AmrikeeAkbar
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User ID: 1187
AmrikeeAkbar
10mo ago
Stalled out on "Democracy in America". Its not that it lacks insight or is badly written, its just...a long winded nineteenth century book, i guess? And it seems like it may suffer from its success, being one of those books whose key points have already passed into the broader culture in some way.
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
For a long time I've been thinking I need to make it a rule to tell someone if I enjoyed reading something they wrote. This is another data point in favor of making that a rule.
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
Be very interested to read the Putin thing
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
Off the top of my head, the highlights are:
a) The Great Gatsby - technically I read this right around Christmas of 2021, but I'll include it here. Gatsby's a total simp. Daisy, so far as we can tell from the text, probably isn't even that hot. You know who's cool and who I want to read a book about? Meyer Wolfsheim. How did he claw his way up the ranks of organized crime? Did he kill a dude and make his teeth into cufflinks? I think he did.
b) The Maltese Falcon, Dashiel Hammett. I'd tried some Hammett before - the Glass Key and Red Harvest - but I just didn't get that into them. I liked this one a lot more for some reason. I think it just seemed more tightly written than those two, though I'm not sure if that's the explanation
c) Francis Fukuyama - Political Order and Political Decay. This one was on audiobook so without an actual copy in front of me, I have a hard time remembering what I thought about it. The main impression I retained is that Fukuyama is clearly a smart guy who's read and thought a lot about his topic, but is hamstrung by his commitment to an orthodox-western-liberal view of "progress" and state formation. His analysis would probably have been more interesting if he'd been willing to consider more heterodox ideas.
d) The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster. Famously gloomy and violent Jacobean revenge drama. Probably one of the best works of fiction I read this year. The anti-heroic Bosola gets all the best lines, even though he's largely tangential to the plot until the last few scenes. Surprised I haven't seen a film adaptation of this sometime in the last ten years.
e) The Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle. Beagle is probably best known for The Last Unicorn. This is a sort of early urban-fantasy story about an itinerant musician who returns to a thinly-veiled Berkeley after ten years of wandering. He finds that all his old friends are now part of a thinly-veiled Society For Creative Anachronism and that some of them get way into character and sometimes their re-enactments get just a little too real. Started off slowly but hit it's strides at the two-thirds mark and wrapped up with a satisfy albeit ambiguous conclusion.
f) The Ballad of the White Horse, GK Chesterton - Sometimes hailed as the last epic narrative poem in the English language. A fictionalized depiction of King Alfred's defeat of the Danes at the Battle of Ethandune. Short, with a pretty simple and straightforward plot, but a lot of great quotable lines. A few choice morsels
A gloomy Norseman: "You sing of the young gods easily/In the days when you are young/But I go smelling yew and sods/And I know there are gods behind the gods/Gods that are best unsung."
The narrator: "The Great Gaels of Ireland/Are the men that God made Mad/For all their wars are merry/And all their songs are sad".
Alfred, rebuking the Norse kings pseudo-Nietszchean worldview: "What have the strong gods given?/Where have the glad gods led?/When Guthrun sits on a hero's throne/And asks if he is dead?"
I'm told that Tolkien didn't like it on account of how he felt the Norse were misrepresented. Nonetheless, its well worth your tim."
TL; DR - The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini. He was probably a pretty interesting dude to hang around but the writing didn't hook me.
TL; DR - The Divine Comedy. Tried it, couldn't get into it.
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
Thank you for the link. I think fear of retaliation is the heart of political bargaining power in this context, but I'm not sure that retaliation needs to be overwhelming per se. To return to the Afghanistan example, the Taliban couldn't go head to head with the US Army, but they could apply pressure on local officials attempting to enforce unpopular edicts. If you're a local official, you might not die, but you would be forced to ask yourself: how badly do I want to do X? Badly enough to risk assassination? If you're local law enforcement, are you willing to pursue lawbreakers into hostile territory? Probably all such decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. Network actors could alter the balance of power even if they never grow strong enough to actually overthrow the system.
Also, I guess you guys know something about Balaji I don't, but even if Balaji's personal Network-State Utopia is people only by 160 IQ STEM-Wizard Philosopher-Kings and their hangers-on - that needn't be the only game in town! I think you're operating off of a model where all crypto remains the realm of the tech-savvy shape rotators indefinitely. I don't think that will be the case. I think that over time, the tech will disseminate and become accessible to the layman, and they will apply it in new ways. The street finds its own uses for things.
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
Two from my endless pile. Both labor intensive so who knows when, if ever, I'll get around to them:
Globalization, Fragility, and Monoculture - Basically, an exploration of the idea that modern economic conditions facilitate economies of scale in which commodity production and distribution is highly centralized, for reasons of cost i.e. the huge percentage of the worlds semiconducturs traditionally manufactured in Taiwan. This also facilitates standardization of design in these products. The analogy in the natural world would be the ability of certain species, hyper-optimized to fill a certain ecological niche, to flourish and crowd out potential competitors. This is well and good until something happens to disrupt the status quo; the product or organism that was perfectly adapted to one set of conditions is often too specialized to adapt when those conditions change. None of these ideas are terribly new of course. Since Covid, lots of people have been thinking about the idea that globalization is pretty fragile. Both John Robb in the security sphere and Nicholas Nassim Taleb have arguably been preaching similar ideas long before they started to enter mainstream currency. The issue, I think, is that the mono-cultural model tends to be very profitable in the short-to-medium term. Hyper-specialization is what allows for explosive growth, which is what hordes of slavering venture capitalists and would-be venture capitalists are always seeking. Not sure anyone has addressed the explicit tradeoff between growth and security/systemic diversity and the compromises that we may be forced to make on that front in a generation or two.
