alt Hacker News> deliberately provocative
Is it?
Or perhaps it's a point of view that you don't agree with? What makes it "deliberate"? The author takes a different PoV than perhaps the most folks here but that's because most folks here are accountants:
> [...] Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’.
Which is also fine, it's not "provocative" or "slopsationalism", it's just a PoV that is different.
There are many sides to a debate, not just mine. It's not black and white, there is much grey that is just as legitimate as your or my PoVs. And any other PoV isn't by default "provocative" and especially not "deliberately" so.
Replies
It doesn't even make sense, provocative is a good thing for an article to be to most people! It's nice to be moved whichever way by someone else's writing!
There is an assumption on this forum I see a lot that any published written work has some hypothetical ground-level, some wholly un-ornamented, just-the-facts form, and anything the writer adds beyond that is a kind immoral indulgence. With this, provocative is bad because its unnecessary to some 'truer' telos of the text.
It's a kind of funny misunderstanding of writing to see here, because its exactly the one you'd expect a programmer to have!
> Is it?
Absolutely. It is the nature of sharing radical ideas with the world to be provocative. The range of reactions in this thread alone supports the "provocative" part, and of course it's deliberate. Otherwise you would be saying that the author is not aware of how uncommon these ideas are, which I would find extremely hard to believe.
> It's not black and white
Yet you are so firmly convinced that it's white that your whole comment only talks about why it can't possibly be black. You haven't shared your opinion, all you have done is try to invalidate the one you responded to.
> most folks here are accountants:
But it's not that black and white, remember?