Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Pretty good biography. Spends a surprising amount of time on his parents and their drama involving a decade long divorce situation. (Ford's mom fled his biological father like a month after he was born.) I don't really have any kind of extended critique of this because it was pretty much exactly whatever you would expect. Gerald Ford was a pretty funny guy in private.



Moving onto the next Republican President, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea of this beyond the standard support of revisionist histories. I don't really think it executes though. For one thing, other than contemporary complaints it uses pretty much no sources that are critical of Reagan except to the extent that was he was too much of a peacemaker and didn't start wars and show strength enough. Despite the evidence the guy does a poor job building his case as well and he generally sees a conscious intentional strategy where a more reasonable explanation might be a general temperament. Despite Reagan's distaste for details in favor of big picture stuff he mostly insists that Reagan adhered to a detailed strategy and people like George Schulz went along with it when it seems more reasonable to believe Reagan suggested things and Schulz filled out the details. He swerves from this when Reagan runs into problems or opposition and ascribes it all to Reagan being hands off with the details and allowing subordinates to fill them in. That just makes it the typical explanation that only applies in favorable cases. Although the bulk of the book says otherwise, he does at one point admit that Carter started the "Reagan military recovery" and also changed policy on détente before Reagan even ran for President again. He obviously applies extremely over the top value to that military buildup. Generally his portrayal of Reagan made me decide fairly early on I was going to post something along with this but later on he actually referenced it and included the URL in his footnotes so now I have to post it:




Not very good. First of all, it's not really a history of corporations, it's eight brief chapter histories about specific corporations. Second, his definition of corporation, despite being a law professor, is so narrow as to write out most existing corporations in the world. To pick a recent famous example, Twitter is no longer a corporation by his definition. The examples are all less corporations than they are big (mostly publicly traded) businesses. He develops a strange notion that "in the past" corporations were created not for nasty profit but for "achieving the common good" which is pretty interesting stuff considering his first three historical examples are tax farmers and military-imperialists during the Roman Republic, a banking family that seized control of an Italian Republic they drove into the ground alongside their bank and the East India Company. (Despite the the first half of the book, he later claims multinationals didn't exist until after World War II. Later still he claims "start-ups" are an invention of the 21st Century.) Indeed much of the book is about state-granted monopolies not typical business corporations, he completely passes over the Congressional grants to the railroads as if it's some kind of "invisible hand" process to give away millions of acres of land, rights and other capital to monopolies that you then decry for being subsidized monopolies that can't compete but lobbies, bribes and enriches the executives personally. (He even describes the Union Pacific as a "good candidate for monopolization" and that "barons were hell-bent on turning the corporation into a monopoly" ignoring completely the history of its creation he just had outlined. He also didn't do a very good job investigating the ICC which he believes was anti-railroad despite being pushed by the railroads.) This leads of course to what you just know will be coming from your friendly neighborhood anarchist, he conceives of the state as not a corporation but some kind of mystical spiritual force emanating from god-like beings. His "common good" era of corporations was all achieving the goals of the state, namely seizing control of territory with warfare and lots of enslaving non-citizens. He makes much about adoo how corporate charters are granted by the state and laments that just anyone can create one now instead of outlining how it's for "the common good" before being approved as if this isn't just two corporations agreeing to keep out competition. This takes on its greatest form when he goes on for some length about how every corporation's goal is to establish a complete monopoly, something I hadn't considered before about the goals of his employers the corporations of Harvard and Texas A&M, while simply accepting the claim of a corporation that it owns a monopoly, including his desired monopoly on which corporations can exist, simply because it says it does. His conclusion even says that corporations should not be allowed to comment at all on politics as this is not in the interest of the "common good" (so much for Harvard, Texas A&M and the publisher, Hachette, of this book I suppose, Bill says his "common good" is more important than your "greed"), that should only be the domain of a single monopoly corporation with no customers or liabilities which should order all other corporations as to what is the common good they must pursue. Again, as a law professor, he says the NIRA was "ineffective" so Congress passed the Wagner Act, which while it's true it was ineffective (at least for the stated reasons) the real reason for the Wagner Act was because the NIRA was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Lastly, he's really paranoid about Mark Zuckerberg personally (despite, or perhaps because of, Facebook being one of his few non-state-monopoly chapters although he alleges it is an "obvious" monopoly because nobody uses Bing) and I can't support that kind of anti-robot prejudice in 2023.

[archnemesis]

I'm reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I really enjoyed the first book in the series and this is more of the same. Humans ruined earth and now they have the opportunity to ruin other planets.

[MJBarret]

Reread Death of a Salesman recently, hadn't read it in over two decades.

It was a physical, paperback copy.

And yet, shortly after finishing it, I start seeing notifications on my newsfeeds and social media about Wendell Pierce playing 'Willy Loman, live on stage'.

