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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1811 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 5, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Eternal Dissident: Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman and the Radical Imperative to Think and Act.

It seems strange that a Rabbi would proclaim himself agnostic and have his first sermon be about how Adam ought to have eaten the whole fruit of knowledge and not just part of it, but I have to agree with the introduction that there is an authenticity to it. Beerman, if he is to be believed, was inspired by the Spinozan God-as-nature idea, and argued that authentic doubt can be a religious stance.

The tropes fit perfectly into today's leftism: social justice, activism, inequality, racism, oppression, but these things must have made a different impression before Current Year. Various dubious aspects pepper the narrative, like support for the Rosenbergs. If there's one thing I've taken away from it, it is the reminder that I'm not exactly a church-goer myself, and that perhaps a renewed study of my relation to God is in order.

I, Asimov by, predictably, Isaac Asimov. Some biographies and especially auto-biographies bored me, but this one is not the case. The author clearly is writing about the subject he is deeply interested in, and is not hiding it at all (I'd even say flaunting it), and yet it remains an interesting book. Asimov being a pretty standard prosperous New York secular American Jew, with all cultural and political stances that follow from that, there are a lot of things for me to disagree with him about, but I think it's still a very illuminating and interesting book.

Also, Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World - the topic is pretty obvious from the title. Not too much new there in general, but the details are fascinating. Those early explorers were really wild, and it's insane how dangerous and close to suicidal their exploits were.

He wrote some giant two-volume biography first, and then cut it down to that one (and added more recent material) a decade later. It's easier to avoid being boring if you have to force yourself to cut most of what you've written.

IIRC he did leave in my favorite part, the bit about becoming the most popular teacher at Boston University and having his writing career take off but being belittled for not doing enough research:

I finally felt angry enough to say, “…as a science writer, I am extraordinary. I plan to be the best science writer in the world and I will shed luster on the medical school. As a researcher, I am simply mediocre and…if there’s one thing this school does not need, it is one more merely mediocre researcher.”

Of course he got ... not fired, since he had tenure by then, but effectively "constructive dismissal" from the administration? Still he disclaimed coworkers' admiration for the incident:

I shrugged, “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words:

“What’s that?” He said.

“Outside income,” I said.

The resulting one is pretty massive too, if it were twice as big I'd probably never even tried it because there's no way I could finish it. So far I'm about 1/3 in, and he already talked a lot about how his science career sucked, unlike his writing. Given that I had always been his fan and yet was never sure (or interested, to be honest) about what he did as a scientist, that's not a surprise.

If you go to his Google Scholar page and look at the list by citation count it's topped by fiction ("I, Robot": 2670 citations), then adds popular science writing ("Asimov's biographical encyclopedia of science and technology", 663) and other non-fiction, then eventually gets down to science textbooks ("Biochemistry and human metabolism", 54) and science research ("Acid‐phosphatase activity of normal and neoplastic human tissues", 48).

IIRC it could have been even worse. He went into biochemistry, so was relatively immune to the quantum chemistry revolution sweeping upward through the field, but I recall him describing the horror with which experienced chemists discovered that they would have to practically get a second degree in physics just to keep their own chemistry research relevant.

It's kind of a shame that he's now much better-known for his science fiction writing than his science writing, though. He jokingly had the "Clarke-Asimov treaty", acknowledging Asimov to be the second-best SF writer and Clarke the second-best science writer, but IMHO with SF Asimov was (among their contemporaries) second-best to Heinlein, whereas with pop science he really was the best around.

I finished The Sun Also Rises this week. I needed to intersperse my slog through a history of the roman empire with some shorter candy. I grabbed recs from a couple people, this one from @FiveHourMarathon and Stranger in a Strange Land from someone else.

In short: I found it decent but not great, and strangely compelling in many ways. I powered through it fairly quickly, found myself looking forward to it, and felt like Hemingway did a great job of conveying an enormous amount of depth through simple language in a way that is lost on many authors (especially in Spain).

At the end of the day, though, it's a circular story with a lot of repetition, and the things that made it so transgressive and compelling aren't really that unique nowadays.

The level of cuckery that Jake engages in with Brett (re: the bullfigher) is pretty breathtaking. I'm glad that she didn't end up getting him killed in the ring. It would have been too predictable, for one thing, and added a discernible plot to something he clearly designed not to exist, for another.

At the end of the day, though, it's a circular story with a lot of repetition, and the things that made it so transgressive and compelling aren't really that unique nowadays.

I think it's exactly as, if not more, transgressive than it was at the time. The central argument of the story is "Who is the manly man and who is the cuckold?" And I don't think we have any better of an answer now than we had then.

