Edit: of course it is up to individual judgement on a case by case basis, and there are instances were it is obvious that no other concrete implementation of an interface will be required. But otherwise, writing an interface is good practice because it helps safeguard against time consuming future refactoring.
This is exactly what YAGNI is meant to counter: the constant tendency of programmers to add speculative extension capabilities that are never used. These add complexity and cognitive overhead. It's a net loss.
Also, people pretend like refactoring is hard. My experience is that refactoring is only hard on the ends of the spectrum, where someone has added all the wrong abstractions, or no abstractions at all. Of the two, I'd prefer the latter, but obviously anything in the middle is usually better.
The comment above said the opposite, that the future was irrelevant.
These days there are tools that can help in a lot of languages; it's not a time consuming operation to press the Resharper "extract into abstract interface" button.
Why all the animosity towards "frat bros"? I worked in a "nerd only" environment before and I felt incredibly lonely. Nobody ever wanted to go out for drinks, nobody even talked during lunch.
We're talking in stereotypes, but I think it has more to do with your feelings about competition than about lunchtime conversation. When I was working I really enjoyed lunch (with the right people) and I'm definitely more into nerdy things.
One can only hope this would make it to the US as well. The problem largely seems to be banks being ancient behemoths in terms of technology, and introducing APIs like this poses a significant risk from security and policy perspective. Plus its not going to be a major source of revenue either, so why bother?
I think it's very unlikely. "Things to come" and "metropolis" were huge in their day, but ultimately didn't have the same effect 2001 did. "M" by fritz Lang is my comparator for a film which defined a genre (film noir)
Elements of many films since 2001 have their moments. "Silent running" was probably the first successful eco scifi. "Dark Star" was the precursor comedy scifi. Nobody much wants to laud "interstellar" or "inception" but both have moments of cinematic genius. "Tron" was Disney lite but a neccesary moment.
I could make a case for the original "Solaris" or "stalker" which are beautiful and more about an inner journey than scifi proper.
I think an additional factor that discriminates 2001 compared with other films was that it was made at the height of the space race when there was a lot of technological optimism about the possibilities. When the film was released, Apollo 8 hadn't yet orbited the moon.
Also, the screenwriter (Arthur C. Clarke) was a confirmed space cadet (in the nicest sense of the phrase) and didn't see a need to throw in dystopian civilisations and evil corporations (standard fare in contemporary Hollywood SF) when there was so much scope in 'just' exploring the possibilities of the universe.
Interstellar and Inception are really juvenile, sophomoric and one-dimensional in comparison to 2001. I'd agree that it's highly unlikely that we'll get a big-budget film with the same philosophical caliber as 2001 anytime soon.
I'm ADHD and have a hard time sitting through movies in movie theaters but got roped into seeing Inception somehow. I left aggitated and absolutely furious after sitting through a 3 hour movie with so little character development that I didn't give a shit if any of those people died. God, that was a painful experience.
I don't know about you, but I'm somewhat fascinated by these opinions! I mean, if Inception and Interstellar are "juvenile", what possible vocabulary do they have left for all the superhero films we now have in the cinema?!
In all seriousness, of course Inception and Interstellar are very different films to 2001 (just as 2001 is very different to Kubrick's other films, really), and made I think for a very different audience. There actually aren't all that many films that can easily be compared to 2001 - Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are probably as close as you're going to get, and both of those are, relatively, only a little more recent. Malick's The Tree of Life isn't quite a sci-fi film, but always feels to me like a very good companion to 2001.
Perhaps the reason you won't really see much like 2001 ever again is that modern audiences, on the whole, just can't really cope with it - the pacing is regarded as risible and the ambiguity is too much intellectual effort.
Check out the third season of Twin Peaks from Showtime. It's more or less an 18 hour movie, with slow, seemingly-deliberate (or not!) pacing. A truly fascinating work for this age.
I love Tree of Life, but I’ve tried and failed to get into 2001 several times. The thing I love in Tree of Life is the humanism: I can see people sorting through their feelings through their memories in real time, and the characters feel absolutely real. 2001 is more interested in “philosophy” than people, and to be honest if I want that I’d rather just read a nonfiction book.
I once saw Tree of Life, totally on a whim, no knowledge at all, bought a ticket when passing the cinema during an evening walk.