How do you know, internet? How do you know!?

[Besticus Maximus]

Finished The Stand on audible, by the GOAT narrator Grover Gardner yesterday. I read the stand when I was a kid and loved it, it remains one of my favourite big books and anyone disputing King's place in modern world literature can get fucked, imo. M-O-O-N, that spells fucked, everyone knows that, laws yes.

Now deciding what to follow up with. Maybe some more horror, but I feel like I've read basically everything good at this point.

[Switters]

An engrossing historical guidebook to all the wonders of the Deadfire Archipeligo.

[RetiredSkunk]

https://www.amazon.com/My-Antifa-Lover-Romance-Against/dp/B08FPB34LD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KL02IPEZOBRV&keywords=my+antifa+romance&qid=1685654439&sprefix=my+antifa+romanc%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-1

[Tucker's Law]

Props for the TNG reference with the title.

[Potato]

I'm still going through book 7 of The Expanse

[Snoopy]

Finished The Stand on audible, by the GOAT narrator Grover Gardner yesterday. I read the stand when I was a kid and loved it, it remains one of my favourite big books and anyone disputing King's place in modern world literature can get fucked, imo. M-O-O-N, that spells fucked, everyone knows that, laws yes.

Now deciding what to follow up with. Maybe some more horror, but I feel like I've read basically everything good at this point.

The main female character. I forget her name. Sally or Jessy or whatever. The one that fuckin fat guy fancies, is easily the worst character King has ever written. Genuinely fucking awful. Literally all she does is bitch, moan and cry. There is no other side to her. Also the end with Trashcan dude. Bullshit. Total cop out. That's always been King's problem. He cannot finish a story without resorting to cheap cop outs or total bullshit. Under The Dome being a prime example. Maybe Salem's Lot is the exception, but that's just modern Dracula so he doesn't deserve credit for that. I'm a fan. I like his books, but they're bullshit.

[chronovore]

The first three books in the Temeraire series are like $10 on US Kindle store, so I'm reading that. Had I noticed that it is Naomi Novik, of Uprooted and Spinning Silver, I would have been reading sooner.

[benji]

I quite recommend this, if only to anyone who thinks things have never been more dangerous in this country than now. My only real complaint is that he falls back too often on his comforting false narrative, that all this state terror was part of a conspiracy by "business" (that singular unified class with perfectly aligned interests at all times of course) to thwart democracy and the Progressive Era reforms. (At one point even saying that only "left-of-center" Americans have anything to fear about the military, or any part of the government, spying on civilians as if only they should/would oppose this.) The problem with this is that big business was the instigator of most of these state actions and the Progressives (Wilson especially) disdained the masses and believed the ultimate purpose of these reforms was to push the unwashed lower classes (the uneducated, Black, immigrants, most women, etc.) into their proper permanent caste so society could transition into an expert-led utopia free from "messy" competition and people who did not know their place. Rather than a distraction from their Progressive goals, the war was cheered because it was an opportunity to completely enact their vision, a singular national "body" organized by the elite to focus on a singular goal for all without any dissent or challenge. The Progressives would spend most of the post-war period lamenting the end of the totalitarian wartime state, masturbating fondly at the "great experiments" of fascism and communism for bringing back that "unity of purpose" while hoping for another crisis to bring it back so as to hopefully establish it permanently. Because he needs to instead continue his fantasy narrative about the people against the powerful or whatever he spends much of the book inventing an unnamed shadowy conspiracy to try and explain why the Progressives and labor unions and so on were so enthusiastic for war, openly racist/xenophobic and willing to immediately use organized violence (legal, illegal and semi-legal) against leftist/anarchist groups, anti-war protestors, anti-slavery protestors and anyone else (mostly minorities) who either refused the state's dictates or just got in the way of the central plan. Even as he spends nearly 300 pages on how Wilson personally oversaw and enjoyed becoming a tyrant and oppressing the country he struggles to not make excuses for him rather than accept this "Progressive paragon voice of the people's will" really was a totalitarian monster who despised liberal democracy and constitutional constraints on power. (You know, the things he wrote whole books about how much he hated and wanted to abolish so he could force everyone to adhere to his parochial utopian vision.) Some of the Goodreads reviews were quite angry at him for being politically biased, in the modern sense, but it was only really a couple pages in the conclusion when he mentions Trump and it was in the context of saying not to pretend these issues are lost to history. Best review accused him of "hating America" which is perfect for a book about how the state unleashed violence on people it accused of the same.

[Snoopy]

I started listening to the audiobook of They All Love Jack. It was written by the guy who made Withnail & I. So a book about Jack the Ripper by him sounded interesting. For some reason it's all about the Masons and it's really boring. I was expecting loads of blood and top hats, but nah. Just endless rambling about Masons. Anyway what I recommend is Jerusalem by Alan Moore. It's pretty mad as you would expect.