I don't think there is a single manly man or cuckold in the story. The only way to win the game with Brett is not to play, but to go fishing instead.

There are more Bretts in today's society than ever before, and they have even more freedom and power. I know a dozen of them. That's what I mean about the relative level of transgression being lower than when the book was written.

I thought the Sun Also Rises made much more sense after college than highschool. When you meet people who live their lives without hope, or goals, or responsibilities.

I agree 100%, it'd be almost nonsensical as a highschooler

Recently finished The Secret History after @FtttG recommended it (although he was just the most recent of many to do so). Definitely had a few weak points, but overall an enjoyable read.

Glad you liked it. Having read Tartt's entire oeuvre I can confirm it's all downhill from here, although The Goldfinch is better than The Little Friend.

Based on reviews I've seen of those two works, I was planning at stopping with TSH.

Jack London's South Sea Tales.

Please tell me what you think of them so far.

I recently read the Sea-Wolf, and was of two minds about it. OTOH, there's some interesting bits in there. OTOH, the POV character is insufferable, and I suspect that large parts of the book could have been excised with no meaningful losses.

The action-adventure parts are very Jack London, that is, good. Characters are all painted with a mildly racist brush, that is, broadly true and not one-dimensional, but still superficial and somewhat uncomfortable to read in 2025.

Plutarch’s Athenian Lives: if you have any interest in history, human nature, or human greatness, you owe it to yourself to read Plutarch.

Walter Ong, Fighting For Life: picked this up because I wanted a different perspective on some of the stuff in The Mountain. The first 40% or so of the book is awful, one of the worst attempts at psychoanalytic writing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some stinkers. It’s just starting to get good now as he dives into a field he’s qualified on - agonistic competition in academic and intellectual history. Cautiously excited to see if he can turn it around, since I’ve greatly enjoyed his other work.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: well, the section on linguistics drags, but now it’s heating up again. I’m frustrated at times, cruising at times, mindblown at times, but it’s a hell of a ride.

Machiavelli, The Prince: like Plutarch, a re-read, but very interesting to compare the two directly. Machiavelli has this very incisive, diagrammatic way of analysis that, now that I say it, reminds me of some stuff Deleuze says. He writes in a very “arborescent”, binary-tree way, but the cumulative effect is a tremendous deterritorialization that rips the prince from the feudal order. I don’t think Strauss’s claim that Machiavelli and Bacon are the beginning of modernity is at all a stretch.

My recent reading queue has been a tour through various subgenres of speculative fiction, with predictably mixed results.

First, John C. Wright’s Golden Oecumene trilogy. Post-singularity fiction is a high-difficulty endeavor, usually collapsing into either utopian hand-waving or prose so baroque you cannot parse what the god-minds are even doing. Wright’s work mostly sticks the landing. It presents a surprisingly coherent model of a far-future society without shying away from its deep strangeness. I have a much longer post on this simmering in my drafts, but the short version is that it’s one of the few genuinely solid attempts I’ve seen.

Next was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history with a compelling hook: what if the Black Death was 99.9% fatal in Europe? I found it interesting, but with two confusing caveats. The author makes a strange ontological commitment from the outset: Buddhist reincarnation is literally true, and we follow a small cluster of souls through the ages. I’m still not entirely sure what work this does for the narrative that couldn’t have been achieved by other means. A more confusing structural choice is the novel’s reluctance to explore its own primary conceit. A vast, effectively empty Western continent is sitting there, yet we spend surprisingly little time with the civilizations that eventually investigate it. It feels like a missed opportunity.

Then I tried Virtuous Sons, a highly-rated web serial. A Greco-Roman take on Xianxia cultivation tropes is, on its face, a brilliant idea. And to its credit, the story executes the core translation of concepts like qi and cultivation into a classical framework with reasonable competence. The problem is that everything else is aggressively mediocre. The characters lack interiority, the prose feels unrefined, and the worldbuilding seems to operate on dream logic. This seems less an indictment of one specific author and more a reflection of the incentive structures of platforms like Royal Road. It is optimized for high-volume, low-friction content, and the market rewards this optimization with high ratings. A classic case of revealed preferences in action, and the revealed preference seems to be for slop. I could not continue.

Finally, I am now reading Through Struggle, the Stars. It’s military science fiction, and the most accurate description is that it’s aiming for the same niche as The Expanse. This story, however, operates under stricter constraints: no alien magic, and a much more rigorous adherence to the laws of physics. So far, it’s just solid, competent storytelling. No major complaints.

I remember liking the golden oucumene but don’t remember a ton of what it was about.