I left the movie in the middle. I thought it so bad, but fascinatingly bad. Well at home I found out it was directed by same director as The Thin Red Line, one of my favorite movies. Since then I have been puzzled, I really should give Tree of Life another chance.
Definitely give The Tree of Life another go, and watch Malick's older films too - they are wonderful. Avoid all of his most recent films unless you're feeling very, very meditative (I slept extremely peacefully through the last third of Knight of Cups, I will say).
Give it a shot, at least! A lot of people feel about it the same way I feel about 2001, though, so it may just not be your thing. I think if you can be immersed in the visuals and empathize with the characters then you're good; otherwise, it probably won't do anything for you.
2001 is also one of my favorites but I also loved Interstellar.
The fact that it was was a fairly authentic representation of astrophysics and relativity made it compelling to me. Much more than any other movie, with the help of Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it stuck to mostly credible physics and relativity and avoided falling too much into a fake magical sci-fi space.
There is so much that is incredible and interesting about real physics that it is sad when movies too eagerly jump to phony physics. The attention to details related to the effects of approaching a black hole were great. They included a realistic simulation of a supermassive black hole that took up to 100 hours per frame to render and generated 800 terabytes of data and resulted in the publication of three actual scientific papers.
Which other movie do you know lead to academic publications and advanced the state of knowledge of astrophysics?
Maybe a weak aspect of Interstellar, compared to 2001, was its exploration of robotics and AI. The weird minecraft-like blocky robot was out of place.They should either have left that out completely or gotten hold of the same level of expertise as they got for the physics. Too bad they didn't go for the latter. Given the recent popularity of AI, experts are widely available and the subject would have been ripe for an updated cinematic treatment.
Yeah, that's a funny aspect of realistic accuracy, where, if you're doing it in one place, you have to do it elsewhere as well, else you'll ruin the immersion.
I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, but I watched it only once, in IMAX, and deliberately never watched it again because the visual experience was such a crucial ingredient.
Aside from the beauty of the visual experience itself, I also enjoyed the post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and many of the hard-SF elements, like the depictions of relativity and black holes. Maybe I'm still easily impressed, but people aging out of sync with each other makes for a really evocative image that I hadn't really seen in film before. The implication at the end that the black hole itself was artificially constructed in a predestination-paradox sort of way was the one obvious departure from hard-SF, and that's a hell of a lot better than most movies get away with.[1]
The part at the end with Anne Hathaway incoherently blathering about love didn't really bother me since I interpreted it as "this character is incoherently blathering out of emotional distress" rather than "this character is explaining one of the themes of the movie", so maybe I deliberately missed the point of the movie so as to not ruin my enjoyment.[2]
I enjoyed Inception a little, but it's little more than a high-concept heist movie, and I wouldn't even think to compare it to 2001 aside from both movies technically being science fiction.
[1] There may have been other departures from hard-SF that are obvious to people other than myself, but I'm probably at a high percentile of the general audience when it comes to 'ability to catch obvious departures from hard-SF'.
[2] This is a technique that I highly recommend for creative works in general.
The problem is inception crossed the line into fantasy. Antigravity paint or whatever mcguffin you want to name is explicitly changing some rule. Inception went the magic wand route.
That’s not uncommon. The Matrix for example was straddling that line, but eventually crossed it.
I may be misunderstanding this but isn't the point in Inception that what they are experiencing is explicitly not real?
That because they are inside a dream-like state the rules of reality can be broken and it is only by spotting when the rules of reality are broken that you can tell you're not in the real world.
That I don't have a problem with. You can have people see all kinds of crap while tripping on LSD without issue.
It's the mechanics like 10^(layers deep) where going deeper kept increasing time compression in dreams. Dragon Ball Z for example had space ships, but the mechanics of the world where based on fantasy ideas.
The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results. If it’s a simulation then him picking up a rock and turning it into a spaceship is viable. Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world, though again same deal.
But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
> The best example was in the sequels when Neo affected the machines in the ‘real’ world while he was also in the ‘real’ world. You can interpret that as this all taking place in a simulation, but that means he could have arbitrarily results.
Neo's hardware implants allow him to wirelessly interface with the machine world, which he has root access to. This is even better established when he seems to fall into a coma and ends up being in the Matrix. I don't know why this wasn't obvious to anyone else.
