, anon.

[Anonymous No.23045324]

>>23045202
>>23045095
You two almost understand the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement was a mistake. No, I'm not being racist. Black people were acquiring respect organically by
>keeping their segregated neighborhoods orderly
>establishing and maintaining their own businesses
>doing and looking well on their own
Basically, if you drove through the south and saw the segregated white neighborhood, and then drove and saw the segregated black neighborhood, and you couldn't really tell the difference asides from the color of the people in them, then a+b= well it looks like they're not so bad after wall. The real shitty end of it was school segregation. By all rights higher education SHOULD be available to anyone intelligent enough. But if people learn together, they will fuck together, and miscegenation was sadly the biggest fear. The forced desegregation only stirred resentment in the white community. That may or may not have had something to do with LBJ's crack cocaine epidemic that then set the African communities back another fifty years.

tl;dr, right-wing pre-neo-con casual racism somehow almost creates a utopia and then leftists managed to kill it

[Anonymous No.23045328]

>>23044688
No, they didn’t. You just have a mistaken view of the past. The typical person was illiterate and went to taverns every day for fun.

[Anonymous No.23045354]

>>23045328
In England in the 1880's illiteracy was about only 20% of men. Dickens was a rockstar in his time and sold millions of copies.

[Anonymous No.23045358]

>>23045208
>You don't catch up in 50 years
But you aren't supposed to get dumber either right?

[Anonymous No.23045369]

>>23045226
>>23044709

so during Shakespeare's time, 20% of people knew how to read (30% of men, 10% of women). That explains why he focused on making plays for the theater

England only had 4M people during Shakespeare's time only 0.8M (800K) of which could read. Canada, US, and Australia had just been discovered.

nowadays you have this on the English-speaking site of reddit alone
24.0M - r/books
2.1M - r/literature
2.0M - r/Poetry
1.2M - r/booksuggestions

During Chaucer's time, there were only 2M people in England, and 10% of the men could read, much less for the women. Even if we act like England was all men and we do 10% of 2M that only 0.2M people (200K) that could read in the UK during Chaucer's time, much less being that England wasn't all men so probably 100-125K tops

[Anonymous No.23045400]

>>23045369
>reddit
>24m
I don't use reddit but is this anything like youtube? there's fuckhead with 10 million subscribers that get about ~200 views. I suspect that youtube and especially reddit and twitter are heavily botted, or full of accounts with no real activity. What's on 'books' anyway? Pictures of bookshelves? Harry Potter?

Either way, current times and about two centuries ago are comparable. Every twenty years or so there's a total celebrity of an author and the last one was JK Rowling

[Anonymous No.23045412]

>~200k views

[Anonymous No.23045487]

>>23045400
It's an online discussion board

looking at r/books books now and the discussion threads suck to scroll through because there are so many ads on that site, some play videos. That site slows down the rest of the stuff I have up

but some of the threads at the top are:

>Finished reading every Michael Crichton novel (under his real name), so here's my ranking from least to greatest!

>Some Thoughts on Lolita

>Finally Read Anne of Green Gables. I genuinely loved it.

>reading Les Miserables

>Three Literary Science Fiction Books I have Read Recently and Enjoyed

>Once and Forever - The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa. the first, and already quite possibly the best, collection of short stories I've read this year.

>I just finished The House in the Pines. Thoughs and other books like it?

>Have you ever wanted to read something for the first time again
- feel The Giver by Lois Lowry changed my life
- Every book I can think of that I'd like to read again for the first time, what I really want is to be the age I was when I first read it. To be a teenager and read Harry Potter. To be in college and read House of Leaves. To be in my first long-term relationship and read Spring Snow, or Carmilla, or even Last Exit to Brooklyn. But you can never go home again. Not really. Like, if I could somehow wipe my memory of reading After Dark
-Oh, to read The Wheel of Time for the first time again (or the second, for that matter)!
-Lord of the Rings. The first book I ever really loved. I get so excited when I meet people who are reading it for the first time.
-Wish I could read “Swan Song” by Robert McCammon again for the first time. Was a wild ride
-The Great Gatsby, loved the book. I obsessed over the tone and depth of the writing. Has always given me inspiration for my own writing
-A Thousand Splended Suns was a gorgeous and gut-wrenching read. At the end I was sobbing. I've reread it numerous times and it's still emotional. Not like the first time though.
-Yes. Mistborn, by Sanderson. That series is a trip.
-Confederacy of Dunces. I will read LOTR one hundred times. But Confederacy only really hits once imo.
-My first time reading Dune was an unforgettable experience. So, really, I don't want to lose that. But to feel the wonder of stepping into that universe for the first time again? I would love that feeling again.
-the wolves of mercy falls. I think about it every day
-Sula Toni Morrison

[Anonymous No.23045518]

>>23044688
why does it matter what the average person does you should read cause you like it

[Anonymous No.23045527]

>>23044953
https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/qvz8xn/south-park-yes-ah-tah

[Anonymous No.23045599]

Alternatively, you could say that the novel has run its course and is an inferior medium to visual arts. The prose novel was only really popular for 150 years, and at the tail end of that they essentially just became sources for adaptations.

[Anonymous No.23045608]

>>23044701
I don't have any friends.

[Anonymous No.23046623]

>>23044905
>source: your gaping, prolapsed asshole
Kill yourself.

[Anonymous No.23046699]

normal people couldnt read and write at all

[Anonymous No.23046765]

>>23044723
Stephen King is fun. Don’t be such a cynical little fag and accept that average art still has value.

