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| 1510735801
| 9781510735804
| 1510735801
| 3.77
| 813
| Sep 18, 2018
| Sep 18, 2018
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liked it
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THE CONSPIRACY ICEBERG This book is a practical guide to deprogramming your friend or family member. In order to get to grips with the whole thing we h THE CONSPIRACY ICEBERG This book is a practical guide to deprogramming your friend or family member. In order to get to grips with the whole thing we have to start by understanding this other conspiratorial way of thinking, beginning with the conspiracy iceberg. I thought this was a useful way to think about conspiracy theories. There’s a hierarchy. At the top is the almost reasonable, and the bottom is the clearly batshit. This is Mick’s little list: 1. Big Pharma – they conspire to sell drugs that people don’t actually need. 2. Global warming – it’s a hoax. 3. JFK – blah blah 4. 9/11 – it was an inside job. 5. Chemtrails – they are putting something sinister into the atmosphere. 6. False flag shootings – the LA and the Sandy Hook shootings were false flag fakes. 7. Moon landing – look at the shadows, sheeple 8. UFO cover up – blah blah 9. Flat earth – now you’re talking 10. Reptile overlords – yeah, those shapeshifting rascals. The Queen of England was one, you know. In fact the whole royal family. It turns out that someone who believes in 9/11 theories thinks flat earthers are crazy and quite likely government shills paid to make decent conspiracy theorists looks like idiots. Now the next excellent point : within the mainstream theories there are also hierarchies of believability. The 9/11 stuff gives the clearest example. The most believable version of that one says that the Bush government knew it was going to happen and deliberately allowed it. In this entry-level theory, you can agree on the rest of the official version, that the planes brought down the towers. The next set of 9/11 theories say the US government made the whole thing happen themselves, that it was a gigantic false flag operation. Controlled explosions, not planes, brought down the towers. Then down there in the bottom of the barrel are the “no-planers” : a group who thinks that all the television footage was faked, that nothing hit the towers and that all the screaming running crowds were paid actors and the planes were CGI. The mainstream truthers think these no-planers are either raving idiots or quite likely government shills paid to make decent conspiracy theorists looks like idiots. In order to begin extracting your friend from the rabbit hole, says Mick, you need to locate their demarcation point – the line where they say this bit is what I believe, but that bit is silly. And then you can start investigating the bit of the believed theory that is closest to the demarcation line, and start to move the demarcation line inch by inch towards reasonableness. It might take a long time, and you have to do it with maximum respect. No name calling. No sneering! YOU ARE MIRRORED IN THE EYES OF YOUR OPPONENT He says you have to remember that the conspiracy believer thinks you have been fooled by bad information into believing something that is clearly impossible. Hey, just exactly what YOU think about HIM. So, proceed with caution. You can let him try to convert you. You can restate his argument and improve it! This reminded me of the Stones’ 19th Nervous Breakdown On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind But after a while I realized you were disarranging mine IT WON’T BE EASY For example, the difficulty in rebutting the truthers’ controlled demolition 9/11 theory is that this was a unique building collapse, so when they all say well, it just doesn’t look right, how could they fall down so neatly we can’t point to other examples where 102 storey buildings fell down. THREE COMPLAINTS, KIND OF This is a pretty good well meaning book but of course there were a couple of things wrong with it. Mick began his debunking by spending years investigating chemtrails so this is his big expertise, and I myself wouldn’t care if twenty chemtrails fell on my house, I have zero interest, so pages 85 to 128 were useless, and should have been devoted to something of more general interest. Also – a bigger question is glanced at but never confronted, which is : what kind of world do the truthers think we are living in? If the US government is so evil they will murder 3000 of their own citizens to provide themselves with a pretext for a couple of foreign invasions (that seems to be the gist of the argument) then – are Americans actually living in a democracy at all or is this elaborate Congress and elections and political parties set-up just shadowplay? If the deep state can steal one election, why won’t it steal the next election too? And by the way how come they allow all you truthers to run about undermining their total information control? And also by the way what are we supposed to do with all this truth? If enough people believe in the 9/11 theory will that mean we can rise up and catch the criminals and put them in prison? Is that the point? Also – and this is probably true – in order to rebut most of the conspiracy theories you have to arm yourself with the most arcane knowledge, because that’s what the theorists do. When they quote Newton’s second law of thermodynamics at you you tell them that Newton’s laws only apply to abstract point masses, and they will tell you that’s bullshit. You try to tell them about point masses versus rigid bodies versus articulated bodies, elastic versus inelastic collisions, conservation of momentum versus conservation of energy, potential energy in the building versus chemical energy from explosives, static force versus dynamic force, vertical support cross-sections, and the square-cube scaling law. They tell you that’s all a bunch of handwaving because they think “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” proves the buildings could not have simply collapsed as they did. THERE’S PROBABLY A CUTE NAME FOR THIS FALLACY The 9/11 theorists can’t abide the idea that 19 guys with box cutters caused all that horror. It can’t have happened like that, there must be something more to it. This is the same thing as thinking that weaselly nobody Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed JFK either at all or by himself. One nasty little guy killing the most powerful man in the world? Come on. Must be more to it than that. I LIKED THIS The common concession in debates that “the truth is somewhere in the middle is a fallacy. The world is not half flat I BELIEVE IN THE GOVERNMENT AND I LOVE THE FBI AND THE CIA Non-theorists are always in the invidious position of sort of more or less accepting the Official Version of 9/ll or climate change or vaccinations, etc, for which we are continually mocked. It’s cooler to be a conspiracist. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 2024
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Apr 02, 2024
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Apr 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0593476093
| 9780593476093
| 0593476093
| 4.48
| 9,599
| Mar 28, 2024
| Mar 26, 2024
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liked it
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The survivors will envy the dead. - Nikita Khrushchev This book is terrifying and tedious at the same time. In fact, I might say it’s borderline unreada The survivors will envy the dead. - Nikita Khrushchev This book is terrifying and tedious at the same time. In fact, I might say it’s borderline unreadable – not because of the ghastly scenario it spells out but because of the horrible uncontrolled gushings of military acronyms falling like fallout on each and every page SIOP NORTHCOM STRATCOM SBIRS FEMA COOP SLBM The Football The Black Book SecDef KNEECAP And so on, but also because of the inevitable GIGANTISM of everything being described here : because everything concerning nuclear war is extreme ! The power of the bombs, the vastnesses of the military bases, the complexities of the delivery systems, the silos, the subs, the casualties, the deaths, the deaths. I must say that Annie Jacobsen appears to be obsessed with the size of everything : The Ivy Mike prototype bomb weighed around 80 tons (160,000 pounds), an instrument of destruction itself so physically enormous it had to be constructed inside a corrugated aluminium building eighty-eight feet long and forty-six feet wide. The underground Battle Deck, a 1000 square foot, concrete-walled room Some 720 million gallons of sewer-infested waters flooding the base, ruining 137 buildings and destroying 1 million square feet of workspace, including 118,000 square feet of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility space (also known as SCIF space) With its 16 petaflops of speed and 236 petabytes of storage capacity This one-of-a-kind, stadium-sized, seagoing, self-propelled radar station weighs 50,000 tons, requires 1.9 million gallons of gas to run, can withstand 30-foot-tall waves, is larger than a football field, requires 86 crew members CUT TO THE CHASE! WHAT HAPPENS ? Annie imagines the following possibility : 1. North Korea fires a missile towards the USA, targeted on the Pentagon. This is spotted quickly but the Americans can’t tell what’s in the warhead – could be a dummy, could be biological or nuclear weapon. Might have been fired accidentally. The Americans try to shoot it down and don’t succeed, because, as the quote on p 73 says, it’s “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet”. But I did not really understand this bit – as luck would have it, I’m writing this on 14 April 2024. Overnight, Iran sent around 300 drones and missiles towards Israel, and “almost all” of them were intercepted and shot down. Probably it’s because drones are easier to hit because they’re slower than an ICBM? But also they’re smaller! So I don’t know. 2. 17 minutes later, a second missile, fired from a Korean submarine off the coast of California, aimed at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a nuclear plant. This second one detonates first. 3. Americans retaliate with 50 missiles aimed at N Korea. Because of limitations of range, these missiles have to go over the North Pole. Because of the known inadequacies of the Russian detection system (Tundra) they can’t tell the destination of over-the-pole missiles, so they could easily think it was Russia under attack, and that is what happens in this scenario. Because of the chaos of the NK attack, the Americans have not been able to get in touch with the Russian president. The whole thing from beginning to end has only taken 34 minutes. 4. The first missile hits the Pentagon; Washington DC is eliminated from American geography. 5. After that, things go downhill rapidly. THE FOURTH WORLD WAR Everybody knows it will be fought with bows and arrows, in about ten thousand years from now. The first chapters of Annie Jacobsen’s horrifying book are the best, dealing with the way the American military has successively considered the way a nuclear war should be conducted, exactly how many millions would die, how many cities should be deemed expendable and so forth. Because they were “governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink” they just got on with the assigned task, they never refused to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Everybody should read this part. This is where we are right now, flinging lighted matches around in a leaking gasoline storage depot. The worst part of Annie’s book, which I would be most surprised if she doesn’t now regret, is the reason for the initial North Korean missile strike. Kim Jong Un, it seems, harboured a very deep grudge about photos released by Western sources showing satellite images of the Korean peninsula at night. The south was awash with bright electric light, the north was dark, and North Korea was ridiculed as “electricity poor”. To a mad king, this comparing image was like a poke in the eye…. What happens next is revenge for that insult. Really, this is very bad! I hope no copies of this book end up in Pyongyang. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 12, 2024
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Apr 14, 2024
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Mar 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1509851747
| 9781509851744
| 1509851747
| 4.61
