I mean Jesus, he might have a good point buried in there underneath the rabble but who can find it. So by default, he loses the argument. Does anyone have a reader's digest version of what his argument is?
I know you're saying it in jest, but goddamn some people actually quote that game as a justification for radical egoism. I really hate it when people quote bioshock as advocating randian ideology, and not because it's a videogame. It's as if they never played it and watched what actually happened to rapture as it took hold.
Bioshock is actually quite an ambiguous game. Initially, it's an endorsement of Randian objectivism. Five minutes in, it swings into several hours of intensive and ruthless deconstruction of Rand's philosophy and ideals, showing how it would fail catastrophically if put into practice: if you tell people that charity is a weakness, they devolve into selfish egoism and society falls apart. But by about two-thirds in, you realise that the game is simultaneously condemning the opposite.
I mean, the villain is a man who abuses the concept of social services to subvert Rapture's minimalist government and make society dependent on his goodwill. Furthermore, if you look at the tapes, Ryan only goes downhill when he warps the concept of "every man chooses his destiny" into "I choose other people's destiny because I can." And the protagonist...just before the last act, when it's revealed that Fontaine has been directing your actions all along, using you to get at Ryan - a fact frighteningly displayed in a cutscene in which you murder Ryan with a golf club, a scene the player has no control over. If Rand and Ryan are condemned for their selfish individualism, the protagonist is condemned for his lack of free will, for his inability to make his own choices. He's just a pawn for Fontaine.
I mean, ultimately, Bioshock tears into both Rand's delusional theories and their extreme opposing number, showing them to be equally undesirable. If you remove the restraints of civic responsibility and strong government, society crumbles into a dungeon full of murderous anarchists; if take away their capacity to choose, they become mindless pawns of a potentially malevolent authority. The only definite conclusion one can draw from it all is that underwater cities are a really sh*tty idea.
But who pays for the health care of the Big Daddies?
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"The Rich are there to take all of the money & pay none of the taxes, the middle class is there to do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the crap out of the middle class." -George Carlin
I once ran my State as some fundamentalist dictatorship and had the #1 ranking in the word for stupidest population. Then I stopped checking it for a few weeks and it was deleted for inactivity. Bastards.
Funniest thing was idiots would actually send me private messages taunting me for having the #1 stupidest people on the planet. As though I was really bothered by this fact instead of tickled to see me ranking #1 out of thousands of nations.
I remember that game. I had a nation named Fishstick Paltrowia, dedicated to the limp and bready Gwyneth Paltrow. It was mildly socialist but too interested in maintaining the oligarchy to take any principled stance.
And it didn't deserve the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.
I really like how after Reid talking about ending the Healthcare Industry's anti-trust exemption yesterday, Pelosi was reiterating that earlier today.
Have the Dems actually grown a pair?
Nah...too soon for that.
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"The Rich are there to take all of the money & pay none of the taxes, the middle class is there to do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the crap out of the middle class." -George Carlin
I know you're saying it in jest, but goddamn some people actually quote that game as a justification for radical egoism. I really hate it when people quote bioshock as advocating randian ideology, and not because it's a videogame. It's as if they never played it and watched what actually happened to rapture as it took hold.
Stuff
Well sure, ambiguity is the heart of any good soul-wrenching story.
But because it's ambiguous, we can tell what it's not, even if we can't tell what it is, and what it's not, is an advocation of Rand, and just because the middle isn't excluded, doesn't mean we get the liberty of handwaving aside all of the tension and crap and quoting Andrew Ryan as if we just got some sort of immanent delivery of satori through a ******* FPS that we didn't question. It's like, did you even think about it for five minutes? No you just want to espouse some randian crap because its in vogue with some psuedo-elitist counterculture.
Obviously I'm talking about a hypothetical "you" still.
The worst thing about Ayn Rand though, is that she shares the last name of my favourite professor. *****, had to go and ruin it for everyone down the road.
But because it's ambiguous, we can tell what it's not, even if we can't tell what it is, and what it's not, is an advocation of Rand, and just because the middle isn't excluded, doesn't mean we get the liberty of handwaving aside all of the tension and crap and quoting Andrew Ryan as if we just got some sort of immanent delivery of satori through a @#%^ing FPS that we didn't question. It's like, did you even think about it for five minutes? No you just want to espouse some randian crap because its in vogue with some psuedo-elitist counterculture.
Because of its ambiguity, it swings both ways. Someone inclined to disparage Ayn Rand will read it as a reasonably subtle deconstruction and condemnation of Randian philosophy. You know, subtle for a computer game. Someone inclined to admire Rand will read it as an even-more subtle endorsement of Randian philosophy. Because both positions are partly there and partly not.
It's like how 1984 was a condemnation of socialism, except it also wasn't.