[chronovore]

1686547163[/url]']


I quite recommend this, if only to anyone who thinks things have never been more dangerous in this country than now. My only real complaint is that he falls back too often on his comforting false narrative, that all this state terror was part of a conspiracy by "business" (that singular unified class with perfectly aligned interests at all times of course) to thwart democracy and the Progressive Era reforms. (At one point even saying that only "left-of-center" Americans have anything to fear about the military, or any part of the government, spying on civilians as if only they should/would oppose this.) The problem with this is that big business was the instigator of most of these state actions and the Progressives (Wilson especially) disdained the masses and believed the ultimate purpose of these reforms was to push the unwashed lower classes (the uneducated, Black, immigrants, most women, etc.) into their proper permanent caste so society could transition into an expert-led utopia free from "messy" competition and people who did not know their place. Rather than a distraction from their Progressive goals, the war was cheered because it was an opportunity to completely enact their vision, a singular national "body" organized by the elite to focus on a singular goal for all without any dissent or challenge. The Progressives would spend most of the post-war period lamenting the end of the totalitarian wartime state, masturbating fondly at the "great experiments" of fascism and communism for bringing back that "unity of purpose" while hoping for another crisis to bring it back so as to hopefully establish it permanently. Because he needs to instead continue his fantasy narrative about the people against the powerful or whatever he spends much of the book inventing an unnamed shadowy conspiracy to try and explain why the Progressives and labor unions and so on were so enthusiastic for war, openly racist/xenophobic and willing to immediately use organized violence (legal, illegal and semi-legal) against leftist/anarchist groups, anti-war protestors, anti-slavery protestors and anyone else (mostly minorities) who either refused the state's dictates or just got in the way of the central plan. Even as he spends nearly 300 pages on how Wilson personally oversaw and enjoyed becoming a tyrant and oppressing the country he struggles to not make excuses for him rather than accept this "Progressive paragon voice of the people's will" really was a totalitarian monster who despised liberal democracy and constitutional constraints on power. (You know, the things he wrote whole books about how much he hated and wanted to abolish so he could force everyone to adhere to his parochial utopian vision.) Some of the Goodreads reviews were quite angry at him for being politically biased, in the modern sense, but it was only really a couple pages in the conclusion when he mentions Trump and it was in the context of saying not to pretend these issues are lost to history. Best review accused him of "hating America" which is perfect for a book about how the state unleashed violence on people it accused of the same.

I love you but please use carriage returns now and then.

[Potato]

Finally finished Persepolis Rising (The Expanse book 7).

I was really concerned that I wasn't going to enjoy it after the first few chapters. Felt like a retread of themes that had already been covered in earlier books.

Once it settled into its groove though, things got very good.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

Taking Holden off the board allowed the supporting characters some much-needed room to breathe and develop enough to keep me interested. I don't think I could have handled 3 more books of Mary Sue Holden solving the universe's problems with his annoying virtue.

Don't get me wrong, it's been entertaining enough, but I wasn't prepared for these 3 books to be more of the same, which is part of the reason it's taken me so long to get to them.

[benji]

I love you but please use carriage returns now and then.

But then it would be readable even with the extended digressions and asides!

[benji]

I liked this. Basically, when he started out as President Washington didn't have a cabinet. The British Cabinet was hated in the U.S. so the idea of recreating it was a non-starter. Overtime, Washington tried alternatives and he hated them all and decided to recreate the kind of advisory body he had as a general. One of the biggest was he took the "advise and consent" of the Senate literally and went there about a foreign policy issue, and they had nothing to say and decided to refer his questions he had sent weeks before appearing to a committee they'd form after he left. Washington then decided to never physically visit Congress again. So the entire reason that clause of the Constitution means nothing more than "Senate votes yes or no" is because the first Senators were a bunch of lazy idiots.



These two have somewhat of the same premise though they go about it in very different ways, the question is essentially when did Americans start thinking of America as one unified thing rather than a bunch of joined states. The first book offers one choice of answer (World War I more or less), the second book completely ignores the question it posed.

The first book is more of a set of biographies of historians who overlapped and had theories about American's historical purpose. Since I like that kind of thing I liked this well enough, it somewhat helped that the historian who sounded like the biggest jerk (and also the biggest racist) kept having all kinds of problems and failures in his life from his own doings. Although the author didn't seem to notice what I liked about the end is how every historian basically got it wrong. All their theories of what America means to Americans and how they would think about America was completely and utterly off. And I have to give absolute props to the author because unlike almost everyone else ever he notes that Woodrow Wilson's PhD was basically fraudulent and all his academic research was similar. A few errors here and there some which might just be typos, only real serious one was that he spends time talking about how one work was influential to the leaders of Confederacy but it was written years after the Civil War, so while I can't pronounce on how influential it was I can say I don't think it was that influential.