| 7,443
| Oct 06, 2020
| Sep 17, 2020
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it was amazing
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Fans of the Humans of New York blog & books will need no encouragement, this is more of the same but from all around the world. I have to say that the Fans of the Humans of New York blog & books will need no encouragement, this is more of the same but from all around the world. I have to say that the stories of these people are mostly sad or jarring or frankly horrendous – the longest entry is a ten page account of a woman’s experience of the Rwandan genocide. There are many victims here, many having bravely overcome their struggles, some who are overwhelmed pools of sorrow. I notice that we get many victims or ex-victims and almost zero perpetrators. Authors should read all these Humans books and re-think all their novels – so many ghastly or remarkable circumstances explained by these interviewees leave most fiction looking timid and becalmed. Most people get a dense couple of paragraphs but some of my favourite entries are the one-liners : We’re eating cookies before lunch because Grandpa doesn’t have any rules. We don’t have any hobbies. But we do try to get together a few times a month to judge people and complain about things. I should have invested the money I stole. The landlord doesn’t care how much furniture you’ve sold this month. I photoshopped my head onto a healthy body to see what I would look like. My only obstacles are my thoughts. ...more |
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1
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Apr 04, 2023
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Aug 04, 2023
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Aug 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B092PHCW48
| 4.32
| 168
| unknown
| Feb 03, 2022
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liked it
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The UK puts an increasing number of children into “care”, meaning that social workers take the kids from their parents, or more usually, from their si
The UK puts an increasing number of children into “care”, meaning that social workers take the kids from their parents, or more usually, from their single mother, and give them to a foster family, or put them in a state care home. This book analyses why the number of kids has skyrocketed in recent years. The main reasons these parents fail is because they are suffering from one or more of the “toxic three” afflictions : alcohol/drug addiction, mental health problems, and domestic violence. The almost total absence of middleclass kids in care tells the author that the “toxic three” are intimately connected to poverty, but it’s hard to see what causes which. Mothers catch it every which way, of course – for example, having been beaten by their partner, the mother will be judged by social workers to have psychologically abused her children in turn if she failed to prevent them seeing or hearing her being beaten. This is a painfully genuine attempt to diagnose and prescribe for a whole area of social misery. Unfortunately, for me, there was a whole lot too much vague language. People say stuff like Things could be done so much better if people had the time and space to invest in people Or suggesting that it would be better if we started “putting parents’ voices at the head of the policy-making process”. In the end, a very brave attempt to look honestly at a difficult subject, but for me the picture of life at the bottom needed to be much more detailed and the suggested ways out of this morass much more radical. ...more |
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1
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Mar 13, 2022
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Mar 15, 2022
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Mar 09, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525560343
| 9780525560340
| 0525560343
| 4.35
| 40,820
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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liked it
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This is a strange book. The two authors spent weeks and months putting a huge story together about Harvey Weinstein but it was tough to get any women
This is a strange book. The two authors spent weeks and months putting a huge story together about Harvey Weinstein but it was tough to get any women to speak out, almost all of his victims were silenced by non-disclosure agreements, which were so restrictive that one woman’s husband had never heard of his wife’s problem with Harvey until our two reporters came calling. Now, after the first big story, dozens of other victims immediately surfaced. It became bitterly ironic. After scouring the country to find women willing to talk on record, the reporters were now overwhelmed with far too many abuse stories. The authors tell this part of the story in great detail, trying to keep the tone cool and unemotional for the most part. I was reminded of books about Watergate – there is a waterfall of names and a steady flow of legalese to negotiate. But after this first big story and its immediate aftermath in October 2017 – shazam! we skip forward to May 2018 and find Harvey being hauled into court and charged with rape and serious sexual abuse. Damn, I really wanted to know the whole sequence of events between him being accused by a few very nervous women to the cops dragging him into court. But the authors weren’t directly involved in that part, so I guess that’s why they don’t allow us to enjoy Harvey’s rapid decline and fall. Schadenfreude denied! (Okay, some schadenfreude is allowed to us. When Harvey is led into the courtroom to hear the charges one victim said “He’s now experiencing all the things he put everybody else through – humiliation, worthlessness, fear, weakness, aloneness, loss, suffering and embarrassment.”) What they spend the rest of the book on is the accusation of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. This is also recounted in great detail. And then the book ends. Very curious – it’s like the authors were presenting the reader with a Harvey counter-argument. With Weinstein many victim voices told similar stories about hotel rooms, Harvey in a bathrobe, coerced sexual contact, and so forth. But with Kavanaugh there was only one victim, and one incident, which happened when they were both teenagers, 30 plus years before. (“Others were likely to dismiss it as drunken horseplay”) BACK TO HARVEY One lawyer explained why the authors should maybe soft-pedal their Harvey story : Weinstein had started to see his previous behaviour in a different light. Powerful men of an older generation were changing their understanding of the meaning of the word consensual…and why “women don’t feel it’s consensual even if a man convinces himself it is” (That reminds me of what one cop said in a true crime book I read. The rapist told him “Well, she didn’t consent at first, but I pulled out a gun, then she consented.”) Another lawyer asked the reporters : Are you sure this isn’t just young women who want to sleep with a famous movie producer to try to get ahead? So I think there must be a whole other book out there which contemplates the big picture, this #metoo tidal wave, and investigates whether men’s behaviour has in fact changed. This book often finds itself throwing off excellent questions : Those who felt #metoo had not gone far enough and those who protested that it was going too far were saying some of the same things. There was a lack of process or clear enough rules. The public did not fully agree on the precise meaning of words like harassment or assault. …the feelings of unfairness on both sides just continued to mount. Ugh, enough of all this old stuff about Weinstein and Trump and Bill O’Reilly and all those dreadful old guys. I think things have improved now. Anyway, I’m tired of thinking about it all. Let’s see what’s happening at the Olympics. Oh wait, what’s this on the news today…. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been accused of sexually harassing multiple women, subjecting them to unwanted kissing and groping, in a damning independent investigation. The state's Attorney General Letitia James said Mr Cuomo had violated state and federal laws. In response, Mr Cuomo denied touching anyone inappropriately and vowed to continue as governor. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 31, 2021
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Aug 03, 2021
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Jul 12, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0807076910
| 9780807076910
| 0807076910
| 4.24
| 4,845
| May 21, 2019
| May 21, 2019
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liked it
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This book is about the scientific basis of race. There isn’t one. From a scientific, biological point of view, there is NO SUCH thing as race. You pro This book is about the scientific basis of race. There isn’t one. From a scientific, biological point of view, there is NO SUCH thing as race. You probably heard this, but there are more DNA variations between black Africans than between black Africans and white Europeans. Since the Unesco statement in 1952 (“The Race Question in Modern Science”) this has been official scientific policy. In their words race was “a fundamentally anti-rational system of thought”. You will have noted that, alas, this announcement did not stop the whole entirety of human society proceeding on the basis that of course race exists, and of course there are different races. Angela Saini puts it like this : Racial categories were still alive in people’s minds. They were still active in everyday life, playing out in the politics and the racism of the real world. For scientists to suddenly stop thinking about humans in racial terms was impossible so long as everyone out there still thought about themselves and others that way. Or in a nutshell, race is a “social reality” not a biological fact. THE RISE AND FALL AND ATTEMPTED RISE AGAIN OF THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE CONCEPT OF RACE Angela Saini tells the story of how science came to believe in the biological basis of separate races and how this “race science” rose to become orthodoxy, then fell dramatically and smashed to bits, and how now it tries to get back in through the back door, courtesy of some well-funded alt right whack jobs. In the Victorian period there were a lot of bogus scientists running around spouting total nonsense, it took a long while to get them thrown out. You couldn’t tell the bogus ones from the sensible ones for the longest time. Race science began as part of the Victorian mania for classifying everything, butterflies, albatross eggs, fossils, types of wheat, and …. Humans. EUGENICS (IT’S PRONOUNCED EWWWGENICS) At the same time came the Darwinian evolution-revolution. When you put the two together, and considering Mendel’s rediscovered work on selective breeding, you got the idea of improving the human race… or a part of it…. (let’s say, oh, I don’t know, the white part)… by selective breeding of people. You know, just like farmers do with cows and those other things. That was called eugenics. Built into all this thinking was, of course, that some races are essentially superior than others, and therefore worth purifying. DOWNFALL OF RACE SCIENCE By the 1920s and 30s race science in the form of eugenics had been signed into law in over 30 states in the USA. Compulsory sterilisation of those deemed mentally or physically unfit was the first idea. Europeans were enthusiastic about this too. Germany under Hitler was the apotheosis of the racist state, and you know he kind of gave a bad name to that whole way of thinking, so this led to the abandonment of scientifically based race concepts after WW2 by all except the whack jobs. DNA However, says Angela Saini, there has been a partial return of race science in the form of genetics. Self-described antiracist scientists use the phrase “human biodiversity” and sometimes this whole DNA human genome thing sounds kind of not that dissimilar to something those old Victorian gentlemen scientists would have thought they were talking about. THE BORING BIT This book spends half its pages detailing the nefarious shady organisations and methods of right wing fruitcakes who still think there is a biological reality to race and who want to reintroduce their untruths into public discourse, to reclothe the Victorian racial hierarchy with sciency DNA chatter. Angela Saini really cares about that stuff, she wants those people recognised and booted out and crushed. I can see why but there was way too much detail for me. First half was very interesting though. I’m not sure if it’s useful to say I recommend the first half of a book! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 17, 2020