> Alternatively, he has some undefined mystical connection to the machine world
Wireless connectivity isn't undefined or mystical!
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean.
I don't think it actually counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules, which is where "residual self-image" comes from.
Also, just as a fun fact, in one of the earlier revisions of the script of the first movie, Switch was supposed to be a transgender character who was one gender in the Matrix and the opposite gender in the physical world. This was dropped for some reason.
> counts as breaking the rules if you do it at the same point that you're originally explaining the rules
It’s not that it’s a rule it’s that it’s an undefined rule. If they had said nothing then you don’t know, perhaps they are taking photos and uploading avatars off camera, or perhaps the Matrix keeps track of this stuff, or perhaps the Matrix downloads the data from your mind. Residual self immage does not answer the question.
Characters are not omnipotent. Character X explaining the rule does not mean Rule X actually applies. For example character says you need to use a plug to jack into the Matrix and need a hardline to get out. Later on you break those rules and that’s fine the character does not know what they are talking about.
But, the Sci-fi fantasy devide is not the lack of technology, as cellphones work just fine in Dresden Files and other Urban Fantasy. It’s the type of rules that exist and how they can be broken without destroying the suspension of disbelief. The cold equations is a good low budget film based around some very hard rules. The Matrix fails this, you can come up for explanations for anything that happen, but doing so is not bound by any rule in the world.
Further, it frames things in non technical terms perhaps the character just noticed he has a modem up his bumb. Perhaps he can wirelessly hack an alarm clock rather than setting the snooze button. Or maybe he has psy powers and can cause EMP’s. Undefined major plot elements under the control of the protagonist or antagonist is the hallmark of Fantasy. What can and can’t Gandalf do?
> but that means he could have arbitrarily results.
Well, he could have, if he understood the simulation well enough; even in the overt simulation, which he was coached on, he had more constrained apparent ability. He clearly goes through an awakening over a period about the nature of the “real” world and his ability within it, that in some way parallels (without the coaching) his earlier awakening to the Matrix, but at it's most advanced point (as far as his externalized use of abilities, at least) it is still obviously less complete than the point he reaches with the Matrix at the end of the first movie.
> But, you see this stuff much earlier, take ‘residual self image’ and consider what that’s supposed to mean
That everything the humans “know” about the Matrix is curated material that is part of the system of control revealed later in the series, and is often misleading, and frequently incoherent under careful examination, which is discouraged by the quasi-religious framework of belief that is itself part of the system of control.
I am more referring to how it fits in with the story. What humans know about the Matrix is treated like what Hogwarts professors know about magic vs what starfleet academy knows about warp cores.
The fact that people jacking in can die is not treated as an open technical problem to be solved, but gamps rules of transformation. Warp cores are not nessisarily fully understood, but they are actively trying to test out and improve them. In the Matrix they don’t treat things as a theory they just notice stuff and slap a name on it. At the same time they built a loading program to bring guns into the system. Which is why I am saying it’s even a close call between science fiction and fantasy.
Oh, sure, the sequels were problematic. I actually interpreted the real world shenanigans as something of a Gurren Lagann-style wink at the audience. I misunderstood the post above.
A magic rock by some likely 100,000+ year more advanced civilization. Story wise however they could have been visiting the Grand Cannon as neither the protagonist or antagonist had access to magic. You could do the same thing with the rock saying releasing the Nanite cloud and nothing changes.
As far as 2001 is concerned it’s basicly highly advanced Starfish Aliens. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StarfishAliens Which seems like the most likely contact with extraterrestrials we will see. Motivation and reasoning are not going to be obvious, is this some major effort on part of their civilization or some 6th graders high school science project we just don’t know.
Again though, the Aliens are mostly irrelevant, it’s HAL human relations that’s driving things.
Maybe some people wouldn't consider it strictly sci-fi but I really enjoyed "Upstream Color" and reading what Carruth was planning to create with "A Topiary" I really hope someone gives him the funding and creative control to complete a project on the scale of that.
Its a student film. Its a classic frat-house set in space with minor gems. One guy has a home-made jamjar and scraps piano he plays to keep himself sane. the "rimmer" annoying character keeps a very sad video diary. There is a talking bomb. the Captain is semi-alive in cryo-storage.
