"eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed."

Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.

Which is odd, because it still hasn't actually ended in africa....

Why is that odd? Slavery is explicitly legal for felons in america right now. We don't typically compare our principles against the worst of history, we try to be better than that.

You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe. Semiotics and the post-structuralists then took this further. While today people might talk of "structural racism", the similarity to the term "structuralism" is merely coincidental, through sure, one might try to apply the idea there, too.

I feel like I didn't know anything more by the end of the comment then at the start.

Can you word it again but more clearly?

It currently reads like a signal of what you have memorised, rather than an effort to increase the knowledge of the reader.

Structuralism can mean different things based on the context, I think the post you're replying to is meaning Structuralism in the philosophical context, but I think the post they're replying to is meaning it in the literary context (which derives from the philosophical), while the author of the post you're replying to seems to think they(the original poster) are somehow referring to structural Racism, which that interpretation of the primary poster does not make sense to me (hence my saying I think they mean Literary structuralism)

So structuralism in literary theory is that the structure of a text is the important thing which can end up being a lot like those articles you see every now and then "There are only 10 basic plots in the world, here they are" or some stuff like that (I obviously say this as someone who does not much care for structuralism so take my words with a giant grain of salt)

on edit: clarification

> You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly.

The first sentence is the important part. "Structuralism" is in no way related to "structural" or "institutional" racism. "Structuralism" is what the next sentences are describing, and it doesn't matter if you understand them; they were probably added as ample evidence that the first sentence was true, and possibly as stuff to google if you're interested in a subject completely unrelated to this discussion about the article.

Structuralism is some French theories about how creative writing should be structured.

> no consensus that Jesus is divine, or about the nature of the divinity ascribed to him, even after the declaration in 325 of the Nicene Creed

Which shouldn’t be surprising, because by 325 CE (and really, by 100 CE) Christianity had been around long enough for groups to take it in all kinds of directions, just like some Asian or African peoples have created new religions that are ostensibly Christian but preserve little of the Christianity originally introduced by colonial powers. In my own academic field, I deal a lot with third-century Manichaeism, where it is obvious how popular preachers could repurpose existing monotheistic religions into something that bore little resemblance to them.

> This NPR interview with a former Evangelical…

You really ought to state plainly in your post that this is Bart Ehrman. While he is a prominent scholar, even researchers of early Christianity who are not themselves Christians take issue with some of his claims.

People often consider the 2000 X-Men film to kick off the explosion of superhero films in the new millennium, and that was pre-September 11, so I’m not sure that correlation is causation here. Moreover, a lot of European artists in the early–mid 1960s remarked how superheroes were oddly prominent in American pop culture, and at that point the USA was still on top of the world and hadn’t been shamed by Vietnam.

"one of the few human characteristics that hasn't been used to justify discriminations"

Of course it has. That notions like “Napoleon complex” circulate in pop culture, suggests that society broadly considers short-statured people to be somehow disadvantaged and, moreover, it can be funny when the short-statured kick against the pricks. Also, the demand that a suitable male partner ought to be over six feet tall, is absolutely widespread, both in match-seeking profiles on online-dating platforms and in dating fora where women give advice to each other. (Or, if you want to reverse the sexes, Truffaut’s gag in Baisers volés about dating a tall girl, wouldn’t work if people broadly didn’t feel that there was something weird about this.)

Romania dropped several zeros in 2005, so 1,000,000 became 100. As someone who was around at that time, I still tend to think of prices in the old system, which makes me look ridiculous to younger people and even most of my same-age peers.

Albania dropped a single zero way back in the mid-20th century, and yet even generations born long after that still think of prices in the old system. The first time I went to Albania, I was paranoid and made a scene in shops, thinking every shopkeeper was trying to rip me, a foreigner, off by quoting a price an order of magnitude higher. My face was red when someone finally explained how the country works.

"the whole fucking point of leisure activities is to escape from the hellscape that is life and reality"

I get that you don’t like woke, but that is too blanket a claim. There has just been too much popular literature across America and Europe that has directly dealt with dire social and political trends of the day. Even when it comes to the issue of American race relations and the impact of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the all-time bestselling books of the 19th century, so fiction readers clearly weren’t interested only in escape.

It has been years since I read the Sea of Fertility, but I remember one Western scholar of Japan claiming that the fourth volume was a shoddy work compared to the previous three, written hastily as Mishima was preparing for his death. Since the English version didn’t obviously strike me as so flawed, I wondered if the translator had done some rescue work. Sadly, I’ll probably never be able to read the book in its original Japanese.

I saw nothing wrong with the fourth book -- and I preferred it to the first, which was perhaps a little bit too saccharine and tinged with nostalgia for a lost world, and the third, which was a little bit too sedate. (Especially after the wild vitality of the second.)

Public opinion turned on Mishima after his death. Westerners, by and large, took offense at his final actions. The Japanese found it embarrassing and endeavored to forget all about it. I'd venture a guess that your critic could be influenced by feelings that have nothing to do with the book as a thing in itself.

The primary complaint I have seen about Murakami in internet books forums, is how repetitive his writing ultimately became. His treatment of women that strikes many as problematic, is just one of the things that get repeated.