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Jan 05, 2021
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Dec 17, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 1526151162
| 9781526151162
| 1526151162
| 3.45
| 22
| unknown
| Nov 20, 2020
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liked it
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Goodreads had its own troubles with free speech back in 2013. Not everyone reading this will recall the details so I will mention that it hinged on th
Goodreads had its own troubles with free speech back in 2013. Not everyone reading this will recall the details so I will mention that it hinged on the question is it okay to say an author is a bad person in your review? A few authors in the YA genre had done some bad things IRL and people were outraged and posted straightforward reviews saying “don’t buy this person’s books because they are a minion of Satan”. GR management said that was not within the guidelines, you had to stay on topic and review the book, not the author. And some reviews were deleted because of that. Naturally people began reviewing Mein Kampf and saying what a terrible person the author was and waited to see if those reviews would be deleted. I remember at the time if I gave one star to a book I made a point of saying I thought the author was an absolute darling and they were welcome to come for tea any day of the week. Manny Raynor wrote an ebook about the whole affair and you would have to say it’s rather critical of the then GR management. I think they tried to delete the book entry from GR but gave up in the end – it’s still there now Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt by G.R. Reader https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... This whole free speech issue is tricky. Currently it’s the alt-right who like to say they’re being cruelly banned and deplatformed and censored and whatall. All I can say is, I hope they are. Ban the lot of them. Just to be clear, free speech is a sacred right for everybody I happen to agree with. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 26, 2021
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Mar 12, 2021
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Dec 03, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1781256632
| 9781781256633
| 1781256632
| 4.42
| 8,800
| Mar 21, 2017
| Jan 01, 2017
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really liked it
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Not only is this a terrific bunch of stuff, it also functions as a personality test, and the things you find out about yourself might not be the thing
Not only is this a terrific bunch of stuff, it also functions as a personality test, and the things you find out about yourself might not be the things you particularly wanted to know. I was completely unaware of this Moth phenomenon. It’s been going on since the late 90s, it says here, and it’s all about storytelling. Some person will get on a stage and talk into a microphone and tell the audience a story. This has become a really big thing. What did I know. Me and the zeitgeist, we are not so close anymore. I should say straight off that they are using this word storytelling in a specialized way. These aren’t made up fictional stories, these are autobiographical mini-essays. It’s all true. And these are not some random amateurs telling us their experiences. This book could have been called THE MOTH : A COLLECTION OF CURIOUS AND AMUSING INCIDENTS FEATURING MOSTLY MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS WITH MOSTLY ARTISTIC CAREERS Normal people are not invited to the Moth. Let’s take a random sample of four tale tellers here : Sara Barron is the author of the story collections blah blah blah, her work has featured in Vanity Fair blah blah; Stephanie Peirolo is the author of the novel Radio Silence; Dr Mary-Claire King is American Cancer Society Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle… she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama; Simon Bill is an artist and writer, his novel Artist in Residence blah blah…. So the first part of the personality test made me uncomfortably aware that I am quite prejudiced against this flowing parade of the great and the good, and when I came to Tony Wheeler’s account of how he was this guy with a wanderlust who whisked his jolly family all over the world in this jolly smug hippy way and created the Lonely Planet series of travel books and made billions I couldn’t stop counting up the pitifully few countries I’ve visited and the years wasted without founding a single publishing empire and frankly I resented Tony Wheeler and I didn’t feel so good about that. But Tony is an anomaly. In general what you get here is a whole series of being thrown into the middle of situations. One guy was working inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on the day of the earthquake March 11, 2011 One woman discovers a family secret – her dad was black! She thought he was white! One woman has to decide if her brain damaged son should be switched off One guy wrote Go the Fuck to Sleep and tells us about the media typhoon that blew his life to pieces because of that One guy gets to be an extra in Silence of the Lambs - and blows his scene, repeatedly And there are a number of really grim ones too. One guy’s daughter is raped and killed. He describes the trial and his thoughts about the murderer and how he eventually met the murderer and forgave the murderer and here is another part of the personality test of this book – when he forgave his daughter’s murderer I could not accept it! I was thinking No! You can’t do that! Forgive a moral degenerate like that! This book will get you like that, and uncomfortable truths are revealed. A new mother’s painful feelings when her baby has Downs; an experience in Congo trying to rescue people who will otherwise be killed. But then on the next page you will get an account of the kosher food problem when you’re ultra Orthodox. Psychological whiplash is the result of reading this stuff straight through. Which you can’t stop – like a bag of Revels, oh just one more , just one more until the whole bag is gone. In double quick time. You may be thinking – aren’t these just 49 Readers Digest articles? “I am John’s spleen”, “I fell off the Eiffel Tower and died”, “My wife was in the Manson Family”, that sort of thing. Well, yes, It’s kind of true. Okay, it is completely true. Busted! But I didn’t care, it was great, funny, good, bad, strange and annoying, some times all at once. Kind of recommended. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 17, 2019
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Mar 19, 2019
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Mar 17, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0856340006
| 9780856340000
| 0856340006
| 4.16
| 19
| Aug 01, 1971
| Jan 01, 1971
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really liked it
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[image] There were two main underground mags in those old hippy days in England. The louder, more in-your-face one was Oz. It started up in 1967 and by [image] There were two main underground mags in those old hippy days in England. The louder, more in-your-face one was Oz. It started up in 1967 and by 1970 the acidhead revolutionaries who ran it were accusing themselves of getting old and complacent & so to jive the whole thing up they thought they’d turn one issue over to under-18 year olds. Some of us are feeling old and boring. We invite our readers who are under 18 to come and edit the April issue. We will choose one person, several or accept collective applications from a group of friends. Oz belongs to you. And so it began. So these schoolkids, the ones who answered the above advert, would write and edit the whole thing and the three guys who usually ran Oz would stand back and just show them how to do the practical stuff. The Schoolkids Oz (issue number 28) came out in May 1970. Later that year the cops raided the Oz offices (again) and finally brought the prosecution for obscenity they’d been hankering for. The trial of the three editors of Oz was held at the Old Bailey because it was most important, and it started on June 23 1971 and lasted for 6 weeks. It was the showdown between the straights and the hippies. Sex, drugs & rocknroll versus the Establishment. The whole thing is fascinating. First off, one of the main issues – what is the right way to discuss drugs with young people? – is still a red hot topic 50 years later. Schoolkids Oz was accused of encouraging minors to smoke dope and take LSD. Well, of course it was. But one of the main defense arguments was : yes, the mag was created by kids, but it was sold to our usual clientele, other hippies. Hmmm.... Second, the somewhat precocious self-selected kids (all around the 14-18 age range) were obsessed with sex jokes and rude cartoons. Surprise! And the one that got the big attention in court was RUPERT BEAR AND GYPSY GRANNY Rupert Bear, a friendly fellow, the innocent companion of many an English childhood. [image] One of the kids just snipped his head out of a Rupert Annual and stuck it on a vulgar Robert Crumb-type American comic strip. Naughty! So we get the amusing cartoon strip of old Gypsy Granny being raped by Rupert Bear who has a huge erection. This led to one of many hilarious exchanges in court : Leary (for the prosecution) : Do you find the erect male organ nice? Would you agree it’s clearly indecent? Anderson (defendant) : No, not indecent in the least. Leary : What? Anderson : I don’t find it indecent in the least. Leary : Do you find anything indecent? In fact, the Rupert cartoon provided endless entertainment. Here is a favourite exchange : Schofield (defense witness) : The cartoon is intended to be humorous. It’s a joke. It may not be a good joke, but I maintain even the funniest joke in the world would, after you, Mr Leary, had finished with it, not be very funny. The sexual part of this cartoon is of little importance. Leary : Of little importance? Schofield : The main point about it is that Rupert Bear is behaving in a way one would not expect a little bear to behave. Leary : Yes, but what sort of age would you think Rupert is to your mind? What sort of aged bear? Schofield: Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not up to date with bears. Judge (intervening) : I think the question is, what age do you think Rupert is intended to be, a child, adult or what? Schofield : It’s an unreal question. Leary : He’s a young bear, isn’t he? He goes to school, that’s right, isn’t it? Schofield: I don’t know whether he went to school or not. I’m sorry, but I’m obviously not as well informed as you are about little bears. I’m a psychologist. When Edward de Bono was called as a witness, Rupert was back on the menu : Leary : What do you suppose Is the effect intended to be of equipping Rupert Bear with such a large-sized organ? De Bono : I don’t know enough about bears to know their exact proportions. I imagine their organs are hidden in their fur. MORE SEX And then you get cartoons of pervy teachers getting sexually aroused when caning children – corporal punishment by caning being wholly approved of by English society at the time. (It wasn’t banned until 1986.) When you look through the Schoolkids Oz now, 50 years later, there are still really quite jarring things in it. The link for the whole issue is down below – check out if you will page 5, where we get a full page photo of a very young schoolgirl captioned JAIL BAIT OF THE MONTH. Eww. And one of the Sine cartoons towards the end is really Patrick Batemanesque. But most of the stuff the kids write about is predictable – children’s rights and school reform. THE TRIAL During the horrible trial the hippy editors and Mr Leary, the prosecutor, might as well have been on different planets. He would say ridiculous things, they would say even more ridiculous things back. Leary : But