The thing with movies like interstellar and inception is that they're ultimately action/romance movies set in a sci fi context. 2001 is the only movie that I know of which is exclusively about themes such as human evolution, alien life, etc... and dispensing of all "hollywood fluff". I'm not trying to diss interstellar or inception (I loved both of them), but they're not of the same caliber as 2001.
In my opinion, 2001 feels cold, empty, and sterile when compared to Solaris by Tarkovsky. They both use space travel to touch on themes about the human experience, but Solaris is miles ahead dealing with human psyche.
Kubrick didn't think much of humanity, it's pretty clear in 2001 and in all his movies. His gaze is naturalistic: individuals are struggling for power and sex, sometimes they climb hierarchies through cunning and violence, sometimes they fall. He didn't seem to be that heavily interested in the human psyche.
On the other hand, 2001 is precisely a movie about humans trying to transcend themselves by suppressing anything emotional about them and exhalting pure reason- this is also a factor for the sterile appearance of the movie.
Sunshine by Danny Boyle dealt with human extinction, although the focus was on reigniting the sun instead of colonizing planets. The cinematography is beautiful and it gets into some heavy themes.
Exactly, Interstellar is good. The setting is a backdrop, but it's not a bad backdrop at all. In fact, I like how sci-fi and colonization of the solar system is made to look normal, it might give future generations a feeling of "of course we are going there". While it being a good love story in its own right.
Maybe I should try the book. I like me some good sci-fi (the Hyperion series is probably my favorite read-wise). I've never gotten through the 2001 movie. Several goes at it. I literally pass out asleep. Maybe I need to try a morning viewing. I think of movies as entertainment. Trying to watch this one has become a chore.
The book is essentially the same story but has a lot more description of what is going on. It'll certainly make sense, even if it isn't a page-turner suspense.
More generally, literary critics distinguish between 'show' (reader has to figure things out) and 'tell' (author makes things very obvious) modes of writing [0]. Show and Tell styles also appear in film making. Obviously the film and the book are in different media, but I think it's fair to say that the film 2001 is totally at the 'show' end of the spectrum while the book is mostly 'tell' (in common with a lot of Clarke's writing).
I'm in a somewhat similar boat to you -- I find the movie a bit too tedious. I've seen it thrice, and enjoy specific sections of it, but it just doesn't do anything for me. I think it may be because I left it until too late to watch it, and by then I'd already encountered a LOT of 2001-influenced sci-fi. By which time, very few of the concepts or examinations within the movie struck a chord inside of me.
Having said that, I REALLY liked the book, and would recommend that you give it go!
(p.s.: it's BS that you got downvoted for stating a contrary opinion in a measured, reasonable manner -- hopefully my upvote cancels out the haters!)
This will annoy a lot of people, but: turn on the subtitles and turn up the speed. Large sections of it can be zoomed through at 4x or 8x speed, returning to normal once people are talking.
Large ares of it are basically "wow factor" shots which looked really impressive in 1968 and lack a lot of that to present-day viewers. Sometimes it feels more like an agonisingly slow pan across the concept art.
For the last part of the movie, sure, speed through.
In the early part, the slow pace of the journey into space heightens the sense of isolation. It's something a modern movie couldn't get away with, and is a unique part of 2001 that you should really experience.
I'm in my late-30s but I think I'm simply to young to appreciate the impact of the space imagery in '2001' because I grew up post-Voyager and came of age in the post-Hubble world. I'm a huge fan of Kubrick and I'm highly tolerant of slow pacing but '2001' just never really grabbed me.
I was enraged at Gravity's rendering of space, which at the opposite extreme of 2001's: a crowded backyard playground, with plenty of traffic and people wandering around and having a great time.
I believe space is black, silent, and immobile- though this might be just the lasting imprinting of 2001. I doubt you'd see anything resembling Hubble images up there.
I actually enjoyed Gravity. But it was also the first example I thought of where something like 2001's long journey could have enhanced the feeling of how far they were from rescue.
This way of thinking is common, but you're missing out. There is an entire world out there where movies are art and they can be as perspective-changing as a good book.
I never saw the film, but the book is great. A neat fact is that Arthur C Clark, and Stanley Kubrick wrote the book and the film at the same time. There are actually 4 or 5 books, and they're all pretty good.
I had to learn a little about what went on behind the scenes to appreciate it. Once I saw the making of the ship models, watching the camera pan across one for an hour wasn't as boring.
