In other news
In the current news climate we see that some figures and events tend to dominate the front-pages heavily. Still, there a
Ethan Frome was by far the worst book in my high school curriculum and it should definitely be banned. Dull beyond conception and the lamest suicide attempt ever.
so you're one of the people that thinks that however comprehensive the changes we can make in the future you will still argue someone who has had the procedures to make them like a man in every respect, is in fact still a woman because their genes determined it?I cant imagine you arguing for including them as women but I may be wrong.re poll results - so much difference is dow
Yes, and the UK Supreme Court, in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers 2025, has ruled that this is a fact in law. (It is not true, as trans activists have claimed, that the ruling only applies to public boards in Scotland, since the judges' published ratio makes clear that it applies universally.) Incidentally, what you just did is known as the 'trans man gotcha', and i
Notice how you were asked a very simple and circumspect question about a future possibility and instead of engaging with it you went off on a tangent about scottish case law?
Also notice how bringing up the idea of cosmetic surgery was your own idea, not chez’s
Yes, and the UK Supreme Court, in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers 2025, has ruled that this is a fact in law. (It is not true, as trans activists have claimed, that the ruling only applies to public boards in Scotland, since the judges' published ratio makes clear that it applies universally.) Incidentally, what you just did is known as the 'trans man gotcha', and i
the court rules on the law. Laws change.
Medical science advances and our ability to overide genetics increases rapidly. I look forward to you demanding that people who are male in every respect except for what's in their genes must play women's sport and use womens toilets etc. I admire your determinitation to stick to your principles however odd they be.
Ethan Frome was by far the worst book in my high school curriculum and it should definitely be banned. Dull beyond conception and the lamest suicide attempt ever.
I had to read The Old Man and the Sea as a freshman. South Park nailed that one.
I slogged through Moby Dick after my son was assigned the book as a freshman in college. A miserable experience for both of us.
I slogged through Moby Dick after my son was assigned the book as a freshman in college. A miserable experience for both of us.
I had to read “Les miserables” , for school.
Today I’m glad I did and had to work on it .
Humanizing children is a good thing imo….
I quite liked it, although it does go on a bit. Chapter 42, 'The Whiteness of the Whale', is only ten pages and is considered a tour-de-force.
Same here it's a great book. But I've been pretty much a lifelong avid reader. I actually re-read it probably ~10yrs after the initial time in school.
There are def. some authors I've skewed away from after a book or 2 though vs my standard of reading everything someone's written.
The Sun Also Rises is a fantastic book and very easy to read compared to the other two imo.
1 for 3
We had a homicidal advanced English teacher in highschool who assigned The Good Earth, Night, and Things Fall Apart for summer reading one year. Good times…
I'm making my way through "Of Human Bondage" now. Title was quite misleading; it's just about some lazy incel that can't decide what to do with his life. Uh, you were born 100 years too soon to try that move pal.
Dickens is great but kind of verbose, so I can see why people might not like his books. Haven't read The Invisible Man or anything else by Wells as far as I can recall, so no comment there, but I have read Hemingway. Not The Sun Also Rises, but if it's anything like The Old Man and the Sea, I'm good.
We had a homicidal advanced English teacher in highschool who assigned The Good Earth, Night, and Things Fall Apart for summer reading one year. Good times…
No joke, mine assigned All The Pretty Horses, best call any HS teacher ever made vis-a-vis my education.
I have a ton of respect for most of the classics, and there's a lot to be gained from reading and analyzing them, even if it's just developing a contextual understanding of the present age, but there's no better way to make teenagers less interested in reading than to assign depression era tragedies and tell them "It doesn't get better than this."
I strongly disagree that Great Expectations was an awful book but that's the cool thing about books because everyone interprets things differently and that interpretation changes over the years - unless it's a really shitty book, i guess.
Can I start a book thread in politics? If not, say so I don't really care. I've been reading non stop for two years and have spent half the time, when I'm not binge reading Stephen King novels, reading Native American History and the general American west of the 19th century, which is good stuff.
Do it! Political topics as they relate to stories would make for some interesting discussions.
Yes but there were a lot of hardcovers too. Totally normal to get a book that had several people's names/initials on the inside cover etc. For something like Catcher in the Rye I can't even remember if my copy was hard or paper at this point--leaning towards hard iirc. But the odds were pretty slim people would get a brand new copy to work with just kinda in general. There was
We had hardcover textbooks, but never novels. I wouldn't have guessed you could still buy hardback copies of most old novels.
Ethan Frome was by far the worst book in my high school curriculum and it should definitely be banned. Dull beyond conception and the lamest suicide attempt ever.
I hated Moby Dick and The Sun Also Rises. But mostly because, in each, about half of the text wasn't about the story, but about the whaling and bullfighting traditions.
We had a homicidal advanced English teacher in highschool who assigned The Good Earth, Night, and Things Fall Apart for summer reading one year. Good times…
Things Fall Apart is a really wonderful book. Sorry you didn't appreciate it.
The Sun Also Rises is about a dude who had his dick blown off in the war. Who can hate on that?
I think you misunderstand. Each of those books had a profound lifelong effect. That teacher was a favorite. He just ruined my summer.
We had hardcover textbooks, but never novels. I wouldn't have guessed you could still buy hardback copies of most old novels.
They still make hardcover editions of all the classics, but they're usually money grabs. "Look how aesthetically pleasing this edition is. You know you want it." It's almost always the case that it's the worst version out there...
This is getting off-topic, but it reminded me of something. I was just debating about how appalling it is to alter the texts of old books for ethical reasons, but it a lot of the time it's not even clear that the edits are made for that reason. I read an article a while back from someone who reread The Maltese Falcon and found themselves perplexed. I guess a character in that book tells an anecdote where they mention a specific year. To paraphrase the author of the article: "I read this when I was a teenager and remembered it differently. It was 1937, not 1947. Plus '1947' doesn't make sense based on when it was written." So he got his hands on a first edition, and sure enough, the original text said 1937, and the version he just read changed it. At that point, he referenced Van Halen. You know how they had that thing where no brown M&M's were allowed in the dressing room? Yeah, I thought they were just being douchebag rockstars too. But around that time they were putting on these crazy shows with all sorts of pyrotechnics and lasers and stuff. A lot of venues they played were old, and the crews who worked at them weren't used to putting on such big productions. And there had been some incidents in the news about other artists getting injured or whatever because a stage light or something fell. Since that was a concern, they put it in their contract.
The promoter will provide:
-2 cheese pizzas
-2 cases of Budweiser
-A case of Diet Coke
-A bowl of M&M's ....
Five pages later, on page five of an eight page contract:
-4 Shure SM58 microphones
-Eight 1000W stage lights not to exceed 75 lbs and fastened with 3/4" bolts
-There shall be no brown M&M's in the bowl in the dressing room. If brown M&M's are found, the promoter forfeit's the contract. Van Halen will not play the concert and is still owed the previously agreed upon 20k guarantee. The promoter is responsible for refunding tickets.
-Amplifier cords are to be taped to the stage floor.
So Van Halen always had to check to make sure everything was safe, but if they showed up to a venue and there were brown M&M's in the dressing room, it meant the promoter didn't thoroughly read the contract. They weren't actually going to bail on a show, but they did have to spend more time inspecting things. It didn't necessarily mean the promoter didn't adhere to the safety standards in the contract, but they couldn't be sure. So, when a year in a book is changed from 1937 to 1947, it doesn't necessarily mean that anything else was changed, but it is a brown M&M, and you can't be sure if the editors changed (in Van Halen's case, overlooked) something else, and without a database for this sort of thing, you can never really know for sure. It's quite unsettling.
