An unforgettable classic of the dystopian genre, it's still unparalleled in its deep satire of totalitarian states and their systems of propaganda, byAn unforgettable classic of the dystopian genre, it's still unparalleled in its deep satire of totalitarian states and their systems of propaganda, by which they change the language itself to the point of absurdity, where everything's true meaning is the opposite of its name: the Ministry of Love is where you go to get tortured; the Ministry of Truth is where they fabricate lies (propaganda); and so forth. These patterns have been played out the world over, again and again, in so many countries and political parties.
I used to think that between 1984 and Brave New World, that the later got things more right because a system built on drugging your population by appealing to their happiness (as opposed to their fear) is more self-sustaining. Today, I look at the long-lasting examples in the real world of both and think, it looks like either one can be self-sustaining.If anything, this story is sad and scary because certain places (China and North Korea for instance) are so ridiculously dystopian today that, well...I really wish this book were just fiction, because of all of the very real people who have to live in these regimes.
To the degree that a country or political party mimics the ones in this book is the degree to which they should not be taken seriously in one sense--in that they should have zero credibility--but they should be taken very seriously in another sense--in that they know what they are doing and are a serious threat to the free world. Cults also follow this same pattern of mind control.
This book is also striking for calling out the war culture, where a dystopian government needs and wants continual war because the fear and extreme patriotism and brain-washing all go together so well.
The book is also just very well-written, very easy to read, hard to put down, even as it takes you down a dark path, you are drawn to keep reading it, drawn to the "horror" of it, for lack of a better word.
George Orwell is also just such a great man for inventing so many new words: Big Brother, doublespeak, newspeak, crimethink, unperson. What a great man for giving us words and imagery to convey just what it is that we see and fear our governments becoming....more
Is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde science fiction? I found myself wondering this as I read it. The plot centers around a speculative scientific breakthrough thIs Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde science fiction? I found myself wondering this as I read it. The plot centers around a speculative scientific breakthrough that enables the main character (I won’t call him the “hero”) to transform his body into an alternate body, complete with an alternate personality and sense of morality. Obviously no such drug existed in Victorian times; in fact no such drug exists today, so it’s still science fiction by our own standards.
I say that no such drug exists today but actually, in a broader sense, as far as altering one’s personality, you could definitely say that alcohol does that for people. Furthermore, one of the hallmark signs of addiction is that it causes the addict to do things that he is normally morally opposed to, things that cause him great moral distress.
I happen to know a lot about alcoholism. I’m not an alcoholic, but I am part of a rich twelve step tradition that points to Alcoholics Anonymous as its origin. So I’ve read a lot of the AA literature throughout the years; in fact I read the “big book”, Alcoholics Anonymous, on a regular ongoing basis as a spiritual discipline.
So reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was of great interest to me. People have theorized for a long time on whether he was writing an allegory about bipolar disorder or alcoholism or something else. I don’t think it’s necessarily an allegory, but I will say that I think RLS had some insight into how alcoholics think and behave and how the progression works. As Jekyll describes his back and forth journey into indulging more and more in this dark pleasure, I can’t help but see clear parallels. He even uses a metaphor for the way “a drunk” behaves…RSL may have been ahead of his time in understanding alcoholism.
What else is this book? It’s a thriller, it’s chilling, and it has a mystery unraveling aspect for the first two thirds of the short book. Of course if you already know how it ends there is no mystery, but it is still interesting to try to piece together some of the strange things Jekyll does, like sending a message to a friend asking him to break into Jekylls quarters alongside Jekylls servant and then take out a certain box and hold onto it until an associate of Jekyll comes and asks for it. Why would he do that? I enjoyed trying to tease that one out.
But I don’t think this story is primarily about the mystery. I think it’s primarily (to me) about compartmentalization, addiction, progression into insanity, and in a broader sense, it’s a scientific version of the Faustian Bargain that is one of the great themes of literature. For that alone this is a wonderful read. I heartily recommend it.
As for whether it’s science fiction, I would say yes. To me it is science fiction at the core because it does what science fiction uniquely does well; it shows how science can affect our humanity and gets us to ask chilling questions that grapple with that sense of perverseness, the Uncanny Valley, the demon in the mirror....more
It’s fascinating to see where your heroes started.
