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| B005GPSLHI
| 4.26
| 10,126
| Sep 27, 2011
| unknown
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liked it
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This book makes a whole lot of common sense points but pushes them way past most people’s comfort zones to the point where you may find yourself squir
This book makes a whole lot of common sense points but pushes them way past most people’s comfort zones to the point where you may find yourself squirming and looking away and muttering surely, surely people aren’t all like that? One big common sense basic here is that if you depend on the support of a lot of people (i.e. their democratic vote) you will be trying to please all those very people, whereas if you depend on the support of a few people (army chiefs, ministry of the interior, police) you can cheerfully ignore the starving millions, because they just don’t matter. Another big not so common sense point they make is that all leaders, democratic or despotic, want to stay in power FOREVER : So we started from this single point : the self-interested calculations and actions of rulers are the driving force of all politics. Does this mean that every time a politician spouts about improving housing, education, health services, care for the elderly, all those nice baubles, this is always based on finely calculating how much of this soup they need to ladle down our throats in order to secure our votes? Don’t they believe even a tiny bit of it? [image] Well, it seems the authors think that one main difference between democracies and dictatorships is that democracies make it tougher to siphon off the nation’s cash into their own accounts, but you should bet they will all try their best anyhow, because that’s why they’re politicians. Because it’s not that power corrupts, it’s that, as another reviewer said, corrupted people are irresistibly attracted to politics like buzzy bees to pollen bearing flowers. And what has more pollen than the State Bank? TINY LITTLE BABIES So the level of cynicism here is severe : A leader who can afford to keep the people isolated, uneducated, and ignorant and chooses not to do so is a fool. And: It so happens that even in many autocracies with reportedly good healthcare systems, infant mortality is high. This may be because helping little children does not particularly help leaders survive in power. What about where the dictator happens to be sloshing around in a sea of oil? His overseas bank accounts all runneth over. Won’t there be some left for the people and their little babies? It is ironic that while oil revenues provide the resources to fix societal problems, they create political incentives to make them far worse. This part is explained by two incidents I remember from English history – the Bad King John (a tyrant) went broke and had to ask for money from his barons, and they wouldn’t give him any until he signed the Magna Carta, that founding document of liberty. And fastforwarding to 1640, likewise the Bad King Charles (a tyrant) had to convene parliament (which he’d avoided for 11 years), again to ask for money; and one thing led to another and the parliament chopped his head off in 1649. If King John or King Charles had have discovered oil on his royal estate, none of that would have happened. Well, they wouldn’t have known what to do with the oil, but you get the idea. [image] So, the more you have to rely on taxation, the more you will be pushed towards democratizing your country. The less you have to rely on taxation – say, if you have free money bubbling out of the ground – the more the people can get stuffed. POL POT WAS AN IDEALIST [image] The rules for dictators explained in this book seemed to me pretty straightforward, even kind of obvious, but when the authors claimed that they fit anyplace anytime I couldn’t but disagree. They perfectly fit dictators like Saddam Hussein, Emperor Bokassa I, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Macias Nguema, Samuel Doe, Ferdinand Marcos and Augusto Pinochet. These ones seem to have had no concept of improving their nation, they just wanted to settle on it like a vampire bat and make sure all the other littler vampire bats got enough blood to suck on. But other dictators had notions of entirely rewriting human society for the good, that is, for what they considered to be the good. And they tried their best to crush and squeeze society into some new lunatic utopia – Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong. I admit, these are the unusual ones. NATURAL DISASTERS The authors ask : Why are the effects of earthquakes so much worse in autocratic regimes? Simple – because the leaders steal all the funds that could otherwise spend on better infrastructure, building regulations, etc. They examine earthquake outcomes in Chile and Iran and the deaths from comparable earthquakes are way higher in Iran. But I was dubious – we may profoundly disagree with the ayatollahs of Iran but can we put them on the same kleptocratic footing as all the other rascals? The authors clearly do. Again, their cynicism is breathtaking. COULD DO BETTER. SEE ME AFTER CLASS. The authors veer from specific examples which are always welcome to tiresome abstractions which aren’t – they love sentences like this : Our subject is how variations in the size of the group of essentials and interchangeables determines how resources are allocated between public and private rewards I couldn’t love that. Aside from the stylistic infelicities and the level of repetition you tend to find in books of arguments like this, I do kind of recommend The Dictator’s Handbook as an act of provocation. Is the world really like this ? [image] *Whereby the religious might pipe up to say yes, they are, this is what we mean by the fallen state of man – read our book, not this one! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 26, 2024
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May 03, 2024
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Apr 10, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0593476093
| 9780593476093
| 0593476093
| 4.49
| 8,313
| 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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| 1838955259
| 9781838955250
| B0CMDRP142
| 3.97
| 93
| unknown
| Mar 07, 2024
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liked it
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1) In warfare human beings discover a capability for violence they never knew they had; so long as it’s sanctioned by the state they can bomb and kill
1) In warfare human beings discover a capability for violence they never knew they had; so long as it’s sanctioned by the state they can bomb and kill with ease. Now social media has revealed something else we weren’t aware of - a propensity in many people for wild untethered beliefs and uncouth speech that has come as a shock. We have all found out that for many people (your son, your dear little grandmamma, the hairdresser, the bassist in your third favourite band) there is absolutely no notion of the objective reality we ourselves always assumed; they actually never did believe in any of these concepts of democracy and liberal government and rule of law that the rest of us have been taking for granted, they think it’s all a puppeteered sham and we are the sheeple being herded about. And it’s never not been a sham. 2) But wait - if the conspiracies unearthed by the theorists are so vast, complex and powerful how are they ever to be defeated? What would success look like to a conspiracy believer? 3) One conspiracy pusher explains the difference between him and Marianna : ”You believe all people are good. I believe almost everyone is bad.” [image] 4) Marianna asks herself why she doesn’t believe in conspiracies: At the heart of it is a simple answer: trust. I have faith in a system and institutions that have no on the whole let me down, plus a doctor for a dad and a mum who was once a nurse. OMG, this sounds truly naïve, and I can hear even non-truther readers failing to stifle guffaws. And yet, I agree with her. I believe in double blind clinical trials, I believe in peer-reviewed scientific papers, I believe that the government is real and that I and my fellow citizens can throw the rascals out when we vote, and get some new rascals in. 5) But! If you oppose conspiracy theories you are quite often in the sorry unpleasant position of having to defend the findings of the FBI and CIA etc about such matters as 9/11 and JFK. It’s invidious. [image] 6) The conspiracy believers will take the official version of a particular event and give it unrelenting scrutiny and dismantle it and mock it. The arguments against the official version, however, are given zero scrutiny, they are instantly accepted. 7) You might think that the conspiracy believers get involved in their campaigns in order to feel better, to gain what they call “agency” these days. But you’d be wrong (I was). The true believers become even more powerless, because ultimately thy can’t resolve the fabricated plot they think they’ve uncovered. They also find themselves exploited by new powerful people – the leaders of this conspiracy world. That was an interesting insight, on page 46. Unfortunately on page 47 we read : Conspiracy theories and falsehoods help believers feel powerful in a world where lots of people feel powerless. So, er, which is it? 8) Isaac Newton was an alchemist and Conan Doyle believed in spiritualism, and also fairies. Some scientists are full of irrational thought. 9) The Russian state conspires to promote conspiracy theories about the West, NATO, Ukraine, etc. A real conspiracy encourages fake conspiracies. 10) The last part of this book is very repetetetive. Marianna sets up a number of fake accounts with the Big Five (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter/X, Tiktok) using various profiles and checks what stuff their algorithms send to her. No surprise, as, for example, a profile for a fake 14 year old boy, after he clicka and likes some videos, is quickly sent by Tiktok lots of videos glorifying gang life and knife carrying. Or a profile of a concerned 40 year old woman is sent antivax stuff. This is the stuff the companies say they don’t allow. When Marianna shows them proof that their vetting procedures are not working, they refuse an interview and fob her off with a bland statement. “Snapchat strictly prohibits bullying, harassment and any illegal activity…[we] provide confidential in-app reporting tools”. Marianna is contemptuous in a polite sort of way : These are the sorts of responses I often receive from social media sites. They are practically interchangeable, and often describe policies that my reporting contradicts or reveals to be inadequately enforced. 11) Conspiracy theories rely on the belief that many many people are almost superhuman, capable of plans that would be incredibly difficult or even impossible to pull off. When backed into a corner, conspiracy theorists afford magical powers to the cabal of powerful, corrupt people they believe are pulling all the strings. 12 ) Between 1 January 2023 and the end of June that year the BBC received 14,488 warnings about abusive social media posts relating to their personnel. Of this number, 11,771 relate to me. Because Marianna has been exposing online conspiracy trollers for a few years. They know who she is and they hate her. FURTHER READING I have already read : Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout by Ginger Gorman This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball These are all well worth it, but of course the conspiracy theories of yesteryear begin to look quaint. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 09, 2024
