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Right. He hasn't read Marx. Or any other critique of capitalism, European or homegrown, for the past 100 years. Or any fiction that is informed, in whole or in
by onan_barbarian 16y ago
Right. He hasn't read Marx. Or any other critique of capitalism, European or homegrown, for the past 100 years. Or any fiction that is informed, in whole or in part, by this critique. No, he didn't invent this 'independently'.
What's the point of 'reaching' people if you've got so little new to say? Its not a matter of 'citation', it's a matter of acknowledging that there are a host of proposed solutions (and critiques of critiques, and so on) out there. By pretending that none of it exists, you wind up with a tl;dr column that says what's been said before.
His contribution is in fact a subtraction from the sum total of human knowledge, in that the only thing original about it is wrong - the notion that the phenomenon that he talks about has something specifically to do with America between 1950-1990.
- steveklabnik 16y agoDo you think that everyone should be required to read everything about a topic before posting their thoughts on it?
- onan_barbarian 16y agoHe was not 'failing to read everything'. He was either 'failing to read anything', or, more likely, reading a fair bit and intentionally stripping all reference to this existing knowledge out of his column for whatever reason. The result was unsurprisingly sophomoric, which I suppose is why it has 150 points on HN.
- grammaton 16y agoOr, possibly, he was offering anecdotal observations, and he's not as dumb and lazy and unmotivated as people here are making him out to be. I know it's surprising, but people do come up with these things on their own sometimes.