Second book is weird in more ways than just ignoring its own premise and never developing a thesis of any kind. The subtitle purports to be about Daniel Webster but a condensed biography is maybe a third of the book and his "nationalist idea" is never even described other than his own words where he says the Constitution should be paramount. The bulk of the book is just an overview of historical events which is fine enough and I enjoyed reading it but something I could get from Wikipedia. And Wikipedia would be better because it wouldn't try to connect events from two hundred years ago to being exacting parallels of Donald Trump who the author seems to see everywhere. (I've since discovered that he posts about his Trump visions regularly in strange formats to zero likes on Twitter.) Nor would Wikipedia digress by sharing the plots of a bunch of 1850's novels including over two pages about Moby Dick. Wikipedia would also cut down on the weird unsourced claims he makes. Some of them are understandable in that they're obviously from his very parochial knowledge of history and politics such as when he describes someone as "paradoxically" opposing slavery, monopoly and socialism. Others vary from his strange attempts to fit 250 years of American history and politics into two and only two camps, the "constitutional nationalists" (never defined) and the "populists" (also never defined) which basically breaks down to Good Guys (Daniel Webster, Lincoln and Obama) versus Bad Guys (Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun, Trump and Putin) with the Bad Guys constantly forcing the Good Guys to do bad things. Some of these claims are just strange asides that I think the guy just made up for some reason. Lastly, three times he writes "explicitly" when he meant "implicitly" including once for a quote that didn't even explicitly say the word "slavery" let alone what he said it "explicitly" said about slavery.

[benji]

This is a great book and I recommend it if you can read it for free. One caution, you have to want to read a hundred some pages where a really stupid man brags about how much smarter than everyone else he is while he constantly says obviously wrong things. Much of Scott's theory for why he's brilliant is that he makes such accurate predictions, such as his "famous" prediction that Trump would win in a "landslide" in 2016. (Ignore that there was no landslide.) After about fifteen pages of talking about how smart and accurate he is for saying Trump would win to his "100,000 followers and blog visitors" (a "huge" number he says since "almost nobody pays attention to politics") he makes his first new prediction of the book (which is from 2017 btw) that because Donald Trump is such a detail guy he will solve immigration (Scott, not being a detail guy, does not explain how it would be solved) and also that The Wall will go down in history as one of the greatest achievements by any President. About halfway through the book Scott covers some of his many failed predictions about who Trump's VP would be, noting that he did not predict Mike Pence because he had never heard of him. (And may still not have, calling him both a Senator and one of the "most experienced politicians" in American history. He then says that Dan Quayle, an actual Senator from Indiana, was not on the 1992 Republican ticket.)

One of my favorite chapters is about cognitive dissonance where despite copy/pasting paragraphs from Wikipedia (he admits it at least) he then spends the rest of the chapter and book using an entirely different definition. In Scott's world if you like pickles and I say I don't like pickles you'll suffer cognitive dissonance. He also says that multiple explanations for something is a sign of cognitive dissonance because everything has one correct explanation. Also that groupthink is actually a "mass hallucination" that only people like trained hypnotists aka Scott are aware of. There's also a chapter on the science of hypnosis, a "superpower", Scott learned from a ten week course forty years ago* so you know you're getting top notch academic information from a "weapons grade" skeptic who is also a body-language expert. He mentions confirmation bias as another thing people suffer from, not Scott of course, while not realizing how much of his book is based around Scott not recognizing his own confirmation bias because he also defines it differently from everyone else. (A good example is Scott describing how he didn't understand criticism of The Wall because he always pictured it as a "tourist destination" with "special trade zones" for people of both countries, which doesn't sound like very much of a wall to me since my "confirmation bias" of "walls" is a barrier not a mall or bazaar.)

Scott's favorite analogy (something he says using is a sign you've lost a debate, but we'll ignore that too) says that most people live in a 2D world and that he lives in a 3D world because of how much more of reality he sees (this is not me paraphrasing he really says he's aware of more of reality; later he explains that reality may actually just be a simulation, something he tweets about often), if this is true then I at least live in a 4D world like we actually do because a cartoonist saying a bunch of weird nonsense while bragging about being a stupid wrong weirdo isn't very persuasive about how persuasion really works. Another analogy he uses a bunch is how we view reality like movies, three acts and all, and that Scott could predict accurately because in all of his "movies" (visions) Trump always won. (In a similar vein, though he means it seriously, he wrote a few times in 2016 that if people turned to violence to resist Trump he would be a top assassination target.) In another analogy Scott turns to his simulation idea and that events repeat because of "code reuse" in the simulation programming, a hilarious analogy that Scott refuses to drop no matter how many times programmers and others tell him about routines.

