I would hope so since that's what he was referring to. What worries me is that it took this long in the comments for someone to reference "Trusting Trust." That should have been the obvious problem from the end of the first sentence of the summary.

That is the most absurd characterization of Civil War Missouri I've ever heard. Missouri was the scene of the most intense internecine violence of the entire war. The state didn't secede, true, but the neighbors were murdering each other in their beds over it. I would not call that "how that whole "representative democracy" thing is supposed to work."

Do you always taste test your tears?

You do realize that those young'uns you deride aren't old enough to have had a phone last 3 years, right?

Bwahahahaha! Ahhahahahahaha! Oh ahahahaha!

That was a good one. Tell another.

Someone was clearly brain damaged by high school. MOST literature contains sex. Certainly nearly all of the good stuff. This is because most humans have sex in their lives. It makes it important in narratives about humans. Joyce's Ulysses includes a guy masturbating in the bushes while perving on a cripple and a vivid description of a rimjob. Gravity's Rainbow is basically a 760 page dick joke. The Sound and the Fury is all about how women's liberation (promiscuity in Faulkner's mind) affected Southern men. McCarthy's Child of God has graphic descriptions of necrophilia. Very few major novels since the 1950s have been vague about sex. Even before then it was almost always there (what did you think the entire conflict of The Sun Also Rises was, or Dorian Gray, or Whitman's poetry?), it just wasn't as explicit or graphic.

Speaking of bad writing...

Swamp gas refracting the light from Venus? Definitely not a supernova though. Those last much longer than a second. One that flashed that brilliantly would have lasted a long while and would have been widely reported. For comparison, SN 1054, which formed the Crab Nebula, was visible to the eye for two years (according to Chinese records).

Do you mean an airburst over a city like this ?

That was Argentina. Poor Buenos Aires.

But then who will scrutinize the scrutinizer of the scrutinized?

It's scrutiny all the way down!

Of course they can. Have you never heard of a cornered market? If the same conglomerate owns all grocery stores in my city, then I can do business with them or starve. Worse, if all the providers in an area collude against their customers (and they frequently do) they don't even need to own all of it themselves.

Economic violence is no different than physical violence.

Or did you think the railroad owners got rich through being better than their competitors?

Many of his conclusions (vis-a-vis the outcome of industrialisation) ARE good. It's his solutions to those conclusions that haven't worked out so well (class consciousness isn't a thing, and it never will be as long as our social intelligence is limited by our primate brains).

Ahahahaha! Ahahahaha!

Who in the fuck do you think decides what is in those ebooks and learning apps? Who do you think approves the Pearson rep's scripted answers?

Only because you don't know anything about American history. The native-born population has ALWAYS been anti-immigrant, all the way back to the Revolutionary War. It's just that the government is more efficiently reflecting that prejudice than it has at most times in the past.