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Jerusalem Demsas

lines on the record: 58
first: 2023-09-06
most recent: 2023-09-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Rail. And it's a problem across sectors. So the US doesn't look at anyone. If you look at the UK, they don't look at Spain and Italy, even though they have lower transportation infrastructure costs. Because why would you look at Southern Europe? It's absurd. You get to Southern Europe and other areas. They don't look at East Asia because as a model, even though those places are often much better at building these infrastructures. So it doesn't seem like a uniquely American problem. It just seems like we have fewer neighbors to look at.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to see I wonder sometimes if it's just about America's so big we have two neighbors, that's like bizarre. Most countries have like so many neighbors and are much smaller and so the proximity to them is so much larger that you're used to kind of that spread. And our states kind of function like this, right? Like you see, it's one of the most interesting things that I've realized as I do a lot of reporting at the state level and at the local level. The amount to which one state taking an action increases the likelihood of its neighbors engaging with that question is just remarkable to me. Even if a major, like if California does something, that's much less impactful to New York than if New Jersey does something or if Massachusetts does something. And so similarly, I think that's the part of the problem with the US engaging with other countries. I mean, at the same time, I've done some infrastructure reporting and the researcher Alan Levy at the Marion Institute very much complains often about how transit authorities don't pay attention to how other countries are building infrastructure much more cheaply than we are, especially rapid.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's interesting because on one end, I agree there are sort of non-tangibles that you learn from the sort of, you know, the speculative fiction on one hand, also like the travel that we're talking about here. But at the same time, if you're trying to affect things in concrete terms, I mean, in my opinion, Reeves is. I mean, he wrote, I think, article for the Atlantic where the excerpt was just about the one policy prescription of keeping boys back one year. And to me, it's like, you know, I think it depends what your theory of changes. Is your theory of change that whatever you can do to illuminate these broader ideas or truths that you think you've discovered about the world and however you can make those things entertaining and accessible to as many people as possible?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reeves, yeah, and I had not thought about these three as having very many connections before I like sat down and started reading them again. And I think one of the things that's very interesting me all the time is we're having the same conversations in so many different contexts over decades, over centuries, and in ways that can, if you're in a good mood, can feel very unifying, right? You're just like, wow, like I'm just like every other person that's out there. I'm like Jonathan Swift. We're all wrestling with the same questions. I'm like Gwynne, all these people, Reeves. But I think it can be very, like, maybe it's a knock against moral progress that the same questions are being debated over centuries. It doesn't matter the format. It doesn't matter the style. It doesn't matter the background of the interlocutor. It's just like we're just forced into this one kind of circular human condition. So I think that's kind of my large, I was surprised by the amount of overlap in themes, honestly.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's interesting to me because I think you suggested Gulliver's travels, and I'd suggested Le Guin. And you suggested.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increased freedom from that work. The idea that we'd have artificial womb seem so far outside of my current technological horizon. But, you know, at some level, being pulled out of the workforce and being in many ways potentially have your healthcare disabled long term seem like things that are such permanent facts about being a woman right now if you end up having kids that it seems hard to get to a level of moral progress where you have kind of like equality of the genders there.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's hard because moral progress and feminism were inextricably linked at a time where there was even more tons more gender-based violence or things happening in the United States. Of course, moral progress had to point in the direction towards more liberation of women in that direction. The idea that it's just that would be totalizing seems incorrect. It really depends on the structure that are then set up once women are freer, but you can't get around sort of biological sexism in some ways. The fact that women have these, I mean, the costs of the wage gap are largely explained by the cost of having children and what happens after you have kids. People are having fewer and fewer children. But I also think that there's countercultural reactions to that. And then people, I could see having more and more children response. And so I think it really does depend on what happens with technology around.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, Pinker, I think that there have been obviously a lot of economic gains that have been made over the last century. And it's very possible to, I think that ideas are very powerful and that in general that over time, it really matters if those ideas are true or can be persuasive. And as a classical liberal, and I think that it's true that there's a quality across people. And so I think that those ideas end up winning out time and again because they're just unsustainable when you set up societies that don't work that way. They'll be beaten by other societies that are more egalitarian, that can take advantage of other people. And so I think moral progress goes along with kind of the economic progress. Those are the inextricably linked. And so you end up beating out other.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's difficult? I agree that it's difficult. I think he's much more pessimistic about it than I am. Given how quick the gains have been in my own lifetime around moral progress,”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like this is a very low opinion of men that is being described by, if you think that's what all these authors are sort of getting at, then that's kind of intractable.