you wouldn’t think it is a good thing that parents should masturbate in front of their children, would you? Anderson: Well, it depends on the family circumstances. Leary : The WHAT?? I’m sorry, may we have that reply again? On every other page of this excellent account the 2019 reader’s eyes will be falling out, either at some gross thing in the magazine itself, or the unbelievable would-you-let-your-servants-read-this-filth mind of Mr Leary, or the ineffable ultraradicalism of the acidhead editors, or, indeed, sometimes, the comments made by our narrator Tony Palmer. Here he is introducing one of the defence witnesses, Caroline Coon, who founded the drug charity Release : The first of these witnesses was the ever lovely Caroline Coon, white hot pants and all. “I certainly have, as I’m sure most of us have, seen you on television,” said the Judge. Was he looking at the hot pants? And later “Well,” she replied, hitching up her pants And later Neville continued, turning again to Miss Coon who was batting her eyes at the jury And later Leary blundered into action against the delectable Miss Coon And finally Miss Coon hitched up her pants and looked pleased. Boy, I wished I had a picture of Caroline Coon in her white hot pants so we could all check her out.This is like Carry On at the Oz Obscenity Trial. IN THE END Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson were found guilty of publishing an obscene magazine and got prison sentences (from nine months to 15 months). There was much outrage, there were marches in London supporting the Oz Three, John and Yoko issued a single called God Save Oz, not very good but the flipside Do the Oz is pretty great, and the Oz Three appealed. The appeal court found the Judge at fault in the direction of the jury and all sentences were quashed. [image] ONE BATTLE WON I think that prosecuting a publisher for obscenity has now become a thing of the past in Western countries. Our beloved Goodreads parent company Amazon is happy to sell you The Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf , and in the dvd section American Guinea Pig, Slow Torture Puke Chamber and many others. So the battle over obscenity has been won. Things are so much better now. AND YOU CAN READ THE WHOLE OF THIS OBSCENE MAGAZINE RIGHT HERE https://flashbak.com/schoolkids-oz-re... ...more |
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| 3.41
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Mary McCarthy saw Susan Sontag at a party, where else, and said to her “I hear you’re the new me.” **** This account of the careers of Dorothy Parker, Ha Mary McCarthy saw Susan Sontag at a party, where else, and said to her “I hear you’re the new me.” **** This account of the careers of Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm with walk-on parts for Rebecca West and Zora Neale Hurston was kinda interesting and I must also confess kinda just a little bit boring too. I have read biographies of three of them already and am a big fan of Janet Malcolm already but the others are mostly just names. Like, I know that Joan Didion wrote The White Album but I have no idea what she thought of Rocky Raccoon. Big points go to Michelle Dean for wrangling a vast amount of information and squishing it all down into 300 pages but this means that some of it is a breathless dash. I must take some of those points back, though, for a dull pedestrian no-style of writing, and also for some real clunkers which have you rereading in bafflement : To the extent it reflected her own experiences, she was clearly standing outside them, evaluating them and evaluating herself, and then fictionalising events according to the judgements she made. Er, does that actually mean anything? And because a lot of these women had very similar zigzag careers in journalism & then writing novels & living in New York & having bad marriages & becoming alcoholic & so forth it got a bit samey, to tell you the truth, sometimes it seemed to be about one person with ten heads rather than ten people with one head each. Like, they all wrote for lotsa magazines and newspapapers, which sounded completely interchangeable to me. No doubt the editors of the said rags would have shot me dead on the spot if I said such a thing back then, but the New York Review of Books sounds a lot like the New York Book Review to me, and Esquire and Vanity Fair and the New Yorker were all the same thing weren’t they and if they weren’t, no one cares anymore. But throughout this book it’s a big deal getting fired from this magazine and hired by that one. Those pages, and they are not infrequent, are a yawwwwwwwwwwwn. ( NB - Hannah Arendt was nothing like the rest of them. She wrote enormous tomes like The Origins of Totalitarianism and why she is in this book alongside Pauline Kael who wrote Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a head scratcher; it’s like inviting Mother Theresa to an all-night poker party; but it’s true the others knew of her and kind of worshipped her from afar.) Michelle Dean’s main point here, I think, and it’s an uneasy one, is that these intellectual women who were fierce and original and successful had only the most reluctant relationship with feminism, at the very time when it had come back ragingly. Hannah Arendt for one seems to have hated the very word. Eventually some of the others coughed to being feminist but only in latter years. They were conflicted. I wanted to know exactly why in each case but I think that would have expanded the book to 400 pages. It was complicated, as they say. The jacket designer by the way should stand in the corner with the dunce’s cap on for the sheer dopiness of including seven photos of these writers without identifying who is who. And any way, come on, a few photos inside the book too wouldn’t have killed you, Little Brown Book Group trading as Fleet, you mean people! Your budget wouldn't stretch that far? That's not because they're women writers by any chance? ...more |
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May 14, 2018
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May 08, 2018
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really liked it
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Everyone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theo
Everyone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theory but it won’t help at all when you’re pulled over for speeding. “I’m just a brain in a vat, officer”. So that thing you have there draped round your soul, yes, your very body – did you know that it’s like an explosive device waiting to go off at the slightest movement? It’s so offensive! Depending on the context. For instance, on p155 we read: Jock Sturges has been photographing the same nudist families in France year after year, watching the children grow into young adults. Sally Mann photographs her own children negotiating the turbulent waters of childhood. This book was published in 1994 and in the last 24 years we have had such a tsunami of revelations about the prevalence of paedophilia that the very young nudes in these two photographers’ works are now alarming and very unsettling. (But still on sale at Amazon.) How’s this for a story about the offensive qualities of the human form. A modest form of swimwear was created for Muslim women which got called the burkini – actually it’s nothing to do with the burka as it does not cover the face, but it covers everything else. [image] The burka had already been banned in France as you will know. But then the burkini was banned by various French resorts. What could possibly be the problem? The Independent newspaper explained: The first city to announce the prohibition was Cannes, where mayor David Lisnard said he wanted to prohibit “beachwear ostentatiously showing a religious affiliation while France and places of religious significance are the target of terror attacks” to avoid “trouble to public order”. So then you had the crazy sight of French policemen on the beach ordering Muslim women wearing the burkini to expose more of their bodies or face the judicial consequences. “You’re offending public decency by wearing too many clothes!” This fits right into the chapter of this remarkable book called “Politic” – “the body as a site of contested meaning and value”. Boy, you can say that again. * So this book is stuffed full of 366 photos – “35 in colour, 331 in duotone” (yes, black & white) – of the human body in its many phases and attitudes, from the very gruesome Felice Beato 1865 – Crucifixion of the Male Servant Sokichi who Killed the Son of his Boss and was Therefore Crucified. He Was 25 Years Old to surrealistic fun in the 1930s and all the way to the pinnacle of straight and gay male and female beauty. It’s also stuffed with rather turgid and waffly prose consisting of statements of the obvious and statements of the indefinably abstruse with very little in between. * One of the most interesting chapters is called “Estrangement”, dealing with imperfect, disfigured, disabled, rejected, sick and dead human bodies. So here we have the bound Chinese foot, the Fijian cannibals with a fresh corpse, the hermaphrodite, elephantiasis due to scarlet fever, and a selecting of grossly deformed foetuses in big jars (always a crowd-pleaser). And let’s not forget A Filipino Freak Of Seven Or Eight Years Old Having An Extra Pair Of Legs Protruding From The Pelvis, C 1900 We are then informed that in the 19th century there was a brisk trade in such photographs of 'the other' : the circus freak, the bearded lady, Siamese twins, and so forth were popular subjects to be collected and traded So all those sites on the internet specialising in the gross and the grotesque have a venerable pedigree. A book like this demonstrates how our notions of what is decent and what is indecent mutate quite confusingly as the decades roll on by. I now think that the Victorian collectors of pornography would not be shocked by modern porn; instead they would be delighted at the quality of the images. We 21st century people, however, might well be shocked at some Victorian practices : Dead babies were another popular subject. Although to our thinking there is something of the macabre in this practice, people in the 19th century seemed to find much solace in it, as they did also in the so-called spirit photograph, a portrait of the widow or widower with an image of the dearly departed (manufactured by double exposure) hovering reassuringly over the shoulder. (If you’re interested, just google “Victorian babies in coffins”) * In 2016 Lucy Martin became a weather presenter on the BBC – here she is [image] I’m used to her now but at first she kind of shocked me. Okay, not kind of, she did shock me! I’m still trying to work out why. ...more |