Seven years ago, I was strolling through McKay’s—a massive used bookstore in Nashville—and I did theIt’s fascinating to see where your heroes started.
Seven years ago, I was strolling through McKay’s—a massive used bookstore in Nashville—and I did the unthinkable. Well, for me, anyways. I bought a book on whimsy. Normally I research to death first, but this time, this one time, I saw a book called Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, and picked it up capriciously—the author’s last name was almost identical to my own—and I began reading.
“My pen falters, then falls from my knuckly grip, leaving a worm’s trail of ink across Fedwren’s paper. I have spoiled another leaf of the fine stuff, in what I suspect is a futile endeavor. I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.”
And then he goes on to describe his first memory as a boy, his hand gripped in a much larger, callused hand, dragged to massive fortress doors on a dark night of icy gray rain. And as the narrator describes these things, these little memoir-like asides creep in, these comments wondering about his lack of memories, comments mentioning drugs and bitterness and death, as if from the perspective of a very old man looking back over a lifetime of hurt and regrets and…life.
Immediately there was something about this that felt cozy and comfortable and exciting all at once. All I knew was that this book was “large” enough to contain both coziness and adventure and sadness and rawness—having “assassin” in the title, after all—and that was enough for me. I bought it, took it home, and read it in the evenings while drinking malbec and eating peppered jerky and romano cheese, because food like this is mentioned so much in this book that you find yourself craving it like a heroine addict.
And I developed a bit of a habit. Now I’ve read three complete trilogies by Robin Hobb, and two of those trilogies I have actually re-read; I got my wife and my mother into it and we have read them all together as a group and discussed every week for a few years now.
Somewhere along the way I discovered that Robin Hobb was a pseudonym, and that Megan Lindholm was not only the author’s real name, but also, Megan Lindholm was a name that she had written several other novels under in a distinct voice. I became intrigued to hear this distinct voice, but years went by, I was busy, and I never got around to it.
Until this year. For some reason, although I have always been a skinflint with buying the cheapest possible books, I found myself actually in a place where, as just one act of self-care for my own mental health, I started to actually spend a little bit of money on myself. Primarily through buying very nice copies of the Fitz and the Fool trilogy, but also, this nice 35th anniversary edition of Wizard of the Pigeons. For after all, this is the original break-out book Megan Lindholm, and she’s one of my favorite living authors.
How different this is, and yet the same. Right from the first page I was drawn in. She writes in the style of a fairy tale, but it’s also very specific to the city of Seattle; like James Joyce said of the book Ulysses, if Dublin (or in this case, Seattle) disappeared from the face of the earth, it could be re-created block by block with the detail in this book. I learned a lot about the Free Ride Area and the King Dome. And the sidewalks, oh the sidewalks…they used to be a whole story above ground, you know…
I also read this because of the premise: a homeless man on the streets is actually a modern street wizard, a type of wizard which Megan is creating out of whole cloth—in fact, I have seen this book cited as the prime precursor of the urban fantasy genre. How cool is that? But back to the book.
Our protagonist—a Viet Nam vet named Wizard—is not the only wizard in his world. He and the other street wizards follow a similar pattern: they each have unique powers and each have unique rules in order for their magic to work.
Wizard’s particular gifts are endearing. Inspiring, even. I really love them. He has a gift of Knowing the inner truth that people need to hear. People are drawn to him, strangers, who come to him and pour out their hearts to him, and then he Knows the Truth that they need to hear, says it to them, and if they receive it, it changes the whole trajectory of their lives. This concept alone made the book worth gold to me.
But Wizard is a difficult character to be the protagonist of a whole book. He’s a laconic character, silent and stubborn, immovable as a brick wall seemingly. He exhibits signs of depression and PTSD, and he is sometimes maddeningly silent. Yet for all this, the story good enough with pacing and plot and description that it still worked for me.
Something interesting to see in this book is that Robin Hobb’s knack for writing compelling characters is at work here. Here she has several very distinct, compelling characters. But they aren’t as developed over several books as she did later. It’s neat to see her craft being germinated here. It’s also neat to see her real-life compassion for the homeless (which you can learn about if you read her blog) shining through.
(view spoiler)[ The main conflict of the book is centered around Wizard losing his magic when a romantic interest shows up, Lynda, who starts basically taking over his life, and he starts to break his rules. He loses the magic more and more until it seems that he is irrevocably lost.