He's also got tunnel vision of parochial knowledge, when he's talking about why he thinks Trump's insults were so great he seems unaware that Pocahontas was a popular Disney movie, nobody is looking up the historical person. (He later says nobody thought the Clintons were "crooked" until Trump created the insult.) In another instance he has a very weird secret theory of how guest hosting on SNL works and seems to base it on how his own talking head appearances on TV have worked which he claims is "deep industry knowledge" when you can just find out how SNL works online. At the end, Scott considers if maybe he actually caused Trump to win by writing about Trump winning, while he says he can't be sure he proceeds to outline what he thinks is evidence that he did and though he doesn't mention it in this book I will mention that Scott believes affirmations can change reality and ascribes his success to them. Also, almost all of one of the chapters is indented like it's a blockquote when only one of the paragraphs is a quote from his blog. Worst of all, he never once in the book mentions that he created the Dilberito.

Finally, he seriously posted the newsfeed thing on his blog back in 2016, he quotes it in the book:

Have you ever noticed that professional sports teams are great at overcoming racism and getting everyone to play together? That’s because the coach has persuaded the players to see the team as their dominant identity. Trump can do the same with America.

*Scott also relays a story about how when he was going through this "hypnosis school" he gave a woman twenty orgasms just with words and has since done this many times because of the real power of hypnosis. (If hypnosis doesn't work to get you girls, later Scott says negging works with all women. Scott has since got married and divorced again btw.)



This is fine (and long) but there are some strange things about it. The title is very misleading, as it's not about any of this, it's a biography of three people somewhat related to the Plessy case and covers their lives since birth including their romances, careers, etc. The entire thing is a prelude to the Supreme Court case which takes place entirely in the last chapter and quickly covers over the decision on a couple pages. Then it ends immediately. Also strange is the guy seems to have used very few secondary sources at all, he instead went to the archives and read diary entries and newspaper articles to construct his narrative with almost no content from what anyone else has published about this. Maybe it's because he's a journalist instead of a historian but it is a bit odd, though he didn't make too many historical errors just a couple that I recall. He especially enjoys making "images of how location were" that he footnotes by noting that he "synthesized" them from reading newspaper articles from the time, which okay, whatever you tell yourself buddy.



Not necessarily terrible but there's some things about this, the biggest one is that the guy (writer of Forrest Gump) read only a handful of biographies about the three and then abridged them into this. Which is fine I guess but a bit odd for a book. He also organizes each chapter by person, which again is fine but the way he does it is that he redescribes events in each chapter. So for example he talks about things that led to the Boston Tea Party and how Hamilton reacted. Then he does it again for Adams and again for Jefferson, could have just mentioned the event again! Lastly it has a number of temporal oddities, my favorite is that George Washington leaves Philadelphia for Boston on July 3rd. He then spends some pages describing events that happen as Washington travels before Washington arrives in Boston on July 2nd. Now, we know George Washington was a time traveler who could also move faster than light, but he never gets into how Washington solved the resulting time paradox.

[Potato]

I'm reading Rise and Fall off the Third Reich by William L Shirer.

Big arse book that will take me ages to finish, but I'm really enjoying how in depth it is and how close to the action Shirer was.

Rampant homophobia in the text is a little jarring, bit a product of its time.

[chronovore]

Reading Charlie Stross again, both Accelerando and The Merchants’ War, the 4th book in The Family Trade series. 

The latter, I’ve accidentally bought the same novel 2-3 times, and ended up ignoring every paperback edition and listening to it on audiobook. Finally gonna finish it

[Besticus Maximus]

I have two mega recs for you all that I've recently finished up.



Should be on every edgy boy's reading list.



Stephen king style horror novel, good stuff.

[chronovore]

Reading Charlie Stross again, both Accelerando and The Merchants’ War, the 4th book in The Family Trade series. 

The latter, I’ve accidentally bought the same novel 2-3 times, and ended up ignoring every paperback edition and listening to it on audiobook. Finally gonna finish it

Finished The Merchants' War, am unsure when I'll continue the series. Charlie Stross has introduced too many characters for a casual reader to follow, and too many spinning plates of "intrigue" to the point where it looks like he was paring them back in the third act of the novel.

[Besticus Maximus]

Dude who does a load of antiquity/steppe courses for the great courses wrote a book and it's wonderful

[benji]

Liked this a lot, but I've got some problems AND NOW YOU'RE GONNA HEAR ABOUT EM. First, the book is supposed to be about the supposedly timeless wisdom of the classical era that the Founders tapped into but the entire book is framed as the authors personal existential crisis about Donald Trump winning in 2016. Along these lines the final chapter is about what we can do to stop Trump which is even worse than that part. (Even more so by the fact that the book came out after Trump lost in 2020.) The author spent 300 pages on how brilliant the Founders were and then says they were so stupid they would shocked and appalled at modern politicians and society for its self-serving focus on personal or factional benefit. Buddy, did you even read any of the shit you wrote let alone the sources you used? 

