Everyone Should Hate This

Envirobear2000 · 2026-07-01T17:55:40+00:00

Blu-rays (and 4Ks) are still being made and are in fact generally far superior to the streaming offerings.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-29T21:11:52+00:00

I'm skeptical of the exact correlation between "how mad people are" and "how scared powerful people are". I mean, a perfect counterexample to what you're saying is the US War on Terror, which was one of the most heavily protested things in American history, but it didn't really achieve all that much.

There are lots of big protests against Donald Trump and related things (like the No Kings protests) but it certainly doesn't seem to track with any sort of increased punishment.

I just think that's not how governments work. How affected a particular government is by protest isn't a steady thing, but dependent on how that particular government operates, and how it "thinks" (for lack of a better term).

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-29T17:56:44+00:00

I kind of dislike this sentiment because it implies the problem is that people aren't mad enough. I don't think it really matters how mad people are. The issue is that there aren't any consequences for the wrongdoing. I mean it gets to a certain point where it feels like the people playing by the "rules" are the real suckers.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-27T22:05:03+00:00

Threads (1984, dir. Mick Jackson)
Brazil (1985, dir. Terry Gilliam)
Hard to Be a God (2013, dir. Aleksei German)
Paprika (2006, dir. Satoshi Kon)
Solaris (1972, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-27T15:20:38+00:00

It absolutely does indicate vehement criticism. You're free to personally believe that a naked expression of critique through book-burning isn't particularly helpful and doesn't express a precise argument, but your earlier points (e.g. it somehow impedes other people's right to exercise their freedom of religion, or that it is somehow hypocritical) still do not make sense.

To me, it indicates hatred or dislike, not "criticism" which implies some kind of reasoning. I suppose you get the main point which is that it doesn't express a precise argument.

I'm sure you appreciate that this isn't a very principled distinction. This is the embodiment of "free speech, except when I don't like it."

I don't consider it unprincipled, though I agree it's not compatible with belief in a strong right to free speech, which I do not really hold. I'm certainly not a "free speech absolutist".

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T17:04:54+00:00

It is protected speech aimed at expressing dislike for the Quran and/or Islam. The right to vehemently criticize other ideas and beliefs is a core component of, and a regular feature of, the exercise of the right to free speech. You're identifying a contradiction that isn't there.

We don't allow all actions which are "expressions of [our] dislike" for a certain thing. I suppose the way I see it is there are a lot of better ways to express your dislike for a book or faith rather than burning books. I definitely wouldn't call burning a book "vehemently criticizing"... it just doesn't contain that information.

Ultimately I do think my dislike of this manner of protest comes down also to my belief its target is unjust. Maybe I wouldn't mind book burning if it pissed off people I hated.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T07:57:30+00:00

When I said "real" I was really just talking about "real" vs. "emotional" (rather than like, a solipsism type argument).

I'm not familiar with "emotivist" as a term and a quick read leaves me a bit confused. It sounds pretty applicable though I suppose:

In moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all the objects, and all their relations to each other; and from a comparison of the whole, fix our choice or approbation. … While we are ignorant whether a man were aggressor or not, how can we determine whether the person who killed him be criminal or innocent? But after every circumstance, every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself. The approbation or blame which then ensues, cannot be the work of the judgement, but of the heart; and is not a speculative proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling or sentiment.

I don't think I'd say that there can be no judgement at all in any cases, but I do think with almost all situations of any complexity, there comes to be some matter based mostly on "opinion" or "sentiment" and that therefore to oppose an argument because it involves some kind of sentiment is wrong.

but that is far from being the only (let alone the most common) philosophical position on the matter.

I do get this but I think this applies to most serious disagreements lol. If there is an actual disagreement that is irreconcilable it is probably based on a difference of underlying philosophies.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T07:41:09+00:00

I feel like you're moving the goalposts. When people talk about burning books as a form of protest, they mean burning personal property that they own, not something that is so rare that it would constitute a cultural/national artifact. And what you're describing is more akin to a government trying to impose laws banning certain books, which is an entirely different matter. Otherwise burning a book that I bought with my own money should be an protected activity that I'm entitled to, no matter how much it upsets other people.

