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    Cover of The butter battle book

    The butter battle book

    Dr. Seuss · 1984

    Engaged in a long-running battle, the Yooks and the Zooks develop more and more sophisticated weaponry as they attempt to outdo each other.

    Fiction & Literature
    Open LibraryAmazon
    Stats for nerds
    5recommend
    9mentions
    9people
    2014–2023years
    56% recommend44% neutral

    Mentions per year

    2014201520162017201820192020202120222023

    What Hacker News says

    1. jrflowersDec 2023
      The Butter Battle Book
      thread
    2. claudiulodroApr 2022
      I think The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss covers this topic pretty well, as well as the one-sentence street book "never bring a knife to a gun fight".
      thread
    3. jancsikaFeb 2022
      You didn't take the effort to explain the relevance.

      E.g., you could have said that you agree with the message but that you didn't want this piece to stand as a kind of Dr. Seuss image rehabilitation project that serves partly to whitewash his legacy in the interests of his current estate holders.

      On the other hand, you could merely be trolling in an attempt to derail the topic of the book.

      I like to keep track of functional equivalencies in cases like this. So if for whatever reason someone doesn't want to discuss the fantastic Butter Battle Book, we could just as easily discuss H. Bruce Franklin's non-fiction War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. He traces weapons dev from Robert Fulton hawking one of the first submarines all the way to nuclear weapons. (Plus it looks like it was updated to include 21st century weapons development.)

      Discuss!

      thread
    4. daltonlpJan 2018
      Some fun facts and thoughts:

      - Seuss sought input on the book from his acquaintance, marine General Victor H. Krulak.

      - Like The Lorax, the story is structured as a tale from an older generation to a modern one, where the younger character is a stand-in for the reader.

      - As much as Seuss was against transparent moralizing, he delighted in obvious satire, and he wasn't afraid of being too on the nose. The Chief Yookeroo, the back-room boys with their slide rules and spectacles, the butter-up band. The "Your yookery" sign. The slavic-named antagonist VanItch.

      - This book is interesting to compare with Seuss' editorial cartoons decades earlier, during WWII. At that time, he was producing unabashed anti-axis propaganda. During his lifetime, he had not just observed the kind of wartime fervor the Yooks subscribed to - he had been an active participant in it. http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/

      - Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of a challenge. The Butter Battle Book is a masterpiece.

      thread
    5. metaphormMar 2017
      - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

      - Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts

      - The Tao Te Ching

      - The Gateless Gate (Koun Yamada translation/editing)

      - The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson

      - The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

      - Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, The Bed of Procrustes) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

      - Iron John by Robert Bly

      - Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

      - The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman

      - Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

      - 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

      - Pharmakon by Dale Pendell

      - The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss

      - Greek Mythology by Edith Hamilton

      - The Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual by Gary Gygax et al

      - Introduction to Algorithms by Charles E. Leiserson, Clifford Stein, Ronald Rivest, and Thomas H. Cormen

      thread
    6. istoricalApr 2022
      You might be missing the point of those who disagree with your take, which is to call those who want to do different things on /r/Place than you 'trolls' or 'griefers' is itself just you projecting your own value judgment onto them, or acting as if you are the judge of what is right and wrong.

      From the perspective of someone who likes /r/theblackvoid, the pixel artists coloring over the void are just trolls and griefers.

      So the parent would refer to anyone 'complaining' about other users as unnecessarily angry. Whether it's a flag person mad that some other flag or art or void or whatever is drawing over their flag, or whether it's a void person mad at the flag person, or whether its a pixel artist mad at the flag person, it's all just people projecting their own preference as if its some moral imperative.

      Who are you to say that streamers shouldn't use their followers to leave a mark? Or that chaos and randomly placing pixels isn't a valid goal? You may personally find it really stupid and annoying. I personally find baseball really stupid and annoying. But I wouldn't refer to people who enjoy baseball as trolls.

      Dr. Seuss' butter battle is the perfect illustration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book

      thread

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