Wow, my comment was removed for just a mild hint that Chinese communism isn’t free from corruption?

The Tragedy of the Commons was popularized by a man who was anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics, and it’s not good science. The good science on it was done by Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel-ish prize for fieldwork showing that various societies around the world had solved the issues of the governance of commons.

The thing is, Ostrom didn’t disprove it as a concept. She just proved that with the right norms and rules in place it doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse. IMO it’s not about capitalism or communism, it’s about population. A small number of people who all know each-other can negotiate an arrangement that everyone can agree to. But, once you have thousands or millions of people, and each user of the commons knows almost none of the other users, it’s different. At that point you need a government to set rules, and law enforcement to enforce those rules. That, of course, fails when the commons is something like the world’s atmosphere and there’s no worldwide government that can set and enforce rules.

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I’ve been through at least 5 different kinds of phone chargers over the years. Starting with the olde-fashioned coaxial power connector, then going to various versions of USB, and at least 2 kinds of Apple proprietary connectors. Standardizing on USB-C is great. I just hope that they’re able to update it in 10-20 years when USB-C is fully out of date.

I mostly agree with you, it’s just that historically governments have been really bad at producing some necessities of life.

I really wouldn’t want anybody other than a government providing clean drinking water. I think they’ve proven they’re great at that, and private industries just mess it up in various ways. OTOH, governments historically haven’t been very good at producing crops. It seems like every time a government wants to fully take over farming, the result is a famine. Having said that, farming subsidies, and programs where governments are guaranteed buyers of farmed stuff is pretty great.

It really pisses me off that some of the most right-wing, most anti-government people in the US are farmers, and farmers are absolutely supported by the government. There are certainly some flaws in the system. The corn subsidy being so high is ridiculous, and results in things like high fructose corn syrup being available nearly free, and so it’s in everything. OTOH, it’s thanks to government intervention that the US is absolutely secure when it comes to price shocks for food items. Almost everything is made domestically. And, while there can be quirks like egg prices being high (which again is due to unregulated / badly regulated monopolies) the overall system is very stable.

Housing is another thing that is iffy if it’s 100% government made. The awful apartment blocks of former soviet republics are an example of that. But, unregulated housing construction is even worse. This is one where you need to find some balance between fully capitalist and fully government run.

Mostly though, right now, the governments of the world just need to start cracking down on capitalist businesses that are harming the public. The EU is at least trying, but the results have been mixed. The US was starting to do something under Biden and then Trump took over and… wowza. I think the recent NYC election shows that the population is well to the left of the democratic party establishment, and that cracking down on big business could be a huge win in future elections.

Capitalism only works if it’s regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.

Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it’s regulating. You can’t have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.

A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we’ve come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn’t really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.

Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.

However, this is ultimately a matter of subjectivity, and I don’t think I’ve referred to LotR as the greatest fantasy story.

No, I don’t think you have. I just think that some people do. I think the hype around LotR makes kids go into reading it expecting it will be the best thing they ever read, and some come out of that disappointed.

I agree that Harry Potter is also massively overrated. If you ignore Rowling and her current issues, Harry Potter is a decent fantasy book for kids. But, it became this international phenomenon. I don’t know why.

As for A Song of Ice and Fire, I get that one more. He did things that most other fantasy authors didn’t. For example, he was willing to kill off characters in a way that almost nobody else does. That really raised the stakes because you could no longer assume the main character was untouchable. He also did something really interesting in the early books in that they were fantasy books, and there was all this talk about magic and gods and dragons… but for a long time there was nothing in the books that proved that magic really did exist. The dragons were all dead. The stark children had “dire wolves” but they weren’t magical wolves, they were just really big. People believed in magic and all these interesting gods, but there was no proof that anything supernatural was happening. I was actually disappointed when the later books revealed that magic was real, and that the gods seemed to exist (or at least there was supernatural stuff associated with worshipping / believing in gods). It would have been really interesting to have a full book series that was “fantasy” without the supernatural element.

Classical music is a bit different because it’s effectively frozen in time. They’re not introducing new instruments. They’re not using amplification for the most part. It’s like doing the same Shakespeare plays over and over again.

If there were a Beethoven today, he probably wouldn’t be composing classical music. He’d be doing popular music of some kind. In fact, the historical record suggests he would have been a keyboardist in a rock band.

For music, a better example might be Jimi Hendrix. He was an amazing musician and his approach completely shaped modern rock music. But, while his music was influential, are his songs the best rock songs of all time? I don’t think so, because other people have built on what he did and have taken it further.

Tom Bombadil is such a minor portion of the Shire, is that even something relevant to the narrative as a whole?