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just am a strong believer that, I mean, obviously, there's always going to be outliers, but as Reeves mentions multiple times in his book, even though on average men may experience X or Y or C traits, whatever, there's remarkable overlap of the genders. There's tons of women who are quote-unquote more aggressive than other men or are above the mean for median for male aggressiveness or things like that. I think my question is, yes, maybe there are tale. To become that fatalistic about people would require a lot more action on very low hanging fruit that we know we haven't done on policy matters. But”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think this is incorrect for a couple of reasons. One is that he makes a comment that I think is meant to fly under the radar very early in the book, which he's only talking about cis heterosexual men. Obviously, most studies are only going to focus on that because you don't have high enough numbers. But what's interesting is that there is some research showing that these gaps disappear with gay men and that on educational fronts they're doing as well as women. And that to me is just like, I mean, obviously there's like questions about heritability and the genetics of it, but at the same time it's like there's this idea that men just cannot succeed in the society is also not true given that even within the world that we live in from country to country men are able to be less violent in certain contexts and are more violent in other contexts or institutions matter clearly incentives matter.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you know, we tell women all the time, and like, some of these are good lessons. You should try to salary negotiate. Men do it all the time. And that's a very productive lesson that a lot of women learn and have transmitted amongst themselves. And we tell them, be more assertive, don't in conversation and don't let people interrupt you. And these are all very important cultural lessons. These aren't like these are norms that have been expressed and have allowed women to do well in the workplace and maybe even lean in by Cheryl Sandberg as an entire book of this. But in this book, there's no question about should men be given lessons as well. Like, hey, the reason why you're doing better in school at a younger age, if you're a girl, is usually because you're more willing to sit still, you're able to sit around and do the work. And reading is the big place where there's a divergence. He talks about English scores a lot. And there's nothing stopping men from reading. It's like one of those things where I feel like there's a complete abdication of any kind of idea that there should be some cultural shifts around what you should”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are things where there are legal barriers or physical barriers barring them from accessing academia or accessing the job market or voting or from even being free and walking around in society? And the things that he's identifying that are barring men are not laws saying men can't go to college. There's no admissions. Actually, there's affirmative action for men. It's trying to push men into college because otherwise all colleges in the US and much of the West would be female dominated, more so than they are already. Part of me is saying, okay, if we've identified that these two things are actually quite different in kind, then the question is these responses have to actually engage with the cultural pushes, not just the institutional pushes. And he has this one line very early on, which I find pretty bizarre where he says, conservatives say men should be more like the old school fathers, and progressives just say you should be more like your sisters. And both of these are wrong.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dresses most of the time, I mean Richard Reeves, he's a Brookings, so a lot of his audience is obviously going to be at least center left and liberal. And so he spends most of his time is addressing them and kind of excoriating progressives for having this large blind spot of men. And I don't know. It just feels like this is actually not engaging with a lot of work that's been done to talk about how men suffer under patriarchy. I mean, one of the very old feminist critique of patriarchy is that men are going to be harmed just as much, not just as much, but are going to be harmed even though patriarchy is going to privilege men in many ways. It talks about the fact that men are alienated as fathers. They don't get to have that caring persona, that they're castigated for showing emotions, that these things are going to have real harsh effects on them. Of course, feminism is primarily concerned with the plight of women, but I think that the equivalence there is what's not that he's saying that those are, you know, that they're the same level of harm, but that the harm is of similar type feels like incorrect, right? Because the things that were happening with the women's movement”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the book kind of starts off with this kind of presentation of an idea where people have worried in recent decades about the plight of women, and now we need to also add to that the plight of men modern economies. It kind of relates a bunch of statistics around college completion rates or how male students do in academia, but also even earlier in kindergarten or throughout their education. And then it kind of provides a few prescriptions. There are a couple ones that are pretty well known by this point, whether it's paid leave for fathers or it's hiring more male teachers, but the one that's kind of different is redshirting the boys, which is basically having a presumption of starting boys one year later than girls in kindergarten. And I found the book, I don't know, it's hard because I was saying this to you before we started this, but most of the book is trying to convince you that the idea is a very heterodox idea that we should care about men as well.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I feel like this is a particular way about how you travel. I think many people when they travel end up staying within very similar social groups or even only with Americans or the people they're traveling with and have very little interaction with people and learning about their lives in any kind of meaningful way.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that if you were to buy the idea that, I don't know, happier is just a kind of a hard metric because, you know, am I happier if I'm more satisfied or more well-rounded? Like I'm not really sure. It kind of depends on how that actually takes root. But, you know, at the same time, it's just like many of the things that I've gotten from really productive travel experiences have also been analogous to sorts of experiences when I read very good books or I hear a very smart argument or something like that. And those are much lower cost things to attain. And there are millions of those versus, I don't know, it's obviously costly.