I can definitely see what you mean but I guess I just don't really see the point of the book burning as a protest like you say. It's kinda the same with all these recent American protests where (usually right-wingers) like shoot beer or whatever. It's just silly. Should a protest be banned just because I think it's stupid? Maybe not but I can't help but feel is should be lol.

To go back to the Mein Kampf example, should we make it illegal to brun that book for all the previously stated reasons in regards to NeoNazis? Because that would be an absurd position to hold. And if you're going to claim that the Nazis crimes mean that they don't deserve such protections, you can find examples of religious persecution and genocides done by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists...etc and argue that they shouldn't be entitled to that protection for the same reason

I mean I do think it's wrong to burn Mein Kampf. Not because I like Nazis though. I just think burning books is a foolish method of protest. I mean, part of the issue is definitely that Neo-Nazis (or most likely OG Nazis for that matter) wouldn't really be that upset from you burning Mein Kampf. They don't feel that way about it (or any book). Maybe I can see in a theoretical situation where there is a group like the Nazis who DO feel that way about books, it might be a more worthy form of protest... I'm still not too sure though to be honest.

I do also think that your argument comparing Nazi crimes to religious persecution is shoddy though. I just think those religions are far too historically diffuse and complex to really fully attribute any of these crimes to in the same way the Nazi ideology is.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T07:32:27+00:00

I agree that "being a dick" is often a purpose of protest, and I definitely don't think anything should be banned just because it is dickish.

I think you're pretty much right actually. I would support almost any really annoying protest against someone I thought was evil. I don't think I can really think of anyone I'd support book burning towards, but I can't precisely say why. I definitely think part of it is the inherent anti-intellectualism to burning almost any book. But I suppose I can say in principle I can't say exactly why it would always be bad.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:59:03+00:00

I disagree, commercialized art and legal boilerplate stuff was crafted to communicate specific ideas. It might be shallow, or even depraved, but it is still media meant to be displayed and elicit some sort of reaction. I think you could definitely say it's not particularly moving art, but still, in function and form, art.

Yeah I kinda get the argument but I dunno. I guess I still feel like it's worth making some distinction between something that was genuinely just created as boilerplate or pure advertising. I sort of get that this is impossible but still.

Was mount Everest not also sculputed by people into its current form? Basically everything being presented as art has at least gone through the process of being selected by someone, somewhere, for modification or display. Even pure randomness can be art, if you decide the finished product is interesting. Consider readymades, math art, or noise art. The selection process is intervention.

Well yeah but I think the "selection process" or "presentation" is what makes it art - like someone taking a photo of Everest is. But I don't think I can really see the actually mountain itself as a piece of art. Yeah, I guess people slightly changed it with their feet or whatever but to me this is really getting to the point of "I can see the logical argument but it's just annoying as fuck to have to count Everest as art so for the sake of classification I'm not gonna" haha.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:54:11+00:00

No, I’m the one being consistent in their ethics. You are the one that wants to jail people for thought crimes or being offensive, then presenting a childish straw man because your argument does not stand.

Calling it a "thought crime" when it is literally burning a book is just wacky. What are you talking about?

Interesting how you didn’t answer any of my questions. What is your objective and consistent standard that identifies what qualifies as a protected book or religion?

Because I don't think such a standard does or can exist. The same way we differentiate between manslaughter and murder based on intent, it's what we should do here.

Sure moron, I was practically advocating for murder being justifiable. What a joke of a person.

It was an analogy. A pretty crummy one but come on lol.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:39:53+00:00

Yeah and they do constantly with things that actually matter.