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Mar 11, 2024
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Mar 05, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1526642506
| 9781526642509
| B0BSKYWS4M
| 3.92
| 204
| Jul 20, 2023
| Jul 20, 2023
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really liked it
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From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old
From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old boys who were making stuff up on 4chan which was a place of great unseemliness, not that I would know; they knew they weren’t being serious – well, not serious-serious - they weren’t serious about anything. I mean – there was no vast conspiratorial cabal in charge of everything, but it was such fun to pretend there was, and hey you know, maybe, I’m not saying it is, but maybe it’s true, who knows, not me for sure, but saying all this stuff seems to annoy the very people we love to annoy, it’s the elaborate internet version of ringing an old fart’s doorbell and running down the road. But the thing is, when this laughing gas escaped from its 4chan/8chan messageboards of icky sickness (many rape jokes, apparently), what do you know, people on facebook started taking some of it literally. And then Fox News! Now it really got funny! We couldn’t believe it! Let’s make some other wild shit up! And they found that they could not make up shit that was too wild for people to believe. Because people believe anything! Anything! Not quite core to the conspiracy, but widely believed, was that the cabal was heavily involved in large-scale child abuse, quite probably for satanic or other ritual purposes Leading to the stroke of genius that goes by the name of Pizzagate. You like that one? What about this: Marjorie Taylor Greene [Representative for the 14th district of Georgia] in 2018 wrote that Californian wildfires had been deliberately started by a “Jewish space laser” Yeah, throw that one onto the pile along with 5G and anti-vaxxing. It’s all true you know. They never went to the moon! You know why? There isn’t a moon! [image] IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN So this QAnon thing – it is the very definition of Anarchy. It’s a movement with no leaders, no fixed beliefs, no holy scriptures, it booms along and bits fall off it very frequently – like when a prediction that Trump will be reinstated doesn’t happen – yeah, didn’t happen, so what, we’re now waiting for the reappearance of John F Kennedy Jr – I know, the MSM say he died in 1999 but he didn’t and he’s back and he’s one of us – and anyway we’re all now busy doing research into the connection between Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan laboratory that deliberately started the plandemic – wait, maybe that was Hunter Biden… or Hillary Clinton – hold on, aren’t they the same person? My head hurts, I can’t keep all this straight. I need to lie down. But no time to weaken, you have to be online 25 hours a day or you’re gonna miss the next livestreamed massacre courtesy one of your little QAnon pixies (3 QAnon-related mass shootings in 2019 including the Christchurch mosque attack). Because although the whole thing started as a lot of crazy humour, when the racists and nazis joined the party it wasn’t that funny anymore. James Ball is a great guide through all this madness. Without overburdening us outsiders (who’ve never before heard of MyPillow or LARPing or Frazzledrip and only barely heard of gamergate and The Great Reset with too much detail -but there will still be too many obscure names and acronyms for some, it just cannot be avoided-) he pulls together and makes sense – in a way, in a way – of the means and methods of this amorphous nightmarish alternate-reality choose-your-own-plot do-your-own-research world we now inhabit. [image] He says stuff like The idea that there’s an elite running the show is something almost all of us believe to some extent – not least because it’s at least partly true He says that the MSM response to this farrago of poisonous fantasy is debunking and fact checking and is a total non-starter because there is no debunking or fact-checking these people, they are immune, you can’t prove a negative and with QAnon types there is no proof you could give them that they would believe. As an example, take the #SavetheChildren campaign, a QAnon offshoot. The statistic bandied about by QAnon and QAnon-adjacent influencers is that “365,348 children went missing in 2020” as QAnon congresswoman Lauren Boebert once tweeted, citing the stat to the FBI. “You haven’t heard a word from the media about it.” JB says – this number is accurate! Yes! But it actually refers to the number of missing person reports about children for the total year, not the number who are actually missing. Considerably more than 99% of missing children in the US are found alive and even in the most high-risk category – abduction by strangers or by a family member with an outstanding felony warrant – 97% of children are recovered alive. I think Lauren Boebert would probably wave away those stats as fake news. Even though they are from the same source that she uses. JB says So embedded are QAnon’s ideas in the conspiratorial corners of the internet that there are now hundreds of thousands or people who subscribe, at least in part, to QAnon without ever having heard of Q or QAnon itself. He says In the US, a poll taken by YouGov as early as May 2020 found that 44% of Republican voters believed Bill Gates was plotting to use Covid-19 as a pretext to plant tracking microchips in billions of people around the world. He explains how the wild ‘n’ crazy turbulence of Trump AND Covid rebooted the whole mania, and he pulls in, of course, the QAnon low-point culmination on 6 January 2021. Actually to discuss this whole giant QAnon conspiracy thing you have to rant on about so many loony things you get to start sounding as mad as the people who believe it! [image] THREE THINGS (OF SO MANY) I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND I didn’t get where the obsession with Hillary Clinton came from. I don’t understand that if the deep state stole the election why they won’t steal the next one too, so what might be the point of Trump running in 2024? He will lose, the deep state will see to it. I still didn’t understand quite how the conspiracy believing MSM hating red pill eaters think our lives and our countries work. Because if there is a giant elite running everything, then democracy is a sham, justice is a sham, all those fine words mean nothing. Doesn’t matter which party wins an election, the elite will be pulling all the strings. They will continue to inject us all with vaccines to turn us into zombies or radiate us with 5G to turn us into… zombies… or zap us with a space laser to turn us into… zombies. How come they haven’t done all this already? I don’t understand. Oh boy, actually I don’t understand any of this. Recommended for masochists who enjoy feeling their brain melting. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 22, 2023
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Jul 24, 2023
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Jul 19, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 3.92
| 24,797
| 1937
| Apr 26, 2001
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really liked it
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The first half of this odd book is universally beloved, and I can see why – I loved it too! Investigative journalism at its finest, 1937 style. The se
The first half of this odd book is universally beloved, and I can see why – I loved it too! Investigative journalism at its finest, 1937 style. The second half was greeted with cries of horror and consternation, and I can very easily see why! The publisher, who paid George a handsome sum up front for this, was so outraged he wanted to publish the two parts separately and have part two prefaced by a long apology from himself! PART ONE So, part one is where George Orwell does a poverty tour of the industrialised part of England referred to by everyone in hushed tones as “the North”. He stays with miners, goes down mines, lodges in a tripe shop, describes houses and lives – incomes are itemised and analysed, such as the weekly wage stoppages for a miner (insurance, hire of lamp, for sharpening tools, check-weighman, infirmary, benevolent fund, union fees – total 4 shillings 5 pence) – all of this is beautifully presented with a simmering outrage and a refusal to sentimentalise. And he throws out his eyebrow-raising observations like confetti. A man dies and is buried and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented. OH NO – PART TWO! So Part One is brilliant, five star reading all the way. In Part Two he changes gear and gives us a long, often bizarre essay, kind of like a “What Must Be Done?” cri de coeur, starting off with some autobiography to show how a posh Eton-educated boy like himself ended up as a committed Socialist – this is fair enough – but then he starts flailing and thrashing around trying to answer several questions all at once, the main ones being Why Do the Middle Class and the Working Class Hate Each Other? Why Isn’t Every Working-Class Person a Socialist? And What is Socialism Anyway? George was writing for a leftwing audience and here he tells them just what he thinks of them. They’re all hopeless! They talk over the heads of the very working class people they should be attracting, using their horrible Marxist jargon, spouting utopianism and worshipping Russia. And the people who are attracted to Socialism! What a shower! There is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England. Yes, we see George counted feminists as unwelcome cranks. I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say “whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian”. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. Wouldn’t we love to grab up George Orwell in our time machine and have him wander round our 21st century world and then write a 100 page essay about it! THE ORWELL EFFECT Readers of his often-wonderful sometimes-tiresome essays will be familiar with the Orwell Effect. His plain-dealing honest-speaking unaffected tone of voice creates this idea in your mind that George was the most common sensical man who ever lived and that nobody therefore could possibly disagree with him. He always sounds like he knows what he is talking about. And he throws out the most extraordinary generalisations as if they are so obvious as to almost not be worth mentioning : The habit of washing yourself all over is a very recent one in Europe The soldier’s attitude to life which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a lawless attitude Mongolians have much nicer bodies than most white men People usually govern foreigners better than they govern themselves No modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed Such offhand remarks twang around the reader’s head so regularly that after a while you forget to dodge. No doubt, Orwell seems to think pretty much everybody has got pretty much everything wrong apart from him. He’s a bad tempered eccentric curmudgeon with a great love of the poor and the neglected. The love and outrage that fires this book makes it worth reading, not his loopy trashing of all his fellow leftwingers, during which he seems to be presenting his political enemies with all the ammunition they could ever require. An extraordinary book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2023