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If I was forming a Christian country rock band in 1972 I’m sure Good Faith Collaboration would have made the short list for possible band names. This If I was forming a Christian country rock band in 1972 I’m sure Good Faith Collaboration would have made the short list for possible band names. This book is about Wikipedia and is written in the crushingly dull style of the academic thesis. No jokes are allowed. If any elements of the author’s personality creep in, they are removed in the fourth draft. This makes it quite similar to the deliberately crushingly dull Wikipedia neutral-point-of-view style which is one of the holy trinity of Wiki rules – the other two as you probably know are No Original Research and Verifiability, both of which might also be on the short list for Christian country rock band names in 1972. Five minutes of googling will provide you with several stories way more entertaining than anything in this book. For instance! In 2013 an editor created a sub-category of American Literature called American Female Novelists. The American female novelist Amanda Filipacchi quickly spotted this and saw that now there was one category called American Novelists and a sub-category called American Female Novelists. As there was no sub category called American Male Novelists, she concluded The intention seems to be to create a list of American Novelists on Wikipedia that is entirely made up of men The NY Times article about this was entitled Wikipedia’s Sexism Towards Female Novelists. Wikipedia editors read this attack on Wikipedia and engaged in a furious bout of “revenge editing” of Amanda Filipacchi’s own entry and also deleted entries on her novels, on the grounds that they were “overly self-promotional”. All edits, whether for revenge or not, are preserved in Wikipedia’s talk pages aspic forever, and these anti-Filipacchi edits could be seen as the work of one single editor. While Wiki articles themselves are allowed zero personality, the language used in the talk pages is anything but. When criticised, this revenge editor came back with Oh, by all means let’s be intimidated by the holy New York Times. Because when the New York Times tells you to shut up, you have to shut up. … she’s using this scandal in order to promote and revive her writing career, since she hasn’t been able to publish a book in eight years…. The bloody New York Times supposedly employs fact checkers but they have allowed this incompetent woman to libel Wikipedia not once but twice. They owe Wikipedia two separate retractions. … They are nothing better than a blog, a barrel of dog feces offered to the world as the “truth” He continued in this vein, saying that the NYT has a vested interest in undermining Wikipedia. After a couple of days this guy’s revenge editing had been reversed by other editors. This is very entertaining stuff, and it does illustrate why Good Faith Collaboration may be one of the dullest ever titles but it is the heart and soul of the Wiki project. Amanda Filipacchi assumed bad faith rather than idiocy when she saw female novelists being dumped into a sub-category. But it is true to say that in a very general cultural way, Wikipedia is actually biased. The editors are overwhelmingly the usual suspects – young white generally fairly geeky males. So they’re interested in what they’re interested in. Every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has its own entry. It’s just possible that the same amount of love and care isn’t lavished on African television shows. But I haven’t checked, that’s an assumption. Thinking about Wikipedia is thinking about thinking which is really hard. When you’re a kid you get a mirror and you stand in front of another mirror and you put the mirror you’re holding against your face and you see infinitely regressing images of yourself holding the mirror as each mirror mirrors the other mirror. It’s funny but also unnerving. Thinking about what is information, what is knowledge, what is true and why it’s true and why you believe this and not that is like infinitely regressing mirroring mirrors, but each one slightly distorting, and some mirrors distorting on purpose and others distorting because they didn’t realise they were doing it. During past conversations with my friend Aslam on the subject of evolution we quickly grind to a halt because although I completely accept Darwinian evolution I don’t know the first thing about the subject, and although he rejects evolution as regards human beings, he’s no Islamic scholar either, and all either of us can do is vaguely gesture towards a body of knowledge which we both have taken on good faith. [image] What could possibly be so interesting about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? ...more |
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| 024494878X
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| Dec 2017
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PLATO and SOCRATES are sitting in a Costa Coffee in downtown Geneva. PLATO : So you finally went behind my back and hired yourself a new ghost writer, PLATO and SOCRATES are sitting in a Costa Coffee in downtown Geneva. PLATO : So you finally went behind my back and hired yourself a new ghost writer, you slimy little weasel, then, did you? SOCRATES: Well, my hand was forced. Kindly tell me, if you would, what do you know about super string theory and dark matter and all that malarkey? What’s that you say? Precisely nothing. Right. You haven’t kept up with the times, admit it. I’m trying to build a brand here. I bet you don’t even know what a brand is. PLATO : Sure I do, it’s something to distinguish between your slaves and another person’s slaves. SOCRATES (appeals to the heavens to agree with him about Plato’s dunderheadedness) : Okay, I think you have to agree, I had to find someone who could talk to these modern people. Get my ideas across. Your jawbreaking perorations and antique phraseology don’t go across anymore. You’re yesterday’s man. You been riding my coat tails for 2500 years. I don’t need you any more. Now I’ve got Manny Rayner. PLATO : So who is this Manny Rayner then? He’s the new Plato? I bet he couldn’t philosophise his way out of a paper bag if it was open at both ends. SOCRATES : I didn’t hire him for his brain size, he got the gig because he’s really sciencey and he’s got the gift of the gab. The modern gab. He says he’s going to make me big. This book is only the first – have you seen it by the way? (Thrusts a copy under Plato’s nose.) It’s cute. Looka these drawings. They make me look like Toby Jones, but that’s okay, he’s hip. PLATO : Yeah, whatever. SOCRATES : Then we’re going to do youtube videos. I’m going to be a Youtuber! I’ll do a short punchy video every day, I’ll be walking around and I’ll see something – like for instance a dog dressed in a hat and boots for Christmas – or an earthquake – or one of those living statues you see all over - and I’ll spontaneously gush forth in some great philosophy about how a dog is not a thing or an earthquake is one and not many. It’s gonna be great. PLATO : So where does that leave me then? SOCRATES : Well, look, I know you kept my name alive all these years, and I’m not an ingrate. That would not be virtuous, and I’m all about the virtue. If this relaunch goes like Manny says it will, I’ll chip in a good word and we could put some debates online or whatever. Maybe in future there could be Socrates and Plato action figures available. Maybe we could join the Avengers. Go on tour. PLATO : Anyway, I heard the new Star Wars movie is really good, do you fancy it? SOCRATES : I don’t have much cash on me. PLATO : They give concessions to the over 65s. In fact I think if you’re over 90 you get in free. SOCRATES : In that case it’s only logical they should pay us to see this movie. Let’s go. Am I in it, do you know? ...more |
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| 3.79
| 80
| unknown
| May 23, 2017
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really liked it
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The author : Sayeeda Warsi, Baroness Warsi. Tory politician. Stood for parliament in 2005, failed to win. Co-opted into the Conservative government –
The author : Sayeeda Warsi, Baroness Warsi. Tory politician. Stood for parliament in 2005, failed to win. Co-opted into the Conservative government – to do this they had to make her a Life Peer so she is a Baroness. Pelted with eggs by a group of young Muslims in 2009. Resigned from government in 2014 over British foreign policy regarding Israel. [image] The title: it’s referring 1) to the Islamophobe’s idea that the Muslims are the enemy within, but 2) to the idea that the jihadis are the enemy within British Muslim society. * This is a feisty breathtakingly fearless book which has already been praised and hated. She takes the current toughest British domestic problem – Islamist terrorism – and gives a comprehensive analysis of how we got here and how we might get out of here to somewhere better. Most of what’s in here is a diagnosis of political and moral failures on all sides – by mainstream politicians and Muslims – and she sounds like an exasperated but trying-to-be-upbeat teacher with a class of real dimwits to deal with. It turns out that everything is wrong. All the politicians are cowardly or ignorant or covertly racist. All British Muslim leaders are venal, bigoted and blinkered. All news reports are Islamophobic. And the language we use to talk about this stuff is also wrong. Terms like “islamophobia”, or “Islamist” or “fundamentalist” – all inaccurate, misleading and almost useless. It turns out that Sayeeda Warsi may be the only clear-sighted person in the entire UK! I’m very glad she has written this book then, with its to-do lists for every section of society. I sound like I’m having a go at her now, and I don’t mean to. Probably there’s no way you can write about “the Muslim problem” in Britain without sounding knowing and a bit superior and like a brisk no-nonsense matron. But for instance I was impressed with her dismantling of the term “British values”. These are the values Britain stands for and expects its citizens to adopt, whether new immigrants or established minorities. She points out how rapidly British values mutate. In a nutshell as politicians and as a country we have been sectarian, racist, sexist and homophobic, and each time our behavior has been in our view consistent with our Britishness…. We speak about these so-called “British values” as if they have always existed in the way we define them today. The debate… is often only directed at British Muslims. I’ve yet to see a politician go to a synagogue, gurdwara, temple or church and talk British values. * [image] Her book comes a little bit unstuck on the subject of terrorism. First because of timing. Publication date was 30 March 2017 so we assume the book was completed a couple of months before. 22 March – Westminster Bridge attack, 5 killed and 49 injured 22 May – Manchester Arena bombing, 22 killed, 120 injured 3 June – Borough Market attack, 8 killed and 48 injured Her stats do not include those events. I’m sure she would now like to change some statements in this book indicating that the security authorities had developed an unnecessary paranoia about the Muslim communities. In reality the majority of terrorism is not targeted at the West. After 9/11 only 0.5% of all terrorist deaths have occurred in Western countries. And We are more likely to be killed at the hands of a terrorist with a far-right, nationalist or supremacist ideology. Really?? Not in this country, Baroness. But she is quite correct to say that when we do have a far-right terrorist committing a terrorist murder – the assassination of Jo Cox in June 2016 – the British media do not call it an act of terrorism. Instead, they immediately label the perpetrator as mentally ill. It’s true, there is one rule for the Muslims and another for everyone else. But it’s also true that “Islamist” terrorists kill many many more people than any other type of terrorism in this and other countries. And – most importantly – she makes the point that “Islamist” terrorism kills way more Muslims than non-Muslims. But of course some may well have the opinion that raining bombs down from drones and now and again hitting the wrong building or the occasional wedding party is state sponsored terrorism. Context is vital for the understanding of these complex and fraught issues and context is sometimes - often - hard to get right. It is true that Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist. It is true that terrorists become presidents of their liberated countries. It is also true that Isis cannot be equated with the ANC. The Baroness says that the term “terrorism” is so hard to define that the UN has been trying to establish a draft definition since 2000 and still has not done so. * So in the first part of The Enemy Within she dishes it out to the British political class, the media, the police, etc, and also dishes it out to the jihadis. In the second part she dishes it out to all the other Muslims she missed in the first part…. She says she realizes that this stuff might be used by Islamophobes but she thinks it has to be said so she doesn’t care. She is saying that British Muslim society is not helping itself and needs to get real. The elders of the communities are fiddling with their expenses while Rome burns. Sample quote: No form of engagement with the British government did as much damage as the sectarian approach adopted by government from about 2005 and the sectarianism that British Muslim communities employed to become the government’s favoured “Muslims” and diminish the space for other sects. Sect squared against sect, Wahhabis against Barelwis, Sufis against Deobandis, and Tabliquis against Shias. … This allowed British Muslims to play out their own historic sectarianism against the backdrop of the war on terror with the added dimension of groups being paid through the public purse to further their version of the faith. (Large swathes of this book are directed to British Muslims and I would think some of them will be buying more eggs in case she comes down their street soon. ) [image] * This book takes on so much, and often so contentiously (she is anti-burqa and now pro-gay rights) that we could be here all day. So I should stop now, even though there is so much more to say. Highly recommended for anyone interested in what’s going on right now. ...more |