He makes a list of ten things we can do against Trump but two of them contradict, #2 says the state needs to suppress freedom of speech, press and assembly to the point that any organization of individuals needs to be outlawed and the corporate form to be abolished entirely since the Founders wouldn't have recognized it even though it was a central component of common law for centuries and two of the four in the book were actual trained lawyers and a third simply did not pass the bar. As if this was not bad enough then #8 says that in the time of Trump's evil ways we need to defend freedom of speech and press more than ever before. Pal, buddy, friend, you just said the state needs to suppress it and borderline totally. 

Lastly, he uses "First Peoples" for Native Americans, cites a source that does not at all remotely speak for all of them to justify this as he claims, is ahistorical and erases their tribal individualities, which I bring up mostly because he erases actual tribe names to insert First Peoples. The founding generation understood the tribes were separate and distinct rather than a homogenous "Indigenous" and this was important to basically all their dealings with them. (Something the author comes close to accidentally stumbling upon when he mentions the different ways the French and British treated them and how it determined what side they fought on in the numerous wars.) Tribes today absolutely do not consider themselves to be one large demographic group outside of the shared (yet still distinct, look at how the different tribes in different locations were treated) experience, they even less did back then.



Amusingly, in the preface of this book, the author muses about the insatiable modern need for historians to engage in presentism to show they're on the right side of history and that he won't be doing it so suck it up. It's also a lie as he drops in a number of them, but nobody's perfect. That's not one of my serious complaints about this book, of which I basically have none, though there are a few errors related to these. My only real complaint is that the endnotes are one after another on the same line which makes it really hard to look at them. This was a necessity since even doing this left like 100 pages of them.



Pretty meh, especially after the first few as they increasingly become less friends and more like staff aides or something. The author worked for Bill Clinton and was able to talk to Bill, Hillary and Vernon Jordan and the extent of the "friendship" we learn about Bill and Jordan is that they liked to play golf and Vernon gave him advice a few times. Amazing stuff! They're just like me except for the golf thing! It's pretty trite in general but the chapter about Woodrow Wilson doesn't dance around how much of a weirdo asshole he was and I don't want to be too critical now that people are finally catching up to me on that.



This was okay but it feels like he abridged a longer book or two. But too much because it starts repeating itself and skipping over events as it goes on after spending way too much time on earlier ones. I didn't necessarily set out to learn an extended description of the Battle of New York but that's what I did since it's a central part of this. I thought there'd be more about the conflict with Loyalists based on the subtitle but he spends like two pages on it. Funniest part is he opens a chapter by talking about the importance of looking at maps and how one of the British war planners didn't do this, then later on in the chapters wonder why a British general didn't take a route through Delaware. If you look at a map you'd see that he could have been locked on a peninsula if he went that way and Washington had merely moved south. The British may have had sea superiority but it still would not have been a great idea since the goal was to get back up to NYC.



Since I obviously believe that "social justice" is a conservative and regressive reactionary ideology to justify oppression I intended to savage this book on principle alone. But he tricked me and legitimately looked at the literature on the original Puritans. While he gives too much of a pass to many Republicans in the conclusion, in a form of "less worse", the bulk of the book was limited in this regard and the conclusion avoided (though maybe not enough) endorsing them as the alternative so I unfortunately cannot rage about it. Another trick on me. If I have a major complaint it's that he didn't put enough of the big picture together on the original Progressive Era, he hits on a number of examples including the Temperance movement but he didn't delve into it like he did the Puritans so he missed the connecting tissues you can trace from the New England colonies through that period and on. I guess I can't entirely complain since he didn't promise to do this.

Since it's a "modern" politik book I looked at the negative reviews on Goodreads and laughed about all the people who missed the point and got very angry because it hit too close to home. Almost all of them completely bent out of shape about a single specific thing he mentioned to the exclusion of the overall thesis. Lots of opportunities to drink at the "it's called being a decent person" justifications for oppressing others. Best one attacked him for being "porn sick" and obsessed with "degrading pornography" because he mentioned on two pages feminist efforts to ban pornography. And one of those pages was merely contrasting those feminists with other social justice people who uphold sex work and everything related to it as revolutionary and important. I bet the sick freak was masturbating while he wrote it! The pervert!

[Besticus Maximus]

The Bodysnatchers by Jack Finney. It's way, way, way better and creepier than you're expecting.