I loved Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". I know it's not everyone's favorite movie but I keep thinking about it "in a deep manner" (for lack of a better phrase) from time to time, it makes me question my essence as a human being: "Would I be able to love a robot child? Yes, I would, wouldn't I? Or would I? I know I should, robots like the ones presented in the movie are just like humans, I should love them the same, if not more" and stuff like that.
Being originally a Kubrick's project, I wondered sometimes about what Kubrick saw in it, and what's the kubrickian theme under the, well, cartload of saccharine that Spielberg threw on it.
A vague possibility is that the story is about a machine that is programmed to require love, and because of that desperately searches for someone to love it until- and that's the punchline- aliens come and build a machine for it that finally wants to love it, so they're both mechanically happy. I can picture Kubrick cynically grinning at the idea.
The aliens are not actually aliens though, they are robots which have survived after humans went extinct, and they recognize the boy as an ancient ancestor of their kind.
A lot of people hate that film, but I liked it. It got me in to the books, and I think it's a fine scifi film.. though I wouldn't mention it in the same breath as 2001.
Try "alternative edition redux" -a fan recut the thing and made ... a really good movie out of it. Unlike the official cuts, you don't need to have read the book first.
To me, "Solyaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky comes close, even though the sweep is much more limited when compared to 2001.
And let's also not forget the greatest sci-fi movie never made, Jodorowski's attempt at "Dune". Even artifacts from that aborted attempt are iconic, like the Harkonnen chair:
Tarkovsky's my favorite director, but I really did not like Solaris. For me, Tarkovsky's Stalker is the infinitely better film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.
There are many of them. they are not made by the US film industry. Check out "Mr. Nobody", check out "The Congress", "Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind"... come on now, these are masterworks.
I loved Mr Nobody as a teenager, and I still think the overall concept is great, but when I watch as an adult, I can't help but cringe at a lot of the scenes. the acting is just so overwrought. maybe I've watched it too many times.
I always wondered why Franco has such a bad rep. I'm not really knowledgeable about the Spanish civil war but it seems he prevented Spain from becoming a Stalinist totalitarian country, which is a good thing in my book.
I mean no doubt he was a brutal dictator but in the grand scheme of things he was by far the lesser of two evils.
Edit: also I think your comparison of the American prison system and the gulag to be rather ridiculous. Afaik, american prisoners aren't worked to death in arctic conditions.
It was not all that clear at the time that communism would become as bad as it turned out almost everywhere it was tried.
Edit: downvoted, but I think this is objectively true. The worst atrocities hadn't happen yet in the 1930's. Hindsight is 20 20. A lot of people drew on older ideals from the French revolution which we still celebrate today, not the least in the US. (Do you really think the blood of tyrants can be spillt without collateral damage?)
If you wonder about Franco's bad rep, why don't you actually check it out, instead of challenging people to prove the evil of fascist to you from first principle, and claiming their virtue if they don't.
What is your professed naïveté supposed to accomplish, except to serve as propaganda for a universally abhorred fascist while simultaneously retaining your option to claim ignorance when challenged?
It wasn't actually a fascist regime (the Falangists were brought under political control by Franco); it was a standard issue military dictatorship, encompassing many right wing tendencies. Including things most English speakers would consider bonkers, like Carlism, which was a movement to install ... some other guy (from a slightly different branch of the Bourbon family) on the Spanish throne. Carlism was arguably more of a political force than the Falange (and still is) -they had just fought a vicious civil war over this a hundred odd years back.
Franco also wasn't and isn't universally abhorred; many Spaniards still admire Franco for whatever reasons, and there are large monuments and contemporary political rallies by fairly ordinary people honoring his memory.
Anyway, it's fascinating history and current events; reading a book will serve you better than ... expressing sentiments.
It is as much not a fascist regime as Hitler's wasn't, in that you can argue academically that there are better terms to describe it than "fascist". Nonetheless, you can clearly identify a set of characteristics that Franco's Spain has in common with fascist ideology, therefore you can call it fascist (among other terms that some argue are more descriptive).
Franco also wasn't and isn't universally abhorred;
Over 50% of Russians say they miss the Soviet regime and would prefer it to the current autocracy. What are we to conclude from that, according to you?
reading a book will serve you better than ... expressing sentiments.