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[image] According to Johan Norberg those people who were wearing shades because the future was so bright were right. His introduction is called “The Go [image] According to Johan Norberg those people who were wearing shades because the future was so bright were right. His introduction is called “The Good Old Days Are Now” and his book is an antidote to the daily news because the news is one of the very few things Johan thinks isn’t getting better. That’s because they only report the bad news because the bad news is rare and dramatic, which of course gives us all the idea that terrible things are happening all the time, which of course, they are somewhere on the planet, there’s a lot of people here and a lot of stuff is happening. PEASE PUDDING AND SAVELOY- WHAT NEXT? IS THE QUESTION Johan lists nine ways the lot of the human race has vastly improved over the centuries. Let’s take the first one : food. What was the most important invention of the 20th century? Computers, planes, radio, television maybe? No – nitrogen-based artificial fertilizer, invented by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. “Without the Haber-Bosch Process about two-fifths of the world population would not exist at all”. Now, back in the 1960s ecologists were predicting massive famines in books like The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich (“in the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”) and Famine 1975! by William and Paul Paddock (“in fifteen years the famines will be catastrophic”). Johan says “yet the exact opposite happened”. This was because the Green Revolution happened, pioneered by Dr Norman Borlaug, about whom it has been said He is the first person to save a billion human lives. Johan’s book is cramful of statistics and I will just quote a few about food – In 1961 people in 51 countries, including Iran, Pakistan, China and Indonesia, consumed less than 2000 calories per person per day. By 2013 that number had fallen to just one : Zambia… and world agricultural prices are now half of what they were in the early 20th century. And The UN reported in 1947 that around 50% of the world’s population was chronically malnourished… Today this has declined to around 13% TIME FOR A EUPHEMISM OR TWO Okay, let’s talk about poo. Sanitation. Countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam have reduced “open defecation” by around one third since 1990. As a result of these efforts, global deaths from diarrhea have been reduced from 1.5 million in 1990 to 662,000 in 2012. Between 1990 and 2015 427 million more Africans gained access to clean water. What’s “open defecation”? Hey, I will leave that to your imagination, along with “flying toilets”. [image] MORE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL Let’s talk about life expectancy. “Before 1800 not a single country in the world had a life expectancy higher than 40 years”. Then came the largely successful war against infectious disease – TB, diphtheria, polio, measles and smallpox. And as we recently saw, there was no ebola pandemic. Even death from malaria has halved between 2000 and 2015. You see where this all is going. Poverty and violence are declining, literacy and “freedom” (meaning liberal democracy) and equality are all going up up up. I was with him all the way in these chapters. Now we finally made it to the 21st century (which when you think is a lot of centuries) it seems that the appropriate response is to grab your coat and get your hat, and leave your worry at the doorstep, and just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street. The hard sell was the chapter on the environment. Only the day before yesterday the British news reported this: Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, a report says. The Living Planet assessment, by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and WWF, suggests that if the trend continues that decline could reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020. The figures suggest that animals living in lakes, rivers and wetlands are suffering the biggest losses. Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines. And similar jeremiads are issued with conscience-deadening regularity. But Johan tells us the excellent news of cleaned up air in European cities, unpolluted rivers like the Thames, no more acid rain, and deforestation stopped in the rich countries. Yes, caring for the environment is a luxury rich countries can now afford, while some poor people shoot elephants to gouge out their tusks to sell to other not especially rich people in other countries who believe ivory has magic powers, and rich people in rich countries disapprove of them terribly. Going back to air pollution, this is one thing which he admits has got much worse – The number of people breathing unsafe air has risen by more than 600 million since 2000 to a total of almost 1.8 billion. But even here we can find a silver lining. This industrial pollution is being created because poor countries are getting richer via industrialization and “wealth creation”. This process in poor countries is a way of dealing with even more acute and dangerous problems, just like the Industrial Revolution in the West increased pollution but solved the urgent problems of early death and poverty. So Johan says chill, give these countries a few decades and they too will be able to deal with the environment like rich countries can now, because the poor countries in the past 50 years have been able to catch up extremely quickly. Look at China. I must say that on occasion Johan appears to have been eating some of those funny mushrooms, he becomes so excitable : In laboratories around the world, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers are trying to revolutionise energy… If just one of them is successful, it will blow our minds and change the world. I’M ONLY HAPPY WHEN I’M MISERABLE British people were surveyed in January 2015 – the question was : is the world getting better or worse? 71% said worse. Johan Norberg demonstrates over and over that they’re wrong on every possible level but he knows they won’t change their minds. Things will keep improving and we’ll all still think we’re going down the drain. Because won’t it be terrible when we don’t have anything left to moan about? No more greenhouse gases, no more climate change, every car electric, free childcare for all, giant pandas roaming the streets, hundreds of them. We’ll be reduced to moaning about not having anything to moan about. According to Johan this will happen around 34 years from now. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 29, 2016
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Nov 2016
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Oct 29, 2016
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| 1568589751
| 9781568589756
| 1568589751
| 4.24
| 4,832
| Oct 04, 2016
| Oct 04, 2016
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really liked it
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The idea of this book is simple – take a random day (Saturday, 23 November 2013) and write an account of all the kids who were shot and killed in that
The idea of this book is simple – take a random day (Saturday, 23 November 2013) and write an account of all the kids who were shot and killed in that 24 hour period in the USA. There were ten. (Note – suicides are omitted because they are never reported. So the figure is probably higher than ten.) The author Gary Younge (a black British journalist) quickly makes clear : this is not a book about the need for gun control, although to a British reader, it may appear that it is. Gary Younge is writing about the whole difficult Gordian knot of intractable problems which has led the USA into the horrendous levels of violence it now suffers. We do have to mention some comparative figures. In the USA (population 323 million) in 2014 there were 15, 872 homicides, of which 11,008 were homicide by firearm In the UK which has a population of 65 million there were 573 homicides in 2016 in total of which 51 were by firearms There are cities in America which have more murders than the whole of the UK. Such as Chicago (population around 3 million) – 762 in 2016. TEN KIDS AND TEN USEFUL MORAL LESSONS Here are the basic details of the cases in this book. Jaiden Dixon. Grove City, Ohio. Aged 9. Killed by his mother’s deranged ex-boyfriend. Moral of this story : sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Kenneth Mills-Tucker, Indianapolis. Aged 19. Shot on the street, no one arrested, no motive discovered. Moral of this story : don’t walk around at night. Stanley Taylor, Charlotte NC. Aged 17. Shot by a 27 year old guy at a gas station. No motive discovered. No arrest. Moral of this story : Don’t drive a car. Pedro Cortez, San Jose, California. Aged 18. Drive by gang murder. No arrest. Moral of this story : don’t be in a gang or know anyone in a gang or know anyone who’s in a gang which you’re not aware of. Tyler Dunn, Marlette, Michegan. Aged 11. Accidentally shot by best friend aged 12. Moral of this story : don’t have a friend who lives in a house full of unlocked loaded guns. Edwin Rajo, Houston. Aged 16. Accidentally shot by his female best friend. Moral of this story : if you’re going to buy a gun for self-protection against all the gangbangers in the neighbourhood, learn how to use it. Samuel Brightmon, Dallas. Aged 16. Random street shooting. No arrest made. Moral of this story : if you’re young and black, don’t leave the house. Tyshon Anderson, Chicago. Aged 18. Gang murder. No arrest made. Moral of this story : this was the only acknowledged gangbanger of the ten victims. So, I guess, the moral is you reap what you sow. But the other nine victims never reaped what they sowed. So that moral is just not true. Gary Anderson, Newark NJ. Aged 18. Shot in a drive-by, everyone agreed it was mistaken identity. No arrest. Moral of this story : don’t look like anyone else. Gustin Hinnant, Goldsboro NC. Aged 18. Everyone agrees, shot by accident. They were aiming at the other guy in the car. No arrest. Moral of this story : don’t leave the house, don’t have any friends THE DAILY TORRENT This book is a companion piece to another wrenching piece of journalism, Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, which I also recommend. Both books cover the same ground in different ways. But heck, there are so many others too. This is not uncharted territory. Great tv shows like Homicide and The Wire have charted all this stuff already. But it seems every time we get reminded of it, we then forget. What Gary Younge does is lament the invisibility of these kids’ deaths (they barely register in the media, after 24 hours they’re gone and forgotten) and link them to various immense trends in American society. He interviews the families where he can (some refuse to speak); he transcribes 911 calls; he creates portraits of these kids as far as he’s able. As you can see from the summary, in seven of the ten cases no murderer was ever discovered, no arrests were made. This book takes a snapshot of a society in which these deaths are uniquely possible and that has a political culture apparently uniquely incapable of creating a world in which they might be prevented We get pages on the collapse of manufacturing, the implosion of the black family, the failure of politics, the corrosive segregation of the American city –He throws out various insights. Regarding the famous school/workplace/mass shootings, he remarks They disturb America’s self-image and provoke its conscience in a way that the daily torrent of gun deaths does not And he ploughs on to the next sad case. Okay, you may be thinking this is not a very cheerful or hopeful book. You’d be right. “Researching this book has made me want to scream” he says in the Afterword. That may be your reaction too. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 29, 2017
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Jul 31, 2017
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Sep 26, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1447272447
| 9781447272441
| 1447272447
| 3.94
| 2,215
| Jan 07, 2016