Also finished up A Kiss Before Dying this week. Ira Levine is one of the great popular post-war novelists and this is his debut novel, written when he was very young. Whereas Rosemary's baby and the Stepford Wives live in the popular consciousness this is the one that the book snobs advance as his best work and I'm not sure I agree. It's a textbook thriller but it was written before textbook thrillers were a thing, so it sits somewhere between a modern pulp paperback and an old fashioned noir story. The characters are straight out of American Graffiti and the anti-hero of the novel is somewhere between the Fonz, Indiana Jones and Norman Bates. It has a particularly silly ending and the plot is advanced with a number of contrived deductions and revelations, though it does have a decent twist that comes halfway through the novel. I much preferred the Boys From Brazil and Rosemary's Baby but if you like thrillers/mystery novels/noir then it's one of the best early examples.

[Potato]

https://gizmodo.com/the-expanse-authors-new-space-opera-captives-war-trilog-1851008526

Apologies for the Gizmodo link.

New trilogy from The Expanse authors. Not Expanse related.

That reminds me, I really need to finish the last three books.

[benji]

It's silly but I'll keep porting these to bump this thread sure:


It's not exactly a straight forward history but each chapter has something more like a theme that ties in certain years or awards. For example there's chapters that involve the transition into talkies, Weinstein's campaigns to win awards, the Blacklist or New Hollywood. Only a couple chapters focus on any one Oscars award show, though only one really covers the presentation and show itself with the other focusing on the wrong winner getting named. Some of the reviews on Goodreads bitched that he provided too much background information to where the setup sometimes swamps the actual "Oscars drama" but I had no problem with that at all, many of those same reviews complained about the length of the book but that's also not something I generally complain about but yeah, it's almost 600 pages. I think the general aspect he takes of the Oscars within the context of the industry is the proper way to go and I don't really give a shit about it ruining the "mystique" and "drama" like who seriously thinks the Oscars are some kind of pure merit awards or some grand cultural event. The funniest part is that one of the worst and most cynical movie moguls of all time, Louis B. Mayer, was maybe the most serious of all the founders about it actually being that. He thought maintaining the legitimacy of the awards would help justify film as art which would ward off the attacks that began in the silent era (and have never left us) from conservatives worried about social justice that film was corrupting and from Satan unlike books or music or stage plays. All of which was bad for business.



Meh. It was okay to start when LeBron is a kid and then becomes a high school star, though the book explains everything with NO FATHER and curiously never mentioning the far more unique ONLY CHILD. But when he hits the NBA it basically becomes about the Business of LeBron and less and less basketball as it goes on. Trump gets more pages than the Cavs 2016 title run. There's essentially no criticism of LeBron in the book, Maverick Carter takes the fall for The Decision but generally his inner circle is treated as perfect too. The most insane thing is that this book came out this year but it ends with LeBron signing with the Lakers. The basketball talk is highly questionable at times, suggesting that the Cavs did nothing to surround LeBron with talent (except getting Shaq) when the 2010 team was pretty clearly better than the 2011 Heat. It took another year for the Heat to figure out how to surround LeBron and Wade with multi-position 3 and D guys rather than ancient veteran names. My favorite parts were mentioning a since deleted Marco Rubio tweet where he says Cleveland is never getting LeBron back a couple weeks before he went back and some classic Stephen A. Smith takes about how LeBron wasn't a leader and even that the Heat needed to break up the Big Three right before they won their title too.

[Potato]

I'm still making my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Big book, busy life.

Amazing read though

[Besticus Maximus]

Boys in the Valley by Philip Fracassi. INCREDIBLE. One of the best new horror novels I've read in a very long time.

[benji]

It only gets worse. First of all, this guy writes like you'd expect an upper class British journalist named Simon Winchester to, especially constant personal digressions about conversations he's had that add nothing. It starts as an entirely superficial brief history of writing and schools before spending the entire second half worrying that we're at the end of knowledge itself. He refers to absolutely nothing from epistemology or the philosophy of knowledge or anything like it except an early reference to Marshall McLuhan's most widely known phrase. Essentially he reasons that thanks to Google there's no need to ever learn anything ever again since you can just type whatever you want in and it'll give it to you. As a result nobody will ever bother to learn anything. And so this is how history finally ends.

He laments the loss of elites who knew everything there is to know though he can't come up with any examples. He fears that allowing anyone to publish whatever they want will undo all the great achievements of the BBC forcing people to enjoy opera, that without elites giving people what they need to know people will only enjoy what they want to rather than what's best for them. The result will be an endless spiral to nothing. He laments the loss of polymaths preceding to give examples of some half of which he describes as learned in only a single thing and the rest who are reduced like Richard Feynman to the "guy who solved Challenger" (something he would have objected to) ignoring everything he himself wrote about philosophy of knowledge.

