On easy analogies
Submitted by infojunkie on Thu, 2006-10-12 21:03.
If religion is the opium of the masses, then communism is their heroin, capitalism their speed, and science their LSD!
reversing entropy, one bit at a time
Nice...
...but masses don't think that much about science anyway :).
Capitalism may be the cancer that needs heroin or morphine!
Where would agnosticism fall on the drugs spectrum?
The trouble with analogies...
...is that they're sensationalistic and hence inherently untrustworthy. When you said "Capitalism may be the cancer [...]" you used another analogy, one that reveals your strong disagreement with this particular ideology. That's precisely what Marx did, and my point can be put as a question: How deep can this analogy resist scrutiny? Because it's easy to come up with resounding statements such as those, and to orient them according to your opinion to gain the sympathy of the reader, but then it becomes a game of semantic wit and not a rational critique of the subject matter.
Hence the title of the post, which says: don't take analogies too seriously, lest you yourself become the victim of yet another illusion.
That's brilliant
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