Unless you consider 'fascism' to be "stuff adrepd don't like," Franco's system of government was not fascist. The Falange, a movement eventually coopted into Francoism, was the local fascist contingent, and they weren't super popular. As I stated above, giving a mini lesson on Spanish mid 20th century history; reading a book will serve you better than point and sputter. Please go read a book and keep your point and sputter to yourself.
"Franco also wasn't and isn't universally abhorred; many Spaniards still admire Franco for whatever reasons, and there are large monuments and contemporary political rallies by fairly ordinary people honoring his memory."
Many Germans still admire Hitler, many Russians still admire Stalin, and many Chinese still admire Mao.
In Mongolia, Ghenghis Khan is admired as a great leader of their nation, and the negative things said of him are considered to be exaggerations or lies made up the people he fought with.
It seems no matter what a dictator does, or how many atrocities he commits, there'll always be people that admire and defend him.
Your point being? Point and sputter isn't much of an argument, even with great goblins like the ones you mention above.
Franco by any sane measure, was a much lesser goblin. As was his next door neighbor Salazar. For their times, and particularly considering their situations, they were fairly reasonable leaders. Which is probably why they were integrated into NATO.
Which is probably why they were integrated into NATO.
They were integrated into NATO for the same reason that Fulgêncio Batista was propped up by the US, or the Iranian Shah, or the guy that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz. That reason is: the US benefited economically and militarily from that situation, and any other considerations (moral, ethical, the well-being of the people, whether it was democratic) simply did not enter the equation one way or the other. Who cares if Arbenz was democratically elected and his land reforms lifted millions out of poverty, the United Fruit Company was making less money for their owners after some inhumane exploitation was outlawed so in comes the US coup, etc etc.
You simply cannot argue morality or democracy when discussing this.
I simply can argue morality when discussing this, actually, and just did. Again, point and sputter isn't an argument, and your argument will appear absurd in a few decades, as "point and sputter" at Napoleon was among Victorian gentlemen in the UK.
I didn't say anything about democracy, and confounding this word with the word "morality" is pretty ... questionable. That was one of the points that Solzhenitsyn made very well; go read his speech to Harvard.
The US picked Franco as an Ally, yes, because it served US interests. The US also allied with a lot of unsavory spanish speaking dictators in latin america; mostly for the same reason -they saw generalissimo types as a lesser evil to communist revolutionaries. All things considered, it was a reasonable thing to do. Communist body counts were considerably higher than all of these put together.
The political situation in western Europe in the 1930s was explosive, specially so in Spain. On the one hand there was the then quite new Soviet Union stoking unrest in a, by contemporary standards, shockingly poor, unhealthy and exploited working and peasant class. On the other hand, you had much of the rest of society scared out of their wits by the very real prospect of revolution at their doorstep, and more than willing to support and make do with a strongman that, first and foremost, promised to crush the communists. Either side would have crushed the other if victorious.
I recommend anyone to read good books about the Spanish Civil War (like for instance Hugh Thomas' very readable history) to understand the huge polarization of both extremes, the violence, and how those in the middle where totally swept aside. I doubt that the only possible outcome, given those conditions, could have been but one side exterminating the other, either the left or the right.
Our world is, fortunately, very different. Of late, given an increasing political polarization and rise of populism, comparisons have been made with the 1930s, but if you start investigating you will realize that current conditions are nowhere near as bad.
I don't know where you are from, and how familiar you are with European politics, but modern euro-socialism is much closer to pure capitalism than anything the stalinists would have created in Spain.
I strongly dislike Franco, and I am aware that thanking him for preventing a stalinist Spain may turn heads these days. But the fact is that this is exactly what the West thought at the time. Franco became a pariah right after World War II as the only remaining leader that had supported Hitler. However, as soon as the reality of the Cold War kicked it, all that was forgotten, and western leaders (and specially the USA) started toasting him, indeed, as the man who stopped communism in a country in a very strategic position.
I hardly think there was a unified Western view at the time (perhaps amongst governments but not individuals). George Orwell fought in Spain against Franco's troops in an anarchist unit (POUM) and he hated Stalinism as strongly as anyone.
His Homage to Catalonia is a superb account of his time in Spain (and just how chaotic things were politically):
Sure, I meant across decision makers. Realpolitik (the rest is propaganda).
