The Madeleine & Anvi Gallery of Excellent Effortposts

[Oakvale]

I disapprove of renaming the GPG. The late, great Sam Spade should not be forgotten.

In any event, the GPG, like literally all the various Mines apart from the Comedy one has always been basically trash with the occasional pearl buried every couple of pages.

A good case in point is the truly awful Simple Truth or whatever mine/gallery/institute. No one will ever, ever read a good post in there and it exists only as a way to move an empty quote of agreement from the original thread to a zoo for sentences like "Republicans are bad". The Deluge should also be wiped out since any truly absurd or bad post is usually inherently funny and could thus fit in the Comedy mine.

[Oakvale]

I don't see what's excellent about that post. It's just the kind of rhetoric about Progress that Mikado's implicitly critiquing. "The mistakes of the past", "leave things broken", etc.

[Oakvale]

I don't see what's excellent about that post. It's just the kind of rhetoric about Progress that Mikado's implicitly critiquing. "The mistakes of the past", "leave things broken", etc.

So no mistakes were ever made in the past and nothing is broken?

Of course not, but the problem I have (and I don't know if Mikado shares this) is that Progress implies a continuum with barbarianism at one end and utopian supermen at the other. Taken to its extreme that thinking gave us the USSR and fascism. And what follows from this is that a dogmatic notion of Progress implies inevitably and permanence, which is obviously absurd. I think abolishing segregation and the invention of birth control were good things, but I don't think they form part of a steady march towards a "better world". This kind of atheist religious thinking is neatly summarised in that quote about the "arc of history bending towards justice" or whatever. I don't think there's any reason to believe that's the case.

[Oakvale]

I don't see what's excellent about that post. It's just the kind of rhetoric about Progress that Mikado's implicitly critiquing. "The mistakes of the past", "leave things broken", etc.

So no mistakes were ever made in the past and nothing is broken?

Of course not, but the problem I have (and I don't know if Mikado shares this) is that Progress implies a continuum with barbarianism at one end and utopian supermen at the other. Taken to its extreme that thinking gave us the USSR and fascism. And what follows from this is that a dogmatic notion of Progress implies inevitably and permanence, which is obviously absurd. I think abolishing segregation and the invention of birth control were good things, but I don't think they form part of a steady march towards a "better world". This kind of atheist religious thinking is neatly summarised in that quote about the "arc of history bending towards justice" or whatever. I don't think there's any reason to believe that's the case.

You are the one who made the "rhetoric of Progress" into a strawman. Train's post was merely an apt rebuttal of the opposite extreme, which Mikado is increasingly espousing in his recent remarks.

But anyway, this thread isn't for arguing, so if you want to respond let's move to the thread where that post was from.

This is why these threads are a bad idea. A post quoted here is forever Good or Excellent and any debate will be neutered.