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Mar 21, 2023
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Mar 20, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0008294046
| 9780008294045
| 0008294046
| 4.07
| 1,800
| Feb 07, 2019
| Jan 14, 2020
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it was ok
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The Author is Turkish and so uses her own country as the Awful Example of how democracy can be frittered away while you are watching cat videos on Ins
The Author is Turkish and so uses her own country as the Awful Example of how democracy can be frittered away while you are watching cat videos on Instagram. Turkey is a complicated country but there is a pretty simple split between the vast Anatolian countryside and the Westernised, more affluent, more liberal, secular, less religious cities. Guess which group votes for Erdogan – that’s right. Elections are coming up in May and as a distant observer from England I can’t see how they won’t be tossing him out on his ear – they have been suffering from over 50% inflation for over a year (it peaked at 84% in December – how do people live??) and this was all due to Erdogan’s own brilliant economic experiment – and then of course they have had this terrible earthquake; and we have all seen the footage of devastated streets where this and that building is still standing and those built later have fallen down, in spite of new strengthened regulations brought in after the last earthquake – so what has been going on? Either of those two disasters should be enough to terminate Erdogan’s presidency but alas, for his followers they don’t matter. They see him as their champion – against the machinations of The West, and against the impieties of those subversives in Istanbul. He is their guy. He is like the (abusive) father of the nation – they just can’t imagine life without him. So they will vote for him again in May. The Polls are neck & neck between the AKP and the CHP. We will wait and see. Ece Temelkuran’s book is simply fizzing with outrage. She scampers hectically from one topic to another – Paris Hilton, post-truth, hijab wearers, Nigel Farage and Brexit, whataboutism – it’s a farrago, she helterskelters over too many topics, covers too much ground, and gives the reader a mild migraine. We begin suffering from indignation fatigue. And this is a shame : if ever a book’s heart was in the right place this one’s is. Two throbbing stars looking for an aspirin. Final note - my entry for this year's award for the Most Ridiculous Blurb is the one on the front cover by some guy named Andrew Sean Greer : Essential reading for everyone on Planet Earth Do you have any favourite ridiculously over the top blurbs? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 18, 2023
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Feb 27, 2023
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Feb 11, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1910593923
| 9781910593929
| 1910593923
| 4.49
| 224
| 1914
| Dec 15, 2021
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it was amazing
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I figured I would never read this famous socialist novel because every other review says it’s repetitive, didactic and contrived and those are its fan
I figured I would never read this famous socialist novel because every other review says it’s repetitive, didactic and contrived and those are its fans talking! And it’s SIX hundred pages long. So I thought well, if I’m ever reincarnated, I’ll put it at the top of my reading list. Until then, sorry Robert. But then I saw this graphic novel version (a mere 352 pages!) and it was love at first sight – the art is really gorgeous, and proved once again that Mary Poppins was so right to say that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way. In this case several pounds of sugar help gallons and gallons of medicine go down. Five stars for the art & story editing & general spiffiness. But only 3.5 stars for Robert Tressell’s actual story. Even in this truncated & compressed form the characters & dialogue & painful twists of fate hammer you over the head with a pure undiluted socialist message. And then the story pauses while we listen to a ten page illustrated lecture on socialism. This is exactly what I expected but still…. Whew…. [image] IS IT IN ANY WAY STILL RELEVANT? OF COURSE Written round about 110 years ago some of the bosses-grinding-the-faces-of-the-poor stuff might sound a little over the top. Because one of the developments of capitalism that RT did not foresee was the increasing affluence of Western societies. When I was a tiny infant there were only about five or six cars on the street where I lived. Kids played football in the road all day long, no problem. Now the same street is jammed bumper to bumper with cars, some 4 by 4s, and no kids ever play in the street. There is no comparison between the material wealth of an ordinary English working class family in 1910 and one in 2022*. But we just need to raise our eyes to more distant horizons to find very similar ragged trousered philanthropists working 16 hour days in other countries making stuff for Western people to sell to each other. They have not yet got their big cars. A lot of them don’t even have running water and sanitation. [image] NAILS HIT ON HEAD; READER SQUIRMS RT is very good on the painful subject of working class stupidity, meaning their limitless capacity to vote for the parties of the rich and view any leftwing socialist parties as limbs of Satan. Most of this book is made up of a series of very uncomfortable debates between a couple of goodlyhearted socialist guys and their hostile fellow workers. They say stuff like There’s always been rich and poor, you’ll never change it. Socialism means “What’s yours is mine” Socialism means atheism and free love. It’s a beautiful idea but it’s too good to be practical because human nature is too mean and selfish. What about the jobs nobody wants to do? Who will you make do them if everybody’s equal? RT was also not around to observe the progress of the Russian experiment in socialism. I wonder what he would have said to that. Soundtrack : Which Side Are you On? By Natalie Merchant This World Is Not Fair : Randy Newman Banquet : Joni Mitchell Get Up Stand Up : Wailers Dear Mrs Roosevelt : Bob Dylan Hard Times : De Dannan The Sun Never Shines On The Poor : Richard Thompson Poor And Needy : Misty In Roots We Poor Labouring Men : Waterson Carthy and Pete Seeger’s entire album entitled CAN’T YOU SEE THIS SYSTEM IS ROTTEN THROUGH AND THROUGH which features songs such as My Sweetheart’s the Mule in the Mines and I Hate the Capitalist System *But on the news in the UK just now there is a constant flow of stories about energy price rises, and it’s often said that this coming winter there will be many who will have to choose between “heating or eating”. And right now in the UK we have a system of food banks which dish out free (tinned) food for those deemed as poor. RT would have said plus ca change, plus le meme chose. ...more |
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Jul 25, 2022
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| 1785906186
| 9781785906183
| 1785906186
| 4.16
| 202
| Nov 07, 2019
| Sep 15, 2020
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really liked it
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I’m not convinced that my dear goodreads friends are especially interested in the minutiae of British politics so I will try to be brief. You might hav I’m not convinced that my dear goodreads friends are especially interested in the minutiae of British politics so I will try to be brief. You might have been thinking that Boris Johnson was surely the worst British prime minister in living memory, but whilst he may have been an egregious selfserving wide boy who thought no rule ever applied to him, and has been quite rightfully booted out, Theresa May was much worse. This was because she didn’t have any of the qualities required to be a PM. None! She hated speaking in public. She hated being interviewed. She hated meeting the public. She hated most of her own MPs. She hated trying to persuade people to vote for her. It’s strange she didn’t ever notice that you had to do all these things when you are PM. [image] Why would she ever have wanted a job she was so profoundly incapable of doing? This is a mystery this nearly 700 page (small type!) book does not try to answer. For political geeks like myself Theresa was endlessly entertaining with her perpetually collapsing government and her stupendously cringemaking moments, such as sashaying onto the stage at the Conservative Party conference in 2018 to the sounds of Abba’s Dancing Queen – my eyes! My eyes! Not all the therapists in the world could help me to suppress that ghastly memory. ...more |
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Jul 21, 2022
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Jul 24, 2022
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Jul 21, 2022
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| 0525574824
| 9780525574828
| 0525574824
| 3.79
| 4,674
| Jul 17, 2018
| Jul 17, 2018
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really liked it
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Update - I stumbled over a quote that gave me a chill. Here it is : Sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, I would meet wi Update - I stumbled over a quote that gave me a chill. Here it is : Sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realised how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts had become what Hitler and Goebbels said they were. - William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) It fits today's situation all too well. ****** it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it. Jonathan Swift, 1710 The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. W B Yeats, 1919 ** Trump will not be back! I myself am a very accurate political predictor – I said Trump could never ever win the election in 2016 and in the same year I said that the UK would never ever vote for Brexit in the referendum – so whatever I think will happen you can guarantee the opposite will. Therefore because I think Trump will definitely run again in 2024 that means he won’t! This little book is very helpful in trying to wrap your poor throbbing head around all our manic and social political chaos, in which the two opposing sides deny each others’ grasp on reality whilst many alt-right jokesters cackle that there is no such thing as reality anyway. J G Ballard told us this was gonna happen way back in the 1960s. He wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised. GOOGLE MAPS AS A METAPHOR I found out that if you look at Google maps in India or China you will see something different than if you look at them in Pakistan or Taiwan. The way Google gets round the tricky issue of territorial disputes is to show each country the border it wants to see. So in Pakistan Google maps shows all of Kashmir to be inside Pakistan, and in India Kashmir is all Indian. Simple! Avoids