| Jan 07, 2016
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it was amazing
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The first time I saw Euston Station The rails were shining with the rain My bags were light but not my expectation Stumbling from the all-night train And The first time I saw Euston Station The rails were shining with the rain My bags were light but not my expectation Stumbling from the all-night train And when I came to Euston Station I thought my life was paved with gold And with a million other hungry strangers I lay my head down in the cold Here is a stupendous feat of journalism : one man does London and brings it back alive. You’ve seen the travel books and documentaries – London: City of Pomp and Circumstance (cue Beefeaters and busbies); London’s Theatreland!; London: Art Capital of the World… and all of that. This book is not that. [image] This is London: city of a very great many poor immigrants. London : city of not that many white people any more. So no Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace, but the London where 57% of births are to migrant mothers, where between 1971 and 2011 the white British part of the population nosedived from 86% to 45%. By page 300 Ben Judah has spoken to people from Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ghana, Grenada, Somalia, Pakistan, Philippines, Dubai, Saudi Arabia…. You get the picture – but not a single Cockney. Like rhinos they’re dying out and the ones left are fleeing. This kind of population shift is certainly not unique to London. But Ben describes the British soap EastEnders, largely populated by the BBC’s version of the white working class, as “a creepy racist fantasy” and now I have accompanied Ben from Victoria Coach Station to Hammersmith, Elephant and Castle, White City, Beckton, the Arab quarter formerly known as Knightsbridge, and onwards, I understand what he means. Woa, Liza, See the coster barrows, The vegetable marrows And the fruit piled high. Woa, Liza, Little London sparrows, Covent Garden Market where the costers cry. Cockney feet Mark the beat of history. Every street Pins a memory down. Nothing ever can quite replace The grace of London Town. Ukrainian girl : It’s like this: Russian and Ukranian people hate Polish and Lithuanian people. Eastern European peoples hate Indian people. Everybody hates the black people. Whites hate everyone. That’s just the way it is. Do you hear the jaunty tones of Tom Lehrer, singing his naughty song “National Brotherhood Week” from 1964? Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants, And the Hindus hate the Moslems, And everybody hates the Jews. But rescuing us – if just for a little while – from the sour misanthropy which Ben’s book is, admittedly, wont to foster comes a (Polish) registrar, who waxes lyrical about the weddings she has officiated : Polish nannies with Portuguese DJs. Lithuanian cleaners with Romanian builders. Ghanaian pickers [they clean the Tube lines, very bad work] with Columbian scrubbers. Nigerian drivers with Polish waitresses. These are the special ones. … the ones that can only happen in this City where love is really free. But there are more and more of them. So, you know, there’s a little yin for the racist yang. Finchley Central is two and sixpence From Golders Green on the Northern Line And on the platform, by the kiosk That's where you said you'd be mine [image] At the beginning of this great trek Ben is inclined to irritate the reader with his horizon to horizon total hip knowingness. There is nothing about anyone’s culture that Ben doesn’t know, you can’t tell him anything. Here is Ben at a Nigerian party: The entertainment flown in from Abuja, the singers lost in the rising drums, the calling saxophones and the subtle keyboards, as the businessmen in tailored suits, their pocket handkerchiefs so perfectly pleated, dance with their wives under the chandeliers, as they smile with perfect teeth at the women in origami headwraps, and whoop and clink and spray the musicians, the way they always do at the best Nigerian parties in Belgravia, flicking with one palm over the other - $1 bills, then $10 bills – over the shoulders of the most exuberant dancers, over the heads of the most beautiful girls You see how Ben lets you know he’s been to the best Nigerian parties in Belgravia already, so he knows what they do? There’s a lot of this kind of back door bragging in Ben’s book. But after a little eye-rolling you are completely ready to forgive him. Because – however he’s managed to do it in his 28 years on earth – he really does know all this stuff, and not from other books neither. If I wore a hat, I would doff it. Dirty old river, must you keep rolling Flowing into the night People so busy, makes me feel dizzy Taxi light shines so bright But I don't need no friends As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset I am in paradise Ben lets his describing eyes and interviewees do the yakking and he doesn’t editorialise much, except he can’t let some things go: London can’t admit it is addicted to skunk, because London can’t admit it is addicted to coke. This is a city that can’t own up that so much cocaine gets snorted at the weekends that the water authorities notice its presence spiking in the sewers on Tuesday afternoon. This is a city that pretends this £10 billion industry does not exist : by leaving its on-the-go distribution to the people it gives the least of a shit about : teenage boys, especially black teenage boys. They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace Christopher Robin went down with Alice. "They've great big parties inside the grounds." “I wouldn't be King for a hundred pounds," Says Alice. The insights and sharp observations fly out from these pages and will rearrange your reality. Ben contemplates a fellow tube traveller: he stares every day into this landscape, through five tube stops, over which the life expectancy of an average Londoner falls by eleven years. Ben on how easy it was to rob the houses of the rich in London : Moses would climb over the alarm onto the ledge. These fools loved covering their houses in columns and creepers. These idiots also loved then vintage Victorian windows : it was as if they wanted you to get in. And then with a dash he’d rush to the hallway and flick open the door; and Lucifer would be smiling in the orange dark. Holding out that sack. Wait - where have you seen that very scene played out before? Oliver! – that’s right. With the boy himself opening the front door from the inside, and Bill Sykes waiting with the sack. It’s a very London tradition. Then the winter comes down And I can't stand the chill That comes to the streets around Christmas time And I'm buggered to damnation And I haven't got a penny To wander the dark streets of London Ben talks to a Polish labourer: ”Why do they give the benefits? Why £60 a week and a flat free for the lazy pig?” Polish people have little time for the white working class. They think they do not know how to look after themselves. They think they talk like black people. They think they look sick. Burglars love Poles because they are paid in cash and hide it in shoeboxes. When they see builders and cleaners moving in over the road, they are already laughing. They can sometimes make £5000 from one bedsit. And they know the Poles will never call the police. It’s true that Ben sometimes overwrites a little bit There was whisky and palm-oil wine and red rice with plantain and Tyskie beer and sour cream soup and whole trays of cassava fufu and amala. And gives us a trailer for what surely must be his first novel Gone : all those stories nobody will ever write power ballads about, gone, all those gangsters that nobody will ever make blockbusters about, gone, all those cornershop war heroes, winking like owls, laughing, their mouths full of khat, their pupils bulging, and wanting to tell anyone who would listen about the jeeps of the Puntland front and the dust of the Ogaden campaign. As Ben flits round the vast metropolis, his flowing tide of (in general) pretty unhappy interviewees can begin to sound like William Blake I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear But.... all that said, this book is brilliant. 100% recommended. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear With thanks to : The Oyster Band Noel Coward Tom Lehrer The New Vaudeville Band The Kinks Shane McGowan A A Milne William Blake TS Eliot [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 06, 2016
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Mar 11, 2016
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Mar 06, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1472915615
| 9781472915610
| 1472915615
| 3.89
| 1,373
| Nov 17, 2015
| Nov 17, 2015
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liked it
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Behind the ostensible government sits an enthroned invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people Who said Behind the ostensible government sits an enthroned invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people Who said that? Some truther writing about 9/11? No, it was Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. This book is not about whether Obama is really a Muslim or if 9/11 was an inside job, it’s about why people appear to have so much time for such ridiculous guff. Mr Brotherton wishes to inform us that the conspiratorial is not tinfoil-hat stuff but is a profound part of the basic thinking patterns of human beings. Conspiracy theories are still loony, but the thinking behind them is universal, entirely ordinary, and unsurprising. As RB says We’re all conspiracy theorists, at least some of the time It’s interesting to note that if you buy one theory you’ll likely agree with them all. If you don’t believe the moon landings were faked you won’t believe 9/11 was done by the Bush regime. If you do believe that alien remains are being hidden in Area 51 you will probably think vaccines are unsafe. If you think climate change is a hoax you’re more likely to think that “Princess Diana got whacked by the British royal family”, in Mr Brotherton’s inelegant phrase. So, the conspiracists think in general that There are two worlds : one real and (mostly) unseen, the other a sinister illusion meant to cover up the truth They therefore have an immediate a problem – if this conspiracy is so far-reaching and powerful, how come they don’t shut down YOU, the truther? Well, they have an answer. Some truthers think that other truthers are part of the conspiracy because they say such ridiculous things they must be plants put there to discredit the truther movement! This is not a new thought : Astrophysicist and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee argues that many claims of UFO sightings and alien abductions are part of an elaborate disinformation campaign designed to undermine the credibility of serious UFO scholars …. Intimidating, paying off, murdering or otherwise shutting up every conspiracy theorist who stumbles on the incredible truth would presumably be fairly labour-intensive, the logic goes. It would be easier to discredit conspiracy movements from within, by spreading ever more convoluted, implausible, absurd theories, thereby manufacturing an atmosphere in which conspiracy theorists are invariably seen as unhinged whack-jobs (If this is true it has certainly worked on me) The truthers bravely and boldly say some truly repulsive things. