> “Though the word beautification makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”

[0] https://www.nps.gov/articles/lady-bird-johnson-beautificatio...

> Franchises, sequels and box-set formats are extending stories in multiple directions to eke out ever more revenue, bringing to mind Musk’s intergalactic ambitions, which imply there’s a franchise option for human life: late capitalism, it would seem, respects neither narrative nor planetary boundaries. ‘It’s outrageous, really,’ Yorke says of endless sequels. ‘If you think of it in basic terms, a story is a question and answer, dramatised. And when the question is answered, there is nowhere else to go.’

Arthurian legend, Robin Hood, the Greek pantheon, Sun Wukong, Coyote? Trash. No, shared worlds are a modern invention by commercial entities looking to make a quick buck. A story is a question and an answer after all.

> Annabel ends the day much as she started it, the essay incomplete (although Brown does not reject story structure altogether: Annabel relaxing her grip on her timetable is an enlightenment of sorts).

> [...]

> Even art-house films that self-consciously depart from the three-act structure nonetheless define themselves against it.

So we're using 'three act structure' to mean 'something changes between the beginning and end'. By that definition, yes, movies do tend to be pretty samey in structure.

> Being told a story is to be infantilised, somewhat: to suspend one’s critical faculties. In contrast to polemic, stories are covertly persuasive. Even if their message is good for us, the sugaring of the pill represents a lowering of intellectual expectations.

I don't have a snarky comment for that bit, it's funny enough on its own.

It's hard to make a substantive and non-nitpicky comment on the article because there is no cohesive point being made here. It's a random collection of vague ideas that don't mean anything at all when put together, using criticism of modern film as a loose framework - yet written by someone who clearly is not interested in exploring the wide world of film and its fringes where the interesting stuff accumulates.

Thank you for the clarification, your position makes more sense now. It sounds like you're not saying there's something inherently bad about equality, but rather that the practical cost of enforcing absolute equality top-down makes it actually a net negative in well-being for the population of a state?

(I can't help but point out that if there's someone with the power to enforce it, things are very far from equal - but I'm guessing you mean 'equality' more in a monetary / real goods sense)

Because I do assume equality to be a good thing; if that is an incorrect assumption I would like to know.

Edit - Gen Z is defined as those born from 1997 to 2012. But all participants are 18 or older. Hmm.

I took the test[0] and it seems rather biased. The fake headlines seem to be targeting conservative biases and blind spots in particular, e.g.

> Left-Wing Extremism Causes 'More Damage' to World Than Terrorism, Says UN Report

or

> New Study: Left-Wingers Are More Likely to Lie to Get a Higher Salary

I don't find it all that surprising that people find criticism of their opposition more believable. I would be curious to compare results with a test that had the opposite tilt, i.e. replace 'left-winger' with 'right-winger' and so on.

[0] https://yourmist.streamlit.app

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43604015

Points: 52

# Comments: 5

To be clear I do not support the Trump administration in any way - but the attitude I see in this article, that the inequalities and issues that lead to fascism and isolationism are small problems to be solved once everything is back in proper order and the dumb rabble has lost momentum, strikes me as a very privileged perspective. If we don't look deeper into why things have reached their current state and only decry the symptoms we're bound to be here again sooner or later.

Be that as it may, a core trait is very different from a generally accepted threshold. What exactly is the threshold? Which environments are you referring to? How is it being measured? What goals are they?

You may have quantitative and unambiguous answers to these questions, but I don't think they would be commonly agreed upon.

(edit) I do think we've swung a little hard in the direction of color minimalism recently; it can get oppressive when combined with the trend towards minimalism in structure and form too. But I think it's fine for the default to err toward inoffensiveness and color to be used purposefully, and if/when public opinion shifts away from that there isn't exactly any impediment to design shifting with it.

https://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/m1-debian/