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. But the other thing is more like, I don't know, like there's this, there is, I feel like, a large cultural message that you're not going to understand yourself if you don't go travel in some way. Because of the ubiquity of that message, especially in, I don't know, in the US and in other Western societies, especially when my friends went to, I have friends who have gone to study in Europe. It's very push as an idea there. Part of me wonders that you actually are happier because you could at least say that you have fulfilled that cultural norm. You don't get embarrassed by saying, I don't have a passport or I've never balanced out the country, which, you know.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder then, I mean, to me, I've always had this opinion that most people, well, I think a lot of people don't travel well for what they want to do. They end up getting sucked into doing things that would not actually make them happy. And there are things that in many destinations that would have possibly made them happy.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I question whether they needed to travel to get the knowledge because Shevik is really pushed out of his framework of viewing his own society as utopian by a friend who has this sort of realization never travels, is within that community the entire time he just witnesses his own inability to get his own research done. He witnesses a childhood friend of theirs get sent to an insane asylum because he's kind of ridiculed after he does kind of a subversive musical performance or theater performance. To me that knowledge was there and I don't know. I mean, you're obviously a big proponent of travel.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goals when he was moving there seemed like naive in hindsight. I think that there's maybe slightly, that's a little bit too much in the dispossessed world because, you know, we know later on that his connections end up being the foundation for a really important technology that connects space different planets. But at the same time, what was the point?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think maybe part of it is just in both of these novels that these men would not be happy anywhere, like in any context. That maybe that's a part of what's going on here is that there's not a society that would make Shevak happy when he's amongst the communitarians, he's frustrated by the strictures they put upon him, but also he's frustrated with his friend critiques them and he's angry at him and they get into a big fight over it and then Gulliver everywhere he goes he has some sort of critique of the one place he doesn't is a place where he's treated terribly and it's like unsustainable for him to stay there and you can't actually imagine him providing anything of use to that world he's literally just like an oddity that gets pushed out every once in a while like these kind of dinner parties and part of it I don't know to me it's like kind of an indictment of this sort of like traveling in order to find yourself or find something important or true because in many ways Gulliver does not end up like more enlightened by the end of the book Shevek ends up right back where he was his entire kind of”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But I mean, even beyond that, where he had, I remember this one passage where he goes into detail about the types of food that he was eating and then he goes like, well, no one's interested in that. But you've written this as letters. You didn't have to include that. So that kind of indicates to me this level of derision for the reader that he feels like this reader is going to be interested in these mundane details that aren't actually important to the broader story or moral or message of the book.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I couldn't tell if it was not read travel novels of this time and it's clear that there's some sort of form to the genre that he's kind of making fun of at some points in the book where he's just like readers of these kinds of novels he'll say that and then he'll juxtapose that with a dear reader like as if you're supposed to be different but then he'll provide you with the exact same things as if he doesn't actually have that high of an opinion of you as a reader”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very surface level with the reader, it's interesting because he will say things like, obviously this will bore you, but then he'll just tell it to you in extreme detail. Like, I mean, things about what he's eating or, you know, very bizarre anecdotes always about his bowel movements, which I can't say. He's obsessed.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I don't know, like he's obviously, I mean, this is what's interesting what this book has said. It's written, I mean, he's writing it as a letter to a reader. He addresses the reader multiple times in it. How do you think that he views the reader?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, he's a pacifist in real life. Clearly that's where he's going with this. You know, I was really interested. I couldn't tell whether he viewed women as better companions than men in this book. Because, I mean, in his own life, he has, it's unknown, I think, whether or not she was his, they were actually romantically involved, but he has like a female companion that he's, at least has a friendship with for a long time. In the book, the person who treats him kindly in basically each place is like a woman. There's this little girl that takes care of him when he's tiny compared to the giant people, and she makes sure that he's safely being carried around. She actually cries when she knows he's going to be, you know, taken away. I mean, this happens again and again. But at the same time, he describes women as grotesque and very bizarre things happen with him in the giant land. And so I don't know, what did you kind of think?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, I mean, again, I did not find the time with the scientists or the universities to be as, I honestly set that aside quite quickly because it was such a small part of the book to me. And so when I look at the rest of them, you have this king that's threatening to just drop an island upon his subject if they are disobeyed. You have other bizarre articles of impeachment that are laid against him because someone in the court doesn't like him or something like that. So most of it seems like kind of just a rebuke of Royalism and courts, which of course Swift had his own.