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Could you give some examples of these harmful memes you have found in Dostoevsky's works? Although I suppose by definition you might not be willing to do that..

• kuramitropolis 4y ago
  >Although I suppose by definition you might not be willing to do that... That's not part of the definition. Would have much fewer of the things kicking around if they precluded their own distribution, no? Thankfully the ones that do are a subset, otherwise basilisk spotting would be a much more introspective activity.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  I could totally imagine how out of 100000 programmers having read Crime and Punishment, a few would take an axe to their local pawn shop.
  • kuramitropolis 4y ago
    The ones that don't are the ones to be afraid of. Classics are such for a reason. They don't get republished for 150 years because they had an one-time influence on people once. Picture the pawnbroker, having remained on the market precisely due to some insights from Dostoevsky, which had come in handy when dealing with the dregs of society. He buys the axe, kills the programmer with it, then fast-tracks redemption and just, like, carries on. Russian literature has so many different ways of fucking with your head. Savage stuff, in the best of senses. I start finding it relevant to anything at all, I nope the fuck out of there. After all, life is known to imitate fiction, esp. when there's the less friendly kind of crazy aboard. Best outcome for a programmer from reading Dostoevsky would be to stop being a programmer.