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing professional theorist Alex Jones tweeted Our hearts go out to those that are hurt or killed…but this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag The Sandy Hook massacre was likewise seen as a “false flag” operation. All these horrific events , they say, are part of the same singular plot : a ruse staged by government operatives intent on taking away Second Amendment rights to bear arms. So the idea is that the current American government will engineer the murder of 20 children in order to get the power to make gun owning illegal, or some such rubbish. I am stunned that any same person could think like that. Talking of bizarre things some people can argue themselves into thinking : TIMOTHY MCVEIGH (A CONSPIRACY THEORIST IF EVER THERE WAS ONE) EXPLAINS HOW JIHADIS THINK An accomplice explained how McVeigh had rationalised killing secretaries and receptionists and other government employees who had nothing to do with debacles like Waco. “He explained to me that he considered all those people to be as if they were the storm troopers in the movie Star Wars. They may be individually innocent, but because they are part of the Evil Empire they were guilty by association.” Ugh. Let us take a pace back and start again. Believing that someone somewhere is in control is preferable to thinking that the course of life is dictated by nothing more than chance. This must be why creationists hate evolution so much, and how atheism inspires horror in many people. If no one (no God) is in charge then this universe is just gonna crash! And burn! And it’s also a real lonesome thought – nobody cares about us humans, we’re on our own here, cosmic orphans. Believers would rather have a tyrannical God than that, like some people will stay in an abusive relationship rather than leave. One thing which got on my nerves was Mr Brotherton’s continual citing of like a million dubious psychological experiments designed to show this or that aspect of the way we think, or should I say the way some first year American students think, since they seem to be the perpetual guinea pigs here. This parade of uninteresting non-information was a complete bore. But still, if you skip those bits, there is still lots of great information here – the revelation of the Umbrella Man in the Zapruder film, how it is that the buttons on NYC pedestrian crossings were all disabled years ago but still light up (the lights change automatically), how doors-close buttons on lifts likewise do not work, how if a president escapes the assassin (Reagan) people will accept the attempt was by one lone gunman, but if the president dies (Kennedy) then it will be seen as a conspiracy – this is the result of the fallacious (but common) thinking which demands big causes of big events (it offends us to think of the mousy schmuck Oswald being capable of killing John F Kennedy – him?? That guy?? No way.) This book is pretty good at what it sets out to do, which is to contextualise the paranoid conspiratorial tendency of modern thought and, almost, to domesticate it. The theories themselves are, of course, entirely bonkers, but the join-the-dots thinking is something human brains do all the time, even when the dots are not really there. It’s a vital pattern-noticing meaning-enhancing activity which our brilliant minds perform without our conscious intending much of the time, a mental breathing in and breathing out. That’s not ironical, our minds are brilliant. (Also stupid, but brilliant.). We create scintillating science, profound poetry and crazed conspiracy theories. Like Neil Young said, it's all one song. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 11, 2016
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Jan 04, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1250058902
| 9781250058904
| 1250058902
| 4.55
| 19,266
| Oct 13, 2015
| Oct 13, 2015
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it was amazing
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To read this book you will need around four hours and a box of tissues and some solitude in order not to look like a complete idiot to your family. Th
To read this book you will need around four hours and a box of tissues and some solitude in order not to look like a complete idiot to your family. The tissues are to mop the tears which will flow down your cheeks on regular occasions, especially on page 428 when you realise that’s the last page. As you may already know, this book is just photos of random people in NYC with some quotes from them – Mr Stanton talked to each one for around 20 minutes. It would not be a nice thing if I just quoted my favourite quotes because you need the photos that go with them, but to give you the jist of the thing there’s a well-dressed older couple and the quote is "Sixty-one years today!" "Sixty-two." "Sixty-one." "Sixty-two." The glimpses, vignettes and slivers of human lives here careen wildly from the utterly banal (“I guess she just decided she wanted to be with a different person”) to the sinister (“I’ve done a lot of whacked-out shit for money”) to the upsetting (“I’m having trouble dealing with society.” “What aspect of society?” “The whole thing.”) to the frankly alarming (ordinary looking older woman : “I’ve completed a series of monumental-sized drawings in ballpoint pen of girls who’ve killed their mothers.”) You could complain bitterly about the deliberate lack of contextualisation here – that last quote, which is the only thing recorded for that lady, should really be followed by “Whaaaat???” and some kind of explanation, but this is one of those it is what it is deals, each photo & quote is a negotiation between Mr Stanton and his great subjects. If the next novel I read has a tenth of the emotion and pure shining soul of this book then it will be my novel of the year. So here’s a thing you could do, if you have a copy of this. Invite your most stonyhearted, most cynical friend round and give them this casually to look through while you’re fixing up a stir fry or sumpin and then see how long it takes them to baww or lol. If they do neither I think you have a psychopath on your hands and you should get the hell out. [image] ...more |
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1
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Feb 14, 2016
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Feb 14, 2016
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Mar 04, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1900486431
| 9781900486439
| 1900486431
| 3.14
| 7
| Nov 15, 2005
| Feb 01, 2005
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liked it
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[Please note – rude things are mentioned here including one use of the c word which I thought was funny] Remorseless humour may be the only way the sex [Please note – rude things are mentioned here including one use of the c word which I thought was funny] Remorseless humour may be the only way the sex trade can be written about – the awful mixture of the possibility of bliss, probability of loneliness and certainty of exploitation for everyone involved gives it a unique piquancy. But o the laddishness of this author. It’s like a 191-page tiresome article in one of those mags like Nuts or Zoo [image] Here’s Bruce describing himself on p81 : I’m three stone overweight, bald, have a number of badly inked tattoos, and tend to become struck mute when I’m not attached to the umbilical cord of my laptop…. I wanted to get behind the PR campaign, and tear apart the UK sex industry like a bucket of fried chicken, until all that was left was a pile of bones, connective tissue and gristle. So, thickly coated with the oozing jokiness, blokiness, affability, knee-jerk humour, endlessly gurgling wit and banter of Bruce Barnard, the reader is rewarded by some flashes of real humour* and by the sometimes eye-opening (but not too eye-opening, you might get something in it) accounts of the behaviour here delineated. For instance? Well, since you asked. After attending a couple of sex parties, interviewing performers, and observing the filming of a gay porn movie in France Bruce decides that he needs to get more hands-on experience in the sex biz, but being the guy he is (see above) he decides phone sex is the only way to go. As a straight guy, he thinks ah, I’ll be a sex phone worker for a few weeks. Ladies will ring me up and talk dirty. It will be fun! He finds out that there’s no such thing as a straight male sex phone worker. Women don’t require such a service. If there was any market at all, you can be sure the ultra-capitalist sex biz would have spotted the market. But it doesn’t exist. This tells you something about the difference between male and female sex lives right there. I wish I knew what it says, but it surely says something. Anyway, he decides he will be gay for pay & gets taken on by a gay phone sex company, and he describes how difficult or easy it was accommodating the various types of callers – The Regular (these guys are not going to fall for your chitchat about the new line of Prada suits which you undertake to try to drag out the call - the longer the better, heh heh); The Silent Type (occasionally these turn out to be anxious young guys who just want to talk to another gay man about being gay); The Cranks (these want to rant about gays going to hell, and the phone sex companies LOVE them, because the longer they rant, the more money the company makes); and the occasionally really odd one. During one shift I took a call from a softly spoken man, and during the small talk I noticed that there was someone else listening in on another line. I asked who it was , and he happily confirmed that his wife was on the bedroom extension. So the wife liked to listen to her husband describing the gay sex he’d like to have with an anonymous guy on a phone line. And what's wrong with that? The nasty side of the biz is not glossed over. There’s a chapter called “M.B.S.“ which stands for manager boyfriend syndrome. Bruce attends an amateur porn shoot (foot fetishist) at which a row erupts between the female performer and the manager-boyfriend, and the guy starts hitting the woman. It’s a vile little scene and Bruce acknowledges that it’s one repeated throughout the porn biz. At this point his joviality fades away completely. Okay, moving on…. I would like to tell you all about the bukkake party chapter, it would have you coughing your Dr Pepper all over your keyboard, but… my powers of description are defeated and my brain is struggling to cope with the whole concept. According to Bruce, some women enjoy this as much as the “performing” males. I really do find this hard to believe. This book also provides some explicit revelation about Chuck Berry, which go way beyond his ding-a-ling. [image] * *When the case came to trial, the court recorder had to read out a list of all the seized titles. She could hardly keep a straight face. When she got to Hungry Cunts you could see the jury looking at the floor to stop themselves laughing. ...more |
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Dec 21, 2014
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Jan 02, 2015
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Dec 21, 2014
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Paperback
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Apr 02, 2024
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Apr 01, 2024
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| 4.48
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Apr 14, 2024
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Mar 27, 2024
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it was amazing
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Aug 04, 2023
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Aug 04, 2023
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Mar 15, 2022
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Aug 03, 2021
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Jan 05, 2021
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Dec 17, 2020
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really liked it
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Mar 19, 2019
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Mar 17, 2019
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2019
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Jan 27, 2019
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|
liked it
|
May 14, 2018
|
May 08, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
really liked it
|
Feb 17, 2018
|
Feb 13, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.56
|
Jan 27, 2018
|
Jan 27, 2018
|
||||||
|
| 3.79
|
really liked it
|
Dec 20, 2017
|
Dec 19, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.79
|
really liked it
|
Jun 18, 2017
|
Apr 22, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
liked it
|
Nov 2016
|
Oct 29, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.24
|
really liked it
|
Jul 31, 2017
|
Sep 26, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 11, 2016
|
Mar 06, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.89
|
liked it
|
Jan 11, 2016
|
Jan 04, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.55
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 14, 2016
|
Mar 04, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.14
|
liked it
|
Jan 02, 2015
|
Dec 21, 2014
|
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