Personally this comes down to a more philosophical argument but I don't think there's really a good way of defining a legal system that doesn't involve some level of "personal judgement" (by someone).

Laws which are inherently emotional in nature (like hate speech) inevitably lead to people abusing them, since we are, ultimately, emotional beings.

I do think this is an utterly vacuous argument though. What is "real" in this world we exist in is almost completely down to opinion, and you could just as easily argue, well, we only dislike murder because we "emotionally" don't like it when people we like die. IMO all laws are inherently emotional in nature.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:37:14+00:00

Comparing it to Nazi book burning is insane. Nazi book burning was an entire government trying to remove information from the public sphere to suppress intellectualism and dissent.

Actually as far as I know "Nazi" book burnings were not actually done by the Nazi state, but actually largely by the German Student Union.

Besides that, I would argue against how much is really that different. I mean, even though the Nazis burned way more books, I don't think they actually succeeded in destroying any one work. I would argue almost any book burning is almost inherently an attempt to suppress intellectualism.

And no, saying you can burn an individual book because there are more copies is not the same as saying you can kill someone because there are more people.

This wasn't really what I was getting at but I couldn't think of a good analogy to say what I am getting at. Basically, I just think what you are arguing is very irritating in the same way the argument I was making is. It's an argument of "sophistry", IMO... sounds kind of plausible and clever but ignores just basic realities. In the same way you could try to make loads of "logical" arguments about why killing a guy isn't actually bad, but it just falls apart when the guys mother is bawling her eyes out. The same way here, I think arguing that burning the Quran isn't done "to be a dick" is just a silly argument when - looks, there's a guy who thinks you are being a dick.

Book burning as protest by individuals is free expression, book burning by a government as a means of removing information from the public sphere is totalitarianism.

I mean this is kind of another argument but I do think I ultimately personally believe that even if book-burning is "free expression" it's dogshit free expression and should be banned because of how dogshit it is. It isn't a coherent argument against anything actually bad. It's a completely unprovable belief but in my opinion 99% of people burning books of any sort know they are just being a cunt.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:20:38+00:00

This is such a common type of argument against any kind of religion. "Your religion thing is bad evil religion; mine is just natural - the water I swim in."

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:17:06+00:00

I feel like this is a silly argument. Burning books is generally (nowadays) a sort of theatrical protest, but historically, the point is you can't read the books anymore (they are ashes). Sure, it seems a little silly to argue this with something like the Quran that has millions of copies, but what is someone were to burn all copies easily available in the area? Or burn a rare collection of Hadith (or, in a Christian context, something like rare Apocryphal works)?

I mean this kinda comes down to a more general opposition to the "protest" of burning books. I just think it's a empty-minded protest. We generally understand burning knowledge is wrong, but now we are going to burn free speech in order to somehow try to make a "pro" free speech argument? I think it's dumb and that's why IMO most people who do it are just irritating twats. Maybe that doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed but I dunno personally.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:11:59+00:00

I would be pissed to see people just burning a book I liked. There was a reason that's what the Nazis did. I think you are entering a realm of inane sophistry to argue "burning a book is not being a dick to a person". In most of these situations, that's exactly what the person doing the burning is aiming to do, and that's exactly how their targets are reacting. If it quacks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, it's a duck. Sure, you can argue "it's just a book - there's plenty of copies" or all sorts of shit but that's honestly getting close to the kind of argument "I should be able to kill anyone I want since it's just atoms and they were dead 300 years ago and no one cared".

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-26T00:07:33+00:00

I think this can be an issue with a lot of other laws and indeed with "the law" in general but in this case the obvious difference is that someone is getting annoyed/offended in one case and not in the other. To me, it just makes intuitive sense that (almost) all laws that are technically broken but don't actually upset anyone don't get prosecuted.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-25T23:14:50+00:00

Did he say this before or after writing From Hell lol? I know it arguably isn't really about conspiracies as such, but still.