so much hassle! Give people the reality they want. BUT….I MISS REALITY Trump constantly accused the press & tv which he called the main-stream media (implication: controlled by the deep state to keep the sheeple pacified) of broadcasting fake news. At the same time he referred to a terrorist attack in Sweden that didn’t happen and his counsellor referred to another fictitious event called the Bowling Green Massacre, and none of that mattered. You could fact-check these people all day long (and people did) and to the voters it didn’t matter. It was just mood music. Whilst Democrats jumped around exposing his untruths he knew that most voters didn’t care if something was factually correct or not. If it sounded right to them, then it happened. Or it didn’t. Whatever. Likewise in Britain when Boris used to go round making up nonexistent ridiculous rules imposed by the EU on hapless British citizens he understood the same thing, it didn’t matter if it was true or not. Occasionally you get a backwards somersault happening : in the recent Alex Jones trial he had said the Sandy Hook shooting was fake news and had never happened and he had to admit in court that it did. Of course he said that he never said it didn’t happen, he was just posing some alternative facts, asking some questions, presenting some independent research or some such bullshit. Maybe he didn’t say any such thing but it really doesn’t matter if he did or not, he might have. That’s good enough for me. I can do it too. HOW DEEP IS THE DEEP STATE ANYWAY? We now have the strange spectacle of many American citizens despising and distrusting their own government (and clinging fiercely to the second amendment in order, I suppose, to be able to defend their homes when the deep state sends in the army to kill all patriots like them. But don’t these patriots actually venerate the armed forces, those defenders of the state? Yes they do! There doesn’t seem to be any…logic…here….) Trump himself was at war with the FBI if I recall correctly. Has Trump ever said how he grappled with the deep state when he became president? Oh wait – the deep state fixed the election and got rid of him. Of course. That’s the story. Better remember that, Donald. They did it once and they’ll do it again! EVIDENCE We’re always told to check facts and don’t believe anyone until you have and so forth but that’s a counsel of perfection. If you ever read any stuff about the JFK assassination you will know what rabbit holes look like. The arcane intricacies of the Single Bullet Theory, to take just one example : you have experts over here with their 40 minute youtube videos, and experts over there with their entire books. If you’re not prepared to devote months to figuring out if that one bullet could have done all that damage then maybe you’re not allowed an opinion. After that we can begin consideration of the Zapruder film, frame by frame. There goes another six months. This explains partly why people are happy to believe stuff if it feels right. No one has the time for the details, except the true cranks. DEMOCRACY Steve Bannon : Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls. HANNAH ARENDT Michiko Kakutani unearthed a great quote from Hannah Arendt from 1951 : Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. So : this is a short book which asks many difficult questions. Recommended. ...more |
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Aug 04, 2022
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Aug 20, 2022
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Apr 02, 2022
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| 178590731X
| 9781785907319
| 178590731X
| 2.82
| 11
| Feb 22, 2022
| Feb 22, 2022
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it was ok
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THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE KIND OF OBVIOUS OR I’D DO ANYTHING FOR DEMOCRACY (BUT I WON’T DO THAT) Here we have 21 essays by various expert persons musing THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE KIND OF OBVIOUS OR I’D DO ANYTHING FOR DEMOCRACY (BUT I WON’T DO THAT) Here we have 21 essays by various expert persons musing on what the hell happened last August – how come nobody saw THAT coming? And was it all for nothing? I have to report that a lot of these essay writers should be rounded up and sent to Afghanistan where they would succeed where the military failed by blathering the Taliban to death. On every other page we encounter such ringing phrases as “multiple governance models”, “a clear centre of strategic gravity”, “a new paradigm of engagement” and suchlike. The last essay is called “The Post-Afghan Reset And The Case For Rebuilding EU-UK Security Co-Operation”. Then again, there are five Afghan “witness statements”, the last one of which is called “A Mother Turns to Sex Work”. No obfuscation there. All due respect, I don’t think you are going to come away from this book with much you didn’t already know. For example - in spite of its global dominance, the collective brains of the West persistently fail to understand non-Western countries – ex-USSR countries, Iraq, Afghanistan…. In 2001 there was an assumption that Afghans were sick of the Taliban and would therefore welcome its opposite. The first part was probably true, the second was hopelessly naïve. There’s a very obvious point to be made right away : British and NATO officials never spoke Afghan languages or knew any Afghan history or anything about clan and tribal structures. Also, there was a fast turnover of diplomatic staff because nobody wanted to stay there longer than 18 months. We did not work with the grain of Afghanistan because we did not know what the grain was and did not make the time or space to find out. One big problem was the drugs trade. I am informed that 95% of Western heroin was supplied by Afghanistan. What an opportunity for Western forces to eradicate a great social evil. But “many key powerbrokers themselves profited from the trade” and blocked any attempt to destroy the poppies. Well, pardon me, not so surprising. Another big BIG maybe the BIGGEST problem was corruption. This bad word is sprinkled around on every other page, but most annoyingly, all the writers assume we know exactly what they mean. I mean, yes, we have a rough idea, but I would have liked some light shone on this murkiest aspect to the whole Afghan catastrophe. Do the Western authorities shrug and turn a blind eye when all the aid is stolen over and over? A CASE OF REAL BAD TIMING Lord Purvis of Tweed, the Liberal Democrat Party’s bigshot in the House of Lords, writes in his essay : The world is – contrary to what the daily news may make us think – more stable, democratic, free and tolerant than in any time in recent history. As I read that Mr Putin’s tanks were about to start rolling into eastern Ukraine. SERIOUSLY??????? WTF?????? One time I was told something that shocked me – on page 243 : Bagram Airbase…had been abandoned by the US in early July, leaving behind some $85 billion worth of military equipment. $85 billion? Do you think that's a misprint? UPDATE on this : Venus (below) pointed me to articles on fee and politifact which seriously dispute this crazy figure. Undoubtedly there was a whole lotta hardware left behind but not quite that much. Google "No proof Biden left Taliban $80B" for details. A CONTROVERSIAL OPINION The best, most forthright essay for me was by Professor Paul Dixon. He sticks it to the military elite, and I think about time too …Senior British military officers, like their US counterparts, have resented and evaded democratic control. Their growing power represents a threat to democracy but…. criticism of the military elite, whether from the left or the right, is considered largely beyond the bounds of legitimate debate… Scrutiny and criticism are portrayed not only as an insult to those who have served and sacrificed but also as potentially treacherous for undermining the propaganda required to defeat the enemy. Strong words indeed. There are many other aspects to the whole thing which I would love to discuss but I have tried your patience enough I think. 2.5 stars. ...more |
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Feb 22, 2022
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Feb 23, 2022
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Feb 20, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1473562252
| 9781473562257
| 1473562252
| 4.23
| 3,950
| Feb 27, 2020
| Feb 27, 2020
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really liked it
| Girls just wanna have fun damental human rights - Slogan on a banner WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T I was after a history of feminism and in my male brain that woul Girls just wanna have fun damental human rights - Slogan on a banner WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T I was after a history of feminism and in my male brain that would be a cool judicious account of all the great names, you know, Mary Shelley, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, but nope, not at all, they only get some glancing references. This book is all about practical women, the feminists who did something to make women’s lives better, not the feminists who analysed why things were so terrible. You have to have both, but this book is about the doers. ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE FROM ANDREA DWORKIN Her definition of feminism: A political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don’t like, including all the women you don’t want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don’t want anything to do with anymore. WHAT IS DIFFICULT ABOUT DIFFICULT? It kind of seems as if everybody eventually finds every single other person difficult these days, it’s been an irritable decade. I see that mostly this book gets 4 & 5 stars but very occasionally 1 or 2 because predictably it has been judged to be transphobic due (it appears) to using the term “male bodied” in one chapter. I can see that for some Helen Lewis herself is a difficult woman to be writing the history of feminism as she’s too white, too posh and too rich and too often on the television. (I realised half way through I’d seen her many times – ah, THAT Helen Lewis!) NAMING NAMES The issues and the difficult women are : Divorce : Caroline Norton The vote : Annie Kenney Sex : Marie Stopes Play : Lily Parr Work : Jayaben Desai Safety : Erin Pizzey Love : Maureen Colquhoun Education : Sophia Jex-Blake Time : Selma James Abortion : Diana King, Colette Devlin and Kitty O'Kane Aside from Marie Stopes and Erin Pizzey, these were obscure names to me. Maureen Colquhoun, for instance, was the first out lesbian Member of Parliament in the 1970s and has been completely airbrushed from political history since then. I had never heard of her. (She died aged 92 in February this year.) HOW DIFFICULT IS DIFFICULT ANYWAY? ANSWER : VERY Erin Pizzey is the embodiment of the difficult woman. She is famous for establishing the first women’s refuge in Britain. She didn’t wait for any kind of official approval, she just went ahead and did it in 1971. Two years later a male MP got up in the House of Commons and opened a discussion on domestic violence, praising her Chiswick Aid Centre. She was watching from the public gallery. The chamber of the House of Commons was nearly empty. The MP said that if the debate had been about cruelty to dogs it would have been packed. Women’s refuges – couldn’t be more