All this is despite opening the book with Socrates famous remark on knowledge that he seems ignorant of what it means. Additionally early on he absent mindedly mentions the most obvious objection, along similar lines as Socrates, to his thesis while fearing libraries will go away. Namely the curiosity of wandering the stacks and finding something you didn't know you wanted. How can you look up something on Google if you don't know what to look up? How can you know how to use what it tells you? Never does he ponder this in any way. His entire conception of how we "know what we know" is that someone tells us, learning is almost an entirely passive process in his imagination. He barely even approaches the idea that freeing up "knowledge" like using calculators frees you to know even more than you knew before, instead he only laments the "loss" of knowledge from being able to do math instantly whenever you want. He's excessively fascinated by how people navigated on the ocean and laments the knowledge that GPS has forever "destroyed", literally worrying that that the men moving shipping containers around the globe will no longer know how to find land as if everyone on the ships has always learned it and could use it at any moment. (He explains at length how he once went on a boat trip in the early 1980's in the Indian Ocean and the boat had a problem and needed to find the closest land so they got out the ancient Greenwich Mean Time Rolex watches and ancient up-to-date yearly ocean maps, you see.)

Finally, perfectly so, his conclusion ends with some classic conservative racism (though he identifies as a proper procrustean progressive including taking pains to introduce Trump and Brexit for no reason simply to explain that he doesn't approve of either) where he name drops a bunch of so-called backwards tribes from around the world (though curiously not the Amish despite their lack of calculators and Google) then imagines them remembering life "before white people began the slow but ever accelerating process of ruining our planet" and admonishing us that "the Earth is in peril; moderate your behavior and help maintain it in the condition that we inherited, long before you came." That ancient wisdom that says never advance out of step with the elite's divine knowing, it's sinful and we'll all pay for your sins. Though it makes you wonder why he laments all those unwashed out there who won't know anything but what Google tells them since we could just have the elite run Google so it gives people opera and ship navigation courses like they fucking deserve.



I liked it but it's basically about all the infighting of The New York Times from 1976-2016. Almost everybody in this book is both a journalist and a petty back stabber who is constantly plotting against everyone else. Except Arthur Sulzberger Jr. who seemed to think he was in charge of a newspaper for some odd reason. Every story about some journalism they do is really a setup for some drama that leads to people being forced to resign or something. Especially the failures like Jayson Blair and WMDs but even the successes are part of somebody's powerplay at some point. I liked the part where one of the guys who fails to catch Jayson Blair (who apparently was known to have a cocaine habit) worries about the internet allowing people to post stuff without oversight from editors and so wants the NYT to not really have a website except for telling people how to buy the print edition.

Like the LeBron book I mentioned above, this is a (late) 2023 book but it stops in 2016. Stuff like the 2020 revolt or how the NYT became financially viable on subscriptions from a self-described far-left audience is just mentioned in the epilogue.



This was a good idea but is really bad execution. Although the thesis isn't really no mindblowing, Hong Kong worked because it wasn't China and allowed immigrants to get ahead because everybody was immigrants, especially the British who thought they ruled but really just held dinner parties and did little that was important. The problem is that half of it is about family trees of people that read like the begets in the Bible. And another good chunk involves referencing things in Hong Kong like the reader lives there and knows what the streets are or even where things used to be until recent construction. Lady, I'm trying to learn about Hong Kong so I obviously don't know any of this and your map in the book has like two things labeled! Also sounds like you could do a Deadwood like series on early Hong Kong where all the characters are brothel or bar operators plus smugglers and a bunch of British elite (many of whom are failures dumped there because of what they did back home or in the more important colony of India) who think they run the place.



I liked this but it's not too entirely exciting if you want to hear about the technologies. It's written entertainingly at least and the guy talked to lots of people and unlike the other recent 2023 books I read didn't stop five years ago. Basically Walmart is slowly becoming Amazon and vice versa. In many cases literally as they've been poaching each others executives for a long time. My favorite part was how every single story about one of the companies buying some startup is the same, the owners want to cash out and not fight with bureaucracy, none of the bureaucracy knows what to do with the company now that they own it, it loses money and gets shut down or folded into existing operations with some executive giving an epigraph of "I think it still has value we can use down the road" and nobody ever hears from it again. It pairs fairly well with that Amazon Unbound book I read a bit back especially because it's one of the main sources but also because the book leans a bit more towards Walmart in its focus, presumably because those are the sources who were more willing to talk to him. Even as it's short it repeats a few things, one woman gets introduced twice just so she can semi-paranoid complain about Amazon trying to sell her stuff she's searched for.

[Potato]

Finally finished The rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Great long read. Whet my appetite for more WWII history or even WWI. Gonna start looking into some different reads on the topic.