Curiously enough, I've been reading the Old Testament.

Uh... I'm doing a lot of noticing. Like the entire story is just Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and then Joseph ingratiating themselves with wealthy and powerful people, then running off with all their shit. Possibly their daughters. Joseph really takes the cake, where he convinces the Pharaoh to tax his people exorbitantly, and then sells their grains back to them at such insane prices, they have to sell themselves into slavery to him in order to not starve. But you know, they're happy to do so. That's what the book says after all. So anyways, the next book starts with the Egyptians unjustly turning on Joseph and his clan as soon as the Pharaoh dies and they lose his protection, for some reason.

Like, bronze age morality, I get it, Odysseus is quite the scoundrel too and he's still a hero. But, uh... that is the single most Jewish origin story I could possibly imagine. Like if the most antisemitic person you'd ever heard of tried to write a story about where the Jews came from, I'm not sure he'd do it any different. And that's the first book and change of Moses.

Anyways...the bronze age, amirite?

Anyways...the bronze age, amirite?

Funny thing is the Joseph story may actually be relatively young as Genesis stories go, possibly post-Exilic. I don't know if that's better or worse since the later it is the more "Jew" becomes an accurate descriptor of the writers. If it was earlier you could maybe see it as an attempt to ride off the coattails of the Semitic Hyksos (who were also allegedly driven out and destroyed) and claim their blood made it into Israel.

Interesting conjecture:

According to Römer, Joseph in this passage could be loosely based on a governor named Cleomenes who ruled part of Egypt under Alexander the Great:

…Joseph, in this passage, also somewhat resembles Cleomenes of Naucratis, an administrator of Alexander’s, the builder of Alexandria, and the originator of a mint in Egypt. In fact, it was he who, until his dismissal, held power in Egypt. While famine raged in the Mediterranean basin, he first prohibited the export of Egyptian wheat, and then greatly increased taxes on it in 329 BC. In a certain way, he obtained a sort of monopoly of wheat, which he would buy for 10 drachmas and sell for 32 drachmas. He inaugurated the control of the wheat trade by the Ptolemies. Cleomenes also seems to have been in conflict with the priests over the question of the maintenance of the temples.

Many such cases in the Bible. Maybe the biggest sin of the writers is taking credit for shit they didn't do (like the supposed genocide of the Canaanites).

Well, yeah, how do you think things worked at that time? Or, to be honest, in any other time until maybe 20th century when industrial warfare had been invented and private atrocities no longer interest anybody? Of course if you have a small clan that needs to survive, you need to make friends of bigger clans and destroy other small clans before they destroy you. I'm not sure though on the details - which part of Abraham's story you interpret as "then running off with all their shit"? Abraham did try to make friends with the Pharaoh (who was really into his wife, and you can guess what powerful people did to lesser people who had undeservedly pretty wives - if you don't, the Bible has some chapters on that too), but I don't see any mention of any, let alone, all their shit being lost as the result. Other episodes don't seem to match either.

I think the only part where "then running off with all their shit" is appropriate is the Exodus story - but the first part "ingratiating themselves with wealthy and powerful people" is no longer true - by the time, Jews were slaves, so not much ingratiating were happening.

Like if the most antisemitic person you'd ever heard of tried to write a story about where the Jews came from, I'm not sure he'd do it any different.

The story of Jacob (re: him and Esau and him and his father) and him being the father of the 12 tribes of Israel is one of the most anti-Semitic things I've ever read.

Things get spicier when you notice that there are modern groups whose moral guidance with outsiders is remarkably similar and what the effects of that are. Further discussion of that is probably best left for the culture war thread.

Finished Nancy McWilliams Psychoanalytic Diagosis. Interesting and understandable for a layman. Provided me with a good deal of clarification to the terminology, the development and the current practice of psychoanalysis, which in turn reveals that the way that terminology is used in the public sphere is even worse than I already suspected.

Now starting Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. I found this after reading a comment at Reddit that described the 2010s as "the golden age of travelling". That struck me as wrong, I'm not keen on travelling but I would imagine the golden age of travelling to be somewhere around the time that the Lonely Planet books were being written, and maybe the first generation of travellers who were inspired by those books, ie. before everyone went to the same places via the same routes to do the same things with the same people who'd all got the same ideas from the same books (at this point even I've heard about Khao San Road and I've never entertained any thoughts of going there). People used to drive or even hitchhike across the continents to reach Aghanistan and Nepal where they would meet and interact with Afghanis and Nepalese. Then they'd travel back with a van stuffed full of trade goods (and contraband). Now they stack discounts they heard about online to get a cheap flight direct to BackpackerVille and come back with credit card debt, and still call it "travelling" when it seems to me more like a hipster variety of basic tourism. That got me looking into the history of the Lonely Planets books and I came across DTWGTH. The blurb for the book bills it as a behind-the-scenes expose of the production of the kind of travel writing that contributed to the Loney Planet series, albeit it was written in 2007.