feminist, right? Right. But when Erin Pizzey met up with other feminists she took an instant dislike and refused to have anything to do with them. It seems they were ultraleft Maoist feminists, but you might have thought she would meet some non-Maoists later. By 2009 she was writing for the Daily Mail an article called Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family describing feminism as “a lie” and writing that “we must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women”. And now she is “an advocate for the Men’s Rights Movement, serving as editor-at-large of the anti-feminist website "A Voice for Men”. The boss of that site, Paul Elam, has called feminists "human garbage” and says that he would never vote guilty in a rape trial if he was a juror no matter what the evidence was. (For more information about these vermin see the excellent book Men who Hate Women by Laura Bates*). So as Helen Lewis says “How does a woman go from founding England’s first refuge for domestic violence victims to hanging out with MRMs?” The answer to that deserves a book in itself. HL mentions her own experience of what she calls “purity politics” and also “The Intersectionality War” which broke out on the internet in 2011 after the publication of How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran : The next few years were bloody : feminism’s equivalent of a civil war. Fair and unfair criticisms blended into one giant screaming mass, fuelled by Twitter, and left everyone hurt and angry…. Online feminism became obsessed with language. A kind of priesthood had sprung up to adjudicate what terms could be used You can tell HL is still reeling from all this : Outrage had become prized for its own sake and online feminists had lost the ability to distinguish between genuine anger and mere spite. …My own trashing was a traumatic experience. I was accused of endangering lives because my rhetoric was so hate-filled that people reading it would surely kill themselves. I was a racist, I was a transphobe So there is a parallel between Erin Pizzey and the Maoists of 1972 and Helen Lewis and the trans rights movement of 2011, I guess. I think HL or someone else probably needs to write a whole book about how contemporary feminism became such a minefield.** SWIRLING, SURGING, EXHILARATING, DEPRESSING, UPLIFTING, LIKE FLOWING WATER, NEVER STILL FOR ONE MOMENT I liked this a lot. Not the book I thought I was going to read, and like being locked in a washing machine of ideas with the setting on FULL SPIN. [image] *https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... **Has anyone tried to do this? ...more |
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Dec 14, 2021
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Dec 21, 2021
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Dec 14, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| B01NCOSWW5
| 4.08
| 24
| Feb 01, 2016
| Jan 01, 2016
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liked it
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I was interested in how ordinary soldiers very often commit terrible atrocities during wars and if the military command condones these events and perf
I was interested in how ordinary soldiers very often commit terrible atrocities during wars and if the military command condones these events and performs a standard shrugging insincere handwringing exercise if they’re discovered but fundamentally doesn’t care. It was difficult to find a book discussing what soldiers actually do during actual battles (got any recommendations?) and the nearest thing, or so I thought. was this mighty tome. But of course I got something different to what I wanted. This is a very highfalutin very intricate discussion about the whole smorgasbord of ethical conundrums warfare throws up. Well, I probably should have read the blurb, it didn’t lie : will appeal to both an academic and professional readership meaning that us “general” readers are considered too lowly to get an invite. Hmph, what an insult. I ploughed on regardless. And there is a lot of very interesting stuff here, delivered in a style that makes your eyes bounce off the sentences. FOREVER WARS When Joe Biden said of Afghanistan “I was not going to extend this forever war” he got a deluge of harsh disagreement as the Taliban immediately took over. This is a neat example of the issue A J Coates raises on page one : utopians versus realists. Utopianism has grossly inflated expectations about the world of international politics. Wedded to an abstract image of a just and perfect order, it concludes that the world at large must find its ideal constructs irresistible. Utopians know their ends are good and disregard their means. Joe wanted to terminate the hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and so withdrew immediately. Realists were saying that this was naïve, that however nasty American involvement was it had to continue. Joe was optimistic, the realists were pessimistic. Joe’s optimism must have lasted for about five minutes. Was it the right decision? I can sure see why he did it. This book is explicitly against “utopians” : The utopian claims the moral high ground, accusing the realist of moral duplicity and even of rank immorality, while the realist regards the utopian or moralist at best as a dangerous if well-intentioned fool, at worst as a self-indulgent hypocrite, more concerned with the preservation of a spurious moral purity than with the avoidance of conflict or the alleviation of human distress. Well, that’s fightin’ talk! This does not, of course, mean that the realists think war is an ethics-free zone, even if they appear by their conduct to believe that. The lumbering but smooth machinery of the rest of these chapters discusses the intricacies of the ethics of many horrible realities, - one example from many is : what is a non-combatant anyway? It seems obvious, but not so fast. Most people would think that the military should be targeting the enemy army, and that it’s illegal to target civilians. Which is true, but – is it okay to target the factories that are building your enemies’ planes and tanks? If so, is it okay to target the oil refineries providing fuel to the enemy army? Where do you draw the line? Most of the questions discussed in The Ethics of War are very interesting (even though he hardly glances at the conduct of soldiers in battle) BUT it may be the blurb is doing us a great favour by warning off the non-academic reader because this is the kind of obstacle-course sentence you will have to clamber over to get to the raw meat : In considering the morality of area bombing with the aid of the principle of double effect a distinction needs to be drawn first of all between a strategy of “selective” area bombing, that is, of area bombing that has as its sole objective the destruction of an important military target (or targets) and is resorted to out of military necessity alone (that is, because of the involuntary absence of an alternative, more discriminate and therefore more acceptable means of attack) and a strategy of “general” area bombing that involves deliberate targeting of non-combatants and non-military installations or structures (either solely or as an accompaniment of military targeting) as a way of undermining the capacity and will of the enemy to fight. My head, my head! [image] ...more |
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Sep 20, 2021
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Oct 22, 2021
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Oct 20, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 038568634X
| 9780385686341
| 038568634X
| 4.45
| 9,894
| Jan 07, 2020
| Jan 07, 2020
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liked it
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This is a book about Canada, a country which has a wonderful liberal image. There is a Wikipedia page called Canadian Identity which says : immigrants This is a book about Canada, a country which has a wonderful liberal image. There is a Wikipedia page called Canadian Identity which says : immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean have reshaped the Canadian identity, a process that continues today with the continuing arrival of large numbers of immigrants from non-British or French backgrounds Desmond Cole should think about editing that bit, because on page 151 on this book he says For as long as Canada has been a country, it has gone to great lengths the keep Black people out He really doesn’t have that many good things to say about Canada, and particularly the part he comes from, Toronto : a city where powerful white people endlessly boast about how good they are to the rest of us as he puts it. He’s particularly irritated by the argument that goes well, there’s some racism in Canada, we agree, but it ain’t like America – they got real racism down there! So don’t complain. This is kind of a monthly diary of events Desmond was involved in during 2017 and covers some familiar Black activist territory – campaigning to get armed police out of schools, campaigning to end the police stop and search policy (called carding in Canada) or against the deportation of a particular immigrant. The police loom very large throughout the book. Well, naturally, as they have a monopoly on legal violence in any civilised society. Where they direct it is a whole other story. This book can get very detailed at times, Desmond being an activist in the thick of it, as for instance when he explains why the Black Live Matter-Toronto group felt the need to disrupt the annual Pride march. Principles are involved, you can believe it. Because of this close focus Desmond can find himself swimming in alphabet soup – throughout this book you will come across J4A, SIU, CBC, BLM-TO, RCMP, OIPRD, IRCC, SRO, FBC, DCS and some others as various groups of Black Canadians confront establishment hierarchies (and are usually informed they are talking out of turn and should shut up). ANOTHER SUGGESTED WIKIPEDIA EDIT Wiki says : Throughout the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, First Nations played a critical part in the development of European colonies in Canada, from their role in assisting exploration of the continent, the fur trade and inter-European power struggles … Carrying through the 20th century and to the present day, Canadian aboriginal art and culture continues to exert a marked influence on Canadian identity. Desmond says : The Canadian government and its institutions are the products of a white supremacist ideology that claims this land as the property of a white European colonial government. To maintain its stolen land, the government is engaged in an ongoing centuries-long genocide of Indigenous peoples. ...more |
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May 04, 2021
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May 06, 2021
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May 04, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1529312140
| 9781529312140
| 1529312140
| 3.91
| 473
| Nov 12, 2020
| Nov 12, 2020
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really liked it
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There are some funny examples of the Peter Principle at work here – this is where a person is very good at their various jobs in an organisation but i
