Classic

As I have no doubt mentioned before, I have a list of 10 or so "smart person books" that I aspire to read (first in the series was "Age of Innocence", which I liked a lot, but took two tries). Mostly, I will get these from the library as I don't expect to like most of them. However, I broke down and bought one on our trip west of Melbourne:


I am pleased to report that this book was very pleasant and easy to read. It describes an alternative way that we might organize society and is somewhat, but not entirely, dystopian. The good part is that war and disease and hunger and even interpersonal conflict no longer exists, work is optional, and everyone has sex all the time. The bad part is that this is mostly achieved by aggressive reproductive engineering that deliberately makes a big chunk of population too stupid to realize what is going on (eg. by depriving fetuses of oxygen and dousing them with alcohol). Also, a safe type of heroin is safely and constantly used.

On the plane, Lenore watched a movie where a similar level of daily peace and happiness had been achieved but at the cost of euthanizing everyone when they hit 50 (IIRC). Similar to Logan's Run.

It would be an interesting project to try to read all these sort of "alternative society" books (1984 and "The Giver" come to mind) and think about which parts actually could have value.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Change of Venue

Well, I have my doubts that ANYBODY will read this, but here I am: my old blog at progressdeveloper.wordpress.com has become "read only" for reasons that are beyond my control and that I will not bore you with. I might try to scrape it all and stick it somewhere else, but I doubt it. I will probably just let it live in the never-never land of 99.999999% useless information content until someone at Wordpress decides to retire it. (OK, I will bore you just a little. No, I did not lose the password. But they won't let me in anymore because I don't have access to it's registered email address anymore. I am annoyed at Wordpress, enough to try this platform instead [it's part of Google], but not enough to rant about it. These things happen).
Read more

Arrived

 Touchdown in YZP, quick shopping trip in a small Super Valu adjacent to YZP, 20 minute ferry ride (we were 2nd last car on - ferry is tiny and only runs 1x/hour). AirBnb is about 30 seconds drive from Skidegate ferry and is super nice. 3 BR and I think just 1 bath. Huge kitchen. Great view. I think we will be very comfortable. David H is, as expected, unbelievably pleasant and quite fun, but on top of that, seems to know about all sorts of topics that I barely know about and interest me to a greater or lesser extent. How UK's time in India ended. India v Pakistan. Supreme Court in the UK. Whether judges should be elected. He has lived in Africa. He also is super into art as both an observer and a creator. I think the trip will be at least quite good based solely on his involvement!
Read more

Haida Gwaii Part 2

Here I am at YVR Gate C32, waiting for our flight to Sandspit. We're spending 9 nights (7 on HG, one on a ferry, and one in Port Hardy); we being my oldest sister Janet, and a family friend, David (yet another David! Good grief). As you might recall, I went to HG with ex-work-David in May or so of last year. On that trip we were only on the north (Graham) island. I wasn't able to accompany ex-work-David on his zodiac tour of the south (Moresby) island, where, apparently, resides all the "indigenous stuff". (The north island is pleasant but not all that different from "our" gulf islands, at least in my opinion). So I'm going back to fill in the gap of my HG experience with the south island. I'm not hugely interested in Haida art (I think David is, and Janet for sure is), but I'm somewhat interested in FN topics and trying to do my bit to improve my knowledge / empathy towards "them".
Read more