That last post — about warning Trump not to use the criminal trial to prove the 2020 election was stolen — got me exploring the general subject of warnings...

... exploring with a robot.

Me: "What are some examples in literature of a person being told not to go somewhere, as if it would be dangerous, when in fact it would be beneficial to that person to do what he is being warned against? "

ChatGPT:

"There are a lot of movies about reading. I think there are a lot of people who consume movies that cater to their self-image as a reader of books."

"It's quite silly," I wrote in the comments to the post about the trailer for the high-action, special-effects HBO movie based on "Fahrenheit 451." My comment was inspired by a comment from Ron Winkleheimer:

I'm surprised that HBO made this movie since the people in charge are all leftists. I suppose they are still flattering themselves about being the side that's in favor of knowledge and learning and free speech and all that.

What are the movies about reading that cater to this vanity I'm imagining exists?

Here's "25 best movies about books" (Stuff), but many of these are about writing books. The central character is a writer, not a reader. "Neverending Story" "The Princess Bride," "Fahrenheit 451," "Misery"... those fit my search.

Here's "When movie characters read books." For example, the guy in "Friends with Kids" reads "Cod," so, yeah, you get it: That guy! The guy who reads "Cod." Matilda reads "Moby-Dick." You know what that means!

Anyway... it's a hypothesis. Something else reading-related that I was reading this morning is "RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Fun, Friends, Maybe More" (New York Magazine):

[A] fun and playfully shady conversation between several of the queens has Asia O’Hara reading Vixen for wearing someone else’s wig during last week’s Best Drag runway. It’s an understandable thing to pick at, and the Vixen responds good-naturedly about it. Until Aquaria butts in.

“Can we talk about how your best drag is someone else’s wig, though? That’s confusing.” Game over. As the Vixen prepares to go fully in on Aquaria in response, a spider crawls its way up someone’s tulle and wreaks total pandemonium* with its mere existence....

Boldface added. I had to look up "reading" in Urban Dictionary:

In gay culture, the act of pointing out a flaw in someone else (usually publicly and in front of them) and exaggerating it.

Gay guy 1: "Those shorts weren't made for you, honey. Look at that muffin top. More like a cupcake top!"

Gay guy 2: "Bitch, why are you reading me?

Also, "read":

To tell someone about themself, mostly used by gay black men.

"That was a read honey!"
"Don't do it hone[y], I will read your ass"

Great slang. Perfect!
___________________________

* Pandemonium — originally "The abode of all demons; hell, the infernal regions" (OED) — is now usually "Utter confusion, uproar; wild and noisy disorder; a tumult; chaos." Like this:

Some people love this new trailer for HBO's "Fahrenheit 451," but I think it perversely makes the argument against reading books.

If books are what the book "Fahrenheit 451" makes them out to be, then you should read the book "Fahrenheit 451." If you want a movie with maximum action and fire effects — which is what this trailer vigorously promotes — then you are evidence for the proposition that books are not longer essential to human life (or you are part of the redefinition of human life that excludes the reading of books).

From the 60th Anniversary edition of the book, with lots of introductory material:

How animal-expert cat owners justify letting their cats out to roam the neighborhood and kill songbirds.

Here's WaPo's "Cats are bird killers/These animal experts let theirs outside anyway." (Via Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.) It's not just about cats and birds. It's about the human mind and what I think is the single most pithy thing you can say about it: People believe what they want to believe. It's fascinating to see this process at work in such an elaborate, blatant context.

IN THE COMMENTS: David Begley said:

"People believe what they want to believe."

That insight was stated by Christian Bale in the movie, "American Hustle." Screenplay by David O.Russell.

That's really true in this election.

I'll bet "People believe what they want to believe" is said in a lot of movies. Kind of like "Let's get out of here," which we used to insist was said in every movie. Trying to figure out who first said "People believe what they want to believe" is like trying to find who first said "It takes one to know one" or "To each his own."

But I gave it a bit of a try and ended up on a page of quotes for the proposition "willful ignorance." It lets people "like" the quotes and the most-like one comes from Plato: "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

There's an Ayn Rand one for you Ayn Rand folks: "The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see." I like the Benjamin Franklin: "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."

Begley connected it to the election (as did I, to myself, writing the post), so let me feature the Isaac Asimov quote:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

And here's Ray Bradbury:

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

ADDED: That afraid-of-the-light quote isn't really from Plato. I thought it sounded un-Plato-y. Here's a list of things Plato didn't say.

"This election is about values. It's about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we want to build."

Says email I just received from Elizabeth Warren (the Harvard lawprof and candidate for one of the seats in the U.S. Senate that do not represent my state). The Democrats are fundraising. I don't give money (to any political cause), but I do get the email.

Mitt Romney and the Republicans believe in an America that says, "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own."