There are some funny examples of the Peter Principle at work here – this is where a person is very good at their various jobs in an organisation but is finally promoted to the job they can’t do. We just lived through the three gruesome years of Theresa May, Queen Midas in Reverse, and you had to ask yourself, as she was continually presented with betrayals and treacheries and calamities and situations she could not rise to why on earth did she want that job in the first place? For her it was a vale of suffering and tears. In British history there are so many famous names that I know almost nothing about so this was a great one stop shop for some of them. Who was William Pitt The Younger? Well, he became prime minister at the age of 24 – imagine that! And he was good at it too. Some PMs were there for the best part of a decade like John Major but were thought of as continually failing the entire time. Some were immediately crushed by events beyond their control (Gordon Brown with the 2008 financial meltdown, Neville Chamberlain with Hitler). Some began as universally beloved and made a single disastrous decision and became universally detested (Tony Blair). Some were cosy and reassuring (Harold Macmillan) and some were screechy and turbulent (David Lloyd George). Some were modesty itelf and some were flat-out egomaniacs, such as the only novelist to have become prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (“I am one of those to whom a moderate reputation can give no pleasure.”) Most people I think will pick Churchill as the GOAT but I rather think William Gladstone was the GOAT : Yes, it’s true he would encounter prostitutes in the London streets and take them back to Downing Street to convert them to Christianity and the respectable life, and yes it’s true that when he felt he was tempted by their voluptuous charms he flagellated himself on occasion, but let’s put that to one side. He set up employment exchanges for dock workers to stop the gross exploitation by the shipping companies; he organised the new railway network ensuring cheap fares for all and making the new technology of the telegraph run alongside the train tracks; he scrapped ancient laws which kept basic foodstuffs artificially expensive, and this turbocharged the whole economy; he campaigned to extend the vote to the working class; all of this was before he became PM; then, he provided free education for all children up to the age of 12; he abolished the sale of army commissions, replacing patronage with meritocracy; he introduced the secret ballot in all elections; he supported the London dock strike of 1889 when he was back in opposition (aged 77); he began a campaign for state funded old age pensions; he fought the 1892 election at age 83 and won (take that Joe Biden) and so had a 4th time as prime minister). He was an old man in a hurry. Although it feels not a little uncomfortable to endorse a volume with a foreword written by Boris Johnson, I must say this is a lot of historical nerdy fun. [image] My unlikely hero ...more |
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Apr 09, 2021
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Apr 19, 2021
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Apr 14, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 4.20
| 368
| unknown
| Nov 05, 2020
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liked it
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Apr 30, 2023
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May 04, 2023
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Oct 25, 2020
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| 1847922171
| 9781847922175
| 1847922171
| 4.38
| 18,301
| Jan 2012
| Jan 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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They said well, you love biography but you never read Robert Caro? So the very last time I was in Waterstones (when will you reopen, my oasis?) I saw
They said well, you love biography but you never read Robert Caro? So the very last time I was in Waterstones (when will you reopen, my oasis?) I saw they had all of Caro’s vast 4 volumes (& the world waiting for the fifth) of Lyndon Johnson, and he is my second favourite US president, such a fascinating character, so I got the first volume and jumped in and read 70 pages – it was brilliant. And it seems that Mr Caro is the greatest of the biographers-who-hated-their-subjects. Well, he described LBJ as having A hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will… a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself – or to anyone else – could stand before it During his early political career LBJ had a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal And this kind of stood out for me – there was an early election in his career Johnson still behind by a few votes… Jim Wells Country suddenly announced that its return had somehow not been counted, and the two hundred new votes for Johnson from this precinct – votes cast by people who had all written their names in the same ink, in the same handwriting, and who had voted in alphabetical order – gave Johnson the lead in an election he won by 87 votes. Now being a very impatient kind of reader I wanted to skip to the good bits. In the case of LBJ that was the massive drama of 1963 and what followed. So I ditched the first volume and got a copy of volume 4. This goes from 1959 to January 1964. HOW TO READ ROBERT CARO First, it doesn’t matter which volume you pick up. I never met an author who was so happy to repeat himself – but in this case it’s a good thing. Caro does not expect you to have earnestly ploughed through (and remembered) his every word in chronological order. So he quotes himself from earlier volumes frequently to remind you about older stuff. He circles in the air, he backtracks, he waits for everyone to get on the bus before driving onwards. It’s a great technique. Second, for all his beautiful clarity and patience with his readers, Caro is deadly serious and when he describes how LBJ got a bill through the Senate in the teeth of conservative opposition, he is going to take 30 pages of granular hair-tearing detail to do it. This is 29 pages more than your average reader can take. So a LOT of the pages of this biography will be …er…. will be…. can I say this?... hmmm… skippable! Yes! I think Caro fans will already be taking a contract out on me, but I can provide evidence. It's possible that some readers of the flimsier variety like me will wish to jump over sentences like this one : His solution would require two far-from-routine rulings from the committee chairman, rulings that would in fact fly in the face of the committee’s vote that morning : first, that the Dirksen amendment could be brought back that afternoon and voted on again; and second, that it be brought back by a motion that lumped in with it all remaining amendments before the committee, even those that had not yet been debated, so that a single vote by the committee – a vote to defeat the Dirksen amendment – would be a vote to defeat all the remaining amendments as well, thereby concluding the committee’s work on the tax cut bill and removing the last obstacle to its release to the Senate floor. One sentence. There are lots more like that. For American politics students, this is like hardcore porn. You see everything, I mean, everything. For the other 99.99% of us, hmm, these pages can be a slog and you know what, you get the sense of what was going on even if you don’t follow the precise rules of compound motions to the floor in the Senate in 1963. Whole pages can be skipped. Don’t look at me like that, they can. WHY LBJ? He’s Shakespearean. In his great story you can see scenes from Coriolanus, Hamlet, Henry V, King Lear and Julius Caesar. Not so much the comedies. This guy came from the back of beyond, with poor education, and he used every crooked device to get himself into the Senate, and he used every crooked device to make himself Senate Majority Leader, and then found he was really good at it, then came 1960. He wanted to be president, he had been working his 16 hour days, he was in charge of legislation, he was “the second most powerful politician in the country”, and he had a big problem. Could a guy from the South become president? Here’s where you run into American prejudice, which is not obvious from a British point of view. Everyone knows about racial prejudice, but we’re talking about white-on-white hatred here. A century after the Civil War it appears, in the 1950s and 60s, Americans from the Northern states still feared and distrusted the South, and vice versa. So no Southerner had been president for one hundred years. LBJ wanted to be the next guy from the south in the White House. But there was another problem. Kennedy. LBJ figured Kennedy was a do-nothing lazy-ass playboy whose daddy had bought him a senate seat and who was mostly absent from Senate sessions and who never introduced any legislation, and so who cared about him. But as soon as JFK woke up and decided to run for President, everything changed. It was like someone switched on the light all over America. LBJ was in denial, all through 1960. Then when the Democratic convention happened, he did some head counting, and he realised Kennedy had the whole thing sewn up. That smile had charmed the birds right out of the American air. LBJ could have stayed Senate Majority Leader, second most powerful man in the country. Instead he decided to run with Kennedy and be his Veep if Kennedy won. As every child of five knows, the Vice President is a joke, does nothing, says nothing of any consequence. Why did he do it? From 1960 to 1963 LBJ became Uncle Cornpone, the contemptuous name given to him by the glittering brains of the Kennedy cabinet. He was the stooge from Texas, the useful guy who got Kennedy some essential votes from the southern states, and could now be safely stowed away until 1964. LBJ went from hero to zero so fast he got a nosebleed. Why did he do it? He had made a calculation, which is frankly chilling. One part of his mind saw that he could be the candidate in 1968 when JFK had had his 8 years – fair enough. But another part of his mind saw that seven previous presidents had died in office. So LBJ taking this stupid nothing Veep position was a gamble. Enter stage left : Lee Harvey Oswald. A REMARKABLE TRANSFORMATION It is fantastic to see how a guy who seemed all his life to be a block to social progress, a typical Southern politician really, threw off the ugly carapace and emerged as the reforming president who passed the Civil Rights bill and declared war on poverty. One old Kennedy cabinet member wrote in 1978 : For all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weakness of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity, he was at the same time a man of brilliant intelligence, authentic social passion and deep seriousness. This is such a great story. Now I have to go back to volume one, and also hope Robert Caro stays alive long enough to finish volume five. He’s 84. [image] ...more |
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Apr 23, 2020
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May 13, 2020
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Apr 23, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0385536712
| 9780385536714
| 0385536712
| 3.87
| 11,722
| Aug 02, 2016
| Aug 02, 2016
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really liked it
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There’s only one thing wrong with this brilliant book, the title – yeah, oops. What? Was Jeffrey Toobin attempting to win the coveted “Most Exciting B
