Kaufman links e-book trend to bookburning, Nazis

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

Your responses, in fact, are troublingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterates.

You, on the other hand, are one of those faux-intellectuals who constantly need to use the biggest words you can think of to impress or intimidate people who you think to be less intelligent and well educated than yourself. But the secret of truly effective writing is clarity. Which explains why you have to write for a horrible on-line "magazine" which apparently publishes almost anything submitted, and at which the posters (very much including yourself) have not a clue about formatting text to make it legible. If you spent more time attempting to make your message clear and concise and not long, rambling screeds about how smart you are and how dumb everyone else is, maybe you could crack the top 1,000,000 list of sellers on Amazon!

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any on this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.

Ah, "Nerds! I can kick your asses." The traditional cry of the bully, the jock, the one who is losing at a battle of the wits.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

What an internet tough-guy he is. How many more memes can he fit in before he's finished do you think? We've been Godwinned, now it's internet tough guy, my money is on a Rick Roll or a Chocolate Rain

Don't make me pull out the lolcats.

Hey Kaufman, GTFO our internets you Troll.

No, don't tell him to go away. I'm *fascinated* that someone can show up in an ebook forum and say "ebooks suck"--and come back and say it again and again, with long flowery prose (and Godwin points). Most entertaining troll I've seen in months.

Don't scare off the fun ones, Moejoe. The only way this could be better is if he actually replied to people, but I'm willing to deal with the oblique back-and-forth.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

And I maintain that hi-tech as is will produce, inevitably, the conditions that will lead to levels of barbarism and totalitarianism equal to or even surpassing those of the National Socialists.

At what point in human history do you believe that improving technology stopped being a benefit to mankind? Where do you draw your ideal technological end-stop and say "this is the optimum level of technology - stop here"?

/JB

[pshrynk]

Dear Mr Kaufman,

I don't dislike you because you are a Jew. I don't dislike you because your mother is a holocaust survivor. I don't even dislike you because you think you can kick my butt in a thumb wrestling contest.

I dislike you because you are a doink.

So don't make me out to be an antisemite, holocaust denying, weak thumbed technocrat.

I'm a proud antidoinkite technophile.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Don't make me pull out the lolcats.



No, don't tell him to go away. I'm *fascinated* that someone can show up in an ebook forum and say "ebooks suck"--and come back and say it again and again, with long flowery prose (and Godwin points). Most entertaining troll I've seen in months.

Don't scare off the fun ones, Moejoe. The only way this could be better is if he actually replied to people, but I'm willing to deal with the oblique back-and-forth.

But if we keep feeding it, then it'll get more attention, and these ideas (if you can call any of the drivel this looney put forth, an idea) will come to the attention of more people.

[Lo Zeno]

I'm still amazed that he said that by putting "everything on the internet", all information can be better controlled.

This suggests that he has no actual idea of what is the Internet. I mean, things like TOR, Freenet, the Darknet, he obviously has no clue about it. It has never been as hard as today to control information (I'm using the word "information" loosely, meaning anything that contains informations/notions/data in it, so books, music, video apply). And I am not talking about torrents and emule, here.

[kindlekitten]

wow! just wow!

first off, coming in here and accusing people who, for the most part acknowledge having somewhat out of control reading addictions of not reading your temper tantrums is pretty amazing. second, so what if our thumbs are a little over developed? that should actually make you panic whilst in preperation of the challenged thumb wars!

guess what?
<------- that's really me! and not when I was a teenager! that is a 50 y.o. part native female veteran. I take my reader up on the mountain. when I'm not teaching, I'm reading, and I have plenty of the classics loaded on my reader. there have been times when the conditions have been so lousy that getting the littles out on the slopes was just cruel. what do I do? take them to the lodge, get some cocoa, and read to them from my reader. I engage in many other outdoor activities as well, I train and ride horses, camp extensively, hunt, shoot competitively, and go out and look for people lost in the woods. in every situation (well except for the horse training), I have my reader with me. it sure beats the days when I was lugging a big book made out of trees around with me. I can and do read alloud to my companions, quietly to myself, and can pick and choose as I will. what I'm not is tied down to a computer spewing a rather confusing agenda across the interwebs.

peace man, it's all good

(and for what it's worth, I believe our active membership is teens through early 80's)

[wayrad]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

But if we keep feeding it, then it'll get more attention, and these ideas (if you can call any of the drivel this looney put forth, an idea) will come to the attention of more people.

And this will hurt the popularity of ebooks?

[Moejoe]

Kaufman's Law (derivatives; Kaufmaned, Kaufmanning) - when an obviously uninformed and technophobic poster to an internet forum continues to post, believing that what they say is the truth and that nobody but they are privvy to that truth (as opposed to a troll, who purposefully posts remarks with no belief in them).

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

But if we keep feeding it, then it'll get more attention, and these ideas (if you can call any of the drivel this looney put forth, an idea) will come to the attention of more people.

The ones who agree with him aren't going to be *more* convinced after reading his babble. The ones who are unsure have the chance to read the multidirectional responses, and spot the flaws in his arguments which, if they lacked a technical understanding of ebooks or the internet, they might not have figured out on their own.

Really, this is as entertaining as when the vice-president of the SFWA accused people who gave away free content online of being "webscabs" and Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretches.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The ones who agree with him aren't going to be *more* convinced after reading his babble. The ones who are unsure have the chance to read the multidirectional responses, and spot the flaws in his arguments which, if they lacked a technical understanding of ebooks or the internet, they might not have figured out on their own.

Really, this is as entertaining as when the vice-president of the SFWA accused people who gave away free content online of being "webscabs" and Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretches.

I remember that. Hilarious! The SFWA and all those other authors guilds are an absolute sham.

[Riocaz]

Hmmm, the first book I loaded on my iLiad (Thats one of numerous non-kindle ebook readers by the way) was in fact... The Iliad.

Has anyone taken into consideration that the troll is possibly not actully Mr Kaufman?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Lo Zeno

It has never been as hard as today to control information (I'm using the word "information" loosely, meaning anything that contains informations/notions/data in it, so books, music, video apply). And I am not talking about torrents and emule, here.

DO NOT CONFUSE THE MAN WITH FACTS!

Ebooks are wrong, video games are wrong, the internet is wrong, and if you can't see that, you are a nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized... something. Something pathetic! So there!

[Lo Zeno]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

DO NOT CONFUSE THE MAN WITH FACTS!

Ebooks are wrong, video games are wrong, the internet is wrong, and if you can't see that, you are a nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized... something. Something pathetic! So there!

I beg your pardon.
My bad for trying to bring facts into a conversation based on imaginative catastrophic ideas

[MaggieScratch]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.

For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully inculcated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.

Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float: a mental and spiritual prison of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.

In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.

In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my essays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Okay, I'm calling shenanigans. He's just messing with us now, right? Nobody could have seriously written that. It's ironic hyperbole. Isn't it?

Private to Mr. Kaufman: the plural of "Oedipus Rexes" doesn't require an apostrophe. All the best!

P.S. I'm 47. I learned to type on a gigantic manual Royal typewriter in 1978. Computers are better.