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unrelessed, right? I don't know. I mean, I think obviously the novel ends, and we don't know if Gulliver has any more travels or anything like that. But at the same time, I don't know if Swift is making a commentary on the only way for these. I mean, he's actually largely not that imaginative about the structures of society from place to place. There's always some sort of oppressive king usually, except for the final society. There's just very weird, bizarre punishments that are being meted out. Obviously there he's kind of dissatirizing just how ridiculous many of our own customs may look like.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so by the end, I mean, he is so enamored of the horse society, which he views as so full of reason and so full of goodness and does not even have, I think, words for lying. Because why would you communicate to lie the whole point is that to explain and get across ideas to one another? And he's so disgusted by his own species that he faints when he's told he has to go back. He then, I think he considers or he attempts suicide when he's being taken home, even though the person who's helping him is displaying all of the virtues that he's just said he loves about the horses. They're giving him their clothes off their back, either giving him money, they're transporting him all the way back to England, and he gets back to his wife and she embraces him and he faints again because he's so disgusted by her. Obviously, the satires, it's extreme. But even by the end, he's meant to still retain this extreme disgust towards humanity because of this experience with the horses. But like...”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This point, I suppose we're supposed to expect that Gulliver has a very low position of humanity and Swift has a very low estimation of people. But at the same time, he does the weirdest things. He pees on the Queen's tower to put out the fire because he's so much larger than the tower. But then it becomes completely unusable. Because why would she want to live in this home that's been just urinated upon and it becomes a problem for him at the end? And he keeps again going back out there and making decisions that end up with him deserted. And I'm not sure what the rates of being lost at CR at this point, but it just seems like it's kind of wild with him. So I don't know. Did you think he's supposed to be smart?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because I don't know. I think with Gulliver, I had a hard time deciding whether or not he was smart or not because he would obviously be extremely self-possessed when he would come across a new either the giant species or the very tiny people when he comes across, and you can say all their names really well, but I feel like I can't, none of us know how to say them properly. Is it that small people? So when he comes across to small people, he wakes up and he's been bound by all of them and he's able to free one of his arms and then has this thought like after they shoot some arrows at him and it hurts. They're around six inches tall each, but I guess it's like a good hypothetical how many six inch people would it take to subdue a person. He has his wits about him enough to be like I should just not present myself as a threat and then again when he comes across the other groups he's very quick not to present himself as a threat. Interestingly the only people that he doesn't do that with are the Yahoos at the end where those are the humans of the planet but he views them as beasts and by”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's hard because if Gulliver versus standing in for Swift, which I'm not sure about, he spends very little time there. He kind of gets out pretty quickly. He finds it kind of ridiculous. He describes the endeavors as, you know, kind of straightforwardly, but in a way that is very clear that he does not find it a useful pursuit of time. It's almost just these people have no grounding reason, and they're just sort of doing randomness. I mean, the way he describes the books that write themselves is literally just a bunch of random plates being moved around and stamping in different directions. There's not even supporting sort of thoughts behind it. So I don't know. I mean, you're correct. That is the only one without explicit slavery in it. But at the same time, he spends so little time there relative to the other.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other people another time, I find it kind of a barrier because how are you going to understand fully the context? Like I can get the very obvious points that he's making about humanity.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's very readable. I mean, like the actual sentence level, it's like not very difficult to understand what's going on, which, you know, it's written in the 1700s. That's pretty remarkable. But I guess what got me is just how, I don't know, I was saying this right before we started this show, but I can't tell if I like satire or not after reading this because the book is, you know, Gulliver coming across these different people. They're all fantastical. It's kind of like fantasy in that way. And, you know, he satirizing the human condition. He's also satirizing travel novels at the time, I suppose, as either being full of falsehoods or being fixed on really trivial matters or things that are just not that important or observations that are not relevant to a reader back home. I think I had trouble figuring out whether or not I find this sort of writing that useful. I find modern satire to be very funny and interesting sometimes. Like obviously I like, you know, was a fan of Stephen Colbert when he was doing that bit. But as a long-lasting tool for understanding.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very readable. I did not expect that. I know that people talk about this. I mean, I think it's been billed as a children's book sometimes. I don't think it's a children's book.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ahead of its time the only walls on the you know the anarchist plan are the ones that surround the space travel under the launching pad or whatever it is something that's said very early on but then you discover throughout the book how much there are all these other sort of like quote unquote invisible walls that he is kind of discovering and that's made very explicit at times sometimes maybe too explicit but yeah I don't know I think it's also just like a lesson in how much you know you have to have an other to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself he's alone for a really long time and when he's doing his studies in the middle of the book and he can't get these like scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to and it's when he starts interacting with other people and rebuilding those bonds with other humans that you do actually get these breakthroughs so I think that's also another point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is important”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time and obviously there are some real barriers to engagement with one another, but the speed with which they view each other as alien and not human is very interesting because if someone were to come to me from South Africa, I would not view them as a fully alien person, but to me that's, I think, a very weird shift.