There’s only one thing wrong with this brilliant book, the title – yeah, oops. What? Was Jeffrey Toobin attempting to win the coveted “Most Exciting Book with the Dullest Title” award? If so, he did it! The award is his! This book should have been called Absolute Batshit : The Patty Hearst Saga. So just to be clear : Jeffrey Toobin gathers together an immense amount of detail but he moves this complicated story along like a bullet train. I’d vaguely heard of this Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army stuff but it seemed almost too crazy to believe. I was right about that. This story is off the scale. The story begins in Berkeley, the heart of radical California, in the early 1970s. There was a prison education program set up at Vacaville, the prison nearest to Berkeley, and some rad young women got interested in that. There they met a black guy named Donald DeFreeze. A couple of years earlier George Jackson had been killed in Soledad prison and DeFreeze was caught up in the aftermath of that, it was all revolution this, revolution that, and massive amounts of half-baked Marxism. DeFreeze busted out of prison. That’s putting it too strongly. He wandered out of prison when the guards were looking elsewhere. He hooked up with this disparate group of white female prison visitors and within a week they had conjured up this thing, this imaginary thing called the Symbionese Liberation Army, the goal of which was – well, as ever, paradise on Earth. Mr Toobin has some harsh words for Mr DeFreeze : DeFreeze amounted to a junior varsity George Jackson. In almost every respect, DeFreeze was a lesser man – not as intelligent, not as good-looking, not as strong, not as charismatic, not as competent… if George Jackson was tragedy, then Donald DeFreeze was farce…He fancied himself as a leader of the African American people, even though the SLA never had a single black member except for himself. The first “action” the SLA did was the worst and earned them their mad dog image immediately. They assassinated a black guy. This was Marcus Foster, school superintendent of Oakland. His crime was to introduce armed security guards into schools to combat gang culture. He was gunned down on 6 November 1973. Then they issued a communique : On the afore stated date elements of The United Federated forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army did attack the fascist Board of Education, Oakland, California through the person of Dr Marcus A Foster, Superintendent of Schools… DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE This “action” was supposed to galvanise “the people” to rise up against their oppressors. Instead it galvanised people to rise up against the SLA. The Black Panther Party denounced Foster’s murder and demanded that the police capture his killers. The SLA sulked and plotted another action. By this time there were nine members. One of them saw an engagement announcement in the local paper featuring Patty Hearst. They saw where it said she was a student at the local university. They then remembered that the university had a directory of students’ home addresses available to the public at the university admin building. So – a Hearst heiress! Lightbulb moment! And they just strolled along and got her address and planned the kidnap. What they were supposed to do with her after they violently snatched her up on 4 February 1974 and shoved her in the trunk of a car was never exactly clear. And what happened exactly in the weeks and months that followed is the heart of the mystery. But two things were matters of fact. On 12 February DeFreeze sent a tape to a local radio station, explaining that Patty Hearst was now a prisoner of war, denouncing the Hearst family as fascist insects and issuing the following demand : Before any forms of negotiations for the release of the subject prisoner be initiated, an action of good faith must be shown on the part of the Hearst family. This gesture is to be in the form of food to the needy and the unemployed This was followed by detailed instructions about how much, where and how this free food was to be distributed. Randolph Hearst, Patty’s father, took a deep breath and started to comply. It cost a couple of million, it lasted a few weeks, one of the giveaways ended in an unseemly riot with frozen turkeys being used as weapons, but the big free food giveaway was actually done. After that, the SLA sort of wandered off the idea. Meanwhile, something had happened to Patty. There are two versions. There is Patty’s version, and there is everyone else’s version. Everyone else who survived, that is. Either a) she gradually got to know her captors, to talk with them at great length (hey, they didn’t have anything else to do), she began to get caught up in their rhetoric, and to find, somehow, that she liked them a whole lot. They were keen to tell her they didn’t want her to come to any harm & that the only risk of her catching a bullet would be if the FBI bust down the door of their safe house. Meanwhile, she was convincing them that she was being converted to their far-out violent utopianism. Patty was merging into the SLA, as the weeks ticked by. And that included merging into the SLA’s sex life, which was fluid and frequent, they were all militantly opposed to bourgeois monogamy. Or b) she was terrorised form the get-go, threatened with death, raped by two men, denied toilet facilities and eventually forced to comply with everything they wanted her to do. That’s Patty’s version. This book, presenting as much of the facts as there are, and there are a lot, is respectfully incredulous of Patty’s own account. Well, this flies in the face of the modern mantra believe the victim. So, here we have a tough case. The proponents of the majority view will say – what happened next? Lay out the facts. Well, next came the famous bank robbery on 15 April 1974, so only two months after the kidnap. They planned the raid very well and deliberately stationed Patty inside the bank with a big fat gun underneath a security camera, so everyone could see that she was now a fully participating member of the SLA. [image] In one of the many jaw-dropping turns of events in this saga, Patty’s face then turned up on the FBI’s WANTED poster. From victim to perp in 2 months. I realise that I could carry on summarising the lurches from tragedy to comedy and back again that characterised the next few years for Patty and the gang – including what Mr Toobin describes as "the biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil" but hell, I should stop now, and simply say this is a true crime CLASSIC and for anyone interested in what happened to the American counterculture and the history of the 1970s this is a MUST READ. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 14, 2019
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Nov 21, 2019
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Sep 04, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 023118512X
| 9780231185127
| 023118512X
| 3.66
| 267
| unknown
| Sep 19, 2017
|
liked it
|
This author calls the alt-right some bad names. They are all white nationalist, racist and antisemitic. And they hate women too. But alt-righters say W This author calls the alt-right some bad names. They are all white nationalist, racist and antisemitic. And they hate women too. But alt-righters say We just don’t care what you call us anymore WHO ARE THEY? WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHY DON’T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE? Your average alt-righter, I would probably say someone who is thirty years old, who is a tech professional, who is an atheist, and who lives on one of the coasts (Richard Spencer) They write a lot of nasty trolling stuff but they write as if nothing is really serious. This is Andy Warhol cut and paste so-what politics. A penchant for aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs, often delivered in the arch, ironic tones common to modern internet discourse (Rosie Gray) This is really different from what we remember the radical right to have been only a couple of decades ago. In the past, the stereotypical young white nationalist was an angry bitter skinhead with limited skills and prospects That’s right. We remember those skinhead guys! They were scary but they had no brains at all so they weren’t much of a threat. We see them in movies like American History X and The Believer (both recommended). THE ALT RIGHT IS NOT VIOLENT? OH, I DID NOT QUITE REALISE THAT This book is entirely concerned with the USA. That’s okay but I did not quite realise that. George Hawley says : I am not implying that the alt-right is a terrorist movement. At the time of this writing, I am aware of no acts of physical violence directly connected to the alt-right – online harassment is another story I was very surprised at this. I immediately thought of Dylann Roof, the lunatic who shot 9 people in a black church in June 2015. He was a white supremacist, wasn’t he? But George says Dylan Roof’s manifesto suggests he was more influenced by older white-nationalist writers Well, if you say so. If that is a distinction you wish to make. RIGHT WING VIOLENCE In June 2016 Jo Cox, British Labour MP, was shot and stabbed to death in the street by a guy associated with various online far right groups. Previously to that, of course, you had the Anders Breivik attack in Norway in 2011. He killed 77 people in support of his anti-immigration white-nationalist cause. (He described the attack itself as “the book launch”, referring to his online manifesto.) He was the poster boy for white supremacism. And only a month ago we had the horrible mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. So, there are increasing real-world manifestations of the type of white-nationalism & racism that is peddled in arch, ironic tones by the American alt right, those boys sitting in their mothers’ basements. I did not think that this book should have so clearly exonerated the alt right of violence. But this book is nothing if not carefully argued. THE ALT RIGHT IS EITHER VERY HONEST, FINALLY, OR DISGUSTINGLY WRONGHEADED ABOUT THE USA George himself says, most bracingly, Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of independence, the United States operated as a de facto white supremacist nation for most of its history He adds that the alt right and Bernie Sanders would agree that “the United States was viewed by its founders as a country for people of European ancestry” Of course, Bernie would then say “and that was bad” and the alt-right would say “and that was good, and we should get back there again”. Over the past two decades, Americans have constructed systems of intellectual silencing that stifle the range of debate among responsible and public-spirited people, They’ve resigned hugely important topics to the domain of cranks and haters. A growing percentage of white America no longer views racism as a moral failing THE ALT RIGHT LOVES TRUMP BUT THEY DON’T LOVE THE TYPICAL TRUMP VOTER. MEANWHILE TRUMP DOES NOT LOVE THEM BACK Greg Johnson : Like an icebreaker, Trump has plowed through the frozen crust of artificial political consensus, smashing it to bits and releasing the turbulent populist currents beneath But the alt-right are a whole different bunch to the Trumpanistas : Evangelical Christians are more likely to be mocked than defended, and bald eagles and American flags are few and far between I'M SO BORED WITH THE USA BUT WHAT CAN I DO? So, it’s a new and different beast, and according to George, these guys (no surprise it’s always guys) actually want to dismantle the USA and erect in its place either one or several white race enclaves in North America, removing all non-whites from their territories. Pretty apocalyptic. I really don’t think you could do that without a little bit of violence here and there. George Hawley’s little book is probably for politics geeks only, and I would instead recommend for those interested in the more disturbing or alarming areas of internet culture two other books : This is Why we Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips and Troll Hunting by Ginger Gorman [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 14, 2019
