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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1409 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

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 Macpherson's Possessive Individualism. For some reason it has connected with me. His basic thesis appears to be that the origins of liberal thought depended on the idea that one was the proprietor of his own person and abilities, completely independent from others in this, thereby ignoring the formative nature of societal influences in his own character.

Perhaps the reason why it has resonated is the hope of, not a politically motivated economic fiction, but simply a way of thinking. If there's a clear and minimal analytical toolset or mindset which can help me be cognizant of possible errors of judgement arising from capitalist influence, I would certainly like to know it. It remains to be seen if this is where the book is headed.

Very slow progress on Said and Al-Ghazali.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Getting pretty close to finishing, and quite enjoy it so far.

Stephenson's very interesting to me, because many of his novels seem as if they were written yesterday despite being written decades ago...and also because he strikes me as a sort of Grey Tribe forerunner who clearly has a lot of scathing commentary for liberal political correctness but also isn't quite at home in Team Red. (This is, admittedly, mostly due to reverse-engineering his thinking from reading his novels, a pretty risky methodology for figuring out someone's politics.)

Finished Shards of Earth. A bit too slow-paced for my taste, but excellent world-building. In fact, it feels a bit like a waste to build so many possibilities and variety into the world for just three books. Will pick up the next one for sure sometime this year.

Picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being - this time it worked much better for me, I must have been in the wrong mood for it before. Went through 2/3 of it so far, and enjoying it a lot.

Only a few chapters into Ubik. It's remarkable how high-variance a writer Philip K. Dick is when it comes to his level of horniness. Some of his books are remarkably soberly written: others, it feels like he was typing with one hand. A nineteen-year-old girl comes over to a guy's apartment for a job interview: partway through, she begins stripping off for some reason I still don't understand, and of course she has a real set of badonkers. Did any writer in the Western canon love tits as much as Dick? This was commented upon in the 2023 edition of the Lyttle Lytton prize:

Loris is in her womb now, as I’m looking at her.  And one day she will nurse at those superb breasts.

Dr. Futurity by Philip K. Dick

The book quoted above (and yes, the italics are in the original) is from 1960.  In 1974, Dick suffered from a series of drug-induced hallucinations and spent the rest of his life in the grip of a sort of religious insanity, believing at vari­ous points that he had been possessed by the spirit of the prophet Elijah and that he was living a parallel life as a persecuted Christian in first-century Rome.  During this period he wrote a book called The Divine Invasion which I had to read for a college class.  “In the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrian­ism,” the novel explains, “a sifting bridge had to be crossed by the newly dead person.  […]  Judaism in its later stages and Christianity had gotten their ideas of the Final Days from this.  The good person, who managed to cross the sift­ing bridge, was met by the spirit of his religion: a beautiful young woman with superb, large breasts.”  So I guess it goes to show⁠—you can go mad, you can become a radically different person, but perhaps there is always some deep-seated element fundamental to who you are that will never change.

I love myself some Dick that came out wrong

I love myself some Philip K. Dick, but once you get past the classics, that is, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and everything that had a movie very loosely based on, the stories start to blend into one. It's as if he had this massive 7D hologram of a perfect story inside his mind, and every book is a crude projection of it from a different angle.

everything that had a movie very loosely based on

That is a lot of stories though. PKD might be one of, if not the, most adapted writer of the 20th century.

*EDIT: Ok, checked and he's nowhere near Stephen King in how many works he has had adapted.

He's also one of the most prolific writers, as well, so there's still a couple dozen novels left.

I positively adored A Scanner Darkly. I read The Man in the High Castle and felt distinctly underwhelmed; so far, I'm enjoying Ubik more than that. Come to think of it, I think those are the only of his novels I've read, with everything else of his that I've read being the contents of this short story collection, each of which made a sufficiently big impression on me that I can still recall the premises ~20 years later. I particularly recall "Second Variety" (which anticipated Terminator by thirty years) being terrifying.

Second Variety has been adapted in a movie, if you enjoyed that. The movie is good cheap 90s sci-fi jank, called Screamers.

"Out of the Gobi". I never realized how much of an insanity the Chinese Cultural Revolution was. Reading the accounts of a teenager caught in the middle of it is definitely very interesting.

Alexander to Actium(the Peter Green version). So far, slow going- I expected a more challenging read, but the cultural changes in Athens are a bit dull.

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