I think the golden age of travelling was back in the second half of the 19th century. Steam and rail made it possible to cross the oceans and the continents, but the land was still unspoilt by mass tourism, travelling was still a process, not hurtling through the air in a cramped metal tube.

Finished Nell Zink's Doxology on Friday.

Easily the most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book this year. Have you ever been at a standup comedy gig and the comedian tells a joke which doesn't land, and there's just this awkward silence? Doxology is that in literary form. There were so many attempts at humour which simply fell flat. While reading it, I found myself constantly rolling my eyes at some of the really lame attempts at humour. Zink seems incredibly smug and pleased with herself for some reason beyond my capacity to divine — her attempts at humour are neither funny nor even clever enough that she gets brownie points for being obscurantist. For some reason, I pictured Zink making this expression the entire time she was sitting in front of her computer typing. There's one point where one of the characters tells her husband that she's looking for a collaborator (i.e. in a business startup), and her husband "quips" back something like "You mean you're going to shave my head?" And then the narration adds a parenthetical literally explaining the joke, that the husband was referring to the French women who dated Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation. I'm not saying the joke would have been funny to begin with, but explaining it didn't help any and just made me feel annoyed in addition to not laughing.

Awhile back, someone on this forum complained that, when writing fiction, Scott suffers from "MCU disease", in which he's unable to stop himself from cracking jokes even when it's inappropriate, thereby puncturing the dramatic tension. I agree that this is a bad strategy, and the chapters in Unsong where he's able to restrain himself are some of the strongest, showing that he's perfectly capable of generating real dramatic tension and power when he wants to. But in Scott's defense, at least a lot of his jokes actually work. The only thing worse than disrupting the tension of a dramatic scene with an actually clever joke is disrupting with a joke which isn't funny and which just annoys the reader.

Nell Zink is attempting an ambitious family drama charting three generations of a family from the 1970s right up to the start of Trump's first term. But with half of an exception, all of the characters (regardless of age, sex, race, which state they grew up in, which state they live in, their political affiliations, profession, education etc.) sound exactly the same. If one of the characters makes a reference to some obscure hardcore punk musician from the 1980s, the other characters will always understand without any explanation required. In written fiction, dialogue is the primary means of making characters feel like distinct entities, and Zink completely fucking whiffs it. Dialogues in this book sound like two chatbots with identical training data talking to one another. Because none of the characters feel like real people, all of the melodramatic soapy efforts at generating emotional torque (corporal punishment! sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll! 9/11! death by OD! family reconciliation! May-December romance! infidelity! indeterminate paternity!) go nowhere. A character must feel real before we can feel affected by their travails, and none of these do, because they're a league of interchangeable sock puppets.

And my God, the politics. This is some of the most sophomoric, Boomerlib, TDS-brained "political commentary" I've ever read. In the final third of the book or so, it's 2016, immediately prior to the election, and one of the characters decides to become a political activist travelling to various purple states canvassing for Jill Stein. Of course Trump gets elected and all of the characters are devastated. Zink is not even the least bit interested in honest speculation as to the nature of Trump's appeal: in her view, it does really seem to boil down to "Trump is evil and full of hate, and half of America voted for him because they're so hateful and evil". In Pennsylvania, immediately after the results are announced, the narration observes a man driving around in a pickup truck and speculates that he's "probably looking for some black people to shoot", a goal in which he's bound to be frustrated because Pennsylvania is 98% white. Oh, please.

In a particularly outrageous act of historical revisionism, Zink even has the nerve to more or less directly argue the reason Hillary lost was because her campaign was too positive. One of the characters is a political campaign advisor who strongly encourages the DNC to go hard on attacking Trump sooner rather than later, but they ignore his advice in favour of a campaign founded on hope and optimism. "When they go low, we go high" etc. The clear implication is that if the DNC had followed this character's advice, Hillary would have won. With respect, Zink — are you fucking kidding me? Have you completely forgotten about the basket of deplorables? The "grab them by the pussy" tape? "America's Bully"? "Mirrors"? I don't know how anyone could possibly claim in all seriousness that the reason Hillary lost was because she was too positive and hopeful, and didn't spend enough time attacking her opponent. This kind of self-serving cope might be excusable if Zink was Hillary's campaign advisor trying to keep her career afloat after a shocking upset — but no, there's nothing for Zink in this, this seems to be what she really believes. (For clarity: I'm not saying I found the book annoying only because of its politics. The plot arc involving the 2016 election only appears in the final ~third of the book or so, and my goodwill had been more or less exhausted well before that point.)