A tale of two elites - Arguably since the end of the civil war, the United States has largely been run by people associated with political and financial centers of power in the Northeast of the country. Broadly speaking, they tend to have similar educational (Ivy League) and professional backgrounds (often lawyers, academics, or some other wordcel-esque job), and place a great deal of emphasis on technocratic credentialism. The emergence of silicon valley as a possible rival center of power, with its own culture, norms, and ideals could set conditions for a major change. Again, hardly an original idea, but not one I've seen explored in depth to my own satisfaction
AmrikeeAkbar
11mo ago
Would be very interested in the Orthodox Church/Ukraine Situation
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
That depends on whether or not you are permitted to raise your children on your terms, with your own values, way of life, etc. In a strictly genetic sense, the Mongols may be one of the most successful people groups in history; in terms of their culture, society, and way of life, they are largely extinct. You can argue that was always going to happen over a sufficiently long enough time horizon, and that's correct. But it can happen on much shorter timelines, even within a single generation, and often does.
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
Was mistake theory ever strong politics? I suppose I'm cynical, but I think it's generally easier for people to believe they're opponents are evil and willfully ignorant rather than well-intentioned folks with different beliefs. Possibly I'm biased by the internet being my sample.
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
I read that one nearly a year ago and yeah, Elric as a character is...a bit much. Adolescent is the word I would use. Not that I didn't enjoy the stories.
I'd agree that there's something about Lovecraft. His prose can get pretty purple, his plots aren't particularly inventive, and his ideas, when stated bluntly, don't seem terribly sophisticated or compelling (There is no higher power and the universe is pointlessly cruel and chaotic? Shocking twist). And yet, he makes an impression. He casts a longer shadow than many other "better" writers. Maybe it's just sheer conviction. He really feels dread when contemplating a universe stripped of divine purpose and he's able to communicate that dread to the reader? I dunno.
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
I think there's certainly something weirdly compelling about dead internet theory, but I haven't noticed a huge decline in comment quality here. On the other hand, it may be that I don't spend enough time here to notice. But I agree its potentially a problem. Perhaps we need to bring back mass email chains? Something analogous to the way 16th century radicals disseminated their ideas? I don't know, but more long-form writing might equate to more effortposts, higher barriers to entry, and higher quality in general.
What exactly is the distinction between a paraphilia and a sexual orientation? The most thoughtful answer I can find with a quick search suggests that the latter is biological and the former psychological? But that already strikes me as a fairly fuzzy and non-absolute distinction. Most of the rest of what I found can be boiled down to "paraphilia = gross/sexual orientation = perfectly legitimate, no judgement dammit" without ever actually explaining why that would be.
I do think that thinking of these things as a cluster of associated impulses is probably the best way to describe it. I don't really think you can separate sex from emotion from social roles from (insert X addenda here). One thing Lawrence and Blanchard don't touch on but may be worth bringing up. From my personal observations, frequently the fantasy of being a woman is associated with a fantasy of the loss of agency, and by extension, responsibility. You mentioned a military academy cadet and star athlete who apparently didn't measure up to his own standards for masculinity. I suspect there may be a lot of folks in this space with similar profiles. There's an element of stress relief to the fantasy. The wall street dude who spends all day amongst ultra-competitive alpha males making split-second decisions on which millions of dollars ride. The soldier who has to make split-second decisions on which the lives of his team-members ride. Anyone who lashes themselves into the breach of war or politics or business or science, through some combination of ambition and responsibility. To someone like that, the fantasy of being a stereotypical princess - of being passive, helpless even, loved for what you are rather than anything you do, of being at the whim of people and forces more powerful than yourself - that can be a powerful intoxicant. Nothing to base this on other than my own personal experiences and too much time spent in the seedy parts of the internet, but I think its worth considering.
AmrikeeAkbar
1yr ago
I think this is done because real diversity would require trying to get into the mindset of people who think differently than we do, which is something our increasingly insular and status insecure elite is profoundly uncomfortable doing. A truly diverse story about Afghanistan, for example, would be a story about hardscrabble clansman surviving by will, strength, and guile, with the US a background actor. I think there probably would be an audience for such a story, but I don't think those who control the media means of production have the vision or daring to try something like that, for various structural reasons. Much easier to cast some conspicuously nonwhite actors and call it a day.
Just wanted to say hear-hear to this sentiment. I'm not sure what the practical solution is to trying to maintain a stream of fresh blood, but I think this community exists to fill a real need; as long as that need exists, people will find their way here.
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