this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
1097 points (99.1% liked)

News

23367 readers
3117 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 103 points 9 months ago (1 children)

topics deemed to be “political ideology” in schools

Don’t you dare pledge allegiance! Don’t you dare play the anthem! Don’t you dare promote capitalism!

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I still very clearly remember reading Harrison Bergeron in school and having some idiot school teacher act like "that's that socialism kids!"

How the hell is that socialism? A reference to income based taxation? If anything, following the big scary Soviet and PRC model, they'd have pumped Harrison full of roids and told him to rip a capitalist pig dog in half for his landing.

And, of course, Vonnegut agrees it isn't about socialism, no matter what American school teachers have been ordered to teach.

https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/may/05/vonnegut_lawyers_could/

[–] Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I mean you wanna be technical about it socialism is a much wider spectrum of ideas than Communism. There are definitely people who define it strictly by the presence of the worker co-op or as anti-capitalist but that's one floating idea in a nebula. Market Socialism for instance is basically a blend of capitalism and socialism where things like capitalist incentives are still maintained but regulated and systems of social support are expanded to make up for the gap of the whole capitalist "not my monkey not my circus" washing of hands of social responsibility to be an active part of a community. It's basically anti-capitalist in the same way putting up a privacy fence is anti-neighbor... So a wide spanning income based taxation could be construed as sort of Socialist but its basically the air we breathe as far as a norm goes.

But Harrison Bergeron is more like the Conservative satire of what "Cultural Marxism" looks like in practice. The strawman idea that is designed to make people clutch their individuality and random blessings like something someone wants to forcefully take away from them... It's a metaphor for things like social programs and inequality conscious measures that lift up disadvantaged people to allow them access to participate in society but not a particularly good one as it pre-supposes that lifting someone up is the same thing as crushing persecution of the naturally gifted.

Your teacher was half right, the story is about Socialism but it's a hostile framing of Socialism in complete bad faith using the conventions of science fiction to paint an overblown dystopia with hyperbolic absurd metaphors that underline the anxieties anti-civil rights advocates had when it was written.

The whole thing makes more sense when you consider that hardcore disability advocacy groups that started the path to creating the ADA basically was beginning to gain traction when the book was being written.