Max Barry is one of the more awesome things to come out of Australia in recent years. Other, less awesome things include uranium, Fosters, and Nicole Kidman.
It's like how 1984 was a condemnation of socialism, except it also wasn't.
George Orwell wrote:
My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.
"Totalitarianism" bolded by me. It's always been the worst problem, no matter which political process it's applied to.
It's like how 1984 was a condemnation of socialism, except it also wasn't.
The point I was trying to make is that the message of 1984 depends as much on how the reader views it as it does what Orwell meant by it. Orwell meant it as a criticism of totalitarianism, but if someone reads it a criticism of socialism, Orwell doesn't really get a say in that. Its ambiguity means it can go either way.
It's like how 1984 was a condemnation of socialism, except it also wasn't.
The point I was trying to make is that the message of 1984 depends as much on how the reader views it as it does what Orwell meant by it. Orwell meant it as a criticism of totalitarianism, but if someone reads it a criticism of socialism, Orwell doesn't really get a say in that. Its ambiguity means it can go either way.
If they read it as a critique of socialism, they know nothing about either socialism or George Orwell. There isn't much ambiguity there. He criticized Stalinism, more specifically, or Nazism, not socialism as a system. Democratic socialism, for example, has very little to do with 1984.
It's like how 1984 was a condemnation of socialism, except it also wasn't.
The point I was trying to make is that the message of 1984 depends as much on how the reader views it as it does what Orwell meant by it. Orwell meant it as a criticism of totalitarianism, but if someone reads it a criticism of socialism, Orwell doesn't really get a say in that. Its ambiguity means it can go either way.
If they read it as a critique of socialism, they know nothing about either socialism or George Orwell. There isn't much ambiguity there. He criticized Stalinism, more specifically, or Nazism, not socialism as a system. Democratic socialism, for example, has very little to do with 1984.
I really don't think you're getting the point.
I'll try to clarify: The author's intentions can never comprise the entirety of the meaning contained in any given text. Significant weight must be given to the reader's perspective and interpretation when talking about the "message" conveyed in any given work. What Orwell meant has very little relevance. What's important is how the reader interprets it.
It's like how 1984 was a condemnation of socialism, except it also wasn't.
The point I was trying to make is that the message of 1984 depends as much on how the reader views it as it does what Orwell meant by it. Orwell meant it as a criticism of totalitarianism, but if someone reads it a criticism of socialism, Orwell doesn't really get a say in that. Its ambiguity means it can go either way.
If they read it as a critique of socialism, they know nothing about either socialism or George Orwell. There isn't much ambiguity there. He criticized Stalinism, more specifically, or Nazism, not socialism as a system. Democratic socialism, for example, has very little to do with 1984.
I really don't think you're getting the point.
I understand your point, I just don't think it's a very good one if you apply it to Orwell's writings. It's like saying that Wagner wrote a **** symphony when he did the Ring Cycle. Just because people pervert the meaning of your works doesn't make it a critique of socialism or a celebration of the 3rd Reich, respectively.
I understand your point, I just don't think it's a very good one if you apply it to Orwell's writings. It's like saying that Wagner wrote a **** symphony when he did the Ring Cycle. Just because people pervert the meaning of your works doesn't make it a critique of socialism or a celebration of the 3rd Reich, respectively.
I really think you don't get it. If someone uses Wagner to celebrate the 3rd Reich, and everyone interprets Wagner as celebrating the 3rd Reich, then Wagner is a celebration of the 3rd Reich. Wagner doesn't get a say in the matter. If Wagner wanted to avoid those kinds of confusions, he could make the work as clear and unambiguous as possible. But this is artistically uninteresting and wouldn't make a very good opera.
Another example: the swastika is a near-universal symbol of Nazism in the modern world. Why? Because the ***** appropriated it as a symbol for Nazism, presented it as a symbol for Nazism, and consequently everyone read it as a symbol for Nazism. If you draw it today, everyone will say "****." They won't say "the two forms of the creator god Brahma."
I disagree with your view on the matter. I don't know about Bioshock, but I think it's pretty obvious and unambiguous in the case of Orwell. I think it's also pretty obvious in the case of Wagner, given the time he created his work.
I do get it. I think you fall into the trap that alot of people do here. They assume if someone disagrees with their point that they don't understand it.
I do get it. I think you fall into the trap that alot of people do here. They assume if someone disagrees with their point that they don't understand it.
I'm to interpret this then, as you seriously disagreeing with the status of the intentional* fallacy as a fallacy?
I do get it. I think you fall into the trap that alot of people do here. They assume if someone disagrees with their point that they don't understand it.
I'm to interpret this then, as you seriously disagreeing with the status of the intentional* fallacy as a fallacy?
*literary intention, not logical intention
Yes. Not in all cases but in this case and some others.
