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Jerusalem Demsas

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58
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2023-09-06
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2023-09-06
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  1. “Well, I think that the message is that, like, I mean, first of all, he gets drunk on the planet for the first time, and then he sexually assaults this woman that he's friends with. And, I mean, I don't think it's about blank slate. It's that he's entering a society with different incentives and different rules, and that in a society that's been very clear is very non-egalitarian, where he has an entire conversation with someone where they're very clear about the lower assumption about sexism. Within just weeks, he's able to understand, and he explains to his friend that, you know, women here are there just ornaments, they're always below men, and she pushes back on this slightly. But, you know, at the end of the day, he's being influenced by the society around him. I don't think something like that would have happened on his home planet. He would have been constrained. So I think it's hard to say one of these is blank slate or not. I think both of them people are clearly products of the institutions that are pushing behaviors. There's nothing about...”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a comment made by a woman that our protagonist Forced as they are in his home planet to never be able to kind of openly confront the political problems because the assumption is just like there is no hierarchy, there is no government. So there's nothing to confront, which makes it actually quite difficult to confront the very things that are causing distress and they realize that the real problems are within all of their own collective minds about what are social norms or rules that are actually concerning them. And I guess this just comes down to like, I don't know, from my perspective, Yes, there can be a lot of things around social norms and rules and things that are allowed to be spoken about that can stifle and reduce freedom, but nothing can be more stifling than the state itself creating violence against other people, which we see on the capitalist planet, they're having a proxy war. There's an invasion of another country, which is meant to be an allegory to Vietnam, I suppose. But even there's a real present threat of danger and violence, which Chevek has not really felt, except in a brief fight that he has early on when he's a youth on his own planet.”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I think this is chronologically this is the first of a larger series of works that take place in the same universe. And his breakthrough ends up being extremely important later on for future communications. The Ansible idea later on. I do think it's interesting that the thing that he takes back is that it's important to have free flow of information. I mean, he's obviously very frustrated by that throughout his time at university. But again, even back on the capitalist planet, there wasn't free flow of information going on. They'd describe all the newspapers as just lying and making things up, like other professors at the university can't even really talk about, you know, he feels uncomfortable sharing that he's dissatisfied with his home planet. So I think there's this current here, which is just trying to really undermine the idea that there are these ideals in the capitalist society that are actually, 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

  4. “Ideals to be satisfactory at any point. But I don't know. I think it's pretty clear that she has, I mean, as you said, greater hope for the anarchist planet.”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I don't know. I mean, the fact that she pregnances from the anarchist world, and he's the one who has kind of the major scientific breakthrough that everyone is trying to get their hands on. The fact that she has him return to his home planet at the end, we don't know if he actually lands and is safe there. I think it's a clear message of how I feel like a lot of the words that she used to describe the capitalist society is quite disdainful. Not that she thinks somehow that your original world is perfect, but it's pretty clear to me that she doesn't think it's worth it. She doesn't think it's worth it, the pain, the suffering, everything that's hidden there. Even the property owner who becomes friends with our protagonist is pretty upset with his life there. And I mean, at the same time, there's this larger point that she's making, which is that you shouldn't expect any society, even one that claims to be utopian, even one that has a lot of your shared.”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, I think it's referred to as an ambiguous utopia. I mean, I think Laguina is pretty clear that she prefers the anarchist world, but doesn't shy away from the problems with it, which I think is usually the issue with utopian writing. Did you disagree? You don't think that's clear?”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Sure, so there are two planets that are relevant. They're kind of close to each other. One is home to sort of an anarchist, separatist cell that moved away from the original planet hundreds of years in the past. And then the original planet is sort of supposed to be more of like a capitalist, a planet that looks a lot more like Earth. And our main character is a physicist who travels between the two trying to bridge the gap. So I think that's like a broad summary.”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I first read this book, I think I must have been early high school, and I don't know if this is what you were like when you were early high school, but I was very angry about a lot of things. Like it was hard to have conversations about anything to do with politics without getting very upset or angry. And that's, I think, what, I mean, a lot of my peers felt at the time. And I think reading science fiction, it's like a way of having conversations about politics without having to necessarily feel that. And so it actually felt like a real entry point into how to start having discussions without all of that sort of, you know, not that the emotion itself was bad, but that it made it hard sometimes to have productive conversations if you were overcome by the things you were feeling. So the dispossessed is great. I mean, I don't know. We can start, I suppose, with the maybe a very basic plot summary. Do you want to do that or should I?”

    2023-09-06 · Conversations with Tyler · Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source