We believe in an America that pays it forward -- that puts the conditions in place so that the next kid can get ahead, and the kid after that, and the kid after that.

So that's how the Democrats are talking to each other right now. I thought you should know.

When did Romney ever say "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own"? And Obama just put out an ad attacking Romney for making a "false attack" by quoting something Obama said word for word.

But let's be fair. Warren doesn't say Romney said "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own," but that he believes in an America that says "I've got mine, and the rest of you are on your own." But when did America ever say that? Who's accused of thinking like that?

"There were other science fiction writers, and we loved them, just as there were baseball players besides Willie Mays and rock groups besides the Beatles..."

"... but we loved him best, and when I try to remember why, I have to conclude, proudly, that it wasn’t because his alien worlds were so magazine-cover thrilling, or his dystopian predictions so convincing, or his speculative inventions so original — they were, but plenty of others’ were too."

At the Bead Shop Café...

... you can string words into sentences.

(The photograph is from West Lafayette, Indiana — in part of a grand old place called Von's, which is mostly a bookstore, where I bought this book, which contains the sentence "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.")

"Put me in a room with a pad and a pencil and set me up against a hundred people with a hundred computers - I'll outcreate every goddamn sonofabitch in the room."

Said Ray Bradbury, in a 1998 interview, quoted in a new NYT op-ed, by the writer Tim Kreider, who says:

[Bradbury] opposed the kind of technology that deadened imagination, the modernity that would trash the past, the kind of intellectualism that tried to centrifuge out awe and beauty. He famously did not care to drive or fly, but he was a passionate proponent of space travel, not because of its practical benefits but because he saw it as the great spiritual endeavor of the age, our generation’s cathedral building, a bid for immortality among the stars.

His visions of a better world weren’t high-tech but archaic, bucolic. In “Fahrenheit,” Montag remembers “a farm he had visited when he was very young, one of the rare few times he had discovered that somewhere behind the seven veils of unreality, beyond the walls of parlors and the tin moat of the city, cows chewed cud and pigs sat in warm ponds at noon and dogs barked after white sheep on a hill.” His utopia isn’t some flying city or exotic planet but prewar, small-town America — specifically, Waukeagan, Ill., circa 1928, a town of porch swings and bandshells, dandelion wine stored up in cool cellars and fire balloons on the Fourth of July. His Martians are not alien like Heinlein’s or futuristically evolved like Welles’s but a premodern people akin to the ancient Egyptians or American Indians (or a boy’s idealized conception of them), our superiors not technologically but spiritually. He was, like most of my favorite artists, a misanthropic humanist.

That's nice. I respect the art and aesthetics. But back away from the government. Do not lay your hands on the people's money to pay for your nostalgic, utopian trips to Mars. Keep dreaming your dreams and penning your stories, but do not use tax money to make these things real. Trips to Mars belong in the same category with the high-speed rail.

Ray Bradbury has died.

He was 91.

Instapundit says: "People are mostly talking about The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, but I liked Dandelion Wine."

I think I was assigned "Fahrenheit 451" to read in high school, and I was impressed by it, but for some reason what I most remember of his is "The Veldt." Plot summary:

A family lives in a house with the latest technology. It is called the “Happylife Home” and its installation cost $30,000. The house is filled with machines that do everything for them from cooking meals, to clothing them, to rocking them to sleep. The two children, Peter and Wendy, become fascinated with the "nursery," a virtual reality room that is able to connect with the children telepathically to reproduce any place they imagine.

That was written in 1950, long before video games, etc.

The parents, George and Lydia, soon realize that there is something wrong with their way of life. George and Lydia are also perplexed that the nursery is stuck on an African setting, with lions in the distance, eating the dead carcass of what they assume to be an animal. There they also find recreations of their personal belongings. Wondering why their children are so concerned with this scene of death, they decide to call a psychologist.

The psychologist, David McClean, suggests they turn off the house and leave. The children, completely addicted to the nursery, beg their parents to let them have one last visit. The parents relent, and agree to let them spend a few more minutes there. When they come to the nursery to fetch the children, the children lock them in from the outside. George and Lydia look on as the lions begin to advance towards them. At that point, they realize that what the lions were eating in the distance was not an animal, but their own simulated remains.

The kids realized that the only way they could stay in their nursery is to get rid of their parents by locking George and Lydia in the nursery with the lions.

Don't take our video games away! Parents! Leave those kids alone!

"We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves."

Ray Bradbury talks about religion. Some of what he says makes some sense, and some, like that quote, makes no sense at all.

Oh, how I loathe, the use of the space program for inspirational purposes. (Like this.)

"When you gather together 100,000 people who are in love — that's pretty good, isn't it? — so many lovers in one place..."

"... they all love the same thing and you can feel the ambience of their love."

Ray Bradbury, at 1:25, at the linked audio.