…What particular value other than historical do you see in Huck Finn versus The Hunger Games? With no appeal to tradition or the canon why is the historical journey of a boys coming of age superior to a perhaps predictive dystopian coming of age story of a young girl. I mean if I were a young girl a female protagonist could very well appeal to me more…
[/quote]
Huh?[/quote]
Sadly, he only takes a superficial glance at Huck Finn and summarizes it as being nothing more than its plot. Yeah, and Moby-Dick was about a guy trying to hunt down a whale and The Old Man and the Sea was about catching a fish.
“More prone” vs. “single mothers raise criminals.” I am sure that you see the difference.
Anyway, it is complex. Poor people tend not to be good at family planning, which means that poor mothers are more likely to be single mothers than are affluent mothers, which means that children of single mothers are more likely to live in poor households than in affluent ones. And we all know about poverty and delinquency.
Which is not to say that society would not benefit from more nuclear households. It would. But “single mothers raise men who are criminals or emotionally castrated” is, like I said, quite the claim.
“More prone” vs. “single mothers raise criminals.” I am sure that you see the difference.[/quote]
No, there’s no difference, except one assuages the ego and one doesn’t. I read a study a while back that showed 70% of inmates incarcerated in one prison facility came from single parent households.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Anyway, it is complex. Poor people tend not to be good at family planning, which means that poor mothers are more likely to be single mothers than are affluent mothers, which means that children of single mothers are more likely to live in poor households than in affluent ones. And we all know about poverty and delinquency.[/quote]
Only a partial answer.
The incentive to divorce for women is too high nowadays.
We discussed that here:
Marry a man, get settlements of alimony+child support then date whoever you want.
Alimony+child support + government support = lots of single moms.
So the original premise of Therajraj’s thread is that women are turning normal boy behavior such as roughhousing into a psychiatric disorder and thus should not be teaching boys. I gave some personal examples where my son was allowed to integrate his active behavior into the classroom and now Zecarlo posits that my son has behavior issues and is being done a disservice by female teachers because they just let boys do their own thing because they want everyone to be happy.
Which is it? Are female teachers too domineering or too permissive with boys? Or perhaps we can’t paint with such broad strokes.
[quote]kpsnap wrote:
So the original premise of Therajraj’s thread is that women are turning normal boy behavior such as roughhousing into a psychiatric disorder and thus should not be teaching boys. I gave some personal examples where my son was allowed to integrate his active behavior into the classroom and now Zecarlo posits that my son has behavior issues and is being done a disservice by female teachers because they just let boys do their own thing because they want everyone to be happy.
Which is it? Are female teachers too domineering or too permissive with boys? Or perhaps we can’t paint with such broad strokes.[/quote]
I don’t know about your son’s personal situation.
But I do see a general trend of over-medicated youth males and the slow death of boys-only spaces.
…What particular value other than historical do you see in Huck Finn versus The Hunger Games? With no appeal to tradition or the canon why is the historical journey of a boys coming of age superior to a perhaps predictive dystopian coming of age story of a young girl. I mean if I were a young girl a female protagonist could very well appeal to me more…
[/quote]
Huh?[/quote]
Sadly, he only takes a superficial glance at Huck Finn and summarizes it as being nothing more than its plot. Yeah, and Moby-Dick was about a guy trying to hunt down a whale and The Old Man and the Sea was about catching a fish. [/quote]
Lol
More likely I am not being so dismissive of modern works. An appeal to tradition is a poor argument no matter the topic. What is the most recent work you’d consider a classic? Is anything written after that time allowed to enter into the conversation or is there some sort of time limit that allows something to become a classic instead of a trite modern work?
You are overly dismissive of modern works particularly if the only thing you can claim to be more valuable is that one book has past the test of time.
You continue with the strawman’s as well. At what point did I claim that Moby Dick was a book solely about a man catching a fish? Man versus Nature is certainly timeless but its expressed in modern works as well.
The position you are taking toward the canon versus modern works as a whole is much the same is that taken by many in the sciences toward the humanities as a group.
To dismiss modern fiction as simply all style with no substance is the same mistake as simply considering older works more valuable with no analysis.
And Ellison is still better than Shakespeare. I’ll stand by that. If you want to discuss it we can go text to text on some hell we can even do screenplays versus plays where Shakespeare is likely strongest and Ellison is weaker.
Since you’ve shot a couple personal attacks I’ll send one back…your posts read much like an undergrad who’s discovered a few authors and in a bit of literary hipsterness dismisses anything current or popular as lesser by necessity with no other analysis. You only mention the works most taught in the first few introductory courses so I wonder how deep your reading of the canon really is.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
The plural of “strawman” is “strawmen”, not “strawman’s”.
Carry on. [/quote]
Meh its really two words and I think you would have to use it like full of straw man arguments or some such since I really couldn’t find it in a style manual as a plural. Though I guess its considered colloquially ok to write it strawman. I’ll make sure I hit the manual before each post however.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
The plural of “strawman” is “strawmen”, not “strawman’s”.
Carry on. [/quote]
Meh its really two words and I think you would have to use it like full of straw man arguments or some such since I really couldn’t find it in a style manual as a plural. Though I guess its considered colloquially ok to write it strawman. I’ll make sure I hit the manual before each post however.[/quote]
Lol ninja edit and part of it certainly was it has man versus nature and man versus himself as part of it. That being said I still never claimed it was solely about a man catching a fish.
We should have a book discussion thread in PWI to break up the God threads. We can do something like best dystopian book 1984? Hunger Games? A Clockwork Orange? Everyone can pick their favorite and go all in.
“More prone” vs. “single mothers raise criminals.” I am sure that you see the difference.[/quote]
No, there’s no difference, except one assuages the ego and one doesn’t. I read a study a while back that showed 70% of inmates incarcerated in one prison facility came from single parent households.