No, and that’s why a better author (or their editor) would have removed it.

Fantasy, specifically, has evolved over time through the introduction of power systems sure — does that make them inherently better than LotR?

Yes. Not just because of their “power systems”, but because the authors have used some of the ideas that Tolkien introduced, and told better stories with them, or introduced better characters. Or, because they lack some of Tolkien’s key weaknesses, like they’re able to write interesting 3-dimensional female characters. IMO the heavy lifting that Tolkien did is to introduce a world filled with all these various kinds of creatures that we all take for granted now: elves, dwarves, ents, orcs, etc.

He was probably the greatest fantasy writer of his time. But, he’s “of his time”. He unconsciously brings all kinds of biases and baggage into his writing that a reader in the 1950s wouldn’t even notice, but that become more apparent 75ish years later.

You simply cannot deny the level of effort that went into creating LotR on Tolkien’s part

Nor can you deny the amount of effort that went into The Room but that doesn’t mean it’s a great movie. LotR is a great book, but it’s not because Tolkien put a certain amount of effort into it.

But, is it overrated? There are 2 ways something can be overrated. Something can be bad and rated as being ok, and so it’s overrated. Or something can be good but rated as being the best in the world and so it’s overrated. I think LotR is in the second category as a fantasy story. As a foundation for fantasy literature, I don’t think it’s overrated because it introduced so many things that we just take for granted today. But merely as a book, looking at it through modern eyes, it is probably overrated. I think it’s great, but it’s no longer the best fantasy book ever written.

Yeah, there are some amazing episodes. TOS also has some amazing episodes. Offhand, I can’t think of anything since DS9 / Voyager that was that good. There were definitely some fun episodes, but nothing that I kept thinking about for a long time after they aired, like say Picard’s living an entire life in The Inner Light.

((Also funny about The Inner Light, is that I can’t think of that episode without thinking of the really awkward way that they had Patrick Stewart pretend to play the flute by having someone lie on the floor out of camera and pretend that his arms were Patrick Stewart’s arms.))

Robot Wars.

I don’t see what’s disturbing about that. As long as the bodies come from a legal, reputable source, what’s the big deal?

Star Trek is a difficult one. The oldest stuff is very dated, even TNG has some things that are very weird for a modern audience. But, some of the modern stuff is basically unwatchable.

Modern fantasy owners might be standing on the shoulders of giants, but to extend the metaphor, it means their heads are higher than those giants.

LOTR could be overrated as a piece of fantasy writing for a modern audience, even if it is absolutely key to establishing the modern fantasy genre. For me, LOTR was good, but it was unsatisfying in some ways. Like, Gandalf and Saruman were obviously powerful “wizards”, but what is it that they could do? How did their powers work? And there were characters like Tom Bombadil who were confusing and had me flipping pages.

I greatly respect Tolkien’s work. But, unlike some more modern authors, I don’t devour everything he wrote. For example, I absolutely couldn’t read the Silmarillion.

So, yeah, I can see how someone would say that LOTR is overrated, even if it was key to establishing an entire genre.

Man, Connections was such a good show. I gotta rewatch that sometime.

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You use another standard when looking at whether I’m lying.

Yes, I’m using your standard when looking at whether you’re lying, and I’ve determined you’re lying.

Now you’re lying about what I’m saying? Your standard for “lying” is that someone says something untrue and it’s hard to prove that they knew in advance it was untrue. So, clearly you’re a liar.

Apply my rules to both cases, and the media is lying

And so are you. Those are your rules. You chose them, and so now they apply to you.

Apply your rules in both cases, and the media isn’t lying, and neither am I

Apply my rules and we don’t know if the media is lying, but there’s no evidence to suggest that they knew that what they were saying is untrue, so it’s unreasonable to say they’re lying. As for you, who knows.

Your bias is so obvious

My bias? You’re the guy who claims the media is lying without any evidence that they knew what they were saying was wrong, and you insist that you can still call that lying. But, when that same standard is applied to you, you want to reject it. You want to have your cake and eat it too, liar.

You didn’t present evidence of lying, you presented evidence that what they reported ended up being untrue. That’s part of lying, and I don’t dispute that part. The key part is that they knew that what they were reporting was untrue and they reported it anyway. You’ve presented no evidence to support that.

So, based on your rules, I can say you’re a liar, because you’ve said some things that are not true, so I’m just going to assume that you know they’re untrue and you’re lying.

And there’s the double standard, plain as day. To call me a liar, you would need to prove not only that I said something false

No, your new standard is “vibes”. You have “vibes” that the media lies, so you get to call them liars. I’m appyling the same logic to what you say, liar.