[Anonymous No.23046891]

>>23044887
>I don’t really care about litter
This is shameful.

[Anonymous No.23046906]

People actually used to see Shakespeare live, he was a playwright not a novelist. But I'd agree that the first folio is brilliant.

[Anonymous No.23046936]

>ctrl "blacks"
>9 results
Not bad but it should have been pointed out by half the posters that they are the problem. Also arrested development anime/technology

[Anonymous No.23047007]

>>23044701
>>23044712
You have to dumb yourself down to such a retarded degree, it's like you dumb yourself down a bit out of expectation and even then you're seen as some Nietzsche acolyte, my hypothesis is they are all getting type 3 Alzheimer's cause of the retarded bullshit they put in their body, it's not their fault they're so retarded but still it's fucking annoying how I can't discuss anything with like minded people, the whole worlds turning into a fucking kindergarten and I never even think of myself as smart, books for this feel?

[Anonymous No.23047012]

>>23044719
Stephen kings a gay cokehead, gatekeeping matters, how do you think we got to this fucking stage, read gogols folk tales instead

[Anonymous No.23047130]

/// One of his oars fell into the water and floated away /// A proper and contrite apology is needed /// This is daytime television at its most anodyne /// He hurriedly had several wooden castles built on mountains and in dales /// Her behaviour towards her employees is completely beyond the pale /// The chips, fried in dripping, were better than the cemented fish they accompanied /// Only a complete nincompoop would believe a story like that /// What exactly are you driving at with a critical statement like that? If you have a problem with my work, just tell me /// The massive drug profits are used to finance operations and suborn officials /// At the turn of the century, the United States embarked on the project of building a canal across the isthmus of Panama, hoping to carve a faster transcontinental shipping route and to cement the United States’ strategic dominance in the region /// Upon reflection, I decided her arguments didn't hold water /// I was driven for some half mile ere we stopped /// Her eyes twinkled with excitement /// There are ten points allocated to every question /// And the boot does feature a spinning spur charm attached to the backstrap of the shoe /// Winter melon, despite its name (white fuzz coats the mature gourd), is refreshing to eat when it's hot outside /// People shuffle past, giving us a wide berth /// Over £500 million was ring-fenced for improvements to the transport system /// The capillary action refers to the tendency of water to move up a narrow tube against the force of gravity ///

[Anonymous No.23047132]

>>23046936
anime website thoughever

[Anonymous No.23047140]

>>23047012
Thanks for the rec. Only said I find him fun though. Ligotti is my actual favorite horror author, and I definitely give his work more of a focus. Whereas King is the kind of author I'd mindlessly listen to in audiobook form while at work. He's the Marvel Studios of horror; multiverse included.

[Anonymous No.23047309]

>>23044730
>The Protestant values of reading the Bible for yourself is to credit for that.
People used to read the bible mostly because for centuries it was the only book in the fucking house. The entire Western world was a captive readership.
Because of this people used to be biblically literate. You used to be able to make biblical allusions and people would understand them.
When Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd "a real Nimrod", he was mocking him for being a shitty hunter, unlike the mighty hunter of the bible. And the generation that saw that cartoon understood the reference.
But for 50 years now stupid burgerlanders think that "nimrod" just means a nerd or a dumbarse because they don't understand the context of that one cartoon. And when an American occasionally finds out that there's a guy named Nimrod in the bible he's all "Lol! WTF was Jesus thinking???"
Americans are dumb. But, to be fair, the bible is even dumber.

[Anonymous No.23047958]

>>23047309

Nimrod was known as the fool that challenged God. He built the Towel of Babel as a big F you to God

The term "nimrod" is often used to mean a fool, a usage perhaps first recorded in an 1836 letter from Robert E. Lee to a female friend. Lee describes a "young nimrod from the West", who in declining an appointment to West Point expressed the concern that "I hope my country will not be endangered by my doing so."

The nickname 'Nimrod' was used mockingly in the 1914 novel by Irishman Robert Tressell in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The sarcastic moniker was used towards the foreman (named Hunter) of a gang of workmen as a play both on his surname and on his supposed religious beliefs and sense of self-importance. Other than the Lee letter and the Tressell novel, the first recorded use of "nimrod" in this meaning was in 1932.

As for Bugs Bunny, it is in fact Daffy Duck who refers to Fudd as "my little Nimrod" in the 1948 short "What Makes Daffy Duck",[57] although Bugs Bunny does refer to Yosemite Sam as "the little Nimrod" in the 1951 short "Rabbit Every Monday".

[Anonymous No.23048298]

>>23045044
>You should be ashamed of being an animal
no

[Anonymous No.23048337]

>>23045354
Yeah but I’m reading Les Miserables and many of the characters are functionally illiterate so let me doubt your statement. Fantine goes to a letter writer to write letters for the Thenardiers because she doesn’t have the grammar skills necessary to write it herself.

[Anonymous No.23048342]

>>23047007
Catcher in the Rye

[Anonymous No.23048343]

They didn’t. Only highly educated and interested people did that.

[Anonymous No.23048346]

Mass literacy was a mistake anyway

[Anonymous No.23048357]

>>23048346
Well, the real problem with mass literacy is that we’ve made an entire civilization of people are mostly literate, but literate in regard to highly technical material. Almost nobody has a high degree of literacy in for example poetry or classics.

[Anonymous No.23048454]

>>23048357
I would argue almost nobody has a high degree of literacy in anything

[Anonymous No.23048639]

>>23047309
>People used to read the bible mostly because for centuries it was the only book in the fucking house.
Exactly.