But then he meets with the other wizards again, one in particular who has been his mentor. And she says some things that really resonated with me at a level that transcends the story. Although I wonder if these will make sense out of context, I wanted to try to bring the magic of this book to you through sharing some of them here.
“You invented those [rules] yourself, knowing you couldn’t keep them. You wanted to break yourself so the magic would go away, so you wouldn’t be a wizard and have a duty to it. But even in your desire to be free of it, the magic went to deep in you for you to destroy it…you made up your own rules to break.”
“Stop pretending that you’ve been pretending.”
“She believed all the old myths: Men have no feelings such as women harbor; they can share your home, your bed, and your money, but not your life. She knew all about ‘how men are,’ but she had never really spoken to one. She wasn’t going to let him get through.” (hide spoiler)]
So, enough said. This book is iconic, a legend. Read it, if you must. Or try to resist, if you dare. Perhaps though, the more you run from it, the more inevitable it will become....more
Have you ever found yourself reading a Robin Hobb book and thinking, “Huh. I’m a third of the way through this, but I still have no idea where this isHave you ever found yourself reading a Robin Hobb book and thinking, “Huh. I’m a third of the way through this, but I still have no idea where this is going.”? Have you ever wanted to have that thought when you’re 80% of the way through a book? Well, have I got the book for you!
In all seriousness, my wife and I found ourselves saying repeatedly how it was odd how, despite having no discernible through plot, we kept wanting to read more. It was highly interesting. And I will say, when I got to that last 20% of the book, it did start to make a little more sense; the big reveal and the direction it takes are foreshadowed throughout, it’s just not…obvious foreshadowing.
This book is set in Withywoods, which I found an interesting albeit slower change of pace. It’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that this book is set many years later than Fools Fate, and is about Fitz and Molly having married life together. At least, that’s what the story is about at the onset. I love that Robin Hobb allowed us to really experience what that relationship is like for them, since after all we’ve only had 6 books of Fitz wishing he could have a real relationship with her again. It’s really neat to see how their relationship has the same core as before but has significantly matured.
One of the things I love is that you learn more about the culture and history of the white prophets and their people. You also have a lot of the book hinging around a mysterious new person who has supposedly been birthed into the world who is presumably the world’s next white prophet.
From there out I feel that anything I tell you about this book would be a major spoiler, but I will say, it does go in some bold new directions. There are several new characters, including one who will obviously be extremely important to the rest of the trilogy and perhaps beyond. This is the first book out of all the Fool and Fitz books that we have chapters written from someone’s perspective other than Fitz. It’s been engrossing.
The ending of the book is brutal, brutal, and more brutal, bordering on grimdark. There is some violence that is a bit shocking. Sometimes I wondered if it was too much, to make up for the fact that most of the book lacks any action. There is plenty of drama and things happening to care about, but this is one of the least action oriented books of the series. It’s even more character driven.
Because of the darkness at the end of the book I might actually take a break before diving into the next one but, I can’t wait to see what is revealed next about these characters and the world. It does end on a cliffhanger which isn’t my favorite kind of ending, but I’m more than willing to overlook that. This is a solid entry for me with lots of great memories from having read it.
At some point I’m also thinking that this book would be a good study in how to make a book compelling without a clear plot. There’s a lot of really creative things Robin Hobb (Megan Lindholm) is doing here and I’m so glad to see her never being complacent to keep writing in the box she’s set for herself; I feel like she’s always pushing her craft forward, and that’s something I really seek to learn from as a writer.
Also I will mention that if you get the fancier versions of this particular trilogy, they are really worth it. They are just gorgeous with the gold and silver. $15-20 each and I don’t normally spend that much money for a book but in this case I’m glad I did....more
Really excellent short read about how to make habit forming digital products. Loved this hook cycle and all the examples.
The ethical implications of hReally excellent short read about how to make habit forming digital products. Loved this hook cycle and all the examples.
The ethical implications of having this knowledge is profound. He has a chapter about how you need to consider the ethics, including a really interesting four quadrants chart about the ethics of manipulation. Clearly one quadrant is definitely ethical and ideally we would always develop products this way, and one is definitely not. The other two are problematic in different ways which he explains.