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Apr 16, 2019
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Mar 22, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 3.98
| 3,013
| Sep 06, 2018
| Sep 06, 2018
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liked it
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December 2018 : Britain is stuck fast in the most absurd political quicksand. As the date for leaving the EU looms nearer (29 March 2019) these damned
December 2018 : Britain is stuck fast in the most absurd political quicksand. As the date for leaving the EU looms nearer (29 March 2019) these damned politicians literally don’t know what to do. Theresa May, the massively incompetent prime minister who almost lost the last election when it should have been a stroll in the park for the Conservatives, has spent two years in eye-bugging migraine-inducing negotiations with the EU and has hammered out a detailed (585 page long!) agreement that to her horror the British Parliament will not vote for – even her own party. So obvious was it that everyone hated her deal that she would not even put it forward to the House of Commons for approval, as she has to do. What to do? Go back to the EU and ask for a few tweaks here and there? They have said a firm no to any real changes. Then bring the deal back & get defeated in the House of Commons? Then what? If there is no deal agreed by next March the UK will leave the EU without one & this, says everyone apart from a small gang of rightwing headbangers, will be very bad. It will be a little local apocalypse - better stockpile your medications and cancel your holidays if that happens! Better start keeping edible pets! That nuclear bunker you had installed in 1987 doesn’t look so stupid now! Theresa May’s own MPs tabled a motion of no confidence in Theresa May last week. She won it though, two thirds of her party supported her. (I wonder if Donald Trump would win a vote of no confidence amongst Republican senators?) Siren voices are calling for a second referendum – the first asked the question “do you want to leave the EU?” – it was a yes/no thing, and was won by the leavers 52% to 48%. It did not ask HOW you want to leave, & that has been the big problem. There are many ways to leave, it turns out! But other people say – are you crazy? That would only postpose our terminal confusion! The Labour Party, meanwhile, is calling for a general election. They won’t get it as you have to have a two thirds majority in the Commons to have a snap election & the Conservatives will not be voting for it as turkeys would also not be voting for the upcoming Christmas should they have been enfranchised. If they did get it then the problem would be theirs, and they don’t know what to do either. There is no solution to this! But there must be! But there isn’t! This book by a wellknown political journo is a jeremiad about British politics & lands at the exact right time. No one can dispute the main arguments here, that the gruesome culture of Westminster & the House of Commons smothers any outbreaks of competence like a fire blanket. Isabel Hardman anatomises all the ‘orrible things about members of parliament – They are mostly posh, mostly male, mostly white, mostly middleaged Becoming a parliamentary candidate is really very ‘orrible and can drive you mad Should you succeed, being an MP is quite likely to destroy your family life & your marriage. So to avoid that you can employ your spouse as your office manager and are then accused of nepotism. It’s a lonely life with too many very late nights, much freeflowing booze and too many plumptious eager young researchers and too many rabid journalists aching to catch you at it, like the one mp who was inveigled into sending a photo of his genitalia on Snapchat to a delectable young lady who was really a male reporter taking a screenshot The mps are just voting fodder shepherded around by the evil whips. (The term comes from hunting – the whipper-in was a guy who whipped stray dogs to make them go back into the hunting pack.) The mps all suck up their numerous humiliations because they want to become ministers and start being important The House of Commons is like Gormenghast, with a thousand rooms and ten thousand arcane rules and no rule book (words you may not use in a Commons debate : hooligan, git, rat, stoolpigeon and Pecksniffian. You can’t infer any fellow mp is a liar or a hypocrite even though you know they are both.) The public think you’re in it for the money, however many shelters for the homeless or donkey sanctuaries you have established Like any junkie you hate your drug (politics!) and you love it, hate it, love it, round and round No one rewards anybody for proper scrutiny of proposed legislation so mostly that doesn’t happen and we wind up with shambolic laws like the bedroom tax All of this is delivered in a swift merrily gurgling stream of suppressed horror by Isabel Hardman but her book has two problems – 1 – is this how politics is done everywhere or do some countries do it better? If so, who? And do not say SWEDEN or I will bite you. There are no comparisons so for all the reader knows Britain is doing politics much better than anywhere! It might be rubbish but you should see the others! 2 – how should this sorry state be fixed? Isabel has a rather rushed 20 pages right at the end and it is not convincing. But, a pretty good read for political addicts like myself. ...more |
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Dec 14, 2018
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Dec 17, 2018
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Dec 16, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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| 0008264392
| 9780008264390
| B071HSRCLJ
| 4.31
| 1,439
| 2017
| Nov 30, 2017
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it was amazing
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It was in the middle of the big meeting, the one to decide who was the new boss of the whole gang. Suddenly the table was overturned, guns appeared in
It was in the middle of the big meeting, the one to decide who was the new boss of the whole gang. Suddenly the table was overturned, guns appeared in several hands, and death was the decision maker. Within two minutes three bodies hit the floor. The rest of them fled into the night. Except, in the silence, from behind the bar, one stooped figure scuttled to where the bag of jewels and cash lay, scooped it up and padded silently away from the bloody scene. That’s how Theresa May became leader of the Conservative Party in 2015 and therefore Prime Minister of the UK. [image] This book tells the story in microscopic detail of what happened next. Turned out that for Theresa the Vicar’s daughter, trouble was her middle name. It also turned out that she was – like that guy in Alien – actually an android. [image] giving answers that seemed to have been churned out by a malfunctioning android programmed with a meagre diet of soundbites She’s such an odd person to be prime minister. It’s like she wants to be anywhere but there. So awkward physically, she walks like a very tall crab, stooped and ungainly, would suit the role of sinister butler in Arsenic and Old Lace. And she purely hates to be interviewed, all her smiles look like grimaces, as though someone is pointing a gun at her favourite pet’s brains off-camera, as an encouragement – smile Theresa, you can do it. It’s not that she looks like she doesn’t want to go anywhere near ordinary voters, she looks like she doesn’t want to be anywhere near other human beings at all. Rather be in a room on her own writing something down. Making a list. She’s the accidental prime minister, only got there because all the big names stabbed each other to death. (At the same time Jeremy Corbyn is the accidental leader of Labour, only got there because of a bunch of excitable 20 somethings on Facebook; at the same time Trump is the accidental President of the USA, at least, I hope it was an accident.) THE SNAP ELECTION OF 2017 Theresa’s big task was to deliver some kind of Brexit but she only had a little teeny majority in Parliament - 17 seats. This meant that if 9 Conservatives voted with the opposition because they didn’t like her Brexit plan, everything would grind to a halt. So she wanted a BIG majority, and look – a couple of months after she became PM her party was way ahead of the now far-left socialist Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn was regularly denounced as a deluded antisemitic Marxist who couldn’t run a bath, never mind a country, so now was the time…. Except that for a year she told everyone read my lips there will be no new election called I will not call an election no means no absolutely not but okay yeah I want a big majority so I know I said all that but I’m calling an election. And it all went horribly wrong after that, but you can’t blame her. I would have called that election. One MP described the next part of the story : We were steaming under blue skies and then we created our own iceberg and steered our own campaign towards it. THIS LONG ASS BOOK Is for anyone who likes geeking out on British politics. It’s 18 months of news seen from the inside, on the vicious backbiting gossip level. Lots of fun, way too much detail: At one point that week, Timothy approached Hill and ruffled her hair from behind on one side before moving to the other side when she turned her head. They both laughed. A FEW QUIPS Before the election: Except for calling a snap election, Mrs May has barely said or done anything interesting for eleven months and yet is the subject of fevered fan-worship usually reserved for One Direction and Kim Kardashian’s bottom. During the election: It’s like trying to organize a bunch of cats in the middle of a firework display. After the election: I think it’s cruel to keep her. It is like the scene in a Bruce Willis movie where the terrorist who is already shot gets used as a human sandbag to help him get from point A to point B. That is what the party is doing to her at the moment. Apparently Theresa May always wanted to be PM. Which is really a very severe case of be careful what you wish for. She is uniquely unqualified to be Prime Minister. She hates the limelight, hates being on tv, hates the reporters, hates making speeches, hates campaigning. What did she think being prime minister consisted of, I wonder? She must be having the most miserable time unless we have a masochist running the country. ...more |
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Aug 15, 2018
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it was amazing
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Aug 15, 2018
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