[/quote]
There is a very obvious difference and, again, I’m pretty well sure you’re aware of this. But just in case:
That 70 percent of inmates in a prison came from single-parent households is neither surprising nor helpful to your argument in any way. If you had said, “criminals tend to come from single-parent households,” then that would have been a pretty reasonable thing to say, and you could have supported it by doing what you’ve just done: taking a sample group of criminals and showing that a bunch of them did, in fact, come from such homes.
But you flipped the proposition form the outset and said, “single mothers raise criminals and psychologically castrated adults.” Legitimate support for this claim would entail showing that most children of single mothers are criminals, not that most criminals are children of single mothers.
It is the difference between saying that “serial killers tend to be white people,” and “white people tend to be serial killers.”
We should have a book discussion thread in PWI to break up the God threads. We can do something like best dystopian book 1984? Hunger Games? A Clockwork Orange? Everyone can pick their favorite and go all in.[/quote]
Is this the “which of these three things doesn’t belong” game?
Just kidding. But not really.
There’s a book thread going right now, “reading list,” that might accommodate such a discussion.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
The plural of “strawman” is “strawmen”, not “strawman’s”.
Carry on. [/quote]
Meh its really two words and I think you would have to use it like full of straw man arguments or some such since I really couldn’t find it in a style manual as a plural. Though I guess its considered colloquially ok to write it strawman. I’ll make sure I hit the manual before each post however.[/quote]
Fireman → Firemen
Mailman → Mailmen
Garbage man → Garbage men
Straw man → Straw men
Nothing to do with the style manual. You pluralized man as “man’s”. Ellison is frowning.
[quote]kpsnap wrote:
So the original premise of Therajraj’s thread is that women are turning normal boy behavior such as roughhousing into a psychiatric disorder and thus should not be teaching boys. I gave some personal examples where my son was allowed to integrate his active behavior into the classroom and now Zecarlo posits that my son has behavior issues and is being done a disservice by female teachers because they just let boys do their own thing because they want everyone to be happy.
Which is it? Are female teachers too domineering or too permissive with boys? Or perhaps we can’t paint with such broad strokes.[/quote]
It’s that they don’t know how to deal with “boy” issues. Your kid’s teachers have said he has behavior issues.
“More prone” vs. “single mothers raise criminals.” I am sure that you see the difference.[/quote]
No, there’s no difference, except one assuages the ego and one doesn’t. I read a study a while back that showed 70% of inmates incarcerated in one prison facility came from single parent households.
[/quote]
There is a very obvious difference and, again, I’m pretty well sure you’re aware of this. But just in case:
That 70 percent of inmates in a prison came from single-parent households is neither surprising nor helpful to your argument in any way. If you had said, “criminals tend to come from single-parent households,” then that would have been a pretty reasonable thing to say, and you could have supported it by doing what you’ve just done: taking a sample group of criminals and showing that a bunch of them did, in fact, come from such homes.
But you flipped the proposition form the outset and said, “single mothers raise criminals and psychologically castrated adults.” Legitimate support for this claim would entail showing that most children of single mothers are criminals, not that most criminals are children of single mothers.
It is the difference between saying that “serial killers tend to be white people,” and “white people tend to be serial killers.”[/quote]
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
The plural of “strawman” is “strawmen”, not “strawman’s”.
Carry on. [/quote]
Meh its really two words and I think you would have to use it like full of straw man arguments or some such since I really couldn’t find it in a style manual as a plural. Though I guess its considered colloquially ok to write it strawman. I’ll make sure I hit the manual before each post however.[/quote]
Fireman → Firemen
Mailman → Mailmen
Garbage man → Garbage men
Straw man → Straw men
Nothing to do with the style manual. You pluralized man as “man’s”. Ellison is frowning.
[/quote]
Speaking of mailman’s, have you ever heard the one about how mailman’s have ultimate right of way on the road? I met a guy once who claimed to have started that canard, and became pretty damn excited until I found out that it was in fact being talked about at the end of the nineteenth century.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
The plural of “strawman” is “strawmen”, not “strawman’s”.
Carry on. [/quote]
Meh its really two words and I think you would have to use it like full of straw man arguments or some such since I really couldn’t find it in a style manual as a plural. Though I guess its considered colloquially ok to write it strawman. I’ll make sure I hit the manual before each post however.[/quote]
Fireman → Firemen
Mailman → Mailmen
Garbage man → Garbage men
Straw man → Straw men
Nothing to do with the style manual. You pluralized man as “man’s”. Ellison is frowning.
[/quote]
I am a pioneer in incorrect style. My maverick ways will one day become normal.
I would agree that the reading list might be a good spot, but it seems heavy on the nonfiction and tbh this forum sometimes gives off the anti humanities vibe. My secret dark horse is Fahrenheit 451 anyway I didn’t want to give it up too early and let anyone else in there.
Cooper’s works are obviously written for the YA market so its not going to be as complex as a work like Moby Dick which Melville intended to be his masterwork and a piece of pop fiction though it definitely backfired in his time.
Works like the Hunger Games are rarely used in this sort of discussion though more often it would be an author like King who is dismissed in any topic of serious work but is beloved by the masses. Is a modern author like him not given his due in discussions of his works versus the canonical works?
Works like the Hunger Games are rarely used in this sort of discussion though more often it would be an author like King who is dismissed in any topic of serious work but is beloved by the masses. Is a modern author like him not given his due in discussions of his works versus the canonical works? [/quote]
I enjoyed every King book I ever read. He is an excellent writer, particularly in his ability to tell a seamless story. But in terms of fertile ground for thought or discussion–yes, I would have to agree with people who say that he’s a far cry from Faulkner.