But my question is: did Nir consider the ethics of making this book? How many of his readers are going to make ethical vs non ethical products? If the negative results outweigh the positive, wouldn’t it have been better for him to have never published this book to begin with? Normally I’m all about publishing information but my perception is that the vast majority of apps are not being developed altruistically. The vast majority of social media, video games, and certain other categories of apps definitely have a much more negative effect on society than positive. There are some categories that are more positive and many that are neutral. I don’t know. As a software engineer myself, this whole question has had me in a quandary for a while....more
Most interesting highlights: 1. Big companies ignore smaller segments to their detriment; the companyThis has good advice based on clear case studies.
Most interesting highlights: 1. Big companies ignore smaller segments to their detriment; the company that focuses on a niche market and does really well with them will then expand outward to the more generic market and kill the competition. Big companies want to move on markets that already exist but you can’t know anything about a market that doesn’t exist yet. 2. Disruptive markets are the ones where first mover’s advantage matters the most 3. There is no market data, there is no hard numbers, there's none of that when you're dealing with a new emerging market 4. Discovery-based planning: this is when you assume the market forecasts are wrong, not right 5. As the products in a new market evolve, the customers’ main desires that drive their purchasing decisions go from functionality to reliability to convenience to price. Once you’re competing based on price you are making low margins and can only win through economies of scale and things like that. 6. Almost all large companies are terrible places to do discovery of new projects; it will always be an uphill battle of people asking why that project needs to exist at all because it’s such a small portion of the pie, it doesn’t match with a large company’s growth needs. 7. Normally the only times a large company fosters a new innovative product successfully is when the CEO himself (or someone nearly as important) makes it their personal vision and mission to make it happen at all costs, and even then it’s just a one time deal. Like Steve Jobs pushing Apple to make the iPhone even though it cannabalized iPod. 8. Johnson and Johnson is an interesting case study, the exception to the rule. It manages 160 completely autonomous companies
There’s good stuff in here. But some of the advice is old news, the case studies are ancient history, and it’s also written clearly for a target audience of middle managers at big stuffy corporations that don’t understand how innovation works in the least. You know, the kind of companies that are dinosaurs; huge but ultimately irrelevant because they probably won’t be around twenty years from now. Finally, the tone was too corporate to be engaging.
I’m still begrudgingly glad I read this and at least it had the blessed strength of not being as overly long as most nonfiction is....more
Beautiful in its starkness, sudden and yet inevitable, with characters cut from glass and etched on your heart, even if you've never met such a personBeautiful in its starkness, sudden and yet inevitable, with characters cut from glass and etched on your heart, even if you've never met such a person, you feel as if you have, because even though they feel very Korean, they're also just so human. I felt like I learned a lot about a culture without it ever being "work" to read or confusing. This is a family epic done in the very best way I've ever read, that pulled me in and affected me deeply. This made me feel things without being in the least bit saccharine. It just felt brutally honest.
And yet, nothing is perfect, I suppose. The one thing that I didn't like was the sudden, sometimes quite explicit sexual content. This author has a style where she likes to jolt you with suddenness, and it really works...but personally I would much rather not have this level of explicit information. I don't feel that that does anything for me.
So alas, I thought perhaps I was reading the perfect book, maybe I had found it. But nothing is perfect, nothing ever will be, there will always be some little wrinkle, no? And so I will keep reading, searching for that one perfect book out there......more
This is one of, if not the, most engaging history book I've ever read. It also feels very complete, even-handed, and it views things from multiple dimThis is one of, if not the, most engaging history book I've ever read. It also feels very complete, even-handed, and it views things from multiple dimensions. It follows the stories of two different individual people (one of the King Louis, and the other a glassmaker named Menetre) in addition to the broader descriptions. It pulls together from a huge number of sources and has many endnotes if you want to go deeper. And all this while still managing to be very engaging (sans the last fourth of the book, which is just inherently a less interesting phase of the revolution as it fizzled out and was gradually dismantled by the Thermidorians and Napoleon).
Popkin even does a good job of foreshadowing, introducing important characters and foreshadowing important events before they happening. I don't think I've ever read a history book before where I genuinely just really wanted to keep reading to find out what happened next.