I donated it to a charity shop this afternoon. Probably my fastest ever turnaround time between finishing a book and disposing of it. Next up is SE Hinton's The Outsiders.

Why would you read the book to the end if you found it boring and frustrating? Sometimes I get gifted books where I can intensively disagree with the author, think the author's a fiend who wants to make the world worse but admit the logic and argumentation given the premises and goals is tight and coherent. But that's non-fiction. If I read fiction and I'm not having fun, I dump it.

One of my new year's resolutions was to read at least 26 books this year. About halfway through the book I rather strongly felt I was no longer enjoying it, but I didn't want the time I'd invested so far to go to waste.

To be fair to Zink, the book wasn't boring as such. Her style isn't funny, but it's at least easy to read.

The Nutmeg of Consolation.

Its hard to read these books, knowing the series is coming to an end. Where do I go from here?

It's been like 2 years for me, I'll let you know if I ever figure it out. Admittedly I haven't gotten around to Hornblower. Mr Midshipman Easy was ok but not the same sort of thing at all.

Based on your other comment, Wodehouse might not be a million miles away from what you're looking for. Obviously lighter, but a good deal of the same spirit.

Thanks, I'll take a look.

Suppose Hornblower is the obvious next suggestion, but the question is whether you want something in the same niche or something in the same spirit. The former is easy to find, the latter is hard.

I guess I like the same spirit. Like an overarching series of interesting characters just doing their thing and growing over time. Its also kind of low stakes which is fine.

I might go and check out Hornblower or Sharpe next and see what comes of it unless I get a better suggestion.

Have you read The Baroque Cycle?

The Baroque Cycle

No, but I do like Neal Stephenson from Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, so I'll look into it. Thanks.

Nassim Taleb's books.

Book of the Dead 3: Masquerade by RinoZ. Pretty confident that #4 will be up next on my reading list.

What are the most common second and third languages around you?

Where I'm at Spanish is obviously #2, but Vietnamese is #3. I think Arabic is probably the fourth- the various dialects of India are too... various to bump either of those.

In Malaysia it's a bit of a Starcraft situation with the 3 major races of Chinese, Malays and Indians (mostly Tamil). Plus English is probably the most common language. So the majority of Malaysian Citizens will tend to speak Malay, English and either Chinese or Tamil if they're from the applicable ethnic groups.

After those, probably Indonesian (Though Malay and Indonesian have the same Bahasa root language and could easily be argued to be dialects and/or mutually intelligible) is next then it's a wild mess of different immigrant groups and other nearby languages due to a hell of a lot of illegal and legal immigration. I think Filipino and Arabic speakers potentially would be the next bigger linguistic groups.

When looking at the country as a whole, I would suspect Polish and Hindi.

When looking at Dublin specifically, it might be Portuguese and Mandarin.

Tajik and Uzbek, if you mean second and third most common first languages.

Well, according to the Anchorage School District, the top 5 languages after English (for K-12 students, as of 2023) are:

  • Filipino
  • Hmong
  • Samoan
  • Spanish
  • Yu'pik

Presented in alphabetical order, not ranking. Based on an older Anchorage Daily News article from 2018 (which gave numbers, but had Korean in fifth place and Yu'pik a couple rungs down), the order should be:

  1. Spanish
  2. Hmong
  3. Samoan
  4. Filipino
  5. Yu'pik

English and Chinese, then a big gap, then probably Vietnamese and Tagalog.

Spanish is #2 by far. #3 is hard to say, but maybe Korean? I see Korean writing on some businesses and churches in my part of town, but can't think of any other foreign languages I see while out and about.

Well Japanese but it's everyone else's first language. In places like Namba (a heavily touristed enclave of Osaka) probably Chinese and Korean, not necessarily in that order. I've also met down there Germans and French and one Italian couple. Not as many English speakers around as there seem to have been in previous years, though English is probably the second language go-to for most Japanese. I also hear spatterings of Vietnamese and occasional Urdu (?) as there's a Pakistani extended family around town.

"Due to the federal shutdown", data.census.gov is not responding to queries. You may want to ask again when the shutdown has ended.

Right I don’t expect anyone to check census data. What are the common not-majority languages near you?

English is #2, and my gut feeling us #3 is Arabic, though the dated info I find puts Italian slightly ahead of it.

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