/lit/ - Literature

>>3348159
Thought not.

>>3348072
I'm fairly certain that at some point, he directly addressed the Eagle problem by saying angrily that the Eagles were "not a taxi service."

>>3348205
Same series.

>THE END IS ONE BOOK AWAY.

>>3348149
>I give no arguments? This is offensive. I have examined your posts closely

A dodge, if I've ever heard one. I'm explaining my actions, but if you've got even the barest hint of the philosophical background you're pretending to have, you know that you're the one making the positive claim of there being an objective morality, and that the burden of proof is always on the affirmative.

Until such time as you provide evidence that there's an objective morality, we're just jerking around with my morals. I'm happy to do so, but you've got to quit pretending that you're going to disprove the null hypothesis by proving that a drunk guy's Internet arguments aren't enough to make you rethink the world.

>I suppose that closed eyes never see

Heh.

>Present nothing but criticisms
>Act set upon when people don't accept your worldview, despite you providing no evidence or arguments for it, nor even any kind of hint as to what it is

You could teach Creationists how to obfuscate, son.

>>3348156
>maybe the same for a [...] farmer

I'd love to see your argument for how, if I could magically take a loaf of bread and make a duplicate of it (like, say, copying a file), that feeding this clone!bread to my friend would be the same as stealing the original loaf produced by the farmer.

Yeah, that's totally the same thing.

>>3348120
>judge you based on your actions and words
>You give such weak arguments and act on such base principles

Except without the actions. A man is apparently defined entirely by the things he drunkenly writes on 4chan. Who knew?

>You give such weak arguments

Whereas you give *no* arguments. Merely insult and feigned protestations that your honor has been slighted. Oh, to be set upon by such Philistines!

>You sound like someone who lives rather insincerely. This is tragic.

Whereas you sound like somebody who has never given up food in order to keep a roof over your head. Moral absolutes are the playthings of people who have never experienced the harsher realities and come to understand that there is no karmic meter handing out wealth to the worthy.

>>3348130
That's a licensing mindset. If I let a friend listen to my CD, they aren't paying for it, and the artist gets nothing. Therefore, by this logic, my friend has stolen the music.

Your logic is equally broken.

>>3348098
There's a graphic out there, somewhere, that shows two scenarios:

>1:
>You steal a CD from the store
>The store now has no CDs, and you have a CD
>The store makes no profit, and loses the ability to ever make profit off of their CD

>2:
>You download a CD
>The store still has that CD, and you have that CD
>The store makes no profit, but still has the original CD, and the ability to make money off of it

Stealing via 5-finger-discount and "stealing" via downloading are not a 1:1 equivalence, and should not be treated as such.

>>3348052
>Was my first inference correct, that you are a relativist? Yes.

No shit, Sherlock.

>what motivates you to act justly or unjustly is whether you can be called on for the matter

See, here's where you've dropped into beating up men made of straw.

A single flippant remark cannot be reasonably assumed to encompass all of a man's thoughts. If you genuinely believe it can, you're simply an idiot.

>when a human is only concerned with acting justly when others are watching, they are clearly missing ethical ideals (personal standards, as you said, of excellence)

Here is where you are clearly contradicting yourself. I have pretty clearly expressed that I have and advocate personal goals and standards. Because of this, your continued assumption that I am operating under a system wherein such things are absent is clearly flawed. Presumably, you know this, and yet you continue typing under this premise that you, yourself have shown not to work. Why?

>if you steal because it's convenient, it's not unlikely that you'd be a bad friend or fail to cultivate yourself as a result, since they are easier or more immediately gratifying.

Ah, there's where it is. If I take up X position on one issue, I must necessarily take up an identical position on all moral issues. Killing is wrong if you are handed a healthy baby, therefore killing is wrong when confronted with a poisonous spider, or a murderer, or in war, etc. Moral standards must be absolute, despite the fact that I've clearly placed myself in a moral relativist stance. That makes any kind of sense at all, right?

>Swear disgustingly all you like.

I will, thanks. If you can't deal with the word "Fuck" on the Internet, maybe you should finish out the third grade before you try insulting people on 4chan.

You can cry all you like, but the simple fact is that morality is never as simple and absolute as any moral objectivist claims. When you live a little, you'll see that.

>>3348004
>I make up a bunch of shit and pretend that it's what Anon said!

Well, that's not a strawman argument or anything.

It's hilarious to see this kind of slippery slope argument, that downloading a .mobi file is basically the same as opposing personal growth as a concept. Tell me again how the fact that universal standards don't exist means that I can't possibly hold to any personal standards. Tell me again how I can't possibly set goals and aspirations without an objective external force guiding them.

And most of all, go fuck yourself, you self-righteous hypocrite.

>>3347981
Right, because Amazon is ruthlessly hunting down people who torrent cheap paperback books.

I'm genuinely terrified of the real-world complications that will arise from loading a stolen .mobi file into the Kindle app.

>>3347950
>the same people who subscribe to moral relativism or moral nihilism
>implying moral relativism is wrong
>implying that objective moral standards exist, and that some jerkoff on the Internet knows them when philosophical, theological, and legal scholars have been debating broad strokes of morality since long before Jerkoff McGee was born

That's nice, Anon. You keep your stone tablets, and I'll live in the real world, k?