He addresses many of the glaring faults of different revolutionaries and doesn't really making anyone into a saint. He addresses questions that we as modern readers would be more interested in, such as the revolutionaries' treatment of women and slaves. He also tells you which things had lasting effects hundreds of years into the future and what those affects were, which helps you understand how important certain things were, as well as which things quickly fizzled out and went nowhere. He makes the time period very fascinating, and pitches it as being a period where there was a cauldron or incubator of every idea imaginable about government and representation, etc. So many things were first tried here. You can see the seeds of communism, fascism, women's rights, the end of slavery, anti-colonialism, and so many other things here.
It's a time of great desperation and violence, where even women stage violent uprisings, often because people are starving. It's also the age of many enlightenment ideas getting tried out for the first time. It's an age of so many things. He explores at the beginning what conditions led to this era happening. He also explores why it developed the way it did, why he doesn't think the French Revolution was inevitable, and what King Louis could have done differently to avert it.
He also shows the rise of Napoleon, although this book isn't primarily about him, but it's a good introduction to his character and importance to ending the French Revolutionary period. I get a feeling this is an ideal thing to read first and then launch into reading a more detailed biography of Napoleon, and/or history of the Napoleonic Wars. By the way, if you didn't know anything about Napoleon, don't get your hopes up to high. He was quite racist and authoritarian, not a hero of our time, but he is a very fascinating character in history.
There are so many other good things I could say about this book. Just read it....more
Thomas Hardy was a great craftsman in the art of writing, and this book is no exception. I love his use of poetic language and how he applies it to chThomas Hardy was a great craftsman in the art of writing, and this book is no exception. I love his use of poetic language and how he applies it to characters and their experiences.
I really loved this book’s feel from the beginning, of this obscure boy who nobody wanted who communed with the stars and dreamed of going to Christminster (Hardy’s alias for Oxford). I love how Hardy explores obscure people’s lives and gives them meaning. In addition to being that, this work also feels a bit autobiographical (just guessing).
This book is a direct critique, if not outright attack, on the institution of marriage. I was surprised to read in some of the reviews that there was question as to whether it was moralistic or not. To my eyes it was quite straightforwardly so. The primary moral, which is quite explicitly put forth in great detail by the two main characters, is that it is harmful to prevent married people from divorcing (or making it so very onerous as it was in Hardy’s day, regarding the way that society would treat you afterwards).
Besides that moral, there are several other related morals that are less forcefully brought up, and may be considered more as general critiques of how culture handles marriage. It points out that people get married without really knowing what they're doing and for all the wrong reasons, pressure from society, being outright tricked (I'm pregnant...jk), guilt, for appearances, etc. It points out that marrying can have negative effects on one’s love (feelings) for their spouse. It points out that in some circumstances, if you have lived together for long enough and acted married for long enough, it really seems more natural and substantive to consider that person to be married to you rather than someone who you may be married to on paper but haven’t seen in years.
It also shows (and this I found to be valuable) how cruel that society could be in that time toward people who flaunted traditional marriage customs. In one scene, Jude and his not-wife are repairing some stone masonry in a church, in particular, a ten commandments edifice. When some passersby happen upon them doing their work and begin discussing rumors about the couple, this escalates to a certain point, and then the parson has to fire them—not for having done anything wrong, but just for appearance’s sake. He does kindly pay them for the rest of the weeks’ work. But I can imagine how I would feel in that circumstance. There are several other scenes that show them being denied employment and lodging, which affects not just them, but their children, to very cruel effect. It feels quite realistic and I wonder if that is why this book pissed off so many people.
That’s a theme that I see in all of Thomas Hardy’s books that I have read so far: how cruel society can be, how it can even threaten the very survival of people who aren’t conforming to the conventions which are dictated by popular moral ideas. I love Thomas Hardy for exploring that theme. I’m a Christian who, instead of shrinking away from such uncomfortable discussions, wants to lean into them; I find them incredibly important.
My parents divorced when I was 12. It had been a miserable marriage for quite some time leading up till that point. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice it to say, as someone who spends inordinate amounts of time contemplating matters like these, I feel 100% confident that life was better for everyone. Unless an act of God happened, that marriage was not going in a positive direction.
By nature, as a child, I was an idealist. I didn’t want my parents to get divorced, and I felt a sense of wrongness. However, experience has a way of beating down your ideals sometimes. Enough pain over enough time doesn’t necessarily destroy the ideal, it just forces you to accept that the ideal isn’t always a sensible thing to pursue.
