alt Hacker NewsIt must be so exhausting to go through life only enjoying things that match one’s up-to-the-minute current moral views. I guess all biographies of influential people are basically out, as being successful in 1000BC or 1500AD required one to do things considered unethical today.
It feels a bit like religious fundamentalism with a different veneer.
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Ok but you do realize that he was alive in the 1900s, not 1000 BC.
> up-to-the-minute current moral views
“You shall not steal” is the eighth commandment from the Bible, two thousand years ago.
You're jumping to some wild conclusions there. This isn't about wokism (if you know the author, that would be clear) or political correctness.
It's more: wow these guys are jerks, and they get on my nerves.
A protagonist doesn't need to be perfect. But, ultimately, you should be rooting for him.
It’s true we should not judge people by today’s morals -one can’t be a visionary and predict tomorrows morals; but, that said it seems those people strayed well beyond what was acceptable even back then. So there is room for criticism.
Scott Alexander is a smart guy, but not everything needs to match taste. For instance, he describes the writer of the book Sadly, Porn as remarkably erudite and so on. The community he belongs to has the habit of describing each other as very smart, certainly, and particularly having pretensions to Hegel but overall he's quite trustworthy. In any case, on actually reading the book I found it less interestingly smart and more like something the character Salvatore in The Name of The Rose might say.
But text is a serialization of an idea and it's entirely possible I have the wrong deserializer. So that's one thing perhaps you and I now have in common. And I suspect Scott Alexander just lacks the deserializer for Jack Kerouac.