>>3347931
>more than 70% of teen mothers with poor living arrangements do in fact get on welfare and never finish obtaining their diploma or college degree.

Generally, that's because caring for a child is expensive and time consuming, and so is getting a diploma or degree. In my state, taking your GED costs $250. Working the sort of McDonalds job you can get without a goddamn HS diploma, you're never, ever going to have that to spare.

You're sure as fuck never going to have the, what, $20,000 you need to buy a degree.

All while you're paying to raise a kid.

I just don't think it's realistic that you're going to get this done, unless your entire operation consists of a free-money-and-daycare intensive-study facility.

>>3347882
Why...of course not, officer.

Anyway, I buy books when they are available physically to me. If I have trouble finding them in pulped-tree form, I steal them digitally, because stealing them is substantially easier than the legal means, with all the checkouts and the logging in and the confirming that I've read the terms and conditions...

It's purely convenience-based, for me.

The primary boundaries to this sort of thing, if I remember from when I did a big project on homeless shelters, are

>Funding: You're not charging rent or fees, and aint nobody as generous toward the homeless as they like to pretend
>Zoning: Businesses tend to assume that if there's a homeless shelter, all the property values will plummet, their bathrooms will be coke dens, and all the wealthy folk will abandon that part of town, taking their sweet, sweet money elsewhere
>Drugs: Not even stereotyping. If you lived under a goddamn bridge for three years, you'd take painkillers, too.

I'd like to note real quick that if your attitude is genuinely that homeless people are
>living off of welfare and passing that idea and lifestyle onto their children,
Then you're going to fail the assignment. The vast majority of homeless people are not the scum you'll see on fucking 19 And Pregnant or whatever the fuck. They're just cold and hungry and desperate.

Also, if you don't differentiate your idea from the already-existent halfway houses and shelters, you're still going to fail. It sounds very much like you haven't done the basic research. There's probably already a shelter that does this in your community. Go find out how they deal with shit, and what they need.

>deciding you aren't a faggot or a commie or a publisher or a Star Trek fan

SINCE BEFORE YOUR SUN BURNED HOT IN SPACE AND BEFORE YOUR RACE WAS BORN, I HAVE AWAITED A QUESTION!

(I would never make it through this step)

>>2726066
Aw, do you feel threatened because somebody doesn't believe the same things you believe?

Last books I've actually read:

>Homeric Hymns (ostensibly by Homer)
>Candide (Voltaire)
>The Road (Carmac McCarthy)
>Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

My "fuck it, the world's ending" rush-read list:

>God is not Great (Hitchens)
>Shadow of the ____ (Orson Scott Card. I think I'm on the third book? Whatever. 3 weeks is enough to burn through whatever's left)
>Castle in the Attic (Winthrop. It was the first book that really captured my interest and got me reading, so I'd love if it I could arrange for it to be my last book, too)

On the one hand, love stories are obscenely easy to contrast with negative situations. Almost every single work that involves a horribly negative situation will involve a love story, so you can feel mood whiplash and both of them will seem to be extremely well-done, even if they're kind of poorly-constructed. It's a crutch.

On the other, your hero in a dystopic story is almost always the guy who remembers or envisions a world that doesn't suck as much as this one does. One quality that helps identify a world that doesn't suck as much as this one does is the presence and regard for love. Showing this hero falling in love helps differentiate him/her/it from the others who are complicit in their dystopia.

That's my take, anyway.

I once had a dream which can be tl;dr'd into "I revived MLK, I gave him a steampunk hand, and we fought Injustice."

Hardbacks have a feeling of permanence to them, which is what I want out of my dead-tree books.

If I weren't interested in cementing ownership of the book into my mind, I'd go to the library or download an ebook.

Wouldn't a better comparison be to Bernard?

John the Savage is from outside the culture, looking in. Bernard is from inside the culture and finding it oppressively difficult to change or escape from within.

I don't know, it's been a while.

>implying I don't write to be self-indulgent and so I can sound cool to my friends when I tell them I'm busy writing

He thinks I believe in myself!
laughinggirls.jpg

>>1602580
It's like Oscar Wilde's Guide to Being Oscar Wilde.

Cancel your cable. You won't miss it after a few weeks.

Limit the shit out of your Internet (I'm still working on this step).

Buy books at the Goodwill for $1 each. Devote yourself to reading them before your pile of books gets too imposing (Goddamnit, Dune series, I was doing so well).

Take classes at the local community college or something if that's not enough for you.

>>1602207
Well, you have two options, here.

Option 1 - Harry in House Slitherin has a profound effect on Malfoy. Harry's Muggle-heavy background makes Draco rethink his Magic Nazi beliefs, and he comes to several crossroads where he has to decide whether to accept the bigotry of his upbringing or broaden his horizons to accept other viewpoints so that he can keep his closest friend. In the end, Draco is the perfect example of the restorative effect Harry has on House Slitherin, going from wealthy decadence and bigotry to a genuinely accepting person.

Option 2 - Harry and Draco split House Slitherin. Half of them side with Harry's glorious path to redemption, and the other half doggedly resist his reformation. In the last book, when McGonagall declares that House Slitherin must choose a side, they finally expel the Magic Nazis and are welcomed back into the School as equal partners, as it was meant to be from the beginning.