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also very interesting to see. I mean, we talked about them as parallel worlds, but the way that the capitalist world views this off-planet is kind of like declining mining outpost that sends them what they need. And it's almost like a mining colony is how they think about it. Oh, sure. In the prison, right? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it's obviously we're starting with his perspective of growing up there. But even that is challenged by Le Guin too, at some point where you're like, oh, is this even, are these parallel worlds or these even countries? And what's also interesting about it too is it started me thinking like, you know, they travel book, I guess we're talking about Gulliver's travels soon, but the travel book kind of presumes a level of alien that is still left to be discovered. And what's remarkable is that the two planets, they refer to each other as aliens all the time, and there's some differences in physicality even as well that they describe. But they've all been separated for a few hundred years, and they've been in trade with one another and in communication the entire time.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. That's a bit older, isn't it, as a book? Yes, but I mean, like just in last couple decades, you know, they're really good at world building and being very particular about the, you know, making the world as realistic as possible and how they would get there. Gwynne dispenses with a lot of that and just tries to get you to a point where you can actually engage with the ideas that she's working on. I don't know. This is, I find, very valuable with science fiction that Le Gwyn writes is that you can have, I don't know, it becomes very possible to actually engage with questions of right and wrong in this such a different context, though she does bring earth in the mix at the very end. So yeah, I think that's what's valuable about it. What about you?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that, you know, the ambiguity about what, I mean, clearly between you and I about what Le Guin is trying to tell us about these different systems is actually extremely valuable, I find that what's really good about science fiction today, if you're reading Ted Chang or you're reading, what is it, Children of Men Who Wrote that book?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I guess there have always been people preaching doom, even people amongst technologists, not just Luddites or people who are very religious or finding themselves in cults. But there's usually, I don't know, again, the bulk of my literary reading has been 20th century literature. And so it's something that is very interesting when I read modern day to see that kind of a shift.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know so, I mean, is the idea then that there's like, or maybe there are other cultures who are writing utopias? I don't know, you were the one who reads internationally.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's hard because I see the value of utopia as trying to clarify what it is that you're actually trying to get to. It's not meant to be we think that this form of society will necessarily come about because of my preferred policies or changes, but just if you could define what Eden is, then you can approximate it as close as you can get. I don't know, it seems kind of sad to me that people don't really do that anymore because obviously, even if things have gotten better on various measures, but I don't think anyone would describe our current world as a utopia.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, one thing I thought about while reading this book was, I mean, I don't know, if you had an opinion on this, but I feel like people don't really write utopian literature anymore. Do you feel like that's changed?”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is it about men? Because they're all boys. Yeah, men also, of course. No, but I mean, I wonder if that's what she's saying, is that it's not about human nature. Maybe she's making a comment about male nature.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From doing the very bare minimum of not hurting her. I think that she's making a clear critique of how feminism or women are treated under capitalism, how they're commodified, and even the people who realize that commodification end up hurting them. Because, I mean, it's the same day that he gives this whole speech about how women are treated terribly in society that he ends up assaulting her. But none of that happens on his own planet, even though there are harms that women are facing all the time being separated from their children, not being able to make choices similarly to men around their life and well-being. But I think there's a clear difference.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a story goes on, yeah. But if it's a sentence all, it's hard because, I mean, obviously, Le Guin is a woman, and it's interesting she chose to have her protagonist be a man. And usually, I mean, that happens all the time, but all of the women are technically pretty side and supporting characters that seem to only in at least in Chevik's mind be pushing his own story arc forward. But at the same time, they are, and even the woman he befriends and then later assaults, she describes her own agency as being secretly being able to like push men behind the scenes to do what she wants. And that becomes revealed to be, you know, kind of a farce in the society because she's not able to stop him, obviously, from assaulting her. And that's one of those things where I think Ursula is making a pretty clear comment that like, yes, there are problems on both planets, but here is a planet where even this woman who's clearly very wealthy, very well connected, can't stop this strain.”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know. I think that's pretty clearly the case that the incentives and how different people are viewed in a society matters. I mean, we'll talk about Gulliver's Island pretty soon, but the behaviors that people, I don't know, engage in are going to be extremely contextual. If there are no laws or if there are no rules or mores around treating women as inferior, then I think it's going to open up a lot of things there. But also, I don't really know if we should take Chavek to be some sort of hero, as you said. There are a lot of problems with this character. So it's not really clear to me that Laguinda is valorizing this man in many ways”
2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source