So anyways. I don’t approach this question from some naive perspective, happy to hand-wave at others’ suffering as I hold fast to dogma. That’s not where I’m coming from at all. What I am is a seeker of Truth. I really want to know what the Truth is, what Truths can be learned about life and can be applied to questions like these. I’m married right now, have been for 7 years. It’s either the most difficult thing I’ve ever done or the second most (apples and oranges are hard to compare). And this has caused me to examine in an intensely personal philosophic way: what is the purpose of marriage? When is divorce actually helpful?
Here’s what I took away from Hardy’s book.
It’s a broken system when divorced people are treated worse than married people. My dad couldn’t be a deacon in his church simply because he was divorced. There were stigmas toward my mother. There were stigmas toward my family, at my Christian school. It could have been worse. It wasn’t like what Hardy described. But I can get behind this idea of his. It simply is harmful; I don't see a benefit.
I spent some time trying to write about and give my opinions on several other topics related to divorce and marriage, and then quickly discovered I was in over my head. Having thrown away those paragraphs, I will summarize thus. I think Thomas Hardy brings up a lot of real problems with how society handled marriage and divorce, esp in that day, and a couple of fake problems which I thought were red herrings. I also think the book would have benefited from examining the other side of the coin; he never anticipated the counter-arguments and tried to address them, and never gave counter-examples. Where are the happily married couples, or the people who grew to love each other more over time? Curiously, none of those people exist in Hardy's world. So I didn’t find it to be a thorough treatment of the theme.
However, with that said, I think it has a lot of valuable food for discussion and critical reasoning on the topic of marriage and for that reason alone it is a very worthwhile work. It may be that Hardy wasn’t trying to present the other side of the coin because he was writing for a very different audience that was incensed or outraged at things that today are non-problems; their reactions seem bizarre to us. Back then divorce was scandalous to the point of being practically a non-option for most people if they didn’t want to ruin their lives. It wasn’t illegal…it was just that all the societal consequences you would face would be drastic enough to ruin you. That’s not true choice; just the illusion of it. So maybe it made a lot more sense for Hardy to treat the subject that way; he was really trying to make an unpopular point for (in some ways) the first time. So his non-thoroughness can be forgiven.
Today I think our culture is in a very different place, where divorce is often turned to quickly, or even assumed at the onset of marriage. I think a lot of people have lost track of the value of marriage as an instrument for becoming a better person. People have also become less used to pain and difficulty, and no longer see it as the good thing that it truly is. When I’m going through “another fucking growth opportunity,” yes, I don’t have a good attitude often. But in the big picture, this does not change my philosophy on life. I know from countless experiences that I must embrace pain in order to grow, and avoiding pain only causes me to stagnate.
Anyways. There is so much that could be written on this subject and I am certainly not ready to do a thorough treatment of it. So I will stop trying for now and instead simply say that this book by Hardy is good, it is poetic and makes some good points if a bit moralistically in parts, but on the whole it is not so moralistic, but rather just quite focused on showing every problem with the institution of marriage (as implemented in his society) that Hardy could muster. It is also sad, to the point of being depressing in parts. Particularly gruesome is the (view spoiler)[child suicide/homicide (hide spoiler)].
Also, I almost forgot to mention one of the themes was the difficulty in being allowed to get a higher education if you weren't born into privilege. I took great interest in seeing how a no-name stonemason would go about trying to get educated in this time period if he were particularly determined. This book answers that question. Spoiler: it sucked.
I am very sorry that he received such intense backlash in his day from this book to the point that he quit writing novels (yes, that was the reason he gave, whether that was a cop-out excuse or not we will never know). I disagree with Hardy on many points about marriage (at least what I think his points were), but I never would have attacked or censored someone for writing a book eloquently making a case that I disagreed with. I’m glad he wrote it and shook up Victorian sensibilities. I’m sad there were no more books after this one.
It shouldn’t have been so controversial as it was. And by that I just mean that I'm against censorship in all its forms. Arguing about controversial topics is essential. Unfortunately, though, most people, when discussing a controversial topic, just resort to dogma instead of a reasoned conversation. I would have loved to engage with Hardy on this topic or any other. I think he was a great man, a reasonable man, and one of those few souls who were gifted with intelligence and compassion in equal measures. Perhaps I’ll meet him in the afterlife and we can argue it out there....more
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