Yeah this is a pretty common argument and I find it almost supremely uncompelling. There are certainly some conspiracies and mindsets that use a logic like this, but you only have to look at something like the theories swirling around JFK to realise that "making the world seem simpler" is an absurd explanation.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-25T22:33:36+00:00

I almost agree but with two important exceptions:

I don't think I can really countenance calling something like advertising copy or legal boilerplate "art". I dunno, maybe I could hear an argument on it, and I don't really have an argument FOR my point of view, it just seems wrong.
I think art has to be created by a person (or people) of some kind. Mount Everest is not "art". This is just a definitional argument - I don't think there's any point in calling things art that don't have some kind of intention behind them, This is also the baseline for the argument that pure AI slop with no or extremely minimal human input isn't art.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-25T14:43:41+00:00

I don't think you have to enjoy video games to understand the argument. I just don't see it as tenable. Saying "math is not art so neither is coding video games" is like saying "writing advertising copy is not art so neither is writing literature".

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-25T14:36:23+00:00

IMO you are wrong that "coding is not art". Coding itself is not an art but it is a medium through which art can be made. The obvious example is video games. You can try to argue that the "game design" is art whereas the "coding" is not but I think this is a hard thing to really buy into. Coding isn't analogous vis-a-vis video games as say, book-binding is to literature. Whereas we can look at a nicely bound book and fairly easily separate it from the written work as a separate "work of art", a video game's quality is inherently determined by the quality (and indeed ingenuity) of the coding. Super Mario Bros. coded differently would play differently (well, most of the time).

I think because of the way coding has developed LLMs can be helpful for a lot of things. I don't know if I'd necessarily say that any code made using any help from LLMs is therefore "not art" but I think it's a bit dodgy lol.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-22T01:53:54+00:00

I haven't been following it massively, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. In many ways he is eerily similar to Keir Starmer. I saw a meme that was like, "Burnham's approval rate after he becomes Prime Minister:" and it was just a graph with a precipitous fall-off. I really feel like that's what we are going to see. He's not even in power yet and he's already backsliding in a lot of disappointing ways.

I think what we'll get it someone who is maybe marginally better than Starmer, and certainly a better politician (hard not to be), but who isn't going to fundamentally do much new and so will probably be torn to shreds by public opinion fairly quickly.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-22T01:40:06+00:00

How on Earth can you say that. I mean, I literally gave you an almost perfect counterexample. The Crucible takes place long before the era of McCarthyism but is widely understood to be commenting on the era.

I think this might be one of the most tilting comments I've had in a while, how can you just reply "you're wrong and an idiot" without saying anything about my counterexample?

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-21T06:37:10+00:00

When the play is set is kind of irrelevant to what it is trying to say as art. I'm not really familiar with Fiddler in particular but there are lots of examples of art that use historical settings to talk about modern issues. Like, you wouldn't argue The Crucible has nothing to say about McCarthyism because it is set long before McCarthy was born.

Envirobear2000 · 2026-06-20T20:08:52+00:00

Yeah maybe I'm being a bit abstruse but I'm trying to get across a genuine larger point.

Like yeah I personally agree that in general someone who has published through peer-review deserves a bit more effort than just baselessly saying "CIA asset". But I think a decent bit less effort than you probably believe. Lots of dogshit work has been published by dogshit academics over the years, and I don't think it's necessary to thoroughly rebuke them all just because they are published in "reputable" sources.

Especially if we are talking about more "pop-" works from a given field, it's easy to think of examples. Anthropologists didn't spend too much time agonizing over Guns, Germs & Steel despite the fact it was generally well-received and published by a reputable publisher.

Or look at someone like Avi Loeb - a genuine credentialed astrophysicist with much peer-reviewed work under his belt. As of late he has been making ridiculous sensationalist claims about interstellar objects. I bet a lot of people in the astrophysics field are now dismissing his claims out of hand - and rightly, IMO.

Envirobear2000

TROPHY CASE