Before and in the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, when the great Orwell fought, the left in Spain was extremely atomized: there were the anarchist (very active in the beginning), the socialists, the communists (actually a minority initially), and many splinter groups (like POUM). But, just like an equally varied right swiftly unified under Franco, so did the left, more slowly, under the "oficial" communist faction, which, although it decided to be mostly pragmatic until the war had been won, fought some of the other leftists as fiercely as it fought the right.
Yes, that was one factor for sure. But it was actually really complicated, quite mind boggling in fact. The thing is that, in spite of Stalin being pretty much the only effective external support the Spanish republic had, the communists inside Spain were pretty much a marginal group when the war started, and had to resort to all kinds of intrigues to get support from both the population and the, still, official government, and also to had get rid of rival groups, like the ones you mentioned.
Yeah - I read Homage to Catalonia again recently - I have read The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor a while back but as you say, it is quite complex - I need to read it again!
He's a writer, not an historian. Thus his non-fiction works do not have to be read like history books, more like journalistic opinion pieces. In that sense, the factual errors on this book are mostly irrelevant, and the work is still very interesting and insightful.
Indeed. There's not a history book that is without some critique or alternative theories, anyway. Solzhenitsyn spent a long time compiling the information he presents in Two Hundred Years Together (1120 pages in the original Russian)[1], and I would like to read a professional translation of the entire work more than the small excerpt that's in The Solzhenitsyn Reader.
But if it is not factual, what makes it insightful? If you're looking for insights, aren't you better off reading an actual history, rather than the text of an anti-semitic, nationalist, Putin apologist?
Are there factual errors in it? I haven't seen any actual valid criticism of the factual content of the book, just "its antisemitic ban it don't let anyone read it!".
I assume that most books must contain some false sentences. They are certainly worrying in a serious scholarly work, but not in the case of "Two Hundred Years Together", which is an informal essay that nobody is expected to use as the ultimate reference on historical facts.
I don't understand. You assume the book is wrong but that doesn't matter because it isn't serious? It is serious, and I am not aware of anything incorrect in it. The criticism is not its accuracy, it is that it says things you're not allowed to say.
It is certainly inaccurate (thus, false) in some concrete numbers. Most famously, it says that in the first Soviet government almost all of the ministers were jewish people; in fact it was less than a half of them who were jewish.
I am not saying that the book is not serious. It gives a valuable personal perspective of important historical facts. But it should not be used as a source of factual data.
>Most famously, it says that in the first Soviet government almost all of the ministers were jewish people; in fact it was less than a half of them who were jewish.
I think you are confusing him with Putin, who actually said that. He said the cheka was mostly jewish. Which is correct.
It very much has many factual errors pointed out by historians several times since its publication. If you're truly looking for an objective account and not something to stoke emotions and tell you want you want to hear, I think you're better off reading an actual history.
I'm still really unconvinced by this whole "Russians influenced the election" narrative. I doubt a few articles written in poor English about how Hillary runs pedophile sex rings would have had a greater influence on the electorate than Hillary being actively endorsed by nearly every respectable establishment media outlet.
People really wanted to hate Hillary, and to some extent this was because she was endorsed so heavily by the media. So they latched onto every little thing that could be used against her.
There's really two parts to the populist wave: "establishment politics isn't delivering what we need" and "we must turn to what seems like a Man of the People". The first has some extremely valid points, the second has (mostly) been a total disaster.
I'm pretty sure Venezuela was (and still is) a democracy.
I think people tend to conflate liberalism (in the classical sense), and democracy. You can have undemocratic liberal states (the Austro-Hungarian empire was a good example).
Undemocratic liberal states only stay liberal for as long as suits wealthy elites. Venezuala is technically a democracy, but, as I said in another comment, you also need strong institutions for a functioning democracy. Venzuala has a weak court system and Maduro didn't allow opposition parties to take part in the 2017 presidential elections, so it's not exactly a model democracy.
Right, what I'm saying is that we should uphold objective standards rather than just saying independent journalists are generally more/less trustworthy than established ones.
Any examples that aren’t old enough to have finished high school by now? And were not a major public scandal, that cost the people involved their jobs?
Edit: of course it is up to individual judgement on a case by case basis, and there are instances were it is obvious that no other concrete implementation of an interface will be required. But otherwise, writing an interface is good practice because it helps safeguard against time consuming future refactoring.